The Trump administration’s decision to hold a 30-day review of the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal has sparked concern across the Australian political and military establishment. Many are worried Australia will never get the submarines. Far from lamenting this possibility, we should welcome it. The nuclear submarines have one purpose only—to make war in the Asia-Pacific region more likely and more catastrophic.
The Pentagon review is the result of growing worry in the US defence establishment that its shipyards are way behind schedule and incapable of delivering sufficient submarines to equip both the US navy and Australia’s on the timetable set out in the 2021 AUKUS pact. There is a push on now, cloaked in Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, for the US to keep every submarine for itself and talk of a “Plan B”, in which Australia would provide bases for US submarines but not have any of its own. This is what is causing the most apprehension in Canberra.
The first thing to say about this is that the submarines have nothing to do with self-defence, of either the US or Australia. The media and politicians want us to think that China’s increasingly frequent navy and air force exercises indicate that an attack on Australia is a possibility in the not-too-distant future, and that submarines provide an effective deterrent against such an attack. But hard-headed military analysts have consistently dismissed the notion that an attack on Australia is imminent, and a series of defence white papers have all concluded that the likelihood of any nation invading Australia is extremely low. The only nation that has the capacity to do so is, ironically, the United States.
Insofar as China does pose a threat, it is not primarily to civilian lives but to the interests of Australian big business. For decades, the US has dominated the naval approaches to Australia through which pass hundreds of billions of dollars of cargo every year, including weapons from the US, oil from the Middle East and manufactured goods from Europe and Asia, along with Australian mineral exports to Asia. US dominance protects Australian trade, and by extension Australian capitalism, since building a navy big enough to patrol the extensive region from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific is far beyond Australia’s capability. Australia’s alliance with the US enables Australian capitalism to benefit from US power, and saves it having to foot the bill for its own naval force. 
In return for US military protection in the Asia-Pacific, successive Australian governments have provided the US with a safe base from which to operate intelligence gathering in Pine Gap in central Australia and a submarine listening station at Exmouth, along with friendly ports for the US navy. When the US goes to war, usually far from Australian shores, Australian governments, both Labor and Liberal, send troops, aircraft and ships to back it up—Australia has supported the US in every one of its wars since 1945. Often these are only token deployments, but they are politically advantageous for the US in its efforts to rally military backing from other powers.
The US alliance—the imperialist pact that enjoys unwavering bipartisan support despite contributing to millions of deaths in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific since World War II—is therefore mutually beneficial. Australian governments do not support the US because they are weak or lapdogs, but because they understand that having the backing of a superpower allows Australia to punch above its weight in its region. When Australia intervenes in Asia, foreign leaders know it speaks as the US’s deputy sheriff, as former leader John Howard once described Australia’s role.
With the US protecting the broader region in the interests of the US-led imperialist bloc, Australia can get on and use its military—the most powerful in South-East Asia and the South Pacific—to dominate its immediate region, in particular what politicians and diplomats often refer to disparagingly as “our backyard”. That means treating Papua New Guinea and smaller island nations like colonies, extracting minerals, capturing markets and taking over their security forces for the benefit of Australian capitalism.
The “threat from China”, which we hear so much about from politicians and the media, is really about the threat it poses to US and Australian capitalism. They are worried that China’s increasingly powerful armed forces may at some stage be capable of pushing the US navy out of its traditional hunting grounds, overturning more than a century of Western domination in the Asia-Pacific. 
This explains the rapid expansion of US military forces and those of its allies in the region, including Australia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. The nuclear submarines are therefore not so much about preventing China from invading Sydney, but about equipping Australia with the capacity to carry out long-range missions to attack Chinese ships and Chinese bases close to China’s shores. They are designed to work alongside the growing US presence in northern Australia, ranging from port visits in Perth to air force and marine bases and fuel depots in and near Darwin, to increasingly ambitious military exercises and a troop presence in Queensland. 
The current mad dash for rearmament comes at a tremendous cost. In 2022, the Albanese government estimated the submarines on their own will cost $368 billion over 30 years. The final figure will be far higher. Military spending is projected in this year’s budget to rise from $63 billion to $100 billion by 2034, a rise from 2.0 percent to 2.4 percent of GDP. With the Trump administration demanding that US allies boost military spending to 3.5 percent, the bill will only keep climbing. 
Money spent on the military is money taken from public housing and health care, education and social assistance. Instead of these important social services, we are getting a military juggernaut, the only purpose of which is death and destruction. In the event of war breaking out between China and the US, with Australia riding shotgun, the consequences will be catastrophic. This insanity must be stopped.

Tom Bramble

AUKUS deal should be scrapped

With few exceptions, Liberal Party federal parliamentary representation is now restricted to regional and rural seats removed from the centres of political and financial power it once dominated. 
For the Liberals to lose their traditional blue-ribbon seats in wealthy areas of Sydney and Melbourne in two successive elections is significant not just because of the loss of votes on the floor of the House but also because of the role these electorates have traditionally played in the internal life of the party. 
Branches in these electorates have a long history of training activists and leaders, making connections with business executives and senior state functionaries, fostering relationships with deep-pocketed donors and contributing to the party’s image a meeting place for the country’s elites.
The Liberal Party has historically been the preferred party of the capitalists, who have been important financial contributors and at times run serious campaigns on its behalf. Currently, though, the capitalists and their representatives are despairing of the Liberals. 
In part, that’s because the Liberals have now lost two federal elections and could be out of power until the 2030s. But it’s also because, through his attempt to create a right-wing populist constituency, former leader Peter Dutton advocated a shift away from the “free-market” policies beloved by business. 
Dutton’s nuclear power program would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars of public funds, a white elephant in the eyes of capitalists who can access much cheaper sources of energy and who were happy to let private investors decide if nuclear power had a future in Australia. 
Dutton’s pitch to regulate or even break up supermarkets, insurance companies and Bunnings and to introduce a gas reservation policy appalled the likes of the Business Council as outrageous infringements on big capitalists. 
Dutton backed away from his initial commitment to press ahead with the original highly regressive stage three income tax cuts if he won office and very soon learned to love what he initially called Labor’s “cost-of-living sugar hits”. 
This was a far cry from 2014, when Tony Abbott and Treasurer Joe Hockey delivered a budget written by Business Council of Australia, which threatened a wholesale attack on social welfare and a huge redistribution of income to business and the rich. 
Since the defeat of the 2014 budget, coming on top of the defeat of the Howard government’s anti-worker WorkChoices industrial relations laws, the Liberals have not been game to try such a full-frontal offensive against the working class again. 
For this, they have been slammed by pro-business partisans and capitalists. During and after the election, business mouthpiece the Australian Financial Review ran a string of comment pieces blasting the Liberals for running economic policies that were “Labor Lite”, “defied basic liberal economic principles” and were a “mix of economic populism and socialism” that “bowed to an insidious entitlement culture”. 
The Financial Review’s attacks are echoed by the Business Council and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. They want a fresh wave of “economic reform” involving income and corporate tax cuts, “workplace reform” (i.e. reductions to minimum wages, awards and worker protections), public asset sell-offs, a reduction in “reckless” public spending on things that benefit workers and the poor and the winding back of industry regulations. 
The goal, these business lobbyists say, is to increase “productivity”. What that means in practice is fewer restrictions on the capitalists’ ability to rip off the working class, fatten their profit margins and improve their ability to undercut competitors.
Yet, presumably, one of the reasons that the capitalists have complained but not intervened to discipline their party is because they have generally done well financially under governments of all stripes. The profits share of national income has increased decade after decade, the economy has expanded almost uninterruptedly since the early 1990s, Labor has governed in the capitalists’ interests and, thanks to the trade union leaders, strikes have been at historic lows. So the bosses have not needed special laws to screw the working class; they have just been getting on and doing it in the absence of much resistance.
Business may have tolerated the Liberals’ failure to mount a more aggressive attack on workers and to preside over a new wave of pro-capitalist “reform”, but they don’t like it. The Australian economy may have steadily expanded, but in recent times, growth has tanked and relied entirely on immigration. Capital investment is low, public debt is rising, even if it is lower than elsewhere, and “productivity” is stagnant. These are all alarm signals for the capitalists—and they want a party that can tackle these head on, at the expense of the working class.
Since the Liberals lost the election, the bosses must, perforce, lobby the Albanese government to squeeze the working class and cut taxes on business and the well-off. We cannot trust the ALP to resist these demands, 
While Labor rules for the rich, the capitalists are never satisfied. They want a government run by their own people to rule the country in their interests; they want their party back. Similarly, we need a party to fight for our interests.

