Victorian Socialists hosted a members’ conference over the weekend of 14-15 June. After garnering impressive votes and national attention in the May federal election, the executive moved to establish socialist parties Australia-wide. More than 2,200 financial members have since joined outside Victoria, including more than 900 in NSW, 480 in Queensland, 270 in South Australia and 330 in WA. 
The momentum and excitement of this project were reflected in conference attendance—360 people participated over the weekend, making it the biggest gathering of party members to date. This is an important step at a time of overlapping capitalist atrocities that highlight the need for a radical left challenge to the status quo. This was acknowledged in the first motion moved at the conference, a <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/news/palestine-statement">statement of solidarity with Palestine</a>. 
“In the past week, a small boat carrying twelve international activists set out to the ocean to deliver a tiny quantum of food, baby formula and medicine to Palestinians being genocided in Gaza”, Palestine solidarity activist and Socialist Alternative member Simone White said, introducing the motion. “They are amplifying one clear message, one statement of fact ... And it’s a statement of fact written into this motion. They asserted that governments and politicians around the world, particularly in the Western world, were complicit in the genocide in Gaza, and where they were complicit, where they betrayed and failed the Palestinians, we needed to fight.”
VS Secretary Corey Oakley introduced the first session by talking about the overlapping crises of the capitalist system—from far-right authoritarianism to escalating imperialist violence. “What underpins all of this is a savage class war taking place all around the world”, he said. 
The conference overwhelmingly endorsed motions to enlarge the scope and scale of Victorian Socialists’ activity. The executive’s decision to expand the party federally was supported, as was a proposal for an ambitious strategy to contest all 88 lower house seats in the 2026 state election. Victorian Socialists members also voted to expand the democratic structures of the party, organising members into groups based on electoral districts and enshrining democratic processes at a local level. 
On Saturday afternoon, members broke into groups to discuss organising in their local areas. Reports from these groups give a sense of the work VS members are doing to promote socialist politics locally and in workplaces. 
In Melbourne’s West, party members are organising an anti-racist demonstration to respond to police discrimination and violence. In Brunswick, the group is supporting a union rally to defend Merri-Bek council’s library social worker program, which has recently been cut. In the south-east, where Victorian Socialists have a newly established presence, the focus is on setting up the first local meetings to organise volunteers. In the Whittlesea and Darebin council areas, members are preparing to run candidates in upcoming by-elections.
Many conference participants were new to Victorian Socialists, from unionists sick of Labor’s sellouts, to Palestine activists brought into the socialist movement through interaction with the party. 
There was a series of debates at the conference, reflecting the party’s democratic internal life. The Communist Caucus, a minority faction, intervened with proposals to significantly alter the party’s structures and strategic orientation. They proposed a program for Victorian Socialists modelled on the politics and structure of early-twentieth-century European social democracy. The faction also nominated an alternative leadership and was provided ample time to explain their positions. They garnered only a small minority of votes for any of their motions or candidates. 
Conference elected a new executive, and re-elected the incumbent secretary, treasurer, campaign director and communications officer based on their records of orienting the party through an impressive period of growth. 
The conference closed with remarks from Rebecca Barrigos, a teacher unionist and state secretary of the new Queensland Socialists. Bec described the success of the new party in attracting support from blue-collar trade unionists disgusted by the federal Labor Party’s support for union-busting, including the takeover of the Queensland branch of the construction union (the CFMEU). 
“It’s a question that’s been posed to them very concretely because they have had ... Labor governments that have actively attacked them”, Barrigos explained. “They can’t have a meeting in their union offices without a bloody government spy sitting in their office listening to what every union member says.” 
Bec read from a statement by unionist Dan Jones, explaining to other CFMEU members why he has joined Queensland Socialists: 
“The political class is out of touch with the working class, because it’s not made up of ordinary people. Part of it is made up of lawyers, lobbyists and career politicians—people who’ve never clocked on, have never packed a lunch, and have never fought for a pay rise ... Militant unionism, the kind that refuses to beg, that organises and takes collective action, needs political representation that represents its values. Queensland Socialists don’t just talk about supporting unions. They hit the streets, and they do it.”
The project of building a nationwide alternative to the political parties that prop up capitalism in Australia is still in its early stages. However, if this conference is any indication, there is a great deal of willingness to build a new socialist alternative.

