Labor’s push for a “misinformation bill” collapsed last month under pressure from the political right and social media bosses. Labor’s proposed solution to the proliferation of online misinformation was a series of laws that would have given the Australian Communications and Media Authority the power to monitor digital platforms and require them to keep records about misinformation and disinformation on their networks. 
Opposition leader Peter Dutton, who last month called for Palestine solidarity demonstrations to be banned, described the proposed laws as a “scandalous attack on free speech”. Pretence to lofty principle aside, the Liberals were worried that the laws would be used against the right-wing kooks that are a cherished part of their base. The sort of people who, for example, used social media to argue against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament proposal on the basis that a “Yes” victory would lead to “apartheid” and potentially pave the way for the UN to take over Australian land. 
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also found himself in an unwanted conflict with the incoming Trump administration in the US. Trump plans to pass laws prohibiting social media platforms from removing anything other than unlawful content. The right-wing press seized on this clash with glee. For example, Sky News’s Michael Shellenberger described Labor’s bill as a “very unwise and counterproductive act of aggression” against the White House. 
Albanese’s ALP is pathologically incapable of defending any of its policies against the political right or the business lobby when it comes under pressure. Hence, Labor failed to respond to an inquiry that recommended banning gambling advertising: it’s scared of putting even marginal sectors of capital offside. The only group the party seems confident standing up to is the under-16s, who have been banned from social media after an absurd piece of legislation passed the parliament.
Labor’s proposal was also incoherent. It assumed that social media companies would develop their own industry codes and self-regulate, the government bureaucracy stepping in to impose standards only in “exceptional and urgent circumstances” when there was a threat of “serious harm to the community”. This was defined broadly to include interference in electoral and referendum processes, harm to public health, the vilification of particular groups, and imminent harm to the economy or critical infrastructure. 
The bill’s <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:%252522legislation/ems/r7239_ems_13b01a0b-4684-4e0e-b336-0028d4c0e3cd%252522">explanatory memorandum</a> said it would cover not only verifiably false claims but also “opinions ... commentary and invective”, presumably with the government to decide what constitutes a “false” opinion. This overreach meant the bill also came under criticism from the Greens for being “half-baked” and from the human rights commissioner for posing genuine risks to free speech. 
The proposed legislation was a mess. But the surrounding discussion—which focused on balancing policing responsibilities between social media bosses and state bureaucrats—largely missed the point. Misinformation and disinformation are hard to root out because they are not simply the products of a few basement-dwelling trolls; they are permanent features of capitalist politics. 
For example, conservative political parties promote lies designed to inflame the reactionary fears and delusions of their right-wing base. When right-wingers claimed during the Voice referendum that a “Yes” victory would result in suburban homes being repossessed under Native Title, they were echoing a racist fear campaign initiated by Liberal PM John Howard in 1998. And during the pandemic, Melbourne anti-vax rallies organised by fascists were addressed by Liberal MPs, who lent legitimacy to the notion that COVID-19 was little more than a pretext for Labor Premier Daniel Andres to establish a communist dictatorship. 
These “culture wars” are essential to mobilising a popular base for parties that exist only to represent business interests. Paul Weyrich, a leader of the “new right” that pioneered this strategy in the US 50 years ago, explained: “We talk about issues that people care about, like gun control, abortion, taxes, and crime. Yes, they’re emotional issues, but that’s better than talking about capital formation”. 
Business interests are often found lurking in the background of these campaigns. Anti-lockdown demonstrators were the rag-tag shock troops for a push led by the Business Council of Australia and other industry groups eager to return to business as usual and let COVID-19 rip, regardless of the health consequences. Fears of increased Native Title claims if Indigenous rights are advanced have been stoked for decades by big farmers and sections of the mining industry to reinforce their control over resources. 
Fact-checking and media regulation do nothing to challenge these politics—they have to be confronted by challenging the reactionary worldview that underpins them. Labor, typically, is unwilling to do this. Instead, it hopes that presenting itself as a party of “adults” committed to facts and reason will be broadly appealing and result in a second term in government—much like the Democrats did in the recent US presidential elections. 
This approach relies on the wide acceptance that the mainstream political establishment represents “sense” and “truth” as opposed to the “loony” right-peddling conspiracy theories of its opponents. The problem for Labor (and the Democrats) is that there is a “truth deficit” on both sides of capitalist politics. It might not be as unhinged, but the political establishment has always relied on lies and misinformation to rule.
For example, millions across the world who have engaged in Palestine solidarity over the past twelve months have seen first-hand how the establishment presents supporters of Israel as victims and paints critics of the war on Gaza as antisemites. In November, international headlines were dominated by an extraordinary piece of fake news along these lines. 
Mainstream politicians—from the German Greens and Australian Labor to the Israeli far right—united to present a picture of antisemitic pogroms in Amsterdam. Foreign Minister Penny Wong posted on social media: “Violence in all its forms is unacceptable. The Antisemitic attacks on Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam overnight are abhorrent”. Israeli President Isaac Herzog claimed: “We see with horror this morning, the shocking images and videos that since October 7th, we had hoped never to see again: an antisemitic pogrom currently taking place against Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and Israeli citizens in the heart of Amsterdam, Netherlands”.
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/when-a-zionist-riot-is-reported-as-an-antisemitic-pogrom">But there was no pogrom</a>. Within hours, the truth came out. Israeli football fans had gathered to burn a Palestinian flag, destroyed a taxi, chanted, “Let the IDF win, we will fuck the Arabs!” and “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!” After Israeli fans began attacking houses displaying Palestinian flags, members of the community responded to calls on social media to defend themselves, clashing with the Zionists before police intervened. 
In this topsy-turvy world, Israelis marauding around inciting genocide are painted as victims of racism, while local communities defending themselves from violent attacks are smeared as pogromists. 
Politicians and the media establishment will tell far bigger lies than this in the service of upholding their imperialist interests and alliances. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which killed and displaced millions of people, is just one example. 
In 2001, the Republican administration of George W. Bush seized on the disorientation and fear caused by the 11 September terrorist attacks to launch a campaign of regime change in the Middle East. Bush claimed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein represented an existential threat to the world and possessed weapons of mass destruction: anthrax, nerve gas and nuclear weapons. The administration also tried to link Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US, insinuating that the Iraqi president was in league with al-Qaeda. The enemy was clear, Bush argued: “States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world”.
But Saddam Hussein didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction, nor did he have anything to do with 9/11. So they cooked up fake intelligence. Grainy satellite photographs of warehouses, bogus testimonials and ominous rumours of imported “aluminium tubes” were reported earnestly by the world’s media as evidence of the existential threat proposed by Saddam, now dubbed the “new Hitler”.
On 3 February 2003, the Washington Post—which purports to be a great defender of democracy and truth—published an article about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” headlined “Irrefutable”. The article stated: “It is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses [WMDs]” and claimed that the evidence was “overwhelming ... powerful and irrefutable”. It went on to assert: “Saddam Hussein’s regime is cooperating with a branch of the al Qaeda organization that is trying to acquire chemical weapons and stage attacks in Europe”.
Dodgy intelligence prepared by Bush’s allies in Britain’s Labour Party made the false claim that Iraq possessed WMDs that could be deployed against British citizens within 45 minutes . The Sun newspaper ran the hysterical headline “BRITS 45 MINUTES FROM DOOM”. 
These lies were repeated ad-nauseum in the Australian press. The Australian’s Greg Sheridan claimed in August 2002 that Saddam Hussein possessed a vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons would obtain nuclear weapons in “one or two years”. 
Sheridan’s gushing support for Bush won him proximity to power, which elicited further gushing. Months later, Sheridan reported on the “dizzying week” he spent in the US capital. “It is the heart of Washington, this display of US strength and pride”, he wrote. “It is imperial Rome without the vomitoriums, greater than London was at the height of the empire ... [This] is the known universe, the most formidable agglomeration of pure power we have ever seen.”
The arguments justifying the war rapidly unravelled. Iraq’s WMD arsenal, the pages of the Australian admitted a few months later, had always been a matter of “speculation”. The false claims about the Iraqi WMD arsenal were, two years later, “perhaps the worst American intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor”.
But the damage had been done. A monstrous and murderous eight-year-long occupation was in progress. The cost? The ensuing wave of war and crisis in the Middle East, organised to reinforce American power in the region, is estimated to have taken 4.5 million lives.
“Misinformation” and “fake news” are often portrayed as modern, algorithmically driven scourges. But there is nothing new about either. 
The Australian state was founded on a lie: that the continent British colonists encountered was “terra nullius”—empty land. Invaders, fully aware of the highly organised cooperative Indigenous society, destroyed evidence of it to justify their claim to the land. This heinous legal fiction stood as a defence of genocide for more than two centuries, perpetuated through history books and the education system until it was finally overturned by the Mabo land rights decision in 1992. 
Dishonesty trickles down in capitalist society. The profusion of misinformation, conspiracy theories and fake news on social media is a symptom of a society ruled by liars. When reputable sources package self-serving and malicious lies as “facts”, why wouldn’t far-fetched conspiracy theories seem credible? The people who run society spend inordinate time and energy beating opponents into submission and justifying their exploitative and unequal system. They have no credibility to be the arbiters of fact and fiction.

