The death of Charlie Kirk has made me think about the growth of the right-wing presence on US campuses during the last three decades. The student right during these years morphed from Ronald Reagan boosters into the neo-Fascist <a href="https://threewayfight.org/what-charlie-kirks-life-and-death-can-tell-us-about-the-u-s-right-in-the-age-of-trump/?fbclid=IwY2xjawM4ESNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHu8PqzTEntFEztYxLQuEmyv4smjV33BW_JmQofQ3W6Q8P5lUO81PBwPWMsvq_aem_l9157vR0G7XvFPGl73RotA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Christian nationalists</a> of Turning Point USA. Yet one of the major reasons for the success of Charlie Kirk and his roadshow was the weakness of the campus left. Another was the financial and political backing from the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/turning-point-usa-donations-surged-pandemic-rcna37143" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">rich and powerful</a> from its very founding, despite its origin mythology of starting out in Kirk’s family’s garage.
Scanning through many articles documenting the growth of Kirk’s “nonprofit” foundation during the past decade is like watching a well-capitalised media start-up with aspirations to become a global player. Turning Point’s <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800835023/202501359349304810/full" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IRS tax return</a> reported, for example, that it had revenues over $86 million in 2024. Kirk received a salary of over $285,000 and another $99,000 in compensation. Not huge in corporate terms. But, for student politics, this was unprecedented. This <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&amp;v=WORO-OgThig" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">gushy video tour</a> of Turning Point’s headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2019 gives an idea of the burgeoning confidence of Kirk and his entourage.
The post-sixties campus
Whether you date the decline of the campus left in the waning years of the Vietnam War or in the decade that followed, when the New Left turned to the working class, it was pretty clear by the late 1970s and early 1980s that the right had begun to build a significant presence on college campuses. Not everywhere at once, of course, it was a herky-jerky process. The Republican Party, however, took building their campus operations far more seriously than the Democrats, who, from my perspective, appeared virtually non-existent, disorganised and had little political appeal.
The Republicans drew many of their future leading cadres from battles within the College Republicans and against the student left, liberal faculty members, and administrators. Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, for example, future Republican presidential campaign managers and advisers, first cut their teeth in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/05/us/man-in-the-news-fierce-ambition-karl-rove.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">College Republican politics</a> in the 1970s. On campuses previously known for their liberalism and radicalism, typical of the media coverage of the time was a New York Times article from 1984, “Students Leaning to the Right”:
“In his freshman year at Princeton University, Peter Heinecke joined a campus organization so low key that hardly anyone knew it existed. It was the Princeton University College Republicans. ‘It was pretty much a dead thing’, Mr. Heinecke recalled. So much so, in fact, that nobody even bothered to renew the club’s registration with the Dean’s Office. That was last year.
“This year, in the flush of President Reagan’s re-election victory, the College Republicans is very much alive. Membership has grown from a mere handful of students a year ago to 200, with double that on the mailing list. As unusual as the conservative trend might seem at Princeton—a traditionally liberal school—it is hardly an isolated example. On campuses across the nation, students are increasingly becoming aligned with the Republican Party.”
The College Republicans were joined in their efforts by local initiatives that gained a national following, such as the <a href="https://dartreview.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Dartmouth Review</a>, founded at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1980. Anti-apartheid activists built <a href="https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/journeys.dartmouth.edu/dist/3/834/files/2016/05/DivestmentProtests-MandelaHall-1985.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“shanty towns”</a> on the Dartmouth campus to highlight the racial oppression and poverty of the Black majority in South Africa in 1986. Calling themselves the Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival, twelve Dartmouth students—ten of whom were on the staff of the Dartmouth Review—attacked and destroyed the shanties with sledgehammers on Martin Luther King Day. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/13/us/at-dartmouth-the-right-borrows-the-protest-mantle-of-the-left.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">According</a> to an article in the New York Times:
“But the shanty episode is only the latest part of a long campaign by The Review against most of the moves the college has made in the last decade to show sensitivity to women, nonwhites and homosexuals. ‘There is freedom of speech here as long as you’re firmly left of center’, said Roland Reynolds, the editor of The Review. ‘It’s the idea that you can’t criticize people who happen to be black, who happen to be women.’ He described the crew that attacked the shanties as ‘the Bernhard Goetz of Dartmouth’.”
Bernhard Goetz was the infamous New York City <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771433/fear-and-fury-by-heather-ann-thompson/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“Subway gunman”</a> who shot four Black teenagers—and paralysed one of them—claiming they tried to rob him and he was defending himself. That a Dartmouth Review editor would openly identify with a racist vigilante, while its staff eagerly participated in a sledgehammer attack on anti-apartheid activists, speaks volumes about their racism and embrace of political violence against their opponents on the campus by 1986. The Dartmouth Review had rich and powerful friends, including <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2015/12/08/the-crusade-against-political-correctness" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ronald Reagan</a>. This was long before Charlie Kirk was around.
In the early 1990s, the campus far right received a boost from then-President George H.W. Bush with his infamous attack on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01kX1WGdJWc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“political correctness”</a>—a forerunner of the current attack on “woke”—during his commencement speech at the University of Michigan in May 1991. Bush was not known for his emotional displays, but he clearly enjoyed giving the speech, buoyed by the support of many students in the audience. Bush’s attack was enthusiastically taken up by the <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2015/12/08/the-crusade-against-political-correctness" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">mass media and intellectual pundits</a> with the broad support of the Republican establishment and a correspondingly weak response from the Democrats and most college and university administrators.
I was a member of the <a href="https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/international-socialism-is-my-north-star-c3730df819ba">International Socialist Organization</a> at the time, and we were one of the few socialist organisations that tried to build on a handful of college campuses despite our small size. We immediately recognised the threat that Bush’s attack on “political correctness” posed to the small, very limited gains made by African-Americans and other minorities, women and working-class students, who had suffered major setbacks during the two terms of Reagan’s presidency. Bush’s election triumph in 1988 was viewed by many of us as Reagan’s third term. The ISO <a href="https://archive.org/details/whats-behind-the-attck-on-politically-correct" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">published a pamphlet</a>, What’s Behind the Attack on Politically Correct?, by Lance Selfa and Alan Mass. They wrote in the introduction:
“No sooner had President Bush announced the end of the war against Iraq than he declared a new war at home. The battle wasn’t to be fought with weapons, but with idea. Its armies would be made up of right-wing ideologues, media pundits, university faculty, and students, not soldiers.”
The ISO was much better prepared to deal with this new witch hunt than many groups in the US left that had little to no campus presence. Even though we had a tiny number of members nationally in early 1990 (possibly 200), we bolstered our presence during the buildup to and war against Iraq during the latter half of 1990 and early 1991. We launched the National Network of Campuses Against the War, though short-lived, and we were able to project ourselves beyond a handful of campuses.
Under the perfect sun
In 1992, I was living in San Diego, California. An old friend and comrade, Phil, and I were trying to build a branch in a city that hadn’t had a previous branch of the ISO. I know that there were more than a few people who thought that our effort was more like a long vacation. I saw it as a fun adventure. San Diego had a reputation for being a <a href="https://archive.org/details/underperfectsuns00davi/page/n14/mode/1up?view=theater" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">major tourist destination</a> and very conservative. Our small ISO branch was largely active at the University of California at San Diego campus located in La Jolla, a rich, scenic seaside enclave. The campus felt more like a resort. Our campus club was called the International Socialist Club.
But San Diego had a radical tradition, despite being a Navy town with major Marine Corps bases nearby and having a large Christian evangelical presence. Socialist writer, novelist and historian Dan LaBotz <a href="https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/the-intellectual-autobiography-of-an-american-leftist/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">recalled</a>:
“I finished high school in 1963, went to Southwestern Community College in Chula Vista, then to San Diego State, graduating in 1968, and a year later went to the University of California at San Diego where I studied literature with <a href="https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/fredric-r-jameson-1934-2024/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Fredric Jameson</a>. I also sat in on <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Herbert Marcuse’s</a> undergraduate lectures on Marx and, on one occasion, convinced him to lead a discussion of the Paris Commune for the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, of which I was a member. I helped to form a small IS chapter that engaged in strike support. Already a supporter of the United Farm Workers then organizing agricultural workers in California, we joined boycott picket lines at grocery stores, and also participated in strike support at a tomato ranch. We also supported a Greyhound Bus lines drivers’ strike.”
UCSD did have some radical legacy, including the New Indicator newspaper and its “Disorientation Manual”, a radical introduction to the campus, and a weekly film series with a political discussion after. Within the city limits, San Diego was pretty much like any other big American city, but it was surrounded by suburbs that were a bastion of the Christian right, replete with a <a href="https://creationsd.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Creation and Earth Science Museum</a>. I remember my first night in the city—I was out jogging and paused to take a breath when a car stopped in front of me with a bumper sticker that proclaimed, “Rocks prove creation!”
In the early 1990s, historic changes were beginning to reshape San Diego. The post-Cold War and post-Gulf War reorganisation and downsizing of the defence industry, along with Bush’s recession that hit the city and county hard, especially housing construction, sent the economy into near depression. In 1992, however, it was the <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2011/08/19/no-justice-no-peace" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">rebellion in Los Angeles</a>, following the acquittal of three of the four police officers in the assault on Rodney King in April, that was a lightning bolt that shook up campus politics at the very end of the Spring.
President George H.W. Bush also faced a challenge from his right, first with fascist sympathiser Pat Buchanan in the Republican primaries, and then an independent presidential campaign with the strange character of Ross Perot. All of this took the swagger of the UCSD Republicans, who increasingly gave off the aura of a defeated army. But some of the others on the right saw an opportunity. Three weeks after the LA rebellion, hundreds of posters were plastered across campus, along with hundreds of invitations on cards placed at the cafeteria dining tables, inviting the campus community to a lecture sponsored by the Objectivist Study Group, the followers of <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/garbage-and-gravitas/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">right-wing crackpot</a> Ayn Rand.
The speaker was George Reisman, an economics professor at Pepperdine University and a well-known figure among followers of Ayn Rand. The title of his lecture was “Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism”. Reisman wanted to target ethnic studies at UCSD, which he denigrated as “worshipping your savage ancestors”. He had a long involvement in far-right politics stretching back to the mid-1950s. At a banquet dinner honouring Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man and mentor to Donald Trump, who was forced to resign from his committee assignments because of the swing public opinion against McCarthy, Time magazine <a href="https://time.com/archive/6869342/opinion-one-enchanted-evening/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reported</a>:
“The noise rose several decibels when 17-year-old Columbia University Sophomore George Reisman of Students for America called Cohn the ‘American Dreyfus’ and barked: ‘Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy will be redeemed when the people have taken back their government from the criminal alliance of Communists, Socialists, New Dealers and the Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans.’”
Four decades later, he was at UCSD to attack Black and Latino students, faculty and administrators. Reisman was one of the direct connections between the old and new McCarthyism. The UCSD Department of Ethnic Studies at that time was two years old. Walking across campus that day, I saw many people reading the posters but not knowing quite what to make of them. Was this some weird prank? The Objectivists were a campus club, but not known for such provocative behaviour; they were dismissed as a small group of marginal weirdos with little cache. This meeting had all the hallmarks of an outside and well-funded operation.
Our small ISO kicked into high gear. We talked to everyone and every organisation on campus that we needed to picket the meeting and fill the hall to challenge whatever vile bigotries were going to be spewed out that night. Despite our hard work, we weren’t sure how many people were going to turn out. The night of 13 May, we began our picket with fifteen to twenty people outside the lecture hall. Phil made one of his class flyers, “Fight Racism. Defend Multiculturalism!”
It appeared to us that most of the crowd going into the lecture hall was from off campus; they gave off the vibe of being rich weirdos from La Jolla. Reisman and his coterie were incensed that we were protesting. They came out of the hall to stare at us and shake their heads. The hatred in his eyes was incredible. He went back into the hall, and then we came in. Our numbers grew, but at the beginning of the lecture we were outnumbered about two to one. There were about 50 of us and a hundred of them. The chair of the meeting began by reminding us that this lecture was to be copyrighted and not to be quoted without permission. There was a burst of laughter from our section of the audience. Reisman was not pleased.
Right away, he denounced us as “commissars” who stifled “free speech”. By the time Reisman’s lecture began, our supporters in the audience were about equal in number with the Objectivists. Reisman’s speech, with his repetitive drumbeat of the phrases “savage ancestors” and “western civilisation”, along with his sneering tone, enraged the audience. People exploded. “Don’t call my ancestors savages!”, Reisman snapped back, “Who the hell are you? Shut up!”, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. A Gulf War veteran, who wore a gas mask and biochemical gear, rose every time Reisman said “western civilisation”, holding a poster of a slave ship over his head and turning to the audience. He later told me an older woman kept punching him in the back of the head the entire meeting.
It was the only campus protest where I thought a fight would break out because people were so enraged by the provocative racism of the speaker. The meeting got so rowdy that the campus police were called, and slowly the meeting dispersed. The Objectivists were enraged but defeated. Darlene Price, the president of the OSG, told the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Everything we put into that meeting was destroyed. We received nothing”. Phil, who was also the faculty advisor to the International Socialist Club, told the disciplinary board: “When he [Reisman] mentioned savages, he was motioning toward the Black and Latino areas of the audience”. Despite their best efforts to get us kicked off campus and fine us, we prevailed in the disciplinary hearing.
Looking back three decades at the events that night, I see that all of the vile politics of Charlie Kirk were present then, and what was needed was the financial backing and political hustle to turn into a nationwide threat to us all. I also look back on it and think it shows that we can beat them.
Joe Allen is the author of <a href="https://authors.tertulia.com/allenojoe-draftv4iskv/books/teamsterland-reports-on-america-s-most-iconic-union-reports-allen-o-joe/B0FLDHKX48">Teamsterland: Reports on America’s Most Iconic Union</a> and <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1441-the-package-king">The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS</a>. He lives in Chicago.

