Review: Working for the brand: how corporations are destroying free speech
Josh Bornstein, Scribe, $36.99, 304pp.
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Working for the brand: how corporations are destroying free speech by Melbourne lawyer Josh Bornstein is a great read. It is a book about the growth of corporate power over recent decades and one of its more pernicious consequences—companies punishing employees for things they say or do outside of work. 
Bornstein argues that, in policing the speech of their workers, employers are becoming key arbiters of acceptable speech, often breaching employment law in the process. He makes a damning case that it is the unequal relations between employers and workers that drive some of the most significant attacks on free speech, and that the motivation of these employers is almost exclusively to protect their brand’s public image. 
Bornstein offers countless examples of this phenomenon. Typically, cases involve a person making a comment on social media, which is then publicly attacked online or in the media by some individual or group. The individual’s employer learns of it and sacks them, citing concern about “ethics and integrity”. Most employees targeted this way lose their jobs, some their whole careers, some their mental wellbeing or that of their families, and some their lives as a result of the stress.
On Anzac Day 2015, for example, SBS journalist Scott McIntyre posted on what was then Twitter criticising the celebration of war and the writing out of history of the murders and rapes committed by Australian troops. Twenty minutes later, a Murdoch journalist attacked McIntyre’s posts, followed by other professional right-wingers, including the director of a conservative lobby group, a Liberal Party minister and a Sky News presenter. The next day, McIntyre was sacked by SBS.
McIntrye was a sports presenter, so his comments couldn’t be said to show bias affecting his work. Underlining how arbitrary his sacking was, he had made almost identical social media posts on many previous Anzac Days without any consequences. So it wasn’t what he said or did that was the problem, it was how others responded that led to the end of his career, in this case the others being a cabal of right-wing culture warriors.
The policies of SBS that were cited to justify the sacking were incredibly vague (as such policies typically are), making it almost impossible to defend against. They include requirements that workers “act in line with company values”, “treat others with courtesy”, “be truthful and transparent” and “not bring the company in to disrepute”, which could mean anything to anyone. As a US Supreme Court judge that Bornstein quotes points out, “Vague laws invite arbitrary power ... by leaving the people in the dark about what the law demands and allowing prosecutors and courts to make it up”.
These types of company policies and codes of conduct are also often contradictory and therefore impossible to adhere to. For instance, being truthful might be in line with company values but also bring the company in to disrepute or come across as discourteous. 
Some examples include ABC presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who in 2016 was sacked for posting a pro-refugee statement on Twitter, “Lest. We. Forget. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine.)” Or an ALP supporter named Ruth who got in to an argument with a Liberal Party campaigner on election day who then tracked down her employer to put in a complaint. Ruth was suspended pending an investigation and later cleared following legal support.
Likewise, co-founder of the anti-bullying LGBTI program Safe Schools, Roz Ward, was sacked by La Trobe University for making a humorous post on her private Facebook account after coming under attack from the Murdoch press, the Australian Christian Lobby and Liberal and Labour leaders. And in December 2023, another ABC radio presenter, Antoinette Lattouf, was sacked after posting a Human Rights Watch report about Israel using starvation as a weapon of war against the people of Gaza.
There is, by contrast, no requirement that a company comply with its code of conduct or stated values. It’s one rule for workers and another for the company heads. 
Bornstein’s book mostly tracks this trend in Australia, the US and the UK, noting that it has accelerated over the last 30 years. It has coincided with attacks on trade unions and workers’ rights, privatisation, record profits, transfer of wealth to the richest, wage stagnation, longer work hours and huge cuts to corporate tax rates and regulations—in other words, a one-sided class war. 
One important consequence of this is that workers have become less well unionised and therefore less able to defend their interests, while employers have become much more powerful, abusive and exploitative. 
It’s gotten to the point that, far from opposing them, we are supposed to feel emotionally connected to corporations, a situation fostered through the manipulative art of brand management. So Nike doesn’t sell shoes, it “enhances people’s lives through sports and fitness”.
The 1980s and ’90s brought with them the rise of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR), consisting of large publicity machines selling the social good of specific corporations, commonly through some minuscule “giving back” via a tax-deductible charity. 
In a similar vein, “ethics washing” involves companies promoting themselves as ethical and caring (“a friend and neighbour”, says US telecommunication giant AT&amp;T) so as to avoid and discourage proper regulation or to repair their image after being caught committing abuses.
And with a similar goal in mind, some companies have more recently resorted to giving lip service to progressive movements. Qantas eventually endorsed the campaign for same sex marriage rights in Australia, for example. Amazon stated its support for “the fight against systemic racism and injustice” at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Bornstein notes that, since 2005, new hires at UK universities in marketing and public relations departments have grown nine times as fast as new academic hires. Literal armies of people are being employed to convince us to see corporations as friends and not enemies.
The spread of the internet and social media through the 2000s also gave new “popular” weight to campaigns calling for people to be sacked. The growing social media giants were rewarded with enormous investor dollars for increased user engagement, which often came to be based on cycles of outrage.
In exploring the different angles of this development, Bornstein highlights the hypocrisy of corporations—the vilest and most destructive entities in modern society—posing as any kind of authority on ethics or integrity. He cites Canadian law Professor Joel Bakan, who likened modern corporations to psychopaths, pointing out that “the corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others”.
Many of the most successful and ethics-washed companies have killed hundreds or thousands of innocent people, while others have paid poverty wages, destroyed the climate or systematically lied and manipulated consumers. Re-reporting some of those horrendous corporate crimes in the book is a service on its own.
For over 30 years, for example, pharmaceutical giant Johnson &amp; Johnson knew that its talc powder products contained asbestos that was causing fatal mesothelioma and ovarian cancer. The company hid this information, fought against investigations about it and created a shell company to avoid paying damages to around 38,000 victims. In 2022, Johnson &amp; Johnson made $24 billion in sales in one quarter while on average one woman died per day while waiting for her case against the company to be heard.
Apart from being one of the biggest planet-killers in the world, British Petroleum (BP) has experienced explosions at its refineries and rigs in recent decades that have caused dozens of deaths of workers and released millions of barrels of oil into oceans. The company pleaded guilty to manslaughter and other criminal charges after slashing safety budgets and programs that contributed to the disasters. In 2020, 96 percent of BP’s capital expenditure was dedicated to oil and gas, while the company declares that it’s “working to make energy cleaner” and designs it petrol stations in green colours.
Enron, the US-based multinational finance giant, funded a CSR workforce and donated money to arts organisations and environmental groups. When the company collapsed in scandal in 2001, the leaders were found to have hidden billions of dollars of losses and found guilty of fraud, lying, money laundering and insider trading.
Volkswagen was the 2012 recipient of the “Ethics in Business Award” issued by the World Forum for Ethics in Business, and declared its goal to become “the world’s most environmentally compatible automaker”. In 2015, it was discovered that, over six years, the company had installed software in at least 11 million of its vehicles that cheated the tests for pollution emissions, allowing each car to emit up to 40 times the legal limit.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the largest retail bank here, cites “integrity” as one of its core values, which means “saying and doing what is right for our customers, our people, our community and our shareholders”. In 2017, a royal commission found that the bank had knowingly charged dead people fees for financial-planning advice for more than a decade, denied insurance entitlements to customers by manipulating medical reports and colluded with the other big banks to rig interest rates to take more money from customers.
The marketing department of convenience store empire 7-Eleven boasts of embracing “the highest standards” to act “with fairness and integrity”. In 2015 a media investigation found that it had hyper-exploited thousands of workers, often vulnerable migrants who were sometimes paid $5 per hour or pressured to work as “trainees” for months without pay. Pay records were falsified, workers who complained were threatened with being deported. 7-Eleven’s chairman at the time, Russ Withers, was also chairman of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, which promotes and teaches corporate governance. 
Then there’s Qantas, where CEO Alan Joyce’s pay package doubled to $24.6 million in the year that he sacked 5,000 full-time workers, and Coca Cola, one of the key corporate sponsors of the 2022 UN climate summit despite being the worst plastic polluter in the world. The list goes on. Corporate corruption, abuse, exploitation and lies are systematic in the boardrooms of the world.
Bornstein’s passion for shaming corporate abuses, manipulation and power gives the book a similar feel to Naomi Klein’s influential anti-globalisation classic No Logo. But Bornstein’s book is elevated by a class framework: he clearly sides with workers and their industrial and civil rights against bosses’ drive for profits.
He understands that the main beneficiaries of the decline in democratic rights, the growth in inequality, the increased vulnerability of employees are the capitalist class and the layer of managers and politicians who act on their behalf.
Importantly, Bornstein doesn’t call for penalties or restrictions against criticism, protest or organising. He argues that workers’ rights are issues of citizenship and democracy. Employers should not have the power to sack employees for actions outside of and irrelevant to their job and to protect their brand and profits. And he argues that it’s a revived trade union movement that is the key strategy for fixing this.
Bornstein does not shy away from confronting the tendency on the left to campaign for sackings on a progressive basis, even though this is much less common. He writes particularly about the case of Israel Folau—the rugby player sacked in 2019 after posting a homophobic bible quote online which provoked a tidal wave of popular condemnation. This scenario creates a conflict of various instincts for socialists and left-wing people—the need to defend workers’ rights and freedom of expression versus the need to challenge right-wing bigots who attack oppressed people.
Bornstein points out the obvious parallels with cases where right-wing campaigns end with progressive individuals being sacked. While having nothing positive to say about Folau, he argues that the corporation involved should not have been the arbiter of speech, and that the question of Folau’s rights as an employee should have been considered by leftists.
It is definitely fraught for the left to campaign for right-wing employees to be sacked by their employer. In most instances, this has the effect of legitimising the use of such power by employers, even if it also signifies disapproval of bigotry. Finding ways to make it clear there is popular opposition to such bigotry without strengthening the hand of management is definitely preferable. 
There was an important and positive public reaction attacking and isolating the reactionary ideas of Folau, activated in the aftermath of the victorious same sex marriage rights campaign and the attempted backlash against it, but that did not call for his sacking. Of course, the momentum of such a campaign may lead corporate brand managers to decide it is in their interests to end the company’s relationship with certain individuals, but this is not the same as the left targeting its arguments and demands at these managers, a stance that tacitly accepts that it is appropriate for corporations to police our collective ethics and politics.
Bornstein also opposes using feelings as determinants of what speech is acceptable. One of the more chilling cases he cites is that of Henk Doevendans, a machine operator and union activist for 24 years at BHP Coal. While taking protected industrial action in the middle of an industrial dispute, Doevendans was sacked for breaching the company’s workplace conduct policy by standing near a gate and holding a sign that read “No principles. SCABS. No guts”. The case went all the way to the High Court, which ultimately agreed that Doevendans was sacked because of failing to be respectful and courteous, not because he was actively organising for workers’ rights, and that the sacking was therefore legitimate.
Bornstein points to data indicating that the vast majority of public campaigns to get people sacked come from right-wingers. He argues that these campaigns tend to have far more power behind them (the Murdoch press and ruling political parties rather than likes on social media). And he argues that right-wing people targeted by left-wing campaigns are much more likely to be protected by bosses, an obvious case being war criminal and darling of the Australia establishment Ben Roberts-Smith.
The crux of the problem for Bornstein is the imbalance of power between workers and bosses. He likens the power that modern corporations exert over their employees to political dictatorships, with employers having the right to monitor workers with electronic tracking, limit toilet breaks, impose compulsory drug tests, make them wear what they’re told to and smile on demand.
Approximately 60 million US workers are barred from going to a court to seek redress for unpaid wages or discrimination, and must instead go through their company’s internal arbitration processes, removing even the possibility of independent legal processes.
More and more workers in some industries are required to sign non-compete clauses in their contracts, which prevent them working for rival companies (any other company in their field) for up to 12 months after leaving a job.
And non-disclosure agreements restrict or ban criticism of an employer, including after leaving the job, and are used to hide misconduct and abuse by corporations and management.
In a section about the silencing of academics by university admins, Bornstein argues emphatically that “brand management and academic freedom are mortal enemies”. Likewise, capitalism is a mortal enemy to actual democracy, workers’ right, economic equality and a sustainable planet. How deep can democracy be when a tiny minority own and control the majority of media and the dissemination of ideas? Or when a tiny minority own and control the majority of wealth and production?
Looking around today, we see increasing waves of repression aimed at left-wing activists and those who speak out or organise, most notably people supporting Palestinian rights against the murderous onslaught of the Israeli state. It’s imperative for left-wing people to defend democratic rights and challenge power, not ask the state to protect us. 
Bornstein’s book is a radicalising read, publicising a relevant and relatively hidden issue from which to point out the rigged and hypocritical nature of the profit-driven system of capitalism.

