In the early 1990s, Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett launched a savage attack on working-class Victorians. A slew of privatisations, cuts to public services and attacks on working conditions hit working-class communities hard. Public education was a major target, with hundreds of schools on the chopping block. 
Kennett’s cuts and closures outraged working-class Victorians, who looked for ways to resist. At Richmond Secondary College, one of the schools in Kennett’s crosshairs, teachers took matters into their own hands. They drew community members and activists into an epic campaign that involved occupations, protests and pitched battles with police. In the end, they achieved one of the few partial victories in the fight against the Kennett government. <figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Town-Hall-Photo.jpeg" alt="" /><figcaption>Richmond SC students at Richmond Town Hall rally PHOTO: Michael Naismith</figcaption></figure>
Richmond Secondary was just one of 150 schools named in Kennett’s first tranche of school closures. Why did it become such a bastion of struggle? One of the key differences was the presence of socialists in the school’s union sub-branch, who sprang into action even before the closures were officially announced. 
Mike Naismith, the union representative at Richmond Secondary, had been a socialist and militant in the teachers’ unions since the 1960s. According to him, conservative school principals had been working with the Liberal Party even before Kennett’s election, providing input as to which schools should be slated for closure. Despite Richmond Secondary being highly valued by the working-class residents of the area, the school was a likely target for closure because of its relatively low enrolments compared to some others in the area. In the face of resistance from the school’s principal, Naismith and his colleagues set up a committee to fight the potential closure, which they invited parents and students to join. 
When the announcement finally came that Richmond was to be closed, the committee immediately got to work. Naismith describes how they ripped everything off the noticeboards in the staffroom, transforming it into a campaign organising centre. They also notified the school principal—who had previously targeted Naismith and other unionists at the school for their activism—that her office was being requisitioned for organising purposes. 
For the remainder of the school year, the teachers continued teaching classes despite the school’s official closure. The principal’s attempts to restore order were hopeless, as it quickly became clear that the staff were now running the show. 
The occupying teachers had to withstand significant pressure from the Department of Education. Department officials were committed to enforcing Kennett’s attacks, and showed up regularly to try to remove the teachers. Kennett had also given the go-ahead for local principals to ransack the closed school for equipment. The rebel teachers used heavy chains on the school doors to keep them out.
The campaign committee didn’t limit itself to maintaining and defending the industrial occupation of the school—it understood that a broader struggle was needed to challenge Kennett successfully. The activists organised rallies down Bridge Road, the main drag in Richmond. They also packed buses with students and teachers to conduct classes outside the offices of the education minister and state parliament. <figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/bRIDGE-rOAD-MARCH.jpeg" alt="" /><figcaption>March Down Bridge Road, Richmond PHOTO: Michael Naismith</figcaption></figure>
The “rebel school” quickly gained the attention of the press. It became a pole of attraction for activists and community members outraged by Kennett’s attacks. When the school year ended for summer break, the campaign swelled with volunteers.
But they also confronted some serious challenges. The campaign was determined and drew in lots of support from the community, but it was relatively isolated from the broader union movement. The teachers’ union, then the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association (VSTA), could have shut schools across the state and called on other unions for support in an effort to frustrate Kennett’s plans. But the conservative leadership of the union limited itself to only one full-day strike, which was easy for the government to ignore. 
Naismith also attempted to win the support of the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC), the peak union body in Victoria, for a union-supported picket of the school. This could have involved a ban on demolition or other works on the school. But like the VSTA leaders, VTHC leader John Halfpenny was reluctant to offer support. Halfpenny, once a militant Communist metalworker, was by then a member of the Labor Party with aspirations to climb its ranks, not rock the boat.
The lack of support from the union leaders put the teachers in a bind. They risked losing their jobs if they refused the dictates of the Education Department. Leading teachers like Naismith were issued transfer notices, asking them to nominate schools they’d be prepared to move to. Some refused on principle. Others were sacked. 
Without broader support, the teachers could not maintain their occupation. Still, the campaign committee refused to give up the fight. Over the summer break they voted to keep the rebel school going in the new year; only it would now be run by volunteer teachers and activists. 
Their ambitious plan was made possible by a groundswell of support from the community. It helped that Richmond had a rich political history, once being home to three Communist Party branches and a strong branch of the Labor Party. Naismith reported being offered a donation of $50 by a local Communist Party ex-member. Socialist groups sent representatives to the campaign meetings. A shop steward from the Carlton and United Brewery in Abbotsford got involved in the campaign because his child had been a student at the school. Even local firefighters offered their support.
The campaign also transformed many of those participating in it. Elvie Sievers was a local working-class mother whose son attended the school and who had previously been a student there herself. Naismith recalled her “natural ability to grasp injustice and inspire others to fight it”. She would develop into one of the central leaders of the campaign. Some of the school cleaners stayed and became activists. The librarian moved her caravan onto the school grounds and started living there.
But the school also needed teachers. Without any financial backing, the most the campaign committee could offer was $20 a week plus the dole. They scraped together the money for an ad in the newspaper to attract unemployed teachers. It wasn’t long before they started receiving offers from teachers keen to take part. A few were substitutes in the state system, while others just supported the campaign on principle and wanted to help. 
Meanwhile, Kennett’s attacks on public education continued relentlessly. He closed hundreds more schools. The campaign committee attempted to broaden the struggle by organising a “Save our Schools” campaign, which toured around schools and other job sites to drum up opposition to Kennett’s cuts. 
The rebel school managed to survive for nearly the entire school year. But as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to maintain. The campaign committee shouldered the double burden of running the school while also organising a political campaign. Funds were always lacking. Endurance was tested and morale suffered. 
Right-wing pressure was also building on Kennett to crack down on the rebel school. The right understood the campaign was providing a beacon of hope in the resistance to Kennett’s anti-union agenda. The government was eager to put it to bed. 
In December of 1993, after a year of the school being occupied, the state brought the boot down. Writs for up to $1 million were issued to key campaign leaders, and the police forcibly evicted the activists in dawn raids. The school was boarded up.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Police.jpeg" alt="Police charge" /><figcaption>Police charge at teachers and students PHOTO: Michael Naismith</figcaption></figure>
Debates opened up on the campaign committee about how to move forward. Should they reoccupy the school? Naismith reported hearing whispers that some teacher unionists from Mount Waverley were preparing to use bolt cutters to break back into the building. But in the end, the committee decided they lacked the numbers to maintain a new occupation against police pressure. A different strategy was needed.
Despite losing control of the school, the campaign had nevertheless pushed Kennett to reconsider his plans. Originally, Richmond Secondary was to be demolished to make way for luxury apartments. The building occupied prime real estate, just next to the Yarra River. But as a result of the pressure from the campaign, the Kennett government agreed to use the building for a new selective public school, but only for girls.
This was not what the community wanted. In the 1960s, they had fought hard for a coeducational school in the area, which led to the creation of Richmond Secondary. They were not willing to give that up for a selective school that half their children would not be able to attend. 
So the campaign committee decided they would set up a picket at the school, to prevent any work from being done on it until the government agreed to reopen it as a coeducational school. Finally, in response to the forced eviction, Halfpenny and the Victorian Trades Hall Council decided to lend their support to the campaign and endorsed the picket. <figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/PICKET.jpeg" alt="Picket mounted after eviction" /><figcaption>Picket mounted after eviction PHOTO: Michael Naismith</figcaption></figure>
But the Kennett government had other ideas. On Monday, 13 December, known in Richmond as “Bloody Monday”, around 200 police stormed the picket line. They bashed through the community activists using long batons that had not been used against civilians in years. The picket could not hold out against the brutal violence of the cops. Five people were arrested and many were injured, with three hospitalised. 
The thuggery of the cops only increased support for the campaign, as even more picketers showed up the next day and continued to do so for around a week. The police continued to confront them, but resorted to dragging them away from the school one by one, which reportedly took hours. 
The determined resistance forced the government and Halfpenny to the negotiating table with the campaign committee. The government agreed to create a new coeducational school in Richmond, but they left the specifics decidedly vague. Unfortunately, the campaigners felt they had little choice but to accept, as Halfpenny threatened to pull support for the picket if they refused. 
Kennett had succeeded in turning the lives of so many students and school staff upside down. When the dust settled, he had closed around 350 schools and cut around 10,000 education jobs across the state.
But the campaign to save Richmond’s rebel school was not in vain. It demonstrated that resistance to neoliberal cuts was possible and could achieve tangible results. Northland Secondary College in Preston also became a rebel school and won a significant victory. After a community campaign, a successful Equal Opportunity court case—which hinged on the school’s high proportion of Indigenous students—led to the school’s reopening in 1995. 
But to have a real shot at pushing back Kennett’s agenda, the unions needed to shut down workplaces around the state. There’s no doubt this was possible. On 10 November 1992, right after Kennett announced his blitz of attacks, workers took to the streets in numbers that shocked everyone. Police Superintendent Brian Casey estimated that up to 100,000 workers flooded the streets of Melbourne, with thousands more on strike statewide. But Halfpenny and other union leaders showed no interest in maintaining this campaign and offered no meaningful resistance beyond the set-piece demonstrations.
To resist Kennett, a different kind of leadership was needed—one that saw working-class power, not backroom negotiations, as the solution to every problem. This was the approach of those who led the campaign to save Richmond Secondary College, which allowed it to push far beyond where the union leaders were willing to go. And it’s the kind of leadership we’ll need to rebuild in our unions, if we’re going to push back the pro-capitalist agenda that has continued since the Kennett era.

