“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.
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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.

Nick Reich

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

For nearly two decades, Israel has enforced a devastating land, air and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip. Since March, almost all supplies have been blocked from entering the territory, <a href="https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/east-mediterranean-mena/israelpalestine/gaza-starvation-experiment">resulting in mass starvation</a>. 
In early June, the Madleen Freedom Flotilla set sail from Catania, Italy, towards Gaza. On board were twelve activists, including Greta Thunberg and French politician Rima Hassan. Their goal was to deliver humanitarian aid—rice, baby formula and medical kits—and to defy Israel’s criminal siege. Before reaching its destination, and while in international waters, the Madleen was intercepted by Israeli forces. Soldiers boarded the vessel, took the activists on board and held them in Israeli prisons for days. 
This wasn’t the first time Israel has used force to stop activists from breaking the siege. In 2010, Israeli commandos boarded the Mavi Marmara, a ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza from Turkey, and killed nine activists aboard. 
But two years earlier, in 2008, the siege had been broken. Two small wooden boats, the Free Gaza and the Liberty, sailed to Gaza from Cyprus, carrying 44 international solidarity activists and medical supplies. Aviv Shiron from the Israeli foreign ministry <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7578880.stm">said at the time</a> that the government wanted to avoid a PR disaster: “They wanted a provocation at sea, but they won’t get it”. So, Israel let them through. 
When the boats arrived in Gaza, they were greeted by crowds of Palestinians. One participant described the scene: “Dozens jumped into the water and climbed aboard our boats, cheering and waving and hugging everybody”.
The idea to break the siege and deliver humanitarian aid had come from Michael Shaik, an organiser for Free Palestine Melbourne and a founder of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition in 2008. He spoke to Red Flag’s Renee Nayef about the origins of the flotilla campaign. 
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What led to the formation of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition in 2006, and what was your role?
There were a lot of experienced activists who had been deported from Palestine, and we were discussing what we could do. The purpose of international activists is to use their privilege to shine a light on the invisible aspects of the occupation. We’d had some success in working with Palestinian communities resisting the construction of the Separation Barrier through the West Bank and drawing attention to house demolitions in the Gaza Strip. 
The big hidden story in 2006 was that Israel was claiming that it no longer occupied the Gaza Strip because it had withdrawn its settlers, even though it was blockading imports and exports, forcing the population to rely on aid handouts to survive. That was the hidden violence we needed to shine a light on. So I proposed that we charter a boat to “break the siege of Gaza!” The plan was to place Israel in a lose-lose situation. If they let us through, we break the siege. If they don’t, then we highlight the fact that they have intercepted us—not in Israeli waters, but in Gaza’s waters—and that there was a real blockade. 
None of us had a boat, none of us could sail a boat, and we didn’t have any money. So we did a lot of fundraising around the world. Some people raised donations, some did cake stalls and other grassroots fundraising until we got together the money to purchase a couple of wooden boats. When, in 2008, we first broke the siege, it seemed that the whole population of Gaza came out to the docks to welcome us—just a couple of fishing boats. 
In 2008, the Kadima Party, led by Ehud Olmert, was in power in Israel. Their calculation was that it was best to let the boats through, rather than embarrass themselves with the spectacle of intercepting unarmed activists bringing humanitarian supplies to Gaza. We got three boats through before the end of the year, when <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/mde150212009eng.pdf">Operation Cast Lead</a> commenced. 
After that, Israel became much more aggressive and we couldn’t get any boats through, so we decided to ramp it up to a flotilla of boats. In 2010, when the Likud Party, led by Netanyahu, had taken power, Israeli commandos attacked the Mavi Marmara flotilla and shot dead nine activists. For the next four or five days it was headline news around the world. 
A flotilla carrying high-profile activists, including Greta Thunberg, was recently raided and its passengers taken by Israeli forces. What do you think is different this time?
I’ve been repeatedly shocked over the last twenty months at what Israel has done and gotten away with. They’re doing insanely vicious things in the Gaza Strip—cruel things that don’t seem to have any military logic. International solidarity is based on the premise that Israel will be less inclined to use lethal force against Westerners because it will be sanctioned by Western governments. 
Yet Israel got away with <a href="https://rachelcorriefoundation.org/rachel">killing Rachel Corrie</a>. It got away with the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/apr/02/australian-aid-worker-zomi-frankcom-killed-idf-strike-gaza-world-central-kitchen">murder of Zomi Frankum</a> and her colleagues from the World Central Kitchen. Every time they kill an international activist and [Australian Foreign Minister] Penny Wong expresses her regret and then refuses to demand an independent investigation and exonerates the Israeli military by abetting the cover-up, it normalises violence against international activists. We’ve known Palestinian life was cheap for a long time, but even internationals in the line of fire can’t count on their governments protecting them anymore.
The thing you learn when you’ve been doing this for a long time is that Israel’s supporters are active everywhere. They’re active in the mainstream media, they mobilise professional trolls and bots to obscure the facts of the genocide on social media, they are active in all the major parties except the Greens, and I think we have to be the same. The only antidote we’ve got to their big money is big organising—this applies to all movements, Palestine and the climate. 
Rallies are good, but we need to move beyond them. People want to do something to stop the genocide. The activists on the flotilla showed the world that there is something you can do. It’s great what they’re doing. Future generations will remember that when Gaza was on its knees, they, like so many others, stood up for justice and against genocide.
Why is international solidarity important in the struggle for Palestinian liberation?
When I was in Gaza, I noticed that, apart from the physical violence of having their relatives murdered and their homes destroyed, one of the things that most oppressed the people was the feeling that they were being strangled in the dark. 
They can’t leave, the media isn’t allowed in, the walls keep closing in on them, and nobody seems to see them. I think that’s why, when the boats came in in 2008, two pitiful little wooden boats, it was like, “Woah! These people from around the world have come to help, and we’re not invisible”. If nothing else, international solidarity is a morale boost for the people in Palestine—otherwise it’s like they’re fighting the empire on their own. 
Last month, Angela Davis said that Palestine is now the centre of the world. I think she was spot on. The struggle for Palestine, like the struggle for South Africa last century, is bigger than Palestine. Before 2023, I often felt like I was shouting into a void, like no-one was listening. I’d always dreamed that one day there would be an anti-apartheid mass movement in Melbourne, but I never really believed it would happen. Now, people in Melbourne and around the world understand that Palestine stands at the centre of the ancient and global struggle between racism and justice. They also know that Penny Wong and Donald Trump aren’t going to free Palestine, and we have to get up and do it for ourselves. 
I’m not saying that we will win. Or that we won’t suffer defeats and make mistakes—but I don’t think this movement is going to fall away. It radicalised a generation. Palestine is part of young people’s identity now. I think they understand the enormously powerful forces that are supporting Israel, that there will be no easy victories and that we need to be in it for the long term.