The Liberal Party in crisis

Labor has won a smashing victory in the lower house and, with the backing of the Greens, looks set to control the Senate as well. The Coalition has done disastrously, losing its leader and scoring the lowest vote in its history. 
Peter Dutton—one of the last relics of the Howard government and one of humanity’s most embarrassing specimens—has been roundly defeated. He lost a record number of seats, including his own (the first opposition leader in history to do so). The main reason for Dutton’s drubbing was the comprehensive rebuking of Trump style politics in Australia. For all Dutton and his team tried to distance themselves from Trump, the association is just too organic to hide. This is the thug who relished locking up and torturing refugees as immigration minister under Tony Abbott, and as Home Affairs minister under Scott Morrison. He made his mark as opposition leader by whipping up anti-Aboriginal racism. 
Of course, it is a qualified victory. The right-wing Labor government is not going to defend workers, refugees or Indigenous people and, rather than living his days out in a cell on Nauru, Dutton will likely be gifted a lucrative corporate board position and become a Sky News commentator. But it is for good reason that so many people want to take a moment to celebrate this monster’s political failure.
The Liberals and Nationals needed to gain nineteen seats to win office; they lost fourteen. In the Senate, they are reduced to just 27 seats out of 76. Trends that became apparent in 2022 have only continued. The Coalition is increasingly a party of rural and regional Australia. No state escaped the carnage. It failed to advance in targeted outer suburban seats in Victoria and went backwards in Queensland. At the time of writing, it now holds no seats in Adelaide. In Melbourne, it has just three. In Tasmania, it was wiped out. 
The Liberals failed to make any ground against the teals, who now dominate traditionally blue-ribbon Liberal electorates in Sydney and Melbourne. In many cases, teals topped the polls rather than coming second and relying on preferences, as they did in 2022. 
It was not a good night for the Greens in the House of Representatives. They entered the contest with four seats and hoped to pick up four more. Instead, they will likely hold only two. Leader Adam Bandt, who previously appeared to have a lock on his seat of Melbourne, is fighting to stay an MP. In Brisbane, the Greens lost two of their three seats and one of their most high-profile figures, Max Chandler-Mather. Whatever criticisms socialists might have of the Greens, their loss of seats is a setback for progressive politics in Australia 
The Greens’ failure in the lower house was cause for celebration by the political class, who treated the party as a threat to the Lib-Lab consensus and were dreading a minority government dependent on Greens votes in the lower house. They said it would cause “instability”. They meant that the Greens might have held back some of the ALP’s more right-wing legislation in its second term. 
You only had to have witnessed Queensland LNP Senator James McGrath’s extraordinary spray at the Greens on the ABC’s election night coverage—in which he called them “a nasty, horrible, racist, antisemitic party” and got no push back from ALP treasurer Jim Chalmers nor any of the show’s hosts or panellists—to get some idea of the hostility the Greens arouse in the establishment.
Less reported than the Greens’ losses in the lower house is the party’s record-high Senate vote. The Greens will maintain Senate spots in every state. So, while the establishment wants to paint the Greens as beyond the pale and its lower house failure as an indictment of left-wing politics, more people than ever voted for the party.
The desire for a progressive alternative was also evident in the vote for the Victorian Socialists, who recorded a big jump in their vote in the Melbourne electorates of Cooper, Scullin and Fraser, while the Socialist Alliance also increased their vote in highly contested Wills. These are the best results for a clear socialist alternative for decades and were notched up in inner-city and mid-suburban booths. In multicultural, working-class Scullin, the Victorian Socialists scored between 15 and 20 percent of the vote in Thomastown, Epping Views and Campbellfield booths. 
Independent Arab and Muslim candidates backing Palestine also scored decent votes in Western Sydney, helping to break the stifling pro-Israel consensus of the major parties.
The other bright spot is the failure of the hard right to break out. Polls were suggesting One Nation could potentially win up to six Senate seats. It fell short. The party’s lower house primary vote went up partly at the expense of Clive Palmer, whose Trumpet of Patriots was more shambolic than its United Australia Party predecessor. But One Nation’s lower house vote increased by just over one percentage point, to 6.2 percent. 
In the Senate, it picked up one to two percentage points in most states, taking its vote to around 5-6 percent. The party might gain one or two extra spots, but its vote went backwards in Queensland. Given the Senate’s likely composition, One Nation will have zero leverage to pursue its racist agenda.
Explaining the results
The defining feature of the Albanese government’s first term was the dramatic drop in living standards: household disposable incomes fell to their lowest in a decade. Other government positions angered those who had hoped Labor might enact progressive change—the approvals of more coal and gas projects, the promises of massive spending on nuclear submarines and its do-nothing approach to the housing crisis, for example.
Beginning in late 2022, the government’s fortunes fell in the polls for two years. In the first few weeks of this year, though, the situation began to turn around. Several things have gone its way.
First, there has been some relief from the squeeze in living standards because of falling inflation, increased wages, the first interest rate cut in nearly five years and the prospect that more will follow. Unemployment remained low even as interest rates shot up in 2022-23, mitigating the worst effects of the cost-of-living crisis. There is a sense that things might finally be getting better.
Second, Labor was helped by the ruling class’s willingness to give it another go. Under the ALP, the economy continued to grow on the back of high immigration, the stock market and property prices climbed­—so the investor class did magnificently—and the fossil fuel industry, the banks and the supermarkets reaped super profits. Meanwhile, the prime minister attacked the construction division of the CFMEU, one of the few unions with a reputation for delivering higher wages for its members.
Third, Labor’s job ruling for the rich was made easier by the trade union leaders who sat back and watched as the cost-of-living crisis ravaged workers’ pay packets. The union leaders’ apathy was not because workers did not want to fight for higher wages. Time and again, workers voted to strike for inflation-busting wage increases, only for union leaders—many of them ALP-aligned—to accept some rotten deal that left workers further behind. 
Fourth, the Albanese government was helped by the uncharismatic, untalented and charmless political hacks who made up the Opposition front bench. Many were holdovers from the Morrison government, which voters enthusiastically dispatched only three years ago.
The Coalition did capitalise on government weakness for a while. In 2023, it began to reduce Labor’s early polling lead when Peter Dutton took up the fight against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament and defeated the referendum. Given the string of defeats of incumbent governments worldwide last year and the impact of the cost-of-living crisis, Dutton may have thought things would just fall into his lap. Instead, once the federal election approached, support for the Liberal leader began to evaporate. 
Dutton’s former Queensland cop/property investor/right-wing head kicker image may have warmed the hearts of Liberal loyalists but won him few friends elsewhere. Dutton promised an even more right-wing version of the unlamented Morrison government. If the cost of living was the most pressing issue for people, Dutton never made a convincing case for how he would address it. Anti-immigrant rhetoric may have poisoned the political atmosphere, but it wasn’t going to make Dutton prime minister. As public opinion hardened against the opposition leader, the media, who had given him a free ride, began to sharpen their criticisms.
Finally, there was Donald Trump. Trump has never been popular in Australia, and it didn’t take long in his second term for anti-Trump sentiment to revive. But Dutton initially seemed to believe Trump’s election would work for him. Albanese would be seen as out of favour with the White House, and Dutton, a fellow conservative, would be the man to cut deals with the new president. And so, Dutton described the US president as “a big thinker and deal maker ... shrewd”.
Fairly quickly, however, the Coalition realised that blindly following Trump would come with an electoral cost. So recent months have seen a consistent pattern of Dutton grabbing some element of Trumpism and then dropping it or shunting it to the sidelines—whether that be nuclear power, Jacinta Price’s DOGE-like government efficiency unit and her MAGA hat, scrapping working from home in the public service, or sacking tens of thousands of public servants. 
With two-thirds of respondents to a mid-April Resolve poll stating that Trump’s victory at the US election had been a bad outcome for Australia, Dutton’s identification with Trump seriously hurt the Coalition. It didn’t help him with the Liberals’ capitalist backers either. Few were enthused by Trump’s apparent determination to blow up trade with China, which the Albanese government had successfully restored after the Morrison government had sabotaged it. The ruling class didn’t love the Albanese government, but they opted for “better the devil you know”.
These broad trends came together at the election to demolish the Coalition. 
What can we expect from Albanese’s second term?
The Labor camp was overjoyed on election night. With a sizable majority government and a two-party preferred vote of nearly 55 percent, Albanese has been elevated to the ranks of Labor heroes, for now at least. But the rest of the country is hardly cheering; mostly, there is just relief that Dutton wasn’t elected. 
Labor has promised next to nothing to reverse the decade-long stagnation in living standards. All the things that have pissed off Labor supporters will continue—environmental vandalism, support for Israel, refusal to tackle tax breaks for the rich, rising inequality, denial of Aboriginal rights, billions for nuclear submarines and US bases and so on. The government will not say or do anything that will seriously antagonise business nor do anything to give workers the power to go on strike or fight for their rights.
Labor may have won, but Essential polling one week before the election showed that half the population believes Australia is on the wrong track, compared to less than a third who think it’s heading in the right direction.
This is all the more reason for the working class and oppressed to fight. 
The resistance we need means demonstrations and strikes that mobilise the working class where they have power. More than anything, if we are to push back against the sustained, decades-long ruling class attack on living standards, the working class must rediscover the strike weapon. 
But demonstrations and strikes rarely happen of their own accord. They need leadership. The problem is that the traditional organisations that might lead, most importantly the trade unions, have gone into hibernation. The union leaders’ refusal to call strikes has allowed the capitalists to grab more and more of the wealth produced by the working class. The Greens are no alternative either. They prioritise parliamentary games over campaigning.
We need to rebuild grassroots leadership that is not beholden to the ALP. Leaders who aren’t simply waiting for an appointment to a plum political position, as so many in the trade unions are. Leaders who aren’t compromised by dependence on government funding and contracts, as so many in the NGOs are. Leaders who resist all the arguments to go easy on the government for fear of giving the Coalition any advantage. Leaders who are serious about fighting for workers. That means we need more socialists agitating for class struggle, defiance and mass action, not polite lobbying.
A good place to start is joining the 24 May National Day of Protest demanding the government cut ties with Trump’s America. The protests have been called by Students for Palestine. They are backed by local Palestinian solidarity groups, the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network, the Campaign against Racism and Fascism and Labor against War. In this election, millions voted against a party identified with the Trump agenda. We need to turn that rejection of Trump into a movement on the streets.