Joe Allen

Fighting the far right on campus: a small victory from the US in 1992

Today was a brilliant day of protests against Israeli atrocities in Palestine and our government’s complicity in them. 
I’ve been asked how it compares to the national rallies on the weekend of 14-16 February 2003, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets around the country in opposition to the US government’s imminent invasion of Iraq. 
Today was similar in that it was a series of nationwide protests from the biggest cities to the smallest towns (600 in Tathra!), all coming out against the government of the day. The energy was the same—the experience of turning what would otherwise have been a sleepy Sunday into mass political action that has become the key political issue around the country.
But the differences are equally striking. Today was angrier, more hostile to the government, more oppositional.
Consider the two situations. A whole section of international ruling class opinion was opposed to the US invasion of Iraq. The German and French governments came out against it. The ALP was against it because the UN did not sanction it. In 2003, Labor opposition leader Simon Crean spoke at the Brisbane rally, and the Labor lord mayor also spoke at rallies. The Age
newspaper in Melbourne editorialised against the war. 
To be against the Iraq War didn’t require people to stand on principle against Western imperialism. The stance was in tune with widespread liberal opinion. To my knowledge, no-one lost their job for speaking out against it, no-one was suspended or expelled from university for doing so, and no-one was condemned as a racist for opposing war. The only accusation the right could dredge up—that you were an apologist for Saddam Hussein or for radical Islam—was regarded as laughable. 
The very premise of the war—Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction—was thoroughly debunked even before it started. Things had well and truly moved on from the US’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, when standing against war put you in a small minority.
Today, we’ve got no friends in any lodge, chancellery, palace or ministry. Every Western government backs Israel. Government rhetoric in much of the West may have shifted a bit in the last couple of months, but this doesn’t disguise the fact that Israel can massacre the Palestinians without a single government doing anything to stop it. This is true of social democratic governments as much as conservative ones. 
It's not just that they’re not standing up to Israel. They are attacking opponents of the genocide. Standing up to Israel’s war takes guts. It requires a much stronger sense of purpose, because opposing Israel means opposing the entire establishment—the politicians, newspaper editors, managers and university vice chancellors who have disgracefully used the antisemitism slur to destroy careers, sack workers, withdraw funding and expel students. 
Our rulers have subjected opponents of the war to public ridicule and hatred. The “antisemitism” slur has been much more chilling than the ridiculous slurs of being a “Saddam stooge” in 2003. The Israeli genocide, by highlighting the lines of division in our society, therefore exposes the workings of our system much more clearly than the Iraq war did.
With the Iraq war, we knew what horrors it might (and did) unleash, but everyone attending rallies today has seen the barbarism that has been meted out to the civilians of Gaza, the emaciated bodies wracked by starvation, the bags of body parts being collected by grieving parents or children, the sheer horror of Israel bombing people queuing for food. The morning news bulletins tell us how many dozen civilians have been blown to pieces while we slept. 
This experience has burned itself into the minds of everyone who marched today. At least in the early stages of the Iraq war, the US was fighting a conventional army. Who is Israel fighting? It’s just massacring unarmed people. 
The Iraq war demonstrations were unprecedented in that hundreds of thousands came out before a shot was fired (although US sanctions had killed hundreds of thousands in the years preceding). That was incredible, and we hoped the antiwar movement would build as the war dragged on. But they were a rocket that lit up the night sky only to quickly fall to the earth. The US smashed Hussein’s army and quickly established control. The protests of hundreds of thousands quickly subsided. 
Today, we have been marching on the streets virtually every week for two years. And yet today was the biggest day of action yet. We’ve learned some lessons over these two years. None of us marching today has any illusions that any government will help us. All of us despise the complicity of our governments in this genocide. At the Brisbane rally against the Iraq war, a minority of us booed Simon Crean, but most gave him the benefit of the doubt. Today, we all despise the Labor politicians. Their hypocrisy, their token measures that do nothing to stop the killing are worse than Australian PM John Howard’s fawning over US President George Bush. 
And it’s been more than two decades since 2003. Australia has escaped some of the worst economic crises since that time and our political system is still less polarised than elsewhere in the world. But our government’s complicity in Israel’s genocide is another reminder that we are part of a world system of barbarism—a world in which the far right is growing, the climate crisis is getting worse, social welfare is being further gutted and inequality is becoming more extreme. 
As well, the threat of a major war in our region looms as governments throw hundreds of billions of dollars at new weapons systems. Israel’s genocide is of a piece with this: a world in which the powerful can simply destroy the common people with impunity.
The comparison between 2003 and 2025 reinforces in my mind the need for a socialist alternative to this rotten system. George Bush went. John Howard went. But things have gotten worse. They’re not going to get better. 
Today was a beautiful demonstration of the power of ordinary people when they decide “enough is enough”. We need many more of them. 
But we also need a clear vision of what we’re fighting against and what we’re fighting for. I think the movement today is angrier than in 2003, more determined, in it for the long haul. But that doesn’t mean it’s particularly politically sophisticated. Debates over how to defeat Israel are virtually non-existent; people in their desperation tend to grasp at straws.
The Israeli genocide is like a distillation of the evils of capitalism. The Israeli government has been planning this offensive for years. Its backers in the West support it. Our side, that of the working class, needs to be conscious of our tasks if we are to defeat them. That’s why, 22 years on from Iraq, and 40 plus years since I first got involved, I’m still as dedicated as ever to building a socialist alternative to this rotten system.