Zak Borzovoy

The fight for Richmond’s rebel school

I could hear the car horns blaring as soon as I turned into the airport parking lot. 
Hundreds of Uber and taxi vehicles idled outside Terminal 4 of Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport on 20 September, with a group of a few dozen striking Uber drivers at the rank exit, waving down other drivers to recruit them to their strike. A few of them tussle with airport security, while others explain to other drivers the importance of the strike, sometimes in heated exchanges. 
You wouldn’t know it based on the near-total media blackout they’ve been subject to, but these workers have spent the last four weeks going head-to-head with the biggest rideshare company in the world. Uber raked in US$1.1 billion in profits last year, and according to a technology industry source quoted in the Australian Financial Review, the Australian market is the “crown jewel” for the global gig economy company.
So how does this billion-dollar behemoth treat the drivers whose gruelling and often unsafe work is the source of all their wealth? You get a sense of it by talking to Zahir (not his real name), one of the organisers of the strike, who has been driving for Uber for nearly 10 years. He told me that earlier this year drivers found out through an email from the company and reports in the media that Uber would be reducing fares for customers by up to 5 percent. 
Uber says this is because demand has dropped as a result of the cost-of-living crisis, but drivers at the picket claimed that the company’s real concern is with lowering the bar before it has to negotiate minimum standards for the industry as part of Labor’s 2023 Closing Loopholes Act.
All of this was done with zero consultation with the drivers, who Zahir reports were kept in the dark on what the changes would mean for them. Then the payment reductions hit. At the start of this month, Zahir reports that trips that used to earn him $50 dropped to around $35. Clearly more than the 5 percent Uber had knocked off the fare price. 
Drivers already struggling with the high cost of living are now being crushed by 20-30 percent pay cuts, as others on the picket confirm. Zahir describes it as “trying to strangulate us when we’re already hardly breathing”. 
To make matters worse, Zahir also said that the reduced or “grandfathered” cut that Uber takes from him and other experienced drivers, 22 percent instead of 27.5 percent, had been revoked, with Uber now taking the same giant 27.5 percent cut from everyone. Some reward for their years of service.
“Uber is a multimillion-dollar company,” Zahir says. “They are operating in so many countries. Surely they can provide that discount [to passengers]—but not off the driver’s backs.”
These changes build on Uber’s carefully designed and deeply unjust relationship with their workers. From its inception, Uber has operated on the premise that its “driver partners” are independent contractors, not actual employees. This allows the company to dodge whatever limited protections workers are usually afforded by industrial relations laws. 
The result, Zahir explains, is that “Uber provides drivers with nothing. The car, petrol, insurance and maintenance all have to come from the driver’s pocket.” When asked if Uber offers any cover for drivers in case of injury or otherwise, Zahir told me that the company provides none. “They have insurance to cover their own ass but that’s about it” he says. 
The recent pay cuts have pushed drivers over the edge. Now, they’re fighting back. Their demands include weekend and holiday rates, and that Uber reduce its commission from 27.5 percent to 15 percent. 
The determination and solidarity among workers collectively fighting for their rights is always a sight to behold, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picket as inspiring as the one organised by these drivers. To say the odds are stacked against them is an understatement. Uber has a long track record, documented by The Guardian’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/uber-files">Uber files</a> investigation, of using its obscene wealth and political muscle to flaunt laws and punish opponents. Airport management wants the striking drivers gone and regularly sends security to monitor and harass them. The media have given them barely a mention. The Labor government has kept silent about Uber’s dirty tactics despite the move undermining the small pay rises resulting from their Closing Loopholes Act. 
The drivers are also fighting against the atomisation that results from Uber’s “driver partner” system. Zahir explained how this is often reflected in drivers’ behaviour towards each other, which he said can be competitive and even aggressive.
Staring down this mountain of obstacles at Tullamarine is maybe a few dozen drivers, slightly damp from the rain. In their arsenal is one banner, a small table with tea, a box of samosas and custom shirts with messages like “drivers protest for better pay”. All of it paid from their own pockets. 
But they will not go down easily. As the rain comes down a bit harder, they continue talking to drivers. One picks up a megaphone and gives a short and impassioned speech about their right to protest.
“We started on our own. We’re still on our own,” Zahir tells me. “But I am a member of the Transport Workers Union and we are requesting that other drivers join too.” The TWU is the largest union covering ride-share drivers, but it has so far not supported the strike. 
What the drivers lack in funds and institutional backing they make up for in determination and a strategy to expand their ranks. The picket stops cars exiting the ride-share rank and two or three strikers explain to drivers why they should join them, with a QR code to their WhatsApp chat. 
Another driver says that on their first strike day four weeks ago, he noticed that among the drivers participating “unity has increased”. This growing solidarity in a normally atomised industry is evident in my chat with Joseph, a taxi driver. The taxi drivers are traditionally hostile to the ride-share drivers, whose lower fares deprive them of customers. I ask him if he supports the strikers. He says he does. “Would you work for $10 an hour?” he asks. “Sometimes we wait 45 minutes to an hour just to pick up a rider. It’s like modern slavery.” 
The burgeoning unity and determination of the drivers is an example of how workers can overcome all sorts of divisions and challenges in their collective struggle for dignity on the job. And it’s not just Uber that are getting away with punishing workers while raking in billions. Big business has made record-breaking profits in the last few years while workers’ wages have lagged well behind inflation. The fight that these Uber drivers are waging is one that we all have a stake in. 
Come to the Terminal 2 ride-share rank at Melbourne Airport at 3pm on Thursday 26 September to show your solidarity.

