Every day we are bombarded with messages that degrade women. Sexualised images of women are used to attract attention to advertising, news stories, social media accounts, pop culture, TV shows and pretty much anything else you can possibly imagine. You only have to think of Bianca Censori attending the Grammys as Kanye West’s virtually naked accessory to appreciate how ingrained into celebrity culture the objectification of women is. Meanwhile, the spread and mainstreaming of horrifically sexist pornography and the sex industry is normalising violent sexual practices and the dehumanisation of women.
So imagine an artist is given a whole wall to make a statement, free from corporate influence, and the thing they choose to do is to add yet another demeaning, objectifying image of women to the world. This is exactly what happened in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, where a mural was recently installed depicting a bound and gagged female body in stilettos, a studded dog collar and cat ears. Rightly, the mural has been denounced by anti-violence group Collective Shout as “a chilling image of eroticised violence against women”. Many members of the public have likewise registered their outrage in emails to the council. And fair enough—are women entitled to no relief from this unrelenting reminder that we only have value when we’re being debased for the pleasure of someone else? 
The artist responsible for the mural, Los Angeles-based Lauren YS, responded to the criticism by saying that “anyone imposing negative narratives onto it is incorrectly assuming its meaning”. They claim it is a piece about “empowerment and queer selfhood”. A local man speaking to the ABC defended the work on the basis that it is “representing a culture that a lot of people don’t know about, shibari (Japanese rope bondage) is a beautiful art-form that brings intimacy in people”. Apparently, violence against women, when it is a reference to Japanese culture or a form of queer expression, is different to other misogynistic images. But why? If Andrew Tate were to claim that his interest in abusing women was a queer fetish with allusions to feudal customs would that make it ok? 
The refusal to engage with the idea that the mural might be sexist even extended to progressive Yarra mayor Steve Jolly. When asked about it, Jolly chose not to comment on the content of the image, citing his main concern as the potential breach of council by-laws. 
Most of the media reporting about the mural has focussed on its location on a public street where children might see it, and the appropriateness of exposing children to sexually explicit content. But this misses the point. Whether its children or adults exposed to it, the problem is the acceptance of the dehumanisation of women as legitimate sexual activity, in the context of a society in which women are oppressed and already subject to unacceptably high levels of violence, often deadly violence. How can we wring our hands at every news report of another woman killed by a man at the same time as every conceivable available space is saturated with images that erotise such violence to make money and, even worse, elevate it to art? 
There is no denying the connection between the demeaning portrayal of women in advertising, pop-culture and pornography and abuse in the real world. A 2023 report by a French equality watchdog found that 90 percent of online pornography <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/27/online-pornography-breaks-french-law-equality-watchdog-france" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">involved verbal, physical and sexual violence against women</a>. Higher levels of consumption of porn correlate with men holding <a href="https://cdn.jss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/05144735/The-Man-Box-2024-7.1-LR.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">more derogatory attitudes towards women</a>. Acts like choking, commonly depicted in porn, have become more mainstream with 61 percent of women, and 79 percent of trans and gender diverse people aged 18 to 35 <a href="https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/4978840/Sharman,-Fitzgerald-Douglas-2024.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reporting that they have been strangled during sex</a>. Sexual assault is also increasing among young people, <a href="https://www.anglicare-tas.org.au/young-in-love-and-in-danger/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">with 28 percent of men between 18 and 30</a> reporting using at least one form of physical or sexual violence against a partner. And, abhorrently, sexist attitudes among young men <a href="https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/july/radical-anti-feminism-the-most-prevalent-form-of-violent-extremism-in-australia,-report-finds" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">are on the rise</a>. 
Too often today, objections to sexist objectification and the normalisation of porn are dismissed as prudery, and support for it sold as “sex positivity”. But objecting to demeaning portrayals of women is not anti-sex. Sex is not synonymous with degrading other people. That young women and queer people are today exhorted to release their inner porn star, love kink and BDSM, and even see violence against (almost always) female bodies as “empowering” does not make these practices liberating. Rather, it is a victory for the sex and pornography industries, which are the main beneficiaries of the mainstreaming of violent or non-consensual sex as pleasurable. 
The acceptance of depictions of violence when they are sexualised points to a glaring cultural hypocrisy. If this mural had glamorised a woman being violently restrained in a police cell or lying unconscious on the kitchen floor after being assaulted by her partner, or being stalked by an ex, it would not have been seen as progressive or appropriate for public display. Similarly, if the figure in the mural had been a man, the meaning of the mural would be completely different. This double standard is a product of sexism—violence is not ok, unless it’s for someone’s sexual gratification and is being directed at a woman. 
Anti-sexists have a responsibility to resist this and to stand up for a world in which human interactions are first and foremost about equality and mutual respect, not degradation and dehumanisation. When I first got involved with activism, feminists and leftists would never have embraced such filth. Women have for a long time been subjected to demeaning stereotypes in popular culture. These things used to be met with hostile eye rolling, culture jamming or protest. Today, it is self-described activists and leftists who are embracing sexist symbols and tropes, or refusing to criticise them on an anti-sexist basis. Those of us who want to see a world of genuine liberation need to stand against this reactionary tide, to assert our right to be socially equal and sexually free.