Tom Bramble

Fighting imperialism then and now

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” —William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

Why do socialists put so much emphasis on reading, discussing and writing history? There are two main reasons. The first is that, in the absence of this work, the radical movements and traditions we draw our inspiration from would be buried under the ideas about the past promoted by the ruling class and its institutions. 
This was a theme of Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm">“On the Concept of History”</a>. In the sixth thesis of the essay, he wrote, “In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it”. The tradition he’s referring to is that of working-class radicalism and socialism, and the conformism that threatens it that of various forms of ruling-class ideology.
If the past, as William Faulkner put it, isn’t really past, but continues to exist as a component of contemporary reality, then it too is subject to the rule set down by Marx <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/">in The German Ideology</a>: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force”. 
You can’t directly observe and experience history, as if it were a view from a mountain. It’s something that’s constructed in the mind out of raw material of words, images and sounds—traces of the past that are captured and preserved amid the turbulent flow of time. It is, as such, easily manipulable by those in power. They fund and control our schools, universities, museums and other institutions that do both the capturing and preserving of history and the work of constructing historical narratives out of that material and presenting them to the public.
To the extent that some awareness of history is necessary for the smooth functioning of capitalist society, the ruling class wants to ensure it will be theirversion of it that dominates. This means history will primarily be the study of great men (and until very recently it has almost exclusively been men) and their works. 
Bertolt Brecht’s poem <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/brecht/works/1935/questions.htm">“Questions From a Worker Who Reads” </a>refers to (and cleverly critiques) this view of the past:
Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?


Popular history podcasts like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@restishistorypod">“The Rest is History”</a> present what can sound like a thorough account of past events, but their focus is almost always on the decisions and actions of a tiny layer of leading politicians, diplomats, intellectuals and artists, military generals and so on. Workers and the poor appear mostly as an undifferentiated mass, buffeted this way and that and blindly following along while history is made by those at the top.
This even applies when capitalist historians turn their attention to working-class revolutions. You may well have been taught about the Russian Revolution in school. As part of that, you were probably taught that the revolution was the product of the (nefarious) ideas and political visions of revolutionary leaders like Vladimir Lenin. According to this view, the mass of workers who made the revolution were only ever “useful idiots” for the Bolsheviks. And of course, it all ended in disaster, demonstrating (they hope you will agree) that all attempts at genuinely transformative change are doomed to fail.
Benjamin went on, in his essay, to say, “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious”.
Anyone who has found themselves swept up in a historical narrative like that of Trotsky’s <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/">History of the Russian Revolution</a> will understand what Benjamin meant by “setting alight the sparks of hope in the past”. Trotsky makes us feel, as readers, as if we are somehow experiencing events as they happened, marching alongside the workers of Petrograd and sharing something of the intensity of their hopes and fears. And we learn that, far from being duped by Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, the Russian workers strode confidently onto the stage of history and became, for a period, the true masters of their destiny.
It’s important to say, too, that when Benjamin writes of “the enemy” here he’s referring to all varieties of “conformist” ideology, not just its most overtly capitalist forms like fascism. He has in mind, too, both social-democratic, reformist socialism and Stalinism—which came to dominate the world communist movement after Stalin carried out a counter-revolution in Russia in the late 1920s and ’30s and had many of those who, like Trotsky, attempted to hold fast to Marxist principles murdered (including, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jul/08/humanities.internationaleducationnews">some have claimed</a>, Benjamin himself). 
The Stalinist economic model was that of <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1955/statecap/index.htm">state capitalism</a>, not socialism. With it came all the ideological trappings of the deeply divided class society that it was. From historians, it demanded the reinstatement of the “great man” view of history in its most extreme form yet. Trotsky’s History, in fact, was in large part inspired by a desire to preserve the true story of the revolution from the obscurity into which it was falling due to the distortions being peddled by Stalin and his supporters (Trotsky wrote it soon after being expelled from Russia in 1929).
It’s not for nothing that Victor Serge, another Russian revolutionary and veteran of the early, heroic years of the Soviet state, described the late 1930s as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/17/midnight-century-victor-serge-review">“midnight of the century”</a>. With Europe threatened by fascism on one side and Stalinism on the other, the danger was that the spirit and traditions of revolutionary socialism that reached their height in the years following 1917 would be snuffed out and lost forever. Trotsky, Serge and Benjamin count among the relatively small number of socialists who were awake to the danger. And despite Stalinism emerging strengthened from World War Two and continuing to dominate the world communist movement right up to the 1990s, theirs is a historical legacy on which we can, fortunately, continue to build today.
The work of socialist history is, then, a form of “raising the dead”. At its most effective, it does this in a double sense. First, it rescues and revives the events of revolutionary movements and the lives of their participants—events and lives that would otherwise be either completely forgotten or distorted and buried under the accumulating weight of ruling-class ideology. Second, it transmits the revolutionary spirit of those events to people in the present day, providing a spark of hope that can inspire us to take up the fight against capitalism in our own time.
The best socialist historians are (frequently, probably, contrary to appearances) rabble-rousers—stirring up trouble for the ruling class among both the dead and the living. This, however, is only step one. As socialists we know that merely “stirring up trouble” isn’t enough to win change. We also need to have a good understanding of the means and ends of socialist politics—how best, in short, to wage the fight for a socialist future. And the importance of identifying what to do (and not to do) in this regard is the second main reason that the study of history is essential.
The history of our movement is the only real guide to revolutionary organising and strategy that we have. There’s been no shortage of ideas on this front. But the real test of those ideas has come in practice, and the attempt to apply the ideas without consideration of the historic practice—and the way that practice can best be applied in contemporary contexts—is among the worst, and most frequently committed, errors socialists can fall into.
Imagine, for a moment, the theory and practice of socialism to be like a martial art. To learn it requires a knowledge of the established rules, theories and techniques of fighting. That alone, however, is no guarantee of success. The construction union slogan<a href="https://sa.cfmeu.org/product/hardened-by-battle-long-sleeve-shirt-white/"> “hardened by battle” </a>comes to mind. Being good at fighting (whether in martial arts or in socialist politics) requires a degree of accumulated knowledge and experience of actual fights. To be truly “battle hardened” means fighting and fighting and fighting until your movements (and your capacity to predict and pre-empt those of your opponent) become like second nature.
This is one reason why the truly great revolutionary fighters of the past have been the products of periods of heightened class struggle. By the time he was 26, Trotsky was a leader of the Saint Petersburg soviet in the Russian revolution of 1905. At age 19, Rosa Luxemburg was head of the revolutionary wing of the German Social Democratic Party, the most powerful working-class organisation in the world. Most socialists, most of the time, don’t get the chance to hone their skills in the kind of intense class battles that were raging across Russia and Western Europe in those years. What we can do, however, is study them. 
We can come to an understanding of the ideas and strategies socialists like Trotsky adopted in those circumstances, how they changed as the struggle progressed, what the ruling classes did in their effort to hold back the tide of revolution, and the reason, until 1917 at least, that those efforts were successful. We should try, as much as possible, to absorb the lessons of all the great battles of our movement throughout history. The 1917 Russian Revolution, Germany from 1918 to 1923, the Spanish revolution and civil war of the 1930s, Cuba in the 1950s, Chile in the early 1970s; the list could go on indefinitely.
Here in Australia, we should grapple with the history of radical movements and organisations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Communist Party. We should come to understand why it was that, just at the point when—in the context of the anti-conscription fight during World War One—the potential for revolution was greatest, the IWW was crushed and never able to revive. And why, despite the immense potential for the growth of communism in Australia in the Great Depression and World War Two years, the CPA never established itself as anything more than a tepid left flank of the Labor Party and the trade union bureaucracy that ultimately played a key part in forging the class-collaborationist Prices and Incomes Accord of the 1980s. 
As the boxer Mike Tyson famously said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”, and history isn’t likely to stop laying punches on our movement any time soon. To really advance towards socialism through future class battles we need to do much more than just arm ourselves with a theory and a program. Leaving things at that is like stepping into the ring having merely memorised an instruction manual on how to fight. Fortunately, if we’re prepared to engage seriously with the work of reading, discussing and writing history, the socialist movement’s historic triumphs and defeats provide all the material we need to turn those sparks of hope in the past into a powerful fighting force for socialism today.

