Jacinta Nampijinpa Price could well become as synonymous with the far right as Pauline Hanson. Four weeks out from the referendum on the Voice, she cemented her position as one of Australia’s leading white supremacists with her comments at the National Press Club about how colonisation has been a wonderful thing for Aboriginal people. She railed against “separatism” (any acknowledgement that Aboriginal people are oppressed) and implored people to recognise that Aboriginal disadvantage is not due to racism but is the result of something “much closer to home”.
“Tout le monde deteste la police!”—Everyone hates the police—was chanted at demonstrations and riots across France last week. The trigger was an event both enraging and depressingly familiar: the murder of an innocent 17-year-old Black kid, Nahel Merzouk. The teenager from Nanterre, in the western suburbs of Paris, was stopped by police for driving in a bus lane. Moments later, he was shot after being asked to pull out his licence.
“You’re just a performing fucking monkey”. A racist barb, and one of many pointed moments in Jacky, a Melbourne Theatre Company production currently playing at the Arts Centre. Jacky is about the politics of performing monkeys. It is about racism and exploitation, hypocrisy and resistance.
If you google “Andrew Tate”, you will discover that he is one of the most googled individuals in the world, and thus the cycle continues. Tate is a far-right misogynist megalomaniac who currently sits in a Romanian jail, suspected of human trafficking, while his fans cry out that their “Top G” has been framed: another victim of the Matrix. The Tate phenomenon is horrifying., a morbid symptom of a sick system.
“Win, lose or draw, I could not be prouder of the campaign we’ve all been part of.” Jerome Small, Victorian Socialists candidate for the Northern Metropolitan region, summed it up well to an elated, exhausted crowd of hundreds at the Victorian Socialists’ post-election party. Throughout months of campaigning, it felt like we were having an impact, connecting with people who feel abandoned by the major parties, angry at the system and open to socialist solutions. As the results came trickling in on election night, we knew this feeling was right.
The history of class societies is awash with revolutionary uprisings, but no class system has seen more revolutionary ferment than capitalism. Throughout its 250-year history, not a decade has gone by without revolutionary struggle breaking out somewhere, and periodically there are waves of revolution that sweep across several countries. The most recent was the Arab Spring in 2011, in which revolutions erupted one after another across the Middle East and North Africa.