Sandra Bloodworth

How workers brought down apartheid in South Africa

Lance Selfa

What makes the Democrats different from, but the same as, the Republicans?

In his lifetime, Karl Marx witnessed the establishment of capitalism as an all-encompassing, global system, and with it the international working class—a force capable of radical social transformation. As this system of exploitation and ruthless competition developed, Marx studied it closely, becoming well known for his theories of class, exploitation and value. 
The power of Marx’s economic writing means that frequently, and sometimes deliberately, his political insights are overlooked. But Marx was, first and foremost, a revolutionary, an activist and a radical. Coupled with an understanding of his economic insights, the evolution of his political writings demonstrates most clearly how Marx became a Marxist, and founded a movement that continues to fight for radical social change more than 140 years after his death.
In February 1848, Marx published The Communist Manifesto with collaborator Frederick Engels for the Communist League, a recently formed revolutionary party based in London that both were part of. The manifesto was a bold call to revolution and an assertion that it was the working class that must lead it. Immediately, historical events provided a test and, ultimately, vindication for the manifesto.
The 1840s were racked with mass hunger and poverty for those at the bottom of society. At the top, rifts and ruptures were emerging between the rulers—the old nobility and the conservative bourgeois states—and the liberal bourgeois reformers who were challenging them. 
In 1848 a wave of popular uprisings and revolutions crashed over Europe. Beginning in France, upheavals went on to rock the Habsburg, Russian and Prussian empires. It was the last radical gasp of the emerging bourgeoisie.
The uprising in France began in February 1848. Initially successful, it toppled the unpopular regime of Louis Philippe through an alliance of the liberal reformers and radical workers in the cities. It ended only a few months later when the capitalist forces turned on the workers and drowned their struggle in blood. The capitalists installed a military dictatorship with a liberal veneer, and in so doing laid the basis for the brutal dictatorship of Louis Napoleon that followed. The workers, although outnumbered and outgunned, erected barricades and fought heroically in the streets of Paris.
In the German principalities, the bourgeoisie were far more acquiescent to the old nobility. They undermined their own nationalist project of uniting Germany into a modern capitalist state by refusing to confront the German kings and princes. They abandoned the working-class forces, leaving them vulnerable to brutal defeat.
Marx and Engels were keen observers of these developments and were closely involved in the German uprisings. Engels fought to the bitter end in south-west Germany, while Marx participated in the Rhineland with the Communist League.
Marx was engaged in debates about strategy and organisation within the league at this time, and emerged from these heady days with two key insights: first, that the bourgeoisie was no longer a revolutionary class and could not be relied upon to confront the old feudal ruling classes; and second, that the working class must organise independently as a class.
After experiencing the brutal backlash of the old order in alliance with the new capitalist ruling classes, he concluded that the liberal bourgeoisie was not willing to pursue democratic reforms, including those they themselves would benefit from as a class, like political freedoms. He compared the approaches of the French and German bourgeoisies in an article written in November 1848: “In France it [the bourgeoisie] played the part of a tyrant and made its own counter-revolution. In Germany it acts like a slave and carries out the counter-revolution for its own tyrants”.
Following from these revelations were organisational implications, namely, the urgent need for working-class independence. He argued that the working class must act in its own interests and needed independent organisation to do so. He was beginning to see what this could look like as he took inspiration from nascent forms of working-class organisation, from the Silesian weavers’ strike to the Chartists in Britain and the workers’ clubs in Paris. 
He outlined these arguments most clearly in his Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League in March 1850, known as the March Address. He explains, “[T]he workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organisation of the workers’ party ... the League must aim to make every one of its communes a centre and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence”.
As the 1848 upheavals were crushed, Marx and Engels were exiled to London. There, they found themselves at the heart of the British Empire—the centre of industrial capitalism—and surrounded by the most developed working class in the world at the time. This working class was, by the 1860s, rallying for abolition of slavery in response to the US Civil War and in support of Irish independence. Much of Marx’s political life was preoccupied with how the working class could develop the political consciousness necessary to take power, and the 1860s provided an opportunity to better understand this through close observation of the workers’ movement happening around him.
Civil war broke out in America in 1861. On one side was the Confederacy, fighting to secede in order to maintain slavery in the interests of the southern landowning elite. On the other side was the northern bourgeoisie, the Union, for whom industrial development was key and slavery dispensable.
The British ruling class came down on the side of the Confederacy, certain sections pushing for Britain to intervene. Slavery provided Britain and Europe with cheap cotton and was an integral part of industrialisation and world trade. It’s estimated that the livelihood of one quarter of Britain was based on the cotton industry. On the other hand, European and English workers by and large supported the Union, even those in Lancashire, who were devastated by the cotton famine.
The Civil War signalled new political possibilities after a decade or so of retreat following 1848. Meetings of workers in support of the Union were called by the London Trade Union Council. This renewed internationalism became the precursor to the International Working Men’s Association, better known as the First International, which Marx helped found in 1864. The International brought together unions and radical political currents from across Europe.
Unlike many other radicals at the time, Marx landed firmly on the side of the Union. He understood that slavery needed to be opposed because the presence of slavery anywhere undermines the conditions of labour everywhere. In his words, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded”. Although Abraham Lincoln and other conservative Union leaders initially denied the war was about slavery and refused to promise abolition, Marx identified that a Confederate victory would mean an expansion of slavery. He could see that the war was a contest between two economic systems, and only one side could win out. 
In a similar vein, the Irish struggle for independence from the yoke of British occupation gave Marx an opportunity to deepen his understanding of how political questions were central to working class self-emancipation. In the 1860s, Fenianism, a radical expression of Irish nationalism, emerged, inspiring many Irish workers and English workers to take up the cause.
A high point of this was the campaign to save the Manchester Martyrs in 1867. Three Irish nationalists were put on trial and publicly hanged for the death of a police officer. The ruling class whipped up a hysterical campaign to inspire anti-Irish sentiment. A campaign for the release of all Irish political prisoners was then spurred on.
Although Marx and Engels criticised Fenian terrorist tactics in private letters to one another, they championed the Irish cause and pushed for the International to take up the fight. Marx fought the more conservative union leaders to his right and the ultra-lefts around Bakunin, who were hesitant to support Irish independence. He argued that the impoverishment of Ireland was a great source of wealth for the British Empire, and that anti-Irish sentiment amongst English workers undermined working conditions and their ability to fight the English ruling class. He urged, “[I]t is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland ... to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation”.
Marx and Engels’ enthusiasm for and affinity with working-class struggle is captured in Engels’ words to Marx in a letter the day after the execution of the Manchester Martyrs in 1867: “To my knowledge, the only time that anyone has been executed for anything similar in a civilised state was the case of John Brown at Harpers Ferry. The Fenians could not wish for a better precedent”.
Marx first articulated a theory of working-class self-emancipation in the 1840s. Decades later, in 1871, this theoretical assertion became a reality. For 71 days, Paris was under workers’ control, a heroic experiment in radical democracy and the first of its kind.
In The Civil War in France, a pamphlet Marx wrote in June on behalf of the International, Marx describes it as a “glorious harbinger of a new society”, one of many emotive descriptions throughout.
The backdrop to this uprising was the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. France was losing, and Adolphe Thiers, the head of the new French republic, refused to defend Paris if it meant arming the working class. He sent soldiers into the working-class neighbourhood of Belleville at dawn on 18 March to disarm the National Guard, a workers’ militia. By midday, the soldiers had fraternised with the guardsmen, barricades were erected, General Vinoy—who was leading the operation—had fled Paris, and crowds of men, women and children were taking to the streets in anger and building barricades. The Paris Commune had begun.
Over the subsequent months, workers constructed a new state out of radically democratic institutions, with recallable, elected delegates of the working class. Workers envisioned and enacted radical change in every aspect of society, from the family to the workplace. Everything was up for debate, from political strategy and defence of the commune to science, the church and even the arts. Marx got to see, if only briefly, humanity flourishing under workers’ control. He wrote: “For the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and ... without any police of any kind”.
In order to re-establish bourgeois rule, the ruling class carried out a brutal massacre. Thirty thousand Communards were killed within a week. The privileged classes and their newspapers delighted in the torture and imprisonment of countless more.
Marx responded to the counter-revolution with equal parts rage and theoretical clarity about the need to smash the capitalist state in order for workers to take power and create a socialist society. He explained that the working class in power naturally meant the abolition of exploitation. The Commune was “the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour”.
The Paris Commune showed, Marx argued, that workers couldn’t simply take hold of the existing state. There needed to be new radical forms of democracy. And the capitalist state must be confronted—his only criticism of the Commune was that they took up arms too late; they needed to defend their fragile, embryonic institutions of self-government against the might of the bourgeois state.
Marx’s political legacy offers invaluable lessons for us today. He developed and refined his theory of social revolution by engaging in the debates of his time and by taking part in the most important struggles of the day. This approach—learning and developing theory through the practical experience of the working-class movement—remains the guiding principle of the Marxist movement today.