Luca Tavan

Victorian Socialists conference resolves to expand party organisation

Starving Palestinians forced to walk kilometres under scorching heat in a desperate search for food are crowded into metal cages. Drone broadcasts direct civilians to aid distribution points, where Israeli forces open fire on them. The situation is so desperate that many decide to brave the gunfire and attempt to gather food for their families.
“People fought over five pallets. They told us to take food—then they fired from every direction”, Mansour Sami Abdi, a father of four, <a href="https://msf.org.au/article/project-news/gaza-dozens-massacred-us-israel-backed-food-distribution-sites">told Doctors without Borders</a>, a humanitarian organisation, earlier this week. “I ran 200 metres before realising I’d been shot. This isn’t aid, it’s a lie.”
Massacres occur almost daily. On 1 June, at least 30 Palestinians were murdered like this. On 3 June, there were another 27. Who can now deny that Israel is waging a war of extermination? As the horrific results of the Zionist state’s project are laid bare, the collaborators—politicians, media organisations and “respectable” capitalist institutions—are searching for alibis. 
Last month, the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada for the first time <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-from-the-leaders-of-the-united-kingdom-france-and-canada-on-the-situation-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank">issued a joint statement</a> criticising Israel’s “disproportionate” escalation in Gaza. The asymmetry has been discovered just 600 days into a “war” between one of the world’s best-equipped militaries and a starved civilian population. They should not be allowed to feign ignorance. The architects of these crimes could hardly have been clearer in their intentions. 
At the invasion’s outset, Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cze5w2wd4x0o">wrote on X</a>: “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”. Two days after 7 October, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “<a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/we-are-fighting-human-animals-dehumanization-of-palestinians/">fighting human animals</a>” as he announced a complete siege of the territory.
“It’s time to kiss doomsday”, Israeli MP Revital Gotliv wrote, also on X. “Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighbourhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza ... with penetrating bombs. Without mercy! Without mercy!” 
Ariel Kallner, another member of parliament, wrote: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suddenly finds distasteful the use of starvation as a weapon of war. On 26 May, he told a press conference: “It is outrageous that there be a blockade of food and supplies to people who are in need”. But UNICEF began warning that all children under five were at risk of death from starvation in December 2023. And Israel has blockaded Gaza for almost twenty months. 
Albanese knew exactly what Israel’s endgame was when he refused to criticise US President Donald Trump’s plan for forced relocation back in February. “I’m not going to have a running commentary on statements by the president of the United States”, is all he had to say. Foreign Minister Penny Wong knew that access to food and water in Gaza had been cut off when she said on 10 October 2023: “I think it’s always very difficult from over here to make judgements about what security approach other countries take”. 
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s recent statement that he “no longer understands” what Israel is doing has been <a href="https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/27/no-longer-comprehensible-german-chancellor-slams-israels-gaza-strikes/">hyped in some quarters</a> as an “unprecedented criticism of Israel’s Gaza operations”. But, like the rest of the world, Merz does understand. He understood it in February when he invited Netanyahu to Berlin, promising to find a way around the prime minister’s <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu">International Criminal Court arrest warrant</a> for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He understood it last year, when his party approved €161 million (A$284 million) of arms shipments to Israel. The entire German establishment understood it as they closed ranks to have opponents of the genocide <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250304-german-ministry-dismisses-lawyer-for-supporting-gaza-rejecting-genocide/">fired</a>, <a href="https://hyphenonline.com/2024/10/04/ava-moayeri-germany-pro-palestine-protest-free-speech-police-arrest-violence/">raided, arrested</a> and <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/germany-palestine-activists-deportation-state-repression">deported</a>. 
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy recently labelled Israel’s actions “abominable”. But he’s comfortable with UK-manufactured drones being used by the Israeli army. According to testimony from a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7893vpy2gqo">retired British surgeon</a>, those drones target and shoot children who survive air strikes. Palestine solidarity activists who attempted to disrupt drone production have been <a href="https://thebristolcable.org/2025/02/filton-18-palestine-action-activists-treated-like-terrorists-elbit-israeli-arms-factory-action/">arrested</a> by “counter-terrorism” police and are imprisoned awaiting prosecution by Lammy’s government. 
