In a political landscape in which rising costs of living and attacks on work conditions confront a union movement hamstrung by spineless leaders and bureaucracy, it’s easy to forget what it looks like to really fight. In Australia today, despite the best efforts of rank-and-file activists, mass working-class struggle is on the ebb. For a generation of young workers, this means that it is not a matter of forgetting what real, militant unionism looks like, so much as never having experienced it to begin with.
'Pravda', the newspaper indelibly associated with the Bolshevik Party and the Russian Revolution, means 'truth'. It’s an appropriate name for a publication that set out to relate and generalise the experiences and struggles of the Russian working class, which was numerically small and scattered over a vast area in the early twentieth century.
The sculptural silver exterior of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Bilbao Museum is notable for its monumentality and architectural significance. For one hour last December it was also notable for the 12 members of museum cleaning staff standing silently at the top of the enormous staircase in front of the Museum’s entrance. Wearing t-shirts with the question “Is everyone’s work equally important?” printed on them, the workers were collaborating with artist Lorenzo Bussi and the Aboriginal rapper Barkaa announced before Christmas that, in solidarity with Palestine, she was pulling out of the Sydney Festival. The Malyangapa and Barkindji artist announced her decision on Instagram, saying: “I stand with Palestine always and I’m pulling out of all events associated with [Sydney Festival]”. “We took an oath of friendship”, wrote French poet, writer and performer Tristan Tzara in his account of the origins of Dadaism, “on the new transmutation that signifies nothing, and was the most formidable protest, the most intense armed affirmation of salvation liberty blasphemy mass combat speed prayer tranquillity private guerrilla negation and chocolate of the desperate”. Today, unfortunately, Dadaism has suffered the ultimate fate of all major aesthetic movements under capitalism. Crises tumble around our world, challenging certainties, destabilising regimes and shaking-up people’s understanding of society. Out of the disruption comes political analysis and organising, a battle between left and right—liberation or barbarism. Alongside the organisers and agitators are the writers, poets, filmmakers, photographers and artists whose work documents our world of change, forging iconic images that provide fuel for the struggle.