Sarah Garnham

There is nothing edgy about turning violence against women into art

The far right’s “war on woke” has been taken to a terrifying new level with Donald Trump in the White House. He has made it clear that oppressed groups will be trampled until they shut up and put up. Trans kids have no right to be addressed as themselves. Young Black men have no right to resist being murdered by cops. Women have no right to reproductive control. Immigrants are invaders. (But far-right criminals like Andrew Tate should be <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/27/europe/andrew-tate-romania-us-intl-hnk/index.html">brought back into</a> the country.) 
This isn’t just a push-back against cultural symbols; it is about winding back the clock more than half a century on the rights and expectations of the working class and all of its constituent oppressed groups. The left should oppose all of Trump’s “anti-woke” measures, individually and as a package. 
The move that has grabbed the most attention has been Trump’s orders to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and practices. Basically, DEI has been outlawed for government bureaucracies and institutions. Trump has even rescinded a 1965 executive order mandating non-discriminatory hiring practices for government employees and contractors. 
On the chopping block is everything from the high-profile cosmetic DEI government initiatives of recent years (for example, the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/21/politics/cia-dismisses-intelligence-officers-diversity/index.html">CIA has dismissed its DEI officers</a>) through to <a href="https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/education/education-department-schools-cut-dei-lose-funding/">cutting vital education programs</a> for disadvantaged kids. In fact, Trump has threatened to shut the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-department-education-budget-employees-why-trump-wants-it-shut-down-2025-02-19/">whole federal education department</a> because it disproportionately assists kids in poverty or with special needs. This offensive against DEI dovetails with the DOGE campaign to trash the public service. 
Trump has also made it clear that the private sector is expected to follow suit in abandoning DEI and woke policies. The response has been more than obliging. Since the Supreme Court decision against affirmative action late in 2023, the anti-woke current has gained ground. But now there is a stampede away from DEI within corporate America. 
Walmart is ending diversity hiring commitments, shutting down its Center for Racial Equity and removing many LGBT-themed products from its website. Goldman Sachs is dropping its policy of having two “diverse members” on its board. Amazon is shutting down its “outdated programs and materials”. Google is ending diversity hiring and its observations of cultural events like Pride Month and Black History Month. Deloitte told its employees to remove pronouns from their email signatures. 
Meta is ending diversity hiring and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to bring more “masculine energy” into the company. Disney is getting rid of its Reimagine Tomorrow website, which highlights diverse employees. Talk about a bleak new order: no tomorrow for the kids. 
It’s an embarrassing turnaround, especially given the fanfare with which DEI was taken up by corporate elites just a few years ago. The craze began in response to the Black Lives Matter rebellion of 2020—the biggest demonstrations in US history. Corporations, government bureaucracies and NGOs rushed to capitalise on and contain the movement by rebranding themselves as “inclusive” and “culturally sensitive”. 
Some of the things they did were positive—like introducing or expanding non-discriminatory hiring processes. But mostly, it was about making token and well-publicised gestures, especially those that appeared to “diversify” management positions. There was also a rush to implement “implicit bias” training programs, often run by grifters such as Robin D’Angelo, who has amassed significant personal wealth by lecturing company employees about their inherent “privilege”.
It was no accident that US capitalists shelled out millions of dollars to corporate consultants like D’Angelo while opposing minimum wage rises and resisting workers’ attempts to form trade unions. 
Given the superficiality of DEI, it is no wonder that many corporate lackeys have quickly abandoned it in favour of the now trending far-right bigotry and an all-out assault on the oppressed. 
In general, the “woke era” offered only superficial reforms, at the same time as creating a sensibility that oppression is the result of cultural backwardness rather than structural and economic inequalities. It has been an era in which social solidarity and challenging the system have been jettisoned in favour of “calling out” bad ideas and the people holding them and adopting the supposedly “correct” and “inclusive” language, symbols and etiquette. 
Of course, it is perfectly legitimate to call people by their correct pronouns, rename or remove colonial monuments and so on. But we should not, especially now, go along with the liberal narrative that DEI and “woke” represented an important extension of the gains made by the civil rights movement and the liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. 
For the left, and those looking to dismantle systems of oppression, the “woke era” actually reflected a period of setbacks. It started with a turn away from the radicalism, collectivism and economic gains of the 1960s and 1970s, and towards the commodification and academisation of identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s. This happened alongside Reaganism (named after the Republican US president), which inflicted crushing defeats on working-class organisations and asserted the primacy of markets over all aspects of life. “Woke culture” represents the fusion of degenerated progressivism with the sensibilities of Wall Street financiers.
Nevertheless, while a left critique of modern identity politics and its effects is necessary, it should in no way prevent us from opposing Trump’s attacks and from recognising their much broader implications. Unfortunately, some on the reformist left have welcomed Trump’s offensive against “woke”. Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin magazine in the US, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/business/economy/trump-dei-democrats-left-unions.html">was quoted in the New York Times</a> as saying: “I am definitely happy this stuff is buried for now. What comes next might be worse ... [but] it has a chance to be better”.
This is deeply misguided. For one thing, Trump and his cronies have very different reasons for opposing “woke culture”. And in fact, the political right has, for now, won the conversation on “woke”, a term originally coined by anti-racist activists in the US but now turned into a pejorative term that encompasses every symbol of respect and dignity that oppressed groups have won, as well as our fundamental rights and protections. 
In their eyes, anyone who has even a passing concern about oppression is infected with “the woke mind virus”. And that is why Trump’s moves against DEI are far reaching and include attacks on laws and conventions established as a result of the civil rights movement. And his attacks on woke extend even further: to any individual institution or policy that defends the environment, to threats of deportation to people who dare to stand up to Israel’s attempted genocide in Palestine, to dismembering the National Labor Relations Board, opposing minimum wage increases, trashing the public service and firing thousands of workers. 
Also, the lines between cynical DEI measures and supportable measures are very blurry. The left should not call for diversity on corporate boards or support HR departments having more discretionary power. And the left should not support the punitive and censorial atmosphere that has become associated with social justice and identity politics. But more opposition to racism and other forms of oppression throughout society is a good thing—as is awareness of historical and contemporary injustices.
Rather than distinguishing between reasonable and reactionary “social justice” policies, we should recognise that the right-wing assault on “woke culture” is part of an assault on the working class in all its diversity. In fact, any criticism of wokeness that does not pose a superior way to advance the fight against oppression is a step in the wrong direction. This is especially the case when it is coming from a heinously reactionary administration that is inspiring fascists and the far right the world over. 
Trump is not clearing the path for the left to build a superior way of fighting against racism and other oppressions but throwing up more obstacles to the creation of a more caring and egalitarian society. Trump aims to create an atmosphere of fear. He wants to brutalise the most oppressed, and society more broadly, to lower all of our standards and expectations. He is about attacking the working class and any idea that workers should have rights. 
Sunkara’s comments are linked to a broader political view, termed “class first” socialism, which conflates neoliberal identity politics with all anti-racism and opposition to oppression, and which says that focusing on oppression is alienating to the working class, particularly at an electoral level. In practice, these people tend to support the Democrats. They blame the party’s adherence to identity politics when it fails and, while this is certainly a factor, their critique is aimed at rehabilitating the party. 
As well as a thin veneer for opportunist electoralism, these class reductionists sell out our side twice over: once by in effect arguing for the abandonment of the oppressed, and then again by arguing that the working class is too basic and self-interested to care about oppression. 
Yet, here we have such a clear example, in the negative, of how oppression and class are entwined. Trump wants to attack the oppressed, as a spearhead for a major assault on the working class—not one that is going to be phased in but one that is going on as we speak. In the name of the war on DEI and “woke”, vital services that workers rely on are being slashed, workers themselves are being fired, and basic standards that the workers’ movement has fought for are under threat. 
The political right has clearly benefited from defining its agenda as a “culture war” to make it seem separate from class attacks. The far-right politicians want to be able to masquerade as defenders of workers against culturally progressive elites. Liberal elites also like to peddle this idea, because it assists their class interests to present workers as culturally backwards but also to frame the struggles against oppression as classless pursuits of human progress. 
It is up to the left to reject these lies. The rights of racially oppressed groups, women and the LGBT community are inextricably bound with the class struggle. It was during high points of class struggle that oppressed groups won the most gains. Struggles against oppression have repeatedly been a lightning rod for broader working-class rebellion and advances. 
If we are going to defeat Trump’s assault, our side needs this history and political outlook. Fighting back will require mass resistance in the streets, industrial action by workers and the offering of an anti-capitalist horizon for our struggles. 
We have seen mass resistance in recent times: the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, the historic Palestine demonstrations in support of Gaza, some smaller but important mobilisations for trans rights recently. We need all these people and more to start organising, disrupting business as usual, asserting that the rights of the oppressed will be defended and expanded. 
And, crucially, we need to build links of solidarity between our struggles. Agonising about who has more privilege or whether people are harbouring implicit biases or manifesting micro-aggressions is a distraction from building these kinds of movements. 
Ultimately, to make real gains, we need the working class to move, to use its industrial power to fight for better wages and conditions and to fight like hell for the dignity and humanity that we all deserve. The workers’ movement, at its best, takes up the cause of every oppressed group because an injury to one is an injury to all. 
It is no accident that the far right and its billionaire champions want to degrade all of us: their power and wealth are based on trampling people. It is no accident that the liberal elites can be progressive only in tokenistic and superficial ways, because their power too is based on our oppression. 
In contrast to both, our power is based on solidarity and a collective drive for justice and dignity. It is this power—that of the working class and all of its constituent groups—that can one day establish a society that is genuinely diverse, equitable and inclusive.

Trump’s ‘war on woke’ is a war on all the working class

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”. 
Her fans in the front row—a selection of the Liberals and Nationals’ finest—could not wipe the ghoulish grins off their faces. A cackling Michaelia Cash almost popped a pearl button when Price mocked the idea of intergenerational trauma. Andrew Bolt has since referred to Price’s “stunning speech” as a “turning point” that will “ring through the ages”.
But despite all the excitement and accolades, Price is just the latest in a long line of racists who attack Aboriginal people as welfare cheats and land robbers, and who extol the virtues of colonisation. After all, Australia Day exists to celebrate it. In 2018, Tony Abbott declared: 
“What happened on the 26th of January 1788 was, on balance, for everyone—Aboriginal people included—a good thing because it brought Western civilisation to this country, it brought Australia into the modern world.”
Price is making her career on the backs of her forebears in the Liberal Party, National Party, One Nation and the Bennelong Society. Her Aboriginality gives her more licence to spew racist filth; she has become a mouthpiece for things some in her camp are unwilling to say and invites everyone on the right to share in a little joke at the expense of the “woke identity politics left”. 
Price is consciously casting herself not just as a conservative, but as a figure of the hard right. She regularly outflanks Warren Mundine (this country’s other most prominent Aboriginal racist), for instance, by vociferously opposing treaty, which he supports. Before becoming a senator, she worked with Mark Latham on a “Save Australia Day” ad. During her first week in parliament, she expressed support for Pauline Hanson storming out during the acknowledgement of country. When Gary Johns recently commented that Aboriginal communities are living in “stupor” and need to “learn English” before they can have a voice, some conservatives distanced themselves—Price endorsed his comments. 
One of Price’s favourite topics to discuss is violence within Aboriginal communities, especially towards women and children. She is an outspoken supporter of more policing and state removals of Aboriginal children. These are the “practical solutions” she counterposes to “symbolism”. In 2016, she argued: 
“Growing up in and knowing my culture, I know that it is a culture that accepts violence and in many ways desensitises those living the culture to violence ... this becomes very apparent when an evolved culture comes up against a long unchanged culture.” 
Weaponising her own experiences of domestic violence to justify white supremacism is something Jacinta learnt from her mother, Bess Price, who became John Howard’s favourite pet during the racist Northern Territory intervention. Bess Price helped implement the military takeover of Aboriginal communities as chair of the Northern Territory Indigenous Affairs Advisory Council. She was rewarded by the Country Liberal Party with a spot in the NT Legislative Assembly from 2012 to 2016, and became minister for community services in the Adam Giles government.
Jacinta Price has similarly been rewarded for her services to racism. She likes to present herself as a grassroots champion of Aboriginal remote communities, as against “inner-city activists”, academics and politicians of the “Canberra bubble”. This is part of her self-styling as a far-right figure. 
In truth, Price is a creature of the Canberra bubble. The Country Liberal Party handed her their number one Senate position at the last federal election. As John Faine <a href="blank">recently explained</a> in the Guardian, the CLP vote declined by 20 percent in the Northern Territory, and Price’s main constituents are wealthier white voters in urban centres. The same was true in 2019, when Price ran for the Legislative Assembly: she received fewer than 50 votes in remote communities where 500-600 votes were cast.
Peter Dutton promoted Price to shadow minister for Indigenous Australians when he recognised that the Voice referendum was a golden opportunity to reignite and repopularise anti-Aboriginal racism, and a potential step in the Liberal Party’s road back to power. Like conservative and right-wing parties around the world, the Liberals recognise the value of identity politics for their own side. 
Opportunism works both ways in this arrangement. Price clearly intends to be a big political figure beyond the referendum. She has stated that she would expect a place on the Voice advisory body if it did exist, and she intends to broaden her right-wing vitriol by <a href="blank">taking aim at trans rights</a>. Her consolidation as a leading figure of the hard right could well be one of the lasting legacies of the referendum fiasco.