Albanese triumphs but promises nothing for the working class

The Trump administration announced enormous tariff hikes on 2 April, taking them to the highest level in a century. These are a threat to the working class and a weapon in America’s hands as it prepares for a military confrontation with China.
Donald Trump’s tariff announcement caused financial panic, with stock markets crashing as investors pulled their money out, fearing that world trade would tank. When the bond markets moved in, threatening to force up interest rates on debt held by corporations, governments and mortgage holders, Trump was compelled to pull back, implementing a 10 percent tariff on most countries and pausing the higher rates for 90 days. Nonetheless, even at 10 percent tariffs are at their highest for decades. Given Trump’s erratic moves in the past few weeks, anything might happen in three months.
Trump’s main motive is to punish countries with which the US runs big trade deficits. He says that US trading partners have ripped off the US for years and he is going to fix this by making imports from those countries more expensive. That was why in the original plan, tariffs were highest on countries with which the US ran the biggest deficit. 
Trump also sees tariffs as a way to encourage companies that have offshored production to bring it “home” to the US and to force overseas companies to invest and produce in the US. In particular, the president wants to rebuild the US manufacturing base in the service of military preparedness. Former President Joe Biden tried to do that with big subsidies. That had only limited success. Trump is using tariffs to try to force US business to invest more at home.
Trump is also promoting tariffs to generate a federal revenue stream that will allow his administration to eliminate capital gains tax and pay for the renewal of regressive income tax cuts due to lapse in 2027.
Many economic commentators and mainstream politicians have attacked Trump’s tariffs, saying they will harm American capitalism and the interests of the American state. But this means nothing for the working class. These figures just want to patch up the existing trade system in the hope that the capitalists maintain their fortunes. 
Much more important is the devastating impact these tariffs will have on the working class.
First, they exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis. Tariffs make workers poorer by increasing the price of imported goods, most obviously Chinese-made goods, that many low-income households depend on. They also give US producers the opportunity to immediately raise prices on their goods, as they will be under less pressure from imports.
Trump’s tariffs will shift the burden of taxation from the rich to the working class by taxing consumption and lowering taxes on investment incomes. Poorer households spend all their income (and more) and have no or few investments, so are the worst affected.
Trump’s tariffs plan feeds into a right-wing conspiracy that blames scheming foreigners, rather than America’s own billionaires, for US economic problems and the loss of blue-collar jobs. 
Many trade union leaders representing blue-collar workers unfortunately buy into this argument. They argue that workers must form a bloc with American capitalists to lock out imports through tariffs and quotas, a strategy known as protectionism.
Protectionism leads the labour movement in the wrong direction. Rather than fighting the capitalists by striking and occupying their factories to protect jobs, the union leaders jump into bed with the bosses, selling their members out in the name of “saving the industry”.
If “saving the industry” involves cost-cutting, as it invariably does in the cut-throat capitalist world, the union leaders will line up with the bosses to demand workers’ pay this price. This has been the long and sordid history of protectionism in some of the few industries where American unions still have a foothold—auto, steel, chemicals, rubber—and the workers have seen their jobs sold down the river. Far easier for the union bureaucrats to join company delegations to Washington to lobby for tariffs than to mount a fight for jobs.
The tariff trap is alive today. Shawn Fain, the leader of the US United Auto Workers, who appears at anti-Trump rallies condemning the president’s attacks on trade unions and public sector jobs, has applauded Trump’s tariffs as “a major step in the right direction for autoworkers and blue-collar communities across the country”. How are workers meant to fight Trump’s attacks if their leaders are at the same time praising their enemy?
Protectionism also contributes to the kind of nationalist tub thumping that very easily translates from economic competition to military competition. This is increasingly obvious with Trump’s announcement that wound back initially very steep tariffs on Washington’s allies while ratcheting them up on China, which now faces a tariff of 145 percent. The Chinese ruling class is responding in kind. Tariffs are just one element of a broader military build-up by the US against its imperialist rival and contribute to growing racism towards Chinese Americans at home.
This is why socialists oppose all the demands to Buy American, Buy Canadian or Buy Australian so beloved of trade union leaders. It leads us into class collaboration and jingoistic nationalism rather than class struggle and international working-class solidarity.
But if we oppose these tariffs as an attack on the working class and increasing imperialist tensions, this does not mean we support free trade. Free trade and protectionism are simply two different strategies the capitalists use to advance their interests, sometimes leaning towards one, at other times to the other.
If tariffs are currently being introduced by the US to give it an edge in its competition with China, so did the US use free trade for decades to help American companies make money and to advance US power far beyond its borders. Free trade was the flag flown by American gunboats—and British and French gunboats before them—to force open new markets in Africa and Asia. Free trade was the banner flown by the US when it created the post-World War II international financial system that has favoured its capitalists and crushed poorer countries for decades. 
Contrary to what Trump says, the US has not been a victim of free trade but its architect and major beneficiary. It was American multinationals and American governments that offshored production to low-wage countries to boost their fortunes starting in the 1980s. The job losses that resulted were not the responsibility of cheating foreigners but America’s own capitalist class. The US is a victim of no-one. 
It is only now when it faces a growing threat from China, whose economic take-off it initially sponsored, that the US is retreating from free trade. 
Business and governments never have our interests in mind when they choose between free trade and protectionism, only their own.
The working class cannot rely on any scheme capitalist governments devise to protect their interests but must fight against all capitalists and governments, free traders and protectionists alike.
The recent chaos emanating from the White House and New York financial markets demonstrates how much control capitalists and governments have over our lives and how little we have. 
The world is being held to ransom by an increasingly authoritarian US president and the big financial institutions that run the bond markets. Whether or not we have a trade war, whether the world economy tips into recession, what happens to unemployment, whether inflation escalates and whether mortgage rates go up or down, are all decided by tiny numbers of people. Trump is nominally elected but with the political system in America so beholden to big financial interests the democratic process is totally compromised. The financiers are elected by no-one but work herd-like to punish or reward governments as they see fit. 
Recent developments have made clear that you can have democracy, or you can have capitalism, but you can’t have both.

Trump’s tariffs an attack on the working class

Donald Trump’s decision to upend US relations with some of the country’s main allies heralds the intensification of imperialist competition and the acceleration of an already rapid military build-up in Europe and Asia.
The trigger for the current turmoil is the Trump administration’s decision to throw Ukraine under the bus. Keen to end the financial drain of a stalemated war, the US is trying to come to an agreement with Russia for a ceasefire and peace agreement to be imposed on Ukraine. The result will not be peace, as Trump boasts, but an imperialist carve-up in which Ukraine will surrender one fifth of its territory and most of its mineral wealth to be jointly plundered by the US and Russia, in a deal reminiscent of 19th century colonialism. 
The Trump administration’s plan to cut Ukraine loose, along with its decision to impose onerous tariffs, has caused panic in European capitals as Trump overturns what European leaders have long regarded as a cast-iron US commitment to European defence.
Since the US threw itself into the European war in 1941, it has formed the military backstop for its allies. That put it in a commanding position when it came to dividing the continent as the war came to an end. When US-Soviet relations broke down in 1948, Western European governments looked to the US to defend them. The US, concerned that the Soviet Union would make inroads in Western Europe, introduced a major economic package for its allies, the Marshall Plan, valued at US$160 billion in today’s prices. It encouraged moves towards a common market, the forerunner of today’s European Union, and took the lead in forming NATO in 1949 with an initial 11 other nations, including Britain, France and Italy, Germany joining in 1955. There was never any doubt who called the shots. While the NATO secretary general was by convention European, he always took his orders from the US commander in chief of NATO forces.
The economic and military alliance suited both Western Europe and the US. For the US, it ensured that the Eurasian land mass would not fall under Soviet control—the US could never lay claim to be a leading world power if that occurred. It gave US corporations access to a growing market as Western Europe recovered from the war. US hegemony allowed it to persuade or coerce the European empires to withdraw from their colonies in Africa and Asia, creating openings for US multinationals to exploit new markets, resources and pools of cheap labour.
Western European leaders valued the US partnership because the US provided them with military protection against Soviet advances, relieving them of the expense of building up their own militaries sufficient to deter Russia. While the US was spending 6-8 percent of GDP on its military in the 1960s through to the 1980s, Germany, Spain and Italy, were spending only 2-3 percent. Lower military spending in Europe freed up more money for investment in civilian industries, which began to catch up on US rates of productivity in the postwar decades. US multinationals setting up in Europe provided investment and capitalist know-how to European business and governments. 
NATO also suppressed the potential for a revival of imperialist tensions between France and Germany, responsible for three wars in three quarters of a century. First NATO Secretary General Lord Ismay accurately described the bloc’s purpose as “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. 
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many former Moscow-aligned states rushed to join both, leading to the expansion of NATO and the EU to territory stretching from the Atlantic to the Russian border in places. 
