Louise O'Shea

Capitalism can’t end women’s oppression: we need a revolution

Should deference to oppressed people be the basis for solidarity? Among progressives, the answer is increasingly yes. 
At the University of Melbourne’s sizeable Gaza solidarity encampment last year for example, events were in effect dictated by a group of about six individuals—the only people involved with “lived experience” of colonial occupation—and who therefore unilaterally decided who could participate in the action and what strategy and tactics participants were allowed to use. 
It is likewise now routine for organisers of events like Invasion Day rallies to draw up authoritarian rules that attendees are expected to adhere to, many of which violate democratic rights in a way that would be vigorously objected to if imposed by the police or government. 
But because they are the dictates of the oppressed to be adhered to by the “privileged”, they are not only accepted by most attendees; they are actively enforced by large numbers for whom deference to such demands has become both second nature and a badge of honour. At Invasion Day, this means in practice white people aggressively policing the rallies.
This fawning approach to oppressed people is so unquestioningly accepted as a moral virtue that it generally escapes interrogation. But in an effort to give it a more solid ideological footing, two UK academics, Kerri Woods and Joshua Hobbs, last year published a journal <a href="https://www.theglobaljusticenetwork.org/index.php/gjn/article/view/274/211">article</a>
titled “The Normative Demand for Deference in Political Solidarity” with the explicit aim of better thinking through this “prevalent” but chronically “under-theorised” practice. The article didn’t make much of a splash, and it’s not likely to enter the canon of journal articles, if there is such a thing. But it is of interest because, in attempting to draw out the theory behind this ubiquitous practice, the authors inadvertently make a compelling case against it.
The problem, according to Woods and Hobbs, is this: “Allies of those experiencing injustice or oppression face a dilemma: to be neutral in the face of calls to solidarity risks siding with oppressors, yet to speak or act on behalf of others risks compounding the injustice.” 
The solution to this dilemma is “a normative demand for deference” to those with “lived experience”, which means “accepting the authority of a given speaker’s testimony or guidance and accepting normative demands arising from that as prima facie action-guiding”. In other words, whatever the oppressed say or say to do about their oppression should be accepted unquestioningly as a matter of principle. 
This, they argue, is “an important corrective to the tendency of the privileged to erase and to fail to understand the experience of oppression, and, alongside this, to deny and diminish the agency of those in disempowered positions”. 
This tendency of the non-oppressed doesn’t just mean that they might sometimes be insensitive or imperfect opponents of inequality, and therefore should exercise caution and be respectful when showing solidarity. Such an approach is denoted by different academic jargon: “epistemic humility”. 
The Normative Demand for Deference, by contrast, involves understanding the “distinct limitations” to the “knowledge or authority to speak and act” on the part of those who do not have “lived experience” of oppression, and therefore the likelihood that any attempt by them to challenge oppression will “compound the injustice”. Only through the complete relinquishing of agency in thought and action on the part of would-be “allies” can there be “authentic” solidarity and the perpetuation of oppression avoided. 
There is no doubt that there is a need for humility, sensitivity and respect in political spaces where people’s experiences of life and society are likely to differ. But the assumption underpinning this argument—that perfect knowledge of the experience of a particular form of oppression is a precondition for effective solidarity and necessary to avoid generating further injustice—does not stand up to scrutiny. Nor does the converse: that first-hand experience of a specific oppression provides the sufferer with some sort of portal into truth and strategic infallibility not available to others.
Oppressed people simply do not uniformly demonstrate a greater understanding of or tendency to challenge their oppression. The very experience of oppression, which by definition degrades and disempowers people, can mean that those experiencing it more readily internalise the ideology of inequality that shapes their reality. Just think of the phenomenon of refugees or new migrants who oppose refugee boat arrivals on the basis that the actions of those refugees attract hostility to already arrived refugee and migrants. 
Or women who spend endless money and time on products and procedures to make themselves look younger or more “attractive”, and who influence or shame other women into doing likewise. 
Oppression can of course also lead to resistance and rebellion, and struggles against oppression almost always are led by members of that group. But even then, the ideologies and strategies those leaders gravitate towards are not necessarily the most effective, “lived experience” notwithstanding. Take some of the early gay rights activists, who argued that invisibility (remaining in the closet) was the best way to be accepted by society. Or the many national liberation struggles that have adopted counterproductive terrorist tactics that have more often than not advantaged the imperialist power that was oppressing them in the first place. 
Then there are countless examples of non-oppressed people demonstrating meaningful solidarity even when their experience and understanding, or likely understanding, of those they’re standing up for is quite limited. The international solidarity movement against apartheid in South Africa, which provided important encouragement to the struggle within South Africa, is one example. The solidarity meetings and actions in support of the 1966 strike by Aboriginal stockmen and domestic workers at the Wave Hill station in the Northern Territory, which eventually won important gains, including the first iteration of land rights, is another. 
In fact, gains can be won for the oppressed even when there is no understanding at all nor any conscious intention to win gains for the particular oppressed group on the part of the people whose actions win them. When the Family Code was abolished in Russia shortly after the successful workers’ revolution in October 1917, it opened the door to greater acceptance of lifestyles outside the nuclear family. But this was not primarily because people with “lived experience” of homophobia in Russia demanded workers take this action. It was because the workers came to view as intolerable all forms of ruling class social and economic control. This made them natural allies of all the oppressed, whatever they thought they were doing.
If “lived experience” is uniquely able to bestow insight and political wisdom on its subject, and this knowledge is unavailable to those without it, how can we understand how and why all this happens and has happened?
If meaningful solidarity can be measured in its contribution to winning greater rights for the oppressed, the latter examples would have to count as very meaningful, despite the notable absence of deference. If instead solidarity is only “authentic” when those taking part in it are deemed to have prostrated themselves sufficiently to guarantee moral purity regardless of what it means practically for the struggle to end oppression, then solidarity is no longer particularly relevant to the pursuit of social justice. 