Adam Slater

Want to keep your job? Shut up

Mannie de Saxe, who lived for an impressive 98 years, inspired many. From his early life in a Jewish family opposing apartheid in South Africa to his condemnation of apartheid Israel’s Gaza genocide, Mannie stood on the side of the oppressed, supporting workers’ rights and the fight for socialism. 
He argued for a fundamental change to society, to rid the world of capitalism’s stranglehold—for a world run by workers for human need. 
After living in a country in which “racism was institutionalised by law and life was based on race”, Mannie thought he was arriving in an egalitarian society when he migrated to Australia in 1978. But he was soon disabused of that notion when witnessing Australia’s treatment of Indigenous people. 
“Australia has institutionalised racism to a degree that almost puts racist South Africa and apartheid Israel to shame”, he angrily noted. “After all, from 1788 onwards a genocide has been practised”.
Mannie and his family’s move to Australia opened a whole new chapter—a mostly positive change, but one that also saw his marriage collapse and his family life disrupted for many years. But he began to get more politically active and felt more confident to come out as gay. 
From then on, he took on cause after cause and met his partner Ken Lovett at a rally in Sydney protesting British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Clause 28 bill, which made portraying LGBTI life to young people a crime. In Sydney, he participated in the Gay Solidarity Group’s many actions. In Melbourne, he was often photographed with Ken at various rallies, holding a Lesbian and Gay Solidarity banner. 
Although he and Ken never wanted to marry, they campaigned to support marriage equality and were very critical of the ALP’s opposition to change. They celebrated with everyone else when the law was finally changed under the Liberal government. It wasn’t lost on them that Labor supported equality only once it was out of government and the issue had become popular.
When HIV/AIDS hit Australia, Mannie and Ken were active in the protests for better care and against the homophobic backlash. They also became carers of many young men dying with the disease before effective treatment was discovered. Mannie also got a master’s degree, studying the role of health unions in the HIV/AIDS pandemic. They played a key role in establishing a memorial park in Sydney—SPAIDS—and helped to save the memorial gardens at the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital in Melbourne.
“If you think activism doesn’t work”, he wrote in one online debate, “you are wrong—lobbying didn’t get legislation changed which decriminalised homosexuality in Australia—activism on the streets did; and the Gay Embassy caravan outside [then NSW Premier] Neville Wran’s house in Woollahra ultimately helped that tardy premier get the law in NSW changed with his private member’s bill in 1984”.
Living in inner Melbourne, he took up local issues. More recently, he supported a campaign to save the Preston Market, a hugely popular marketplace for thousands of working-class people in Melbourne’s inner north. 
Both supported refugee and migrant rights and worked with Meals on Wheels, reaching out to isolated and aged people. Mannie was always outspoken against South African apartheid and was known in the anti-Zionist Jewish community around the world. He proudly wore anti-Nazi badges and commemorative badges with the yellow star symbol overlaid with the pink triangle, the two symbols used by the Nazis in the concentration camps to identify Jews and homosexuals. He refused to accept the invocation of the Holocaust as a justification for the current war on Gaza.
He viewed socialism as the only solution to the world’s problems and joined the International Socialists and Socialist Action. Never one to shirk activity, he regularly sold socialist papers on street stalls and at protests and spoke up in meetings. While he didn’t remain a member after the early 1990s, he remained a socialist all his life.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/MANNIE-FOR-OMAR-23.10.2020.jpg?1732148778696" alt="Mannie for Omar" /><figcaption>Mannie with a Victorian Socialists corflute, 2020 council election in Darebin electorate, Melbourne PHOTO: Liz Ross</figcaption></figure>
When the Victorian Socialists was established, though no longer able to be as active, he was keen to support the party’s electoral campaigns. In 2020, he was particularly pleased to be photographed beside candidate Omar Hassan’s corflute to show his support for the socialist cause and against Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.
Mannie has left a lifetime of memories. He had a vast collection of memorabilia and books and an amazing collection of T-shirts and tops with slogans for every progressive cause. Mannie remained mentally sharp, always up for a lively—and lengthy—discussion about the world. His interests spanned politics, music, film, literature and more. He was a generous, kind, fascinating friend of many, and he was loved by those friends, his daughters, son and grandchildren. 
Along with his partner Ken, he fought for a socialist world right to the end. 
Mannie passed away in Melbourne last Sunday. Rest in Power!