Renee Nayef 

When the first freedom flotilla broke the siege of Gaza

Alexis Vassiley

Workers’ revolution in Portugal, 1974-5

The following is is an edited and abridged extract from <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/collections/trade-union-organising/products/striking-ore-the-rise-and-fall-of-union-power-in-the-pilbara">Striking Ore: The Rise and Fall of Union Power in the Pilbara</a>, a new book by Red Flag contributor Alexis Vassiley published by Monash University Publishing. 
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When Harry Hoskin came to the Pilbara in 1968, the mine superintendent made him a “powder monkey”. His job was to blast the ore body with explosives. But he had no experience: “I can’t even spell gelignite let alone [know] what it’s about”. His boss insisted, so he got on with it. Fortunately, he wasn’t injured—others weren’t so lucky. It was like the “Wild West”, Hoskin recalls. Safety was terrible.
But business was booming for the iron ore companies. When the iron ore export ban was relaxed in 1960, there was a development bonanza in the Pilbara. Demand for iron ore was relentless. Tonnage of iron ore increased from 6.8 million tonnes in 1967 to 50.5 million tonnes in 1972.
Conditions in the late 1960s and early 1970s for miners were tough. Production worker Randall Grant remembers the “soaked and soggy” salad sandwiches at Dampier in 1968, stating, “The guys were really pissed off with that. They wanted a hot meal”. Grant later became an Australian Workers’ Union shop steward (union representative who continues to do their usual work for the company, now usually called a “union delegate”). 
Lance Elliott, a staff member at Mount Newman, describes conditions at that time as “unairconditioned, dusty, unsafe to say the least”.
In the 1960s, before workers exercised their collective muscle, the companies used their responsibility for food, housing and amenities in the “company towns” to their advantage. Towns were run by the companies rather than by a local government. 
So, for example, the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) reported that in June 1968, a Hamersley Iron boilermaker had his accommodation, and therefore job, withdrawn after making “sharp criticisms” of the food to the messing officer from Poon’s.
The same month, a worker’s complaint about food resulted in his alleged assault by a manager. Three workers were framed and remanded in custody for eight days by a justice of the peace who worked for the company; the three were then sacked. Power rested squarely with management in these early days.
Workers took action even while the mines were being built. On Christmas Day 1965, the construction crew on a Hamersley Iron mine rioted over the food.
It was in the late 1960s, however, that both workers’ struggle and union organising really took off. The two things went hand in hand. 
AWU organiser Gil Barr relates that Mount Newman was unionised in this period by using the sacking of three workers as an organising opportunity. After previously getting only ten to fifteen workers from a 400-strong workforce to a union meeting, he “fronted the company” and got the workers reinstated. “From then on, we started to get membership as the guys could see the benefit of it”.
Randall Grant was present at the first AWU meeting at King Bay in 1968. Workers with union traditions from the eastern states—who later became shop stewards—got Grant to the meeting: “They were saying this wouldn’t happen at Port Kembla [an industrial hub eight kilometres south of Wollongong, NSW] and places like that”. Grant himself didn’t come from a union background, but he became a shop steward too: “as soon as you got onsite and saw what was going on it’s like ... hang on, things have got to be improved here”.
AWU officials addressed around 40 workers in the single men’s quarters, signing them up to the union. Yet the Pilbara’s remoteness posed a significant challenge. Unions needed to devote significant resources to the task. They required sacrifices from organisers, some of whom camped in tents with their family while on organising drives. 
The formula for union organisers was as follows: go up north for a few weeks, talk to workers about their grievances, sign them up to the union and establish a union branch or sub-branch.
So, for example, Jack Marks of the AEU, Frank Bastow of the Boilermakers and Blacksmiths Society and J. Quinn of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners went on a “North-West Organising Trip” of several weeks in July 1967.
Marks reported back to his union that they “set up new shop stewards wherever we found a group of workers, and when this group consists of more than one union representative, shop committees were formed”.
In 1968, workers at Goldsworthy’s port on Finucane Island tried unsuccessfully for weeks on end to convince management to let them eat at the mess (canteen) rather than consume the “power packs” in the smoko room. The entire workforce of 80 then struck for four days to force the issue and were sacked. The company re-employed them days later when a ship needed loading.
Union militancy increased in 1969. 
On 22 May 1969, workers at Tom Price, Mount Newman and Goldsworthy stopped work for a day as part of a statewide strike in support of jailed Victorian Tramways Union secretary Clarrie O’Shea.
In October 1969, there were strikes lasting seventeen days and involving all unionists at two Hamersley Iron sites. Starting with one union at one site, the dispute quickly spread to other unions and a second company site. The grievances included dust, refrigeration, food and heat money (an allowance for working in the hot weather). The strike “was controlled/administered by newly established combined union committees at each of the two sites. Compulsory conferences held between union officials and the company in the Industrial Commission failed to resolve the strike. Further, union officials were given hostile treatment by mass meetings of the workers”.
In late 1970, workers broke through and made significant gains in their wages and conditions. Workers at Hamersley Iron won an over-award payment in May. The deal was a substantial increase, worth around $1,000 for lower-bracket workers and $550 for those in a higher bracket.
Mount Newman workers were in dispute with the company for about four months, ending in a stunning victory. The workers obtained “more money for a 40-hour week than they were offered for a 60- hour week”.
There was a tug-of-war between the company and its workers during these on-again, off-again strikes over many months. Mount Newman tested the workers’ strength, determination and organisation and tried to avoid meeting the unionists’ demands. As Lance Elliott remembers, “All of a sudden there were union meetings, there were union delegates talking with the management and it all came to a severe head ... and the whole place went out on strike”. The atmosphere was “acrimonious”. 
Staff (managers and white-collar workers) crossed union picket lines to do workers’ work. Key to the victory was the industrial pressure put on the company in the context of high demand for iron ore. Idle iron ore carriers were visible from the site of union-management negotiations.
Power relations were changing. The mining companies didn’t grant any concessions willingly—improved pay and conditions were hard fought. Engaged in a show of strength with the unionists, companies reneged on agreements if they thought they could get away with it. Gains won at one company did not automatically flow through to another mining company. 
Accounts of the Pilbara iron ore industry can make the gains in wages and conditions, and union organisational success, seem almost inevitable.
A tight labour market and clauses in industrial awards for “union preference”—where workers need to be members of the union to work in the industry—certainly wouldn’t have harmed the unionists’ cause. But on their own, these are not enough. 
100 percent union membership had to be won, enforced and even re-won from the ground up—including by withdrawing, or threatening to withdraw, labour. Once established, this became a weapon in the union movement’s arsenal.
The 1969 Iron Ore Industry Award gave limited recognition to shop stewards for the first time. These rights, however, were heavily circumscribed. Concerned that their negotiating role not be usurped, some union officials opposed even this limited clause.
Committees consisting of shop stewards representing each of the different unions on a site were first established in 1967. Similar structures were set up at various companies and worksites in the next few years, undercutting management’s ability to play unions off against one another and engendering solidarity between the different unions. 
These grassroots bodies would later organise strikes in the region involving all or many of the unions, lasting weeks and costing the mining companies millions of dollars in lost production.