Strengthening the fight for liberation and to end oppression notably does not feature in the case Woods and Hobbs make for deference. Instead, they point to deference’s potential to facilitate emotional repair of the psychological damage caused by oppression. As they put it, “There is also an element of moral repair in adopting the appropriate (deferring) attitude or response to persons affected by injustice. To not accept as authoritative the testimony of those with lived experience is to disrespect the person as a knower”. By elevating the “testimony” of the oppressed, their dignity is accordingly restored and trauma to some degree ameliorated. 
The problem with this that the non-oppressed become the potential saviours of the oppressed, despite their ostensible commitment to being dominated by them. The hierarchy might be artificially inverted in the world of deference, but the “privileged” still hold the key to liberation, or, more accurately, the psychological recovery of the oppressed from their oppression. This denies the agency of the oppressed. Oppressed people simultaneously shouldn’t be engaged with as equals, argued with or debated because it takes away their agency, but only the action of allies properly elevating their voices and listening to their “moral knowledge” can alleviate their suffering. 
Another glaring problem with what Woods and Hobbs advocate, and which they acknowledge to be a problem but don’t address, is that it is not even possible to do what they suggest. The reality is that oppressed groups are not homogeneous, and rarely agree on even basic questions. Just think of the referendum about establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament—an utterly bland gesture that was nevertheless a chance for the population to express some minimal sympathy with the plight of Aboriginal people. The referendum was strongly supported but also vehemently opposed by different Indigenous people, for a range of reasons. 
If the task of an ally is to do as an oppressed group says, this situation presents a problem. To decide who to defer to, the non-oppressed must exercise their agency, but the limits of their “lived experience” mean that, in doing so, they are only likely to add to the injustice according to the “deference” schema. When there is no consensus among the oppressed then, there is no possibility of deference and nor therefore of meaningful solidarity. 
The argument for deference also can’t accommodate the overlapping oppressions under capitalism, all with their own peculiar dynamics and manifestations. Working out which combination of oppressions commands the greatest authority within this matrix at any one time, assuming the would-be ally can legitimately make such a determination, is no straightforward task.
A problem with deference that Woods and Hobbs do attempt to solve is the unfairly onerous burden it places on the oppressed to educate and direct the non-oppressed. This has generated its own peculiar backlash in the form of resentment at the “work” the oppressed are expected to do to facilitate solidarity, the nasty flavour of which is encapsulated in the title of this popular 2017 Medium article “White people, stop asking us to educate you about racism. Signed, every POC [person of colour] you’ve burdened with this question”. 
In keeping with their deferential approach, Woods and Hobbs get around this problem by advocating what they call “second order engagement”, an alternative to active solidarity which relieves the oppressed of this burden. They define this type of engagement as “reading ethnographies, narrative work of any kind (fact or fiction), watching films or listening to podcasts, that offer testimonies or reflections on lived experience—which, to some extent, may be taken as a practice of solidarity that expresses deference to those with lived experience of oppression. This may evolve into not just reading or watching material, but promoting and distributing material: organising exhibitions, screenings, readings (though it may not).”
But even this becomes a minefield, because to work out what material to best engage with should legitimately be done by the oppressed, not those without lived experience. But then that places yet another undue impost on them. So, consistent application of the deference approach leads logically towards disengagement as the ultimate expression of real solidarity. If the first rule is “do no harm” to the oppressed by exercising agency or requiring the oppressed to do the work to fill the void said agency has left, disengagement is the safest bet to ensure authentic solidarity. Happy news for the supporters of the status quo. 
For those of us not keen on the idea that activism is best done by withdrawing or spending inordinate time in front of a television set, there is an alternative: one that involves moving away from the idea that the subjective experience of individuals is the holy grail of truth and that listening to and “elevating” the right ones the pinnacle of political virtue. 
Sensitivity to the reality of oppression, and success in challenging it, is much more effectively forged through the practical and collective experience of fighting society’s various injustices and finding common ground between groups that face the same enemy. The process of developing and testing strategies aimed at achieving a clear and common goal has the potential to build bonds of solidarity between people and groups that otherwise might not have had reason to interact. This is precisely why the bosses and governments so frequently deploy divide and rule strategies to undermine the strength of campaigns or industrial campaigns. 
Working together in this way, whether to maintain a picket line, maximise numbers at a rally or prevent an eviction or deportation, brings people together as equals, in a way the practice of deference cannot. Deference engenders more of a disciple-prophet type relationship than one of comrades as equals in a common struggle. 
This matters, because the type of society we are fighting for is connected with the means adopted to achieve it. If a revolution is brought about primarily through military struggle, for example, it usually does not develop the level of working-class organisation necessary to ensure the resulting society is genuinely democratic and that production is under collective control. 
The way workers’ struggle, and ultimately revolution, rests on the collective power of the oppressed majority is what makes socialism—a society of mass, democratic control over production by the working class—possible. The collective fight against a common enemy necessary to achieve this itself changes people and shapes their political ideas—no-one, not the oppressed or anyone else, starts out with all the answers. The rigid hierarchical nature of the deference model leaves little room for this dynamic to develop. 
Of course, people’s experience of oppression should be respected. If it is not, and activist spaces or struggles just seem to reproduce the same demeaning conditions that the rest of society foist on people, this weakens the struggle. But the deference Woods and Hobbs talk about doesn’t help get us there. It condemns us to a never-ending vigilance over who is where in the pecking order of suffering in order to decide whose perspective should dominate our political thought and practice. 
The accumulation of experiences of fighting alongside others, the conclusions drawn from victories and defeats, and the obvious strength that unity confers shape the consciousness and understanding of all involved, and provide a material reason to be concerned with and sensitive to the suffering of others. The passivity and atomisation inherent to “second order engagement” cannot do this. Nor can deference. Woods and Hobbs have done us a service in highlighting why this widespread practice leads us nowhere.