James Plested

Why history matters for socialists

Eighty years ago, the United States government exploded over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the only two nuclear bombs ever used in wartime against a civilian population. Never before in human history had a single weapon caused such widespread death and destruction.
A report by engineers and scientists of the Manhattan Project (the US project that developed the bombs), based on a 1946 investigation in both cities, estimated that more than two-thirds of Hiroshima’s 90,000 buildings had been destroyed or badly damaged, including everything within one mile (1.6km) of ground zero, aside from a few structures made from reinforced concrete. In Nagasaki, buildings with reinforced concrete walls 25cm thick, more than 600 metres from ground zero, collapsed.
In Hiroshima, the bomb destroyed 26 of 33 firefighting stations, killing or badly injuring three-fourths of their personnel. It killed or badly wounded more than 1,800 of 2,400 nurses and medical orderlies, and left only 30 of 298 registered doctors able to treat survivors. Many of those not killed immediately burned to death in the subsequent firestorm, or drowned trying to escape it in rivers, or died within hours or days of radiation sickness. 
The Manhattan Project report estimated that Hiroshima suffered 135,000 casualties—more than half its population—and Nagasaki 64,000 out of a population of 195,000. Both figures were underestimates because they did not include prisoners of war and other foreigners, such as thousands of Korean forced labourers present in both cities.
People who survived the immediate effects of the blasts were not necessarily safe. Two years after the bombings, there was a notable increase in the rate of leukaemia among initial survivors, which spiked four to six years later. The largest number of victims were children.
But while the power of the bombs was unprecedented, the mass slaughter of civilians was anything but new. All of the major powers involved in the war carried out or assisted deliberate massive attacks on civilians: Japan’s 1937-38 Rape of Nanjing, which killed up to 300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers; the German Blitz of Britain, which killed around 43,000; the US-British firebombing of Dresden, which destroyed 90 percent of the city’s centre and killed at least 25,000 people, many of whom died of suffocation as all available oxygen was consumed by the conflagration; there are numerous other examples.
If the ruling classes of the warring countries had a similar amoral sense (the belief that any slaughter they engaged in was justified), the course of the war and a technological lead gave the US rulers the opportunity and confidence that they could get away with the greatest atrocities. In the last year of the war, US air raids systematically destroyed Tokyo, taking advantage of the large number of highly combustible houses to create firestorms. Early on 10 March 1945, some 279 US bombers firebombed most of eastern Tokyo, killing 90,000 to 100,000 people and leaving a million homeless; the destruction was even greater than that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In part, the atomic bombs were more “efficient” than earlier air raids: in the 10 March raid on Tokyo, fourteen US aircraft were shot down. But strategic decisions directed against the Soviet Union were a more important consideration. This was summed up by South Africa’s Nelson Mandela in 2003:
“Fifty-seven years ago, when Japan was retreating on all fronts, they [the US] decided to drop the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Killed a lot of innocent people, who are still suffering from the effects of those bombs. Those bombs were not aimed against the Japanese. They were aimed against the Soviet Union. To say, look, this is the power that we have. If you dare oppose what we do, this is what is going to happen to you.”
Looking forward to the next war between the “allies” was also evident in a memo issued to British airmen on the night of the attack on Dresden:
“The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
When the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949, considerably earlier than the US expected, the US quickly recognised a need to “outcompete” its rivals, beginning serious steps toward developing a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb. An investigation of the desirability and possibility of building the new bomb, chaired by Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had headed the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos laboratory, concluded: “The extreme danger to mankind inherent in the proposal wholly outweighs any military advantage”.
The extreme danger to the human race was less important than the military needs of imperialism. US President Harry Truman approved the development of the hydrogen bomb in January 1950. The first thermonuclear bomb was tested on 1 November 1952. It was more than 450 times as powerful as the Nagasaki bomb, with an explosive force of 15 megatons of TNT.
The US thermonuclear monopoly lasted less than a year, the Soviet Union testing its first hydrogen bomb in the following August. And although 15 megatons was an already unimaginable force, the Soviet government in 1961 tested a bomb with a force of 50 megatons. Within the test zone, brick buildings 55km from ground zero were destroyed. The heat from the blast was capable of causing third-degree burns 100km away. 
That test was, in part, an experiment designed to discover whether there was any inherent limit to the potential explosive power of a nuclear bomb. There wasn’t; in a report for the US Atomic Energy Commission, physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Isaac Rabi concluded that hydrogen bombs potentially have “unlimited destructive power”.
At the time, the 50-megaton thermonuclear bomb was too heavy to be carried by any existing missile or aeroplane. But technological “progress” has since created hydrogen bombs light enough for ten or more to be carried by a single missile.
And yet, today, all of the nine nuclear-armed states—United States, Russia, France, United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea—are attempting to “modernise” their arsenals, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions”.
SIPRI calculates the world nuclear arsenal at 12,241 warheads. “An estimated 3,912 of those warheads were deployed with missiles and aircraft ... Around 2,100 of the deployed warheads were kept in a state of high operational alert on ballistic missiles. Nearly all of these warheads belonged to Russia or the USA, but China may now keep some warheads on missiles during peacetime.”
In 2010, the USA and Russia agreed to a treaty (New Start) to limit their nuclear stockpiles and the number of warheads deployed on strategic missiles. But that treaty expires next February, and neither side has shown any real interest in renewing it, so the number of warheads able to be fired in minutes if not seconds is expected to increase.
Despite most nuclear arsenals being labelled “deterrents” by those who wield them, no government keeps nuclear bombs for peaceful purposes; they are intended for use when military and political conditions make that seem advisable. While the US and Russia have the biggest stockpiles, does anyone imagine that moral or humanitarian considerations would have more of a restraining influence on Benjamin Netanyahu than they have on Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin? At least one minister within the Israeli government has publicly advocated using an atomic bomb against Gaza—on which Israel has already inflicted destruction comparable to what was done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In short, the danger of capitalist governments letting loose nuclear weapons has not significantly decreased since 1945; in many respects, it is greater.

Allen Myers

A warning from history: ‘This is what is going to happen to you’

The 15 July 1939 edition of the Mirror, a Perth weekly broadsheet, hit newsstands about six years and four months after the Nazi dictatorship was formally established in faraway Germany, and a month and a half before the beginning of World War Two. This seemingly obscure bit of information is relevant only because the edition <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/75869223">carried a report about a mid-week address</a> by Prime Minister Robert Menzies at Anzac House in the city’s CBD. Inside, the prime minister declared:
“History will label Hitler as one of the really great men of the century. As far as the German people are concerned, Hitler has proved himself a great man and a tireless worker. He dragged his nation from bankruptcy and revolution.”
The first thing that strikes a reader today is not that Menzies found something to like in Nazism, even if he wasn’t himself a fascist. His sympathies are well known, at least by people familiar with the history of the Liberal Party. It’s that his Führer fawning was so gratuitous, and so public, so close to the outbreak of the war. 
If you’ve grown up believing that WWII was about defeating Nazism—that the conflagration ought to be read as the twentieth century’s great parable of good vs. evil, favourably resolved by democratic virtue mobilised as a military arsenal—Menzies’ words would be difficult to reconcile. The inconvenient truth, however, is that much of the establishment, in what today is broadly called the West, admired the Italian and German governments of the time. Among conservative politicians, Britain’s royal family, industrialists and the “respectable” middle classes, fascism was fashionable.
This is illustrated, in part, by the Mirror’s report, which described the PM’s pro-Hitler comments as “perfectly sound reasoning”. It is also shown by another article in the same edition of the paper, describing a reception at the Palace Hotel attended by “most of Perth’s business executives and industrial chiefs”. The event occurred several days after Menzies’ Anzac House address, and there is no indication that his Nazi nuzzling was cause for consternation. Indeed, it seems to have passed without comment by Western Australia’s luminaries. The prime minister, readers are informed, “Showed fine command of words and never hesitated, mixing subtle humour with politics in a pleasing manner”.
Bear in mind, again, that this was July 1939: six years after the establishment of the Dachau concentration camp; four years after the Nuremberg Laws, which, to protect the “purity of German blood”, outlawed marriage or sex between Jews and “German nationals”; sixteen months after the annexation of Austria; eight months after Kristallnacht, the grotesque nationwide anti-Jewish pogrom carried out by Nazi paramilitaries; and five months after Hitler’s <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/docs/extract-from-hitler-speech.html">well-publicised 30 January speech to Reichstag delegates at Berlin’s Kroll Opera House</a>, in which he warned that, if another world war were declared, the result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. 
To be fair to the capitalist establishment of the time, it wasn’t the Nazis’ virulent antisemitism that was the main attraction. They were sympathetic primarily because Hitler’s government had waged war on the left, banning the Social Democratic Party, the Communist Party and the trade unions. While Dachau is today known primarily for being part of the Nazi network of Jewish extermination centres, it was established in Munich to house political prisoners. Heinrich Himmler, then the city’s chief of police, was open about this, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150906190330/http:/www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/images/photo02.jpg">telling the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten</a> (Munich Latest News) in March 1933 ahead of the camp’s opening:
“All Communists and—where necessary—Reichsbanner [a returned soldiers’ organisation associated with the Social Democrats] and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here ... [T]hese people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organise as soon as they are released.”
This was widely known. As early as July 1933, the Argus in Melbourne was <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/4752129">repeating German secret police claims</a> that they were fighting off daily communist plots to overthrow the Nazi regime. The leftists were described as “terror groups”.
“The police allege that hardly a day passes without their unearthing new Communist ‘cells’, notably in the Ruhr Valley, where storm troops at Bochen discovered an organisation of between 4,000 and 5,000 members”, one report noted. The correspondent said that there had been arrests around the country before mentioning, almost in passing, “18,000 Communist prisoners in Prussia”.
The Nazis’ war on the left, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/01/nazism-political-communist-socialist-victims-world-war-two-history">in which up to 1 million civilians were murdered</a>, was a war on a common enemy of the Western ruling classes, which were trying to combat socialist and left-wing movements in their own societies. Capitalists and establishment politicians had a natural ideological affinity with fascism, which led them to ignore, downplay, tolerate or even celebrate Hitler’s crimes against democracy and against Jewish people, who were disproportionately represented in the communist movement. Indeed, Hitler painted his antisemitism in anti-communist colours: Bolshevism was Jewish, and Jews were Bolsheviks. 
The people who run the world today try to bury the fact that their old brethren and political heroes were ideologically aligned with fascism. Moreover, they bury the fact that the systematic eradication of left-wing political opposition to Nazism, which they supported, opened the terrain for the extermination of 6 million Jews. Instead, they make out that the antisemitic fascist-sympathising statesmen of the time were responsible for snuffing out Nazism. 
We are now told that it is illegitimate to draw parallels with the Holocaust because it was uniquely evil. Yet it is arguable that drawing parallels is precisely the way to honour the call “never again”—because as soon as one does, it invites an investigation of who exactly was complicit, of what the preconditions were for such shocking barbarity, and of how such conditions might again materialise. 
What about Palestine today? To be sure, there are obvious differences. Western politicians do not generally hold up Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as an example of how to run a country; few state leaders appear to want to emulate his domestic policies. And, as Israel’s supporters frequently point out, the project in Gaza does not involve gas chambers. If Netanyahu’s goal was to exterminate all Palestinians in the territories Israel controls, he could have carried it out. That he hasn’t is considered enough proof that there is no genocide, let alone another Holocaust. 
Yet there are clear echoes today of some of the political dynamics of the 1930s. 
As noted above, the Nazis did not entirely distinguish between their barbarity against the left and Jews—hence they were fighting “Judaeo-Bolshevism”. Similarly, Israel’s war against “Palestinian terrorism” cannot be separated from the country’s broader role as Western imperialism’s regional enforcer. 
The ruling classes of the 1930s watched on, often with admiration, as the Nazis smashed their common enemy: the political left, in which Jews were the vanguard. The Western establishment today does more than watch on—it supplies Israel as it smashes all vestiges of resistance to Western domination of the Middle East. And like European Jewry in the early twentieth century, the Palestinians have been the vanguard in, and their cause has often been a catalyst for, the anti-imperialist struggle in the region. That is precisely why the carnage in Gaza has been allowed to go on for so long: there is a coincidence of interests between the ethno-nationalist Israeli regime and Western ruling classes. 
It is why there is no end to the declarations that there can be no peace unless Hamas is eradicated—by which they mean not simply that particular organisation, but any organisation that refuses to accept and make peace with the Zionist state and Western imperialism. It is why German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in June said of Israel’s criminal attack on Iran: “This is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us”. It is why Israel’s earlier terrorist attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon made Netanyahu such a celebrated figure: overnight, in Western eyes, he went from being a man without a plan to the guy who might have the final solution to the niggling problem of regional anti-imperialism. 
As in the 1930s, the rhetoric today among sections of establishment opinion is increasingly fascistic. That’s true in Israel, the government of which is propped up by fascists, and in the heartlands of Western imperialism, where the far right either leads or has a genuine chance of leading governments in France, Italy, Germany, the United States, Britain and elsewhere.
Insofar as the far right is making ground, the left is again often labelled the primary enemy within—even if “communism” now includes the cosmopolitan capitalism of such radical organisations as the Democratic Party in the US. There are no concentration camps (although the US is skating close). Still, the repression brought to bear on left-wing activism and Palestine solidarity activism is now significant. It began to ramp up during the war on terror, when there was endless talk of an Islamo-leftist alliance against Western civilisation, which sounded much like the old Judeo-Bolshevism canard.
Another political echo: just as Nazi sympathisers in the West were broadly hostile to Jews and Jewish immigration, so too are many of Israel’s friends in the West hostile to Arab/Muslim/Palestinian immigration. Take then Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s comment last year that welcoming refugees fleeing Gaza was “very bad for cohesion and harmony”. He sounded eerily similar to Australia’s representative to the 1938 Evian Conference, Colonel Thomas W. White, who said: “As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration”. (The Evian Conference was an international summit to discuss the growing number of Jewish refugees fleeing Germany.) 
The Australian press did carry critical commentary about the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, particularly after Kristallnacht in November 1938. Some politicians spoke out, too. But prevailing establishment attitudes can be divined from press responses to Hitler’s odious and ominous diatribe the following year, threatening “the annihilation of the Jewish race”. A front-page headline in Melbourne’s Argus on 1 February read “reassuring on the whole”. The associated article reported:
“The [London] Daily Telegraph says that it is not too optimistic to read into the speech a promise of better things to come, while the Daily Express points out that the speech shows that the Fuhrer does not intend to embark upon any adventures at the moment.”
Again, this optimism was because the Jewish question hardly figured in Western calculations. The key concern was the possibility of Germany going too far and upsetting the existing imperialist applecart. So when the war came, it was not about a clash of ideologies, let alone about saving European Jewry; German expansionism—regrettably, in the view of the establishment—came to threaten the interests of the other European imperialists. Viewed from the top of society, the war was just another power struggle among the ruling classes.
Returning to the 1939 Mirror article, we find another notable thing: unlike the Palace Hotel reception attended by the upper classes, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Menzies at Anzac House. The correspondent noted that some in the audience reacted badly to the PM’s pro-Hitler talk:
“In the back of the hall a good-looking young woman jumped up waving aloft a placard. Another let fly at Mr. Menzies a battery of words that were finally drowned in cat-calls and cheers ... Then a voice close to the microphone whispered to the speaker: ‘Would you like her thrown out?’ Mr. Menzies hesitated, then decided that, if he was going to finish his speech, the interjectors would have to be given their walking orders. 
“So the police had a busy few minutes, and the ranks of the interjectors were lessened by a dozen or so. But Mr. Menzies saw the humorous side of it before the meeting closed. ‘I would like’, he said, ‘to thank all those present—and those who are no longer present’. And even the opposition gave him a good hand for that.”
An uncivilised “hullabaloo” disrupted proceedings. But all officialdom united—even the “opposition”—to have the cops take care of them. Again, we find echoes in today’s political atmosphere and the treatment of anti-fascist and anti-genocide activists. How, then, do holocausts and genocides happen? With the complicity of the capitalist establishment and the maligning, marginalising and worse, of the left.