Jacinta Price is Australia’s leading far-right activist

“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. 
The police lied about what happened, claiming that Nahel tried to run them over. But someone had filmed the murder on their phone and soon the footage was circulating. Both police officers drew their weapons and, despite facing no threat, one chose to shoot. Mounia, Nahel’s mother, summed it up when she said: “He saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life”.
Riots erupted in Nanterre and other Paris suburbs, and in suburbs in other cities. The anger was palpable, thousands of young people saying that they would not let the police continue to kill and that Nahel would not die in vain. The police union responded by calling the protesters “vermin” and rallying their officers to restore the “republican order”. This meant arresting more than 1,000 people over three days. Among those arrested, the average age was 17. 
This was rising of the banlieues—working-class, immigrant neighbourhoods in which poverty is high and police intimidation is constant. This is another France: by one measure just a few kilometres away from the centre of Paris, but in reality a world apart. 
Banlieues populations are discriminated against economically and politically. The number of children from immigrant backgrounds in poverty is markedly higher than that for white children. And as is the case everywhere, the cost-of-living crisis is disproportionately hitting working-class people, particularly those of colour. In the banlieues, there has been a systematic underfunding of schools and public services, which puts paid to the idea that Republican France treats everyone equally. As a joint statement from French unions in response to Nahel’s murder put it: 
“How can we believe in equality when some neighbourhoods are left without public services, when they remain isolated because of a lack of accessible transport, doctors and local hospitals ... These young people find themselves under social and geographical house arrest.”
Many in the banlieues come from West Africa and North African Arab countries. The young men are twenty times more likely to be stopped by police than other citizens. 
Under President Emanuele Macron, the police have become more militarised and gained more powers. A 2017 law giving cops more scope to shoot at drivers was an advance death warrant for Nahel. Since the law passed, police shootings of motorists have increased six-fold, according to French researchers who <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/30/world/europe/france-police-traffic-stop-shooting-law.html">shared their findings with the New York Times</a>. The police force is also thoroughly infiltrated by fascist ideas—<a href="https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/chez-les-policiers-la-tentation-grandissante-du-vote-rn-3142534">well over half</a> supported fascist presidential candidates such as Marine Le Pen or Éric Zemmour in the last election, according to Radio France polling. 
The French ruling class says that France is colourblind, treating everyone equally regardless of race or religion. This is laughable given the extreme racial divisions in the country, and the deeply entrenched influence of the Catholic Church. But also, the history of France is a history of colonial conquest, of the denial of basic rights to colonial subjects and to successive waves of immigrants—many from predominantly Muslim countries. 
In recent decades, the war on terror and the barbaric treatment of refugees throughout Europe have increased the state sanctioned Islamophobic repression. Each wave of migrants has been treated with hostility, leading to their concentration in the outskirts of major cities.
The riots were just the latest manifestation of the profound political alienation of the banlieues. These communities have not been integrated into French capitalism under the banner of multiculturalism, as in Australia, or through Tammany-hall style clientelism, as in the US. They are disproportionately poor, unemployed and targets of daily harassment and abuse. The combination of repression and abandonment leads inevitably to the sorts of political explosions seen last week.
Tragically, the French left has few roots in these communities, and is therefore unable to provide a political lead. The Communist Party, long hegemonic on the broad left, spent most of the twentieth century opposing anti-colonial movements in the French empire. It also accepted at face value the racism implicit in France’s so-called secularism, which has always been used to attack religious minorities. While the revolutionary left took principled stances against imperialism, they too failed to consistently defend the rights of Muslims to wear the hijab, to run for public office and so on.
The corporate media and the political right dismiss riots as mindless violence. Even sections of the left have condemned rioting in the past, criticising rioters for sabotaging their own cause and equating the violence of police with that of the oppressed. But this time, things have been different. 
Partly because of the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, the French left has responded more sympathetically to this latest rebellion, with the more left-wing trade unions joining activists in denouncing the police and the state for its economic and political oppression of migrant working-class communities. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing La France Insoumise group, has also made good statements in response to the violence, insisting that there can be no peace without justice. This is a message that has been scrawled all over the walls of Paris in recent days.
As Martin Luther King said, riots are “the language of the unheard”. They reveal deep wells of anger and frustration, and though they are not the methods socialists promote, they are undeniably acts of collective political rebellion. 
Yet France is deeply polarised. Despite the significant solidarity shown to Nahel’s family, the overall effect of the riots has been to strengthen the reactionary far right. Marine Le Pen seized the moment for a recruitment drive to her National Rally party, sending out a mass email valorising the police and calling for “order” to be imposed. Following the police union, Jordan Bardella, a party chief, called the protesters “savage hordes” and denounced immigration. A 30 June opinion poll showed that 39 percent of people supported Le Pen’s response—the highest level of support of any politician.
It is hard to predict what comes next. There is a widespread belief in the ruling class that the extreme alienation and misery of the banlieues must be alleviated to some extent. Macron has been relatively constrained in his rhetoric so far, balancing a desire to calm tensions while also strengthening the police. 
But without a sustained response by the left and the union movement, it is hard to believe that justice will be served for Nahel, or for any of the many other victims of police violence and abuse. While it is positive that major unions have issued reasonable statements, talk is cheap when not backed by action. Only through a mass movement that unites the radical youth, the oppressed minorities and the power of organised labour, can the racism and exploitation inherent to French society be challenged.

No justice, no peace in France

“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.
Playwright Declan Furber Gillick and director Mark Wilson have managed to indict the political and economic system behind racism, while also authentically portraying how it plays out on a grassroots level. There is nothing didactic or overwrought about the play. The script is rich with politics, warmth and wit. The dialogue is natural even when heavy, but also interspersed with many moments of humour that the actors deliver well. It’s a tight production.
Jacky (played by Guy Simon) is at the centre: a young Aboriginal man who grew up on a mission up north and has come to Melbourne to make a life. He is a multi-dimensional, believable character, torn between a sense of duty to his family and his people, and a desire to fit in and get ahead in a deeply unjust society.
Jacky is clearly a reference to Jacky-Jacky, an Aboriginal guide who was awarded medals for his service to the colony of NSW. Jacky-Jacky became a derogatory name for an Aboriginal collaborator, a subservient to the white colonialists.
The three characters around Jacky each have a particular kind of relationship with him. Two exploit him and the other is his brother. Jacky’s relationships with these characters become connected microworlds that together build a picture of this unjust society. The society depicted is not one of open apartheid and racist brutality (not that this doesn’t still exist in some parts of Australia). Nor is it one in which microaggressions and cultural faux pas are the be-all and end-all of racism.
Instead, it is a picture of a society in which Aboriginal people are disproportionately poor and marginalised, even as Aboriginal inclusion, advancement and cultural appreciation are common talking points. It is a society in which a lucky few Aboriginal people are expected to “behave well” and show gratitude to the bosses and bureaucrats who generously offer them “opportunities”. And it is a picture of a society divided by class, ruled by market forces, where everything has a price tag.
This picture is brought to life with some great staging and design. The set (by Christina Smith) is a sterile pub, a sterile hotel bed, and a comfy apartment living room—representing the three relationships that make up the worlds of the play.
The first of these worlds is the blackwashing and tokenism rife throughout corporate bureaucracies. Companies and agencies scramble for “Indigenous advancement” grants and funding from governments and big corporations. By slapping together a partnership with an Indigenous organisation or a training program for Indigenous youth, all sorts of companies can qualify for this extra funding—including shonky recruitment agencies that make bank by robbing workers. Jacky gets brought into this world by Linda (Alison Whyte). The perks are real but precarious and conditional on his performance.
“Culture” is a very important part of this arrangement. As Linda says with an eager, desperate glint in her eye: “We need as much culture as we can get”. Acknowledgements and Welcomes to Country have become ubiquitous. Though this reflects gains against racism, these ceremonies are generally hypocritical and cynical, especially in the corporate world. Jacky’s treatment of this is perfectly scathing. One of the most brilliant scenes in the play is an Acknowledgement of Country that will no doubt make many Melbourne Theatre Company regulars squirm.
Another of the worlds is the sex industry, specifically the relationship between client and sex worker. Despite Jacky’s self-confidence and assertion that his arrangement with client Glenn (Greg Stone) is a “win-win”, the play explores the many exploitative and degrading aspects of the job; from it being insecure and outside of the formal economy, through to it being a site of racist abuse.
The transaction is never equal, because it involves one person paying another to use them—in this case to play out a “misogynist, racist little fantasy”. As Glenn becomes more comfortable in their relationship, the fantasy of racial domination becomes more overt, though he tries to cover it up with a self-help fad: “I’m exploring”. This attempted domination involves both paternalism and brutality. In a gesture of apparent kindness, Glenn gives Jacky a vinyl record that reveals everything about their relationship. Ultimately, the brutality comes out as well: sharp, naked, violent racism that had previously lain beneath the surface. Jacky, however, is no one-dimensional victim. He is abused by both Linda and Glenn but not destroyed.
The third world of the play is the one inhabited by Jacky and his brother, Keith (Ngali Shaw). Keith is the truth teller, and the medium for the play’s most radical messages. He enters Jacky’s life and immediately sees the hardness behind the smiles and promises and “opportunities”. He is acutely conscious of class and race, not because he is a politico, but because he can recognise exploitation and refuses to be a performing monkey. Keith consistently challenges all the rules and social conventions that Jacky has relied on as his ticket out of oppression. Keith refuses to play along with the pretence that racism is over, that society is equal and that bosses are our friends. If you want to be like Keith, do yourself a favour and see this play.
Jacky, written by Declan Furber Gillick and Directed by Mark Wilson, is on at Melbourne’s Fairfax Studio until 24 June.