Luca Tavan

Who’s to blame for ‘misinformation’?

Campus antisemitism beat-up attempts to crush pro-Palestine activism

“It’s tough being a member of the Squad these days”, wrote Branko Marcetic last year in the pages of Jacobin magazine, lamenting that “even committed socialists question what the point of the Squad has been”.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s successful bid to unseat long-term Democratic Party powerbroker Joe Crowley from his New York congressional seat in June 2018 unleashed an avalanche of expectations. The popular documentary Knock down the House chronicled her rise, described by producers as one of the “most shocking political upsets in recent American history”. Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, was joined by three other successful progressive challengers: Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. Together, they were dubbed “the Squad” by the media.
On the American reformist left, expectations of a socialist breakthrough led by the Squad were high. Miles Kampf-Lassin wrote in Jacobin: “It’s no shock that Ocasio-Cortez and her cohort are being treated as a threat to a party establishment that has cozied up to corporate power and helped maintain the deeply unequal economic and political order in this country. It’s because they are one”.
Five years later, the Squad has lost its sheen. Rather than taking a hammer to the Democratic establishment, the Squad has become its enthusiastic left flank. Commitment to party unity has meant accepting the Biden administration’s right-wing domestic and international agenda, from voting to impose a unilateral contract on railway workers and quash their right to strike, to voting to fund Israel’s Iron Dome. 
As large numbers of young people turned away from Biden, labelling him “Genocide Joe”, and wealthy party donors abandoned him over his fading mental acuity, the Squad stood out as the biggest enthusiasts for the increasingly beleaguered president. 
In response to criticism after Biden’s disastrous performance in the presidential debate, Ilhan Omar offered a passionate defence, telling the Washington Post: “He’s been the best president of my lifetime, and we have his back”. This came after Omar in early February accurately described Biden as “greenlighting the massacre of Palestinians”—apparently a minor detail. 
When Biden announced his intention to withdraw from the 2024 race and endorsed Kamala Harris as his replacement, support from the Squad followed. Squad colleague Jamaal Bowman wrote effusively: “I am ... excited to see her execute her own transformational vision for the future of our democracy and our foreign policy ... Let us all follow her guiding light”.
The “guiding light” the Squad are now following is a cop. Harris is a former California attorney general—making her one of the leading enforcers of a system that has given the US the most incarcerated population on the planet. Harris fought against the early release of prisoners, her legal team arguing that emptying prisons would deplete the state’s source of cheap labour. She resisted Black Lives Matter demands to make police body cameras compulsory. 
Those who once claimed to challenge the warmongering, mass-incarcerating, corporate-backed Democratic establishment are now part of the furniture. Those, like AOC, who built their profiles protesting migration detention now face angry pro-Palestine protests calling out their complicity in their party’s crimes. So what happened? 
The truth is that, despite projections of radicalism from some of their supporters, the Squad were always moderate liberal Democrats with no real project of challenging the party leadership. While portrayed as “outsiders” in the media, most members of the Squad have a long history in the party. Ayanna Pressley worked her way up as an intern for a member of the Kennedy dynasty, as did Ocasio-Cortez. Rashida Tlaib worked as a Democratic staffer from 2004, while Ilhan Omar did the same in Minnesota from 2013. Their subsequent trajectory shows that it’s impossible to defend left-wing principles within the structures of a profoundly pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist party. 
Their approach to the Democratic Party was collaborative from the start. One of AOC’s first acts in office was an occupation of congressional powerbroker Nancy Pelosi’s office alongside climate activists. But AOC couched this action within an approach that aimed to gently influence Pelosi. “One of the things I admire so much about leader Pelosi is that she comes from a space of activism and organising, and so I think that she really appreciates civic engagement. And really what I’m here to do is just to support the folks who are here”, she said at the time. “Should leader Pelosi become the next speaker of the House, we need to tell her that we’ve got her back”, AOC added. 
The Squad did indeed have Pelosi’s back. They supported the venture capitalist—who has an estimated net worth upwards of $100m—for re-election as party leader at the end of 2018. Soon, AOC had christened her the “mama bear” of the Democratic Party. This established a pattern: members of the Squad would trade loyalty to the Democratic leadership for a shot at sitting on influential congressional committees.
The relationship between the Democratic left and centre was consummated under Biden. After swiftly dispensing with the half-hearted challenge from Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries, he moved to coopt the left by adopting some elements of their rhetoric as part of his policy agenda. As journalist Ryan Grimm, a sympathiser of the Squad’s project, admitted: 
“While Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad spent much of 2019 in conflict with party leadership, and spent the first half of 2020 trying to nominate Sanders for president, AOC had been a team player in the general election, and through Biden’s term, she had consistently framed her advocacy as in support of his administration and his agenda.”
The economic and social agenda of the Biden administration, dubbed “Bidenomics” by the press, has sometimes been presented as a victory for the left, something at least approximating the reformist vision of a Green New Deal. US socialist Ashley Smith argues that Bidenomics should better be understood as a project of “imperialist Keynesianism”—a project to rebuild the foundations of US capitalism, stabilise domestic politics and restore Washington’s imperial supremacy over China and Russia. 
Rather than pulling Biden to the left, Sanders and the Squad were pulled to the right, abandoning their reformist program to cheerlead an administration overseeing attacks on workers at home and militarism abroad.
The consequences of self-described socialists signing up to be the left wing of Biden’s imperialist agenda have been made starkly apparent over the past ten months, as a US-Israeli war on Gaza has claimed tens of thousands of Palestinian lives. AOC’s willingness to betray Palestine in the name of party unity has been clear since 2021, when she refused to vote against funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile system. Months of waffling about the war, evading and criticising protesters have alienated many in the Palestine movement.
More than five years on from the shock election of the Squad, there is a need for a serious critique of their project. The Democratic Party is the world’s oldest and most established capitalist party. Its list of crimes is the longest of any, given the party’s central role in administering one of the most brutal capitalist states on the planet—a state that has spent 80 years as the largest and most aggressive empire the world has ever known. The Democrats are the party of slavery and segregation, of Hiroshima and the wars on Vietnam and Gaza, of union-busting and austerity.
The very name “Democratic Party” is an oxymoron. Its structures are profoundly undemocratic, and it’s not really a party. Rather, it’s a series of fundraising cabals controlled by a powerful wing of the US capitalist class. No genuine socialist could operate politically within its institutions.
The best representatives of the socialist movement have always understood this. The American revolutionary Eugene Debs once said: “There was a time in my life, before I became a socialist, when I permitted myself as a member of the Democratic Party to be elected to a state legislature. I have been trying to live it down. I am as much ashamed of that as I am proud of having gone to jail”.
The balance sheet of the Squad’s first five years shows that a group of aspirational, progressive political careerists can comfortably exist in the swamp of the Democratic Party despite occasional ideological tensions and policy clashes. A real socialist movement is something different—it will have to be built based on an implacable hostility to the oldest, most powerful capitalist party on the planet.