Ben Hillier

How do holocausts happen?

These days, the usual refrain when it comes to women working topless in bars, in the sex industry or otherwise being sexually objectified at work, is that it’s about a woman’s right to choose this treatment and that it can even be a sign of empowerment. The increasingly extreme objectification of women and the normalisation of violent sexual practices, far from being condemned, are increasingly apologised for, even by supposed anti-sexists, as women “<a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/music/sabrina-carpenter-s-new-album-cover-has-sparked-uproar-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-20250612-p5m6up.html">taking ownership</a>” and being “active agents” in their sexual life, or savvy entrepreneurs. 
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was a different story. Many young adults had had some experience of fighting to win women’s rights against hostile authorities, or of confronting other social injustices. They were also much more likely to be members of a union—the rate of union membership was much higher than today, and more workers had some experience of industrial action. This demonstrated in practice to many the importance of unity and solidarity, and gave workers a sense of their own power to shape and change the society around them. There was an understanding that something practical could be done about social or economic injustices, and that they weren’t simply moral concerns. This applied to the discriminatory treatment faced by women and included the sexualisation they were subject to in the workplace. 
A particular battleground was the hospitality industry. Denis Evans was a militant and organiser in the industry and recently spoke to Red Flag about this campaign. After doing a variety of jobs, Evans became a shop steward at a winery, after which, around 1969, he went to work at the Carlton and United Brewery in Melbourne. It was there that he “soon learned the benefits of militant union action”. 
Between 1975 and 1982, Denis worked as an organiser with the Liquor Trades Union (now United Workers Union). In 1979, the union faced a new scourge—a management push to have more women bar workers and wait staff working topless. As soon as it was notified of this development by some of the bar workers, the union took up the fight. 
The union’s women and men organisers had worked in the hotels before becoming organisers and knew immediately what this would mean for working conditions and occupational health and safety. Denis recalls that the feeling was “someone had to stop it”, or the exploitative practice would only spread. Women who refused to comply with management’s demand to work topless and who objected to working alongside topless co-workers were sacked and quickly replaced by women brought in by the criminal-run employment agencies. 
It was going to take a serious union campaign to defeat the power of the hotel industry, known at the time for its strong criminal links. As Denis explains: “Organisers [including Denis] visiting these shonky premises were routinely threatened with violence, knives held to their throats, or in two incidents two organisers taken out the back of the premises and guns drawn and held to their heads, women organisers threatened with rape or worse”. Despite the threats, the organisers went around the pubs telling hotel bosses to stop their discriminatory practices, which were not only demeaning to the women involved, but made their work more dangerous. 
A problem the union faced was that sexism was so profitable that the bosses were willing to pay women well over the going rate to work topless, “up to five times the rate”, according to Denis. But for the union, it was a matter of principle—higher wages should be won based on industrial power, not by individuals unilaterally giving up important conditions and dignity at work. This, Denis argues, left “other hard-working women to survive on the hard-won wages and conditions fought for by them, and the union”, and undermined solidarity.
Stepping up the campaign, the union went to the brewery workers who supplied the hotels, calling for support. At stop-work meetings in every brewery, the workers passed resolutions of support for the bar workers, promising to take their own industrial action. 
After a negotiation between the union and management at the Tarmac Hotel in Melbourne’s west, the publican refused to stop using topless bar staff and to stop showing pornographic movies in the bar, deriding Denis as a prude. This didn’t worry Denis: “I couldn’t wait to let our members at the brewery know about my failed talks with management at the Tarmac Hotel. The instant reaction was one of solidarity with the female workers, and the passing of a resolution confirming the planned industrial action”.
The union’s motto became, “No porn, no top, no beer!”, Denis says. “All the Sunday papers were on to it, five topless women turned up in the union office the next day organised by the criminal element in the hotel industry and the sensationalist media in tandem. Fronting up at the front desk, I was summoned to face the women with cameras flashing and videos whirring; they were hoping my face would be flushed with embarrassment.” 
But Denis didn’t react in quite the way they were hoping. “Well, you could have knocked me over with a wet tram ticket; they continued the theme in the headlines of the newspapers that I was a 40-year-old prude, with photo, mind you. The shame, the ignominy! How was I going to hold my head up in the trade union movement for attempting to wipe out this insidious practice?” 
Denis exposed the hypocrisy of the bosses’ justifications of the practice by asking them whether they would employ their wives or girlfriends as topless bar staff, or do such work themselves. He described their response: “How dare you even suggest that we would subject our loved ones to such a display of semi nudity in public? Well then, [Denis countered] how about you publicans doing a few hours with your penis hanging out, just make sure it goes nowhere near the drip tray. The reaction was apoplexy!”
The first target of the industrial campaign was the Tarmac Hotel. “I told them to consider filling the cellars with coal, because the brewery workers were not going to supply any beer sourced by their labour from that point, and a cellar full of coal might help them survive the coming winter”, remembers Denis. After that, “The victories came fast and furious. Every hotel employing topless bar attendants or waiters was now on a final warning to cease this practice or answer to union members employed at the brewery. It’s called cap in hand. The cellars were soon running low on the amber liquid, and bosses who previously had refused to take down their pornographic movies or sack the women prepared to break down hard-won union conditions for a price, soon mellowed.” The result was that a conga line of publicans “beat a path to the union office to offer their sincere condolences for putting profit before people in an already lucrative business”.
Denis gives most credit to the tremendous work of the rank-and-file women and men in the industry for shutting down the practice at the time. He also points out that it was a warning shot across the bow to other employers who were thinking of employing topless sandwich makers, hardware assistants, hairdressers and the like, that their businesses would get the same treatment. He quipped “Thankfully we were able to cease the practice before seeing topless parliamentarians or, worse still, half-naked bosses”.
It is, however, an ongoing battle. The action taken by the brewery workers, thanks to former Prime Minister Bob Hawke and the ACTU-ALP Accord of the 1980s, is now illegal. Known as secondary boycotts, such solidarity action today incurs huge fines, which are a significant deterrent. 
The battle against sexualisation at work likewise is ongoing. In 1991, liquor trades and retail workers, along with bodies such as women’s refuges and legal groups, set up Women Against Sexual Exploitation in Training. It was followed by the inclusion of a statement of condemnation in the ACTU’s Working Women’s policy. Today, the normalisation of the sex industry and associated practices has broken down consciousness of sexism and the need to take it on industrially as well as in broader society. 
Now in his 70s, Denis still believes it should be a priority of the union movement to stand up for women’s rights and end sexualisation at work. Using occupational health and safety provisions is an obvious basis to object to such practices, but, Denis insists, this has to be combined with industrial action to actually shut down this demeaning, unsafe and exploitative practice, which must be understood as a blatant profit grab. 
The rhetoric of “empowerment” to justify appalling sexism, along with a weakening of the unions and with them class consciousness, means sexual exploitation at work is rife today. It is therefore more important than ever that we remember the history of the workers’ movement fighting back against this, and, in this case, winning.