Jacky shines a light on racism and exploitation

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.
Tate’s misogyny is genuinely jaw dropping. His rhetoric alone makes Donald Trump seem mild mannered. He thinks women bear responsibility for being raped, and talks openly about beating and choking “his” women and trashing their possessions if they try to leave him. 
“It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch”, he explains of his response if a woman accused him of cheating. He says he likes young women that he can control and make an “imprint” on. Several of the women in his videos are branded with the tattoos “Tate’s girl” or “Tate’s property”. 
“I fuck women so I can get what I actually want. Which is not them. They are a means to an end”, he explains in one of his videos. Tate says that he began making money from pornography by getting his four girlfriends to produce hours of footage for him each day, the proceeds of which were then pocketed by him and his brother. This sexcam business reportedly expanded to 75 women in four countries, raking in millions. Romanian prosecutors say that those arrested (Tate, his brother and two other associates) “appear to have created an organised crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content”.
Tate is hardly an outlier in the porn industry, despite attempts by some to portray it as a form of liberation. Maria Boroghina, for example, makes millions from a sexcam business employing 160 models in a glitzy studio in central Bucharest. She has been favourably contrasted with Tate and <a href="https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/camgirls-paid-8000-a-month-break-silence-after-andrew-tate-controversy/news-story/3f7205c85923077647a11245208fa461">insists</a> that Tate does not represent the industry. But the sexcam business, like pornography and sex work more generally, exists because sexism and the objectification of women are rife in our society. 
The myth that “camgirls” are independent, safe and having fun in their bedrooms is a sexist fantasy peddled by the industry. Sexcamming involves high levels of trafficking, coercion and hyper-exploitation. Sexcam sites take up to 75 percent of a model’s earnings, and bosses often control their passwords and accounts, as well as the sex acts that they perform. In Romania, which has the largest number of women involved of any country, the industry has close links to the mafia. 
Tate’s other business interests include gambling, crypto investing and of course, social media influencing—endeavours that don’t exactly rely on intelligence and talent. He claims that he is the world’s first trillionaire and that he can help young men become gangster capitalists. 
In reality, Tate is a Bottom G. Unlike others in the current cohort of famous lowlife rich men—like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—Tate doesn’t command a global empire. His self-declared wealth is overstated, as is his claim to own several casinos. A recent Guardian investigation found no evidence of these enterprises, only a few slot machines in a couple of seedy arcades in Bucharest. Tate is a petty scrounger, making money by hook or by crook, scrambling desperately upwards, kicking everyone beneath him in the teeth. 
One of his biggest ventures is the online “Hustler’s University”, recently rebranded as “The Real World”. It is a scam within a scam. Tate makes money through $50-a-month subscriptions from students. He builds his brand by getting the students to post video content of him on social media to recruit more wannabe gangsters. In exchange, Tate and his band of “professors” provide tips and tricks to make quick money, which soon will be followed by riches, women, luxury cars, status, power and, of course, more money. 
It’s all a fantasy, a pathetic teenage boy fantasy combining Fast &amp; Furious, James Bond, gangster rap, Mein Kampf and Milton Friedman. It is a cartoonish version of everything that capitalist ideology promotes: human nature as little more than ruthless competition, the rules of the market being akin to the laws of nature, entrepreneurs as “wealth creators”, individual success measured by the accumulation of material goods, the valorisation of self-absorption, and so on.
Tate says that to make fantasy a reality, men need to practise far-right mindfulness and free themselves from the Matrix, which he describes as “the systems which are being created by society that are deliberately designed to enslave”. Basically, to become free, his teenage followers just need to stop thinking of themselves as weak and subservient and instead become confident, ruthless alpha males who are prepared to fuck over everyone in their path. If they fork out even more money, they can join the exclusive “war room” training camp where they can gain access to even better educational activities, like how to fight in a cage like a real man.
Tate’s affiliations with the far right are well documented. He collaborates with extreme right conspiracy theorists and other male supremacists. He is an admirer of Donald Trump and Alex Jones and has long-running connections with known fascists, including the notorious UK Nazi Stephen Lennon. His politics represent a specific brand of far-right extremism that has been growing and becoming more dangerous since the “alt-right” came to prominence in the 2014 Gamergate campaign.
Gamergate was an outpouring of violent sexist rage involving torrents of abuse towards women in the gaming world, including rape and death threats, and a collective wallowing in perceived male victimhood. It was a fusion of men’s rights activism and the far right.
Since then, the “manosphere”—online communities built around savage hatred towards women and LGBT people—has expanded and become a fertile recruitment ground for the far right and fascists, as well as self-help gurus like Jordan Peterson. Peterson brought a faux-intellectual element to the table with his pseudo-scientific blather about natural hierarchies of domination among humans. 
For all their supposed edginess or rebel posturing, Peterson, Tate and their associated cohorts of con artists are champions of the capitalist order. For them, the best and truest social system is one in which individuals compete for resources. Within such a society, the strong succeed while the weak suffer. Challenging supposedly natural inequalities, like those between men and women, distorts the natural order and oppresses those who would otherwise succeed. Like Peterson, Tate professes to offer practical advice for men to stand up and take back what is “rightfully” theirs.
To most, Tate is a first-rate loser who can be contacted at <a href="mailto:smalldickenergy@getalife.com">smalldickenergy@getalife.com</a> (thanks Greta Thunberg). But he undeniably has a large fan base. There is no shortage of media commentary and musings about the reasons why. Many attribute it to a combination of his canny talent for self-promotion and the vulnerability of young men. Others cite concerning trends in social attitudes among young people, especially men, towards women. 
The trends are certainly alarming. According to a recent Deloitte report mapping social attitudes towards women, people born between 1995 and 2010—“Generation Z”—on some questions rate worse than any other generation, including those born in the 1930s. 
According to the report, sexist attitudes are particularly high in Australia. Thirty percent of all Australian men think that gender inequality doesn’t exist (this was the highest of all countries except Saudi Arabia), and 28 percent of men think that women often make up or exaggerate claims of abuse or rape (this is higher than any other Western country included in the survey). 
Few look for an explanation of these trends beyond the world of social media influencers and manipulative algorithms. But the far right is a major factor. Far-right parties are in government in many countries in Eastern Europe, in India, in Italy, and recently were in office in Brazil and the US. They have used their prominence and power to push a reactionary agenda: to roll back basic rights for women, to deny rights to trans people, to double down on the already extensive oppression faced by immigrants. This has normalised reactionary political attitudes and created facts on the ground that reinforce the right’s vision of an oppressive society. For instance, the repeal of Roe vs. Wade was significant in pushing back against women’s political gains. 
Abortion rights were repealed, not under Trump, but under Biden, demonstrating that the liberal establishment is no bulwark against reaction. Not only do centrist politicians provide fodder to the far right by putting forward a cynical and faux-progressive agenda promoting identity diversity while entrenching class inequality; they also oversee the structural forms of oppression that exist throughout society. In the case of women, there is the gender pay gap, the unequal division of labour in the home and the rampant sexual objectification that has been monetised by the booming global sex industry. 
As well as presiding over gender inequality, all sides of the capitalist establishment promote the ruthless ideology at the heart of Tate’s politics: that market capitalism is a natural, hierarchical order in which the strong rise and the weak fall—at best being cushioned by a minimal “safety net” of temporary social supports. Those who can’t learn the arts of entrepreneurship and self-promotion are destined to scrabble around in the dirt, while those who can deserve all the wealth they can get. 
Tate is basically what you get when you distil capitalism and its toxic ideology into its most unadulterated form.