Deference to the oppressed gets us nowhere

Since the election of Labor to government in 2014, Victoria’s police force has become more well armed, well resourced and well staffed than at any other time in the state’s history. The provision of $15 million by the Allan government for police to better brutalise Land Forces protesters—while hospitals and schools are being told to cut costs—is just the latest example.
When Labor was elected a decade ago, annual spending on the police was $2.27 billion. By 2021, it exceeded $4 billion, an increase of more than 75 percent. But that is just the baseline: the police receive significant funding on top of that. 
Minister for Police Anthony Carbines boasted last year in his budget estimates hearing submission about the government’s “record investment” of more than $4.5 billion since 2016 in addition to the police’s regular annual funding. This included an extra $685 million in 2016 for “technology, equipment and capability uplifts across the force”. Later in 2016, then Premier Daniel Andrews announced a further $2 billion “community safety” package, the biggest investment in the history of the police force. Rolled out over four years, the package included funding for 3,200 new police officers—the largest increase in police numbers in Victoria’s history—as well as for “critical equipment and hardware”. 
One piece of this “critical equipment” was semi-automatic rifles. In 2018, the government announced it was equipping at least 800 more police with these deadly weapons, at a cost of $25 million. Prior to 2018, only members of the Special Operations Group and Critical Incident Response Team were trained in the use of long-arm weapons, both already having access to semi-automatic weapons and machine guns. The 2018 announcement expanded the use of such weapons to the Operation Response Unit and officers in four regional areas. 
Victorian special operations police now have an arsenal that includes projectile launchers, chemical weapons detonators, pepper-ball guns, rubber-pellet grenades and stinger grenades that release smoke, light and eight-millimetre pellets. The extra weaponry was justified by the police minister, Lisa Neville, in 2018 as necessary to deal with “high risk events, like a terrorism event”. But the weapons have so far been deployed only against protesters.
The police’s air arsenal has also expanded. In 2020, the government spent $63 million acquiring three Leonardo AW139 helicopters—the “envy of many police forces around the world”, according to Air wing Inspector Craig Shepherd—and a Beechcraft Super King Air 350ER, reported by the Age
to be the first plane provided to the police in more than two decades. These aircraft have high-tech capacity to track people on the ground and can fly faster and further and can carry more people than older models.
It’s also not just specialist police that have become more heavily armed under Labor. In December 2021, the government announced that every front-line officer would have access to tasers, a weapon previously available only to special operations police. Last year, two women in New South Wales, one aged 95 and the other 47, were killed by police tasers, despite these weapons being touted as a less lethal alternative to conventional weapons. 
Measured in officer numbers, Victoria Police is now the largest law enforcement agency in the country. According to its 2022-23 corporate plan, the organisation has around 22,200 police personnel, a number which exceeds that of New South Wales, a state that has 1.4 million more people and three times the area. Victoria has more police per head of population than any other eastern state or the ACT. 
This has corresponded with a rise in the rate of incarceration in Victoria. According to the state’s Sentencing Advisory Council, Victoria’s imprisonment rate reached a record 122.9 people per 100,000 people in 2019, the highest level since the 1890s. 
Funding for police is prioritised by Labor over essential services like health and education. A Productivity Commission report on government services found that between 2013 and 2019, spending on police grew by 60 percent and prisons by 96 percent, while health and education spending grew by just 45 percent and 30 percent respectively. So while health workers struggle to treat patients and surgery wait times blow out with devastating human consequences, no expense is spared ensuring police are better placed to kill and maim people. 
The readiness demonstrated by police to use this greater arsenal of weaponry at the Land Forces protest, as well as at reactionary anti-lockdown protests before that, is to be expected. To justify the cost associated with the maintenance and replenishment of high-tech weaponry, the hardware must be shown to be necessary. This means finding opportunities to use it. In the absence of other threats, this has meant, and will increasingly mean, these military-grade weapons being used against protesters doing nothing other than exercising their democratic rights.