Uber drivers fight back

Australia’s teacher shortage is becoming increasingly desperate. Some schools have resorted to offering sign-on bonuses of up to $10,000 to attract staff—money that will have to be offset with cuts in other areas.
The haemorrhaging of staff is causing the number of vacancies to grow to unprecedented levels. In Victoria alone, at the start of August, there were 2,255 vacancies posted on the Department of Education website, more than double the number in January. By the end of the month there were 2,543. This makes the federal government’s prediction of a shortfall of 4,000 teachers nationally by 2025 look conservative.
Many of the vacancies are concentrated in disadvantaged schools where students have more complex needs, leaving them with even less support. Government schools have long been underfunded compared to non-government schools, and the gap is widening. Parliamentary library data provided to the Guardian shows that real <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jul/17/gonski-review-government-funding-private-public-schools">funding to private schools has increased</a> almost twice as much as funding to public schools in the last decade. 
At the heart of the crisis are teachers’ unmanageable workloads. A <a href="https://www.monash.edu/perceptions-of-teaching#:~:text=8%20in%2010%20teachers%20feel,in%20shaping%20our%20shared%20future.">2022 survey</a> of almost 5,500 teachers by researchers at Monash University found that “workload and associated concepts such as burnout, work-life balance and exhaustion were the most common reasons for teachers’ intention to leave their careers”. The workforce hangs by a thread, with up to 70 percent of teachers considering quitting. 
When asked why they wanted to leave, respondents reported that teaching “is too stressful, the expectations are so high, you are not paid for the hours you work, [and] you are overworked which isn’t healthy”. According to a 2022 <a href="https://grattan.edu.au/report/making-time-for-great-teaching-how-better-government-policy-can-help/">Grattan Institute report</a>, “more than 90 per cent of teachers say they don’t have enough time to prepare effectively for classroom teaching”. A 2021 survey by the Australian Education Union found teachers were working an average of 53 hours a week, 15 more than they are paid for.
Without extra time to manage growing class sizes, challenging student behaviour, pressure from parents and principals, extra administrative work and the never-ending curricula reviews, teachers are burning out. Many are moving to less stressful and often better paying roles in different industries. Those who stay are forced to pick up the slack. 
Labor could stop this vicious cycle if it wanted. It could pour funding into public schools, lift teachers’ and education support staff wages, hire thousands of additional teachers and support staff to reduce workloads and give staff more planning days. The main obstacle is that this doesn’t fit with the party’s political priorities. Labor would rather spend hundreds of billions on nuclear submarines and tax cuts for the wealthy than support our schools.
Instead of any genuine support for the public education system, Labor’s response has overwhelmingly focused on pushing more teachers into the meat grinder. Programs like <a href="https://www.vit.vic.edu.au/register/categories/ptt">Permission to Teach</a>, <a href="https://www2.education.vic.gov.au/pal/teach-today-teach-tomorrow-programs/overview">Teach Today, Teach Tomorrow</a>, and <a href="https://teachforaustralia.org/">Teach for Australia</a> push unqualified professionals and teaching students into schools in priority areas before they’ve completed appropriate training.
This undermines the professional status of teachers, devalues their qualifications and will contribute to the burnout that many teaching students experience even before they graduate—the result of juggling work and study simultaneously. According to the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), the completion rate for initial teacher education (ITE) is as low as 50 percent. Still, Labor refuses to make ITE free and ensure all students are paid while on placement.
By focusing on the supply-side recruitment of teachers, Labor is obscuring the source of shortages rather than fixing them. Who cares how many teachers you recruit when, according to AITSL, up to 50 percent of them are likely to quit in their first five years on the job? Any attempts to patch up vacancies without addressing working conditions will fail. A strategy that seriously addressed teachers’ concerns would likely boost both recruitment and retention.
But don’t bet on Labor’s Minister for Education Jason Clare to deliver something as sensible as that. His latest scheme, the <a href="https://www.education.gov.au/teaching-and-school-leadership/resources/national-teacher-workforce-action-plan">National Teacher Workforce Action Plan</a>, will do nothing significant to ease workloads. It will invest $328 million over nine years, a pitiful $36 million a year, with only just over $3 million a year going to a “Teacher Workload Reduction Fund”. The majority of the funding will go towards increasing teacher supply—shovelling more teachers into the same hellish conditions.
Another important part of Clare’s strategy is to <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-07/review-of-university-teacher-degrees-at-ministers-meeting/102564402">blame universities</a> for not preparing teachers properly. They will be required to overhaul their ITE programs in the next two years. Scapegoating the universities allows Clare to continue neglecting the thorny issues of teachers’ pay and conditions. It also conveniently implies that teachers are quitting in droves not because of any failure on the part of the government but because teachers themselves are not capable enough. It’s another way of blaming teachers without saying as much. 
In June, the Australian Financial Review published an <a href="https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/courageous-clare-s-plan-to-stop-australia-s-great-schooling-rot-20230704-p5dloc">editorial</a> titled “Courageous Clare’s plan to stop Australia’s great schooling rot”. It’s no surprise Clare has earned such high praise from the ruling-class propagandists at the AFR. They want to see education funding kept low, teachers’ professional status undermined and the crisis in schools blamed on teachers’ supposed failures. By those standards, Clare gets a high distinction.