Andrew Tate is a misogynistic monster pimp

“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.
Almost 60,000 people cast a first preference vote for Victorian Socialists in electorates across the north and west of Melbourne. The campaign we embarked on was double the size of the party’s first attempt in the 2018 state election. At that time, we ran only in the north. This time we took on the west as well. This meant campaigning to a combined electorate of more than 1 million people. 
Our vote went up substantially in the north, with a positive swing in every electorate. Some places received outstanding votes, including around 8 percent in Broadmeadows and Brunswick. 
The results in the west are a vindication of running a more ambitious campaign. We received an average of around 5 percent, including impressively high votes between 6 and 7 percent in Laverton, Kororoit and St Albans. In Footscray, we recorded our best vote anywhere, of 9.4 percent at the time of writing, for socialist councillor Jorge Jorquera. The upper house tends to lose votes due to the large and confusing ballot paper. But even still, we received close to 4 percent in both the west and north.
The results surpassed the expectations of all but our most optimistic supporters, let alone those of our detractors. While campaigning in Footscray, Bill Shorten said to a Victorian Socialists volunteer who criticised the Labor Party for privatising public services, “Enjoy your 2 percent”. The zinger backfired on election night when the numbers for Footscray came in, including numbers from individual booths, the highest of which recorded a 23 percent vote for Victorian Socialists. 
It is especially impressive for a new socialist party to have received such support without there being a left-wing polarisation or high levels of class struggle. Our success is down to an impressive ground campaign (including knocking on 190,000 doors) and a clear political purpose. 
In fact, the space for the left was relatively limited in the election. The media ran a relentless right-wing campaign against Daniel Andrews, attacking his government for its early attempts to stamp out COVID-19. They amplified the voices of the fringe far right and its infamous “freedom movement”. Fortunately, the far right and the Liberal Party did not win what the media frequently referred to as a “referendum on the pandemic”. 
But the media campaign also meant that the most progressive face of the Labor Party was highlighted, and the government faced very little left-wing criticism despite its years of attacks on public services, workers and the poor. Even the Greens refused to critique seriously the Andrews’ government, instead preferring to talk about their positive role in “lobbying” it. 
Despite this, socialists were able to carve out a small space for radical politics. We argued that the system is rigged for the rich and the politicians who serve them. Economic inequality is not a given. The cost-of-living crisis is not a given. Workers need a pay rise. We need to reverse privatisation, fully nationalise health care, education and energy, and inject billions of public money into these services. 
Other, supposedly progressive, campaigners counter-posed themselves to our volunteers by pointing out that they were “focused on moderate, evidence-based policies” (Reason) or that they “had all policies costed by Treasury” (the Greens). The Victorian Socialists have also costed our policies. We will fund them by stripping the billionaires of their obscene wealth. As far as evidence for the necessity of this goes, time and again voters raised their horror stories of being overworked or overlooked when it comes to essential services. 
Healthcare and aged care workers raised the ways they are being wrung dry. People recounted having to wait hours for ambulances to arrive or being sent away from emergency rooms because there was no capacity. A voter in Laverton spoke to me about how he had recently become a full-time carer for his ageing mother because she didn’t qualify for NDIS support and was terrified of going into aged care.
A woman working in state emergency housing recounted to a Victorian Socialists volunteer that, rather than providing people in need with apartments or motel rooms, she was reduced to offering people tents. That this goes on in a wealthy state in which thousands of houses stand empty every night should be a scandal. 
No wonder people responded positively when we argued that we need to end the homelessness crisis, freeze rents and ban multiple investment properties. In the lead-up to the election, Victorian Socialists campaigned to save the old Footscray hospital site from being sold off to developers. We organised a community survey to field suggestions as to what the site should be used for. The most popular response was public housing, something that the Labor Party has been selling off. And in Preston we are part of a campaign to save the Preston market from being demolished in favour of high-rise apartments. This campaign has garnered wide support throughout the electorate, reflected in the votes for both Victorian Socialists and Gaetano Greco, a local left-wing independent. 
Victorian Socialists also campaigned for radical action on climate change in one of the largest carbon-emitting states per capita anywhere in the world. For the thousands of people who see through the Labor Party’s greenwashing, a vote for the socialists was a vote for urgent action, for shutting down the fossil fuels industry rather than pandering to it. 
The same goes for refugee and migrant rights. Victorian Socialists volunteers spoke to hundreds of people languishing on temporary visas that make them insecure and vulnerable to hyper-exploitation. We were able to tell people not only that Victorian Socialists supports full citizenship rights for all refugees and migrants, but also that some of the most prominent refugee activists in Melbourne are committed members of VS.
Throughout the campaign, we had thousands of conversations, in particular at doors and on the polls, but also at stalls, political forums and rallies. Because there is no general surge towards socialism, the basis on which people voted socialist was varied. For some, the most compelling reason to vote socialist was around a specific issue. For many, it was a combination of our policies and arguments. For most, I would wager that it was to do with the fact that we call out the electoral racket and the wider social system. 
Rather than present a series of policies designed by a PR team, Victorian Socialists has the conviction and politics to argue that we will fight for workers and the oppressed, that we won’t be part of politics as usual, and instead want to use positions in parliament to build resistance to the injustices of capitalism. 
This message cut through in different electorates and different demographics. One of the most significant aspects of the recent campaign, building on our approach in previous campaigns, is that we have managed to win solid votes in inner-city progressive seats, as well as in traditional working-class seats. 
The anti-working-class stereotype that the left enjoys support only in affluent, highly educated communities is peddled by most political commentators and parties, including the Greens. But socialists take the working class seriously. We want to win people to fighting in their class interests, and to left-wing political positions that will strengthen our side. Broadmeadows remains our most successful seat in the north, and is also the most solidly working-class seat in the country. We out-polled the Greens there, as we did in Thomastown and Greenvale. And in the west, apart from Footscray, our best votes were in solidly working-class seats. 
Among the people who voted socialist at this election, there was also a minority for whom it meant something deeper than just supporting the best party on offer. For people looking for a more serious alternative to capitalism, voting socialist was about supporting the growth of a conscious, radical socialist movement in this city. This motivated both young people new to politics and older socialists who were able immediately to identify with their kind.
At the Sydenham early voting booth, Victorian Socialists volunteers met Marinita, a Chilean socialist who told us how she and her comrades used to seize land from the rich and build houses on it for working-class and poor people. She then spent a few hours with us on the booth, talking to us about the need to build the socialist movement. Activating new socialists and potentially reactivating people like Marinita is one of the most hopeful aspects of the Victorian Socialists project. Over the course of the campaign, hundreds of people joined the party, and on election day more than 1,000 people helped out on booths across Melbourne. 
This campaign marks a step forward for the socialist left in Melbourne and in Australia. We went into this election with a serious shot at winning positions in the upper house if we could get a decent vote and secure a preference deal with progressive parties. We managed to do both. At the time of writing, we can’t win the seat in the north, but still have a chance in the west. Either way, our vote alone marks the campaign as a major success, and confirms we can make more gains in the future.
The strength of our effort was in our ability to mobilise our members and supporters and to make politically convincing arguments. Neither would have been possible without the growth and political development of Socialist Alternative over the past two and a half decades. Socialist Alternative members were the majority of active volunteers and coordinators who led and participated in the campaign. 
The campaign required determination and tenacity to talk to people one on one all across Melbourne about socialist politics. The ability to do this comes from an organisation that has spent years involved in and leading grassroots campaigns against racism and imperialism, for civil rights, for LGBT and women’s rights, for workers’ rights. Socialist Alternative has experience leading workers on strike and in building radical campaigns on the campuses and in the streets. 
The skills learnt through this kind of activism helped to make our campaign vibrant and politically responsive. As well as doorknocking and staffing polling stations, the campaign organised people to join picket lines of striking workers, held regular forums and called a number of protests. For example, early in the campaign Liz Walsh, candidate for the Western Metropolitan region, organised a protest of 15,000 to stand against the overturning of Roe vs Wade in the US and to defend abortion rights in Australia. 
Just as significant is the political depth that comes from years of collective discussion and debate among socialists. Socialist Alternative takes seriously the task of educating its members in Marxist theory, history and politics. All of this helps to make sense of the system we are up against in a broad sense, and more narrowly the political contours of the election. It also provides a foundation of understanding and shared agreement around the fundamental tasks of socialists: to promote and build the struggles and confidence of the working class. 
We can learn from history that neither struggles, nor the socialist movement itself, are built in straight lines. Socialists need to take opportunities to expand the reach of socialist ideas, to inspire more resistance to capitalism and to convince more people to become active socialists. Win or lose, Victorian Socialists provides a basis for all of these tasks.