The militarisation of Victoria Police under Labor

Israel’s war on Gaza has, up until recently, had a negligible impact on Australian campuses. Students have attended the regular protest marches that have been taking place in most capital cities, but the campuses themselves have remained relatively quiet. At Melbourne University, an institution with a long history of student activism, the student union shamefully even rescinded a motion it had adopted in support of Palestine under pressure from Zionists. 
On 23 April, all this changed. Inspired by the stand of US students at Columbia University who were brutally attacked by the NYPD on the orders of the university administration, students at Sydney University established their own Gaza solidarity encampment. Like the US students, their demands included that the university divest from weapons research, that the university and government break links with Israel and for an immediate end to Israel’s assault on Gaza. 
The students set up their camp at the heart of the campus, and it quickly became a hub of activity, with hundreds of students getting involved with painting banners, writing press releases, holding discussion groups and making announcements in lectures. The idea, as Students for Palestine convenor Jasmine Alrawi told Red Flag, is to “raise awareness and draw attention to the ways in which Israel’s genocide is being aided and supported by our own university, as well as to involve more students in activism and standing up for the cause of the Palestinians. Our government, the opposition, our university, our media and a lot of civil society in Australia support and defend Israel. Others are intimidated out of showing their support for Palestine lest they be slandered as anti-semitic. We’re here to show that intimidation no longer works. We are seeing the heartbreaking images of genocide, starvation and displacement with our own eyes, every day. And we refuse to be silent about it.”
The Australian National University in Canberra and Melbourne University were the next campuses to join the movement, with activists establishing similar camps a few days later. According to Students for Palestine member and ANU camp participant Carter Chryse, the camp has played host to “daily speak-outs and has attracted massive community support. We have had donations of all sorts of things and lots of words of encouragement. Dozens of students are staying out overnight and the numbers are growing.”
Encampments have since been established at the University of Queensland, Adelaide University, Curtin University, Monash University and more are planned. This represents the most serious explosion of national student protest since the movement against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. 
Like in the US, university staff have thrown their weight behind the students. Branches of the National Tertiary Education Union have passed motions in support of the camps, have sent speakers to rallies and speak-outs at the camps, and some staff at the University of Melbourne have even brought their classes to the camps to both show solidarity and teach students about social justice activism. NTEU activist at Sydney University, Alma Torlakovic, who supports the campus protest camp, told Red Flag “Staff here support the right of students to protest, of course. But it’s more than that. Union members have watched what has happened to universities in Gaza—every single university in Gaza had been destroyed by January this year. That’s according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Nearly 100 professors have been killed along with thousands of students. But when we speak out against this, we are treated like criminals or bigots. The level of repression and attacks on academic freedom in the US and Europe is shocking—professors have been sacked, investigated and disciplined for quite reasonably expressing concern about Israel’s war and sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. We have a duty to stand up to this—to defend the right to criticise the powerful and to act on that criticism through protest.”
Unlike in the US, the campus administrators have so far opted to tolerate the encampments rather than repress them. Police have not been called, and students have been able to organise fairly freely. This has angered supporters of Israel, who see opposition to the current genocide as offensive and a form of bigotry. Australasian Union of Jewish Students president Noah Loven told the Australian
that Jewish student are “not safe” on campus because of the protests. But protesters object to the assumption that all Jews support Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, and that Jewish students are therefore offended by protests against it. “We’ve had Jewish students involved in the camp, they have spoken at rallies and have an organised presence here”, University of Queensland camp organiser Liam Parry-Mills told Red Flag, “And I know from communication with other protest organisers that that is the case at other camps around the country”. The Jewish Council of Australia has also expressed support for the protests, writing in a public statement that it “strongly rejects the claims that these protests are a threat to Jewish students and staff”.
Other supporters of Israel, like Chris Kenny writing in the Australian, attempt to discredit the protesters by implying or openly accusing them of supporting Hamas. Kenny spent his time at the Sydney University camp badgering students to condemn the 7 October attack. But as one of his targets, Palestine Action Group member Josh Lees, pointed out to Red Flag “The supporters of Israel aren’t continually called on to distance themselves from the deranged lunatics masterminding Israel’s genocide. But look at who makes up the war room: they’re religious fundamentalists using extreme violence to realise their vision of an expanded religious state.”
The eruption of student activism in support of Palestine is historic. It builds on a movement against the Gaza war that is without precedent in Australian politics. The media may have tried to bury it, but it is proving very difficult to repress. The students’ actions, along with the thousands who are regularly marching, moving motions on councils, picketing weapons companies and organising walkouts from work, are a source of hope in a world of brutality and war.