‘Courageous Clare’ kicks teachers while they’re down

Wildfires are tearing through the Canadian province of Alberta, the heart of Canada’s lucrative oil and gas industry. The images of orange and black skies from the thick smoke—which is now billowing across the US border, causing air quality warnings in several northern states—are dystopian yet familiar.
From the California wildfires of 2018, to Australia’s “black summer” of 2019-20, to the destructive fires in Greece in 2021, deadly heatwaves and uncontrollable wildfires have become the new normal. As a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/climate/climate-change-un-wildfire-report.html">landmark report last year</a> by the United Nations warned, “the heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes”.
Alberta is a perfect example of this development. The last few decades have had an unprecedented number of catastrophic blazes. In his new book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, John Vaillant chronicles the devastating Fort McMurray fire of 2016, dubbed “the beast”: “Fires are natural. What isn’t natural is something that cauterizes the landscape. Entire houses, 50-tonne objects, volatilize [convert into combustible gases] in five minutes”.
Today’s fires were exacerbated by the early onset of heatwave conditions, with relative humidity below 15 percent, creating what wildfire scientists call “cross-over conditions”. More than 100 fires have ignited throughout the province, including 31 categorised as “out of control”. So far more than 30,000 people have had to evacuate their homes. David Marin, a firefighter, told CBC News he’d “never seen it this dry this early ... this is going to be a long summer for us”.
Right-wing conspiracy theorists, with no evidence, claim supporters of the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) started the fires to undermine Alberta United Conservative Party (UCP) Premier Danielle Smith’s re-election campaign. The truth is less conspiratorial. The criminals behind this crisis include some of the most powerful institutions in Canadian capitalism—and they operate in broad daylight.
Canada’s biggest banks remain all aboard the fossil fuel gravy train. According to a report by the NGO <a href="https://www.bankingonclimatechaos.org/">Banking on Climate Chaos</a>, the “big five” Canadian banks all made the list of top 20 fossil fuel funders globally after investing more than US$1 trillion in the industry since 2016. The Royal Bank of Canada ranked as the world’s largest financer of fossil fuels in 2022, providing fossil fuel companies with US$42.1 billion.
Alberta is at the heart of this fossil fuel addiction. Its oil sands operations, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2015/may/28/carbon-bomb-canada-tar-sands-fort-mckay-town-sold-itself">which use heavy machinery to mine the landscape for bitumen and steam to extract oil,</a> are so large they are visible from space. They’re the planet's third largest trove of oil, making crude oil Canada’s top export, and they provide by far the largest supply of foreign oil into the US. That’s why the big producers in the region like Enbridge, Cenovus Energy and Canadian Natural Resources have the entire Canadian political establishment in their pocket.
Liberal Party Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, when he isn’t <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-post-explainer-1.4914384">breaking strikes</a> or <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/us/politics/us-canada-asylum-seekers.html?fbclid=IwAR1H8E7EucEeaxqDPHbdavlkYWpfJ_Exjly3Km6wwEarAELhSeVHMVnyjuY">making agreements with US President Joe Biden about how to turn back migrants</a>, is shovelling billions of dollars into fossil fuels. Last year, Canadian climate NGO Environmental Defence found that the value of government subsidies to the industry was at least CAD20.2 billion.
Trudeau’s hypocrisy is brazen. On 18 June 2019, his government <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/5401586/canada-national-climate-emergency/">declared a national climate emergency</a>. The next day, it <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tasker-trans-mountain-trudeau-cabinet-decision-1.5180269">approved the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion</a>, which was to move almost 600,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta to the port of Burnaby in British Columbia. The farce continued at last year’s United Nations COP27 climate conference, at which Canada was the only OECD country to bring delegates from fossil fuel companies.
Trudeau’s government follows a global trend in which vague commitments to meet net zero emissions targets are accompanied by increasing subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and new investments in oil and gas projects. <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/fossil-fuels-consumption-subsidies-2022">A report by the International Energy Agency</a> estimates that global fossil fuel consumption subsidies doubled in 2022 from the previous year to an all-time high of US$1 trillion.
To make matters worse, the UCP provincial government in Alberta has slashed funding for firefighting. It shut down <a href="https://calgaryherald.com/news/politics/youre-losing-a-significant-fighting-force-ucp-scraps-wildfire-rappel-program">26 active fire towers</a> across the province, made cuts to the rappel attack program (in which firefighters seek to control blazes in remote areas by attacking them from the air) and pushed through cuts to permanent and seasonal wildfire personnel at a district level. A lookout observer with almost 20 years’ experience told the Narwhal “our areas of responsibility have doubled”. “The problem isn’t the people working to manage the wildfires. It’s politics.”
The opposition is no alternative. The day after fires broke out, Alberta’s NDP leader Rachel Notley <a href="https://twitter.com/RachelNotley/status/1654356346605834240?s=20">took to social media</a> to boast about her unwavering support for the Trans Mountain pipeline.
Despite popular opposition, crude oil is only becoming more important to Canadian capitalism. As Canada and its allies look to shore up their energy security and prepare for a possible war with China, Alberta’s oil sands have been given a new lease on life. Former Alberta UCP Premier Jason Kenney summed it up when he told a US Senate committee hearing, “Calgary is a lot closer to Washington than Riyadh, and you don’t need the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet to patrol the Great Lakes”.
While Alberta’s fossil fuel barons will recover quickly from the disruption to drilling caused by the fires, working-class Albertans will suffer. Indigenous communities are some of the hardest hit. According to Indigenous Services Canada, dozens of structures <a href="https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/45-structures-destroyed-by-wildfire-in-sturgeon-lake-cree-nation-1.6391812">have been destroyed</a> in Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation, where more than 1,000 people were forced to evacuate. Thousands more <a href="https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/20-homes-destroyed-by-wildfire-entire-indigenous-community-evacuated-in-northern-alta-1.6384541">were evacuated</a> from the Little Red River Cree Nation. Frankie Payou, a veteran firefighter and father of three living in the East Prairie Metis Settlement, remains in a coma after attempting to fell trees to save his family’s home.
Preventing more of this suffering begins by challenging the priorities of the system that produces these unnatural disasters.
PHOTO CREDIT: Felton Davis (Flickr), licensed under 'creative commons': <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/</a>