Belle Gibson

Karl Marx: more than an economist

Mick Armstrong

The hidden history of Lebanon’s revolt

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

Jess Lenehan

The West’s war on workers’ power in Russia

It took working-class revolutions in Russia and Germany to end the First World War after four years in which 45 million people were killed and the lives of hundreds of millions upended.
World War One was the culmination of decades of rivalry between European capitalist states, in particular Britain, France and Germany. In a lecture delivered in May 1917, Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/14.htm">argued</a>: “The present war is a continuation of the policy of conquest, of the shooting down of whole nationalities, of unbelievable atrocities committed by the Germans and the British in Africa, and by the British and the Russians in Persia”. 
The European states had competed for markets, trade routes, raw materials and labour—just as the companies within their territories competed for profits. Long before 1914, the year the war broke out, most of the world had been carved up between them.
Britain and France had divided up Africa and most of Asia, soaking the land in blood. Britain’s sprawling empire was economically and militarily superior, but it faced emerging rivals. Germany was the most important of these. Although it had a far smaller colonial footprint, Germany had developed new technical and organisational methods to build its economy, linking businesses into cartels and trusts that allowed for rapid expansion through the pooling of resources. 
Britain used its enormous navy to constrain Germany’s access to overseas markets and colonial possessions. But by 1914, Germany was no longer prepared to tolerate British naval control. Polite negotiations could not overcome the reality: for any European state to continue to expand its power, others had to have theirs reduced. The violence previously inflicted in the colonies was now unleashed in the heart of “civilisation”.
On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Habsburg throne, was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. Austria formally declared war one month later. Within seven days, all of the European powers threw themselves into the war: Russia, France and Great Britain on the Serbian side; Germany in alliance with Austria-Hungary. As the war progressed, more countries joined in. Germany’s alliance, called the Central Powers, invaded Belgium and drew in Ottoman Turkey. Britain, France and Italy became known as the Entente. The war now consumed the world. 
A year into the conflict, Polish-German communist Rosa Luxemburg <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/">described</a> in her Junius Pamphlet the evil being wrought by the capitalist war-makers: 
“Business is flourishing upon the ruins. Cities are turned into shambles, whole countries into deserts, villages into cemeteries, whole nations into beggars, churches into stables; popular rights, treaties, alliances, the holiest words and the highest authorities have been torn into scraps ... Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands.”
Peace negotiations wouldn’t end the fighting, nor would anti-war marches alone. Each country’s ruling class had too much to lose: their future position in the geopolitical order, their alliances, their access to the world’s resources, their wealth and status. 
Not even the revolutionary overthrow of the Russian tsar in February 1917 could pull Russia from the war. The new pro-capitalist provisional government, which replaced the monarchy, remained committed to the war even though it ran the risk of another revolution. But the government knew that to withdraw would be to undermine the state’s future.
In the May lecture referred to above, Lenin <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/14.htm">argued</a>: 
“The war which the capitalists of all countries are waging cannot be ended without a workers’ revolution against these capitalists ... So long as the government of the capitalists has not been replaced by a government of the revolutionary working class, the government is doomed merely to reiterate: We are heading for disaster.”
Revolutions in Russia and Germany finally ended the war. In October, Russian workers and soldiers, led by the Bolshevik Party, overthrew the provisional government and replaced it with a workers’ government. 
The revolutionaries withdrew Russia from the war, signing a peace treaty with the Central Powers on 3 March 1918. That entailed a sacrifice: allowing annexations and giving away important industrial and farming land, putting the chances of building socialism in Russia in peril. 
But the revolutionaries hoped that this radical act would demonstrate the internationalist spirit of their new state, and encourage the working classes across the world to launch their own revolutions against the war and for socialism. Leon Trotsky summed up the Bolsheviks’ attitude in a February 1918 <a href="https://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/trotsky-speech-brest-litovsk-1918/">speech</a>, delivered shortly before signing the treaty: 
“We are leading our army and our people out of the war, in anticipation of an imminent time when the oppressed peoples of all countries will take their fate into their own hands, in the way that Russian workers have done.”
German workers and soldiers answered the call. Throughout 1918, mass strikes and demonstrations against the war shook the German government. A mass revolutionary movement flowered across Germany in November. Workers created revolutionary councils, inspired by the flowering of democracy in Russia’s new workers’ state. 
Through these councils, they took over the running of their workplaces, then entire cities. Sailors organised mutinies, refusing to launch their battleships against the British fleet. They joined the councils and made joint plans with the workers. Soldiers’ councils took charge of battalions comprising tens of thousands of men. Historian Pierre Broué gives a sweeping account of this revolution in his book The German Revolution, 1917-1923.
Only five days into the revolution, the German government collapsed. A new revolutionary republic was declared on 9 November. Two days later, the European leaders rushed to sign a set of deals to end the war. 
This history should be a clarion call: we need to rebuild socialist parties everywhere that can lead revolutions against the capitalists and end their barbaric wars forever. 
Over the past three years, Europe and the Middle East have again become theatres of major war. Russia’s assault on Ukraine is now in its third year, and Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. Both of these wars could yet become wider conflicts. An even greater threat looms on the horizon. The United States and China are preparing for a conflict that could again draw in other major powers from across the world. Australia is positioning itself as the key military ally of the United States in Asia. 
As in 1917-18, we will need revolutions to bring a stop to this imperialist madness.