A socialist breakthrough in Victoria

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.
The outcomes of revolutions vary greatly. They have toppled governments, defeated imperialist armies and brought down centuries-old repressive regimes. Some have introduced new forms of popular control over society. Others have been brutally defeated before claiming any victories. Many have had contradictory outcomes, combining elements of victory and defeat. 
Regardless of the outcomes, revolutions open up possibilities that no other form of struggle does. Slow, gradual reform cannot shake loose the nuts and bolts that hold together the existing social order in the way revolutions can. Most commonly, it merely achieves small modifications to laws and policies. Regular protests and strikes can win limited victories and be important in advancing political consciousness, but on their own, even when mass, they do not create a new form of society.
Revolutions are qualitatively different. Business as usual, politics as usual and daily life as usual are all suspended. Every institution and section of society is affected by revolution, and almost all are forced to take a side one way or another. 
Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin described two important features of revolutionary situations: the ruling class can no longer continue ruling in the old way, and the oppressed are no longer willing to put up with being ruled in the old way. 
The inability of the ruling class to continue ruling in the old way is demonstrated by widespread defiance of laws and repressive conventions. People take over public spaces, occupy government buildings, go on strike to join the movement and start to take aspects of society into their own hands. The ruling class no longer has control, and its distress is palpable. During the Tunisian revolution in 2011, one employer commented about the situation: “We are seeing everything nowadays, Workers who get rid of officials they don’t like, citizens who do not recognise any authority in court decisions and even a government which is not capable of saying ‘no’ to the streets”.
After WWI and the successful Russian Revolution, revolutionary struggle broke out across Europe, including in the key industrial heartland of Germany. The situation prompted British Prime Minister Lloyd George to write to French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, “The whole existing order, in its political, social and economic aspects, is questioned by the masses from one end of Europe to the other”. 
While the ruling class feel mortally threatened, the feeling among the masses is the opposite. For the first time, millions of people who have been downtrodden and oppressed are able to take some control over their lives and the society around them. Within days of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 erupting, the people had broken through the tyrannical repression of Hosni Mubarak’s reign and established permanent protests all over the country, including a spectacular mass occupation of the central square in Cairo. One protester described the experience: “It is like we have lifted our heads for the first time in our lives. We have seen the sun and we will never look down again”.
In Budapest in 1956, security police opened fire on a peaceful protest and kick-started a mass revolutionary movement against the Stalinist Hungarian state. Marxist historian Chris Harman wrote of the immediate effect of the revolution on its participants: “The energies of a whole population were turned within minutes from the normal round of daily life, with its essentially private concerns, to intense discussions and arguments about what had just happened and how they should respond. Practical politics became a public, popular affair. A mass a-million-and-a-half strong was beginning to think how it should take control of its own society and to act accordingly”.
In most revolutions, popular committees are formed to coordinate and better organise the struggle. In the Arab revolutions, neighbourhood and other community revolutionary committees sprung up. In some countries, such as Sudan in 2019, workers also set up activist committees in their workplaces that began organising strikes and making demands. In Hungary in 1956, workers’ revolutionary councils were established three days after the revolution broke out. Harman again:
“As the Hungarian people ripped into the fabric of the old order, they used these new organs of power, which were directly under their own control, to begin to build an alternative order. Such tasks as the running of factories, the distribution of food, the publication of newspapers all passed from the disintegrating apparatus of the old state to the new organs of popular power.”
In the establishment of these committees, people demonstrate not only that they have the creative and organisational abilities needed to run society, but also that they would do it in a far more decent, democratic and rational way than the capitalist class. 
But not all revolutions are the same. There is a critical difference between those that remain political revolutions, such as the recent Arab uprisings, and those that become social revolutions, such as Hungary in 1956. 
Political revolutions demand political changes—usually the removal of particular governments or politicians, or greater democratic rights. Social revolutions, by contrast, “rip into the fabric of the old order”. They extend into workplaces and the wider productive process, and forge new ways of doing things that affect every area of life and society. They involve a different class taking political power and reorganising the economy and society in its own interests. The capitalist class itself had to wage this sort of revolutionary struggle in order to defeat the feudal system and establish a new status quo according to its principles. 
To establish a society on socialist principles, revolution is needed on a more far-reaching scale than anything that has gone before. A socialist revolution doesn’t just replace one ruling minority with another; it establishes a society without class distinction of any sort. It brings into being a society free from exploitation and oppression, in which production is for human need and resources are controlled collectively and democratically. 
The working class is the only social force capable of creating a socialist society. It has an interest in ending its own exploitation and oppression, and therefore in waging revolutionary struggles against the capitalist class. But it is also a class that has no capacity to exploit or oppress another. Therefore, workers are unique in history, in that their struggle for emancipation is also the struggle for the abolition of all class society and the liberation of humanity. 
Not all revolutions are led by the working class. Many are initially led by middle class forces, which seek to bring together significant layers of the population in what is often conceived of as a fight for the soul of the nation. 
As revolutions deepen, the more moderate forces or leaders tend to want to settle for a few reforms, whereas more radical and oppressed sections often want to fight for more. Where workers are able to play a more leading role, and establish independent organisations that can make decisions about the direction of the struggle, there is greater chance for the movement to grow into a social revolution. The balance of forces going into any revolution is critical in this process. If radical and revolutionary organisations exist, and there are established traditions of workers organising, revolutions are more likely to develop in this direction. 
There have been several workers’ revolutions over the history of capitalism, starting with the Paris Commune in 1871. In the twentieth century, there were workers’ revolutions in Russia in 1905 and 1917, in Germany 1918-23, China 1925-27, Spain 1936-37, Hungary in 1956, Chile in 1973, Portugal in 1974-75 and Poland in 1980-81. 
All of these involved workers taking control of society to some degree. For instance in Poland in 1980, thousands of workplaces were occupied by striking workers, and, under the leadership of the Gdansk shipyard strike committee, restarted production on their own terms. The striking tram drivers and railway workers returned to work and adorned their vehicles with posters declaring: “We are on strike too, but we are working to make your life easier”. They also organised for bakeries, canneries and essential services to be reopened, to be used by the workers. 
Another important feature of workers’ revolutions is the arming of the working class. In some places, like Spain and Hungary, this happened almost immediately. In others, it took serious debates. Either way, it is a critical step: when the capitalist state cannot control its forces of repression, it is severely weakened. 
In many workers’ revolutions, a situation of dual power emerges. This involves structures of workers’ power competing with the old state apparatus. Nowhere was this more advanced than in the months leading up to the October insurrection in Russia 1917. Lenin described the situation: “dual power is evident in the existence of two governments: the one is the main, the real, the actual government of the bourgeoisie, the ‘Provisional Government’ of Lvov and Co., which holds in its hands all the organs of power; the other is a supplementary and parallel government, a ‘controlling’ government in the shape of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which holds no organs of state power, but directly rests on the support of an obvious and indisputable majority of the people, on the armed workers and soldiers”. 
Whether workers can seize power at this point determines whether or not socialism will be possible. The history of revolutions teaches us many things but a key one is that the ruling class will hold onto power with all of its might, cunning and brutality. This is true at all stages of a revolution, but is especially the case when their whole social order hangs in the balance. 
There has been only one time when a situation of dual power has gone workers’ way: Russia 1917. Workers were able to take power under the leadership of the Bolshevik party, which initiated an insurrection that established the workers councils as the sovereign bodies of authority. The insurrection enjoyed profound support from the highly conscious working class and other oppressed layers.
But for socialism ultimately to succeed, revolutions need to spread internationally. As Lloyd George noted, the Russian Revolution did inspire impressive uprisings all across Europe and beyond. Unfortunately, all of these revolutions were defeated, most crucially the German revolution. In isolation, the Russian working class did not have the social power to stand up to the full economic and military force of international capital. The lack of strong enough revolutionary parties in Germany and elsewhere, unlike in Russia, was a crucial weakness. 
There are both certainties and uncertainties when it comes to revolutions. Certainly, the injustices and contradictions of capitalism will open up revolutionary situations. Certainly, in revolutions lies the potential for a struggle to overturn the social order. And certainly, socialism can be brought about only through revolution. 
But whether a revolution is able to move from the political to the social, and whether it is able to succeed in overthrowing the ruling class, are outcomes that can be determined only by subjective political factors. Most importantly, the level of class consciousness, the existence of revolutionary organisations and, ultimately, the balance of political forces. 
As German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg put it, “The victory of socialism will not descend from heaven. It can only be won by a long chain of violent tests of strength between the old and the new powers. The international proletariat ... will thereby learn to try to take its history into its own hands; instead of remaining a will-less football, it will take the tiller of social life and become the pilot to the goal of its own history”.
Our task is to learn the lessons from the long chain of revolutionary struggles behind us, and to build up the revolutionary forces that will be needed to win future struggles.