Palestine solidarity encampments spread across Australia

Sexism is so fundamental to our existence that we are not even aware of it much of the time. 
It starts from before we are even born. An experiment described by Annie Murphy Paul in her book Origins highlights the different ways pregnant women interpret the movement of their babies in utero. Those who knew they were expecting a boy were more likely to use words like “energetic”, “vigorous” and “jabbing” to describe the movement, while for girls it was “gentle”, “rolling” and “quiet”. 
This sort of unconscious bias shapes and curtails women’s potential throughout their lives. In her book Delusions of Gender, neuroscientist Cordelia Fine describes an experiment which showed that simply reminding university students about whether they’re a man or a woman at the beginning of a test, by asking them to tick a box, reduces women’s performance on the test compared to that of men; in the absence of such a reminder, men and women perform equally well. Even the “feminine” or “masculine” nature of the décor in the room where the test is held has a measurable impact on performance. If such subtleties can have a statistically significant effect, just imagine the cumulative effect of this conditioning over a lifetime. 
The sexist bias that plagues data collection and design has been documented by Caroline Creado Perez in Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men. Every area of design and technology is affected, from medical testing and drug development to building design, workplace temperature and tool size, all of which have wide-ranging and material effects on women’s health and lives. The male bias built into car safety testing, for example, means women are 49 percent more likely to be seriously injured in car accidents and 17 percent more likely to die than men. 
Then there are all the manifestations of sexism that we are conscious of, like unequal pay, lack of adequate maternity leave, limited access to child care, greater poverty on average for women throughout their lifetimes, greater risk of violence and death from intimate partners, sexualisation and objectification in daily life as well as in popular culture and advertising, to name just a few. 
There is not an aspect of life that isn’t affected by the gendered, and therefore sexist, nature of society in some way, from the most personal to the most public. 
So what can be done about this so all-pervasive form of inequality?
First, we—women and men—need to become as conscious as we can of sexism in our daily lives and strive to minimise it as best we can. We want women to be able to reach their potential and participate in whatever area of society, work and culture they want as equals. That means being sensitive to how the minutiae of behaviour—things like who dominates conversations and who gets listened to and taken notice of—affect women, who are used to being ignored, dismissed and generally treated as less important than men. It means treating women as equals, not sex objects, there merely to be admired or preyed on by men. And it means taking pro-active measures to push against the various subtle ways sexism shapes all sorts of human interactions. 
But even if we do everything we can to be alert to everyday sexism, it doesn’t alter the social reality around us that is reinforcing sexist ideas and norms as fast as we can reject them. 
So we also need a strategy for changing society and the inequalities that are structured into it and which every day normalise the subordinate position of women. 
In the immediate term, this means policies and services that enable women to participate as equals in paid work and the public sphere as much as possible—free, accessible child care and aged care, unlimited maternity leave, greater scrutiny of hiring and promotion to reduce discrimination against women, as well as higher wages in industries dominated by women, to name just a few. 
But on their own, these measures merely support women to undertake paid work more easily while they continue to take primary responsibility for caring as well. Hence the notorious “double burden” that plagues working women’s lives. In themselves, such reforms don’t challenge the idea that women are naturally nurturing and better suited to caring for others than men, who, by their nature, belong in positions of power. 
So, important as measures that enable women to participate fully in paid work and the public sphere are, they are not sufficient to bring about genuine equality or liberation. To achieve this, we need more radical change. In particular, we need to transform the way work is done, including breaking down the division between work in the formal economy and caring work, and the subordination of all work to profit making and capital accumulation. 
As long as most of us are expected to spend 40 hours or more a week performing waged labour—during which our “real” lives are on hold and we are under the control of a boss and doing work to generate profit for those who hire us rather than doing what is needed to keep ourselves and those around us alive, healthy and happy—the division of labour that so effectively supports this economic model will endure. Indeed, this is why it persists more then 50 years after most formal rights for women were won, including the right to equal pay, the right to work while married, the right to financial autonomy, the right to divorce and reproductive freedom. 
The bosses rely on the existence of a sub-class—women— to take responsibility for ensuring workers are looked after and fit for work, and that new generations of workers are produced who are willing and able to work. Women perform the majority of this work for free out of a sense of duty and because they genuinely care about the wellbeing of those around them. But the value to the bosses, who rely on that work to provide a productive workforce, is nevertheless enormous. 
A 2017 PWC report, “Understanding the unpaid economy”, found that unpaid work is worth $2.2 trillion to the Australian economy, equivalent to a third of GDP. Unpaid child care is the largest contributor, worth 25 percent of GDP, and would be by far the biggest industry in Australia if it was part of the formal economy. Domestic household tasks, including cooking and cleaning, are the next biggest category of unpaid labour. 
Having more women in the halls of power won’t be enough to change this. The halls of power are dedicated to strengthening the economy—i.e. generating more GDP through better exploiting workers and maximising the profits of business—and are dominated by the economic interests of the powerful few who control major corporations and industries. Waged labour and the status quo that ensures exploitation continues smoothly serve their interests, and those who challenge that soon find themselves on the outer. So while women have as much right as men to occupy parliaments and boardrooms, this is not a strategy for liberating women. 
To bring about the radical change that is necessary, we need to orient to an alternative source of power: the power the working class has collectively to challenge and transform society by mobilising at the point of production. Workers make everything, and they do it together. Rather than bosses directing this process, workers have the potential to decide democratically how and what to produce and for what purpose. 
Work and production could and should be reorganised to meet need—including the social need to care for everyone as well as the need to protect the planet from destruction. And because it could only be done collectively, cooperation, solidarity and fostering mutual respect are necessary to help strengthen working-class power. This is why we can be confident that the prejudice and inequality that are so rampant in capitalist society would be organically challenged and eventually overcome in the course of workers fighting for a socialist society, as has happened historically at high points of workers’ struggle. 
Working-class women aren’t necessarily conscious of the need for this sort of radical change to solve the problems they experience as a result of capitalism’s need both to exploit them and maintain their caring role. And nor are most male workers, who likewise have an interest in challenging waged labour and exploitation. But the reality is this is the only way to bring about a society of gender, as well as broader, equality, and to have a society that can meet people’s needs as a matter of priority, not as an afterthought or a ritualised hand-wringing every year on International Women’s Day. 
To get there, we need to start with rebuilding working-class consciousness and power from the bottom up. This is the radical origin of what was originally known as International Working Women’s Day when it was founded by socialist women in 1910 and celebrated under the slogan “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism”. 
There is no easy way to do that, and we are currently a long way from the sort of consciousness and organisation needed to overthrow this system of inequality and prejudice. But if we want to avoid the cynicism or despair that comes from watching politicians carp on about women’s empowerment while they maintain policies that keep women down, or CEOs raising champagne glasses at International Women’s Day breakfasts while women languish on low wages in low-status jobs, we need some idea of what could actually transform the position of women. And we need to fight for those ideas wherever we are—at work, on university campuses and in every other area of life—and get together with other people doing the same, so that we can maximise our impact and form a larger pole of attraction for people who are continually pushed to radical conclusions by the injustices and atrocities of the capitalist system. That is the small but important step we can take towards women’s liberation, and the liberation of all humanity, in the here and now.