Canada is burning. Capitalism stoked the flames

The Albanese government’s National Reconstruction Fund is a $15 billion handout to “Aussie made” big business. Labor calls it the first step in its “plan to rebuild Australia’s industrial base”. The off-budget fund will invest in seven sectors of the economy: resources, agriculture, transport, medical science, renewables, advanced technology manufacturing and defence. 
The NRF is supposed to fortify Australia’s “national sovereignty”. In the last few years global supply chains have been disrupted by the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and climate disasters. While the initial shocks have subsided, the Labor government is looking to shore up domestic industry to better insulate the economy in a period of increasing instability. 
Another motivation for the fund is rising tensions with China. Albanese is taking a page out of US President Joe Biden’s book, whose Chips and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act have provided a big boost to US manufacturing with the aim of reducing dependence on Chinese imports in sectors key for the military, such as silicon chips and advanced technologies.
The fund’s benefits for Australian manufacturing bosses are clear, which is why it’s been warmly received by the Australian Industry Group. They must also get a kick out of how little red tape the fund imposes on the businesses it invests in. 
In accordance with Labor’s “tripartite” approach, unions were invited along with the bosses to consult on the bill. Concerns were also raised about the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which the NRF is supposed to emulate. The CEFC invested $125 million in Snowy Hydro 2.0, a hydropower project in New South Wales, despite many health and safety issues. The Australian Council of Trade Unions requested that companies that receive NRF funding should have enterprise agreements, that a labour standards policy should be enforced and that union officials should sit on the fund’s board of directors. 
A search of the bill reveals Labor’s response to the unions’ submission. The terms “union”, “wages”, or “conditions” do not appear. 
The unions have so far not kicked up a fuss about this rebuff. Why would they? Australian manufacturing unions have long sold the idea that getting a “fair share for manufacturing” is also good for workers, and that electing Labor governments that promise to support “making it here” is how to get the goods. 
We can go back to the “industry plans”, inspired by the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union’s “People’s Economic Program” of 1977, and in the Prices and Incomes Accords of the Hawke-Keating Labor governments of 1983-1996. The People’s Economic Program argued that transnational corporations and their allies in the Liberal Party, rather than the ruling class as a whole, were the source of unemployment and attacks on wages and conditions. The solution was to elect a Labor government committed to more “progressive” policies, particularly for involving the unions in the development of domestic manufacturing.
When they came to fruition, the industry plans were a disaster for workers. In Stuff the Accord! Pay Up!: Workers’ Resistance to the ALP-ACTU Accord, labour historian and activist Liz Ross describes how the plans were “promoted as providing a secure future for workers and the economy and a way for unions to intervene in the economy and have a role in determining policy ... Profitability returned in areas covered by the industry plans, but there was a massive loss of jobs, and lower wages and conditions, for workers in the waterfront, steel, textiles and meat industries and the federal public sector”.
We’re told that “making it here” is about protecting jobs from offshoring, as well as investment in sectors whose expansion workers have an interest in, such as renewables. But the union leaders pushing these campaigns, whose positions depend on playing a delicate balancing act between the interests of their members and the employers, are not confronting these issues by mobilising their members against the bosses and the state to shape the economy in workers’ interests. 
Instead they look to deals with Labor governments and industry groups. Lobbying and collaborating are no doubt safer alternatives for the union officials than costly and potentially explosive strikes, and those who play the game “sensibly” could one day land themselves a seat in parliament or an extremely comfortable position at the head of an industry superannuation fund. 
The union leaders’ plan is not only about economics and self-promotion. They are stoking Australian nationalism. Nationalism makes workers think we’ve got interests in common with Australian capitalists. It softens us up to accept the prerogatives of the ruling class as in our own interests. 
But under capitalism, no “tripartite” collaboration, so cherished by Labor and the unions, can make industry work for the working class. Any deals we make need to be based, not on “good-faith” collaboration, but on strikes and mobilisations that force the bosses into concessions. And even then, the capitalist economy will always be shaped by the interests of the capitalist class. 
We need to do what the campaign to “make it here” does not: revive in our unions the tradition of struggle from below, to fight the bosses and government tooth and nail for industries that work for us, not ones that build $368 billion nuclear submarines designed to unleash “Aussie made” death and destruction on workers overseas.

The trouble with ‘making it here’

“You don’t know what you’ve started!” was one of many warnings shouted at politicians by leaders of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) earlier this month from the public gallery of the Ontario parliament. The MPs had just passed the strike-breaking Bill 28, or Keeping Students in Class Act, which used something called the “notwithstanding clause” to force a contract onto workers while making it illegal for them to take any strike action. The notwithstanding clause, or Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, gives provincial governments the power to override certain sections of the Charter for a five-year period. Its use in this case was to protect Bill 28 from any constitutional challenges. 
The seat of Ontario Premier Doug Ford was empty, presumably because he didn’t have the stomach to face the CUPE leadership. Bill 28 means that if CUPE chose to strike, each of its 55,000 members would be fined $4,000 per day, and the union accruing up to $500,000 in fines each day. After the first day of the strike on 4 November, the union was hit with a bill of around $220 million. But three days later, the fines were a dead-letter and Bill 28 was repealed, with Ford forced into an embarrassing U-turn. So how did education workers beat Ford’s government?
CUPE members, who include custodians, maintenance workers, early childhood educators, librarians, and education assistants, are some of the lowest paid education workers in the province. According to a report from Ontario School Board Council of Unions, more than 71 percent of these workers are women. Union President Laura Walton told the media that many of her members have reported needing to use food-banks. 
Despite CUPE dropping its original demand of around 11 percent annual pay rises to 6 percent, Education Minister Stephen Lecce was using Bill 28 to lock workers into a four-year deal that gave 2.5 percent annual raises to workers making less than $43,000 and 1.5 percent raises for all others, while inflation in Ontario currently sits at 7.9 percent. More than 96 percent of union members voted in favour of striking. “They’ve awakened a labour giant”, Walton said of the government’s decision to pass Bill 28. 
On 4 November, the union organised demonstrations around the province. At one outside the Ontario parliament, a union member described the bill as an “existential crisis for the entire labour movement ... What’s the point of a union if we can’t do collective action? What’s the point of a constitution if we don’t get the rights that it affords us?”
It’s not every day that union leaders are willing to bring their members out in defiance of the law. Usually, the threat of fines is enough to force them into submission. What pushed the CUPE leaders over the edge in this instance was, in part, the cumulative effect of two terms of the union-busting “open for business” approach of Progressive Conservative Party (PC) Premier Doug Ford. 
In office, Ford has slashed public spending and horrifically mismanaged the COVID-19 pandemic. He refused to legislate universal paid sick days when the pandemic was tearing through workplaces, and then used the pandemic’s impact on business operations to justify imposing wage freezes on public sector employees and giving bosses the right to violate collective agreements and bargaining rights for unionised workers. Wage freezes implemented by both Liberal and PC governments have resulted in education workers losing 11 percent of their wages in real terms over the last decade. 
Years of wage restraint and “open for business” policies from both sides of the aisle are now combining with record inflation and housing stress. After suffering through Ford’s mismanagement of the pandemic, which according to Government of Ontario statistics left 12,247 dead, workers are struggling to afford necessities as costs and profits climb while their wages continue to stagnate. 
As CUPE members walked off the job on 4 November, rallies and pickets were organised in cities and towns around Ontario. Despite solidarity strikes being illegal in Canada, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents 8,000 workers, joined the CUPE strike in solidarity. Other education unions, like the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario and Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, are in the midst of tense negotiations. 
A number of construction unions that previously supported Ford’s election campaign, like the Laborers’ International Union of North America and the International Union of Operating Engineers, came out against Bill 28 and said they had “buyer’s remorse” about supporting Ford. The Amalgamated Transport Union, whose 2,200 members started a strike for better wages and conditions on 7 November, called on its members to join the demonstrations in solidarity with CUPE members. 
Daniel Boyer, President of the Quebec Federation of Labour, was quoted as saying “the entire Canadian labour movement will mobilise” in support of CUPE workers, and that “if we have to go to Toronto, we will go to Toronto”. The federation represents some 500,000 workers. The Ontario Federation of Labour, Canada’s largest union federation, was reportedly in serious talks about calling a general strike across the province. All this was enough to spook Ford into repealing Bill 28 and agreeing to restart negotiations with CUPE, but on the conditions that the strikes were called off. 
While the defeat of Bill 28 is a victory for the entire Canadian labour movement, the decision by CUPE leadership to call off the strikes as a show of “good-faith” before sitting back down at the bargaining table is a mistake. Education workers had Ford’s government backed into a corner, but they hadn’t won any of their demands. With the provincial government in retreat, the union leaders could have pressed forward with the strike, generalised it to other unions, and gone into negotiations in an extremely favourable position.
It is not clear how the negotiations will now play out. Significantly, a group of rank-and-file CUPE members have started organising members independently of the union leaders. An online statement from the CUPE Local 4400 Rank and File Group explains that their goal “is to organise our co-workers to bring back militancy in the labour movement so that when we strike, we win!” 
The level of organisation from below will be a key factor in whether education workers can keep the pressure on the Ford government and their own leaders.