Jasmine Duff

We need a revolution to put an end to today’s wars

When Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza last October, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong was quick to take Israel’s side. “We stand with Israel and we always will”, she <a href="https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/penny-wong/speech/remarks-australia-israel-chamber-commerce">told</a> the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce. 
Wong boasted of the role played by “Australia’s most consequential foreign minister”, Herbert “Doc” Evatt, “a leading architect of the partition plan that laid the foundations for the creation of a new nation state”.
Just as Evatt backed the partition of Palestine in 1948, Wong insisted that a new (or not so new) partition plan—the “two-state solution”, in which Palestinians are given “statehood” in a mere morsel of their homeland—is needed to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
That the two-state solution has never eventuated, according to Wong, has nothing to do with Israel’s determination to maintain its 67-year-long occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem through settlement expansion and a brutal siege of Gaza. Instead, it’s the actions of Hamas that have “pushed that two-state solution further out of reach”, she asserted.
Labor’s rhetoric has shifted somewhat over the past eight months. With the International Court of Justice demanding a halt to Israel’s assault on Rafah and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest for war crimes, the Australian government has felt compelled to tone down its enthusiasm for Israel’s genocide.
However, any talk of sanctions against the apartheid state has been sharply rebuked. 
When Western Australian Labor Senator Fatima Payman put the case for sanctions against Israel on 15 May, she faced scorn from across Labor’s front bench. Labor senators joined with the opposition to condemn as “antisemitic” the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, which Payman had used to end her speech. 
And the attacks on our movement continue, Labor accusing the Greens and other supporters of Palestine of “inciting violence”.
Why is Labor so pro-Israel?
One argument—put forward by a number of former Labor politicians such as Bob Carr, Kevin Rudd and Paul Keating—is that the Zionist lobby exercises an all-powerful influence within the corridors of federal parliament and in media debate. The Zionist lobby has been able to dictate Australia’s foreign policy to the detriment of Australia’s “national interest”, <a href="https://johnmenadue.com/the-lobby-and-labor/">according to</a>
former Foreign Minister Carr.
To unpack this assertion, we need to consider what Carr means by the “national interest”. 
Labor governments don’t serve the interests of the Australian working class; they serve the interests of big business. And Australian big business overwhelmingly favours a close relationship with the United States as a protector of its interests in the Asia Pacific. It should therefore be no surprise that Israel—Washington’s most important ally in the Middle East—gains favourable media coverage and red-carpet treatment from Australian politicians.
However, both Wong and Albanese hail from Labor’s left faction. Albanese was once a founding member of Parliamentary Friends of Palestine and early in his career spoke inside and outside parliament in opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Their embrace of Israel is part of a long tradition of Labor governments going back to 1948; it can’t be explained by the power of the Israel lobby alone. Rather, it is rooted in the long history of Labor’s links with Zionism, Israel’s founding ideology. 
When Israel was established in 1948, it had the backing of not only the Labor Party, but also the Communist Party (CPA) and the wider labour movement. The CPA’s position echoed that of Moscow: the USSR under Joseph Stalin had long since subordinated Communist parties around the world to serve its foreign policy interests. The Cold War was just beginning, and Stalin hoped that the USSR could counter Washington’s growing influence in the Middle East by having Israel on its side.
Labor’s links with Zionism reflected the movement’s influence within European social democracy. Zionism began as a minority movement within European Jewry. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, argued that antisemitism was inherent in non-Jews and could not be fought. By contrast, the <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/the-radical-jewish-tradition-revolutionaries-resistance-fighters-and-firebrands">socialist response</a> to antisemitism was that it could be fought, along with other forms of oppression and racism, but that it would require a united struggle of the working class to overthrow capitalism and create a genuinely equal society.
Zionism needed to appeal to a Jewish labour movement that was overwhelmingly socialist or communist in outlook. It straddled this contradiction with the development of a “left-wing” Zionist current, known as Labor Zionism, which embraced the rhetoric of socialism to justify Zionism’s settler colonial project in Palestine. The main currents within Labor Zionism decisively subordinated class questions to nationalism in the 1930s and played a central role in the establishment of the Zionist state.
During the British mandate in Palestine, between 1922 and 1948, Britain attempted to balance Zionist aspirations for their own settler-colonial regime in Palestine with London’s need to foster clientelist relationships with Arab regimes. Between 1936 and 1939, Britain worked with the Zionists to suppress a popular Palestinian uprising, which opposed both British colonial rule and the influx of Zionist settlers. 
The defeat of the Palestinian revolt emboldened the Zionists to go on the offensive. In 1946 the Irgun, a Zionist terror organisation, bombed the King David Hotel, headquarters of Britain’s colonial administration in Jerusalem. Terrorist attacks by both the Irgun and the Stern Gang followed, hastening the end of British colonial rule in Palestine.
In Australia in the prewar years, the conservative Lyons government strongly backed colonial rule during Britain’s suppression of the Palestinian revolt, a policy continued by his successor Menzies and, during the war, by Labor Prime Minister John Curtin. Each shared Britain’s fear of an Arab backlash against the declaration of a Jewish state. 
However, after the war, the Chifley government began to reorient Australian foreign policy, shifting allegiance from a declining British Empire towards the United States. In doing so, Chifley began to pursue a more independent foreign policy attuned to a more assertive Australian ruling class that recognised the Middle East’s significance for global shipping and trade.
In December 1943, Labor’s national conference <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/LIB18896">expressed support</a> for “the continued growth of the Jewish national home in Palestine by immigration and settlement”. Prominent journalist Wilfred Burchett <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/rebel-journalism/163C5F9D2CCA23C857E3841AAEC1B4CA">equated</a> the Jewish struggle for independence in Palestine with that of the Spanish Republicans confronting a fascist enemy. Feminist Jessie Street also emerged as a strong <a href="https://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0403b.htm">supporter</a> of a Jewish “national homeland” in Palestine.
The Melbourne-based Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism, established in 1942, operated as a coalition of Jewish social democrats, communists and liberals. It was significant in shaping labour movement opinion. In a 1947 pamphlet, titled Whither Palestine, the council defended Jewish mass migration to Palestine and, <a href="https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/informit.311270452672386">according to</a> labour historian Philip Mendes, “attributed Arab-Jewish conflict to the malign influence of exploitative Arab landowners, and the extremist Mufti of Jerusalem who had collaborated with the Nazis”.
A May 1948 council petition calling for immediate Australian recognition of Israel gained the support of leading ALP figures Jim Cairns (Snr), William Slater, Doris Blackburn and Frank Crean, as well as Communist trade union leaders Clarrie O’Shea and Jim Healy. The CPA newspaper, Tribune, operated in lockstep with the council, publishing numerous articles supporting Israel.