The rise of union power in the Pilbara mines

One conspicuous sight at the regular Palestine solidarity demonstrations is the contingents of Jews, often with banners proclaiming, “Not in my name” and the like.
This is not a recent development. Anti-Zionism has been a crucial part of the Jewish radical tradition since the late 19th century. Way back in 1886, a Russian Jewish socialist revolutionary called Ilya Rubanovich argued against Jewish settlement in Palestine:
“What is to be done with the Arabs? ... The Arabs have exactly the same historical right and it will be unfortunate for you if ... you make the peaceful Arabs defend their right. They will answer tears with blood.”
Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, argued that nothing could be done about antisemitism, that it was inherent in non-Jews and that Jews must leave their home countries and set up a state of their own. The first Zionist congress in August 1897 represented only a small minority of Jews at the time.
The first organisational opposition to this current, the General Jewish Labour Bund, was set up only two months later in the Russian Empire. The core concept of the Bund was “doykeit”, a Yiddish word meaning “hereness”: it wanted to fight antisemitism in the here and now.
Based in the Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class, the Bund was the first Marxist group in the tsarist empire to create a mass organisation. It played a major role in the Russian revolutionary movement, particularly in the 1905 revolution. After the 1917 revolution, the Bund continued the struggle in independent Poland, including its polemics against Zionism.
Marek Edelman, who participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, put it this way: “The Bundists did not wait for the Messiah, nor did they plan to leave for Palestine. They ... fought for a just, socialist Poland, in which each nationality would have its own cultural autonomy, and in which minorities’ rights would be guaranteed”.
The local Zionists had difficulty articulating their politics. In the parliament, for example, when Jewish deputies were speaking, right-wingers would heckle them, yelling: “Go to Palestine”. The problem was that the Zionists were also calling for Jews to go to Palestine.
It’s not surprising that Zionists were often ridiculed, as we can see in a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJZNcUCVXBo">Bundist song</a>:
You want to take us to Jerusalem
So we can die as a nation
We’d rather stay in the diaspora
And fight for our liberation!
By 1939, the Bund was the strongest Jewish political party in Poland, while the Zionist and clerical parties drastically declined. 
After World War Two, the Bund continued to publicly oppose Zionism. 
In April 1948, it warned that partition of Palestine was the “beginning of a new bloody chapter” in Jewish-Arab relations and that “the creation of an independent Jewish State would lead to a new catastrophe”. It said the atmosphere was becoming “more and more favourable for the development of political brigandry, terror, the extremes of home-grown Jewish fascism, nationalism and reactionary tendencies”. How prophetic.
Today, many Jews are breaking with Zionism under pressure of events in Gaza. This has also happened in the past.
For instance, the socialist-Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard) was a youth group in Eastern Europe with 70,000 members in 1939. Its Zionism had a strange mix of political influences including psychoanalysis and even Marxism. 
Tony Cliff, who later became a well-known British socialist, was born in British mandate Palestine. He explained how “the Zionist socialists were trapped ideologically”.
“They believed that ... in the kibbutz we could see the embryo of a future socialist society ... But in the meantime, Arab resistance ... had to be overcome so they collaborated with Zionist moneybags and rich institutions as well as the British army and police. The Zionist socialists held the Communist Manifesto in one hand and a coloniser’s gun in the other.”
Nonetheless, Hashomer Hatzair provided a route towards politicisation and anti-Zionism for many people.
The most famous is probably Abram Leon, who repudiated Zionism and in 1940 became a leader of an underground Trotskyist organisation in occupied Belgium. He was arrested in 1944 and murdered in Auschwitz.
Chanie Rosenberg was another anti-Zionist who started out as a member of Hashomer Hatzair. Born in South Africa, she emigrated to Palestine in 1944 and thought she was living the socialist dream on a kibbutz. But one day she came across some guns used to steal Palestinian land. “At that point, I knew that I had become an anti-Zionist.”
The USA has a significant Jewish anti-Zionist history. During the 1920s and ’30s, the heavily Jewish Communist Party campaigned against Zionism as a component of British imperialism. 
The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), established in 1938, was also anti-Zionist. It played an important role among Jews in 1939 when the fascist German American Bund (nothing to do with the Jewish Bund) held a mass rally in New York. 
The SWP called a counter-demonstration, but not one Jewish organisation was prepared to participate. Both Yiddish daily papers called on their readers to stay away. 
The Communist Party also refused to support the demo because they “could not undertake to forcibly prevent such a meeting once the City Administration had allowed it”. And the local Hashomer Hatzair branch also refused, saying “sorry we can’t join you ... Our Zionist policy is to take no part in politics outside Palestine”. 
On the day 50,000 protesters turned up—way beyond anyone’s expectation. Most were Jewish, and many rank-and-file Communists defied their leadership to participate.
Anti-Zionist organisations in Palestine have an important history. First was the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), formed in 1923. 
It had a promising start but quite quickly became politically confused. For instance, it attempted to integrate Arabs into the Zionist labour organisation the Histadrut. But the Histadrut was (and remains today) a conscious tool of the Zionist project in Palestine.