Much of the media coverage of Trump’s aggressive pronouncements portrays the European powers as victims of US bullying. The EU has a reputation of being a champion of “soft power”, emphasising diplomacy and economic and cultural ties with its neighbours rather than military force. There is nothing “soft”, however, about much of the EU’s operations. Like Russia and the US, the EU is an imperialist actor defending the interests of its big capitalists against the working class at home and the oppressed overseas. While the EU lacks an army or navy, its bigger member states are violent imperialists, as evident in France’s military interventions in Africa and Italy’s brutal treatment of refugees in the Mediterranean. 
The EU has long insisted on neoliberal budgetary measures restricting spending on social services and the welfare state. Governments borrowing from the European Central Bank have been subjected to harsh austerity measures, while nations applying to join the EU are required to sign up to a full neoliberal program favouring corporate interests. 
There is nothing progressive about the EU, and falling foul of Trump doesn’t change that. 
With a $20 trillion GDP, the EU is the second largest economy in the world after the US, and represents around one-sixth of the global economy. In civilian aircraft, Europe’s Airbus have gone head-to-head with Boeing in the chase for big orders from Asia and Middle Eastern airlines. So while in the immediate postwar decades the US was the dominant partner in the transatlantic alliance, in more recent decades, the EU has begun to challenge the US on a range of fronts.
The EU’s expansion and growth have given it more clout in the contest between competing imperialist powers. EU institutions have pushed back against US corporations, and the European Commission has levied big fines on US companies for anti-competitive practices. European governments have at times also challenged the US diplomatically, most notably in 2003, when Germany and France refused to back President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Some, Germany most notably, have also sought closer relations with Russia and China, reducing their economic and energy dependence on the US. In response, the US has demanded that its NATO partners increase their military spending to match that of the US and imposed financial penalties and export restrictions on European businesses operating in US markets and third countries.
For a while tensions between the US and EU were kept in check. The growth of the Republican right in the 2010s signalled a much more aggressive US approach to the EU. The Republican right regard the EU as a rival and, through its demands for military defence, a drain on the US treasury. They want to smash it up or at least severely weaken it. As “America First” politicians, they reason that the US will be in a better position to assert its leadership without an at-times oppositional EU. Trump’s MAGA project fitted the bill. 
In his first term in office, Trump called the EU a “foe” and imposed tariffs on European steel and aluminium and frequently threatened to extend these to European cars. Trump backed Brexit, Britain’s departure from the EU, as it removed one of the EU’s biggest economies and its most battle-hardened military. Trump celebrated the electoral success of Eurosceptic parties, seeing them as a European incarnation of his own right-wing nationalist project.
Trump also attacked NATO, calling it “obsolete” in 2017. He followed in the footsteps of his predecessors, though, in demanding NATO member states meet the defence spending target of 2 percent of GDP. What was different now was Trump stating that the US might go its own way if its NATO partners did not meet the target. Underpinning this was a desire to pivot the US military and defence industries away from Europe and towards the Asia-Pacific.
Trump’s “America First” approach rattled sections of the US ruling class in his first term in office. Many wanted to stick with the multilateral approach that had served them well for years. They supported Trump’s identification of China as the most serious threat but opposed his attacks on traditional allies. Trump’s successor Joe Biden attempted to right the ship by lashing together a supposed alliance of democracies to resist what he called autocratic China and Russia. 
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Biden’s watch exposed Europe’s military weakness. British and French leaders may object to US Vice President J.D. Vance describing them as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”, but they recognise the underlying reality—that the long period of peace from 1945 until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (interrupted only by war in the Balkans in the 1990s), has left them ill prepared for war against another imperialist power. 
Even before the Ukraine invasion, European NATO members were raising military spending, but in the three years since, they have collectively increased spending on defence by one-third. EU powerhouse Germany, responsible for a quarter of the bloc’s GDP but a fraction of its military spending, sharply reversed years of declining military outlays. In Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, governments increased spending even more dramatically. NATO has also expanded its borders, Sweden and Finland joining the bloc after decades of neutrality, and Ireland too drawing closer. At US prompting, NATO also officially targeted China as a “strategic threat” and drew in Australia, Japan and South Korea as participants in NATO forums to widen the bloc’s theatre of operations.
While the EU is an economic giant, it remains a military lightweight compared to the US. Trump is using this disparity to threaten European governments with unilateral withdrawal from mutual defence commitments enshrined in the NATO charter if they do not spend 5 percent of their GDP on the military, far above even what the US now spends (3.4 percent). Trump’s aggression towards other NATO members is also obvious with his stated desire to annex Canada and Greenland, a territory of Denmark. While it’s unlikely that the US will ditch its European allies—US global power still relies on maintaining a stake in Europe—Trump is certainly trying to bend European leaders to the US’s will, as Biden and Obama did before him, but in Trump’s case without the diplomatic niceties.
Trump is also using Europe’s vulnerability to advance US interests in commercial negotiations. For years, US politicians and business groups have objected to the European Commission’s trade rules that protect European capitalist interests at the expense of US corporations, ranging from rules governing hormone-fed beef and environmental standards to IT security. Big US merchandise trade deficits with the EU have rankled Congress. 
During his first term, Trump attempted to impose swingeing tariffs on Europe, but faced opposition in Congress and from some of his advisers, some of whom were still attached to the idea of free trade. This time around he is much more likely to be successful since his political base is much more powerful and united behind his “America First” project.
In response to Trump’s threats, Europe’s leaders are now dramatically upgrading plans for military spending. Germany’s parliament has just passed legislation to provide €500 billion to extra military spending, while the European Union has approved €800 billion in additional borrowing to pay for military spending. Denmark has announced a $7 billion rearmament plan, representing a 70 percent increase. Poland is raising its military spending to 4.7 percent of its GDP. 
Nuclear proliferation is part of this militarist step-up. Germany and Poland, both non-nuclear powers, are discussing with French President Emmanuel Macron a way to extend France’s nuclear weapons to cover their territory as well. Britain, still a significant military force and nuclear power, has been drawn closer to European rearmament.
Such a massive rearmament raises the prospect of Europe developing its own military capability. The idea of an independent military force has been debated by European leaders over decades and every time rejected on the grounds that the US could always be relied upon to come to Europe’s aid if it is attacked. Times have changed. In the short term, European governments will continue to depend on the US for security because they are incapable of scaling up their own militaries quickly enough and lack a unified military command structure; a United States of Europe is still not a reality. We cannot rule out, however, that in coming one or two decades, European governments may try to pursue a more independent path, even if decades of entanglement in the US military will make this very difficult. 
Nothing to do with this push towards greater independent firepower is politically progressive. Mainstream political commentators, and in some cases governments, in Europe, Canada, Mexico and Australia, have trumpeted their opposition to Trump by waving their national (or EU) flags. In Canada, for example, there is a big push going on to “buy Canadian” and to scrap US holiday plans. In Australia, the Greens are proposing a more independent defence policy. There is certainly an audience for such an approach. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in Canada has gone from deadbeats to favourites in April’s federal election. In Australia, everyone from Malcolm Turnbull to Paul Keating has been applauded in liberal circles for denouncing Trump. But none of this is left wing or does anything to challenge the imperialist competition now unfolding. 
If there are differences between the imperialist powers, whether in Moscow, Berlin or Washington, they are united in their determination to make the working class pay for rearmament. The talk in Europe now is of “warfare states, not welfare states”. When hospitals, schools and welfare beneficiaries knock on the government’s door for funds, the pantry is always bare. But when it comes to the military, money can always be found.
The Starmer government in Britain is already proposing to spend an extra £6 billion every year to lift military spending to 2.5 percent of GDP. Getting to Trump’s target of 5 percent would take the annual figure to £12 billion. That means taking from the budget money that could pay for thousands more doctors and nurses in the National Health Service or four new hospitals or 2,000 new ambulances or 75,000 new council houses. This is a global trend.
Then there is the militarisation of society that will accompany the arms spending. Poland is already proposing to more than double the size of its army to half a million and to ensure that every young man undertakes military training. The focus on the military, entirely dependent on fossil fuels, will weaken European governments’ already dwindling support for measures to tackle climate change. Policies towards migrants and refugees will become even more restrictive and racist. With military industries and facilities subjected to restrictive legislation, workers’ rights will come under further attack. The political right will be emboldened. 
We see a similar push towards greater militarism in the Asia-Pacific. Every government is rapidly building its military. Australia is increasing military spending by tens of billions of dollars, with orders for new drones, ships and aircraft and plans to spend hundreds of billions on nuclear submarines. Acquiring US nuclear submarines is a bilateral priority because their addition to Australia’s arsenal will make the country a top 10 military power and a valuable US ally in any war with China. This ambition also explains the bilateral support for turning northern Australia into a base for the US Marines, Air Force and Navy. Two other big regional military powers, Japan and South Korea, are doing much the same. 
Socialists must oppose all imperialism—whether Western or non-Western—while standing with ordinary people fighting for justice and self-determination. That Trump is screwing Europe today should not make us lend the latter any sympathy. Every power in the world is more urgently looking to build its military in the era of Trump and all of it will come at a terrible price for workers. We desperately need a stronger socialist movement to oppose this horror and fight for an alternative to this system of inequality, oppression and war.