According to Mendes, “the paper constructed the [1948] war as a brave Israeli ‘David’ backed by the Soviet Union and all supporters of freedom confronting a conservative Arab ‘Goliath’ supported by British and US imperialists and oil companies”. No consideration was given to Palestinian desires for liberation from colonial rule and their mass displacement by Zionist colonisers. 
A widespread sentiment of humanitarian sympathy for Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and vocal and organised support for Israel within the labour movement, combined with a more independent and assertive foreign policy, contributed to the Chifley government’s support for Palestine’s partition and Israel’s creation. Doc Evatt, the minister for external affairs in the Curtin and Chifley governments, was well placed to rally support behind the Zionist cause.
Evatt was instrumental to the establishment of the United Nations Committee on Palestine in May 1947. He also chaired the Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question, appointed by the UN General Assembly. Both bodies recommended Palestine’s partition. The Ad Hoc Committee presented a plan to the UN General Assembly that allocated 56 percent of Mandate Palestine to a Jewish state, despite Jewish settlers being less than a third of Palestine’s population. 
Evatt’s chairing of the Ad Hoc Committee was instrumental in persuading the UN General Assembly to vote in favour of partition, leading historian Chanan Reich to <a href="https://research.monash.edu/en/publications/australia-and-israel-an-ambiguous-relationship">describe</a> Evatt as “one of the godfathers of the present Israeli state”. 
Israel’s declaration of independence came at midnight on 14 May 1948. It occurred amid a wave of Zionist terror, known by Palestinians as the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/nakba-understanding-palestinian-catastrophe">Nakba</a>. Between late 1947 and early 1949, 530 Palestinian villages were ethnically cleansed, 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 750,000 more were forced into exile. By the end of the war, the new state of Israel controlled 78 percent of historic Palestine.
While the US and the Soviet Union immediately recognised Israel, Britain moved more slowly. Though the Chifley government supported Israel’s creation from the outset, official recognition didn’t come until eight months later, in concert with Britain. The Chifley government laid the foundation for the US alliance and Cold War policies pursued by his successor, Robert Menzies.
When Labor returned to government, led by Gough Whitlam in 1972, Israel had become the Middle East’s most powerful military state and a key pillar of US hegemony in the region. While Israel’s founding faced no significant opposition within the Australian left, its invasion of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights in 1967 provoked a very different response. 
Israel’s occupation of the remainder of historic Palestine coincided with a massive escalation in the US war in Vietnam and the introduction of conscription in Australia. By 1968, a powerful anti-war movement had developed, and its impact was being felt within Labor’s base as trade unionists became increasingly involved in anti-war protest. Labor’s left faction began to express its solidarity with Palestinians. 
The 1973 Yom Kippur War proved to be a turning point. While the US backed Israel unconditionally, the Whitlam Labor government felt compelled to adopt a more cautious, independent approach. Australia did not condemn the Syrian and Egyptian attacks on Israel but did condemn the US weapons being airlifted in to support Israel. While officially adopting a position of neutrality, Whitlam and most of his cabinet colleagues remained sympathetic to Israel.
Several factors influenced the Whitlam government’s position. The end of the White Australia Policy meant that Arab voters, though a tiny minority, now emerged as a lobby in support of Palestinian rights. Additionally, Whitlam was focused on building a relationship with Indonesia’s military regime, led by General Suharto, and newly independent Malaysia, both Muslim states.
Whitlam’s deputy, Jim Cairns, had been a prominent figure within the Vietnam movement. The elevation of Cairns and other prominent Victorian left party members into the cabinet was an attempt to coopt anti-war and left-wing sentiment. Enlisting Cairns and other leading luminaries of the Labor left in Whitlam’s business-friendly agenda required making some concessions. This was reflected in a somewhat more critical stance towards US imperialism, in both the Middle East and South-East Asia. 
In 1974, Australia’s UN ambassador <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_194211/DU117_18_A55_1977.pdf">announced</a> that “if the Palestinians want to create a state of their own alongside Israel, we will accept this”, committing Australia for the first time to supporting a two-state solution. Before his dismissal in November 1975, Whitlam even approved establishing a Palestine Liberation Organization liaison office in Canberra.
However, this more progressive approach was not without its critics inside the ALP. One of the most vocal Labor supporters of Israel was Bob Hawke, elected Labor president in 1974. Hawke became Australia’s next Labor prime minister in 1983, but had had a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/03/secret-embassy-cables-cast-the-bob-hawke-legend-in-a-different-light">cosy relationship</a> with the US embassy in Canberra in the preceding Fraser years, when president of the ACTU. Once elected prime minister, Hawke reasserted a close relationship with Washington. 
In a 1987 speech, following a visit to Israel, Hawke <a href="https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-7126">expressed</a> his admiration for the Israeli state and its Labor Zionist founders.
“As a social democrat, I could not fail to respect the way in which Israel had incarnated the vision of David Ben Gurion of a working class building its own nation through its own physical and intellectual labour”, he gushed.
Hawke rejected the idea of a Palestinian state in <a href="https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-7089">favour</a> of Jordanian-Palestinian confederation (an idea that resurfaced again under Trump’s presidency in 2018). Perhaps more attuned to realpolitik, Hawke’s successor Paul Keating threw his support behind the Oslo Accords and established Labor’s longstanding support for a two-state solution. 
However, this “solution” was from the outset a capitulation to Israel’s demands. Had it succeeded, it would have given Palestinians statehood on just 22 percent of their historic land. The Oslo Accords failed to meet Palestinian demands for the right of refugees to return to the villages from which they were expelled in 1948 and facilitated Israel’s annexation by stealth of the West Bank through ongoing illegal settlement.
Labor’s support for Israel has continued ever since. During the 2007 federal election campaign, Labor leader Kevin Rudd claimed he had Israel “in his DNA”. Two years later, his deputy, Julia Gillard, defended Israel’s bombardment of the defenceless and blockaded civilian population of Gaza, claiming Israel had “a right to defend itself”.
Whether in opposition or in government, Labor has always been heavily committed to Israel. To the extent that Whitlam embarked on a more independent foreign policy, it proved to be the exception, rather than the rule. Even a national conference resolution committing Labor to recognise a Palestinian state at some point in the future (or rather confer “statehood” on the corrupt and collaborationist Palestinian Authority) has proved a step too far for the Albanese government while Israel carries on its slaughter in Gaza.
Labor’s insistence on a “two-state solution” is and always has been a capitulation to Zionism. It is premised on the idea that Jews cannot live side by side with Muslim and Christian Palestinians within the same state. Moreover, such a “solution” will hold Palestinians hostage in a fragmented territory surrounded by walls and checkpoints, leaving Israeli apartheid intact. 
Genuine liberation requires tearing down the state structures of oppression and racism that Zionism has created, structures now intertwined with Israeli and regional capitalism. It will require a revolutionary struggle by the Arab masses to overthrow their corrupt and capitalist regimes and establish a socialist confederation of states throughout the Middle East.