Liz Ross

Vale Mannie de Saxe

Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade 
By Jeff Schuhrke. Verso, 2024; 352 pages.
Reviewed by Joe Allen.
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Soon after Israel launched its genocidal war in Gaza with the full support of the US government, opposition emerged to the Biden administration in a place that many professional political commentators found confounding: within <a href="https://laborforpalestine.net/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US trade unions</a>. President Joe Biden regularly <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=355239130231216" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">boasts</a>, “I am the most pro-union president in American history”. So it was something of a surprise to outright shock that many unions—including major industrial unions such as the United Auto Workers <a href="https://uaw.org/uaw-statement-israel-palestine/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">(UAW)</a> and an array of smaller local unions and leadership bodies—called for a ceasefire in Gaza. The most notable <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/29/the-teamster-connection-apartheid-israel-and-the-ibt/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">exception</a> to this trend has been the Teamsters, led by Sean O’Brien.
Yet, at the same time, trade union opposition to Biden’s support for Israel has been frustratingly limited, never really threatening to disrupt what the late historian Mike Davis called the <a href="https://indypendent.org/2022/11/mike-davis-forgotten-book/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“barren marriage”</a> of the US labour movement and the Democratic Party. Resolutions and public statements by union leaders haven’t led to strike action in vital industries to stop the manufacture and distribution of weapons destined for Israel, despite it being one of the <a href="https://twitter.com/WorkersinPales1/status/1713908923848130880/photo/3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">demands</a> of the Palestinian trade union movement. Shawn Fain, the President of the UAW, a union representing many defence contractors, for example, <a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/what-the-uaw-ceded-in-endorsing-biden" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">undermined</a> the union’s call for a ceasefire by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvXnFAR52yI" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">endorsing</a> Biden for reelection, then Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out.
However, the echo emanating for a ceasefire from US unions has spread far and wide, surprising many. This is a dramatic change from the past when US unions were reliable, if not enthusiastic, supporters of US foreign policy, especially when it came to Israel. Historian Jeff Schuhrke has played an important role in chronicling the burgeoning labour opposition to the US support for Israel in <a href="https://jacobin.com/author/jeff-schuhrke" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jacobin</a>
and other <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/authors/jeff-schuhrke" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">publications</a>. Jeff teaches <a href="https://sunyempire.edu/news/releases/2023/harry-van-arsdale-school-of-labor-studies-professor-featured-on-matter-of-fact-with-soledad-obrien.php" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">labour studies</a> at Empire State College. His new book Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade examines on a much grander scale the American labour movement’s support for US imperialism.
Jeff sets out his goal early on in Blue Collar Empire:
“The same twentieth-century American labor movement that brought a measure of economic security and personal dignity to millions of working people also participated in some of the most shameful and destructive episodes in the history of U.S. imperialism. For decades, trade unionists in the United States have struggled to make sense of this, reluctant to discuss or even think about it. But, with the U.S. labor movement now undergoing a youth-led renaissance, and with renewed superpower rivalries threatening billions of lives amid a host of other planetary powers, it is long past time for a thorough reckoning.”
Indeed.
The publisher, Verso, calls Jeff’s book “the untold story”, yet he is the first to admit that parts of this seedy story have been told before: “Union activists, journalists, and scholars first began documenting US labor’s Cold War intrigues in the late 1960”. In the decades that followed, many books on the subject have been published: Ronald Radosh’s <a href="https://archive.org/details/americanlaboruni0000rado" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">American Labor and United States Foreign Policy</a>; Paul Buhle’s <a href="https://archive.org/details/takingcareofbusi0000buhl/mode/2up" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor</a>; Kim Scipes’ <a href="https://archive.org/details/kim-scipes-on-the-afl-cios-secret-war-against-developing-country-workers-solidarity-or-sabotage" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The AFL CIO’s Secret War Against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity Or Sabotage?</a> 
I would even include in this list Hugh Wilford’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mighty-Wurlitzer-How-Played-America/dp/067403256X" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America</a>, as well as <a href="https://www.amazon.com/El-Golpe-Labor-Mexico-Wildcat/dp/074534562X" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">El Golpe: US Labor, the CIA, and the Coup at Ford in Mexico</a> by Rob McKenzie and Patrick Dunne, published in 2022.
Jeff argues that there was a narrowness to many of the earlier studies:
“Early studies and exposé characterized the AFL-CIO as being little more than a puppet of the US government. The spotlight was especially shone on labor’s shadowy ties to the CIA. Many assumed the spy agency was corrupting hapless union leaders, while many others mockingly called the labor federation the ‘AFL-CIA’. More recent studies have demonstrated how the CIA was only the most notorious government entity that organized labor partnered with. In reality, the AFL-CIO became closely allied with almost the entire US foreign policy apparatus—not simply the CIA, but also the State Department, Agency for International Development, and the National Endowment for democracy.”
American labour leaders were partners in this international criminal operation, not dupes or paid off lackeys. They were true believers in the anti-Communist crusade. What makes Jeff’s book unique is that he provides us with a century-long history—with an emphasis on the post-WWII era—that chronicles the hand-in-glove workings of the AFL-CIO and various US government agencies, most importantly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the covert and later overt ways that the US unions operated abroad. It’s illuminating and shocking. Reckoning with this history and changing it is the challenge, given that American trade unions continue to have a significant presence in countries around the globe.
I don’t want to recount the whole sordid story here. You should read the book. But I think it worth saying that this alliance between the US government and American trade unions would not have been possible without the crucial role played by ex-Communists, most notoriously by Jay Lovestone, the former leader of the US Communist Party, ex-socialists like Walter or Roy Reuther of the UAW (who later became critics of the CIA connection), or the octogenarian leader of the Socialist Party, Norman Thomas, in the 1950s and 1960s. They provided the US government with inside knowledge on the union movement, the left, international connections, and political cover for US government operatives abroad.
There are two areas in Jeff’s book that I’m critical of. I think he looks back to the founding of the World Federation of Trade Unions in 1945 as a lost moment in international solidarity: “With the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), communist and noncommunist labor organizations attempted to build the kind of international that might have served as a powerful rebuke to the Cold War, but the AFL and the CIO sabotaged this vision”. While Jeff is correct that the AFL and CIO sabotaged the WFTU, the member unions from the former USSR and other “socialist” countries were <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Workers-Against-Monolith-Communist-Parties/dp/0902818414" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">state-controlled</a> trade unions, pursuing their own countries’ foreign policy interests, especially the USSR’s.
This leads to a second problem, which is a bigger issue for the left internationally. Jeff writes:
“If they are to be serious vehicles for strengthening and protecting the working class both at home and abroad in this era of overlapping crisis, today’s AFL-CIO and its affiliates must adopt the kind of principles labor internationalism that would inevitably bring them into conflict with U.S. foreign policy instead of reflexively serving it. But a labor movement that places class struggle and anti-imperialism ahead of deference to Washington’s international designs will not come into being unless workers, both within and outside the AFL-CIO, built it themselves.”
I wholeheartedly agree with Jeff, but how do we do this without mass-based revolutionary working-class parties—the kind of parties spawned by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which had a short-lived existence during the early years of the Communist International? We have lived with the deadening legacy of Stalinism and social democracy for many decades, only to be followed by the collapse of both, along with the unravelling of the older industrial union movement across Europe and North America. These have been some of the most difficult decades for the class struggle and anti-imperialism in modern history. Rebuilding a socialist, anti-imperialist, working-class movement is an international task.
The roots of the current opposition can be traced back in a herky-jerky manner to opposition to President George W. Bush’s invasion of <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/unions-against-the-war" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Iraq</a>, and even further back to Ronald Reagan’s wars in Central America in the 1980s and the closing years of the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/U-S-Labor-Vietnam-Philip-Foner/dp/0717806723" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Vietnam War</a>. War weariness is <a href="https://time.com/6590408/us-biden-middle-east-war/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">widespread</a> in the United States today, a product of two decades of the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Forever-War-Dexter-Filkins/dp/0307279448" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“forever wars”</a> in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with an expanding and visible social crisis at home—issues I have <a href="https://jacobin.com/2020/01/iran-antiwar-movement-united-states-iraq-afghanistan" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">written</a> about and <a href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/12/a-tale-of-two-resolutions-why-is-tdu-so-hostile-to-anti-war-activism/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">participated</a> in. Much work needs to be done. The world is a much more dangerous place now than just a few years ago. Jeff’s book is an important contribution to understanding how we got here and how we can move forward.
First published at <a href="http://www.joeallen-60224.medium.com">Joe Allen on Medium</a>. Joe Allen is a socialist based in the United States and the author of Vietnam: The (Last) War the US Lost.