Imperialist competition drives military build-up

Every day brings a new barrage of announcements by US President Donald Trump and billionaire bigot buddy Elon Musk. Working on the basis that, if they throw enough shit at the wall, some of it will stick, Trump and Musk are creating pandemonium in Washington, DC. 
But while all may seem to be chaos in the halls of power, there is a thread of logic behind it all. Trump is ripping up accepted political norms at home and the liberal world order abroad because, in his view, they have failed to secure American supremacy. Trump’s package of measures, taken together, constitutes a strategy to break America from its cycle of relative decline and come out on top.
Trump’s program is squarely aimed at China. China’s rise to world power status is an existential threat to US hegemony, and Trump's program is the latest attempt to hold China down and assert US global power.
US relations with China have undergone a series of twists and turns since 1949, when the Communist Party (CCP) defeated the US-backed Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in a bloody civil war. The US refused to recognise the new government and imposed a total financial and trade boycott. In the Cold War environment, where the USSR and US competed for world supremacy, Mao Zedong’s Communists, who looked to Moscow, were part of the enemy camp. 
In the Korean War, which started just months after the CCP took power, China and the United States came to blows. Following North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s invasion of the US-backed regime in the South, the US sent hundreds of thousands of troops to prop up its client government and pushed North Korean forces back close to the border with China. Fearing a US invasion, China responded by dispatching the People’s Liberation Army to drive the Americans back. Before long, a stalemate had been reached. There followed two more years of inconclusive fighting before a ceasefire was declared in 1953, which is still in place today, a frozen conflict.
The Korean War did two things to China. It reinforced the country’s close relationship and, indeed, military dependency on the USSR, and it forced the CCP to transform the economy. In the first year or two of Communist rule, the government proceeded cautiously with economic reform and looked to the capitalists to rebuild the economy, which had been wrecked by years of war and foreign occupation. The immense economic strain imposed by the Korean War and the fact that war could resume on the Korean peninsula at any moment drove home to the CCP the need to drastically speed up the process of industrialisation for military purposes. Soviet-style central planning seemed the surest way to do so. Within the space of three years, the Communist government expropriated the capitalist class and replaced them with a bureaucratic Communist regime based on state capitalist lines, much as Stalin had done in Russia in 1929. Self-sufficiency and autarky were prioritised, and foreign trade and investment, except for Soviet aid, were reduced to a minimum. 
China’s close relationship with the USSR lasted only a few years. Mao’s Communists grew to resent what they regarded as overbearing Soviet interventions and were suspicious of its overtures to the US after Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956. In 1964, the two sides split, China declaring the Soviet Union a traitor to the cause of world communism. 
Just as the Korean War had consolidated one alignment of imperialist forces, the Vietnam War was the trigger for another. By the late 1960s, Washington had realised it was losing in Vietnam: it had the military firepower to destroy the country but could not crush the popular Vietnamese resistance. It was facing a growing anti-war movement at home, and US soldiers were mutinous. The US wanted to get its ground troops out. For its part, China, which backed the North Vietnamese government, was looking to break out of its diplomatic isolation. Such was its enmity with Moscow that reconciliation with the USSR was not an option. Vietnam peace talks, which started in Paris in 1968, provided the backdrop for a rapprochement between the US and China based on their common hostility to the USSR. In 1972, US President Richard Nixon visited Beijing, and a new imperialist era was born. Formal diplomatic relations between the US and China were restored seven years later.
China may have broken from its isolation, but it was still desperately poor. In the early 1980s, the Chinese government began steadily to relax state control over its economy to stimulate growth. The process advanced in fits and starts. Inflation and growing economic inequality associated with market reforms sparked widespread discontent, which erupted in 1989, known best for the massive student protest in Tiananmen Square in Beijing but which also involved numerous worker protests in several cities. 
The CCP’s response to Tiananmen Square and its need to increase foreign investment to finance development was twofold: one, an energetic opening to foreign trade and investment and, two, the ratcheting up of political repression to block direct challenges to Communist rule and prevent workers from organising to push up wages. Foreign investment by Chinese diaspora businesses began to flood in to take advantage of tax breaks and cheap land and labour, initially to produce low-end textiles and household goods. 
Starting soon after economic reopening, the Chinese government also shut many of the country’s state-owned enterprises—those in declining industries and unlikely ever to make a return on investment. Tens of millions of workers lost their jobs in the north of the country, while tens of millions more from rural areas headed to seaboard cities in the south, where they filled the production lines of the new factories, having none of the rights of the existing urban workforce. Before long, Western investors had joined their Asian peers in heading for China.
The 1990s and 2000s were the heyday of collaboration between US and Chinese capital and governments. US businesses shifted low-end production to China in search of big profits and new export markets. Even where industry remained in the US, the entry of hundreds of millions of low-paid Chinese workers into the world labour market helped US capitalists keep wages down. For its part, the Chinese government got Western investment, R&amp;D, know-how and access to wealthy markets. Both benefited when China used its rapidly growing foreign exchange reserves to buy US government bonds, enabling the US to finance its government debt at low interest rates.
China rose from a marginal economic player, less than 2 percent of world economy in 1979, to become the number two economic power when it superseded Japan and Germany in 2010.
There were certainly tensions in the relationship with the US. In 1999, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade as part of its war with Serbia. The US “war on terror” in Afghanistan in the early 2000s was aimed, at least in part, at preventing China’s growing influence in Central Asia. Each side needled the other about their respective domestic political regimes. Business owners on each side told of industrial sabotage, theft of intellectual property, unfair government subsidies, legal systems stacked in favour of the other side and so on. Nonetheless, the US believed it could incorporate China within the US-dominated world economy and, on that basis, sponsored China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
China’s rise to number two economic power was celebrated by many Western ideologists, both the right and some formerly of the left. They said China’s economic miracle was proof that capitalist “free markets” trumped socialist central planning, an argument given greater force by the collapse of the USSR in 1991. However, the pleasure they took from China’s growing integration into the US-superintended world economic system soon turned sour as China began to use its new-found economic prowess to challenge the US. 
Starting in the 2010s, alarm bells about China’s growing threat to the US began to ring in Washington. Chinese companies were now marching into markets in Central and Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia that the US once regarded as its exclusive domain. China was now using loans to entice formerly Western-aligned nations closer to it. China was no longer restricted to low-end household goods but was now using its growing pool of skilled engineers to design and manufacture high-end, technology-intensive products matching US and European standards. With Western economies advancing only sluggishly after the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s rapid rebound and annual growth of up to 12 percent only highlighted the US’s relative decline. The country that the US had helped grow to world status was now coming back to bite it.
Just as threatening to the US were China’s moves to use its economic and technological advancement to build a military force capable of pushing the US out of the South China Sea, a region the US had dominated since the Pacific War, and which was now the most dynamic in the world. China has built a navy and a fleet of sophisticated jet fighters capable of reaching far from its shores. It is establishing military outposts on shoals and islets in the South China Sea. It is carrying out flyovers and naval missions close to Taiwan’s shores to forestall any moves by Taiwan to independence and to prepare to blockade or invade the island at some point. China has developed missiles capable of sinking US aircraft carriers. While China lacks the deep and broad relations the US enjoys with many nations in the Asia Pacific, the CCP is trying to remedy its soft power deficit through increased financial, trade and military ties with island nations in the south and south-west Pacific, seeking to edge out traditional relations with the US and its allies, including Australia. 
The US maintains a military lead over China, but the global nature of its imperial interests is also a weakness. It may outspend China on its military by nearly three to one, but its forces are stretched across several continents. Chinese imperialism, by contrast, is focused on domination closer to home in the South China Sea. The US’s difficulties in supplying Ukraine with war materiel in its war with Russia indicate problems in its defence industrial capacity at home. Much US military spending is wasted on weapons systems that are already obsolete by the time they roll off the production line. Long-term offshoring of production of vital components for the war machine, including to China itself, has become a big concern for the Pentagon.
China’s challenge to US hegemony in the Asia-Pacific has dominated US foreign and defence policy for 15 years, from presidents Barack Obama to Joe Biden. It lies at the heart of successive US national security and national defence policy documents. It explains Obama’s 2012 call for a “pivot to Asia” whereby 60 percent of the US Navy would be deployed to the Asia-Pacific. It underpinned Biden’s bid to build alliances to defend the so-called international rules-based order threatened by the “autocracies” of China and Russia. It helps explain growing US military spending and its withdrawal from the Middle East following the failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. 
“Make America Great Again” is a program to prepare the US to fight and win a war with China. It is not only that; there are plenty of right-wing causes to be pursued, such as hostility to vaccinations, that do not have a direct or necessary military connection, but the overall direction is clear. 
Most obviously, there are tariffs and other incentives to encourage US companies to shut down industrial and IT production in China or areas such as Taiwan that are vulnerable to China and bring it home. Such a move would normally be financially unsustainable for many US companies since the cost of doing business is so much higher in the US. Trump’s solution is to try to slash the cost of doing business in the US, with the working class paying the price. What may simply look like gifts to his business mates, such as big corporate tax cuts, the savaging of the IRS, deregulation of environmental and labour provisions, the dismantling of the National Labor Relations Board and the invitation to fossil fuel companies to “drill, baby, drill”, are all aimed at incentivising US companies to rebuild the US’s industrial base.
Preparing for war is not just a matter of military hardware. It also involves rallying the population. This explains Trump’s ideological offensive against “woke”, DEI, trans rights and “cultural Marxism”. In their place, Trump and his cabinet want a patriotic population that evinces a willingness to fight and die for the country. They admire Israel with its highly militarised society and a big majority of the Jewish population fanatically devoted to wiping out the Palestinians. They want, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put it, “to revive the warrior ethos”. If successful, this will have the added benefit of breaking political opposition at home and intimidating the working class, making easier the job of driving down wages and conditions and sacking workers.
Imperialist competition forces the contending powers to begin to mirror each other. So, in both the US and China, we see a repressive and reactionary government, the purging of dissent within and without the state machine, an incessant propaganda effort dedicated to fostering patriotism and “traditional values” and the diversion of funds from civilian to military use.
Trump and his loyal appointees in the state apparatus probably understand the opportunity that now lies open. It is not just Trump’s shock and awe tactics, the disarray in the ranks of his liberal opponents, his domination of the Republican Party, his control over both houses of Congress and the support of a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. The broader geopolitical situation also favours his initiatives to re-establish US power. US imperialism is currently enjoying some respite from its relative decline in the past two decades. In the Middle East, the US’s chief ally, Israel, has enjoyed a string of victories over Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. Iran has been further weakened by the fall of longstanding ally Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. 
In Europe, the cards are also falling the US’s way. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Europe’s economic stagnation have highlighted Europe’s dependence on the US. Trump is now seeking to exploit this as he opens closer relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and tells his NATO European allies to fend for themselves. If this comes to pass, the US will be free to redeploy some of its extensive military assets currently based in Europe to the Asia Pacific, where China continues to increase its imperialist presence.
Then there is the changing political alignment in Europe. Members of the hard right who identify with Trump are on the rise, while the centrist parties that long championed the so-called liberal world order are suffering serious electoral losses and, in some cases, forming blocs with the Trumpian hard right.
And finally, there is the US’s emergence as one of the world’s largest energy exporters, a position it can use as leverage against friends and foes alike.
This, then, is Trump’s project in its essentials. It is important to note, however, that it may not succeed. His coalition of supporters and financiers comprises various forces that do not all see eye to eye. The component parts of MAGA are unpopular among broad swathes of the population, and the president faces mid-term elections in November next year that may result in him losing his double majority in Congress—that is, if he is not stopped by a popular backlash in the workplaces and streets before then. Important sections of the capitalist class are suspending judgement on the program, particularly the attempt to unwind global flows of capital and trade. Growing interest repayments on government debt weigh on the budget, sticky inflation limits the Fed’s ability to cut interest rates, and a full-blown trade war could seriously damage the US economy. Nonetheless, this is the direction of travel in which Trump and his allies wish to take the country, and whatever reservations some capitalists and senior functionaries in the military and public service may have, they share with Trump a belief that the status quo is not working and things must change.
None of this is to say that war with China is about to break out. Both sides understand they are currently not prepared for one. But history has shown that the most dangerous times are those when a rising power challenges the hitherto dominant power. The last time a dominant global power—Britain—faltered, the instability and rivalry resulted in two world wars and fascism in Europe. This is hardly a prospect that should give us any comfort.