Nick Everett

Why Labor has always backed Israel

From the 1960s revolts to today’s Gaza solidarity encampments, students have long been at the forefront of radical struggles. Students have shut down campuses, helped to bring down dictators and sparked general strikes. Their militancy has inspired others to join campaigns against war, racism and political repression. There is much that the student activists of today can learn from the victories and defeats of the movements of the past.
1. Brazil’s “student spring”
“My first question is: who owns the school? To whom does it belong? I believe you already know the answer.” So began 16-year-old Ana Júlia Ribeiro’s address to the Paraná state legislative assembly in 2016. As she spoke, students were occupying hundreds of schools across Brazil. 
The occupations began in September 2015 after the governor of São Paulo announced a plan to close nearly 100 public schools. Speaking to openDemocracy, a student involved in the first occupation recalled, “A student found a news story about the Penguins’ Revolution in Chile. Nobody knew what an occupation was. So we learned what occupying meant and we decided to go ahead and do it”.
Years of attacks on education and other social services meant that wherever there were students, there was discontent. Occupations sprang up to challenge forced closures, mergers, corruption, sexist school administrators and more. The occupations started strongly but eventually receded. 
In September 2016, another round of attacks on public education brought them back. The first attack proposed sweeping changes to the curriculum. The second proposed an amendment to the constitution that would freeze public expenses for twenty years. The third, tabled by the far right, was the “School Without Parties” law, which sought to persecute teachers for “ideological indoctrinations” and ban any “Marxist” influence in schools. 
This time, the response was even larger. According to the Brazilian Union of Secondary School Students, more than 1,000 high schools were occupied. Students started to figure out how to run the schools for themselves—cooking, cleaning, keeping watch and holding their own lessons. In crowded classrooms, at student conferences and on the streets, the students debated the direction of the struggle. The 2019 documentary about the movement, Your Turn, shows autonomists, centrists, revolutionaries, anarchists and social democrats debating horizontal organising, how to fight sexism, the police and what public education should look like. 
In the end, the occupations didn’t break the power of the right-wing government. But the students held out against brutal police repression and attacks from the organised right, transforming themselves in the process. 
As Ana Julia said: “A week of occupations taught us more about politics and citizenship than the years we will spend inside classrooms”. 
2. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement 
The Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964 helped kick off a wave of student activism that would last well into the 1970s. The University of California Berkeley administration banned any activities related to “off-campus political and social action”, meaning that student activists were not allowed to organise information stalls, hold meetings or raise any funds. 
The attack was particularly aimed at Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activists, who, inspired by Black civil rights student activists in the South, had been organising in San Francisco’s Bay Area against the racist hiring practices of local businesses. 
Three days after the ban was announced, police arrested a CORE activist who had set up a stall. Students surrounded the cop car, beginning a sit-in that lasted 36 hours. Joel Geier, a socialist and leading activist in the free speech movement, recalled in an article for Jacobin magazine: “Within a few hours, three thousand people had joined the sit-down protest. The roof of the patrol car was transformed into a podium, a public platform upon which anybody could climb up and speak to the crowd. It was democracy in action, the living opposite of university police repression”. 
The Free Speech Movement had begun. 
In the following months, the campus left produced countless leaflets, newspapers and pamphlets, and held meetings, rallies and sit-ins. Through the Free Speech Movement, radicals and revolutionaries found a sizeable audience amongst the student body. 
By early December, the movement had escalated into a student strike. “When I looked up, a few dozen people were picketing—but within minutes, like a tidal wave, hundreds had joined the picket line. In less than an hour, our plan was working. We were actually shutting the university down”, Geier recalled. The various unions that represented campus workers agreed to support the student strike, and for the week, they refused to cross the student pickets. 
The radicalism of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement set the pace for the student movement across the country. The tactics it used became the touchstone for many other campuses. It proved to a generation that the liberal values espoused by university administrations and Democratic Party politicians alike were utterly bankrupt. And it showed that masses of students could be won to radical politics and throw themselves into the fight against capitalism.
3. The Soweto uprising
The murder of 12-year-old Hector Pieterson by the South African police marked a turning point in the movement against South African apartheid. Pieterson, alongside 22 other students, was killed when the police opened fire on a demonstration of 20,000 Soweto high schoolers on 16 June 1976. Interviewed in January 1977, Tebello Motapanyane, the secretary-general of the South African Students’ Movement, explained that students had walked out to protest the introduction of compulsory Afrikaans language in schools. After being attacked by police, they rioted, setting buildings ablaze across the townships. 
Protests broke out across the country in solidarity with the Soweto students, and in protest at apartheid itself. On 18 June, police fired on a demonstration of students and workers in Alexandra, killing four demonstrators. The government defended the police, and the protests continued. 
From 23 to 25 August, Soweto was paralysed by a general strike. The students turned their attention to the task of involving as many workers as possible in the next one. 
“The SSRC had distributed leaflets beforehand in Zulu, Sotho and English throughout Soweto, calling upon the workers to stay at home on the 13th to the 15th of September”, recorded historian Archie Mafeje in his 1978 article “Soweto and Its Aftermath”. “The strike turned out to be a massive demonstration of solidarity of the oppressed, even greater than the previous one. Approximately, half a million workers in the Reef responded. Not only that, it also received echoes from as far afield as Cape Town, where masses of Coloured as well as African workers came out in support of Soweto.”
The uprising in Soweto marked a new stage of the struggle against apartheid. Eventually, Black workers brought down the apartheid system. The Soweto students helped light the spark of that struggle. 
4. Indonesia’s reformasi total 
In 1998, Suharto, the hated Indonesian dictator, was felled by a mass movement of students and workers. General Suharto had come to power in 1965 in a vicious military coup that slaughtered more than 400,000 communists and left-wing activists, according to the International People’s Tribunal investigation on Crimes against Humanity, Indonesia 1965. 
Max Lane’s history of Indonesia, Unfinished Nation, tells the story of the revolt, which began in 1996. Facing heavy police repression, thousands braved the streets to protest the dictator. When an economic crisis hit in 1997, it deepened the political crisis caused by the protests. 
Students made the first decisive move, organising campus protests demanding price caps on basic goods. At the beginning of May 1998, the government announced an increase in the price of electricity and fuel. The demonstrations escalated in response. 
At the University of Trisakti in Jakarta, the military shot at a demonstration, killing four students. Across Jakarta, students broke out in riots. “Students and kampung dwellers ... took over streets and held open forums”, describes Lane. “Local parliamentary buildings, governor’s offices and other official buildings were occupied. In some cities, students took over the state radio stations and made their own broadcasts. They even attacked military outposts.”
On 19 May, students began an occupation outside the Indonesian parliament demanding Suharto step down. The next day, mass demonstrations took place across the country in support of the occupation. The day after that, Suharto resigned. 
But the movement was not over. The masses were fighting for reformasi total (complete reform)—any compromise with the figures of the old regime was unacceptable. 
In November, a special parliamentary session met to plan the transition to democracy. Students mobilised across the country. The military met their demonstrations with knives, spears, rifles and tear gas. In the urban centres, workers and the poor came to the students’ defence. They built barricades, made Molotov cocktails and threw rocks at the military. After beating back the military, the students surged forward and occupied the parliamentary compound for several hours. 
Eventually, the forces of moderation, who argued for a “slower” transition to democracy, won out. The street movement was disorganised and unable to challenge the power of the moderate political parties. 
But the bravery of the students sparked a mass movement that brought down a despised dictator and revived radical politics in a country where the slaughter of the left was a living memory. 
5. The French May
At the beginning of 1968, France was a capitalist success story. Following World War Two, it experienced almost uninterrupted economic growth, and little in the way of mass protest. Society seemed stable, and many, including on the left, had written off the potential for any radical upsurge. In May, all this shattered. 
In The Fire Last Time, British Marxist Chris Harman describes the events that began the French May. On the evening of 10 May, students held a demonstration in Paris’ Latin Quarter. The police, who had been brought in by the French government to forcibly close the Sorbonne university seven days earlier, fearing the anti-Vietnam War protests that had engulfed the campus, descended on the protest. But the students were prepared. They constructed barricades out of torn-up cobblestones and items tossed to them by local residents, and fought the police long into the night. By morning, the verdict was unanimous. The students had won. 
The battle was broadcast live on radio. Millions of workers listened as the students pushed back the police. Under pressure from their members, many of whom were inspired by the students, the two main trade union federations, the CGT (dominated by the Stalinist Communist Party) and CFDT, called a general strike for 13 May. Nearly a million workers joined. 
What had started as a one-day action developed into an indefinite strike. Workers pushed back against the conservatism of their trade union officials and occupied their factories. The fraternisation between student and worker militants led to a flourishing of political discussion.
In his memoir about 1968, L’aubepine de mai, Francois Le Madec, a worker, recounted the atmosphere of the first occupation at Sud Aviation, a factory outside of the western city of Nantes: “Around the shelters, in the cold night, we eat, we drink fraternally, and above all we discuss. But about what! If not the revolt, the revolution, the worker-student relations, the necessity to unite the struggles into one struggle, of the free university, of student power, of workers’ power”.
Luckily for French capitalism, and unluckily for the student and workers’ movement, the moderates in the CGT were more frightened by the possibility of revolution than defeat. Without an organised political force that could match the size and weight of the Communist Party, the occupation movement was wound up by the promise of a national election. 
Though the French May was over, students and workers around the world took up the mantle of their French comrades. In the following years, struggles broke out from Italy to Mexico. The veneer of a stable postwar compromise was shattered, and the idea that students and workers could change the world was back with a vengeance.