Liz Ross

When the workers’ movement took on sexual objectification

War and genocide, catastrophic climate change, poverty and hunger, oppression and preventable diseases: the case for a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalist barbarity has never been stronger. Yet most revolutions seem to end badly: bloodshed, civil war, dislocation and the replacement of one form of tyranny with another. Why?
The historical record shows that most of the bloodshed results from the violent suppression and defeat of revolutions, rather than the revolutions themselves. Time and again, largely peaceful revolutions have been drowned in blood as the ruling class take a terrible revenge on those who challenge their power. Just one example: from 2011, Bashar al-Assad slaughtered an estimated 650,000 Syrians who dared to revolt, even using chemical weapons against them.
When socialists talk about revolution, we mean the wholesale reordering of society: billionaires and capitalists having their wealth taken from them, and the state, which exists to enforce their rule, being replaced by democratic structures that genuinely reflect the interests and collective will of the majority. A socialist revolution would equitably redistribute the world’s wealth and use it to solve the problems that plague humanity. 
The people who currently rule the world fear this kind of revolution and will do whatever it takes to prevent it. 
The only successful socialist revolution to date occurred in Russia in October 1917. Yet it ended in Joseph Stalin presiding over a hideous dictatorship, a police state that mercilessly repressed any breath of opposition. 
But this outcome was not inevitable. For a few brief years, and under the most adverse conditions, the workers’ state carried out reforms that were light years ahead of what the most liberal democracy at the time could offer: universal suffrage, equal pay, independence for oppressed nationalities, religious and sexual freedom, to name just a few. 
The Russian Revolution took everyone by surprise, including socialists. As the First World War raged in 1915, Russian Marxist leader Vladimir Lenin—who would soon lead the victorious uprising—wrote despondently that he did not expect to see a revolution in his lifetime. Most expected that it would be a country like Germany—with its large, well-organised working class and a mass socialist party—that would have the first socialist revolution.
So there was a problem from the outset. Russia had a much smaller working class and was far less developed than the other imperialist powers, and years of war had shattered its economy. Lenin repeatedly warned that the workers’ state could not hold on for long without economic assistance from a victorious revolution in one or more developed countries. 
The world’s ruling classes were equally aware of this, and organised to strangle the revolution at its source. Armies from fourteen countries (including Australia) were dispatched to Russia to assist the counter-revolutionary White Russian forces to “restore order”. Against enormous odds, and with incredible courage and sacrifice, Russia’s workers and peasants defended their revolution and won the civil war. But the country was left in an even more dire and impoverished state, and the working class that had led the revolution was decimated and exhausted. It was even more imperative that the revolution spread.
And indeed, the October Revolution galvanised workers around the world. In late 1918, German sailors mutinied and German workers toppled the government, ending the carnage of World War One and saving who knows how many lives. A period of intense class conflict followed, with revolutionary uprisings in Finland, Hungary, Italy and Spain, nearly revolutionary situations in Britain, France and elsewhere; even a short-lived Socialist Soviet Republic in Persia. 
But in no other country did the working class succeed in taking power. Russia was left isolated, and this was to have terrible consequences—not just Stalin’s rise to power, but also the triumph of fascism in Italy, Spain and Germany.
There are two main reasons why revolutions fail. The first is that they don’t go far enough. This is above all a failure to come to grips with the nature of capitalist rule, in particular the role of the state. The state is not neutral; it exists to protect the property and rule of the capitalists. They will not hesitate to use their armies, police, courts and prisons to crush opposition. The state cannot be reformed; it has to be smashed.
Within the workers’ movement, some always deny this reality and try to mislead workers into some form of accommodation with the system short of completely overthrowing it. In Chile in 1973 and Egypt in 2011, for example, workers were encouraged to believe that the army would respect democracy. In both instances, the armed forces led the counter-revolution and established dictatorships. As the French revolutionary Louis de Saint Just put it: “Those who make half a revolution dig their own grave”. 
The second reason is related to the first. Success in Russia was predicated on the existence and leadership of a mass revolutionary party, the means by which workers can most effectively organise their power , take on the state and be prepared to withstand counter-revolution.
The party’s role is to lead the revolutionary movement and win the battle of ideas against political currents that try to hold back the fight for a new society. The party embodies and transmits the lessons learnt in previous revolutions so that workers can avoid the pitfalls that have derailed them in the past. 
Revolutionary parties grow rapidly during a revolution, but that’s way too late. Millions of people need to be won to a clear revolutionary perspective. To do this, we need organisations that argue for revolution, train their members in revolutionary politics, history and strategy, and build experience and credibility over time. The party needs, in Lenin’s words, to “patiently explain” why and how the working class can and must defeat the power of the capitalists and their state. This is a lengthy process that cannot occur in the heat of battle. So to have any chance of success, parties need to be built well before revolution breaks out.
By 1917, the Bolsheviks (Lenin’s group) were a mass party, with thousands of worker members in key sectors of the economy. The party had proved its ability to lead the struggle against the Russian monarchy as well as the capitalists. It had earned the trust and confidence of the most politically advanced sections of the working class, who were in turn able to influence and lead those around them. Bolsheviks led strikes, but also seized every opportunity to argue for socialism, whether in the tsar’s fake parliament, the Duma, or through publications such as their newspaper Pravda (Truth), which workers widely read.
During the earlier 1905 revolution, a new kind of organisation had sprung up: the soviets, democratic councils of workplace delegates. Similarly, in 1917, a network of soviets emerged, comprising worker representatives, soldiers and peasants. These delegates had no special privileges and were recallable at any time. As the American journalist John Reed noted: “No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented”. As such, the soviets would form the basis of a workers’ state.
Between February and October, a period of “dual power” existed between the soviets and the provisional government, which wanted to keep Russia in the war and establish a limited form of capitalist democracy. But such an unstable situation could not last: either workers would go forward and take power, or capitalist counter-revolution would triumph.
The Bolsheviks had to wage a political struggle, not just against the provisional government, but also against reformists such as the Mensheviks, who argued that Russia was not ready for socialism, so workers should moderate their demands. The Bolsheviks counterposed the demand of “All power to the soviets”, and their slogan “Peace, bread and land” encapsulated the hopes of millions of workers and peasants.
The Bolsheviks’ leading role in defeating a right-wing coup in August was crucial in helping them defeat the reformists and win a majority in the Petrograd soviet. The depth and breadth of working-class support meant that the insurrection in Petrograd was almost bloodless. As the leading Menshevik, Julius Martov, admitted: “Almost the entire working class supports Lenin and expects its social liberation from the uprising”. 
The Russian workers’ victory inspired a wave of revolutions. But nowhere was there a party like the Bolsheviks. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had long since abandoned the goal of revolution, and in 1914 had betrayed the working class and supported the war. A clearly revolutionary Communist party wasn’t established until December 1918, with only a few thousand members. Lacking both experience and roots in the working class, it launched a premature insurrection, and the SPD, now in government, demonstrated its loyalty to capitalism by ordering the murder of its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and unleashed the reactionary Freikorps
to terrorise the working class. 
In Italy, a powerful workers’ movement waged heroic struggles during the Biennio Rosso of 1919–20—striking, occupying their factories and defending them with arms, setting up councils like the soviets. But again, there was no clearly revolutionary party that could unite all the struggles into a movement to challenge the state. The reformists and trade union leaders maintained control, which ultimately allowed the fascist Benito Mussolini to take power in 1922. 
With Stalin’s rise to power, another deadly factor came into play. The Communist International (Comintern) was set up in 1918 to help spread the revolution by providing advice and assistance to the new Communist parties that were springing up everywhere. But by the late 1920s, Stalin’s new regime abandoned the international working-class revolution, and the Communist parties became agents of Russian foreign policy instead. 
This too was a product of the failure to build revolutionary parties: Russia’s prestige and authority as the first workers’ state meant that the young and inexperienced parties were incapable of standing up to all the bad advice they received. Stalinism strangled revolutionary possibilities in China, Spain, France and Germany. And Stalinist politics have continued to play a counter-revolutionary role. They are responsible for derailing anti-colonial movements and for the failure of the momentous working-class revolts in France and Italy in the late 1960s and ’70s, among other tragedies.
Revolutions have failed or been defeated, often at a terrible cost. But that has never stopped people fighting for a better world. In fact, revolutions are inevitable. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”, wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, and this is particularly true of capitalism. Rarely has a decade gone by without revolution breaking out somewhere, and at times spreading across entire continents, most recently in the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring of 2011. Whether our rulers like it or not, revolutions will continue to occur. The real question is, how can we win?
The capitalists and their supporters are a minority, but they are well organised and command a powerful state. Our side is far more numerous, but to win, we must be as well organised as our enemies. That means building revolutionary parties today, wherever we are.