The PCP also had problems with the constant zigs and zags imposed by the Stalinist Comintern, as it switched strategies in the 1930s.
They were first instructed to have a class-based focus on Arab workers and fellaheen (peasants and agricultural labourers) only to suddenly be instructed to give uncritical support for Arab nationalism and the bourgeoisie. Then the Moscow show trials began in the late 1930s, with many of the victims Jewish; most of the PCP leaders were annihilated in the process. So, the PCP failed among both Arabs and Jews, and became increasingly ineffectual and disoriented.
In 1943, the political tensions became too much, and the party split into two separate organisations—one Jewish and one Arab. On Victory in Europe Day in 1945, the Arab organisation marched together with feudal and bourgeois parties, under anti-Zionist slogans. The Jewish party marched under the Zionist flag, with Zionist slogans. In 1947, the Jewish PCP completed its political destruction and endorsed partition.
Meanwhile, the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League of Palestine (RCL) was set up in the late 1930s. Most of its members were Jewish workers—some were born in Palestine, and some had fled from Germany. There were, however, some Arabs. 
The RCL recognised that unity between Arabs and Jews could come about only “through the abolition of all racist ideology and practice on the part of the Jews”.
The RCL wanted to build a united revolutionary socialist party. But there were major difficulties. For example, when they tried to organise joint trade unions for Arabs and Jews, the British interned them without trial. 
One of those interned was Tony Cliff, at that time still Yigael Gluckstein. Cliff’s family were strongly Zionist. “It took me a few years to make the transition from being an orthodox Zionist to being a semi-Zionist with a pro-Palestinian position and then to making a complete break with Zionism”, Cliff later wrote.
To be a revolutionary socialist operating illegally in Palestine required enormous commitment. With fewer than 30 members, the RCL published two magazines, one in Arabic and one in Hebrew, and put out leaflets. 
Cliff was eventually released from British internment, married Chanie Rosenberg and ended up in the UK, where he was a founding member of the International Socialists, later the Socialist Workers Party.
Another RCL member, Jakob Moneta, arrested by the British at the same time as Cliff, said he “learned that democratic imperialism, in the struggle to preserve its empire, is sometimes no less squeamish than fascism going out to conquer a new empire”.
The RCL was too small to have any significant impact on workers’ struggles. The organisation collapsed after 1948, but individuals including Jakob Taut and Jabra Nicola remained active and provided continuity into the next organisation.
In 1962, a group of ex-members of the Communist Party set up the Israeli Socialist Organisation, usually known by the name of its magazine Matzpen (Compass). 
Most, but not all, members were Jewish. The organisation always remained very small—only a few dozen—but was important. It is historically the only committed anti-Zionist organisation within the state of Israel. Matzpen developed a sophisticated analysis of Zionism that influenced revolutionary socialist groups around the world. 
One of its members, Moishe Machover, moved to the UK in 1968. In a bizarre twist of fate, he was expelled from the UK Labour Party in 2017 for supposed antisemitism—this was the right-wing party machine cracking down on its left opposition.
Unfortunately, the stresses of trying to maintain an organisation like Matzpen are extreme, and the organisation finally ceased to exist in the 1980s. But a large amount of the standard works on Zionism that we use today were produced by or under its influence.
This history of Jewish anti-Zionism also exists in Australia. 
The Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism, established in 1942, was non-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist. It had hundreds of members and widespread support, so much so that in 1948 the council became the official public relations representative of the Jewish community. 
But the council’s non-Zionist stance was unsustainable, and it started to lose support. In 1950, a prominent Zionist attacked it, asserting that they “[do] not ‘combat’ but ‘spread’ antisemitism”. Seventy-five years ago, the Zionists were already slandering left-wing Jews just as they do today.
In 1978, a soft Zionist magazine called Paths to Peace
(PTP) applied to join Melbourne community radio station 3CR. But 3CR rejected its application on the grounds that Zionism is racist.
The right-wing publication Bulletin smeared 3CR as terrorist, and PTP and others laid a charge at the Broadcasting Tribunal claiming the pro-Palestine programs were offensive to the Melbourne Jewish community because they were antisemitic. Sound familiar?
3CR organised a “fight back” campaign and mobilised 1,000 people to distribute half a million leaflets throughout Melbourne. 
Jews Against Zionism and Antisemitism (JAZA) was set up in 1979 to help the defence, declaring that they “represent a socialist and internationalist tradition among Jews that is much older and has a much brighter future than political Zionism”. They held forums and demos, including against the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and brought out Matzpen member Ehud Ein-Gil as a speaker.
History matters because the battle for memory is also a battle for the present. The Zionists don’t want us to know about this alternative history.
They don’t want us to know about the committed anti-Zionism of Jews like Marek Edelmann. During the second Palestinian Intifada, Edelman wrote a letter to the Palestinians in which he compared them to the Jewish Fighting Organisation. He addressed it to “commanders of the Palestinian military ... to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisation”. 
When we loudly proclaim, “Not in our name”, we are following in these footsteps.