Joe Allen

How US union leaders worked with the CIA to undermine democracy

Review of A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution by Anna Reid, John Murray Press, 2023.
Within hours of taking power in October 1917, the new revolutionary government in Russia had declared its withdrawal from World War One. “The government considers it the greatest of crimes against humanity to continue this war”, its ‘<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/26b.htm">Decree on Peace</a>’
stated, calling on “all the belligerent peoples and their governments to start immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace”.
The declaration scandalised and frightened the rulers of the Allied countries Russia had been fighting alongside. What they did in response is recounted in A Nasty Little War, Anna Reid’s very useful new book. In this narrative history, she documents the attempts made, first to corral the Soviet government back into the fighting and, later, when that had failed, to overthrow it. 
To say the Bolshevik-led Soviet regime flouted international conventions is an understatement. The previous tsarist government had incurred many debts. The Bolsheviks refused to pay them. Secret treaties were found and published, including the infamous <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Sykes-Picot-Agreement">Sykes-Picot Agreement</a>,
which, unbeknownst to its inhabitants, carved up the Middle East between Britain, France and Russia. When a Soviet delegation was dispatched to negotiate with Germany for peace, it included a revolutionary by the name of Anastasia Bitsenko, who had assassinated a former Russian minister of war. On arrival, the delegation didn’t bother with the usual diplomatic niceties, but instead took the opportunity to distribute revolutionary literature among German soldiers. 
“You might as well legalise sodomy”, British member of parliament Winston Churchill declared, “as recognise the Bolsheviks”. The fact that war-weary populations around the world were becoming increasingly mutinous only intensified the ruling-class panic and hatred of the Soviet regime. They feared events in Russia would spur on rebellion elsewhere. This fear was well grounded; fully four empires would collapse as the revolutionary wave that began in Russia swept the world in the following years. 
Initially, the likes of Churchill hoped the Soviet regime would die a natural death. In their eyes, the Bolshevik-led government in Russia was so unstable as to represent more of a power vacuum that would inevitably be filled, sooner or later, by a more “responsible”, capitalist government. In the meantime, though, the Allied powers were desperate to keep the Russians in the war. The role of the mass of Russian workers and peasants in the army was, as they saw it, to tie up large sections of the German army in the east, easing the pressure on their own forces to its west. In other words, to be cannon fodder.
They took matters into their own hands. They sent soldiers and diplomats to Russia to take over port towns, control supply lines and scheme against the new regime. 
Gathering soldiers for the intervention wasn’t simple. There wasn’t much public appetite for a new war. But intervention forces, including Australians, were gathered nonetheless. Reid writes of a group of Québécois soldiers who resisted mobilisation—their ship was forced to set sail with thirteen of them handcuffed in the ship’s hold. 
The extent to which the question of Russia’s continued involvement in the war dominated over other considerations in the early stages of the intervention is demonstrated by Britain’s first military engagement on Russian soil—which took place in Murmansk in March 1918. There the British forces fought, not against, but alongside the Soviet Red Army—repelling an attack by a group of Finnish reactionaries who had crossed the border and captured a Russian town. A revolution had broken out in Finland, and the counter-revolutionaries were supported by Germany. If victorious, they would align Finland with Germany in the war, something the British were very keen to avoid.
Despite this peculiar alignment of forces, however, the Finnish revolution went down to defeat. The reactionaries cemented their victory with a reign of terror, slaughtering thousands of the rebels. 
This experience provided a lesson for the Russian revolutionaries, showing the kind of treatment they could expect were they to lose power themselves. At the time, the so-called White armies were grouping together across Russia, preparing to unleash counter-revolutionary massacres of their own. Meanwhile, the lesson drawn from events in Finland by those leading the Western powers’ intervention in Russia was definitely not that the forces under their control should continue their momentary alignment with the Reds. Quite the contrary—the stronger the White armies became, the more support they gave them. 
The attitude of the foreign delegations to the locals was, in the main, appalling. One story recounted by Reid involved an American military engineer running a trench through a cemetery. In the process, many bones were left scattered on the ground, and a group of American soldiers amused themselves by kicking an exposed skull some blocks down the road. Russian women were described as “handy for doing our washing”.
Other examples are more sinister. British Major General Lionel Dunsterville wrote in his diary that on 5 August 1918 he returned to a town where earlier in the year he had negotiated with the local revolutionary committee “all very pleasant and ‘comrade-y’”. This time, though, things were very different. The committee, Reid writes, were “arrested and sent to Baghdad”—an early example of what, in the context of this century’s “war on terror”, became known as <a href="https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/torture/extraordinary-rendition">extraordinary rendition</a>. 
The intervention forces built prison camps with despicable conditions, while they preferred to sleep in luxury hotels. They introduced the Spanish flu to towns with no local resistance, and, according to Reid, deployed the “world’s first air-dropped chemical weapons”.
Given all this, it’s not surprising that the Bolshevik government began increasingly to circumscribe their freedoms. The measures were initially not very harsh. Reid describes the aftermath of an attempt to overthrow the soviet in the town of Archangel. When Bolshevik reinforcements arrived and restored (revolutionary) order, you might expect drastic reprisals to have been inflicted on the coup plotters. Yet, as Reid has it, they were left alone—hanging around the American consulate, playing football and cooking up new schemes. But the Bolshevik situation was becoming untenable as the White armies made gains, and the measures the former enacted became harsher and harsher. 
In November 1918 an armistice was signed, and World War One officially ended. This removed continuing Russia’s participation in the war effort from the objectives of the foreign intervention and left only the overthrowing of the Bolshevik regime. Through 1919, the fighting intensified. Tens of thousands of people were killed in battles between the Red and White armies across Russia. 
For the White armies with which the intervention forces aligned themselves, toppling the Bolshevik regime was only part of the mission. They intended to brutalise the population to such an extent that even the thought of resistance would become inconceivable. 
One of its largest forces was known as the <a href="https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/volunteer_army">Volunteer Army</a>. It was profoundly antisemitic. “As soon as the Volunteer Army entered a city”, Reid quotes historian Elias Heifetz as saying, “one could find everywhere on the walls ... proclamations against the Jews”. Antisemitism provided a convenient explanation for everything the Whites despised in Russian society, which they combined into the figure of the contemptible and traitorous, but somehow also all-powerful, “Bolshevik Jew”.
The pogrom was one of the Whites’ preferred methods of struggle. Scores of them would take place in areas under White control in these years, with something in the region of 150,000 killed. “The first major pogroms of the period took place in December 1918”, Reid writes, “in and around Lviv, near Ukraine’s present-day border with Poland ... The recorded death toll, probably an undercount, was 132, and doctors reported that sixty twelve-year-old girls were recovering in hospital from soldiers’ ‘hooliganism’”. 
Some historians have seen these pogroms as rehearsals for the Holocaust. Certainly some of the members of the German Freikorps who volunteered after World War One to fight against the Bolsheviks later joined the Nazi militias. The future Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss was, in Reid’s account, one of them. 
How did the leaders of the interventionist forces respond to the pogroms and other unconscionable acts of the Whites? “The British military representative”, Reid writes, “dismissed pogrom ‘rumours’ as ‘grossly exaggerated’”. Many Western newspapers in fact politically supported them, providing story after scandalising story about the supposed crimes of the “Jewish Bolsheviks”. In a sign of ruling-class attitudes in this period, the major British horse race, the Coronation Stakes (not the Cup, as Reid has it in the book), was won in 1922 by a horse called “Pogrom” owned by former member of parliament Lord Astor. 
The Russian revolutionary and leader of the Red Army Leon Trotsky later commented that, if the Whites had won in Russia, “fascism” would be a Russian word. Fortunately however, after years of desperate fighting the revolutionary side came out on top.
In some—for a reader with revolutionary socialist politics—particularly enjoyable pages, Reid describes the end of the interventionists’ time in Russia. By early 1920, their forces were in a terrible state. Soldiers had relied primarily on White army-issued currency for money and were now penniless. “They sold spare clothing and blankets at a street market, and found odd jobs”, Reid writes. “Several gave English lessons.” 
One British soldier found himself with a compatriot begging for help from a Bolshevik who, as Reid describes it, “delivered an impassioned lecture on how revolution was about to sweep England too”. “Captain Horrocks and I”, the soldier recounts, “looked at each other with amazement, for we realised that we were dealing with a state of things of which we had no previous conception”. 
In short order they fled. “As the Red Army advanced and the White ones collapsed”, Reid writes, “Allied troops destroyed equipment, filed back onto their ships and sailed away. Typically, the last they saw of Russia was smoke rising from burning warehouses”.
The forces of international reaction had thrown 180,000 foreign soldiers at the revolution. They were armed to their teeth with all that capitalist governments could provide, and financed with limitless cash. But the revolution showed its strength, and fended off the challenge. 
It’s sometimes said that “socialism was tried and failed in Russia”, as though it were a laboratory experiment carried out in pristine conditions and not a society subject to massive internal and external pressures from capitalist forces bent on its destruction. Reid’s book demonstrates the falsity of that claim and exposes the true sordid history of the Western ruling classes that—not content with the rivers of blood that flowed in the slaughter of World War One—attempted with the most barbaric means to quash the rising that finally put an end to it.

Jess Lenehan

The West’s war on workers’ power in Russia

Review of Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Simon &amp; Schuster UK, 2023.
Journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis’ Wasteland provides a horrifying insight into the realities of our global waste system. Through the book, Franklin-Wallis recounts his journey across the world and interactions with the people, processes and facilities responsible for the final stages of the capitalist production cycle. From recycling plants in the UK to toxic e-waste in Ghana, each chapter explores a fresh revulsion with the way global capitalism handles waste disposal.
Franklin-Wallis’ aim is to open readers’ eyes to what is too often left unseen. He starts with the Ghazipur landfill, a mountain of 14 million tonnes of garbage that “looms over” India’s capital New Delhi “as if someone has lifted a chunk of the Himalayas”. The scale is often incomprehensible, but Franklin-Wallis’ descriptions of the sights, sounds and unbearable smells help to convey the spectacle far better than any picture could. 
Franklin-Wallis emphasises the negative impacts of capitalism’s “wastelands” on both human beings and the environment. He doesn’t describe the Ghazipur landfill as if it were a purely aesthetic phenomenon. The reader is given a sociological background to the lower caste workers picking through the mountain of trash, and a harrowing description of a cloud of scavenger birds that have found their place amid the landfill’s ecosystem of rotting foodstuffs. Franklin-Wallis conveys, too, the joy some young children find with a half-empty bottle of bubble-making solution they salvaged. 
While reeling from the immense scale of a garbage pit in the UK so deep that his guide has never seen the bottom, Franklin-Wallis poses the question: “Do we hide our waste because we are disgusted, or ashamed?” The rest of the book makes clear, though, that it’s neither. The mass of people are disconnected from the “wastelands” of the production cycle the better to facilitate the profit-making of companies whose trash ends up there.
The primary consequence of waste is environmental degradation. The various dump sites discussed in Wasteland each produce “plumes of carbon dioxide”, and a single landfill in Pakistan was found to be emitting 126 tonnes of methane per hour. Plastics are particularly odious due to their inability to be fully broken down, with the upper ocean estimated to contain 24.4 trillion microplastic particles. 
The harmful environmental effects of waste are often not well understood, as there are an incredible number of different pollutants. One class of pollutants is known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs). POPs are not very soluble in water but very soluble in fats. This has resulted in them accumulating in whale blubber to the point that certain whale carcasses “are so contaminated they are classified as toxic waste”.
Keeping food waste hidden from view is also important to maintain the myth of global capitalism being an efficient economic system. <a href="https://www.wwf.eu/?4049841/fifteen-per-cent-of-food-is-lost-before-leaving-the-farm-WWF-report">According to the World Wildlife Fund</a>, 15.3 percent of all food produced is wasted before it even makes it to stores. Overall, according to the United Nations World Food Programme, a third of all food produced is wasted—weighing 931 million tonnes and worth US$1 trillion a year. This waste is both an indictment of the system’s inefficiency, as there are still hundreds of millions of people who are malnourished, and devastating for the environment. Food waste produces up to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. 
Recycling is a regularly proposed solution to the world’s waste problem that Franklin-Wallis explores. He is optimistic about this (perhaps overly), while acknowledging there are serious limitations. Globally, <a href="https://www.developmentaid.org/news-stream/post/158158/world-waste-statistics-by-country">less than 20 percent</a> of the more than 2 billion tonnes of household waste produced annually is recycled. And recycling is a drain on other resources too. For example, producing one kilogram of recycled paper requires 170 litres of water. Additionally, a proportion of waste can’t be recycled at all or only for a limited number of times. Many plastics in particular degrade over successive recycles and become toxic. 
Franklin-Wallis talks to the commercial director for a plastics company who, commenting on the recent corporate strategy of encouraging customers to return used plastic bags, says it’s “absolute bollocks isn’t it? It’s greenwashing ... most of it has gone to landfill or waste-to-energy”. The boss of a T-shirt recycling company tells him that if a truly “circular economy” where all products used were recycled was possible, it would involve someone buying clothes, wearing them once, and returning them to the producer without ever washing them. It would be, he says, “less of a closed system of ethical consumption than capitalism as hamster wheel, spinning ever faster”.
Franklin-Wallis discusses how profit-making is an essential component of recycling, waste management and sanitation systems under capitalism. Throughout the world, things happen only when some company can turn a profit. Much of the clothing that is sent for recycling in the West, for example, actually ends up being shipped to countries in the developing world, where a large portion of it is simply dumped, because it’s more profitable to do that than to recycle them. Rivers are polluted and people’s sources of water contaminated because companies won’t accept the cut to their profits that would result from disposing of waste safely elsewhere.
Franklin-Wallis describes how tanneries in India illegally dump chromium waste on roads, polluting the groundwater to 4,000 times the safe drinking limit designated by the World Health Organization. These kinds of breaches are unavoidable in a system in which the logics of profit-seeking and competition dominate. Often, too, the environmental regulations under which companies operate have been designed by governments in consultation with the biggest polluters to be both loose enough not to be a barrier to profit-making and intentionally confusing for consumers.
Inequalities and class differences in how people relate to waste and production are also intrinsic to capitalism. In Wasteland Franklin-Wallis often recounts tours of waste facilities led by, and discussions of waste and recycling with, the bosses and managers of companies. Where he relates to the workers, it is typically as an observer rather than as a direct interlocutor. While this somewhat one-sided class perspective does colour the book, Franklin-Wallis is never uncritical of what the bosses tell him and is incredibly sympathetic to the way workers and the poor are affected by the “wastelands” he discusses. 
When it comes to sanitation, in particular, Franklin-Wallis centres the impacts on the working class. In a way reminiscent of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, he shows how the advance of industry in the early days of capitalism resulted in an incredible depreciation of the standard of living for working-class people. He describes how the Thames river in London “was unimaginably polluted”, but that “despite the putrid state of the river, many of the city’s poorest inhabitants were still sourcing their drinking water from communal street pumps”. It was only, Franklin-Wallis says, after the smell started to affect the wealthy and the health of their labour supply that the ruling class began seriously to consider improvements to sanitation.
The working class and poor suffering from waste and sanitation-related illnesses is not a mere historical fact, but a persistent truth of modern capitalism. Franklin-Wallis points out that 1.7 billion people still do not have access to adequate sanitation. One in ten people globally consume unsafe drinking water, which is largely responsible for <a href="https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/diarrhoeal-disease/">1,200 children under five dying every day</a> from diarrhoea. 
As well as examining its health and environmental impacts, Franklin-Wallis emphasises how waste is dehumanising. He relates feeling sick just briefly walking around a waste dump full of animal carcasses. But, as his book makes clear, many people around the world are forced to live permanently in such conditions. On this point, Franklin-Wallis’s analysis could have benefited from reference to the Marxist concept of alienation, or the idea that capitalist and class societies generally remove people from what makes them human, and often force them to live in truly inhuman conditions.
Crucially, alienation explains how working-class people have no agency in, or real connection to, the production process. Whereas historically people laboured to meet definite needs and contribute to society, under capitalism the individual existence and personal goals of workers have no bearing on productive life at all, and the labour people perform is compelled and directed towards making profit. Franklin-Wallis’ question about why we hide from our waste is fundamentally misdirected. We, as workers, don’t hide from anything. Our fundamentally alienated existence means that what is, and isn’t, hidden from us is something that others—namely, the capitalist ruling class—decide for us. 
The disconnection of the mass of workers from production, and the waste that it generates, is something that the capitalist class facilitates and supports. The “throwaway” culture of contemporary capitalism, in which we’re encouraged to “buy, buy, buy” and think little or nothing of the waste we’re helping generate in the process, provides immense benefits to capitalists whose profits depend on selling things in ever greater quantities. Waste is hidden from us because it’s good for business.
Some of the proposals Franklin-Wallis offers at the conclusion of the book, such as rationalising packaging, are useful. However, a problem as great as waste—itself a product of the internal logic of capitalism—cannot be solved by anything short of a total restructuring of production and class relations with it. This is why Franklin-Wallis’ ultimate conclusion—that we should simply “buy less stuff”—falls so flat after much of the rest of the book lands so forcefully. 
Franklin-Wallis ends Wasteland by pondering a water bottle: “Who made this thing? How many lives has it touched, whose hands, whose lips?” Waste is a product of people, with their labour embodied in its creation. However, it won’t be until we have abolished capitalism that production, and waste, can be rationally organised in accordance with human needs.