Behind the chaos, Trump prepares to take on China

In the weeks since his inauguration, Donald Trump and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk have unleashed a reign of terror on the US working class. Musk’s DOGE team, who are entirely unelected and apparently accountable to no-one, are defunding or shutting down swathes of the public sector that operate or fund services providing health care, education, housing, social welfare and environmental protection. Tens of thousands of federal public sector workers are being intimidated into resigning from their jobs.
Trump and Musk are gutting workplace health and safety and consumer protection. They have dismembered the National Labor Relations Board, the only federal body tasked with protecting workers’ rights to unionise. Any provisions to promote the interests of oppressed groups, many of which were fought for and won in the 1960s, are being stripped away. 
This is accompanied by a racist offensive to divide and demoralise workers. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has been let loose, with thousands arrested in raids across major US cities including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver. 
Trump’s objective is to slash the public sector (aside from the military and security agencies), reduce oversight of private corporations, deliver fewer services to those in need and bend the state apparatus to his will. That will then free up federal funds that can be funnelled to the military and to subsidise corporations and the rich.
The vigour with which Trump, Musk and their cronies in the cabinet are prosecuting this agenda is matched only by the feebleness of the opposition. 
As compared to 2017, when a number of Democrat-aligned media owners, university administrators, Hollywood studio chiefs and Silicon Valley CEOs, along with judges, senior Republicans and departmental heads and left-sounding Democrats opposed Trump and his hard right agenda, opposition from such quarters is barely visible today. Most of yesterday’s opponents have been purged, converted to Trump’s agenda or stand silent out of fear or political opportunism. 
The right wing of the Democrats support his anti-immigrant measures, while liberal Democrats are in disarray and demoralised. The same holds for the hundreds of NGOs that operate in the orbit of the party. 
So much for the liberal “resistance”.
But what of those organisations that are meant to fight for workers’ rights, the trade unions? Little has been heard from them. The federal public sector union chiefs went to the federal court to prevent Musk sacking tens of thousands of public servants and won a brief reprieve. That lasted one week before the same judge waved the cuts through. The union leaders have made no call for broad resistance by workers and those who depend on government services. In some cases, union leaders are even praising Trump for his supposed support for “working Americans” or imposition of tariffs which, they argue, will save jobs.
The forces of official politics—all of which embody different wings of capitalist politics—are giving Trump a free run. What then can stop him? The US working class must move. 
The working class constitutes by far the majority of the US population. It ranges from farm workers and IT workers in California and Las Vegas hotel cleaners to flight attendants and baggage handlers at Dallas Fort Worth airport, oil workers in the Gulf of Mexico, warehouse workers in the logistics hubs of Atlanta and Chicago, New York City bus drivers and teachers in Boston. Whichever way you measure it, at least 100 million Americans are in working-class jobs. Then there are their dependants, the unemployed and working-class pensioners. All up, the working class is two-thirds of the entire population, a mighty force if mobilised to fight.
Workers’ numerical strength is not the only thing that gives them power. More important is their strategic position in American life: nothing moves—not a container, not a crane, package, bus or aeroplane—unless the working class moves it. Nothing gets built and nobody is treated, taught or fed unless workers do the work. And nothing is dug from the ground unless workers do it. 
In a just world, it would be the working class, the direct producers, who would benefit from their labour. Under capitalism, however, because the bosses own all the factories, mines, warehouses, ports and hotels and workers own nothing, workers must sell their ability to labour to the capitalists, allowing the bosses to cream off the profits. 
It is this theft of workers’ labour that is the source of the capitalists’ profits but also their vulnerability: they depend on workers for everything. This is obvious in any strike: when the workers fold their arms, nothing moves and the flow of profits to the bosses dries up. No matter how high and mighty the bosses think they are, they need us; we don’t need them.
And unlike every other oppressed group, workers have a common interest and a common enemy. Each individual worker can improve their life only in cooperation with other workers, and only insofar as they can collectively wrest control of the wealth of society from their bosses. 
The working class needs to leverage this power to halt Trump and his billionaire buddies. Just think about it. If bank workers refused to process financial transactions handing public money over to billionaires, we could stop them looting the Treasury. If truck drivers refused to deliver the cement and construction workers refused to build the detention centres, Trump’s plans to grab, process and deport millions of migrants could be stopped in its tracks. 
There is something else special about the working class. Karl Marx described the working class as the universal class, in that when it fights it does so in the interests of all humanity. This is clear when it comes to the fight against racism. The working class needs unity if it is to win against its class enemy, the capitalists. Racism divides workers and weakens their collective strength. This is why Amazon bosses, currently confronted by a union organising drive at the company’s big warehouse in North Carolina, are trying to stoke divisions between African-American and Latino workers. It is why Trump and Musk are attacking DEI initiatives, which, although they are mostly tokenistic, are at least recognition that the effects of racism should be countered. Wiping out DEI serves only to intimidate racial minorities, embolden racists and undercut workers’ unity.
Because workers need unity in their ranks, they are often at the forefront in the fight against racism, and that benefits not just workers but every oppressed group. In 2019, the Chicago Teachers Union won a clause in their contract declaring that their employer could not ask about or keep track of the immigration status of students or their families. The contract barred ICE agents from entering school grounds unless they provided their credentials, a reason for their request and a signed warrant. In 2017, two unions, the Teamsters in New York City and the National Union of Healthcare Workers, both pledged to refuse cooperation with federal agents in prosecuting or deporting members.
Going back further, on 1 May 2006, labour unions and Latino Catholic organisations and community groups organised a nationwide Day Without Immigrants. Millions of migrant workers and their supporters boycotted work and shops on the day in protest at an anti-migrant bill then being considered in the US Senate. One to 2 million marched in Los Angeles, half a million in Chicago, and 200,000 in New York, along with tens of thousands in other cities. These protests killed the bill. 
Such acts are only the most dramatic way workers can stop Trump in his tracks. But in most cases, getting to this point will require workers to build their confidence by organising to defend their own jobs, wages and conditions. Right now, this means a determined fight to prevent mass lay-offs in the federal public service. That means service-wide strikes. Musk may want to slash public-sector jobs, but government machinery must still turn if the capitalists are to enjoy the services they require. 
If workers defend their jobs successfully, they are more likely to develop the confidence to act in solidarity with other oppressed groups. This is why, in practice, it is those workers with a record of fighting for their own rights who are likely to lead the way in a broader fight against Trump’s right-wing offensive.
That the workers’ movement in the US is at a low ebb should not make us despair. Unions still represent nearly 15 million workers in the US, and every year tens of thousands of workers—last year these ranged from school employees in Virginia and nurses in Michigan to VW auto workers in Tennessee—joined a trade union. 
Unions can still fight and win. After a seven-week strike at Boeing in Seattle last year, metal workers won a 38 percent pay rise over four years, while a three-day strike of east coast longshore workers (wharfies), the first since the 1970s, yielded a 61percent pay rise over six years. Simply a threat to strike by American Airlines flight attendants secured an immediate 20 percent pay rise.
Trump only has to recall his first term in office, when an illegal teachers’ strike wave swept the country in 2018, disrupting parents’ attendance at work for the duration, to remind himself of the power of workers when they withdraw their labour. Particularly impressive was the fact that these were strikes in conservative, Trump-supporting states, such as West Virginia and Oklahoma, where Republican governors had a battery of anti-strike laws at their disposal. The teachers pressed on regardless and won most of their claims. 
Then there are the actions workers took early in the COVID-19 pandemic. US socialist Lance Selfa noted recently: “Workers in the Alameda County, Calif., public health system conducted a strike that succeeded not only in winning their own demands on pay and working conditions but also stopped the county’s plans for privatizing the public hospital. Autoworkers in Ford and GM plants came off the unemployment line to produce ventilators. Workers in the Braskem petrochemical plant in Pennsylvania occupied their workplace in March 2020 for a month while they produced tons of materials for use in producing facemasks. Hundreds of smaller, and largely unheralded, actions of working-class self-defense took place, especially in the first year of the pandemic.”
As these examples show, workers have power and an interest in wielding it for the whole of society. Trump and Musk may now seem unstoppable, but that’s because no organisation of any social weight is doing anything to stop them. 
Public opposition may begin to emerge from liberal or union bureaucratic quarters in coming months, especially if Trump’s right-wing coalition splinters or the economy or financial markets tank. But we can’t wait that long. The attacks are coming thick and fast now. 
Even if resistance to the whirlwind of attacks is currently extremely weak, there are glimmers of hope: demonstrations outside federal offices to protest against the gutting of government services; rallies of one or two hundred in big cities to oppose attacks on migrants and ICE raids. These actions, although small, are steps in the right direction. Everyone shocked by the brutality of the right-wing attacks must try to build on them. But to be most effective, the working class must be at the centre of such mobilisations. Unlike the liberal institutions currently lying low, the working class has not just an interest in defeating Trump’s right wing offensive but the power to do so.
Most likely mass working-class resistance won’t suddenly erupt in the next month or two, but all it would take is for a few groups of workers to start to move and the situation could shift quickly. It’s not like Trump and Musk have a solid mandate to carry out their drastic attacks on workers’ rights—Trump did not even win a majority of votes at November’s election.
And to move from token actions to a mobilisation with real weight, workers must prevent their resistance being coopted by the Democrats, the fate of so much of the resistance last time around.
That means socialist politics and socialist organisation, and rebuilding a movement that looks to the strategic power of the working class, and mass grassroots action, to confront Trump’s right-wing agenda.