To end sexism, we need to destroy capitalism

The level of suffering in Gaza is more than the human mind can comprehend. As the war enters its twentieth week, it feels increasingly obscene to be going about daily life while an entire people are being systematically destroyed, their lives, histories and culture blown to pieces or buried under rubble. 
Normality in the face of such genocide is a quiet propaganda victory for the murderers: a violation of our collective humanity that we cannot stop, so have no choice but to tolerate. For the millions who have raged, spoken out or protested from afar, the feeling of impotence is unbearable. 
Two-thirds of Gaza’s population—1.4 million people—are desperately trying to survive in the 64-square-kilometre area around the border city of Rafah with almost no food, clean water, power or medical care. 
They were told to take shelter there by Israel, and that they would be safe. They have already faced bombing, and now, with Israel pulling out of ceasefire negotiations, a further catastrophic ground assault seems imminent. Much of the rest of Gaza is uninhabitable, and reports indicate the Egyptian government is establishing a camp on the border from which Palestinians will be transferred to a third country. 
Israel seems on the brink of wiping out Gaza as a viable Palestinian territory. 
It has not got to this point without help. Just in the time as Rafah has come under threat, the US has approved another weapons delivery that, according to the Wall Street Journal, “includes about a thousand each of MK-82 500-pound (227kg) bombs and KMU-572 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) that turn unguided munitions into precision-guided bombs”. US military aid to Israel so far sits at more than $14 billion, equivalent to roughly half the estimated cost of the war. 
The Australian government demonstrates a similarly obsequious devotion to Israel. For Foreign Minister Penny Wong, new atrocities are simply opportunities to reiterate Australia’s ongoing support and Australia was one of the first to cut its (measly $6 million) funding to the UN Relief Works Agency following an unsubstantiated allegation from Israel about its staff being involved in the 7 October attacks. 
And it’s not just at the level of foreign policy. At home, Labor is ensuring genocide is not merely tolerated, but actively cheered on. It is not enough that Israel gets unquestioned political, military and moral support to carry out genocide. Opposing it is now being cast as a new form of bigotry. The courage Labor couldn’t seem to muster to make the self-evident point that the No campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament was racist, it has found when it comes to denouncing opponents of Israel’s genocide as anti-Semites. 
So while we watch on in horror as children are starved and killed, as men and women beg for relief and as an entire people and culture teeter on the brink of annihilation, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has rushed through legislation to ensure the privacy of Israel supporters in their online efforts to drive Palestinians and their sympathisers out of their jobs. 
Those of us who thought human feeling simply couldn’t be stirred in the hearts of the Australian political class have been proved wrong: the plight of people apologising for a genocidal regime has finally moved them. They will soon enjoy every protection the Australian state can offer as they slander, threaten and sack pro-Palestinians.
And why not— the Australian state acts the same way. As journalist Michael West has documented, pro-Palestinians who have faced death threats, arson attacks and improvised explosives placed outside their houses have had to fight to have the incidents investigated.
For these acts, no laws were rushed through parliament, no official messages of support from concerned politicians were forthcoming, no front-page newspaper spreads were designed to elicit sympathy. You only have to imagine the reaction should the situation have been the reverse to appreciate the extent of the double standard. 
The atmosphere that has been created—that conformity to Israel and whatever brutality it decides to inflict on the Palestinians is non-negotiable—is nothing short of chilling. The worse the crimes of our rulers, the less they are willing to tolerate dissent. 
We can only hope that at some point there will be some justice, that the criminals will in some way be held to account. In the meantime, we have a duty to raise our voices, to protest and to disrupt this sick system in any way we can.

Catastrophe looms in Rafah, but genocide must not be questioned

High school students in Melbourne taught the government and right-wing media a lesson when they walked out of class in their thousands on 23 November in support of Palestine. From Werribee to Greenvale, students came from all over the city to show their horror at Israel’s war on the people of Gaza, half of whom are children, and their disgust at the Australian government’s backing of the genocide.
“I’m here to support the cause of a free Palestine and to oppose war and occupation. There has been an occupation and genocide for 75 years, 75 years of this”, a Caroline Springs student told Red Flag. “I care about the lives of innocent people and the freedom of these people”, a Fitzroy/Collingwood student said.
The students’ contempt for those who presumed to lecture them about knowing their place and staying in school was palpable. “Kids in Gaza can’t go to school and haven’t been able to for weeks”, a student from Pascoe Vale Girls’ School said. “That’s what we’re protesting for: the right of everyone to go to school. Missing one afternoon seems very unimportant when you think about that.” 
A year 11 student from Caroline Springs, observed, “I’ve learned a lot coming here, meeting people and standing up with others for justice”, while another said they’d learned more being at the strike for two hours than “in an entire semester of history”. Another said that they were taught in school that genocide is bad and that so is remaining passive in the face of it, so it seemed natural to do what they could to prevent it happening again. “Isn’t that the point of education?”, the student asked. 
One of the organisers, socialist activist Ivy Bertrand, argued that the government should practise what it preaches: “If school is so important, fund our schools properly and stop spending so much on the military, including military support for Israel and the US! Our taxpayer dollars are being used to bomb schools and hospitals in Gaza and kill children instead of funding education and health care. How dare they lecture us about the importance of young people learning!” 
The solidarity the students repeatedly expressed for their fellow students in Gaza was profoundly moving, and stood in stark contrast to the daily efforts of the Albanese government to desensitise the public to the suffering it is greenlighting in Gaza. Whether it’s equivocating about the merits of starving an imprisoned population, as Foreign Minister Penny Wong infamously did, or repeating the absurd mantra about Israel “defending itself” while it slaughters defenceless civilians in cold blood, there is no atrocity too barbaric for the Australian Labor Party to defend. 
And the mainstream media reinforce this, demonising Arabs and Muslims and tirelessly presenting Jewish people as the most important victims of the war. A letter from the Jewish community allegedly signed by more than 6,000 people expressing disapproval of the high school walkout and demanding the government take a tougher stance against it enjoyed substantial airtime in the lead-up to Thursday’s action.
Many of the strike attendees expressed bemusement as to why anyone, Jewish or otherwise, would feel unsafe because of young people protesting the state-sanctioned murder of other young people. “This is a movement against violence and racism”, a Northcote High student said. “This protest is inclusive, Jewish students are welcome here, and it doesn’t matter about ethnicity or religion or culture; this is about being human”. A Coburg High student said she thought some of those attitudes stemmed from a “fear of Muslims”. 
The small number of Jewish participants in the march expressed similar views, with one woman, who was holding a placard which read “Jews say no to genocide of Palestinians. Not in my name”, telling Red Flag, “It’s not anti-Semitic to support the rights of oppressed people, and those people [the signatories to the letter] don’t represent the entire Jewish community”. 
The large attendance and defiant attitudes of the strike participants was not only a repudiation of tut-tutting politicians and organised Zionists, but also reflected a cynicism towards and disengagement from the mainstream media and their efforts to shape attitudes, at least among a substantial minority of young people.
“The media is very biased”, the Caroline Springs student said. “Only one side of the story is pushed.” It’s not hard to see why, with journalists from the commercial news channels sent to cover the strike repeatedly challenging the students about whether they were informed enough to be protesting, and interviewing motorists they hoped would smear the protesters for disrupting traffic. 
In contrast to the concern and solidarity on the part of school students for their counterparts in Gaza, not a single one of the six mainstream media journalists Red Flag asked confirmed that they were aware of Israel targeting journalists in its ongoing war against the Palestinians, including a report from just the day before of three journalists killed by Israel while reporting from the Lebanese border. This raises the question of who exactly belongs in school, as well as who has something to learn about compassion and solidarity. 
Underpinning the government opprobrium, Jewish community calls to shut down the strike and biased media coverage is a simple truth that was not lost on attendees: the establishment in Australia backs Israel down the line. That means smearing, discrediting and all too often criminalising those who dare to speak out for the Palestinians currently enduring unspeakable suffering at the hands of Israel. The students’ humanity and defiance in the face of this onslaught is a lesson to us all.
PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Hrkac