Liam Kruger

Why do we hide from our waste?

If your news is coming from the Murdoch stable, you’d be forgiven for believing that university campuses across Australia and around the world are in absolute turmoil with students establishing “no go” zones and scaring off Jewish students with endless rounds of pro-Hamas slogans. In fact, the opposite is true. Peaceful protest camps have been attacked by violent Zionist mobs, only some of them in police uniforms.
If you see the Murdoch papers in your city or town, or you watch Sky News, then you’d know that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese thinks the call “from the river to the sea” is <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/anthony-albanese-issues-strongest-condemnation-yet-of-antiisrael-slogan-from-the-river-to-the-sea-in-interview-for-josh-frydenbergs-new-documentary/news-story/4cc00e220ad78e67bc1cc4181e2f0250">violent antisemitic speech</a>. But you probably wouldn’t know that for the past two weeks, the Israeli military has been bombing Rafah, the last safe haven in Gaza, killing dozens more civilians to add to the staggering numbers of dead bodies piling up outside the bombed-out hospitals, schools and mosques.
If you read the ruling-class opinion pieces in Newsweek, your head might actually explode. Here’s a headline from a column by Josh Levs published on 7 May, seven months after the start of what looks like an endless bloodbath—you might say “genocide”—that has killed more than 40,000 Gazans: “<a href="https://www.newsweek.com/mainstream-media-biased-against-israel-i-know-i-was-part-it-opinion-1898058">The mainstream media is biased against Israel. I know I was part of it</a>”. It is staggering that a semi-celebrity American columnist could believe such a thing in 2024, but here we are. You won’t be surprised to know that <a href="https://www.instagram.com/joshlevs/?hl=en">Josh Levs is a Zionist propagandist</a>.
Now, I don’t know what media Josh is consuming, but everywhere I look across the mainstream media, all I see is pro-Israel apologetics, inflammatory articles that call anti-genocide campaigners antisemites and editorials demanding the police throw students off campus for standing up against Zionist aggression.
The world’s biggest media brands—the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, Bild and Die Welt in Germany, alongside Fox News, CNN and even the BBC—have amplified every lie uttered by the Zionists: “Oh we didn’t bomb the hospital, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/10/26/gaza-hospital-blast-evidence-israel-hamas/">it was a Hamas rocket</a>”, “Hamas <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/unverified-allegations-beheaded-babies-israel-hamas-war-inflame-social-rcna119902">beheaded 40 babies</a>”, “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-67754837">tunnels, tunnels, tunnels</a>”, “Hamas is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/14/hamas-human-shields-tactic/">using human shields</a>”, “<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-04/gaza-aid-convoy-air-strike-visual-analysis-photos-israel/103662942">it was an accident</a> that we bombed that aid convoy/ preschool/doctor/journalist”, on and on and on it goes. 
The Australian media, and that includes the Age, the Guardian, the Saturday Paper
and the ABC, is no better. There have been massive protest marches in Melbourne and Sydney every weekend for seven months, but they’re apparently not newsworthy anymore. Protest action has been constant and widespread—perhaps the most significant mobilisations against war and oppression since the Vietnam Moratorium protests some 50 years ago. Unfortunately, the wise editors at Australia’s major media outlets can’t see past the latest press release from the Zionist Federation of Australia. They don’t seem to notice they’re missing the story of the decade.
There’s <a href="https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/01/10/images-of-war-are-shocking-they-also-can-strengthen-our-humanity">plenty of war-porn</a> on offer—casualty figures and carefully designed graphics showing where the Gazan population has been pushed to in recent days—but this is not designed to explain what’s actually happening. For the last eight months, the Israeli massacre in Gaza has been framed in the media as <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/eu-affirms-israels-right-to-self-defense-within-international-law/">an act of self-defence</a>. Sure, journalists are obliged to report <a href="https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&amp;&amp;p=bb098eeb5c6b95bcJmltdHM9MTcxNTEyNjQwMCZpZ3VpZD0yN2MzNjIyOS02MzdlLTY2NDktMWI2Ni03MDVlNjJhYjY3MGYmaW5zaWQ9NTMwNA&amp;ptn=3&amp;ver=2&amp;hsh=3&amp;fclid=27c36229-637e-6649-1b66-705e62ab670f&amp;psq=penny+wong+grave+concern+gaza&amp;u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc2t5bmV3cy5jb20uYXUvYnJlYWtpbmctbmV3cy9wZW5ueS13b25nLWlzcmFlbC1tdXN0LWFiaWRlLWJ5LWludGVybmF0aW9uYWwtbGF3LWV4cHJlc3Nlcy1yYWdlLW9mLXRoZS1uYXRpb24tdG8taXNyYWVsaS1jb3VudGVycGFydC9uZXdzLXN0b3J5LzE2NGVlMTllODUxYmY5ODU1YjdmZDMxNjVlM2FkODZi&amp;ntb=1">the occasional guilty utterance from Penny Wong</a> or Joe Biden that Israel should “<a href="https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&amp;&amp;p=d8359f3a575ba0dcJmltdHM9MTcxNTEyNjQwMCZpZ3VpZD0yN2MzNjIyOS02MzdlLTY2NDktMWI2Ni03MDVlNjJhYjY3MGYmaW5zaWQ9NTIzNA&amp;ptn=3&amp;ver=2&amp;hsh=3&amp;fclid=27c36229-637e-6649-1b66-705e62ab670f&amp;psq=Biden+tells+israel+to+be+careful&amp;u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly9lZGl0aW9uLmNubi5jb20vbWlkZGxlZWFzdC9saXZlLW5ld3MvaXNyYWVsLWhhbWFzLXdhci1nYXphLTEwLTExLTIzL2hfNzc3OGU1ZmY0ZjAyOGNkODdkZWNjNzg4NDQzYTg5ODM&amp;ntb=1">be careful</a>” where it drops its 2,000 pound bombs and try to “minimise” civilian casualties, but there’s so much that journalists are obliged not to report on.
From day one of its military operation in Gaza the Israeli military has been committing war crimes of unspeakable horror: murdering journalists, doctors, aid workers and over 15,000 children. In recent weeks, we found out that hundreds of people—medical staff, civilian adults, and children—had been <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/25/signs-of-torture-as-nearly-400-bodies-found-at-gaza-hospitals-mass-graves">handcuffed and shot at point-blank range</a> in the back of the head before being buried in hastily dug ditches. In the Western media at least, news of this tends to be buried along with the corpses.
It is war reporting reduced to spectacle and sanitised for Western audiences. Far from being anti-Israel, the mainstream media is complicit—through its actions or its silence—in one of the most horrendous acts of barbarism since the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August 1945.
Anyone with eyes to see has witnessed the horror. We’ve seen the broken limbs, the bloody faces and the lifeless toddlers covered in cement dust. We’ve seen the women and children being pulled from the collapsed apartment blocks. We’ve seen the rotting flesh and protruding bones of the innocents murdered and dumped in the mud by bloodthirsty, murdering cowards. We’ve seen the rows and rows of body bags, the grieving fathers, the lists of the dead, the maimed and the starving. We see all this every day in our social media feeds. 
The mainstream media tends to shy away from the harsh truth of the horrors in Gaza. Journalists and editors like to think that they sit above it all. Aloof and able to decide, like Solomon of the Biblical fable, who gets to see and hear which bits of information.
But it’s not like that at all. The mainstream news media is, above all, a business. Journalism is just another line on the balance sheet for media companies. For all the noble talk of a fearless Fourth Estate that holds the powerful to account, journalism is complicit in power. This has consequences too for the politics of the coverage that we see, not just of this war but of all wars and any conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has the blessing of governments in the West, from Washington to London, Paris, Berlin, Ottawa and Canberra. What ties these governments together—from conservative to liberal or social democratic—is their material interest in the system of imperialism. Media companies benefit from imperialism too, and they ensure that the journalists they hire will conform to similar ideological beliefs. This is why the horror is sanitised and the political explanation reduced to propaganda.
Reporters and editors who step out of line don’t last long; they get <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-11/antoinette-lattouf-abc-sydney-fair-work-commission-/103573364">blacklisted and sacked</a>. Zionist groups campaign against them to ensure they’re silenced. This is happening all over the world right now. Reporters, artists, prominent academics and anybody who dares to speak up against Israeli aggression is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/15/jonathan-glazer-oscars-speech-condemned-by-son-of-saul-director-laszlo-nemes">labelled an antisemite and hounded from public life</a>.
Of course, in the upside-down world in which Josh Levs thinks the mainstream media is to blame for Israel’s bad publicity, silencing anti-Zionists is righteous and moral. It could even be considered <a href="https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinian-campus-protests-columbia-congress-df4ba95dae844b3a8559b4b3ad7e058a">a defence of free speech</a>. This is the exact argument being put out by the Murdoch media about campus protests here in Australia and around the world. It might seem bizarre, but Murdoch columnists are actually attempting to convince us that the students’ Gaza solidarity encampments are an attack on free speech.
Governments have seen the power of the student protests that were set off a few weeks ago in New York, and they are doing everything in their power to crush this new anti-war movement before it overwhelms their lies.
A similar line of reasoning is being put forward about social media and, in particular, TikTok. The US Congress is demanding that TikTok be banned in America because, supposedly, it presents a threat to national security. It’s an absurd argument about how much data TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, collects and allegedly passes to the Chinese government (the hypocrisy here is mindboggling—all the US-owned social media companies regularly share data with the National Security Agency). 
In Australia, the heads of ASIO and the Federal Police have also come out against social media, describing it as a cesspit of hate speech and terrorist indoctrination. What these officials in Washington and Canberra are really worried about is that TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp are platforms where young people can talk to each other and share ideas outside of the control of teachers, preachers, parents, politicians and mainstream editors.
Politicians, bureaucrats and Murdoch editors hate the fact that the majority sentiment on TikTok and some other social media platforms is on the side of the Palestinians and making a mockery of the official pro-Israel propaganda.
As Josh Levs himself acknowledges, the growing awareness of young people about Israel and Palestine is dangerous for the imperialist status quo. Levs supports imperialism, so his solution is for <a href="https://www.aap.com.au/news/pm-concerned-by-social-cohesion-after-uni-protests/">governments to crack down on the sources of dissent</a>, what Levs calls “dangerous, violent radicalisation” on university campuses.
Our solution is the exact opposite. We celebrate the campus protests as a festival of the oppressed. We learn to read between the lines of the mainstream media and to recognise their constant lies and propaganda. We share the TikToks and the videos that make it out of Gaza so that we know, so that we understand, and so that we can act to end the barbarism of imperialism, once and for all.