Tess Lee Ack

Why do revolutions always seem to end in bloodshed and tyranny?

A recent Red Flag article (“<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-palm-scheme-is-modern-slavery">Labor’s PALM scheme is modern slavery</a>”, by Priya De) outlines the PALM scheme, a policy facilitating agricultural production based on nearly slave conditions for many immigrant labourers. This is far from the only instance of unfree labour in Australian history. 
The use of highly exploited, unfree labour in Queensland is as old as the state and former colony itself. From the mid-1860s until 1906, the indentured labour trade, also known as “blackbirding”, was one of many foundational crimes in the history of early White Australia. 
In his 2006 doctoral thesis, <a href="https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/items/0d27c6fe-7a8c-4b84-b84e-8a306366e82e">The making of White Australia</a>, historian Phil Griffiths writes that colonial planners and agriculturalists “were convinced of the racist myth that ‘white men’ could not safely do manual labour in tropical climates”. The high instances of disease and exhaustion, owing to the arduous work of plantation production, would be too high a barrier for white farmhands, they believed. A better acclimatised labour force appeared as the logical alternative: Pacific Islanders. 
There was an economic logic to this racist idea. Islander labour, especially if indentured, was far cheaper than hiring whites. Workers from Vanuatu, Kanaky (New Caledonia) and Papua New Guinea, as well as some from Indonesia, Malaysia and south Asia, were brought to Queensland in the tens of thousands. 
The Queensland government estimates that, of the approximately 65,000 brought to Australia, one-third died on plantations, not including those killed during “recruitment” and transport. Three-year, locked-in contracts with an employer bound Islander workers. They were to be paid at the end of their contract, and only then were they allowed to find employment elsewhere. 
Workers performed a range of tasks, predominantly on sugar plantations. They cultivated fields, planted sugarcane, cut and harvested, refined and milled. The workers also maintained the plantations and performed laborious tasks such as fencing and tree felling. Domestic tasks were often undertaken by women workers, who were responsible for sustaining the workforce as well as the landlords and plantation owners.
Living conditions were squalid: cramped living quarters, minimal leisure time and little access to the world beyond the plantation. Workers faced harsh restrictions, often being confined socially and financially to the plantations and beaten if “out of line”.
In her book Workers in Bondage, Kay Saunders writes about two Islanders, nicknamed Tom and Dick, who received rations of maize meal and pollard, which is usually fed to animals, instead of flour. “When we spoke to Captain Whish about it he said ‘maize meal is good enough for blackfellows, flour for white men”, one of the Islanders is quoted as saying.
In his 1993 book Cane and Labour, Adrian Graves notes that resistance was not uncommon, often by feigning sickness, working extra slowly and, occasionally, going on strike. However, when bosses triumphed, workers faced the lash. 
Indentured labour was chosen because it enabled the Queensland sugar industry, and the colonial economy more broadly, to remain profitable and competitive with its rivals in southern Asia and elsewhere within the British Empire. 
While economic competition initially led to the demand for cheap labour, it later drove technical changes in the industry, which, from the 1880s, ultimately contributed to the abolition of indentured contracts. For instance, advances in milling resulted in the rise of small-farm production and reduced the demand for labour as the industry became more capital intensive. 
Importantly, there were also political factors behind the abolition. Indenture had always been controversial within liberal ruling class circles. And the mistreatment of Islander workers sometimes sparked outrage. In 1885, the Brisbane Courier deemed the trade a “scandal to the Empire ... The labour trade must cease”. 
Beyond moral objections, liberal opposition was also motivated by a desire for social stability and economic development. By the 1890s, with federation around the corner, the existence of a large, “backward” tropical plantation economy in the north of the continent was a sore point for leading parliamentarians and businesspeople who wanted Australia to develop a modern, industrialised economy. Brisbane’s The Week, a business journal, accused supporters of indenture of trying “to build up an aristocracy on a basis of cheap labour”. 
A racially homogeneous society was considered essential to establishing a new federal government and a united Australia. A nationalism founded on Anglo-identification was created to instil fears of racial disloyalty from Asian and Islander populations, and to unite the white population.
By 1901, indentured labourers, brought to Australia by racist employers for exploitation, were being deported under the White Australia policy. Between Federation and 1906, roughly 7,500 workers were shipped back to the Pacific, many to islands they or their families had not come from. 
As Labor continues to promote the exploitation of Islander workers today, we must not forget how the PALM scheme echoes one of Australia’s founding colonial crimes.

Chris Morris

Australia’s history with slavery

“John Vorster Square ... four or five men and then hood and then electric shock, everything. I don’t know ... Angry Hood and torture, breasts, everything. Why? I don’t understand. Why torture? Anyway, it’s sad ... And then me angry so no talk. Why torture? So I don’t talk. So angry. Rape or what. I don’t care. I don’t talk.” 
These are the words of South African anti-apartheid activist Joyce Dipale about her detention, torture and rape at the hands of South Africa’s notorious Special Branch in 1976. The torture centre was named after Prime Minister John Vorster, who held office from 1966 to 1978. It was an appropriate name for a violent and blood-soaked building and reflected the political history of the person it was named after. 
Vorster not only oversaw more than a decade of apartheid, including the crushing of the Soweto uprising; he had also been a member of the fascist Afrikaner group Ossewabrandwag during World War Two. Vorster admired the supremacist politics of Hitler’s Germany and, when he became PM, sought to emulate elements of the Nazi program. 
A white supremacist who believed that blacks and whites could not live together, Vorster dressed up his racism as a kind of progressive generosity of spirit. He jokingly welcomed foreign dignitaries to “the happiest police state in the world” while overseeing the implementation of the Bantustan system of segregation, which attempted to quarantine South Africa’s black population into poor, desperate and underfunded zones of control. It was also under Vorster that the South African military participated in a bloody war against the newly decolonised Angola. 
In the year that Joyce Dipale was raped and tortured, Vorster was welcomed to Israel. His Nazi past and his crimes against the black and coloured population of South Africa were irrelevant to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The fascist Vorster was given a special tour of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, before being honoured at a state dinner. There, Rabin and other Israeli dignitaries toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”.
Today, amid Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians such history might not seem so surprising. But it is important to note that Israel has not suddenly changed as a result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s belligerence and political alliance with his country’s fascist forces. The country was part of a global archipelago of reaction well before the latest atrocities.
Indeed, despite its declared commitment to equality, Israel was a key backer of the apartheid regime in South Africa—and vice versa. Both countries shared a common predicament: they were minority colonial regimes that had achieved their rule through violence and bloodshed. In 1976, the South African government’s yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples”.
In South Africa, these “dark peoples” vastly outnumbered the white Boer and British colonial populations; in Israel, the Zionist population ruled (and rules) over an ethno-supremacist Jewish state that expelled much of the Arab population at its founding. 
Atomic love
The year after Vorster’s Tel Aviv love-in, the UN voted for a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa, calling for an end to the sale and shipment of arms, ammunition and military vehicles to the country. Israel quietly defied this prohibition. From the mid-1970s, Tel Aviv helped, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/12/israel-south-africa-apartheid-weapons">in the words of Alon Liel</a>, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, to create “the South African arms industry”:
“They [South Africa] assisted us [Israel] to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together, we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies. We were involved in Angola [South Africa never recognized the country’s 1975 independence from Portugal] as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate.”
The love affair became nuclear in the late 1970s. Both countries wanted to strengthen their military capacities and become the most significant powers in their own regions. Nuclear weapons were key. South Africa had the uranium, and Israel had the scientists. Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that, during this period, Israel purchased 550 tons of uranium from South Africa for its nuclear plant in Dimona. 
In exchange, Israel supplied South Africa with weapons design information and materials to increase the power of nuclear warheads. Israeli arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe maintained that South Africa helped Israel to test nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean in 1979. The Israeli government later denied this. 
Both countries also required a brutal military infrastructure to police their oppressed populations. By the mid- to late-1970s, a Palestinian resistance movement was gathering strength. Israeli officials travelled to South Africa to learn from the apartheid regime’s counterinsurgency techniques. A Kibbutz called <a href="https://www.972mag.com/the-kibbutz-that-sells-riot-control-weapons-to-war-criminals/">Beit Alfa sold anti-riot vehicles</a> to South Africa and other brutal governments. The vehicles were used against the anti-apartheid movement in the black townships. In 1999, <a href="https://www.icrc.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/external/doc/en/assets/files/other/southafrica.pdf">a former South African soldier recounted</a>, for the International Committee of the Red Cross, the force used against the popular uprising against apartheid:
“I know for myself, each guy was carrying at least three hand grenades and 16 magazines, so you had more than enough firepower and then you’ll have two Caspers [armoured vehicles] rocking up with 500 Brownings on the top. So even if there were 10,000 coming at you, you had enough firepower and there was no way they were going to stampede you and they knew that as well.”
Some of the most notorious and violent figures of the Israeli state spent significant time in South Africa. Ariel Sharon, the defence minister in the 1980s, directed the massacres of Palestinian civilians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the Lebanon war. For these and other crimes, he was known as the Butcher of Beirut. In 1981, Sharon secretly visited South Africa and spoke to troops along the border of Angola. Former Israeli Ambassador Avi Primor was part of the Israeli delegation and recalled how impressed Sharon was with the repressive apparatus of the apartheid regime and with the developing Bantustan program. Former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema told Haaretz
in 2003 that Sharon had expounded on the merits of the Bantustan model for Palestine. 
The Israeli state has perfected and developed many of the repressive and violent aspects of South African apartheid. The current genocide—the massacres, the starvation, the bombing—has brought levels of brutality that the monsters who ran South African apartheid could only dream of. Indeed, when South African Communist and anti-apartheid fighter Ronnie Kasrils visited Palestine in 2004, he said:
“This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.”