Amaya Castro Williams

Five student movements to remember

The emergence of a vibrant student movement in response to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza is an exciting development for socialists. Students have bravely put their studies and future careers (and in the US, their bodies) on the line to stand up for Palestine, shining a light on their universities’ complicity with the Israeli war machine.
For any mass movement to go forward, the dynamism, energy and creative flair that young people bring to it are priceless. Students have pushed to the forefront of the international solidarity movement, giving it a more radical edge and providing a left-wing pole of attraction within it. 
This is far from the first time that students have taken a radical lead. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, students were often the catalyst for mass activity on a much wider scale.
The general strike in France in May ’68 was sparked by student protests. Students and workers found common ground in their hatred of the authoritarian regime and the capitalist system behind it. Their combined forces created a deep social crisis, a nearly revolutionary situation that caused President Charles De Gaulle to flee the country. It was possible to restore “order” only because of the treachery of the Stalinist French Communist Party, which bullied and cajoled workers to return to the job—and did its level best to prevent interaction between students and workers.
In Italy’s “hot autumn” of 1969, radical students linked up with workers to challenge both bosses and the state, setting up student-worker committees and helping to establish rank-and-file groups in workplaces. Even after the workers’ struggle subsided, demonstrations and activities on the campuses maintained the momentum for a period.
It was students who provided the militant vanguard of the movement against the Vietnam War, engaging in myriad acts of disruption and civil disobedience. Many also developed a new political outlook, developing a critique of the capitalist system that causes wars.
Similarly, students played a leading role in anti-racist campaigns, from the civil rights movement in the US to the international anti-apartheid movement to the freedom rides by student activists in Australia that highlighted and challenged the appalling racism directed towards Aboriginal people.
It wasn’t just in the West that students led significant struggles. In October 1973, for example, students in Thailand led an uprising that overthrew the military dictatorship and forced the king into exile. Late into the 1970s, large numbers of students in South Korea and Chile also fought heroically against their oppressive right-wing regimes, often drawing workers into their struggles.
Even well after the decline of the mass student movements, students in China in 1989 led the revolt against their supposedly “Communist” government, with many thousands occupying Tiananmen Square for weeks on end. As in France, they sparked off a workers’ movement that presented a serious threat to the regime, subdued only by brutal army repression.
In this century, students have played an important role in struggles all over the world, from Hong Kong to Sudan to Chile to Canada, to name just a few.
So clearly, students can at times be a powerful force for change. However, because students play no direct role in producing profits, they have no real social power and cannot overthrow the system. Ultimately, only the working class—by collectively stopping the flow of profits and taking control of production—can defeat the combined power of the capitalists and the state.
Nonetheless, students can be a vital element of the struggle. They will often be the first to take action, and because of their ability to move into struggle quickly and their readiness to disrupt “business as usual”, they can act as a detonator for broader social forces. Within a movement or campaign, it is often students who put pressure on (or sideline) the more conservative elements and push it to the left. 
For much of capitalism’s history, universities were the preserve of the elite, where those who were born to rule were trained to rule. However, there were always at least a few (Marx and Engels come to mind) who rejected this pathway. In the early twentieth century, Lenin argued that students could play a vital role as “the vanguard of revolutionary democracy”, drawing workers into the socialist movement, and insisted that revolutionaries should conduct serious work among students.
But the composition of the student population changed dramatically with the economic boom that followed World War II. 
In a newly redivided world, the dominant powers competed frantically for military and economic advantage. The Cold War arms race and the drive for technological development created a demand for much higher numbers of skilled and educated workers to operate the machines, the computers and weapons systems, and to administer the expanding state sector. 
Hence the explosion of higher education, which for the first time drew in large numbers of people from working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds. If anything, that process has accelerated. Between 2000 and 2014, the number of students in higher education globally more than doubled to 207 million. This has dramatically narrowed the gap and increased the connection between students and the working class. Today’s students are less of a detached elite and more embedded into the fabric of society.
Students do not belong to any class—as a group they are in transition, an intermediate layer. A few may rise into the upper echelons of society (especially if that’s where they come from), and some will become middle-class professionals, but the majority are destined to become technical or white-collar workers, just as subject to exploitation as the manual workers more traditionally understood as the working class. In this sense, modern universities can be seen as factories, churning out graduates who keep the wheels of the system turning.
Universities are supposed to foster the pursuit of knowledge, the exploration of ideas, a scientific understanding of the world, abstract and critical thinking, creativity—all in the interests of human progress. To the extent that this is true, it’s actually in the interests of maintaining the status quo, both by training the managers and workers capitalism needs and by inculcating the ideology that upholds the system. But the continued advances required by capitalism do demand some of these things, so students are exposed to a range of ideas and have the time and space to discuss and develop them. And the very contradiction between the romantic ideal of the university and their increasing reality as big businesses and willing partners of capitalist enterprises can raise all sorts of questions. Students soon discover that the competition and profit motive that characterise capitalism pervade university life. 
Young people are more likely to encounter radical ideas at university than anywhere else, and socialist clubs can often find a receptive audience by both initiating activity and providing forums for political discussion. And although students work more today than previously, they are less tied to jobs and family responsibilities and have more flexible time than most workers, giving them more freedom to engage in political activity. This can make them more sensitive to shifts in the political climate. By recognising and relating to such shifts, socialists can play a decisive role in deepening the process of radicalisation. And when serious struggles erupt, students can quickly start to develop a revolutionary critique of capitalism.
As a worker, you must win the support of the majority to undertake any action against the boss, such as a strike. Students face no such limitations. Quite small numbers can initiate bold actions that capture the imagination, develop momentum and inspire emulation. The examples cited earlier often started with tiny groups taking a stand and galvanising wider circles.
The volatility that is characteristic of student movements is both a strength and a weakness: a strength in that it means that students can spring into action quickly and with enormous energy; a weakness in that both their intermediate class position and the transitory nature of student life make it difficult to sustain student organisation over the long term.
In the right circumstances, though, student actions can have an impact well beyond their ranks. Most potently, students’ youthful enthusiasm and defiance—as we saw in May ’68—can inspire and ignite struggle by workers, the only social force that can bring real, material pressure to bear. 
How far that process can go is a matter of politics and organisation. 
Many of the students radicalised during the 1960s and ’70s rightly rejected the Stalinist politics and organisations that then dominated the left. Among the currents that vied for influence, the “new left” and many anarchists suffered from an intellectual elitism that dismissed the working class as the key force for social change. They instead looked to struggles in the Third World (the Cultural Revolution in China, guerrilla activity), alternative lifestyles such as communes or even terrorism, all of which were a dead end. 
A lot of student activists were simply demoralised by the collapse of the movement and dropped out. Others made their peace with the system and sought positions of influence within it. For example, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a radical student leader in May ’68 known as “Danny the Red”, became a leader of the German Greens and a European MP; closer to home, Jim Bacon, a Maoist student leader at Monash, ended up as the Labor Premier of Tasmania.
On a more positive note, large numbers of radicalised students went into teaching and public service jobs, significantly accelerating the shift of their white-collar unions to the left.
A small number, however, rediscovered revolutionary Marxism and set about building organisations dedicated to the project of fighting for socialism and human liberation, led by the working class. Paradoxically, campuses are central to this. Even when struggle is at a low ebb, there are always some students who can be won to revolutionary politics on the basis of ideas. They need to develop the ability to defend their political positions on contested terrain, and when the opportunity arises to take action, they can gain experience in mobilising and leading others.
Student clubs play an important role in recruiting and training new members who can provide the cadre of a revolutionary party. Building a base among students is therefore of enormous strategic importance for any revolutionary organisation. It is out of such work that Socialist Alternative has grown to be the largest revolutionary organisation in Australia. 
At some point, as capitalism continues to wreak havoc on society and the environment, there will be a revival of mass resistance. This will create opportunities for students to link up with the working class and build a revolutionary party capable of leading a fight to overthrow capitalism and build a better world.