Marty Hirst

Swimming against the mainstream on Palestine

Review of 12 Rules for Strife by Jeff Sparrow and Sam Wallman, Scribe publications, 2024 
From the first pages to the last, the hero of 12 Rules for Strife is: ourselves. 
Cartoonist Sam Wallman’s work is a regular feature of picket lines, protests, and union and radical publications in this country. In 12 Rules for Strife Sam teamed up with well known left-wing author Jeff Sparrow to create 128 pages of illustrations and argument, exploring how ordinary people collectively create and share thought, work, movement, controversy, and transformation—in other words, how we go about creating the “strife” needed to win a better world. 
Sam’s work, as always, is wonderful—both in the sense of “really great” and also “full of wonder”. The collective of strife-makers he portrays in this book is no mere accumulation of automatons. Human frailty, contradiction and uncertainty, as well as strength, well up out of every page. 
Sam somehow manages to capture the risk that each “ordinary” person bears in taking a single step on the path to extraordinary, history-making actions. His drawings capture that combination of nervousness and keeping our nerve when we take our first step to contradict a manager; the challenge in finding the courage (and the right approach) to start a conversation about workplace issues with a workmate; and how these individual acts flow out of and feed back into a bigger whole.
Changing the world is no walk in the park. A monstrous three-headed dog, recognisable to fans of Harry Potter and Greek mythology alike, makes an inconspicuous cameo in chapter three being walked by a (literal) cartoon capitalist. This horror then reappears in later chapters—off the leash, roaming at will, and on occasion being fed by some of our fellow workers.
This gets to one of the central political arguments of 12 Rules for Strife, which will be familiar to readers of Jeff Sparrow’s 2018 book Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right. In Trigger Warnings, Jeff argued that the decline in the level of struggle since the 1970s is intertwined with a political degeneration within the left. 
It used to be common sense on the left to view workers as having a vital interest in combating the oppression and division that capitalism creates. Workers could challenge that oppression, and overcome those divisions, through a combination of struggle and political argument. By contrast, much of the left today effectively treats the mass of workers as irrelevant or even an obstacle to social change, due to their contradictory and sometimes reactionary views. 
In 12 Rules for Strife Sam and Jeff, in word and in illustration, take aim at this elitist conception. The chapter headed “Reject smug politics” is a direct and very welcome attack on the idea that struggle and politics should be reserved for those who have already passed some test of political clarity or purity. 
The “direct politics” that Sam and Jeff advocate puts the actions of ordinary people, and especially workers, at the centre of any project for social change. They contrast this with “delegated politics”, where we’re relegated to the status of passive observers. 
This is a useful distinction. It’s also one that leaves plenty of room for argument, given that “direct politics” could encompass the contending approaches of socialism from below, syndicalism, and the muscular do-it-yourself reformism of many progressive trade union militants. The role of “strife” in the sense of polemic between these various approaches isn’t explored in this brief book. 
Perhaps a more consequential omission is the role of political organisation: after all, throughout history it has been organised political forces that have played a crucial role in determining how far waves of struggle and radicalisation can go. No doubt the argument can (and no doubt it should) continue about which rule or rules we might like to add, or to tweak: 12 Rules for Strife
is an intervention into an argument, not the final word.
12 Rules for Strife is a wonderful political manifesto, released at an extraordinary political moment. The book came out on 1 May, just as student encampments in solidarity with the people of Palestine were spreading from Columbia University in New York to campuses across the US and around the world. 
In the week or so since I read Sam and Jeff’s book, I’ve been able to visit several of the student encampments around Melbourne. In a time of horror, it’s been a wonderful experience—again, in both senses of that word. 
At each of the camps, whatever was going on, there was an electricity in the air that came from the awareness that many thousands of people around the world were doing precisely what we were doing at that moment: putting up a tent, defending an encampment either physically or politically, leafleting and chalking, or engaging with students to draw more people in and to discuss the politics and history of the Palestinian struggle and the importance of solidarity. 
More than once, I’ve felt what Sam portrays as a recurring motif in this book: the tendrils of thought and human connection, energy, and purpose that bind us to each other, and to a bigger whole. Many thousands of us, perhaps many millions, are joining each other in strife.