Politicians in the West have united to defend their states’ economic and political relationships with Israel, a vital ally for projecting their power and influence in the Middle East. This has been more important to them than the 2 million people whose lives have been devastated in the Gaza Strip. Now that they have proven their loyalty, now that the job is nearly done, now that nobody is standing in Israel’s way, these politicians want to wash their hands of the inevitable results. 
For the same reason, a slight shift is occurring in media coverage. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post publishes <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/22/israel-gaza-ethnic-cleansing-genocide-2/">opinion pieces</a> decrying genocide. The BBC runs humanising stories on families decimated by Israeli airstrikes. Everyone, it seems, is starting to get the memo that a bit of equivocation and “balance” might be in order, if for no other reason than to begin scrubbing the stains from their reputations. 
But it doesn’t change the fact that corporate and state media outlets have spent 600 days acting as loyal agents for the Israeli military. They’ve treated Israeli accounts of events as facts, silenced dissenting voices and embedded their journalists with Israeli units to be taken on North Korea-style propaganda tours.
One of the most notorious examples occurred at the beginning of the war, when CNN international diplomatic editor Nic Robertson accompanied the Israeli army to Gaza’s bombed-out al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. The network broadcast “evidence” that Hamas was using the hospital to hide Israeli captives. Military spokesperson Daniel Hagari showed CNN a document on the wall written in Arabic, which he said was a roster of Hamas guards. “Every terrorist has his own shift”, Hagari told Robertson. 
The problem was that it wasn’t a Hamas roster—it was just an Arabic calendar. Despite the footage already being debunked by Arabic speakers and a protest being lodged by a Palestinian producer at the network, the lie was broadcast, giving the Israeli state cover for war crimes it may have committed at the hospital. 
The systematic bias against Palestinians and their supporters has been so overwhelming that many normally apolitical journalists at major news outlets—from American CNN to the BBC in Britain—have felt compelled to <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/5/failing-gaza-pro-israel-bias-uncovered-behind-the-lens-of-western-media">blow the whistle</a>. In Australia, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/26/australias-abc-staffs-concerns-over-gaza-bias-revealed">journalists have complained</a> that editors have effectively banned the use of the word “Palestine” in reports.
It’s not until the damage is done that the rewriting of history begins. Wars that can no longer be defended are re-framed by their perpetrators as unforeseeable and unfortunate mishaps. 
During the US invasion of Vietnam, opponents of the war faced a solid wall of capitalist institutions committed to its prosecution. Intellectuals overwhelmingly supported the war as a defence of freedom against communist tyranny. University heads called the police on protesters targeting their defence ties. American journalists identified with the objectives of “their side”, repeated government justifications for war crimes and assisted in their cover-up. Anybody who stood against this consensus was slandered as a “communist sympathiser”.
When as many as 3 million Vietnamese were dead, the occupation collapsed and opponents of the war were proved right. Then the war was rewritten self-servingly as a “tragedy of good intentions”, a noble mission gone awry. 
It was similar with Iraq. Sponsors of the war falsified evidence to justify the invasion, and suppressed, monitored and smeared opponents. Then, when it all fell apart, they shrugged it off as an intelligence failure. Hillary Clinton brushed aside her support for the war during her first presidential bid, saying: “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have voted that way”.
As in Vietnam and Iraq, so now in Gaza. From the beginning, the left and the Palestine solidarity movement have argued that Israel’s aims are clear: an extension of their decades-long project of ethnic cleansing and expansion. From the beginning, we argued that if Israel wasn’t forced to stop, the war would end with the brutal forced depopulation of Gaza. For telling the truth, we were sacked, suspended, slandered and put on trial. 
Israel’s backers now admit the reality of this war, yet they continue to persecute those who oppose it. Now that our leaders mouth rhetorical criticisms, we should demand real action. 
All political prisoners who have been demonised as “terrorist sympathisers” and threats to “social cohesion” should be released. All bogus charges of antisemitism against anti-war and anti-racist activists should be withdrawn. 
States should impose real sanctions on Israel. The “sanctions” announced by the UK government are nothing of the sort, consisting of the pausing of free trade talks and travel bans on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/22/violent-israeli-settlers-under-uk-sanctions-join-west-bank-outpost">a handful of West Bank “settlers”</a>. The government will continue to send weapons and share intelligence from surveillance flights over Gaza, assisting Israel in its targeting of civilians. 
As world leaders try to distance themselves from Israel’s crimes, we must continue to hold them accountable. They’ve been accomplices in this atrocity and implacable enemies of those who have tried to stop it. They must never be forgiven.