Janey Stone

Revolutionary history of Jewish anti-Zionism

It’s a historic anniversary that the US ruling class and its allies around the world wish we would forget. Fifty years ago, on 30 April 1975, US imperialism suffered the worst military defeat in its history as troops of the North Vietnamese Army and South Vietnam National Liberation Front took complete control of Ho Chi Minh City (then called Saigon) and the few scattered areas of the south that had not yet been liberated.
The Vietnamese victory was the culmination of more than three decades of struggle against Japanese, British, French and American imperialism. At the time, the United States was, as it still is today, the world’s leading military power. And yet that incredible power was defeated by a small, underdeveloped, mostly rural society.
The US war against Vietnam at some stages involved well over half a million regular US troops. During the war, the US unleashed previously unimaginable firepower against the Vietnamese forces and the population in general. The tonnage of bombs dropped on Vietnam was approximately three times the total for all theatres in all of World War Two. The US also employed chemical warfare, such as defoliants containing dioxin, which are still today causing deaths and genetic damage. 
Vietnam received limited military supplies from China and the Soviet Union, but they were never enough to be decisive. Surface-to-air rockets, for example, increased the US Air Force’s military losses but never came close to stopping the US air war.
And yet all this firepower was unable to prevent Vietnamese victory. Something proved more powerful than massive weaponry. That reality is the lesson that the imperialists want us to forget.
The liberation of Ho Chi Minh City provided a striking emblem of the limitations of technological military power. As helicopters flew the remaining Americans and some of their Vietnamese agents to warships waiting offshore, the US Navy pushed each emptied helicopter overboard into the sea to make room for those still in the air.
What eventually defeated US military power? First and foremost was the heroism and endurance of the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese resistance gradually widened doubts and divisions in US society, opening time and pathways for opposition to the imperialist war within the US and eventually on a massive scale worldwide. 
Combined with the US’s inability to inflict a decisive military defeat, this continually growing political opposition contributed substantially to the US rulers’ calculation that continuing the war could cost them more than they were likely to gain. They could see that, around the world, oppressed and exploited peoples were concluding that the US was not invincible and that it could be successfully resisted.
Earlier struggles similarly influenced the antiwar movement. After the 1940s and ’50s era of McCarthyism and “red scare” reaction and house-breaking of most labour unions, things began to shift with the rise of the Black civil rights movement and the ’60s cultural and political radicalisation. The opponents of the Vietnam War who organised the early teach-ins at universities were, in part, following the example of the combination of propaganda and action of early fighters for Black rights, particularly in the US South.
The influence went in both directions. In April 1967, I was conscripted (“drafted”) into the US Army in Chicago. By chance, this occurred on the same day that boxing champion Muhammad Ali had been ordered to report for induction—which he had publicly announced he would refuse because of his religion as a member of the Nation of Islam and his ethical objections to the war. 
Ali, who had a talent for concise and colourful explanations, said, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger”. (“Viet Cong” was the name the US military and media gave to the National Liberation Front.) A week before his scheduled conscription, Ali added:
“I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me; I’d join tomorrow.”
There was considerable public interest in what Ali would do, and one of the soldiers staffing the Chicago induction centre had turned on a radio tuned to a news broadcast. With the report that Ali had refused to be conscripted, I heard one of the Black soldiers mutter, barely audibly, “Damn, wish I had done that”.
As Vietnamese resistance forced the US to increase its troop numbers in the country, conscription also necessarily increased, including of inductees who were either opposed to the war or at least suspicious of it. For thousands of young Americans and their friends, relatives and partners, the war stopped being a strange conflict in a distant country and became an immediate threat to their wellbeing. The impact was all the stronger for their ability to view scenes of the war on nightly TV news.