Whatever happened to the ‘Squad’?

Socialist Alternative is a revolutionary socialist organisation. The point of a socialist group is ultimately to fight to overthrow the capitalist system and create a world run democratically by workers—one that prioritises human need, not profit. 
In moments of mass resistance, which break out periodically under capitalism, the question of which political forces are the best organised becomes crucial. The ruling class have numerous defences to protect their rule, from repressive laws and armed police to the loyalty of “moderates” in the movement—reformist politicians, well-heeled NGO leaders, union officials and more. A socialist party is necessary to combat these “respectable” and “pragmatic” leaders who are invested in, and enjoy a privileged position within, the system as it is. They tend to argue that workers and the oppressed should rely on their leadership and their efforts to bring change through official channels, rather than workers’ own power. This functions to protect the status quo. 
Socialists, by contrast, argue that real social change is possible only when the mass of people are actively engaged in bringing about change. In workplaces, this means workers taking control and deciding for themselves what to produce and how, in a collective and democratic manner. 
This is exactly what tends to happen at high points of social struggle or during revolutions, but can easily be crushed or coopted by those looking to preserve the system. This is why a mass socialist party is necessary: to push in the direction of mass action and stronger grassroots organisation. That requires people who can argue and convince others of the need to dismantle the police, armies and parliamentary institutions that back up the rule of the rich, and to begin building a new society based on democracy and solidarity. 
We’re a long way from this today, but this gigantic and urgent task isn’t going to be accomplished by pontificating in armchairs and waiting until the barricades go up. It requires an organisation of people committed to building resistance wherever possible in the here and now—while also preparing for the much larger challenges to come. Through campaigns and organising, socialists can gain experience in fighting for and winning things, figure out what tactics and strategies are effective and learn who are allies or enemies.
This is why we expect our members be active wherever they are—whether at work or on a university campus. It’s why we take working in campaigns seriously—from the fight for marriage equality to the campaign against racism and fascism, to struggles for workers’ rights and against education cuts. We want to win these demands because we support workers and the oppressed having as much control over their lives and the highest living standards possible within the confines of capitalism. And every struggle is a chance to learn how to challenge the power of the capitalist class and its defenders. 
So whenever or wherever the oppressed and exploited have a grievance against the system, socialists want to stand with them, to strengthen the fight, learn from it and, through this process, demonstrate in practice the veracity of socialist politics. 
This is particularly important at work. Our members are often doing the painstaking and unglamorous work of convincing individual workmates to join the union or raising their voices about seemingly small workplace grievances. But this work, which builds union culture and marks out socialists as workplace leaders, is invaluable. It can at times lead to fairly impressive union activism considering the current state of class struggle. Socialist Alternative members have led or been an important part of a number of strikes across Australia, and more recently a walkout of hundreds of community service workers in Melbourne in solidarity with Gaza. Also, socialists can’t expect workers to follow their lead in a radicalisation if they have not already proved themselves to be committed, principled workplace activists. Any organisation that is serious about its claim that workers have the power to bring about socialism must be part of the workers movement and aim to win the respect of other workers.
We are also involved in the gargantuan task of building a genuinely radical electoral alternative to Labor, establishing the electoral coalition Victorian Socialists, which has won more than 8 percent of the vote in a series of working-class suburbs across the state and put socialist ideas on the map. These campaigns have involved conversations with countless thousands of people, where we must make socialist ideas and strategies accessible and convincing to those not already involved in activism.
In all the campaigns we’re a part of, our approach is determined by our socialist politics.
Because we are revolutionaries, we don’t limit what we demand to what we think will be acceptable to those in power. This stands in contrast to moderate organisations and NGOs, which often oppose even minimal demands and activism for fear of alienating their friends in high places or being seen as “extreme” or “fringe” and not listened to by those in power. 
For example, when we called demonstrations against the coal-championing Liberal government at the height of the bushfire crisis in 2020, “progressive” NGOs fell over themselves to parrot police and media talking points about protests being “inappropriate” during a time of national emergency. We said, “Ignore the manipulative cops and come to the bushfire protests”, mobilising 100,000 people across the country. 
Similarly, most of the union leaders have been utterly silent since Labor won government, whilst wages and working conditions have taken a battering. Socialist Alternative is a small group, and we don’t pretend we can transform the union movement, but when we are able to put an argument against the more conservative line of union leaders, we can find an audience. 
For instance, a Socialist Alternative member argued at a mass meeting of Western Australian nurses during their last contract negotiations to reject the state Labor government’s insulting pay cut offer, leading to nurses voting to demand a 10 percent pay increase. During the pandemic, members of Socialist Alternative led a national campaign to defeat a proposed 15 percent wage cut on every worker in the university sector, a plan that was being pushed by the university union itself. 
These campaigns are often inspiring to participate in. They raise participants’ political horizons, give them experience in organising and allow them to draw practical lessons. They demonstrate in practice that the instincts and attitudes of workers are frequently well in advance of their “representatives”, but so often are invalidated by those with a more conservative agenda. 
But campaigning alone is not enough. Small victories can be overturned. And, the reality is, many campaigns and struggles don’t win their demands. This doesn’t mean that those campaigns are a waste of time. But defeat often demoralises people and leads to pessimistic conclusions. Importantly, though, this is not inevitable—defeats can be important learning experiences that make victory next time more likely. And, if the appropriate political conclusions are drawn, they help establish political lessons in the eyes of those who take part that are important for future struggles. Socialist organisation plays an important role in this, by helping to ensure that the skills, insights and political principles learnt through generations of class and social struggles are passed on and built upon in a way that can shape the future of the workers’ movement—toward overthrowing the entire system. That’s why socialists meet, discuss and write about struggles, and attempt to draw the participants into ongoing political activity, rather than let them drift away when the campaign ends.
The fight for a better world is not an easy, linear path. It is paved with ups and downs, victories and defeats, rapid surges and temporary setbacks. Socialists can learn from all of this to try to give us a better shot in the future.
Winning in the long term will require building a mass socialist organisation that is capable of leading strikes and rebellions, thinking and acting collectively, and arguing effectively for revolutionary ideas. 
This is why we don’t just organise activism: we take constructing an experienced, collaborative group seriously. There are many elements to this. 
It means, first and foremost, constantly growing our ranks. To challenge capitalism, we are going to need socialist organisers embedded in every workplace, every campaign and on every university campus. 
That starts today with recruiting individuals, educating them in socialist ideas and giving them the political experience to become effective organisers and recruiters. This is why we promote our politics at rallies, sell a publication and regularly host anti-capitalist meetings after the demonstration concludes. 
Contrary to the complaints of some, this isn’t “hijacking” or bringing an “outside agenda”. This is what every serious organisation, and even many individuals, do in every struggle. Every campaign is a battle of ideas, bringing together people who want to work for a common goal but have different political approaches. Not all those approaches will lead to victory. Arriving at the best strategy is possible only in a democratic environment where all these competing strategies and ideas can be aired, tested and evaluated.
What’s more, many activist campaigns have been sustained only because a minority of participants were convinced to become ongoing socialist organisers, turning a moment of protest into a lifelong political commitment. The more socialists we recruit today, the more people there are who will continue to build resistance in the future. 
For a socialist group to be effective, it must build a culture of serious political activity. This is why we make regular activity a requirement of membership. 
This is not only about maximising the impact Socialist Alternative can have on society. It is also necessary for the organisation to be democratic. We make decisions, carry them out and evaluate them collectively. Only an active membership can hold the leadership to account and learn how to be leaders themselves.
All the work that Socialist Alternative does takes significant resources. Running multiple campaigns, a national publication and theoretical journal, renting or booking venues to organise in, hosting the Marxism conference every year—all this costs money. We are funded through members’ own financial contributions, which vary according to their personal situation. For a revolutionary organisation, this is even more important than for other parties because it’s a question of political independence—to function as a radical group, we can’t rely on corporate donations as the ALP does, or government grants as is the case for NGOs. 
We organise weekly branch meetings in every area where we have a presence. These meetings allow members to discuss what’s happening in the world and campaigns we are involved in, and to deepen our collective knowledge of history and political theory. And they are able to democratically decide the direction of the group, unlike most traditional political parties, which operate according to a top-down model. We have elected leadership structures at a campus, city and national level to coordinate the activities of our group, all of which are democratically accountable to the members. 
Socialists need to be well organised and determined if we’re going to have an impact. But revolutionary groups won’t build themselves—they have to be consciously consolidated by those who believe it’s possible for workers to build a society that’s fit for human existence, even if we’ll always be in a minority outside of major political crises and radicalisations. 
We still have a long way to go—from an organisation of around 600 to many thousands. But we also have a proud history of campaigning, and a conviction that our politics stand a chance of winning the fight for a better world. If you agree with these ideas, you should join the largest and most serious group of revolutionaries in Australia today—you should join Socialist Alternative.