Revolution is the heart of socialism

In 1971, the all-white South African rugby team, the Springboks, toured Australia. The six-week-long tour was met with a boycott campaign involving rolling protests, strikes and constant disruption. Thousands of people joined in what became an important step forward for the international campaign against apartheid and a pivotal moment in the struggle for Aboriginal rights in Australia. 
In 1971, Gary Foley was living in Redfern, Sydney. He was one of a number of radical Aboriginal activists, known as the Redfern Black caucus or the Black Power movement, who were forging a new chapter in the history of Aboriginal resistance. These activists wanted to fight the state and change the world. They were militant and daring and were fast becoming connected with the left and the trade union movement. Gary and other Black Power leaders became some of the key figures in the campaign against the Springboks. He sat down with me to talk about the protests, 50 years on.
We start by talking about why the apartheid system provoked protests in Australia. “In much the same way that the global discussion about racism going on today was set off by events in America, the touchstone in the ’70s was the white racist regime in South Africa”, says Foley. “It was the big global issue to do with racism at the time and an international anti-apartheid campaign had been growing since the Sharpevillle massacre in 1960.
“The issue came to a head in Australia because the then Liberal government decided that the Springboks would be allowed to play in Australia. This was despite sporting ties with South Africa having been cut by many other countries and a significant part of the British Commonwealth at the time. Australia was determinedly resistant to the campaign to boycott South Africa.”
South African sporting tours had become a polarising issue internationally—cheered on by racists and reviled by anti-racists. The Liberal prime minister at the time, Billy MacMahon, was keen to show support for South Africa because, as Gary puts it, “Two of the biggest racist countries, they stick together. Don’t forget the apartheid system was consciously modelled on the Aboriginal Protection Act of 50 years earlier ... and, of course, support for South Africa was necessary to stop the supposed spread of communism and terrorism”.
At the same time that apartheid was becoming a focus, a range of other issues were radicalising young people, making the mood ripe for a militant campaign. “Vietnam was huge for everyone at the time. It demonstrated the racist, imperialist system we were up against”, says Gary. There were many reasons for Aboriginal people in particular to be opposed to the Vietnam War. As Gary explains, “We had started to pay attention to the radical Black literature, the radical Black politics that was coming out of the US. And apart from recognising that the Vietnamese were another group waging a struggle against colonialism, we agreed with what Muhammad Ali had said about the Vietcong: that ‘no Vietcong ever called me nigger’”.
The anti-Vietnam War movement was personal for many in Australia, especially young people. Australia sent substantial numbers of troops and introduced conscription. Gary was tipped off by fellow activist Paul Coe that Aboriginal people did not have to serve in the military. “So I sent in a letter asking for an exemption. But the horrible thing was basically no other Black people knew you could do this, so they signed them up and sent them to war ... two of my cousins had to serve in Vietnam, and they came back, as everyone else did, completely fucked up.” 
Aboriginal activists like Gary made links with the student left through the anti-war movement, and became connected with left-wing trade unions and unionists through it. “You know we had really strong ties in Redfern with Jack Mundey’s Builders’ Labourers [Federation] up there, Bobby Pringle and Joey Owens, they were the fucking legends. Bobby Pringle got arrested with me on three occasions, once at the Redfern tent embassy, and twice fighting coppers in Redfern at the Empress Hotel. I mean, these were trade union officials who were prepared to put their bodies on the line in accordance with their principles; you don’t see too much of that these days.” 
Despite the radical atmosphere at the time, Gary still recalls being surprised that “Almost immediately when it was announced that the tour would go ahead, out of nowhere—well at least that’s the way it appeared to me at the time—an anti-apartheid movement materialised. Suddenly there were thousands of white Australians out there demonstrating against apartheid”. He pauses and then adds, “Well, it was a surprise on one level but, maybe not so dramatic if you take into account that this was only three years or so since 90 percent of the population voted ‘yes’ in the 1967 referendum”. The “yes” vote was for rewording references to Aboriginal people in the constitution, in a ballot overwhelmingly seen as a referendum on racism. “This had indicated to us that there was a reservoir of good will but, much like today, this was largely emotive. The anti-apartheid campaign helped to turn this into active support.”
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="Protestors" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/uncivil-dis-campaign-image-final-jpg%20%281%29.jpg" /></div>
In the weeks before the Springboks arrived, the demonstrations against the tour were growing and public opposition was building. By the time they touched down in Perth, they had a major problem. “The ACTU had slapped a black ban on them, ironically, a black ban. And it held.” With the pilots, liquor and hotel workers unions on board, “They couldn’t get anyone to fly them anywhere, or serve them anything or rely on anywhere to stay”. 
Gary is quick to point out that this wasn’t to do with Bob Hawke, then ACTU president and later Labor prime minister. “If it was left up to him as an individual, they would have walked right in. It was because of the key unions with clout and the principled trade union officials that Hawke was brought over.”
This hostile situation meant that the government and the rugby associations went to extreme lengths to keep the Springboks’ whereabouts secret, especially in Sydney, where the movement was strongest. But they didn’t always succeed. As Gary recalls, “The Redfern Black caucus had relocated from Redfern at the beginning of 1971 due to police harassment. We secretly shifted our headquarters to a double storey old house in Bondi Junction. Next door was a big carpark and on the other side of the road from this carpark was a motel called the Squire Inn. One night we came home and saw all these police everywhere and buses pulling up. We realised the next morning that this was the ‘super secret’ location the Springboks were staying at. And so we opened up our commune to the anti-apartheid mob and made them cups of tea and stuff while they held an almost permanent protest in the carpark outside the inn. We had lots of good rallies there, making as much noise as possible to keep them awake at all hours”. 
As fortuitous as this was, the centrality of the Redfern Black caucus was, of course, more than incidental. All over the country, Aboriginal radicals played a key role in the protests. One particularly colourful incident involved Jim Boyce, a former Australian rugby player who had been to South Africa as part of an Australian tour and had become a prominent member of the moderate wing of the anti-apartheid movement, approaching Gary and the other Black Power activists with a proposal. “He had three genuine Springbok rugby jerseys, from the ritual at the end of every game—you know they swap jerseys and all that—and he said to us: ‘The Prime Minister of South Africa has said no Black man will ever wear this particular jersey. If you guys were to put these on and turn up at a demo it would make headlines in South Africa’. And so we did.
“Me and Billy Craigie grabbed a jersey each and we walked across the carpark and stood in front of the Squire Inn. We were caught by surprise by a bunch of plain-clothes NSW special branch guys: they come running out of the hotel and they grab us, and then they haul us into the hotel and started at us with “Where did you steal these? Who did you steal these from?’ They called down the entire Springbok team to look us up and down; one by one they walked past us. These big, angry racist rugby players looked like they wanted to murder us. And they probably would have if the coppers hadn’t been around.”
Audacious stunts like these helped raise the profile of Black Power activists and drew attention to the issue of anti-Aboriginal racism. In Brisbane, which was another centre for the movement, activists Kath Walker and Denis Walker “provocatively dined with poet Judith Wright at the Springboks’ Brisbane hotel”.
The audacity was not limited, however, to Aboriginal activists. Trade union activist John Phillips and Builders’ Labourers Federation president Bob Pringle walked into a sports ground in Paddington where the Springboks were due to play, and attempted to saw down the goal post. Leading anti-apartheid activists Verity and Meredith Burgmann posed as Afrikaans rugby goers and managed to invade the pitch at a high-profile game in Sydney. In Melbourne, one of the matches descended into a riot, with 200 protesters arrested. In Brisbane, a bitter fight took place. The authoritarian premier, Jo Bjelke-Petersen declared a state of emergency in order to protect the South African rugby entourage, and after protesters were brutalised at Tower Hill, a general strike was called. Across the country there were mass student meetings and mass demonstrations, with regular arrests. 
The boycott campaign in Australia went further than similar campaigns in other countries. In particular, the union activity took things to a new level. Nowhere else had union bans been observed so strictly. The media attention on the campaign, both in Australia and internationally, helped fuel the growing opposition to apartheid, and laid the basis for even more confrontational actions, particularly the New Zealand anti-Springboks protests in 1981. Gary travelled to New Zealand to be part of these protests, and his eyes light up telling the story. “So there’s 25,0000 of us, and we’re marching around the perimeter of this rugby ground, and they’d set up this six-foot-high cyclone wire fence with barbed wire on top, all the way around. And so we were marching around, and all these rugby goers were standing up on the hill and yelling at us: ‘Go home you commo bastards! You’re weak as piss!’ 
“We must have been going around it on our second lap, when all of a sudden Rebecca Evans pulls out this megaphone and she says: ‘Operation Everest, Go!’ and then the front line of women suddenly turn and run as a group at the fence. We saw then that they were all wearing gloves. They just all leapt onto the top of the fence, and behind them a second line of women jumped onto the fence below them, forcing the fence down. As soon as these rugby supporters saw a flying wedge of women coming at them they scattered, and when they scattered they created a path onto the field, so 500 of us managed to get onto the field before the coppers closed the gap.” 
Ultimately, it was not the international protests that dealt the decisive blow to the apartheid regime but the revolutionary uprising of black South African workers and youth. But international solidarity was important.
In the months and years following the fall of apartheid, world leaders who had been its open supporters or on the fence about it for years rushed to celebrate. Among these turncoats Gary includes Hawke, who, apart from being a “CIA stooge” and a “traitor to the union movement”, was a “hypocrite of the highest order” when it comes to pretending to have always been a passionate opponent of apartheid. Gary is also contemptuous of Nelson Mandela, as a “sell-out sucking up to the very people who called him a terrorist and a communist and supported his imprisonment”, a view Gary also very <a href="https://youtu.be/tlyOjfbrqDc">publicly expressed </a>when Mandela visited Australia in 1990.
The most immediate and profound effect of the campaign against the Springboks in 1971 was the boost it gave to the Aboriginal rights movement, especially the struggle for land rights. Gary is clearly still moved thinking about this. “We were on a roll, and we argued to those joining the anti-apartheid movement that they needed to fight racism in their own backyard ... Paul Coe got up at one of the demonstrations and said: ‘You people need to start turning up at our land rights rallies or we will inevitably consider you hypocrites’. And to their credit, the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement accepted this challenge and began encouraging members of the movement to turn up to fight for Aboriginal rights.
“Our marches grew enormously as a result, and this gave us the momentum to set up the tent embassy ... The other thing that the anti-apartheid movement did was push Billy MacMahon, who was already a nervous, hapless, anxiety-ridden man, to become even more of a nervous wreck and to make a fatal political error by giving a speech on Invasion Day, 26 January 1972, about how he wasn’t going to do anything for Aboriginal rights. So out of this we said, ‘OK we will establish an embassy’. The embassy led to the single greatest breakthrough for Aboriginal rights, and the only time that any genuine land rights have ever been granted.”
When I ask him about what we might learn from this history that might be relevant to struggles today, Gary responds with optimism about the Black Lives Matter movement and the massive Invasion Day marches of recent years. “Those marches are pulling bigger crowds than we did. If 90,000 are prepared to come out on the streets for Invasion Day, that really shows that things can change, that we can start to shift consciousness.” But politics, as well as numbers, matters: “It can ironically be a hard thing to educate people about the nature of the boot that’s stomping on their neck but, what we need to do is get the 50 percent in Australia who are genuine about challenging racism ... and educate them as to the underlying cause, make them aware you can’t be anti-racist and pro-capitalist, it’s just a contradiction”.