School students give lesson in solidarity

As millions of people around the world flood the streets in support of Palestine and to condemn their governments’ complicity in Israel’s genocide, many are demanding a ceasefire. In New York City, hundreds of brave Jewish protesters occupied the Statue of Liberty holding banners reading “ceasefire now”. In several major cities, including London, Washington, DC, and Melbourne, record numbers chanted the same thing. The hash tag #CeasefireNOW has been trending on social media for weeks, and is being taken up by millions. 
The ubiquity of the demand reflects people’s desperation to see an end to the relentless bombing that is killing devastating numbers of Palestinians and causing unimaginable suffering. And it is a testament to the scale of popular anger at the blood-soaked Western leaders who reject such an idea out of hand, lest they appear in any way disapproving of Israel’s atrocities. 
There is without question an urgent need to stop the daily murder of Palestinians by Israel. But to be meaningful, any ceasefire must bring a permanent end to Israel’s offensive, and it must be accompanied by immediate measures to prevent further suffering in Gaza and to rebuild what has been destroyed. 
A temporary halt to bombing—whether via a ceasefire or the contemptible “humanitarian pause” advocated by Western leaders—is no solution. It is a victory for spin more than humanitarianism, intended to defuse criticism of Israel so that its military objectives may be better achieved. And for Israel, temporary breaks in bombing can be strategic: urging Palestinians to move south, closer to the crossing to Egypt, during any pause in fighting advances the campaign of ethnic cleansing more than it makes Palestinians “safer”. And it means Israel can treat anyone who remains as enemy combatants and therefore legitimate targets for further massacres. 
So any ceasefire must be permanent if it is to advance the cause of the Palestinians. But even that, on its own, is not sufficient to meet the scale of the humanitarian disaster that is unfolding in Gaza. Urgent and immediate relief is also needed: food, medical supplies, water, fuel, electricity, search and rescue equipment, construction materials and more need to be moved into Gaza both to ensure the remaining population can survive and to ensure that Gaza becomes habitable again. Simply stopping the bombing and leaving Gaza as uninhabitable rubble only further aids the ethnic cleansing Israel is hoping to achieve. If Palestinians are not to be permanently displaced, homes must be rebuilt urgently, along with basic infrastructure like hospitals, markets, roads and schools. 
The terms of any ceasefire are also important: Israel is likely to agree to a ceasefire only if it involves the permanent expulsion of Hamas and any other resistance groups from Gaza. Israel and the US are already in talks about reinstalling the corrupt Palestinian Authority there, possibly aided by a long-term occupation by UN, Arab or even Israeli forces. This would be a significant victory for Israel and defeat for the Palestinians. A ceasefire that strengthens Israel’s stranglehold on the lives of Palestinians in Gaza will be no victory. 
Even if a permanent ceasefire on favourable terms could be achieved, a return to the status quo as it was prior to 7 October should not be confused with peace or justice. Even the best ceasefire will not end the siege Israel imposes on Gaza, a siege that has been collectively punishing Gaza’s 2 million inhabitants every day for nearly two decades. It will not end the expansion of settlements into Palestinian land on the West Bank and the apartheid conditions Palestinians are forced to live with day in, day out. It will not disarm one of the world’s most well-armed states, which oppresses and terrorises the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and inside Israel every day of their lives.
Justice for the Palestinians is simply not possible so long as they are living in the shadow of Israel, backed by the most powerful state on Earth and its despicable allies like Australia, whose slavish devotion to every Israeli atrocity is a chilling warning of what we can expect in the wars that are yet to come. These barbaric regimes have to be brought down and replaced with something altogether different if we want to see a world without oppression and war.

Hajar Riad

Israel’s bombing must stop, but Palestinians need more than a ceasefire

Hope is a scarce commodity in 2023. The threat of military confrontation between the US and China looms large and is fuelling military expansion on a terrifying scale. An aggressive far right is making gains in an alarming number of countries, enjoying both electoral success and gathering support online and on the streets. And the instability in the world economy is condemning ever greater numbers to poverty and economic insecurity, while a minority continue to accrue obscene wealth. 
The Marxism 2023 conference, held in Melbourne over the Easter weekend, proved an important antidote to this grim picture. As veteran Indigenous right activist and radical Gary Foley declared in his speech at the around 500-strong opening night of the conference, "a room full of earnest young radicals is a sign of hope". This set the tone for the weekend. An enduring theme over the more than 100 sessions was that resistance springs eternal no matter what our side is up against. The upsurge of struggle in France against President Macron raising the age of retirement was a particular focus, as the actions of workers there starts to seriously unsettle the ruling class in one of the key centres of European capitalism. Struggles elsewhere, including in Iran against the repressive regime, in the UK over working conditions and against the far right in a variety of places, also featured. 
The history and continuing tradition of radical Indigenous struggle was a key theme, taking on a renewed importance in a year when the the referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament will be both a face-off between racists and anti-racists, as well as ploy by the Labor government to secure some left credibility that it does not deserve. Taking up other issues of immediate concern, such as the investment of billions in nuclear-powered submarines to support a future US-led war, as well as keeping alive the history of resistance and working class struggle in Australia, were all important themes aimed to better equip the activists of today for the struggles that lie ahead. 
After more than three years of online organising and zoom meetings, the conference marked the first national gathering of socialists since the pandemic began. With more than 1,300 tickets sold, attendees came from nearly every capital city in the country, as well as from around the world. The fight against capitalism is a global struggle, reflected in the large number of sessions featuring international speakers, including from the US, Argentina, Spain, France, Iran, Palestine, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and Greece.
The success or otherwise of future struggles to stop imperial war and defend workers' living standards in the context of economic chaos will be in part determined by how well we are able to build up the forces to fight those battles now. The Marxism conference continues to be a vital contribution to achieving that goal.