What kind of organisation is Socialist Alternative?

In a monumental betrayal, Melbourne University’s Students’ Council last month voted to rescind a motion supporting the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and the global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. 
At Palestine’s moment of need, student politicians—mostly from factions associated with the Australian Labor Party—have put self-interest ahead of basic solidarity. 
The solidarity motion was adopted in 2022 and provoked a legal challenge from student Liberal Party member Justin Riazaty, a former leader of the campus Monarchist Association. 
The legal firm representing Riazaty threatened action against the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) if its governing council failed to rescind the motion and issue a formal apology. The firm stated on its website that UMSU had acted outside the scope of its purposes by passing a political motion and that the union had engaged in “oppressive conduct” by not consulting Jewish students. 
Attempts by Labor-aligned forces in the union to withdraw and revise the motion did nothing to mollify Riazaty, who relaunched legal action later in the year, claiming that the motion breached the Victorian Racial and Religious Tolerance Act. Speaking to the press, Riazaty, who is not Jewish, claimed the motion was “anti-Semitism pure and simple and cannot stand”.
An open letter organised by Students for Palestine, signed by hundreds of students and elected representatives, argued at the time: “The arguments made in the lawsuit are cynical and dishonest, conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. This is an attempt to undermine solidarity with the Palestinians”.
This year, the climate is far more favourable for standing up to the pro-Israel right than it was in 2022. A global mass movement in solidarity with the Palestinians has emerged and there are historically high levels of support for the cause among young people. In many places, thousands of vocal anti-Zionist Jewish activists have led the demonstrations. 
So supporters of Palestine have enormous political and moral authority to refute the slanderous arguments that equate anti-racist solidarity with anti-Semitism. Fighting for Palestine in a high-profile free speech court case and campaigning to push back the right could have further raised pro-Palestine sentiment among students. 
Yet this opportunity has been squandered by elected representatives in the union. Under the leadership of both the “left” and right factions of the Labor Party, UMSU has opted for conciliation. Since the legal action began two years ago, UMSU has prohibited elected representatives from speaking publicly about the situation in Palestine while the union’s legal team focused on reaching a compromise with Riazaty. 
The fruits of this bankrupt approach are now clear. On 16 February, the vast majority of UMSU councillors accepted the advice of conservative lawyers and voted to capitulate completely, settling with Riazaty to avoid fighting the case in the High Court. The settlement stipulated that the motion be withdrawn and that UMSU pay most of Riazaty’s legal fees. 
This is a disgraceful refusal to show basic solidarity. It is especially shameful in the context of Israel’s genocidal war, which has claimed more than 31,000 lives—one of the worst imperialist crimes of our lifetime. 
Pro-Israel students are savouring victory. In a recent statement, the president of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students, the largest and most influential pro-Israel student organisation in the country, said that they enjoy “positive relations with the incoming students’ executive at Melbourne University” and that they “hope to continue that relationship for this year”.
By capitulating to the arguments of the Zionists, UMSU councillors are making easier the job of the Israeli government and the right-wing institutions that defend it. They have also inflicted a huge defeat on independent student unionism, setting a precedent that when cashed-up right-wing students want to overturn the democratic decisions of the union, the latter will fold under the pressure. 
Only four councillors, all members of Socialist Alternative, opposed the motion’s retraction. So too did the Environment and Education (Public Affairs) officers. Every other council member voted to rescind the motion.
Solidarity with the Palestinian people is needed more than ever. But UMSU Students’ Council has abandoned them. It’s a reminder that student unions across the country are dominated by cynical wannabe politicians—Anthony Albaneses in waiting—who care more about protecting their career prospects than standing for what’s right. 
The job of socialists on university campuses is to build a principled and resolute challenge to them.