The US ruling class was beginning to learn something that had only begun to be evident during the 1950-53 Korean War: there is a significant difference between a “citizen army” in which the citizenry feels its interests are seriously threatened by a menace such as fascism, and one facing an abstract enemy such as “communism” that poses no immediate threat—or an oppressed people fighting for their liberation. People who had witnessed or participated in mass antiwar protests tended to have their opposition increased, not weakened, by induction into the military.
During my two years in the army, 1967-69, all within the United States, the challenge was not to convince fellow soldiers that the war was wrong. We had to persuade other soldiers that they could do something about it. This was the period during which the publication of rank-and-file antiwar “newspapers” (really newsletters) proliferated at military bases in the US and overseas. 
At Fort Dix in New Jersey, we called ours the Ultimate Weapon, because the base’s main function was infantry training, and the Army liked to call its infantry “the ultimate weapon”. In the early ’70s, the Student Mobilization Committee, the most radical of the antiwar coalitions, launched a GI Press Service, which sought to provide information, exchange and cooperation among the varied military antiwar publications. We eventually knew of more than a hundred of them.
The spread of antiwar activity in the US military was aided by higher-ups’ bureaucratic efforts to suppress it. A battalion commander who learned of “subversive” activity within his domain, fearing that it would hamper his chances for promotion, would arrange for one or several suspected “ringleaders” to be transferred to a different base, hopefully distant. It could not have been better designed if the object had been to encourage the spread of antiwar activity. The eventual situation was described by Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., in Armed Forces Journal, 7 June 1971: 
“The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not nearly mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.”
In short, the US rulers were worried about the effect of the war, not only on their troops in Vietnam, but on their armed forces more generally. President Nixon tried to ameliorate this situation through his program of “Vietnamization” of the war, which essentially meant withdrawing US troops from Vietnam and supplying the puppet “Republic of Vietnam” with sufficient weapons and financing to fight on for US interests. 
From the US standpoint, this was always a forlorn hope, which became increasingly evident after the departure of US ground troops in 1973. When the liberation forces launched their final offensive in early 1975, the “RVN” forces largely melted away or collapsed.
The impact of the Vietnamese victory is still with us, something that capitalist rulers are still trying to overcome. In the US, that impact was often called the “Vietnam syndrome”, as though it described some sort of unfortunate disease. In fact, it referred to the reality that large sections of the US public had seen that their rulers lied shamelessly about a major military conflict. Consequently, they tended to look sceptically at further military operations. 
It has since become standard US political doctrine that any new military adventure needs to be carried out quickly so that there is no time for large parts of the public to become really aware of it. To restore their ability to intervene militarily around the world, the US rulers found it necessary to abolish conscription and to rebuild their army as “voluntary”—meaning using social and economic coercion to enlist mainly the poor and oppressed racial minorities. 
The ending of conscription was a major setback for US imperialism, and its rulers are today, half a century later, wondering whether they can get away with reintroducing it.
You can see another lesson ruling classes have drawn from Vietnam in government responses to the widespread upsurge of solidarity with Palestinians against the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza and the West Bank. The speed and extremism of government reactions against the first university protest encampments showed their fears of protests growing and spreading as they did with Vietnam. It’s the reason for the attempts to suppress free speech and the almost hysterical attacks on protesters. And just as imperialist propagandists of the Vietnam War sought to discredit opposition as “communism”, today supporters of Zionist genocide try to label any opposition as “antisemitism”.
Our side has also drawn some lessons, which is a part of the reason the Palestinian protests have taken the form they have: both the initial encampments and reaching out to broader layers through large and vocal rallies and marches. Around the world, there are uncountable numbers of oppressed and exploited people who may know little or nothing of the Vietnam War but who have absorbed the understanding that imperialism is not invincible, that it can be defeated by determined struggle, and that “If you don’t fight, you lose”.