Gary Foley reflects on the 1971 Springbok tour protests

On the morning of 20 January, Khan* was awoken by security guards and abruptly told he was being released. Talking to him on the phone after he received the news was like talking to a different person. His voice was light as he repeated over and over through tears and laughter, “I am free, insha’Allah, I am free, insha’Allah”. Later that day, Khan and 25 other men walked free, ending almost eight years of imprisonment.
Kurdish-Iranian writer and translator Mardin Arvin was in the next group released. On 21 January, he walked out of the Park Hotel in Carlton with 30 others, tears streaming down their faces as they greeted activists on the footpath. Mardin waited two days before calling his family in Iran. He needed to be sure it was real. When he eventually contacted them, he made sure it was via a video call from the street, worried that, if they saw him in a motel, they would assume he was lying to keep their hopes up. 
For Mardin it was real: a door had finally appeared in the unyielding stone wall of cruelty and bureaucracy. This was a significant victory for justice, an all too rare one for refugees in Australia. 
But this is far from a Disney ending. Those released face continued hardship at the hands of the Australian government, and must live with the emotional damage caused by their ordeal. And the systemised regime of abuse and torture that is Australia’s detention regime endures, despite the release of about 50 men from hotel detention. 
There are currently around 1,400 asylum seekers detained across Australia’s network of offshore and onshore refugee prisons. More than 100 so-called Medevac refugees remain in hotel detention, most at a hotel in the Brisbane suburb of Kangaroo Point. They are refugees brought to Australia for medical assessment or treatment, under the “Medevac” law, which has now been revoked. At the time of writing, 12 such refugees remain at the Park Hotel in Melbourne. They have served more than seven years in prison, including six years on Manus Island or Nauru and around 14 months in hotel prisons in Australia.
Zamir is one of those still at the Park Hotel. He fled Iraq when he was 16 years old and has spent the last eight years incarcerated. He says that the days since his friends left the hotel have felt like a further eight years. “Time goes so slow”, he says by phone. “I think the day must be over and it’s only the morning. There is nothing to do, nothing to think about ... all day. Now there is only a few of us we are all in our own rooms, I only talk to the others when I go to smoke upstairs ... no-one wants to talk any more, there is nothing to say. We get our meals, go to gym and we sleep, there is nothing to do. We have no visa and we don’t know why not us.” 
For those who have been released, the pain is not over either. They feel for their friends who are still locked up, and struggle to come to terms with the last eight years of torture. Speaking to Khan after a week on the outside, the youthful excited boy is gone. The last decade weighs heavily once again: “I don’t know how to communicate with people on the outside, how to explain my life, and how to make sense of theirs. My experiences have been every day for eight years fighting for freedom and nothing else but now I can’t feel my freedom, I can’t feel happiness. My heart is broken”. 
The Australian detention system is intended to break people in this way. Refugees’ suffering is meant to act as a deterrent to others who might think of seeking asylum here. The UN considers this treatment of refugees as a form of torture, and there have been multiple inquiries into the physical, sexual and psychological abuses that routinely go on.
Behrouz Boochani, whose book No Friend but the Mountains deserves a place alongside great political prison literature, perhaps best captures the way in which the system is designed to break people’s hearts. From the minute refugees are taken into custody, they are dressed in garish oversized smocks. They are forced to wait in queues for hours to receive meagre rations of food, cigarettes and soap. Officials and bureaucrats come and go without any explanation. Surveillance is constant, except in the toilet, until the toilet is blocked and the refugees are forced to go behind the building instead. The waiting and the boredom are relentless. There is no relief—when refugees make a backgammon board by drawing on a plastic table, guards come along in the night and draw a big cross through it and scrawl “no games allowed”.
Slowly but surely, the dignity of even the proudest individuals is stripped away. Self-harm escalates.
The damage done by years of this dehumanising treatment cannot be atoned for. Two weeks’ accommodation and $300—which is all the released refugees receive from the government—is a sick joke, especially compared with the $1 billion spent every year maintaining the detention system. 
The released refugees have been issued six-month bridging visas, which means they have no access to welfare payments and will be forced into unsafe and hyper-exploitative work. Like the tens of thousands of other refugees on these visas, they will live in constant fear of deportation or of being thrown into detention again. They have no secure future to look forward to. As Mardin put it, “As long as we remain on these visas, we remain in chains”. 
Like so many crimes against humanity, nearly every part of the capitalist system is implicated in this regime, with acts ranging from the sadistic to the banal. 
There are the crimes of the security guards, cruel and overt, like the beating to death of Kurdish-Iranian asylum seeker Reza Barati in 2014. No Australian guards have been charged or punished for this murderous response to a peaceful protest, despite at least two being suspects in the case. There are the crimes of the parasites who take millions in government contracts to convert their hotels into prisons crawling with armed guards.
Then there are the more insidious crimes—the bureaucrats who sign off on prison transfers, who approve the use of sedatives for people in desperate need of proper medical treatment, who decide that the windows of the Park Hotel should be painted so that the refugees can’t see people protesting outside. These functionaries might play a relatively minor part, but they are still complicit—there is no Nuremberg defence. 
But none are more culpable than the politicians who have designed, honed and presided over this monstrous regime. It is easy to imagine that figures like Morrison and Dutton derive real pleasure from the cruelties they mete out. But just as disturbing are the pragmatic and base motivations that have driven every Liberal and Labor leader to dial up the torture over decades. For both parties, attacks on refugees are a useful go-to for leaders wanting to distract from their own domestic failings, drum up nation-unifying prejudice or seem tough. 
In mid-2013, for example, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, having just clawed his way back into the prime ministership and with a federal election looming, attempted to grab headlines by declaring, “From now on, any asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia”. The fate of hundreds of refugees in transit to Australia was changed in an instant. 
Author Mohsin Hamid describes the precarious life of refugees as one of finding secret doors in the walls that provide passages out of danger. These doors exist only fleetingly before they are shut down by authorities. 
In 2013, Mardin was making his way to a door to Australia. It was a long and treacherous passage: he had fled Iran, made it to Indonesia and finally boarded a boat bound for Australia. Also on board was Boochani, as well as many of those who were to become the Medevac refugees.
They were almost at the end of the passage when their boat began to sink. Boochani describes their vessel as a “caravan of weary bodies ... deep in the expanse of the ocean” being “swept away by those giant waves” and surrounded by “the scent of death”. All of a sudden, just when they were losing hope, the Australian navy arrived to rescue them. 
But the rescue was a cruel trick. The Australian navy arrived on Christmas Island with its hostages on Mardin’s 24th birthday, 23 July 2013, just four days after Rudd’s announcement. The secret door leading away from danger was slammed shut in their faces. 
They were then transferred to Manus Island, the first of many prison transfers. Whether to a new island, a new compound, a new hotel, each of these transfers was a cruel trick: the appearance of a door to freedom, invariably proving a mirage. As Mardin explains: “They wanted to use us to scare other people from coming to Australia; that is why they wouldn’t let us go”. 
Particularly cruel was the transfer of the Medevac refugees to Australia. Advocates told them that they would have a better chance of release through this avenue than if they took the deals being offered at the time for resettlement in a third country. Mardin wrote about the transfer in the Guardian in August 2020:
<blockquote>“I remember when we left the prison camp the sun was shining. We were restless as we sat in the bus, we were smiling. We had a reason to smile. We thought that after six years we would be able to live a free life. That was not to be the case. We entered a city, but we would not experience freedom ... After what I have gone through I now have to spend months confined to a single floor, in a hotel and in a room with a few people; my world is limited to the narrow corridor of the third floor of this hotel.”
</blockquote>
Something, however, did change when these brave men were brought to cities on the Australian mainland. For years, the two major parties have succeeded in keeping their detention regime out of public sight. But with refugees imprisoned in suburban hotels, their plight became harder to ignore. Awareness and horror at what was happening to these men increased. As has often been the case, it was not simply the treatment of refugees that forced attention to the issue, but also their resistance. 
Refugees have a proud history of resistance to Australia’s brutality, whether through collective defiance, rioting, hunger striking, smuggling out messages, articles and books written secretly on phones, scrawling messages on sheets and even barricading themselves inside their prisons to protest against transfers.
Khan, who was involved with all of the major protests on Manus Island, sees resistance as essential both as a political strategy for freedom and as a means to reassert refugees’ humanity. “We could not survive without trying to resist. You can’t resist by yourself, you need people to stand with and people to stand for you.”
It is no surprise then that it was the Medevac refugees themselves who gave the lead by beginning daily protests on the balcony of their Kangaroo Point prison in the middle of 2020. This inspired protests outside the hotel and the establishment of a permanent protest camp, and regular protests of several hundred that continued for months. In Melbourne, delayed by the lockdowns, activists began mobilising in earnest outside the hotel in November.
Samira Kamiri was one of the activists who initiated daily protests. She explained the rationale for this escalation: “They are struggling for their freedom every second, so the least we can do is yell for their freedom every day. They needed to see us outside the window every day, to stay hopeful, to feel like they are not being forgotten”.
The next escalation happened when word spread that the refugees were going to be evicted from Mantra Hotel in Melbourne. Activist organisations, in particular Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, called an emergency protest at the hotel, with the aim of stopping the transfer, which was seen as a move to break up the protests and disrupt the bonds that had formed between refugees and their supporters outside. 
Although not able to stop the transfer, protesters were able to follow the buses to the new prison, the Park Hotel in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton, where a permanent protest presence was immediately established. 
This, along with regular protests that disrupted one of Melbourne’s main streets, undoubtedly caused a headache for the government. It has also meant that news about the plight of the Medevac refugees spread wider and wider.
Along with important legal victories, these actions were significant contributing factors to the government eventually bowing to the pressure and releasing people. 
To secure more wins for refugees, there will need to be more such street protests that are just as militant. The continued resistance of refugees inside and outside provides important inspiration. Since being released, every refugee who has spoken to the media has talked of those still inside with instinctive solidarity. Many have come to the protests that continue outside the Park Hotel to fight for their brothers. In the words of Mardin, “There is no freedom for anyone until they are all free”.
 
*Some names have been changed.

There is nothing edgy about turning violence against women into art

Trump’s ‘war on woke’ is a war on all the working class

Jacinta Price is Australia’s leading far-right activist

No justice, no peace in France

Jacky shines a light on racism and exploitation

Andrew Tate is a misogynistic monster pimp

A socialist breakthrough in Victoria

Revolution is the heart of socialism

Gary Foley reflects on the 1971 Springbok tour protests

Refugee releases are a victory, but the system of torture rolls on

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us