University of Melbourne Student Union betrays Palestine

The 1918 German revolution

Italy’s “Hot Autumn” was one of the most profound moments of the global radicalisation of the late 1960s and 1970s, a period of massive strikes, student revolt and social struggle that lasted a decade. On the streets, movements for education, housing rights and women’s liberation transformed the conditions and social expectations of millions of people.
In Italian factories, a state of permanent warfare reigned, which was so bitter and confrontational that some militants likened their position to that of Vietnamese guerrillas fighting the US occupation. As American troops hastily evacuated Saigon to escape a Viet Cong insurgency, some Italian capitalists were making their own exit plans. Aldo Ravelli, one of the head brokers at Milan’s stock exchange, later recalled: “Those were the years in which I tested out how long it would take me to escape to Switzerland. I set out from my house in Varese and got to the frontier on foot”.
Before 1968, Italy looked on the surface like a capitalist success story. The “economic miracle” of the 1950s and ’60s brought the highest growth rates in Europe. The Catholic Church and the conservative Christian Democrats dominated politics. 
But this appearance concealed enormous social tensions, which first exploded on university campuses. After World War 2, universities had been transformed from ruling-class playgrounds into training grounds for the masses of civil servants, technicians and white-collar workers required to run a modern industrial economy. Hundreds of thousands of children of the middle classes and workers entered tertiary education for the first time; they were confronted by a system in an advanced crisis. 
By 1968, the universities of Rome, Naples and Bari, designed for a little more than 5,000 students, now had 60,000, 50,000 and 30,000 students respectively. The curriculum was traditionalist and archaic. Examinations were mostly oral, where “a policeman dressed up as a teacher spends five to ten minutes in liquidating the accused with a series of questions”, wrote student radical Guido Viale at the time. 
While the student movement first emerged as a revolt against stuffy teachers and crowded lecture theatres, it quickly evolved into an ideological challenge to the values and institutions of postwar capitalism. 
Students who had grown up with a view of the United States as the liberator of Europe now had images of American war crimes in Vietnam beamed to them through the television every evening. The “economic miracle” had created vast riches for industrial magnates like Gianni Agnelli, owner of the Fiat automobile company, but offered little hope of a stable job for the graduates the universities churned out. 
By early 1968, the university revolt had spread across the country, from the urban metropolis of Turin to the sleepiest provincial campuses. A turning point came in February, when students occupying the University of Rome were expelled by police and then decided to recapture the Faculty of Architecture building. Students fought the police in what became immortalised as the “Battle of Valle Giulia”—it was the first time the movement confronted the state head-on. Then in May, a Parisian student revolt sparked France’s largest general strike in history. The news electrified the Italian student movement, and the new radicals turned their attention from the campuses to the workplaces.
By the late 1960s, the factories of Italy’s industrial north were a tinderbox. Southern migrant workers were lured there with the promise of well-paying jobs but found themselves housed in horrid conditions with unsafe workplaces and authoritarian managers. 
The traditional left forces of the Communist Party (PCI) and its CGIL union federation had little to offer these workers. The union leaders limited resistance to planned, one-day strikes that would allow workers to vent their frustration without challenging the system. And the PCI, despite its revolutionary rhetoric, prioritised increasing its parliamentary representation over supporting struggle and disavowed radical actions. So, when workers’ struggles began to emerge on a wide scale, they took place outside these institutions. 
In early 1968, after the national unions settled for a deal at the Pirelli Bicocca tyre factory in Milan that offered meagre pay increases and virtually no improvement to conditions, a wave of spontaneous strikes emerged. A group of militants at Pirelli, with the help of members of the revolutionary socialist organisation Avanguardia Operaia (Workers’ Vanguard), set up a new organisation to give shape to the struggle: the United Base Committee (CUB). The CUB united rank-and-file workers across the factory and put decision making in their hands, sidelining the conservative union leaders. 
Between 1968 and 1969, strikes increased fourfold, and the CUB model of rank-and-file control through mass assemblies began to spread. In June 1969, revolutionary students in Turin successfully established a “worker-student assembly”, which hundreds of workers from the Fiat Mirafiori plant would join at the end of their shifts. When the unions called yet another routine one-day strike over rent in July 1969, the Fiat worker-student assembly issued a blistering statement: “According to these gentlemen the class struggle takes place only on certain days of the year, as if they were Bank Holidays, and they of course decide when. But we are not going to wait for permission from anyone”.
They decided to escalate things by calling their own demonstration outside the factory’s main gates in Corso Traiano. It soon spilled over into street fighting in the surrounding suburbs. The clashes continued into the early hours of the morning, as workers with rocks and Molotov cocktails were pitted against police truncheons and tear gas. The official slogans of the unions were completely ignored in favour of the now famous catchcry: Che cosa vogliamo? Tutto! (What do we want? Everything!).
This agitation spread from the manufacturing centres to chemical and building workers, and then to the railways. Many white-collar workers, who had previously seen themselves as a privileged middle class and often sided with management, struck for the first time. The movement spread to the public sector: from hospitals, to schools, to the postal service. Many industries dominated by women, from shopworkers to hotel workers, saw their first serious explosion of class struggle.
The strike wave was like nothing in Italy since the 1920s, as workers eschewed the usual routine of demonstrative strikes and took their destiny into their own hands. At Fiat, workers organised “internal marches”, moving through the factory section by section to bring workers out on strike. At one demonstration, which must have been especially chilling for Fiat’s owner, 10,000 militants waving spanners in their hands chanted “Agnelli, Agnelli, Vietnam is in your factory”. As methods of struggle changed, so too did workers’ demands. Egalitarian demands to eliminate wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers, and between the north and poverty-stricken south, became popular. 
Collective struggles to transform social conditions spread from the workplaces to every corner of Italian life. Mass action to address the housing crisis mobilised thousands. Between 1968 and 1970, an estimated 40 percent of the 100,000 families living in public housing estates in Milan went on rent strike. Occupations of empty houses took off. In 1974, 600 families were mobilised to occupy the new Falchera estate in Turin. In a climate of radicalism that put the state on the defensive, these actions could be incredibly effective. Magistrates frequently refused to condone police evictions of squatters, or local governments hastily found the families alternative housing. 
As inflation picked up in the early ’70s, workers attempted to combat rising prices through direct action dubbed autoriduzione (autoreduction). Fiat metalworkers refused to pay a 25-50 percent increase in bus fares, instead nominating their own delegates to collect fares at the old rate and send the money directly to the bus companies. This method was quickly adopted by the unions to reduce rising electricity bills. 
The struggle even spread to the poverty-stricken rural south. In spring of 1969, the town of Battipaglia rose in response to local factory closures. Two people were killed by police, and an enraged crowd stormed the local police station. A revolt in Reggio Calabria—spurred by unemployment, squalid housing and police repression—rocked the south for a year. From June to September 1970, the city saw nineteen days of general strikes, twelve dynamite explosions, thirty-two roadblocks, fourteen occupations of the railway station, two of the post office, one of the airport and one of the local TV stations. 
Revolutionary organisations with a mass following sprung up across the country. Turin-based Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle), which didn’t even exist at the beginning of 1969, quickly recruited 10,000 members through leading the worker-student assemblies and other social struggles. Avanguardia Operaia, which pioneered the CUB in Milan, recruited thousands of factory workers. Their politics were eclectic and incorporated diverse points of reference—from the Trotskyist tradition, to syndicalism, to Mao’s China. But whatever their limitations, they succeeded because in the climate of radicalism they offered what the Communist Party and union leaders could not: new methods of struggle, history, politics and theory for radicalising workers to devour, and a belief in the possibility of a fundamental transformation of society. According to Italian socialist Yurii Colombo: “Between 1968 and the late 1970s, more than 100,000 people became members of far-left organisations in Italy”.
These were golden years, when the political horizons of millions were raised by participation in collective struggle, and a fundamental challenge to the capitalist system seemed imminent. Workers won the right to strike, a guarantee that wages would rise with inflation, an expanded pension system and affordable housing. The women’s movement achieved the right to divorce and abortion, facing down the Catholic Church and winning in a country once considered irredeemably conservative.
But after temporarily losing its footing, the Italian capitalist class regained its composure and implemented a variety of strategies to contain the movement. 
Firstly, the bosses went on an economic offensive to smash workers’ resistance. They allowed the economy to enter a recession and drove up unemployment to end the strike wave, but this was largely unsuccessful. When employers attempted to stare down metalworkers by cutting off contract negotiations in 1972, it only spurred the struggle on, culminating in a two-day occupation of Fiat Mirafiori in 1973—arguably the high point of the movement. 
Sections of the ruling class hostile to any reform turned towards state violence to repress the movement. In 1970, the fascist ex-commander Junio Borghese briefly attempted to occupy the Ministry of the Interior and overthrow the government, with the knowledge of US intelligence. State security services collaborated with fascist groups to launch terror attacks that could be pinned on the left and create the pretext for cracking down on the movement. The most infamous example of what was dubbed the “strategy of tension” was the fascist bombing of a bank in the Piazza Fontana in Milan that killed seventeen people and led to the arrest of two anarchists, one of whom was killed in police custody. 
But the most important lifeline for the Italian capitalist class came from the reformist leaders of the PCI and CGIL unions. The union leaders realised they needed to shift to the left in response to the labour upsurge, “riding the tiger” of radicalism to bring it back under control. They worked overtime to bring radical organisations like the rank-and-file controlled factory councils under their influence. 
PCI leader Enrico Berlinguer began arguing from 1973 that there was a “pressing danger of the nation being split in two” by the radical upsurge. As an alternative to growing polarisation between workers and bosses, left and right, Berlinguer proposed a “historic compromise”: Communists should enter government and share power with the Christian Democrats. Positioning as responsible ministers in waiting, the Communists attacked the more militant struggles like autoreduction, squats and unauthorised strikes, and presented themselves as champions of “law and order”. 
Although it took many years, the PCI and unions worked to tame the movement, bring it back into a legal framework and isolate the radicals and revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the existing order. 
The revolutionary organisations that had exploded in the late 1960s now faced a difficult situation. They had made amazing strides—commanding the loyalty of countless thousands, leading militant struggles and controlling multiple daily newspapers and radio stations. 
But by the mid-’70s, society had begun to stabilise. The revolutionaries had to recognise that there was a long uphill battle ahead, a patient battle to win masses of workers who were still loyal to the PCI and CGIL. But the revolutionary groups were raised on the expectation that the final struggle against capitalism was just around the corner. They refused to accept that the pace of struggle had slowed and looked for a quick road to political breakthrough. Some invested their hopes in getting the Communist Party elected to government, hoping this would provoke a revolutionary struggle. Others turned to terrorism, kidnapping managers and politicians and eventually assassinating former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978. Within a few years, the revolutionary left had all but collapsed. 
The capitalist class was able to stabilise Italian society in the 1980s, assisted by a brutally repressive state and a weak and divided left. Dissidents were rounded up en masse—it’s estimated that there were 3,500 political prisoners in 1980. By the early 1980s, Fiat had sacked 23,000 workers, including the leading radicals, in the worst working-class defeat since World War Two. The 1980s were a period of capitalist triumphalism in Italy, symbolised by the long rise of proto-Trumpian media magnate and future Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. 
The memory of the Hot Autumn has left a deep mark on Italian society. Fiat boss Agnelli remembered it as a nightmare: “We experienced a continuous loss of managerial authority ... For us, then, the lack of equilibrium between management and unions inside the factories lasted ten to twelve years. That cost us dearly”.
For Mario Mosca, one of the founders of the CUB at Pirelli Bicocca, 1968 “was the best year of my life. It was the year in which as a worker I felt myself to be a protagonist and the master of my fate. And I continued to have that sensation for the following two years. It was wonderful to be alive”.