Canadian workers beat draconian anti-strike law

“Attention, MOVE. This is America. You have to abide by the laws of the United States.” This was the ultimatum given through a Philadelphia police megaphone to a group of Black activists trapped in their home in the early morning of 13 May 1985. The house on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia was surrounded by hundreds of police. Thirteen MOVE members, including five children, were inside. 
MOVE was an activist organisation influenced by both the Black Panther Party and the hippy movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. It combined the struggle for Black liberation with a focus on eco-friendly ways of living. Ed Pilkington, writing in the Guardian, described the politics as “a strange fusion of black power and flower power”. Members of the group wore their hair in dreadlocks, changed their last names to “Africa” and advocated veganism. 
The Philadelphia police were notorious for their racist violence against working-class Black people. While the civil rights movement had won important democratic rights, for most Black people there was little respite from the poverty and police violence plaguing their lives. Most remained confined to inner-city ghettos. Cops used the crime that resulted from this poverty as justification to crack down on Black communities at will. 
MOVE fought back against abuse at the hands of the police. For this they were deemed a terrorist organisation by the City of Philadelphia, which began to look for any excuse to wipe them out. 
Police closed in on the MOVE house on the morning of 13 May, carrying arrest warrants obtained using alleged neighbourhood complaints. Officers had previously shown little concern about such complaints in Black neighbourhoods. It was clear that they were using them as an excuse to finish what they had started in 1978, when police provoked a firefight with MOVE activists that resulted in nine MOVE members being jailed for 100 years each for the murder of a single police officer. 
More than 500 police surrounded the house. Over the next 12 hours, they fired 10,000 rounds of ammunition from sub-machine guns into the dwelling, as well as teargas and water from water cannons. Any attempt by the MOVE members to leave the house was met with bullets, so they took cover in the basement. 
To finish the job, police were given the green light by the city’s mayor, Wilson Goode, to drop two military-grade bombs on the roof while the thirteen MOVE members were still inside. 
Thirteen-year-old Birdie Africa ran from the house screaming. Ramona Africa also ran. Both were shot at and arrested. The remaining eleven activists were burned alive, including five children. “They’ve dropped a bomb on babies!” a horrified man who was standing behind police barricades watching the terror unfolding before him reportedly shouted.
After the explosion, police refused to let firefighters put out the blaze for more than four hours. They watched as three blocks of houses in the mostly Black working-class neighbourhood burned to the ground. Three hundred people were made homeless in a matter of hours. 
The response of the mayor was unapologetic. “I’d do it again”, Goode said. The streets of cities throughout the US should have been inundated with protests on the night of 13 May, but they weren’t. The main reason is that Wilson Goode was Philadelphia’s first Black Democrat mayor. 
Instead of immediate retaliation, there was widespread confusion. Many people, including local activists, were shocked by Goode’s role in the bombing. The Black liberation movement in Philadelphia had done a great deal of political work to get him elected. They did so with the expectation that Goode would bring about a change in the conditions for Black Philadelphians. Not only was there no significant improvement in conditions under Goode, but he signed off on one of the worst atrocities committed against Black activists the country had ever seen.
This is a pattern that has been repeated again and again. Twenty-three years later, Barack Obama was elected president with similar expectations. One of his first acts was to bail out the banks after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Over the course of his two presidencies, the average wealth of the poorest 99 percent in the US dropped by US$4,500, while the average wealth of the top 1 percent increased by US$4.9 million. Obama doggedly defended the country’s racist police, “Our entire way of life in America depends on the rule of law,” he said in Dallas in 2016. 
More recently, when NBA players threatened to go on strike after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, Obama used his influence to encourage the players to abandon their stand. The basketballers’ strike would have been a significant step forward in the fight against racism and police violence, but Obama shut it down, instead arguing that a vote for the Democrats was the best way to fight back.
Joe Biden presented himself as the liberal alternative to Trump’s bigotry. He chose Kamala Harris, a Black woman and ex-cop, as his running mate. This earned him the applause of liberal commentators who fawned over this progressive pair. 
But since Biden and Harris’ election, very little has changed. According to non-profit research group Mapping Police Violence, in 2021 cops killed 1,136 people—one of the deadliest years on record. As of 24 March 2022, police in the US have killed 249 people, averaging about three killings a day. Biden opposes a key demand of the Black Lives Matter movement—to defund the police—and has instead announced a substantial funding increase for policing-related programs in his 2022 budget proposal, arguing that “the answer is not to defund our police departments”.
The MOVE bombing showed nearly 40 years ago that the Democrats will ultimately defend, with violence if necessary, the institutions that produce and maintain racial oppression. As important as violence though, is the party’s capacity to channel rebellion into safe waters, and co-opt its leaders. After George Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter movement produced the largest urban rebellion in US history. But without a leadership with a clear vision of how to win liberation, and one able to challenge the Democrats’ suffocating influence in NGO and liberal circles, it petered out. 
When Black people took to the streets with rage in the 1960s over police violence, numerous Black mayors like Wilson Goode were installed to put out the fires. The year after the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising, Eric Adams, a Black Democrat, and ex-cop, was elected Mayor of New York City. While lauded by the liberal press, he plans to bring back the controversial anti-crime units which were formally disbanded in 2020 as a concession to Black Lives Matter protesters. He recently pushed for legislation to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to be tried as adults. 
The MOVE bombing sounded the death knell of the Black power movement of the late 1960s and ‘70s, of which MOVE was one of the final remnants. Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and now MOVE, had all been violently subdued by state repression. What followed was a period of defeat and demoralisation in the struggle against racial oppression in the US. 
Not a single cop or official at any level has been held accountable for the bombing. The only punishment resulting from the attack was against its survivors. Ramona Africa spent seven years in prison, charged for the murder of her fellow activists who police had burned alive. Despite this, Ramona Africa continues her activism today and keeps the memory of the attack and its lessons alive, against efforts by the Democrats to sweep it under the carpet. 
Ramona gave a warning to young radicals in a 2017 interview with Truthout, “Don’t allow yourselves to be compromised or co-opted–because trust me–they will try...This system will come at you with all kinds of things. All kinds! But if you fall for it, you’re done...Long live the revolution! Ona move!” To effectively fight and end racist police violence, we need to follow Ramona’s advice.