Allen Myers

Vietnam: a victory never to be forgotten

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

Zak Borzovoy

The fight for Richmond’s rebel school

Just before my 18th birthday, in July 1988, I landed my first full-time job, as a lay-by clerk at Ahern’s department store in Perth’s city centre.
My workday started with getting off a bus at 8am in St George’s Terrace. I collected a bundle of twenty copies of the West Australian from Newspaper House and, with papers under arm, made my way to Ahern’s in the Hay Street Mall. I then navigated a rabbit warren of offices via the back stairs to deliver each copy to a director’s desk.
Then I clocked in at the lay-by department. In those days a customer who couldn’t afford to pay for an item up front could opt to make six payments over six weeks. The item would remain on the shelf in the lay-by department until it had been fully paid for. 
Many Ahern’s staff had customer account cards: they were offered discounts to encourage them to spend at the store. My manager, a middle-aged woman with an eye for the latest 1980s fashion, had the largest Ahern’s card debt of all. 
One Friday morning, several weeks into my employment, I arrived to face her questions. 
“Nick, I hear you have been selling communist newspapers. Is this true?”, she asked.
This was the 1980s; the Cold War was still raging. Being accused by your boss of being a communist was not to be taken lightly.
My thoughts raced back to the evening before. Thursday night was late-night shopping in Perth. I had joined comrades after work in the mall selling the socialist newspaper Direct Action. The cover that week was emblazoned with the words “Free Nelson Mandela” and featured a portrait of the African National Congress leader. The centrespread featured an article on a strike wave that had gripped South Africa’s poverty-stricken townships.
Some evenings, sales of the paper were hard going. But that night Direct Action
was selling like hot cakes. At one point I looked up and made eye contact with a woman I recognised as an Ahern’s sales assistant. She was a friend of my boss and often came by the lay-by counter. When she saw me, her face moulded into a look of disbelief and then a vitriolic scowl. I felt a sense of dread.
My thoughts returned to the present. What should I do? I responded to my boss with a firm denial. Later that morning, she told me to go to the human resource manager’s office. There, I was told that my performance was not up to scratch. I would be finishing up in two weeks. “Use the notice period to find yourself a new job”, I was told.
I attended the weekly Resistance branch meeting upstairs in a Northbridge arcade the next afternoon. Resistance was the youth organisation of the Socialist Workers Party, which I had also recently joined. I spoke to the SWP organiser, Dave.
“Are you a member of the union?”, he asked. Unfortunately, I wasn’t, though the prospect of the right-wing Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association coming to the aid of an alleged communist was slim. Frank suggested I talk to Leon, a comrade involved in the Law Reform Subcommittee of Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP) WA, the main gay activist campaign group in Perth at the time. 
Leon explained that the West Australian Equal Opportunity Act prohibited discrimination in employment based on “political conviction”. Ironically, it offered no protection to gays. Sodomy was still a crime in Western Australia. Though decriminalisation was achieved in 1990, the Equal Opportunity Act wasn’t amended to include sexual orientation until 2002.
On Monday morning, during my morning tea break, I headed into the Equal Opportunity Commission on St George’s Terrace and picked up a complaint form. Over the following days I reported my complaint and met with my assigned case manager, Graeme Innes. Today, <a href="https://graemeinnes.com/about-graeme/">Innes</a> is a company director and university vice-chancellor. For a decade, he was Australia’s Disability Discrimination commissioner. Back then he conciliated anti-discrimination complaints.
Soon Innes was in my workplace asking questions. My manager told him I slacked on the job and my probation “hadn’t worked out”. By the end of the second week my employment was coming to an end. It seemed the complaint was going nowhere. 
At this point, Equal Opportunity Commissioner June Williams stepped in. <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/a-campaigner-for-equal-rights-20061209-gdp0gk.html">Williams</a>
was a former co-convener of the NSW Women’s Electoral Lobby, where she had lobbied hard to introduce anti-discrimination legislation. She took on the role of Equal Opportunity commissioner after the WA Burke government implemented anti-discrimination legislation in 1984, and she held the position for the following seventeen years.
Williams asked me if I was a member of a political party. I told her I was a member of the SWP. 
“Oh, that’s interesting,” she said. “We’ve never handled an employment complaint relating to political discrimination before.”
Williams explained that, if both parties were willing, a conciliation conference could be held. If that failed, I could consider taking the matter to a court hearing. She suggested I locate a “support person” to take with me. I nominated SWP comrade Richard, who had several years of experience as a union delegate with the Public Sector Union.
The conciliation conference took place in the commission offices. I sat on one side of the table with Richard next to me. On the other side sat three Ahern’s company directors. They were all men, each nearing retirement age with pale complexions and bald heads. 
One of them, his face as red as his whiskers, thumped the table and shouted, “This would never happen in the Industrial Relations Commission!” Williams, who sat between us, politely reminded him that we were not in the IRC.
A short break followed before the Ahern’s directors returned with an offer. I would be re-employed on a part-time casual basis, not on the shop floor but at as a packer in Ahern’s distribution warehouse in the industrial suburb of Claisebrook. I would also receive a written reference acknowledging that I have been a “loyal and diligent” employee. 
I accepted the offer. The new job involved earlier starts but my new workmates were welcoming. In the afternoons, I set about applying for other jobs. A month later, I landed a state government job.
My last day at the Ahern’s warehouse was Melbourne Cup Day. At noon, we gathered around a TV set for the race and then went to the pub for lunch. In Melbourne Cup tradition, each of the women in my workplace donned a fashionable hat. There was a competition for the best hat. 
I wore a construction hard hat with a Builders Labourers Federation sticker slapped on the front. It bore the words, “Dare to struggle, dare to win!” My workmates thought it was hilarious. For me, it was a middle finger to Ahern’s management.
Fourteen months later, Nelson Mandela was released from prison following secret negotiations between the ANC and South Africa’s apartheid regime. Four years after that, he became president of a multiracial South Africa. A now sympathetic media transformed Mandela from a “terrorist” to an <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/nelson-mandela-1918-2013">elder statesman</a>. Mandela obligingly reciprocated, heading a government committed to private enterprise, foreign investment and privatisation of “inefficient” state-run services.
Today, the slogans of the anti-apartheid movement are buried in the past. Yet, social media posts about Israel’s Gaza genocide can get you fired, as the cases of journalists <a href="https://www.newarab.com/news/australian-lebanese-journalist-unfairly-sacked-over-gaza-post">Antoinette Lattouf</a> and <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/trending/cricket-axed-over-gaza-views-social-media-sparking-backlash">Peter Lalor</a> demonstrate. And protesting on campus can get you <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/universities-are-repressing-palestine-solidarity-activism">suspended from your studies</a> or facing disciplinary action amid a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/antisemitism-inquiry-recommends-crackdown-on-free-speech">witch</a><a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/antisemitism-inquiry-recommends-crackdown-on-free-speech"></a><a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/antisemitism-inquiry-recommends-crackdown-on-free-speech">-</a>hunt by increasingly McCarthyite university authorities. 
These examples demonstrate that free speech is never a right guaranteed under capitalism, but a right that we must fight for, again and again.
Nick Everett is the chairperson of Friends of Palestine WA.

Nick Everett

When saying ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ could get you sacked