‘What do we want? Everything!’: Italy’s Hot Autumn 

The “catastrophic implosion” of OceanGate’s Titan submersible at 3,800m below sea level, which claimed the lives of five millionaires and billionaires last week, was a tragedy. But, as we have all learned in recent days, it was also an uplifting and inspiring event. OceanGate’s own press release found the bright side: “These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans”.
Subsequent revelations show that Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO who perished in the disaster, had for years been fighting against naysayers, safety bureaucrats and so-called submarine experts. We can only be grateful that he ignored their warnings and decided to take the plunge. And with more than 2,600 billionaires left on the planet, there are still many places left to explore. Here are five other destinations that the super-rich should get exploring in a hurry.
Reactor no. 4, Chernobyl nuclear power plant
Almost 40 years after the world’s most catastrophic nuclear meltdown, members of the public are still too cowardly to venture inside Chernobyl’s reactor no. 4. Tourists are content to take “happy snaps” at designated “safe” locations. But the reactor itself, housing 225 tonnes of radioactive material, remains encased in a structure made of more than 400,000 cubic metres of concrete. We know that entrepreneurs are all about risk-taking. They should crack that baby open and let themselves into one of the world’s least explored destinations.
Snake Island
Queimada Grande, an island off the coast of Brazil more commonly known as Snake Island, is home to the critically endangered and highly venomous lancehead pit viper. It is closed to the public to protect both people and the snake population—a classic example of bureaucratic red tape stifling the pioneering impulses of our billionaires. Snake Island should be opened to those who have the guts—and the income—to brave an overnight stay.
The Gates of Hell, Turkmenistan
At recorded temperatures of more than 400 degrees Celsius, the Gates of Hell crater has burned in the Karakum desert for 50 years. It burst into flame in 1971 when a drilling rig accidentally punched into a massive underground natural gas cavern, causing the ground to collapse and the entire rig to fall in. Thank God there was no bureaucratic red tape preventing that. This beautiful, flaming tribute to the indelible mark our innovators have had on the natural world could be the next top tourist spot for Fortune 500 CEOs. Oil industry executives in particular may be interested in visiting this piece of industrial history and seeing how far down they can go.
Sagittarius A*
At 26,000 light-years from earth, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, measures an impressive 51.8 million kilometres in diameter. Scientists say that if a person were to travel into a black hole like this, their body would be subjected to a process called “spaghettification”. There’s only one way to know for sure—but just to be safe, pack yourself some meatballs!
Black Hills Forest
Conveniently located one hour’s drive from Washington DC’s Montgomery Film College, this is truly an untouched wonder boasting pristine woodlands and sites of historic interest. Despite its obvious natural charm, the Black Hills woods are shunned by residents of the neighbouring town, Burkittsville.
Places like these really do seem to hold their own special spiritual energy, and you will feel this intensely as you explore the burial cairns and small grave sites dotted around this beautiful forest. Visitors are few and far between; adventurers will be following in the brave footsteps of Maryland film student Heather Donohue and her friends “Mike” and “Josh”. Ignore any superstitious townspeople warning you about the Blair Witch who is said to reside here—we live in an age of science and rationality. Don’t let their tiny minds stop a billionaire from losing themselves in this breathtaking wilderness.