‘This is America’: cops, Democrats, and the MOVE bombing of 1985

The Russian military has massed more than 125,000 troops along the Ukrainian border, together with the heavy artillery necessary for an invasion of the country. Why have simmering tensions reached a boiling point yet again? In part, the answer relates to Ukraine’s unique position in European affairs.
Ukraine is the second largest European state by land area, and, along with Belarus, is a buffer between Russia and US-aligned European countries. The US and its Western allies have long recognised that Ukraine is the key to “containing” Russia. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to US President Jimmy Carter, noted in his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives that Ukraine’s “very existence as an independent country [means] Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire”.
Historically, Russia benefited militarily from its distance from hostile forces approaching from its west. But the eastern expansion of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance of European states under US leadership, has drastically reduced Russia’s breathing space as the West has attempted to reduce permanently Moscow’s sphere of influence. 
While its position as Russia’s largest western neighbour is central, influence over Ukraine’s economy is also of importance. Ukraine was the industrial and agricultural centre of the Soviet Union. It remains Europe’s breadbasket and one of the globe’s largest agricultural producers and exporters, particularly of grain and corn. The country also has some of the largest and most diverse mineral reserves in the world. According to the US Geological Survey, Ukraine ranks seventh largest in the world as a producer of iron ore, eighth largest of manganese, sixth largest of titanium, seventh of graphite and ninth of uranium. According to the World Steel Association, it is the world’s tenth largest steel producer.
In the 21st century, there has been something of a permanent tug of war over Ukraine. The dramatic escalation of recent times is the result of two factors. The first is that the country has, since 2014, signed economic agreements drawing it closer to the EU (and therefore to the US), rather than to Russia. Its government reportedly plans to apply for EU membership in 2024 and hopes to join in the 2030s. Its integration further into the military, political and economic spheres of the West would be a crushing blow for Russian imperialism and a blow to President Vladimir Putin’s reputation. Moscow, not without reason, views the ever-growing military and economic alliance of European states to its west as a direct threat. 
NATO, established in 1949, was sold as a “defensive” alliance to protect Western democracy from the threats of German and Russian authoritarianism. But it was a means to advance the United States’ imperialist interests in Europe and to prevent its member states from shifting to the left politically. This was particularly important in states with mass Communist parties such as France, Italy and later Greece. When the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991, the US pressed its advantage and punished its Cold War rival. President Bill Clinton expanded NATO into a host of ex-Soviet satellite countries. The expansion has continued, the alliance more than doubling its original twelve members to 30 states.
It’s little wonder the eastern expansion of its Western rivals is viewed as an existential threat by the Kremlin, as its sphere of immediate influence has been whittled to Belarus, Kazakhstan and eastern Ukraine. Moscow’s most recent demand is for NATO to remove all forces from Bulgaria, Romania and other ex-Soviet states that joined the alliance after 1997. Those calls have gone unheeded, so Putin is sending a message that he wants no further growth in the number of states nominally aligned against Russia, and that he’s prepared to use force to make the point—as he did with the invasion of Georgia in 2008. 
The second factor enabling the recent escalation is that Putin believes that the balance of forces in Europe and with respect to US imperialism presents a number of reasons to push on Ukraine. Partly due to export revenues from its colossal oil and gas reserves, Russia has stabilised its economy and expanded its military capacity. Putin, who has ruled the country since 2000, is confident that his military would overpower its European rivals in any contest. Russia being the supplier of 40 percent of Europe’s oil and gas also gives Moscow significant economic leverage.
In its assessment of the US, Russia finds more reasons to push. The broader international situation over the last fifteen years has highlighted a series of US weaknesses and preoccupations that potentially prevent it from intervening effectively to stop Russia militarily. US President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan exit was a global embarrassment and indicative of a US empire in relative decline. The pivot to Asia has not delivered tangible gains for Washington in its competition with Beijing. COVID-19 has run rampant through the US, and the Senate remains an immovable obstacle to Biden’s domestic agenda. 
With the US appearing weakened, with the EU devoid of the military means to challenge Russia and remaining dependent on its energy reserves, Putin sees a chance to win major concessions from the West over Ukraine, or simply to create facts on the ground. 
Or course, Russia and the West are not the only players in this conflict. What do Ukrainians want? The country has been split by a long history of imperialist warring and meddling in the region. Deep divisions have been sown through every level of Ukrainian society, along “red lines” that separate the east of the country from the west. In the west, where the horrors of Stalinism left a lasting anti-communist legacy, very few people speak Russian and most desire closer ties with the EU. In the east, there are more Russian speakers, many of whom identify primarily with their Russian roots. Both Russia and the West have tried to stoke this division to make sections of the population more amenable to their interests.
The divisions exploded into mass movements beginning in the early 2000s. In 2004, claims of electoral fraud prompted protests rejecting the victory of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. Outrage against the election results exploded in the “Orange Revolution”. Mass protests prevented Yanukovych taking office and brought to the fore the country’s first explicitly pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko, who pushed for EU and NATO membership. The country’s internal divisions deepened as the eastern and southern pro-Russian populations felt discriminated against by the new government and its supporters. 
Yet Yushchenko failed to lift Ukraine’s poor economic performance and eventually fell out of favour. In 2010, Yanukovych returned and won an election deemed fair by local and international authorities. Despite his traditional ties to Russia, Yanukovych eyed relations with the EU and sought loans from the International Monetary Fund. But Putin turned the screws, and Yanukovych swung back towards Moscow, opting to sign on to the Eurasian Economic Union between Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. The union was a means for Russia to integrate and influence its immediate neighbours. 
Yanukovych’s new alignment with Putin was the catalyst for the massive Euromaidan protests of 2013. The protesters were primarily students hoping for a post-Soviet economic future and an alternative to the corruption of the Ukrainian elites. They continued to look away from Russia towards the liberal capitalism of the West and ties with the EU. Demonstrations of tens of thousands were transformed by police repression into demonstrations of hundreds of thousands. These protests ousted Yanukovych, who fled to Moscow. A provisional government was installed, and pro-Western President Petro Poroshenko was elected in 2014. 
The Euromaidan movement sparked a counter-movement in the pro-Russian sections of eastern Ukraine. Insurgents in the Donbas region took up arms against the government. From the beginning, the resistance was influenced and purportedly resourced by the Kremlin. Divisions were deepened when the Ukrainian government enlisted the help of fascist groups to combat the insurgents after the national armed forces became increasingly disillusioned. Russia responded not only by fostering this anti-Maidan insurgency in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but also by invading and annexing Crimea, an important port in the Black Sea and a long-coveted jewel for Russian chauvinists. The Donbas war has continued to ravage the east. More than 14,000 have been killed and 1 million displaced. The divisions between east and west continue to shape and be shaped by the current imperialist conflict. 
For most Ukrainians, then, the future appears bleak. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country has found no respite from economic strife and political crisis. According to government statistics, the average worker earns about A$700 a month, while local oligarch Rinat Akhmetov increased his wealth to $8.5 billion last year. Imperialist intrigue has divided the population and continues to drag them further apart in the contest for influence. A Russian invasion would compound the misery. Yet the promise of a better life through further integration into Western Europe’s imperialist bloc is just so much snake oil for all except a small minority in the country. 
In a classic case of brinkmanship, Romania and Bulgaria have been provided additional military support from NATO. So with tensions running high, the US instinct is to nudge them up a notch further, as it has been doing for decades in the region. These provocations only increase the risk of war, the outcome of which could be thousands dead and millions displaced. But as we’ve seen time and again from the leaders of both power blocs, that’s a price they seem all too willing for others to pay.