Workers have the power to stop Trump

With just a few months, possibly weeks, until the next federal election, the Albanese government faces the prospect of being turfed out of office after just one term, an ignominious fate no federal government has suffered for nearly a century. At best, Labor may scrape back into office as a minority government with the backing of the Greens, but even this is less likely as the election draws closer.
In an increasingly presidential political system, Albanese himself only contributes to Labor’s woes, scoring net dissatisfaction ratings well into double digits. Fawning liberal media coverage enjoyed by DJ Albo, the boy from the school of hard knocks who slayed the Coalition monster, has been replaced by damning accounts of his lack of vision and dull managerial style, and despair at his apparent determination to lead Labor to election defeat. And that’s leaving aside the Murdoch media, which are campaigning relentlessly to bring down Labor.
Albanese may be a soulless bureaucrat and a classic representative of the swill that inhabits the upper echelons of the modern Labor Party, but his bland personality is not the main cause of Labor’s problems. The issue is that Labor has overseen a swingeing cut in living standards for the working class and a fair chunk of the middle class too. 
Australian workers are not alone in suffering squeezed living standards in recent years, but they have endured one of the most severe cuts to real wages. Household incomes are now back to where they were in 2014: a full decade of stagnation, an exceptional historical event. This has allowed the Murdoch media to win an audience for their anti-Labor bile.
The Albanese government inherited from the Morrison government the highest inflation rate in decades and a string of Reserve Bank increases to interest rates. It has done nothing, however, to rescue household budgets slammed by increasing supermarket bills and mortgage payments forced up by hundreds of dollars a month. 
The main effect of the measures the government has taken is simply to channel more public money to the capitalists. Take the $300 energy rebate, which, while giving some relief to households for 12 months, is also a $3.5 billion gift to the energy companies responsible for ripping us off in the first place. Or the expanded childcare subsidy, which will include more households but hands $11 billion to for-profit childcare companies. 
Then there’s the government’s signature housing program, the Housing Australia Future Fund, which proposes the construction of 1.2 million new homes by 2032 but entirely depends on private developers, investors and construction firms buying in. Already, construction is falling well short of the government’s target because the private sector exists to make money, not meet public needs. As for low-income renters, the increased rent allowance introduced in last year’s Budget is a spit in the face—just $19 a fortnight when rents have gone up by $100 or more.
Under popular pressure, the government changed the Morrison government’s stage three tax cuts last year, offering some relief to middle-income earners. However, that was outweighed for many by the elimination of a tax break for low- and middle-income households. Even after the rejig, the changes to the tax system still leave high-income earners the main beneficiaries.
The government now points to inflation coming down from its peak as a sign that the pain is over. It is desperately hoping the Reserve Bank cuts interest rates in February. Even if it does so, however, this will do nothing to reduce prices or raise real wages, only slow down the rate at which workers are going backwards. 
It doesn’t take too long to think of what the government could be doing to address falling living standards that doesn’t simply funnel public money to those responsible. The government could set price caps on supermarket groceries or on petrol prices. It could impose rent caps. It could lower prices in one fell swoop by reducing the Howard government’s GST. It could introduce gas reservation to prevent the fossil fuel companies exporting gas and charging exorbitant prices at home. It could lift the wages of public sector workers and social security payments to the unemployed and those with disabilities. It could include dental care in Medicare or restore bulk billing for GP visits.
It’s not as though the government couldn’t afford to do these things. Treasurer Jim Chalmers crowed last year about two successive budget surpluses. There’s plenty of room to impose tax hikes on those who have been living high on the hog during the cost-of-living crisis, the property investors, including dozens of federal politicians, Labor and Coalition alike, who have benefited from generous tax breaks for years. The government could eliminate handouts to fossil fuel companies worth billions each year. It could scrap the AUKUS nuclear submarines and halt the billions of dollars already flowing to US shipyards, releasing funds for social needs while reducing the risk of war in the Asia-Pacific.
The problem with all these things is not that they are unaffordable or might be electorally unpopular—polling by Essential Media last year shows that they’d be welcomed by two-thirds of the population or more—but that they’d threaten the interests of the capitalists and the broader moneyed class. Taking serious steps to restore working-class living standards would eat into the bosses’ incomes and profits. Scrapping the submarines would endanger Australia’s military pact with the US, the basis of Australia’s own imperialist ambitions. And it is these things that lie closest to the government’s heart. If the working class must suffer, so much the worse for them—do they think we live in a democracy?
This desire to suck up to the rich shapes the government’s approach across the board. It has waved through more than two dozen new coal and gas projects, giving the lie to its claimed environmentally friendly credentials when it took office. Late last year, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek vainly attempted to get a piece of relatively ineffectual “nature-positive” legislation through parliament. All it took was a few phone calls by the bosses of WA mining giants to Albanese and WA Labor premier Roger Cook, and the bill was nixed.
Even though the ALP was founded by the unions, this hasn’t stopped it from putting the main construction union, the CFMEU, into the hands of well-paid government-appointed administrators. Labor ministers regularly speak at union conferences, but it’s much more important for the Albanese government to be seen as “tough” on a union with a militant reputation and to avoid being wedged by the Coalition as supposed union puppets.
While millions have been watching in disgust the developments in the US since Trump’s election, Penny Wong headed off to Washington to attend Trump’s inauguration to assure the White House that no matter what horrors the US unleashes on the world, it has a friend in the Australian government.
The Albanese government can’t even follow the practice of past Labor prime ministers who have at times given a nod to some progressive social cause to fend off criticisms of their anti-working-class policies—Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern speech and Kevin Rudd’s 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations come to mind. Albanese, however, isn’t interested even in going through the motions. His election night enthusiasm for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament soon disappeared when Peter Dutton came out against it. Since the referendum’s defeat, Indigenous rights have been chucked in the bin. Albanese’s idea of smart politics is now to invite Peter Dutton to join him at Australia Day celebrations in Canberra. 
So scared is the government of being seen by the capitalists as in any way hostile to their interests that it has refused to convene a royal commission into the Murdoch media despite their daily outpouring of lies and corruption, their ferocious anti-Labor campaigning and a half-million strong petition calling for one. Albanese is much happier to yuk it up with the media billionaire and attack people who criticise him, like Grace Tame, whom he labelled “disrespectful” for wearing a “Fuck Murdoch” T-shirt to a morning tea at the Lodge.
The icing on the cake of the sheer awfulness of the Albanese government is its leader’s enjoying the fruits of office while the party’s base is getting screwed. This includes attending Kyle Sandilands wedding, his membership of Qantas’ Chairman’s Lounge courtesy of CEO Alan Joyce, or his recent purchase of a $4.3 million seafront mansion on the NSW Central Coast. Everything he does shows how far his former public persona of the scrapper from South Sydney has been pushed aside—even if he does still every now and then wheel out his origin story in an attempt to convince us to go along with his right-wing agenda.
Labor’s record in office is only providing the Coalition with a free run at the Lodge. Albanese has achieved what might have been regarded as impossible in 2022, being more hated than Dutton. It’s not just a federal problem. Labor’s right-wing policies in government resulted in it being swept out of office in Queensland and the NT last year, and the party is heading for a wipe-out in Victoria in 2026.
Dutton is from the Liberal right and rests on support from the party’s hard-right membership base and machine. Together, they have squeezed out most of the party’s so-called moderate wing. 
Dutton has promoted a series of right-wing causes his entire career and made his name as a vicious anti-refugee immigration minister. There’s been no change here. As an opposition leader, he has targeted not just refugees but migrants and Indigenous rights. He gave free rein to Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price, who told meetings of riled-up racists that the Voice to Parliament would make non-Indigenous Australians second-class citizens. He has vowed to pass legislation compelling local councils to hold citizenship ceremonies on 26 January and has prosecuted a hard-right, pro-cop, law and order agenda aimed squarely at Indigenous and African youth.
Dutton’s promotion of nuclear power is simply a gift to the fossil fuel industry while purporting to be a measure addressing global warming.
The opposition leader has loudly backed Israel in its genocidal war on Palestine and, with the help of the Murdoch press and pro-Israel lobby groups, has slandered Palestine campaigners in Australia as antisemitic hate-mongers. He has also blamed the Albanese government for encouraging antisemitic attacks at home and for rewarding Hamas by splitting with the US on votes about Israel at the United Nations.
Dutton has pledged to scrap many of the 36,000 new public sector jobs created by the Albanese government and announced unspecified public spending cuts of $100 billion, presumably including Labor’s modest cost of living relief measures, which he describes as “sugar hits”, while at the same time promising $20,000 annual tax deductions for business lunches and golf matches. Dutton has appointed Price as shadow minister for “government efficiency” to add to her existing brief of “auditing expenditure” on Aboriginal services, in a nod to Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk as tsar of a new Department of Government Efficiency in Washington.
Dutton has also stated that a Coalition government would bar the CFMEU from involvement in publicly funded upgrades to the Bruce Highway in Queensland. Everyone who supports the rights of workers and the oppressed must oppose Dutton’s right-wing agenda.
But while Dutton may be scum, he’s not stupid. He knows that aping Donald Trump won’t win him office. He’s not remotely equipped to do so, lacking any of Trump’s brash showmanship and unashamed public vulgarity, which thrill the president’s supporters. Far from positioning himself as an outsider riding into town to drain the swamp, Dutton advertises his life of “public service” and his many years as a cabinet minister (while keeping quiet about his property portfolio and his wife’s childcare centre business benefiting from government subsidies). Dutton is a machine politician, an elder statesman first elected to parliament in 2001; if he were in the Republican Party, he would have been pushed to one side by Trump.
More fundamentally, Australia is far removed from the reactionary political culture that dominates the US. The electoral system, compulsory voting in particular, works against right-wing extremists winning government. So, Dutton has avoided following Trump’s overall “war on woke” agenda, rejecting attacks on abortion or trans rights, for example, and distancing himself from his National Party colleagues on this score. A Dutton government will also remain a signatory to the Paris Climate Accord, which Trump walked away from (again) on his first day in office. Open climate denialism simply won’t wash in Australia anymore.
Dutton may bang on about high levels of immigration and wants to cap the number of international students, but he’s careful not to take this too far. With the ruling class having benefited for decades from high immigration, Dutton is careful not to slam the door on migrants, emphasising the need for more skilled migrants. No mass deportations here. Nor is Dutton backing Trump in supporting the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, advocating the Coalition’s traditional (and farcical) “two-state solution” instead. 
Dutton may say he is against woke ideology and spew racist poison against Indigenous people, refugees, immigrants and Palestine supporters, but his main weapon is popular discontent at the destruction of living standards. This is why he is always careful to promote his pet issues—curbing immigration and union power and advancing fossil fuels, for example—as a solution to the cost-of-living crisis: cutting international student numbers will take the pressure off house prices; attacking the CFMEU will cut construction costs and, therefore, bring down the cost of housing; nuclear power will lower energy bills; and so on.
These supposed solutions fall apart as soon as they are interrogated. But they achieve the objective of being seen to care about the pain experienced by millions of households while pointing to right-wing remedies that direct the finger of blame well away from the capitalists responsible. This, and not some electoral embrace of Trumpism Down Under, explains why the Coalition is emerging as a potential winner at the coming federal election. Blame for this lies squarely with the Albanese government. Just as Labor did in 2022, the Coalition could win government in 2025, not for any love of the opposition, but disgust with the incumbent.
What Trump has done in Australian politics is give the right confidence. The right in Australia look around the world—at the US and Canada, at France, Italy and Germany, and at India—and see their side on the march.
Labor, by contrast, does nothing for those who want to push back against this global shift to the right. The government has responded to the Palestine solidarity campaign, the most significant mass movement against war for decades, by joining Dutton in attacking the movement as antisemitic and dangerous. Labor state governments have introduced anti-protest laws to criminalise political activism, whether environmental, anti-war or anti-racist. Labor’s response to the anti-Trump sentiment is not to solidarise with it but to crawl to the orange bigot, promising Australia’s unstinting loyalty to the American war machine and, perhaps vainly, hoping to exempt the country from Trump’s new tariffs.
Dutton may not currently be pushing a far-right agenda like Trump. But that is not to say he won’t begin to do so at some point, especially if he wins office. Australia is not immune to the rightward shift in mainstream politics witnessed in Europe and North America. Labor won’t do anything to resist this trend. The lesson from politics around the world is that centrist governments like Labor’s simply prepare the way for the hard right as they contribute to a general sense of disgust at incumbents. Shutting up about Labor’s crimes in the hope that it squeezes back into office—the preferred strategy of virtually every union and NGO—will do nothing to stop this. Nor will simply holding out for a “progressive” Greens-Labor power-sharing agreement, the goal of Greens leader Adam Bandt.
We must fight to defend the rights of workers and the oppressed, whoever is in office. We need to bring together all those who look at Trump and his ghouls and want to resist, not cower. However, such fights and movements need political organisation and clarity regarding the need to fight capitalism. Labor won’t provide that, nor will the Greens. This is the task and duty of socialist organisation.