Western collaborators in genocide now scramble for alibis

As the Trump administration tears through the US, deporting, sacking and ripping up decades of social progress, the Democratic Party has been playing dead. This is no exaggeration—in a New York Times piece published in late February, longtime Democratic strategist James Carville argues: “With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political manoeuvre in the history of our party: roll over”. Essentially, Democrats shouldn’t lift a finger to obstruct Trump’s agenda, and simply wait until he runs out of steam. Tough luck if you’re one of the people Trump plans on running down before the next election. 
The Democrats have been displaying more weaponised incompetence than a dud husband. In a moment that symbolised the party’s stance, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries threw his hands in the air at a February press conference and asked, “What leverage do we have? ...They control the House, the Senate and the presidency; it's their government”. For a party that has spent the last decade staking its legitimacy on being the only viable bulwark against Trumpism, this has not been a good look. 
A recent survey by polling firm Data for Progress showed that 70 percent of Democratic voters gave the party’s response to Trump a “C” grade or below, 21 percent assigning a failing grade. Another from the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini shows that nearly 80 percent of Democrats want the party to take a more combative approach to the president. No wonder they’ve enjoyed <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/16/politics/cnn-poll-democrats/index.html">record low</a> approval ratings, even as Trump’s popularity dips. 
But now Democrats are starting to look alive as the Trump administration hits bumpy roads. One leading elected official is taking calls from the party’s supporters to stand up to Trump literally—last week, Cory Booker stood to excoriate Trump for 25 hours straight, in the longest speech ever delivered to Congress. Booker has been widely praised for this political stunt. In the words of one supporter, a small business owner quoted in the New York Times, “The Democrats have been acting like it’s OK what Trump is doing, and it’s not OK ... Now, there’s finally some fire”. 
Democrats have drawn encouragement from their victory in a race for a vacant Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin—a campaign into which Musk unsuccessfully ploughed $25 million of his own money. Two special elections in Florida returned Republicans to Congress, but with drastically reduced margins. On the left flank of the party, “Fight the oligarchy” rallies headed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are drawing enormous crowds that dwarf Trump’s 2024 campaign rallies. The “Hands Off” protests against Trump and Musk on 5 April, which mobilised millions across more than 1,200 locations, were used as a platform by Democrat representatives keen to relate to the anti-Trump feeling. 
It’s good that there is more push back against Trump. This can help cut through the climate of intimidation the administration is seeking to create, and give people more confidence to stand up. But the Democrats don’t offer an alternative worth getting behind. 
The Democrats agree with many of the worst aspects of Trump’s politics. In 25 hours of speechifying against Trump, Booker declined to mention the administration’s support for the resumption of genocide in Gaza since Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire deal in March. This is because Booker, like the overwhelming majority of Democrat representatives, is a loyal supporter of Israel’s offensive against the Palestinians. While denouncing Trump’s disregard for the “rule of law”, he happily poses for photographs with former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who is subject to an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including using starvation as a method of warfare. 
Booker’s speech neglected to mention the violation of the legal rights of student activists like Mahmoud Khalil, who has been kidnapped by ICE and faces deportation for protesting. When the Palestinian American representative Rashida Tlaib initiated an open letter demanding the release of Khalil, a legal permanent resident who has not had any charges filed against him, only 14 of 213 Democrats in the House were willing to sign it. 
Democratic accordance with Trump’s agenda goes beyond the party’s support for Israel. Trump’s very first anti-migrant bill, giving ICE more powers to detain and deport, was passed with Democrat votes. On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris attacked Trump for failing to support a Democrat-backed bill to hire 1,500 more border cops. 
Post-election soul-searching among Democrats has resulted in a variety of different conclusions. Democrats lost to an unpopular candidate whose last term ended in chaos and embarrassment. Many are envious of the enthusiasm Trump inspires, while Harris lost 6.8 million votes compared to Biden’s 2020 result. 
Unwilling to break with the pro-business and anti-worker policies that have steadily undermined their support, leading Democrats have decided to pin blame for their loss on the left. According to Democrat strategist Stuart Malec’s implausible account, the problem is: “In the name of keeping the peace internally, we have allowed politicians and activist groups from our left-most flank to seize an outsized role in defining the party’s national brand”. He argues Democrats have been shamed out of proudly trumpeting Biden’s many achievements, such as massively expanding fossil fuel extraction and deporting record numbers of migrants. Talking tough against the tiny US left is a lot easier than standing up to Trump or the billionaires. 