Ukraine in the crosshairs

Protesters in downtown Toronto in early June toppled a statue of Egerton Ryerson, one of the colonists who helped devise the Canadian “residential school” system. The protest and defacing of the statue came after the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. 
Written at the base of the toppled statue, in blood red paint, was “dig them up”. The words are a demand for the Canadian state to confront its barbaric history of colonialism and the way in which it has shaped Indigenous oppression today.
As in Australia, colonists waged vicious wars to force the Indigenous people from their lands in North America. To legitimise the genocide, they basically claimed that the land was unoccupied. “The Doctrine of Discovery” was to Canada what “Terra Nullius” was to Australia. Both were lies. 
Alongside the violent appropriation of the land, the colonists developed other strategies to prevent resistance and to facilitate capitalist development. Residential schools were built to turn Indigenous children into wage labourers for Canadian capitalism. Their languages and traditions were suppressed. Physical and sexual abuse were rampant. Children were returned to their families broken, or were not returned at all.
In the 1950s and 1960s the schools began closing, but a new policy was implemented, referred to as the “Sixties Scoop”. Not unlike the Stolen Generations in Australia, the policy of taking Indigenous children from their families and communities and placing them in foster homes was in many ways a continuation of the assimilation policies of the residential schools but with slightly less barbaric cover. 
While many may be “reminded” of these horrors, for Indigenous people they continue today, but in different forms. People are right to criticise Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for a tweet describing the residential schools as “that dark and shameful chapter of our country’s history” when, according to Statistics Canada, more than 80 percent of Indigenous reserves in the country have a median income below the poverty line and Indigenous Services Canada reports that 52 reserves continue to suffer from contaminated water. 
In Neskatanga, a reserve in northern Ontario, people have been forced to boil their water before drinking it since 1993. Trudeau’s government promised to address these issues by this year. While the target will be missed, he has not delayed in signing off on gas pipelines that will continue to poison water and destabilise communities. No amount of lip service or crocodile tears will obscure this reality. 
Despite their oppression, Indigenous people in Canada have been resisting in heroic ways since the time of invasion. There was the Kanehsatake resistance of 1990, a historic confrontation during which the Canadian army was mobilised against Mohawk protesters in Quebec who were being evicted from their land to make way for a golf course. Last year, there was the Wet’suwet’en protests against the Coastal GasLink Pipeline, which resulted in railways and ports being blocked and barricaded in a wave of solidarity actions across the country.
Government-led “reconciliation” and the empty promises of Trudeau and politicians the world over have done nothing to significantly combat Indigenous oppression. To win, we have to organise independently from the states that continue to exploit workers and marginalise the oppressed. From Canada to Australia, the struggle against Indigenous oppression is bound up in the struggle against the capitalist system.

Discovery of mass grave of Indigenous children sparks protests in Canada

JobKeeper relief payments went to businesses to subsidise workers’ wages during the pandemic. They were, Prime Minister Scott Morrison initially claimed, “a lifeline to not only get through this crisis, but bounce back together on the other side”. But the Liberal government handed billions to the bosses with no real strings attached, which made the scheme ripe for rorting. 
Ownership Matters, a corporate advisory group, found that 34 companies on the ASX 300 pocketed $284 million despite reporting increased profits during the pandemic. And some companies paid tens of millions of dollars in dividends to their owners at the same time as they received the taxpayer-funded payments. 
The same generosity was not extended to front-line workers risking their lives to continue production, often without receiving hazard pay. Morrison defended these outcomes, saying: “I’m not into the politics of envy”.
He is into the politics of punishment, though. Contrast his treatment of big business and the rich to everyone else. His government’s “robodebt” scheme supposedly found hundreds of thousands of overpayments to people on unemployment support. Debt-collection letters were sent outlining totals that frequently were more than $10,000. If you couldn’t provide payslips, sometimes from as far back as five years, you were assumed guilty of rorting the system. 
Reports of severe depression and suicide prompted Centrelink to begin tweeting the details for Lifeline, a national 24-hour support and suicide prevention service. Many of these “debts” were completely made up because of the way the scheme averaged incomes over a year. That didn’t stop the government fighting tooth and nail in the courts to be able to keep collecting them.
Where are the threatening debt-collection letters for the CEOs who rorted the JobKeeper scheme?
Now that JobKeeper is being axed, up to 250,000 more people could be made unemployed, according to economist Jeff Borland, as struggling businesses cut costs. Those who lose their jobs will have to survive on a dole that’s well below the poverty line. 
The JobSeeker payment took the previous NewStart allowance and added the coronavirus supplement of $550, bringing the total fortnightly amount to around $1,115. This was the first increase to the dole in real terms since 1994. As the supplement end date approached, public pressure mounted to increase the JobSeeker base rate. The Liberals announced a pitiful $50 fortnightly increase to compensate for the loss of the supplement. 
Women are most affected. Data from the Department of Social Services and the Bureau of Statistics show that middle-aged women in rural areas are the most likely to require unemployment pay, and that women in general lost a disproportionate number of jobs during the pandemic. 
“Mutual obligations” have also returned after being suspended last year. Under the threat of delayed payments, job seekers must attend appointments and training sessions with job service providers and potentially perform “work for the dole”. (Where are the “mutual obligations” for the businesses that received JobKeeper and every other bit of government aid?)
Within a month of mutual obligations returning at the end of last year, 74,000 people had their payments delayed. This included 12,173 First Nations people, 6,334 single parents, 13,169 people with a disability, and 9,100 people experiencing homelessness, according to figures provided by Senate estimates. Yet the jobs that the unemployed are required to search for are few and far between. According to the National Skills Commission, there are more than four job seekers for every job vacancy.
In other words, it is mathematically impossible for everyone to find work. Why then are those without a job being punished and forced to carry out all these punitive “obligations”? JobSeeker must be raised to a living wage, funded by increased taxes on big business.

The fight for Richmond’s rebel school

Uber drivers fight back

‘Courageous Clare’ kicks teachers while they’re down

Canada is burning. Capitalism stoked the flames

The trouble with ‘making it here’

Canadian workers beat draconian anti-strike law

‘This is America’: cops, Democrats, and the MOVE bombing of 1985

Ukraine in the crosshairs

Discovery of mass grave of Indigenous children sparks protests in Canada

Bosses banked JobKeeper, but welfare gets axed

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