Tess Lee Ack

The role of students in radical struggles

This article was first presented as a speech to the Gaza solidarity encampments at La Trobe, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Queensland universities. 
It’s just fantastic to meet with those protesting in support of Palestine and against the war in Gaza, and particularly so as I am one of those Jews who say, “not in my name”.
A couple of weeks ago, Prof Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a British plastic surgeon, was due to address the French parliament. But when he arrived at the airport in Paris he was stripped of his possessions, taken to a holding cell under guard and then deported. Why did this happen? The German government had banned him from the Shengen Area, a single visa jurisdiction encompassing 29 European nations. It may seem strange that Germany would ban a British citizen from entering France. But Abu-Sitta was about to report on his 43 days spent at hospitals in Gaza last October and November.
A couple of weeks earlier, he was due to speak in Berlin at a congress about Palestine. The German authorities prevented him from entering the country, supposedly because they “could not ensure the safety of the attendees at the conference”. 
First of all, we have the assumption that a Palestinian is automatically a danger to everyone else. But second, we have what actually occurred at the conference. Far from being concerned about the participants’ safety, 2,500 riot police stormed the stage, shut off the electricity, arrested several people—including Jewish organisers of the event—and declared it banned.
The German government makes opposing antisemitism a core political issue, and so it should given its history. But how have they defined antisemitism? As opposition to Israel.
In Germany today, pro-Palestinian demonstrations are almost illegal. Wearing a keffiyeh is banned in some parts of the country. Using the phrase “From the river to the sea” and displaying the Palestinian flag are now crimes for which you can be arrested. One German state requires applicants for citizenship to declare their support for “Israel’s right to exist”. 
Meanwhile, the right organises in Germany with very few restrictions. The government regularly allows far-right, and even openly fascist, gatherings. This is in spite of the fact that more than 90 percent of all antisemitic incidents in Germany are attributable to the far-right. Real antisemitism is growing largely unchecked while governments attack and arrest anti-Zionist Jews all in the name of preventing antisemitism.
The Germans aren’t exceptional here. Governments all around the world push the line that anything hostile to Israel and Zionism is antisemitic. Let’s unpack that.
First, let’s consider what antisemitism is.
Discrimination and violence against Jews are nothing new. But in the past, this was based on Jewishness as a religion. All Jews had to do to escape was to get baptised. When Spain expelled Jews in 1492, those who converted were allowed to stay as long as they abandoned their religious practices. At the time Karl Marx’s father converted around 1816, this was still the case. But by the late nineteenth century, Marx himself, although he was not born Jewish by attitudes at the time, was again considered to be Jewish. What happened in between?
Imperialism took hold during the latter part of the nineteenth century and pseudo-scientific ideas of race were used to justify the subjugation of supposedly inferior populations in the colonies. It’s no accident that around the same time Jews also came to be viewed as a race—that is something biological, something you were born with and could not change. No longer was it considered to be something in your head—your religious belief—which you could alter. The basis of modern antisemitism is hatred of Jews as an inborn condition. 
The actual word “antisemitism” was invented by right-wing German nationalists who set up an organisation called the League of Antisemites in 1879.
Modern antisemitism became a tool in the capitalist divide and rule handbook. The ruling class wanted to get rid of competitors and during the nineteenth century a significant Jewish bourgeoisie arose in Germany. So, antisemitism was partly economic. But Jews in Europe were an easily identifiable community with a different language and customs, and were perfectly placed to be scapegoats for all sorts of issues. For instance, authorities in Tsarist Russia provoked pogroms to divert attention from the real causes of the misery in ordinary people’s lives.
Hostility to Jews in the late nineteenth century was also a product of their association with socialists and the working-class movement. Jews had been prominent in the 1789 French and 1848 European revolutions and in radical organisations such as the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Right wingers who wanted to attack the left often did this by pointing the finger at Jews.
On the other hand, it was the left and working-class movements that took a stand against antisemitism. Socialist parties, anarchists, the Bolsheviks, trade unions and many other working-class and left-wing organisations and independents in Europe and the US all joined in the fight against antisemitism, and against the right and fascism. Donny Gluckstein and I go into this in some detail in our book, The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands, and show what nonsense it is to talk about antisemitism being an integral and ingrained feature of radical organisations.
So where does Zionism fit into this understanding of what is antisemitic? 
Theodore Herzl, known as the father of Zionism, proposed his ideas in 1895, and in effect turned the argument about being Jewish as inborn on its head. He argued that non-Jews were inherently antisemitic, that they would always be this way and there was nothing you could do about it. This is a core argument of Zionists to this day. Herzl argued that only the creation of a nation state for Jews could provide safety from antisemitism. Because they wanted to argue for a nation, they needed to argue that they represent all, or at least the vast majority, of Jews. 
The reality is that Jews aren’t a single entity, and in no way do the Zionists represent them all. In fact, regarding Jews as a monolithic entity is typical of antisemites.