Jerome Small

Choose strife

Conservatives in Australia and around the world love attacking universities for their supposed “woke” culture and failure to protect free speech. The Coalition government under Scott Morrison was so concerned about the issue that, in 2018, it commissioned a <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22media%2Fpressrel%2F6607701%22">formal inquiry</a> into it. And in the years since, right-wing politicians, commentators, and institutions like the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA) haven’t ceased talking about what they claim is a <a href="https://ipa.org.au/publications-ipa/parliamentary-research-briefs/parliamentary-research-brief-the-free-speech-crisis-in-australian-universities-and-how-to-solve-it">“crisis of free speech”</a> on campuses.
Last year, the IPA released its<a href="https://ipa.org.au/publications-ipa/research-papers/free-speech-on-campus-audit-2023"> Free Speech on Campus Audit 2023</a>. It found (unsurprisingly, given this exercise in propaganda involved little that resembled genuine research) that restrictions on free speech abounded. Among other things, the IPA complained that “freedom of expression is put at risk by university policies which prohibit a wide variety of speech including ‘insulting’, ‘unwelcome’ and ‘offensive comments’”. It also warned against the adoption of free speech codes which “restrict speech deemed ‘unsafe’”. 
Right-wingers are avowed enemies of the notion that students should be protected in any way from ideas or speech they may find offensive or that make them feel unsafe. Given this, you might have expected that when students in the US, Australia and around the world began exercising their right to free speech by protesting in support of the Palestinians, right-wingers would have defended their right to do so—even if some students were upset by it.
And when the university managers attempted to silence the students, as they have so brutally in the US—using violence to repress the students’ political expression—you would have expected right-wingers to be up in arms. Isn’t this precisely the repressive, offense-adverse culture of universities they continually complain about? Isn’t this cancellation at its worst and most violent? 
Apparently not. Instead of celebrating the flourishing of free speech that the campus pro-Palestine encampments represent, the right have been united in their calls for harsh repression by university authorities and, where that fails, the police.
This has been most stark in the US. There, neither liberals nor conservatives have had any qualms about bringing the full force of the law down on the heads of the students. Starting with Columbia University in New York, the site of the first Gaza solidarity encampment, masses of police have been mobilised to smash up protests. As of 9 May, more than 2,000 protesters had been arrested, and many injured.
In Australia too, right-wing politicians like Peter Dutton have pushed universities to crack down on the campus protests. In <a href="https://www.2gb.com/peter-dutton-questions-labor-governments-mixed-responses-to-anti-israel-slogans/">an interview with radio station 2GB </a>on 9 May, Dutton equated Palestine supporters chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” with “what Hitler chanted in the 1930s”, and he has repeatedly <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/dutton-calls-on-unis-to-shut-down-pro-palestinian-protests-20240502-p5fogj">called on universities and the government</a> to do more to repress the student encampments. 
The Liberals’ education spokesperson Senator Sarah Henderson similarly described the pro-Palestine encampments at universities as “intolerable”. Talking to Sky News on 9 May, she claimed to believe that “free speech and academic freedom are fundamental on university campuses”, but then wheeled out, by way of justification for a crackdown, the completely ludicrous and unfounded claim that other students’ “right to go about [their] studies peacefully” was being threatened. The universities themselves contradict this claim—one of the reasons they have not been able to crack down on the protests is that they do not violate the universities’ codes of conduct, which include prohibitions on violence towards other students. 
Even the erstwhile free speech warriors at the IPA have switched overnight into the pearl-clutching, “call the police” camp. In an 2 May <a href="https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/no-safe-spaces-for-jewish-students-at-universities-20240430-p5fnkg#:~:text=There%20are%20no%20%E2%80%9Csafe%20spaces,but%20this%20time%2C%20it's%20different.">article for the Financial Review</a>, current IPA senior fellow and former executive director John Roskam said it was “wishful thinking” to assert that the Australian Palestine encampments are peaceful, and implied that criminal charges should be laid against students.
This hypocrisy points to the real reason for the right’s claimed concern with “free speech” at universities. It’s not really a concern about “freedom” or “free speech” in general. Instead, it’s exclusively about the ability of the right to effectively promote and propagate its ideas on university campuses, as well as in the mainstream media, schools, churches and all the other places where conservatives are accustomed to having their views predominate.
The right abhors the fact that in the much degraded, but still relatively free atmosphere of intellectual engagement and exchange that exists at universities, progressive and left-wing views tend to prevail, particularly in disciplines like the humanities. It hopes that by constantly complaining about the supposed university “free speech crisis” it will pressure universities to somehow tip the scales of debate to the right, creating a “safe space” for fragile and under-confident right-wingers to speak their minds and counter the hegemony the left enjoys over political life at many campuses. These are the institutions training the future politicians, state administrators, commentators and CEOs, after all—attendees need to be hardened up to run the system, not learning to care about dead Palestinian children.
The right simply cannot tolerate an area of society where their politics aren’t accepted as gospel and challenges to their authority are dismissed as fringe concerns. So when they complain about the stifling of conservative speech on campuses, it’s more a matter of right-wingers feeling resentful that they are isolated and that a large majority of their fellow students are likely to find their views repugnant. This is less a matter of so-called “cancel culture” than one of “cowardice culture” on the part of the right—of being intimidated out of voicing particular opinions by the likely social consequences of doing so.
Seen in this light, the right’s unceremonious junking of its professed commitment to free speech in the context of student pro-Palestine protests makes perfect sense. If your aim isn’t to foster free speech as such, but merely to promote an atmosphere in which right-wing speech can flourish, then the situation on campuses today is dire indeed. Instead of feeling safer and more confident to express their views, supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and other campus right-wingers are running scared. 
What Israel is doing in Gaza is so thoroughly indefensible that there’s no hope of winning anyone much to support them through open debate and discussion. The right can go some way to addressing this problem in broader society via a constant barrage of pro-Israel propaganda from politicians and the media. The brave stand made by students at universities around the world means that there, stronger measures are necessary.

James Plested

Right-wing hypocrisy on free speech

German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht’s life spanned the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century. It was shaped by war, revolution, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and Stalinism and the Cold War, and his work reflects this. “Art”, he said, “is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”.
Brecht famously developed a new and revolutionary theory of the theatre—generally known as “epic theatre”, though he himself referred to it as “dialectical theatre”—that is still influential today. His plays are regularly performed all over the world, and frequently crop up on school curricula. Many features of epic theatre were incorporated into film theory in the 1970s. The films of US director Spike Lee, for example, owe a lot to Brechtian theory. Many people who have never heard of Brecht will have seen his innovations in film and theatre.
Brecht was 16 when World War One began. In 1915, while still at school, he wrote an essay arguing that there was no honour in dying for your country. He was conscripted in the last months of the war and set to work as a medical orderly. This experience further strengthened his horror of war and his hatred of the society that produced it. He later recalled: “As a very young man I was mobilised, and served in a hospital ... I saw with my own eyes how they patched up people post-haste so as to ship them back to the front as soon as possible”. His fiercely anti-war poem, “The Legend of the Dead Soldier”, was based on this experience and had him on the Nazis’ death list as early as 1923.
Brecht was a minor participant in the revolution that ended the war in 1918, serving as a delegate in the short-lived Bavarian soviet. After moving to Berlin to work in the theatre, Brecht found himself at the centre of the flowering of radical art and literature during the Weimar Republic years. In 1922, he was awarded the Kleist Prize, the most important German literary award of the time, for his play Drums in the Night, set against the background of the Spartacist uprising in 1919. The play shone a light on the grievances felt by many working-class soldiers returning from the front to find that their class had been deceived by politicians and robbed by war profiteers. 
Germany was in a continuous state of economic and political crisis during the 1920s, and society was polarised along class lines. Brecht was disgusted by Weimar Germany: the greed, corruption and smug self-satisfaction of the triumphant German bourgeoisie, the treachery of the Social Democrats and the wretchedness of workers and the poor. 
In about 1926, Brecht began a serious study of Marxism, under the guidance of Karl Korsch and Walter Benjamin. He delighted in Marxism’s scientific approach and intellectual rigour. His two short poems “Praise of Communism” and “Praise of the Dialectic” are testament to his newly found enthusiasm. He later said: “When I read Das Kapital, I understood my own pieces”, and commented, “This chap Marx was the first person to really understand my plays”. 
Many Brecht scholars attempt to separate his art from his politics. The usual take is that Brecht was a great artist despite all that Marxist nonsense he espoused. But for Brecht, art and politics were inseparable. From the late 1920s, all of his work was underpinned by his Marxist world view.
In 1928, he found fame and fortune virtually overnight with The Threepenny Opera—a stinging critique of Weimar society and capitalism more generally. Yet, much to his consternation, the capitalists, who were targeted in the play, ate it up. They loved the songs, they loved the wit and the drama, but the politics and the savage satire went right over their heads. 
The success of The Threepenny Opera got Brecht thinking about how to ensure that his political critique couldn’t be missed or ignored in future. Theatre audiences, he said, “hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”. He wanted to create a theatre that had the opposite effect, a theatre that forced its audience to think, to ask questions, make judgements, draw conclusions and, hopefully, act on them.
Traditional naturalistic or dramatic theatre is escapist—the aim is to make the audience forget their own lives, passively immerse themselves in the world of the characters on stage and identify with their emotions. Issues are resolved, whether happily or tragically, and the audience undergoes a process of catharsis. 
Brecht was utterly opposed to this. He wanted his audience to remain objective and emotionally uninvolved so that they could make rational judgements about the issues raised in his plays. The story is the point of interest, not the characters. The story shows the interplay of social forces represented by various characters, and from this the play’s lesson or moral emerges.
To achieve the latter’s aims, Brecht used a range of theatrical devices and techniques to constantly remind the audience that they were watching a theatrical presentation of life, not life itself. To create a distance between the audience and the action, he often used historical or exotic settings to comment on contemporary social and political issues. For example, Joan of Arc becomes a Salvation Army operative in a Chicago meatworks in St Joan of the Stockyards. His anti-war play Mother Courage was set during the Thirty Years War to encourage the audience to think in historical terms about the material causes of war. And rather than developing in a linear way, the action was chopped into discrete scenes or episodes to create a montage effect. 
Brecht wanted to break down the “fourth wall” so audiences could never forget that they were watching a play. For example, non-realistic sets were rearranged by stage hands in full view of the audience; at times the whole theatre would be lit up, not just the stage.
For the same reason, he used devices such as a narrator or chorus to comment on the action, often speaking directly to the audience. Signs and placards were used to provide information about what was really happening, songs and dance interrupted the action and commented on it. 
These techniques and more are collectively known as Verfremdungseffekte, which is often rendered in English as “alienation”. This is somewhat misleading, as it invites comparison with the Marxist concept of alienation (Entfremdung). Verfremdung in fact is the familiar made strange, so that it can be objectively examined and analysed, rather than being taken for granted and viewed as natural. For Brecht, if something seems “the most obvious thing in the world”, it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up. So “estrangement” is a better description of Brecht’s theatrical techniques. 
Consistent with his view of the theatre as a sphere of production, Brecht worked in a highly collaborative way. Anyone who worked with him was encouraged to comment and make suggestions, from the actors themselves to stagehands and technicians.
As Brecht developed the theory and practice of epic theatre, he experimented with a form known as the Lehrstück, or teaching play. He described these pieces as “a collective political meeting” in which the audience actively participated. They were sometimes performed at workplaces, with the performance followed by a political debate. Brecht would invite comment from the audience and would at times adopt their suggestions. 
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Brecht was forced to join the diaspora of left-wing German artists and intellectuals in exile. His work in this period was largely devoted to the anti-fascist struggle. His play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui was a satire on the rise of fascism, the Nazis being portrayed as gangsters. He also wrote a lot of songs and children’s rhymes intended to contribute to the fight against fascism, both within Germany and beyond. “The Song of the United Front”, for example, was sung by socialists who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. 
To those who derided this work and accused him of simply churning out propaganda, he replied: “You can’t write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen”. 
Once the war started, Brecht wasn’t safe in Western Europe. He briefly considered going to Russia, but was warned not to by, among others, the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács, who told him he wouldn’t be safe there either. Brecht’s work was considered suspect, if not outright decadent, in a country where only “socialist realist” art was tolerated.
Brecht’s mentor Karl Korsch had been a leading member of the German Communist Party (KPD), but in 1926 was expelled for “deviationism”. This caused Brecht to develop a lifelong distrust of party officialdom. The feeling was mutual; the Stalinist KPD was not a fan of his work. Nonetheless, Brecht was pulled towards the KPD. It seemed to him and many others that only a mass working-class party could fight the rise of fascism. 
But in private writings and conversations, Brecht was ambivalent about Stalin’s Russia. Stalin’s industrialisation program was in reality about the rapid and forced accumulation of capital, in order to catch up to and compete with Western capitalism. But like many others at the time, Brecht saw in it the development of the productive forces, and therefore believed Russia to be historically progressive. 
However, he also recognised—and unfortunately accepted—that the price of that “progress” involved the destruction of workers’ democracy: “In Russia there is a dictatorship over the working class. We should avoid dissociating ourselves from this dictatorship for as long as it still does useful work for the workers”. As Isaac Deutscher put it, Brecht “surrendered to Stalinism with a load of doubt on his mind, as the capitulators in Russia had done”.
Brecht was dismayed by the purges of the late 1930s, which claimed the lives of some of his closest associates and friends. Not wishing to share their fate, he went to the US. But his hopes of making a living there were soon dashed, and he found himself blacklisted. Of 40 film scripts he wrote, only one was accepted, and it was censored so severely that he withdrew it. It was in this period that he wrote or completed his most famous plays: Life of Galileo, Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Good Person of Setzuan. 
Shortly after the war, Brecht was hauled before the McCarthyist House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and grilled about the political content of his work, especially the didactic plays. The day after his hearing, he took a plane back to Europe. Despite all his reservations about Stalinism, he felt he had to take sides in a world now dominated by the Cold War between the US and the USSR. 
From a personal perspective, the West offered him only continued persecution. The East German regime, only too delighted to have an artist of his stature to lend it credibility, offered him his own theatre. But Brecht was cautious: he came back with an Austrian passport and a Swiss bank account.
Brecht soon came into conflict with the Stalinist cultural bureaucracy, which censored his plays and even banned two of them. The most influential theatre magazine ran a campaign against him. Then, on 17 June 1953, East German workers rose up in the first major revolt against Stalinism. It was brutally put down by Soviet troops. 
Brecht sympathised with the workers; he wrote a letter to the secretary of the SED (the ruling Socialist Unity Party) calling for dialogue on their grievances. But he made the fatal mistake of concluding his letter with a statement of general support for the party. To his dismay, that was the only sentence that was published. 
This was pretty much the end of Brecht’s public life. He retreated to his country house, where he poured his disillusionment and feelings of bad conscience into his final poems. “The Solution” (not published until 1964) is the pithy, satirical Brecht, holding the East German regime up to criticism and ridicule, as he’d done before against the Nazis:
After the uprising of the 17th June The Secretary of the Writers’ Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalin Avenue Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another? 