Following this line of argument, many leading Democrats are now championing the Trumpist claim that “wokeness” has gone too far. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has recently complained that “We’ve gone through five years where people became way too permissive as a culture”. In an <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-03-28/newsom-podcast-democrats-toxic">interview with the LA Times</a>, California Governor Gavin Newsom said his party’s brand had become “toxic”. “People don’t think we make any damn sense”, he said. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/democrats-blame-partys-position-transgender-rights-part-harris-loss-rcna179370">Rep. Tom Suozzi</a> of New York slammed Democrats for “pandering to the far left” on trans rights. 
Democrats who argue the party has gone too far in supporting social justice frequently frame this retreat as a turn back to “bread and butter” issues. But the same Democrats who urge this back-to-basics approach are hostile to workers’ rights and the welfare state. Emanuel, for instance, spent his time as Chicago mayor attempting to crush teachers’ unions and close public schools. 
Democrats can comfortably agree with war, deportations, bigotry and austerity. Their fundamental problem with Trump is that he’s an unreliable and erratic enforcer of the interests of American capitalism. The Democrats’ criticism of Trump is tied to the growing chorus of capitalists who are concerned he is doing irreparable damage to their system. Wall Street billionaires are infuriated by Trump’s tariff gambit: Bill Ackman said the US is “heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter”. Boaz Weinstein predicted the “avalanche has really just started”. And Jamie Dimon warned it “may be disastrous in the long run”. 
This chorus also includes sections of the US imperialist establishment, like ex-Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, who are concerned Trump’s crude and blustering approach to foreign policy risks undermining US imperialist influence. This explains the furore around
“Signalgate”, when Trump’s team accidentally added an Atlantic journalist to their group chat discussing military strikes on Yemen. Democrats condemned Trump, not for bombing a poor country and slaughtering civilians, but for letting the world know about it. Traditionalists through and through, the Democratic Party prefer US war crimes to be kept secret. 
This is why their dominant strategy for “resisting” Trump thus far has been an endless series of legal challenges. The balance sheet of this strategy has been dismal. While court cases may temporarily halt some of Trump’s agenda, the administration is intimidating judges and moving rapidly toward defying their orders. This strategy does nothing to mobilise people to resist attacks or provide people with a coherent political argument against the right.
The huge turnouts at anti-Trump demonstrations on 5 April show that millions are looking for a way to resist Trump’s agenda effectively. While many are frustrated with the Democrats’ leadership, the party isn’t going anywhere. The Democrats hold on because of the strength of “lesser-evilism”, the pull for people to rally around the Democrats because they’re the only viable electoral alternative. Many accept a pathetic and pro-capitalist “resistance” to Trumpism even when they would prefer something better. So Democrats were able to front the 5 April demonstrations to begin rebuilding their credibility after a bruising few months. They were also able to exert influence through the party-aligned NGOs that organised the marches to exclude “controversial” issues like Palestine from the platform. 
The popularity of the “Fight the oligarchy” campaign led by Sanders and AOC shows that many support the idea of a left-wing resistance to Trump’s agenda. Their rally in Denver on 21 March drew 34,000 people and connected Trump’s reactionary social agenda to his war on workers. “People are starting to put the pieces together. The same billionaires who are taking a wrecking ball to our country derive their power from dividing working people apart”, said Ocasio-Cortez. “The last thing they want is for us to realize that the real division and the real harm in this country is how endless greed is costing the lives of everyone else.”
This is a good starting point for a socialist opposition to Trumpism. But it needs to be connected to a strategy that can actually build the power of workers and the oppressed. While they talk about fighting the oligarchy, AOC and Bernie urge support for the Democratic Party, an irredeemably oligarchic organisation. 
The alternative to this is to build grassroots organisations that can mobilise opposition to Trump and involve people in political action, to build working class power at the point of production and to cohere a political force that has an orientation to the power workers and the oppressed have when they act together.

Don’t trust the Democrats, we need real resistance to Trump

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.

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”.

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