Vashti Fox

When apartheids of the world united: South Africa and Israel’s secret embrace

The following is a summary of the new introduction written by Nick Reich for a reprint of <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/revolutionaries-they-could-not-break">Revolutionaries They Could Not Break</a> by Ngo Van, published by Red Flag Books.
--------------------
Colonial rule in Indochina stands as one of the most grotesque monuments to capitalism’s capacity for systematic torture, cruelty and humiliation of masses of people. The price paid by the Vietnamese people for the forceful imposition of French imperialism was desperately high. 
During the war of occupation in the mid-1800s, the French dispossessed tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants of their only means of subsistence: their land. As they vanquished the much less well-equipped Vietnamese defending armies, they concentrated that stolen land into the hands of French settlers and Vietnamese collaborators. Those peasants lucky enough to hold onto their farms suffered the economic burden of much greater taxes, rents, debts and forced labour for the French colonial authorities. Under the new colonial regime, the French managed the inevitable resistance stoked by their system of exploitation through a sprawling network of police spies and torture prisons. 
But French colonisation also laid the social basis for its own demise. In order to make as much profit as possible from the colony, the French state encouraged investment and urbanisation. Under torturous working conditions, a modern rural working class developed in the mines and rubber plantations alongside an urban proletariat and middle-class intellectuals in the cities. With increased education, compact organisation and social power, these forces provided leadership to the hyper-exploited peasantry in their struggle against colonialism. 
The Vietnamese intellectuals were barred from any serious advancement in the colonial state bureaucracy. The French suffocated the development of a free press, independent schools or any other associations they suspected could become subversive. This left only low-level teaching or civil service jobs open to educated Vietnamese. Urban intellectuals articulated their frustrations at being held back and their anguish at the humiliation of their people through nationalism. 
The early modern nationalists in Vietnam looked to advanced countries like France or Japan as models to emulate. They sought to supplant the French as ruling class through elitist methods. One camp embraced conspiratorial terror and the other advocated gradualist lobbying for reforms, hoping France would honour its ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Both methods stalled by the 1920s. 
In the inter-war years, many Vietnamese students in France searched for ways to overcome the failures of the earlier generations of nationalists. They found inspiration in the 1917 Russian Revolution. They viewed it as an answer to the unique problems they faced in a colonised and underdeveloped country. Workers’ taking power in Russia demonstrated that even a small but concentrated industrial working class in a majority peasant country could seize and hold state power to begin the transition towards socialism. 
But the Russian Revolution was an inspiration not just because it was an underdeveloped country. Tsarist Russia was an empire in its own right, often referred to as “the prison-house of nations”. The new workers’ state inherited this imperial structure and almost immediately affirmed the right for all oppressed nations to self-determination, up to and including secession. The Russian revolutionaries also established the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 to attract, lead and organise revolutionaries in other countries to foment workers’ revolutions elsewhere. The early Comintern congresses, in appealing to revolutionaries in colonised countries, laid out their support for national self-determination as a fundamental democratic right and as a means to build international workers’ revolution. They also emphasised the importance of maintaining the independence of revolutionary workers’ parties from pro-capitalist, nationalist forces. 
Unfortunately, international workers’ revolutions did not follow in the footsteps of the Russians, so by the mid-1920s, the revolution was isolated and degenerating under the weight of invasion, famine and economic collapse. Over time, a state bureaucracy came to substitute itself for mass workers’ democracy. This counter-revolutionary process expressed itself politically in Joseph Stalin’s rise to power. Stalin rationalised the increasingly undemocratic, state-capitalist form of rule and turned Communist parties around the world from organisers of international revolution to geopolitical satellites for Soviet Russia. 
This was cruelly demonstrated when a revolutionary struggle broke out in China in 1927. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was prepared to play a leading role in organising workers to challenge for power just as the Russian workers had a decade before. Stalin ordered that they subordinate themselves to the pro-capitalist, anti-colonial nationalist party, the Kuomintang. This was a cynical reversal from what the Comintern had propagated in early congresses. Tragically, the Kuomintang betrayed the Communists as soon as they took power and slaughtered tens of thousands of them. 
Among the Vietnamese students in France, the success and then degeneration of the Russian Revolution created two hostile camps of Vietnamese communists in the 1920s. On one side were the followers of Nguyen Ai Quoc, who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh. His politics were more influenced by the Comintern during its degeneration into a foreign policy arm of the Russian state than by its revolutionary period. He was a die-hard Stalinist. He adopted the perspective that the socialist revolution in Vietnam was not on the immediate agenda, and so the key task for communists was to support and develop the forces of nationalism. Where he did fight for “socialism”, he identified that with the one-party dictatorship of Stalin: a powerful state exploiting workers and peasants to drive industrial development.
On the other side were the followers of Ta Thu Thau. He began as a nationalist, leading the Annamite Independence Party in the mid-1920s. Ta Thu Thau watched the revolution of 1927 closely, and was repelled by the Kuomintang and the Comintern’s directions to the CCP demanding servile submission. His reading of Leon Trotsky’s critiques of Stalinism, particularly his articles about the tragedy of the Chinese revolution, converted Ta Thu Thau and his followers to the politics of Trotskyism. 
Both of these camps attempted to build mass parties to fight for their politics in Vietnam during the 1930s, particularly in the most industrialised city, Saigon. Initially, both Trotskyists and Stalinists agreed to unite around the newspaper La Lutte (The Struggle) and a joint electoral ticket in the local municipal council. This Stalinist-Trotskyist alliance was tested in a major struggle that broke out following the election of a Socialist Party-led government in France in 1936. 
 
Intellectuals, workers and peasants expected a more liberal colonial policy from this government. La Lutte used these raised expectations and relative freedoms to propose “action committees”. These committees were bodies in which Vietnamese workers and peasants discussed their grievances and formulated demands. Just as the action committees began to stall, a strike wave spread across all major industries in Vietnam from mid-1936 to mid-1937. La Lutte played a leading role in this strike wave. But as it spread, the French government shifted decisively towards repression. 
Friction grew between the Stalinists and Trotskyists in these years. Ta Thu Thau and the Trotskyists wanted to denounce the mass arrests and reactionary policies of the rightward-moving French government. But the Stalinists, loyally following Moscow’s orders to help keep the French government as a Soviet ally, refused to condemn it. In late 1937, the Stalinists were directed to leave La Lutte.
Freed from the Stalinists’ conservative influence, the Trotskyists grew their prestige. In the 1939 Saigon Municipal Council elections, the Trotskyists won 80 percent of the vote. 
Unfortunately, the outbreak of World War II, the ascendancy of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime in France and Japan’s occupation of Vietnam all combined to suppress and break up the Trotskyists’ organisation after 1939. These historical developments also created a revolutionary situation in which Ho Chi Minh’s forces rode to power.
In the dying days of their doomed war effort, the Japanese redirected rice from the Mekong Delta to use as fuel for their power stations. As a result, about a million Vietnamese peasants died. Seeing that the war was coming to an end, Ho Chi Minh called on starving peasants to storm rice warehouses and resist taxes, winning mass support. That support enabled his forces, organised in the Viet Minh, to enter Hanoi unopposed after Japan’s surrender in August 1945. On 2 September, Ho declared independence to a crowd of half a million. 
But they fought the French attempts to take back their colony with one arm tied behind their back. Stalin had agreed with the US and Britain to restore French rule in Indochina. Since France lacked troops, the Allies agreed that the British would take over in the south as a stopgap. When British forces arrived in Saigon, the Communist leaders, acting on Moscow’s instructions, welcomed them as anti-fascist allies. 
Needless to say, freeing Vietnam was the last thing on the minds of the British. The British commander, General Douglas Gracey, turned on the Communists and their nationalist allies. Gracey freed and rearmed Japanese forces and French colonials, then drove the Viet Minh and its nationalist allies out of every government building, killing all who resisted. In response, the people of Saigon rose in revolt. Workers, Trotskyists, Buddhists and communists who rejected compromise with the British seized weapons and held the working-class suburbs for days. Ultimately, the French would overpower them and retake the city, but even as they retreated from French attacks, the Stalinists continued to arrest and kill thousands of Trotskyists. Under the political leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh wiped out the entire Vietnamese Trotskyist movement along with many militant workers.
Revolutionaries They Could Not Break documents this history. It is a tragedy written by an exiled participant, Ngo Van, four and a half decades after the events took place. His attention to naming so many of the Trotskyists who fought and died, and his careful account-keeping of the crimes of the Stalinists, all read like a cry for the world never to forget what happened. Such an appeal we must heed. The heroism and sacrifice of the Vietnamese Trotskyists represent more than just a footnote in the grander narrative of Vietnam’s history—they fought for a path not taken and embodied a spirit upon which the counter-revolution had to pile mountains of scorn and rubble in order to suffocate it for future generations. 
Ngo’s book is a political argument about the lessons of their experiences as much as it is a demand to remember.

Fighting the far right on campus: a small victory from the US in 1992

Fighting imperialism then and now

Why history matters for socialists

A warning from history: ‘This is what is going to happen to you’

How do holocausts happen?

When the workers’ movement took on sexual objectification

Why do revolutions always seem to end in bloodshed and tyranny?

Australia’s history with slavery

When apartheids of the world united: South Africa and Israel’s secret embrace

Revolutionaries against capitalism and colonialism: a history of the Vietnamese Trotskyists

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