Marxism 2023 conference held in Melbourne

Hundreds of Victorian Socialists volunteers have been staffing early voting polling booths since 14 November, building on the more than 150,000 doors knocked across the north and west of Melbourne during the state election campaign. They are bringing a new style of campaigning to the state election, and have found a constituency of voters fed up with the prevailing pro-corporate, mainstream politics. 
“Victorian Socialists get very little media coverage, and we have no powerful backers in the big end of town to help us get our message out”, the party’s campaign coordinator for the Northern Metropolitan region, Jess Lenehan, told Red Flag. “So our campaigners try to engage people, through conversations on door steps and chats at polling booths. It can take a while to break through the sense a lot of people have that politicians don’t care about them or about what they think; that they only care about advancing their careers and looking after the wealthy. 
“Once we explain that Victorian Socialists is not a traditional political party—its candidates are not professional politicians but community activists and unionists, who, if elected, will only take an average worker’s wage—we often find people are very open to hearing more of what we have to say.” 
Social media is awash with stories from the campaign trail that illustrate this point. At the Preston early voting booth, Erin, a volunteer, detailed how she met a young woman who worked at a nearby gym: “As soon as I said Victorian Socialists are outraged at the rich doubling their wealth in the last two years, Tiffany yelled ‘YES!’ She’s sick of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. She hadn't wanted to vote for anyone until she met us”.
At the Greenvale booth, another volunteer reported meeting Ahmet, a long-time Turkish socialist who had been imprisoned for two years by the Turkish government before fleeing the country. He said he always voted socialist and gave the volunteer a big hug. 
Esmaeil spoke to Belle Gibson, Victorian Socialists candidate for Kororoit in Melbourne’s west, at early voting. “He’s a welder at a factory in Sunshine”, Belle wrote on social media. “He manufactures the mesh that goes inside concrete structures. A couple of years ago he injured his back at work and is fighting for WorkSafe to cover his second round of surgery ... 
“We spoke about the need for fighting unions to win proper compensation for people are injured at work. When I told him about the campaign to get Liz Walsh elected in Western Metro and Liz’s track record of activism, his face lit up. He said, ‘Women know how to fight, they are leading the way in Iran, where I’m from. They are fighting for Women Life and Freedom’. He spoke about the need to fight for a world for our children. A world free of inequality, violence and greed, and a world full of beauty and parks and dignity ... I’m so proud to have his vote.”
Volunteers in the north and west have met a number of workers who have had personal contact with Jerome Small, Victorian Socialists’ candidate for the Northern Metro region and long-time social justice activist and unionist. Some have been fellow construction workers familiar with Jerome’s union activism. Others are people like Ravi, met by a volunteer in the electorate of Kalkallo, who, in the word of the volunteer, “has known Jerome for years, works at Woolworths logistics and remembers Jerome's support for their strikes and pickets. During the period of lockdown at the height of the pandemic, Jerome gave assistance to Ravi in dealing with health and safety issues at work. Rasika [Ravi’s partner] has always voted Labor since she migrated but thinks they take the outer-suburbs for granted, and is supporting Jerome this time too”.
Volunteers have also taken time to visit workers at the Pampas factory in West Footscray, where nearly the entire workforce of more than 100 is on strike and picketing, demanding higher pay and better conditions for casuals. At the Sunshine booth the previous Friday, a volunteer met Asha, who works for Pampas. The volunteer detailed how Asha has worked at the factory for more than twenty years, “and her workplace is about to go strike for 48 hours for a 6 percent pay rise starting Monday. She was pretty pumped. A socialist in parliament will back striking workers and build solidarity with their struggle”.
There are innumerable stories like this, of people struggling to survive on inadequate pensions, migrants who have been part of similar struggles all over the world, young people who feel hopeless about a future of climate crisis, unattainable housing and inequality. 
Victorian Socialists are trying to do more than just thrust a how-to-vote card in these people’s hands. The campaign wants to get a socialist elected to parliament, and lay the basis for greater resistance to the many inequalities and injustices that the capitalist system and those who run it expect people to accept. This is what motivates its hundreds of volunteers. 
Whatever the outcome on 26 November, this in itself will be a significant achievement and step forward for the socialist left. 
Help is still needed to staff the more than 290 polling booths across Melbourne’s north and west on election day. To volunteer, sign up at <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/polling">victoriansocialists.org.au/polling</a>.

Capitalism can’t end women’s oppression: we need a revolution

Deference to the oppressed gets us nowhere

The militarisation of Victoria Police under Labor

Palestine solidarity encampments spread across Australia

To end sexism, we need to destroy capitalism

Catastrophe looms in Rafah, but genocide must not be questioned

School students give lesson in solidarity

Israel’s bombing must stop, but Palestinians need more than a ceasefire

Marxism 2023 conference held in Melbourne

On the campaign trail with Victorian Socialists

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