Ruby Healer

Five other places billionaires should explore

Last year, amid climate catastrophe, COVID-19 and economic turmoil, Collins Dictionary named “permacrisis” its word of the year. The term “polycrisis” has also become a buzzword in establishment circles. You don’t have to be a socialist to recognise that capitalism isn’t doing well. 
And it’s not only socialists who seem to want to try to tackle these problems. Virtually everywhere you turn, you’ll find talking heads, think tanks, NGOs and global forums ostensibly dedicated to creating social change. Typical is the annual World Economic Forum at the Swiss alpine resort town of Davos, where billionaires, political leaders and “visionaries” discuss everything from tackling food insecurity to upholding civil liberties and human rights. 
The discussions are most often worse than useless. At Davos this year, the leaders of a global economy in which the richest 1 percent own half the world’s wealth mouthed meaningless platitudes about “system-positive change”, “vision-driven policies” and “a growing need for a new global system that is more stakeholder based”. But none of the solutions offered in mainstream political discussion can solve anything because they’re all based on an acceptance and defence of capitalism. 
Socialism offers something different. Socialism can not only identify the problems the world faces, but also provide real alternatives, because it starts with what other explanations of change don’t—an analysis of the social structures that produce inequality, oppression and crisis. 
Capitalism is a system in which private profit-making determines how resources are used. Goods and services are produced only insofar as profits can be made for companies, and are supplied only when the right price will be paid. This is not the result of human nature, but of a small minority of people owning and controlling the factories, arable land, mines, transport networks and power stations. Members of that minority are in constant competition with each other to increase their profits and gain access to ever-widening markets. The search for greater profits underpins the decisions about how resources will be allocated. And those with economic power are unelected and largely unaccountable.
Socialism proposes a rational alternative: a society in which production and distribution are organised democratically to satisfy human need—a society that is run by the majority of people who do all the work, rather than the minority who live off the rest of us. Crucially, socialism isn’t just a nice theory—it’s a movement that has organised hundreds of millions of workers, and poor and oppressed people, over the last 150 years to challenge injustice and fight for a better world. 
It’s a movement that has the answers to the crises of the 21st century. 
Climate change 
There is overwhelming evidence that an immediate shutdown of the fossil fuel industry is necessary to avoid catastrophic warming and the destabilisation of entire ecosystems. Yet coal, gas and oil are experiencing an unprecedented boom. At a time when fossil fuel companies should be pariahs, Shell has posted profits of more than US$40 billion, its highest in 115 years. Shell isn’t alone. A recent report from the COP27 climate summit found that 96 percent of energy companies are planning to expand their exploitation of fossil fuels. 
While the big corporations push us past points of no return, we are encouraged to take individual action to reduce emissions: eat less red meat, buy a keep cup, take fewer overseas trips. This “make change with every purchase” approach is a cynical attempt to distort the source of most greenhouse gas emissions. A 2017 report from the Carbon Disclosure Project found that 100 companies have produced about 71 percent of all global emissions since 1988. The term “carbon footprint”, ubiquitous today in discussions about changing your lifestyle to mitigate climate change, was coined by the fossil fuel giant BP to encourage people to look inwards, instead of identifying the criminals responsible for destroying the planet. 
Emissions targets for 2050, pledged by governments across the world, seem like a more serious response to the climate crisis. But they are just another strategy to buy more time for the expansion of fossil fuels. The bulk of the work is supposed to be done via technologies that will offset emissions, such as carbon capture and storage—technologies that have never been proven to work effectively. 
The socialist solution to the climate crisis would be as simple as it would be effective: expropriate the wealth of fossil fuel companies and use it to transition to renewable energy sources. The International Monetary Fund estimates that US$5.9 trillion was spent subsidising fossil fuel companies in 2020. This amount could have funded enough wind farms and solar panels to supply most of the world’s energy needs. Production facilities could be built in a matter of months if the political will existed. But this would require a complete revolution in the way that we live—not just a technological revolution, but an overturning of our entire political system. 
Inequality and exploitation
According to Oxfam International’s 2022 report “Inequality kills”, the world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes to $1.9 trillion during the first two years of the pandemic, while more than 160 million extra people were forced into poverty. There is general agreement that rising inequality has something to do with government policy over the past few decades. Everyone from the head of the International Monetary Fund to Anthony Albanese can agree on this. But inequality is about more than bad policy—it’s a product of the exploitation and class division at the heart of capitalism. 
Under capitalism, workers are never paid the full value created by their labour. People work eight- or ten-hour days but get paid the equivalent of what they create in three or four hours—the rest is pocketed by the capitalist class. This legalised theft, which socialists call “exploitation”, is what allows CEOs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to amass such obscene fortunes. If an individual worker objects to this unfair arrangement, they are free to find employment with another exploiting boss, or join the Centrelink queue. There’s no escape from exploitation so long as we have capitalism.
How much workers can challenge exploitation depends on their ability to organise collectively. Because labour is the source of all the bosses’ profits, workers can fight for a better deal by withholding their labour—going on strike—and bringing their workplaces to a halt and preventing the capitalists from making any profits. This is what socialists mean when we talk about “class struggle”. 
From the 1960s to the early 1980s, inequality in Australia fell, mainly because workers were fighting for higher wages and better working conditions. Between 1964 and 1974, the strike rate soared; so too did the wages share of national income. Workers also gained important reforms like Medicare. 
But class struggle goes both ways under capitalism. Bosses are always looking for ways to undermine and undo gains achieved through workers’ struggles. This is what has happened since the 1980s in Australia: as strike rates have collapsed, hard-won reforms have been undone and inequality has skyrocketed. 
Socialism is not just about making life a bit better. Socialists want to take workers’ struggle to its logical conclusion, by ending the division between those who give orders and those who work—by ending exploitation altogether. 
Oppression
Racism, sexism and other forms of social inequality are necessary in a society in which a minority rule over the majority. The capitalist class needs to find ways to channel the mass of oppressed people’s discontent towards one another rather than towards the powerful. 
Sections of the working class that are distinctive or somehow vulnerable—whether recently arrived migrants, women, international students or young workers—often face discrimination, receive lower pay and can find only undesirable jobs. The capitalist class is the only group that benefits from this arrangement. 
The most commonly proffered solution to oppression is to make the rulers of our system more diverse. The argument is that if there were more non-white heads of state or more women serving on corporate boards, the interests and needs of the oppressed and marginalised would be considered when decisions are made. In reality, “diversification” at the top has simply resulted in a small layer of “representatives” of oppressed groups joining the ruling class and identifying with (and benefiting from) the system that oppresses the majority. 
The Black Lives Matter movement in the United States erupted under the country’s first Black president: the promise of a “post-racial” society that Barack Obama’s election was supposed to represent patently failed to materialise. When Gail Kelly in 2008 became the first female CEO of a major Australian bank, Westpac, she did nothing to challenge the gender pay gap in the financial services industry. And why would she? Giving women workers at Westpac a pay rise would have cut into company earnings and probably reduced her own bonuses. 
The socialist movement has always recognised that fighting oppression is both an immediate and a long-term task. To eliminate social oppression, the capitalist system needs to be destroyed. But for workers to unite against the system and build a movement capable of challenging it, socialists need to tackle divisive ideas and champion the oppressed in the here and now. This is why socialists have always been at the forefront of battles for equality, from Australian communists championing Indigenous rights in the 1920s to socialist trade unionists fighting for equal pay in the 1960s. 
Many sincere fighters against oppression who began as “moderates” have come through their experience to see the need for socialist politics. For example, Martin Luther King concluded, after his years-long participation in and leadership of the civil rights movement, that moral persuasion would not be sufficient to win equality.
“We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power”, he told Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff in 1967. “We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together ... you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others ... the whole structure of American life must be changed.”
A socialist society, geared towards meeting people’s needs under democratic control, would have no need for unequal pay, Indigenous land theft, religious persecution, sexist objectification, gender binaries and police violence.
The creation of a rational society will require revolutionary transformation. The capitalist class and its institutions will need to be defeated and dismantled by the mass, coordinated power of the popular majority. This is no small task. 
Confronting this reality is a cause for optimism. Socialist politics can help you to understand how the problems facing the world aren’t natural or inevitable, but a product of the specific, class-divided capitalist society that we live in. Humans created capitalism; we can unmake it, too. A completely different world is possible.