Brecht died in August 1956, only a couple of months before the Hungarian revolution shook the Stalinist empire. 
Just a year before the 1989 revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall and heralded the collapse of the Stalinist monolith, the East German government built a monument to Brecht. A plaque quotes from his play The Mother:
Who still lives, should not say never! The secure is not secure So, the way it is, it will not remain.


But, perhaps unsurprisingly, Brecht’s prophetic concluding lines are missing:
After the rulers have spoken The ruled will speak.

Brecht never lost his belief in Marxism or his conviction that the working class was the agent of human liberation. But the crimes of Stalinism, and the seeming lack of an alternative, shook his confidence and brought him close to despair. Yet his very last poem, while expressing his feelings of failure, is also a plea not to give up.
And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself Surely you see that.

Tess Lee Ack

The revolutionary theatre of Bertolt Brecht

The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, Resistance Fighters and Firebrands By Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone Interventions, 2024. 385 pages 



As Israel lays waste to Gaza, an ideological battle rages over who can lay legitimate claim to Jewish identity and historical experience. So this excellent new work by Donny Gluckstein and Janey Stone—unapologetic Marxists, Jews and anti-Zionists—could hardly be timelier.
Zionism extols what Gluckstein and Stone refer to as the “lachrymose” (tearful) interpretation of Jewish history, according to which Jews meekly submitted to centuries of repression, only to find redemption through the establishment of Israel as a Jewish ethno-state. In contrast, Gluckstein and Stone uncover the radical Jewish tradition, which combated anti-Semitism with socialist politics and international working-class solidarity, encompassing Jews and non-Jews alike.
The spread of capitalism across Europe revolutionised social structures and political agencies. Confronted by an increasingly self-conscious working class, the capitalist class and its hangers-on came to rely on nationalism and racism to forge alternative political identities that did not threaten their rule.
This included using anti-Semitism to turn sections of the working class against each other, especially in eastern and central Europe. Gluckstein and Stone demonstrate how anti-Semitism was not innate among non-Jewish workers but was consciously promulgated by the ruling classes in a strategy of divide and rule. The result was pogroms, systematic discrimination and ultimately the Holocaust.
Anti-Semitism drew three main responses from the European Jewish community. First, liberal assimilationism emphasised political respectability and adaptation to locally dominant national cultures. Second, Zionism—Jewish nationalism—argued that anti-Semitism could not be defeated within Europe, and that Jews needed their own nation-state to protect their interests. These responses were popular among the minority of middle- and upper-class Jews.
But the majority of European Jews were workers. They confronted both the economic exploitation common to their class and the racism specifically directed at Jews. Only the socialist movement promised to eradicate the single underlying cause of this dual oppression: capitalism. Consequently, Jews played a disproportionately important role in the development of the socialist movement, both as leaders and among the rank and file.
Jewish socialists frequently clashed with conservative religious leaders, middle-class Jews who craved respectability, and Jewish factory owners who were happy to exploit their co-religionists—or occasionally refused to employ Jewish workers because they were too rebellious! These conflicts shattered the illusion of a unitary Jewish community. 
Defying their impoverishment and political repression, working-class Jews again and again showed their fighting spirit. Stone and Gluckstein trace these stories of resistance from the ghettos of eastern Europe to the slums and sweatshops of New York and London’s East End. The class struggle encompassed consumer boycotts, rent strikes and above all unionisation and strikes. Jewish workers were in particular pioneers of the class struggle in the Russian empire, where they frequently made up a high proportion of the urban working class.
Socialists also organised resistance against anti-Semitism. Armed militias defended communities against pogroms in eastern Europe, while mass mobilisations drove back the British Union of Fascists in 1930s London. Even when unsuccessful, such actions developed political consciousness and self-respect among participants. A particularly moving chapter describes the heroic defiance of armed ghetto uprisings against the Nazis.
Gluckstein and Stone do not shy away from the political debates thrown up in the course of struggle. Some currents combined aspects of socialism with Jewish nationalism, resulting in so-called labour Zionism. This contradictory approach inevitably resulted in Zionist chauvinism winning out over socialist internationalism. Labour Zionists eventually played a key role in the establishment of Israel and the dispossession of Palestinian workers and peasants.
There were also socialists who argued that Jews needed to form separate political parties and unions, exclusive of non-Jews, to counter their specific racial oppression. This foreshadowed what we would today call “identity politics” and “autonomous organising”. But the most successful approach was that of the Bolshevik party, in which many Jews played a leading role. They insisted that all workers should unite in revolutionary organisations, so they could more effectively struggle together against both racism and capitalism. Under Bolshevik leadership, the Russian Revolution was a highpoint in the fight against anti-Semitism, with legal equality secured and pogroms at last suppressed in the land of the tsars.
Ultimately, the Jewish radical tradition shared the fate of the wider European revolutionary socialist movement, suffering crushing defeats under Nazism and Stalinism. Zionism emerged as the dominant political force among Jews following World War Two.
But, as Gluckstein and Stone argue, those earlier generations of rebels have bequeathed a vital political legacy to socialists today:
“This is not a sectional history; it belongs not just to Jews or Jewish socialists but to all people who fight back against the horrors of capitalism, who engage in the struggle to transform the world. It is ... a guide to uniting to resist the threat of annihilation that has returned today.”

Want to keep your job? Shut up

Vale Mannie de Saxe

How US union leaders worked with the CIA to undermine democracy

The West’s war on workers’ power in Russia

Why do we hide from our waste?

Swimming against the mainstream on Palestine

Choose strife

Right-wing hypocrisy on free speech

The revolutionary theatre of Bertolt Brecht

Documenting Jewish radicalism

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