Appalling Albanese gives Dutton a clear run

Israel’s brutal war against Gaza has cost at least 40,000 Palestinian lives, most likely many more. Nearly 2 million have been forced to flee their homes and are targeted even in declared safe zones. Israeli forces have flattened vital infrastructure such as hospitals, schools and water supplies. Such is the devastation in the territory that polio and other deadly infectious diseases now threaten even more lives.
Now, with the assassinations of senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, the situation could escalate into a regional war. Israel has already done its best to bring such a war closer since 7 October, carrying out more than 6,000 attacks on Lebanon, 144 attacks on Syria and further attacks on Yemen and Iran.
Feda Abdelhady Nasser, a Palestinian representative to the United Nations, was absolutely right when she said on 1 August: “Violence and terror are Israel’s main and only currency. There is no red line for Israel, no law it will not breach, no norm it will not trample, no act too depraved or barbaric”.
The United States has backed Israel in all international forums and provides the weapons to massacre the Palestinians. It claims that it was given no warning of Israel’s assassinations, but it gives Israel vital intelligence that enables it to carry out these deadly acts.
Any regional escalation could draw America into direct military engagement. The consequences would be devastating for the oppressed working classes of the region—particularly those in Iran and Lebanon, who already suffer greatly under the authoritarian and reactionary rule of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Hezbollah, respectively.
The US talks about furthering the “peace process” in Qatar, but nothing is on the table that will bring justice to Palestine. Israel’s assassination of Haniyeh and the US’s refusal to condemn it shows their attitude to these negotiations. The peace process is simply a fig leaf the US and the Arab leaders have adopted to cover their betrayal of the Palestinians.
The real attitude of many US leaders was shown by the 50 standing ovations Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received when he addressed a joint sitting of the US Congress last month. US politicians, who lecture other nations about the need to abide by the “international rules-based order”, cheer to the rafters a man facing war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court. 
The US itself is ramping up military spending. Last year, the government spent nearly US$1 trillion on its military, almost 40 percent of the world’s total. Adding in its NATO allies along with South Korea, Japan and Australia, the US-led bloc of states spent $1.5 trillion in 2023, 60 percent of the global total. All of this is in readiness for a war with China and potentially Russia, which themselves are rapidly building their military forces. 
With the death count increasing daily in Palestine, the media are fixated on the medal tally in the Olympics circus. While Gazans line up for rations, hoping to receive even half a serve of rice for the day, as starvation grips the territory, every Australian news site and news bulletin begins with a recapping of just how many ceremonial necklaces have now been handed out in Paris, often accompanied with sympathetic stories about the adults who cried because they failed to secure one.
While Palestinians desperately try to cheat death one more time, we are told about the horror of potential cheating in “the games”, be it by Chinese swimmers or Algerian boxers. The horror that adults who have dedicated their lives to the noblest of causes, such as swimming in a pool, might be cheated out of a ceremonial necklace. 
All the while, the purported grown-ups who sit in parliaments and editorial offices still can’t agree that the mass murder of 40,000 people, the destruction of a whole society, is a horror. 
The overwhelming tenor of the moment is that Australians should identify with Australian athletes in their struggle for supremacy—not with Palestinian children and families in their struggle for survival. The latter proposition is “divisive”, “controversial”. The former is supposedly “unifying”.
What a farce. What an indictment of what passes for public commentary. 
One of Australia’s chief allies, Israel, has spent ten months carrying out a genocidal campaign to wipe out an entire nation, and it is this cashed-up circus on the Seine that dominates the media. 
Any system that elevates the trials and tribulations of pampered, government-funded athletes above the humanitarian catastrophe that is unfolding in Gaza is morally bankrupt and has to go. 
One that allows trillions to be spent on weapons of destruction and that keeps the world on the edge of devastating conflicts year in and year out is not worthy of the name “civilisation”. 
We need to build an alternative to the capitalist system of perpetual conflict. That begins with fighting against Israel's war on Palestine, the government’s drive to increase military spending, the mindless jingoism fostered by the Olympic coverage and the entire capitalist agenda that is taking the world to the precipice. 
We need to build a socialist alternative.

Oppose Israeli escalation, build a political alternative

Thirty years after taking office in South Africa’s first democratic election, the African National Congress (ANC) has suffered a dramatic loss in support, registering a vote of just 40 percent at the 29 May national poll, down from 57 percent in 2019. 
The ANC’s electoral fortunes have been in decline since their peak in the 2000s and early 2010s, when the party notched up 65-70 percent of the vote, but this result marks a sharp acceleration in its declining popularity. 
The big drop in the ANC vote marks an end to its political hegemony among those it once led. This is most obvious in the townships where the ANC regularly recorded a vote of 90 percent or more. In Soweto and Tembisa, outside Johannesburg, and Khayelitsha on the dusty and impoverished Cape Flats, the party’s share of the vote dropped to 50 percent. In Umlazi, a township of 400,000 on the outskirts of Durban, the ANC vote plummeted to just 13 percent.
The falling vote share does not fully capture the drubbing, since millions of registered voters stayed away from the polling booths, and millions more, particularly young South Africans disillusioned with what was on offer, did not register to vote. Just 6.5 million out of an eligible voting age population of 42 million voted for the ANC at this election, down from 10 million in 2019, despite the population having grown by 3 million.
The main explanation for the ANC’s dwindling support over the past two decades is its failure to substantially confront the injustices of apartheid, the system of white supremacy that prevailed for most of the twentieth century. 
Living standards for most of the oppressed Black and Coloured population (“Coloured” in South Africa refers to multiracial ethnic communities) rose modestly in the first decade or two after the fall of apartheid, the new government funding programs to deliver water and electricity to poor communities. But living standards are now going backwards. The mass of Black South Africans live in substandard housing with poor sanitation and have inadequate health care, transportation and schools. 
Unemployment runs well over 30 percent, and above 50 percent for young South Africans. Even when the unemployed find work, wages are low. The government has introduced meagre grants, but these are equivalent to just half the income needed to meet the minimal poverty line, and millions of people do not get the grant each month. For tens of millions of Blacks and Coloureds, life has become a desperate struggle for survival.
Not all Black South Africans have suffered the same fate. Black politicians now dominate legislatures at every level except in the Western Cape. Black professors lead the country’s top universities. The chief justice is Black, as are the chiefs of the defence forces. Big business remains white dominated, but thousands of Black figures—including President Cyril Ramaphosa, a one-time trade union leader, later a millionaire mining executive—have become stupendously rich. Such figures use their political connections to win government contracts to enrich themselves, something the government prettifies as “Black economic empowerment”. 
Beneath this growing layer, a large Black professional middle class has also emerged and moved into previously all-white suburbs in the big cities. Inequality in South Africa is among the highest in the world: the top 0.1 percent of the population, 35,000 individuals, own one-third of the country’s wealth.
Corruption was a feature of the apartheid regime but has, if anything, become even more endemic today. ANC politicians at the national and provincial levels have looted the public purse. Jacob Zuma, president from 2009 to 2018, became particularly notorious for his corrupt relationships with the wealthy Gupta family, but he was only the most high-profile case. Grand corruption, in the form of a liberal democracy systematically favouring capitalist interests, has been a feature of all ANC governments.
The grinding poverty experienced by most Black South Africans has fuelled decades of protest. Shack dwellers have fought forced evictions. Township residents have demonstrated against electricity and water cut-offs. University students have occupied their campuses to oppose increased fees. Public sector workers regularly go on strike. The response of the ANC has often been brutal. Dozens of protesters have been killed, most notoriously at the Marikana platinum mine, where 34 striking miners were murdered by police in 2012. For many who still held out hope that the ANC would deliver for the working class and poor communities, the Marikana massacre ended that chapter and confirmed that the ANC was no friend of the common people.
The South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) have given the ANC government left cover. This “liberation alliance” led the struggle to bring down apartheid in the 1980s and early 1990s. But because the alliance partners were committed to a capitalist outcome, they sabotaged the potential for this struggle to go forward to socialism, the vision for a future for South Africa that animated millions of participants.
The 1994 “settlement”, which secured the continued domination of the country’s big business houses while giving state structures a new coat of paint, is responsible for the inequality and oppression experienced by much of the Black population today. SACP and COSATU leaders sometimes huff and puff about attacks on workers and the poor, but for the most part, they apologise for the government. They have been rewarded for their services by senior appointments in government and the public service. In the meantime, their organisations have been hollowed out.
In the absence of any fighting lead from these organisations, the main beneficiaries of the ANC’s loss of support at this election have been the Economic Freedom Fighters and the uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Party, which won 9.5 percent and 14.6 percent of the vote respectively. 
The EFF, led by former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, was formed in 2013 in the aftermath of the Marikana massacre and quickly won a following among young Black voters who had no loyalty to the ANC’s elders and believed the government was offering them nothing. The MK Party, founded just last December, pitched itself as a voice for the Zulu population and only narrowly fell short of winning a majority of votes in KwaZulu Natal, the country’s second-largest province.
Neither offers any solution to the pain and suffering of the mass of the working class. The EFF describes itself as socialist, but its main objective is to expand the number of Black capitalists running private corporations and state enterprises. The MK Party is a right-wing populist organisation encouraging tribal chauvinism, more powers for traditional chiefs and attacks on immigrants from South Asia and elsewhere in Africa. It is little more than a vehicle for former President Jacob Zuma to attempt to return to power on the back of a reactionary program. 
Even though the two parties compete for the votes of Black Africans frustrated with the ANC, they have much in common. The EFF’s Malema regards MK as “relatives” of the EFF and described its big vote at this election as “commendable”.
The strong vote for the MK indicates the dangers facing the South African working class in a situation where there is no large left-wing political alternative prepared to fight for working-class interests. In recent years, there have been horrific incidents of Black South African mobs assaulting African and South Asian immigrants on the streets, in their homes and at their businesses to drive them out of the communities. 
Such reactionary sentiments are also reflected in this election in the 16 percent vote recorded by the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party in KwaZulu Natal, on top of the MK’s 46 percent, and the 18 percent vote chalked up by the far-right Patriotic Alliance in voting districts dominated by Coloured voters. The ANC’s deportation of immigrants creates the context for this racist groundswell. Social dysfunction and the breakdown of economic life suggest that racist hatred will only get worse unless it is confronted head on.
The dawn of democracy in 1994 gave hope to millions of South Africans that the misery of the apartheid years would pass. Thirty years on, the rotten deal engineered by the ANC and its allies at the time has ensured that those hopes are now extinguished. The situation is bleak and set to get worse under the current line-up of political forces. The task today is the same as in the 1980s: to fight those who have betrayed the working class and poor and build a revolutionary socialist alternative.

AUKUS deal should be scrapped

The Liberal Party in crisis

Albanese triumphs but promises nothing for the working class

Trump’s tariffs an attack on the working class

Imperialist competition drives military build-up

Behind the chaos, Trump prepares to take on China

Workers have the power to stop Trump

Appalling Albanese gives Dutton a clear run

Oppose Israeli escalation, build a political alternative

ANC pays the price for decades of pro-capitalist rule

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