Socialism has the answers 

One hundred years ago, in October 1922, Benito Mussolini’s paramilitary blackshirts marched on the Italian capital to demand the dissolution of the government of Prime Minister Luigi Facta. The March on Rome is the foundational myth of fascist power. Through this daring act, so the story goes, the strongman Mussolini installed himself as head of the Italian government. 
Yet the march itself was a farce. Mussolini’s fascist forces numbered only a few thousand and, armed mostly with sticks, were scattered and bogged down in mud and rain. They were vastly outnumbered and outgunned by government troops in the capital. And Mussolini, the “man on horseback” himself, hid in a barricaded office near the Swiss border. 
Despite the obvious weakness of the fascists, the government mounted only symbolic resistance to the coup. “Everybody knew perfectly well that the troops would refuse to take any forcible action whatever against the Fascisti, with whom they were in sympathy”, the British ambassador observed. Less than 24 hours later, King Victor Emanuele appointed Mussolini prime minister. When the new dictator’s troops finally reached Rome, they entered in a victory parade. 
For all the theatrics of the March on Rome, Mussolini didn’t take power against the will of the ruling class, but with its blessing. The fascists’ road to power was paved by tolerance, the outright collaboration of the police and politicians, and lavish financial backing from industrialists. The Italian ruling class welcomed Mussolini because its members viewed the fascists as a solution to several years of crisis and class struggle that had put in question their own rule. 
The First World War had turned the country into a tinderbox. Nearly 6 million Italians had been drafted, 600,000 killed and 700,000 permanently disabled. Peasant conscripts returned from the fronts radicalised. Factory workers chafed against the establishment of martial law in their workplaces. The 1917 Russian Revolution provided radicalising workers with a practical example to follow: topple the capitalist system to end the barbarity of war. During the movement’s height, the Biennio Rosso (Two Red Years) of 1919-20, workers launched a decisive struggle to wrest control over Italy from the ruling class. At the same time, peasants seized the land and began forcing massive concessions from large landowners. Civil war seemed imminent. 
The social crisis also produced the right-wing radicalisation that gave birth to fascism. Benito Mussolini, a prominent figure in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), shocked his comrades by declaring in favour of the country’s entry into the war. A meeting of PSI members drove Mussolini out, spitting on him and calling him a traitor. 
In November 1914, Mussolini founded a new right-wing daily newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy), with the backing of Italian industrialists and French imperialism. In these pages, his new ideas took form. Il Popolo trumpeted support for the war and hostility to all forces, such as the socialist movement, that had the potential to disrupt it. Mussolini quickly began drawing the conclusion that democracy itself was holding the country back from achieving its destiny—he would eventually describe fascism as “supreme anti-democracy”. 
The movement was a new form of reactionary politics. Instead of relying on sections of the ruling class and state, Mussolini created a mass popular movement in defence of the capitalist order. Fascism’s method was political violence; its ultimate objective was, as Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky described, “to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery”. Mussolini brought together different disaffected layers of society to this end: bitter war-hardened veterans, middle-class youth who revelled in political violence and the despairing long-term unemployed. The project won him support from British government agents, who sponsored the fascist movement after Mussolini explained: “I will mobilise the mutilati [disabled ex-soldiers] in Milan, and they will break the heads of any pacifists who try to hold anti-war meetings in the streets”.
In April 1919, the fascists launched their first major attack on the left, burning down the headquarters of the Socialist daily newspaper Avanti! (Forward!). Police stood aside as the fascist gang murdered three socialists. But while the workers’ and peasants’ movements were still on the offensive, and Italy was caught in “strike frenzy”, the fascists were hesitant to confront the workers’ movement in its metropolitan centres of power in the industrial north. They instead built their base in rural areas, such as the Po Valley, where landowners hired them to terrorise peasant organisations.
The wave of struggle reached its peak in September 1920, when half a million armed workers in the industrial north occupied their factories. Many workers saw this as the final struggle to expropriate their bosses and begin the construction of a socialist society. Speaking at a workers’ occupation of FIAT (the Italian Automobiles Factory of Turin), Antonio Gramsci, a revolutionary Marxist, underlined the historic nature of the events: “Social hierarchies have been smashed and historical values turned upside down”. The head of FIAT was so despondent that he offered to hand his factories over to the workers. 
But the Italian Socialist Party blinked at the opportunity to lead a struggle for power. Its leadership was paralysed by divisions between revolutionaries who wanted to topple the capitalist system and reformists who wanted a share of power within it. In the end, they compromised with the bosses, extracting a few concessions and agreeing to end the occupations. 
While the September factory struggles formally ended in a stalemate, the capitalists immediately sought revenge on the workers’ movement. As the French anarchist Daniel Guérin wrote, they “felt the chill of expropriation pass over them” and wasted no time re-establishing their dominance. In early 1921, unemployment rose dramatically and the strike rate plummeted. Capitalists banded together in new industrial and agricultural federations to coordinate their assault. They also started to give serious backing to the fascist movement. In spring, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti endorsed fascist candidates as part of a national bloc, helping 30 of them get elected. Large amounts of money began flowing to Mussolini’s organisation. 
The fascists were carrying out an orgy of violence against the left. In six months, they ransacked 119 trades council branches, 107 cooperatives, 100 workers’ cultural centres and 28 union branches. Dozens of left-wing militants were murdered. The state rapidly ceded power to the blackshirts—as they marched through town after town, military arsenals were handed to them. 
Given the profound threat that fascist violence posed to the organisations of the workers’ movement, it is remarkable that neither of the main left parties waged a consistent fight against Mussolini’s gangs. 
The Italian Communist Party (PCI) was formed at the beginning of 1921 by activists repulsed by the Socialist Party’s repeated betrayals. The undisputed head of the PCI was Amadeo Bordiga, an energetic and charismatic revolutionary who had organised the opposition to the Socialist Party’s reformist leadership. Bordiga rightly condemned the electoral obsession of the Socialist Party, which subordinated workers’ struggle to winning seats in parliament. But he went too far, dismissing any distinction between capitalist democracy and fascist dictatorship, and systematically underplaying the threat fascists posed to democratic rights, arguing that they would be no different to any other capitalist government: 
“Fascism incorporates the counter-revolutionary struggle of all the allied bourgeois forces, and, for this reason, it is by no means necessarily compelled to destroy the democratic institutions. From our Marxist point of view, this situation is by no means paradoxical, because we know that the democratic system is only a collection of deceptive guarantees, behind which the ruling class conducts its battle against the working class.”
At other times, he implied that the victory of fascist dictatorship would actually be an advance for the workers’ movement because it would destroy illusions in capitalist democracy. “So the fascists want to burn down the parliamentary circus? We’d love to see the day”, he wrote in July 1922, just months before Mussolini’s victory. “The main danger is, and remains, that everyone agrees that the apple cart isn’t overturned, and that a legal and parliamentary solution is found.” This perspective ignored the fact that democratic rights are vital for the workers’ movement. The right to form unions and political organisations, which are the basis for developing workers’ social power, was precisely what the fascists wanted to destroy. 
The response of the Socialist Party, which still commanded the loyalty of most organised workers, was equally dismal. It was still divided between “maximalists” who mouthed revolutionary rhetoric, and reformist parliamentarians and union leaders. The reformists set the tone of the party’s response to fascism, arguing that the institutions of the capitalist state would defend democracy and protect the working class from fascist attacks. Reformist leader Giacomo Matteotti spoke in parliament urging passivity: “Stay home! Do not respond to provocations. Even silence, even cowardice, are sometimes heroic”.
There was, however, one popular organisation that understood the need to unite masses of people in practical resistance to the physical threat of fascism: the Arditi del Popolo (The People’s Daring Ones). This organisation arose out of associations of the war veterans, who had returned to Italy from the front deeply politically polarised. While some joined the fascists, many turned to the left, and pledged to use their military experience to obstruct the advance of the blackshirts. 
In July 1921, the organisation held its first national rally in Rome. Three thousand armed Arditi led a march of 50,000 striking workers from different political and union organisations. The demonstration called for the disarming of the fascists. In August 1922, they repelled an armed attack by 20,000 fascists on the left-wing stronghold of Parma. As an Arditi leader later recalled:
“Working-class people took to the streets—as bold as the waters of a river which is bursting its banks. With their shovels, pick-axes, iron bars and all sorts of tools, they helped the Arditi del Popolo to dig up the cobblestones and tram tracks, to dig trenches, and to erect barricades using carts, benches, timber, iron girders and anything else they could get their hands on. Men, women, old people, young people from all parties and from no party at all were all there, united in a single iron will: resist and fight.”
Just ten weeks after his forces were defeated in Parma, however, Mussolini was in power. He later admitted that, had the tactics used by the left in Parma been replicated across the country, the success of his movement would have been thrown into question.
Despite its initial strength, the Arditi del Popolo was quickly isolated. This was primarily because the main workers’ parties disgracefully abandoned it. While many rank-and-file Communist Party members naturally understood the importance of defending democratic rights, and gravitated toward the Arditi, the party leaders around Bordiga had other ideas. They declared: “We can only deplore the fact that Communists have been in contact with the people in Rome who initiated the Arditi del Popolo, offering to work with them and follow their instructions. If such actions are repeated, the most severe measures will be taken”.
Bordiga had a sterile and sectarian approach to revolutionary politics. Rather than attempting to convince masses of workers of the necessity of revolution by fighting alongside them, he believed it was necessary to build a party of the “pure and hard” that strictly separated itself from every other institution and waited patiently for the masses to come and join it. 
The PSI, on the other hand, clung to the idea that appealing to “legality” would save it, and signed a disgusting “peace pact” with Mussolini. This meant disavowing any support for the actions of the Arditi. Ultimately, the tragedy of Mussolini’s rise is not only that the working class was defeated, but that it was beaten without a real fight. There was no lack of will to confront the barbarity of the fascists, but workers were misled and disoriented by the leaders of their organisations. 
The ruling class thought that it could use the fascists as a battering ram against the workers’ movement, and then incorporate them into the political system. The Liberal prime minister believed that, in power, Mussolini would behave like any other conservative politician. But Mussolini’s project radicalised as he consolidated control over the state. Political assassinations of socialists and other dissenters increased. Within three years, Mussolini had banned all political opposition, dissolved the trade unions and consolidated the world’s first fascist regime.
A century on from the March on Rome, new fascist and far-right forces are assembling. Again, the global ruling classes are showing that they are perfectly willing to deal with them as long as it’s good for business. The red carpet has been rolled out for Giorgia Meloni, a fascist Mussolini admirer, to form a new government in Italy. Far-right regimes have been normalised from India to Brazil. 
The experience of Mussolini’s rise holds important lessons for socialists. Perhaps the greatest lesson, obscured by most conventional accounts of the March on Rome, is that Mussolini could have been stopped. Had the workers’ movement been united to confront the fascists, as it did in Parma, one of the darkest and most brutal chapters of European history might have been avoided.

Who’s to blame for ‘misinformation’?

Campus antisemitism beat-up attempts to crush pro-Palestine activism

Whatever happened to the ‘Squad’?

What kind of organisation is Socialist Alternative?

University of Melbourne Student Union betrays Palestine

The 1918 German revolution

‘What do we want? Everything!’: Italy’s Hot Autumn

Five other places billionaires should explore

Socialism has the answers

Lessons from the rise of Mussolini, 100 years on

Other Media

Shop

Conferences

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us