Rachel Shapiro, a Jewish anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian activist and granddaughter of a holocaust survivor, points this out:
“This designation of all Jews and all Judaism as a single uniform entity, necessarily speaking the same language (modern Hebrew), holding the same values (Zionism) and sharing an identical culture ... is, in fact, the precise definition of antisemitic, Nazistic ... rhetoric.”
Before World War Two, Zionism was a minority point of view in most Jewish communities. Although it later became much more prominent, it has never represented the entire Jewish community. This has become increasingly obvious as Jews around the world are a major feature of the current opposition to Israel and its genocide in Gaza. On the other hand, many supporters of Zionism in the world today aren’t Jews at all—right-wing Christians in the US are a major support base, and the right-wing antisemitic governments in Hungary and Romania are also important international supporters of the Zionist state. 
Zionism is a modern political ideology, and opposition to Zionism is not an attack on all Jews. Modern antisemitism is socially conditioned anti-Jewish racism. In no way can opposition to Israel and Zionists be designated as antisemitic. 
Equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism weakens the fight against real antisemitism and is really about preventing criticism of Israel. 
Zionists constantly invoke Jewish history as a justification for their support of Israel, so an alternative view of that history becomes very immediate and urgent. Basically, Zionists don’t want their own community to know that there is a history of struggle by Jews outside the Zionist movement.
In our book we talk about the “lachrymose [tearful] conception of Jewish history”. That’s the idea that the main element of Jewish experience has been suffering—it’s always been this way and it can’t be changed. In other words, Jews are eternal victims.
There are three ways to respond to this. First, you can say we can’t do anything about antisemitism, so we withdraw into our own ghettoes, customs and religion. We do nothing and remain victims. 
The second option is to get away from being a victim by joining the perpetrators: become an exploiter and an oppressor yourself, or at least side with those who do.
Zionism is a combination of both these options. They start by saying that we can’t do anything about antisemitism and non-Jews will always be antisemitic. But then they say the way to stop being victims is to take lessons and guidance from the colonialists, the imperialists, the ruling class and even the antisemites. Let’s set up our own state and become just like them.
But there is a third option. In our book, we show that while the oppression and suffering have certainly been there, Jews are not just victims. They have always fought back.
The radical tradition is the history of working-class and socialist Jewish struggle against both oppression and exploitation. It’s the tradition that says we can fight to defend ourselves. The tradition that knows what antisemitism is but doesn’t just accept it as eternal or move to set yourself up as the oppressor of someone else. 
Before World War Two, the majority of Jews were working class and part of a wider struggle alongside their non-Jewish comrades on the left. Fighting oppression and exploitation took numerous political forms, including anarchism, left Zionism, Bundism (the Bund was a Jewish workers’ association) and revolutionary Marxism. 
Jews fought back against pogroms in Tsarist Russia and joined strikes and mass struggles in the UK and the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the Holocaust, despite what is widely said, they didn’t go as sheep to the slaughter. They established underground resistance organisations and led uprisings in ghettos and concentration camps. Throughout, they acted in solidarity with other socialist and working-class movements. Far from the Zionist stereotype of the ultimate victims, Jews were revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands.
This Jewish radical tradition is a history of resistance and the struggle to change the world. A history of people who didn’t just weep and hide away, who refused to be just victims or to join the oppressors. 
This history matters because the battle for memory is also a battle for the present. The Zionists don’t want us to know there is a different answer to antisemitism than the Israeli state. The ruling class doesn’t want us to know there are ways to defeat their divide and rule scapegoating.
But this history doesn’t just belong to Jews. It belongs to all of us—to the participants in the encampments and Palestine solidarity actions everywhere, and to all who are engaged in struggle against the horrors of our society, of oppression and exploitation, and of war. This isn’t an academic or a sectional history but is avowedly partisan, a history to support and inspire struggle.
I want to end with the words of Marek Edelmann, a Bundist and participant in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. After the war, Edelmann returned to Poland and remained a radical all his life. During the second Palestinian Intifada, Edelman wrote a letter to the Palestinians, who he compared to the Jewish Fighting Organisation that had led the Warsaw ghetto uprising. He addressed it to “commanders of the Palestinian military ... to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisation”.
Just as Edelmann linked the resistance fighters in Warsaw, so do I link the Jewish radical tradition with today’s fight of the Palestinians against expropriation, persecution and genocide. I stand with Palestine. 
Janey Stone is an anti-Zionist Jewish socialist and co-author with Donny Gluckstein of “The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands”, which is published by Interventions in Australia.

How workers brought down apartheid in South Africa

What makes the Democrats different from, but the same as, the Republicans?

Karl Marx: more than an economist

The hidden history of Lebanon’s revolt

The West’s war on workers’ power in Russia

We need a revolution to put an end to today’s wars

Why Labor has always backed Israel

Five student movements to remember

The role of students in radical struggles

The radical Jewish tradition—the alternative to Zionism

Other Media

Shop

Conferences

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us