“The great majority of you are fed up to the back teeth with them. The election gives you the chance to make it clear to these people how you feel.” 
Conservative British Prime Minister Edward Heath was muttering, weeks before the 1974 general election. “These people” were striking coal miners—the advance guard of the British working class in those days.
The last few years had shaken capitalism to its core. Massive strikes and unofficial actions were the norm. Conservative attempts to break the unions with new industrial laws and wage-freeze policies had only let loose a torrent of resistance.
In July 1972, the government imprisoned five docker shop stewards for defying a legal injunction. Forty-four thousand dock workers struck to demand their comrades’ release—all this without hesitation or recourse to “official” union authorisation. The call from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to stop work didn’t come until ten days into the national strike.
As rank-and-file stoppages landed blows against Heath’s industrial laws, solidarity action was breaking his policies on wages. Heath insisted that no worker should receive a wage increase above 7 percent. In January 1972, more than 25,000 coalminers struck for a 35 percent rise.
The government tried circumventing the action by hoarding coal at power stations and transport hubs. It wanted to prove to the miners that it could keep fuelling the industry even if every pit stopped digging.
A class-wide battle ensued, as the National Union of Miners (NUM) won solidarity to stop the movement of coal. Wherever the government had stockpiles, miners travelled to convince workers not to burn, refine or transport the material. Broad layers of unionists, students and other sympathisers were drawn into the fight against Heath.
“I was away from home, at college in Enfield”, Jean Spence told Tribune magazine 50 years later. “My dad was a striking miner at Dawdon pit. We hosted striking miners—flying pickets—from Kent in our student flat, and I had my first experience of picketing at Picketts Lock Power Station. An old trade unionist taught us how to deal respectfully with lorry drivers we were trying to turn away.” 
The best-remembered battleground of the 1972 strike was the Saltley fuel plant in Birmingham, where the Conservatives claimed to have 100,000 tonnes of processed coal ready to burn. There, 20,000 engineers struck to support thousands of miners who picketed the gates, pushing back police. This crucible of solidarity forced the government into submission—days later, the miners won their wage increase.
The following year, a global recession emerged. Once again, the NUM led the way by imposing an overtime ban to win higher wages. With energy and steel production impacted, Heath saw a political opportunity. He was determined to push back the militant edge of the labour movement, turn popular opinion against the miners and bury them under a landslide election victory for the Conservatives.
On 13 December 1973, Heath announced nationwide power rationing in response to the miners’ bans. Under a State of Emergency, households were subjected to a rotating schedule of energy stoppages. Electricity would be limited to three days per week for industry—workplaces were directed to shut down operations for the remaining four days. Heath maintained this “three-day week” for the whole northern winter. The government was in effect imposing a lockout against the entire British working class in punishment for the NUM’s action.
Back then, coal accounted for three-quarters of the UK energy supply, and steel remained a core part of Britain’s dwindling manufacturing base. By February 1974, miners had moved from overtime bans to all-out action, and the strikes had reduced steel production to 60 percent of its usual capacity. The miners held immense industrial power—and they were fighting on behalf of all workers facing real wage cuts. 
Barclay’s Bank profits had risen by 75 per cent since 1970, while food prices had increased by one-half. Much like our own “cost-of-living crisis”, the “recession” of the early 1970s was a recession for workers, while bosses prospered. If the miners could break through Heath’s wage policies, they could set a new standard for what other workers could win. 
For my parents and their siblings, images of 1974 still glimmer through murky childhood memories. Before I even knew what a strike was, I learned about the power cuts under Heath and those orangey, incandescent evenings in my Gran’s living room.
Winters in Glasgow are cold and dark. So during the three-day week, it was flickering candles and the buzz of a repurposed camping stove. John Peel’s prog-rock sessions had adolescents transfixed by the radio—television channels went dead by 10pm. My dad watched his older brother pore over Tolkien by candlelight, night after night. I can still find those volumes on my Uncle Jim’s shelf, lovingly dog-eared and worn. 
In the mornings, even by 9 o’clock, daylight would be hours away. The street lamps were knocked out by the power cuts. “We had to wear luminous vests going to school in the pitch black”, my Aunty Jackie explained. These were formative weeks, when the children of the British working class undertook with pride the task of outlasting Heath in his stand-off against the miners. 
The older kids at university found their own creative ways to support the NUM. Student unions were barred from sending direct financial donations. So, instead, striking miners were invited to mass meetings at Norwich, Warwick and Essex universities. Socialist student societies fundraised towards a £250 “speaker’s fee” for each miner—a cunning scheme to deliver solidarity funds to the pit communities.
The Tories employed dirty tactics to try to break the workers’ resolve. As a new ballot on industrial action approached, one Conservative MP growled, “Social security should not be made available to wives and children [of NUM members], because it allowed the enemies of the state to go on strike”.
The Thatcher administration would make good on this threat during the great battles of 1984-5. But for the time being, the Tories were driven back by the very union movement they’d hoped to extinguish.
Heath ran the 1974 election on the now infamous slogan, “Who governs?” Would voters prefer questions of economic policy to be decided by responsible Conservative ministers, or by the trade unions? The British working class at that time answered unswervingly: “Who governs? Not you!” 
Heath lost the election in a hammering defeat. Over the next decade, the Tories geared up for another showdown. These years of humiliation at the hands of the labour movement would not go unavenged. 
As early as 1977, with the party still in opposition, Conservative MP Nicholas Ridley outlined a program for hoarding coal, slashing strikers’ entitlements and training a new army of riot police to attack picketers. The “Ridley Plan” would become widely recognised as the Tories’ blueprint for defeating the NUM.
Four years of Labour rule had curbed the tide of workers’ struggle. With Heath gone, union leaders accepted a shameful compromise—they would forgo wage rises and refuse to authorise strikes in exchange for more government welfare spending. In the winter of 1978-79, a heroic bout of wildcat actions arose over the heads of the officials. But Labour had successfully dulled strike rates and cohered union leaders around a new industrial peace. 
When Margaret Thatcher won the prime ministership in 1979, she tried to enforce this “peace” through open class warfare. Ruling classes around the world were looking to slash social welfare and privatise public services to stabilise profit rates after the recession. The Conservatives wanted to win a final, set-piece confrontation to force unions into total submission and ensure minimum resistance. Thatcher announced the appointment of her new energy minister in 1983 with the menacing words: “We’re going to have a coal strike”. 
The Tories were so determined to break the miners that they were prepared to reorganise totally Britain’s energy infrastructure. A massive expansion of nuclear power and North Sea oil was to displace coal—the mines would be closed down to drive out the country’s most powerful union.
Don Keating, a South Yorkshire miner, remembers the night he learned his pit would close. “I was doing a 6 o’clock evening shift with a mate”, he told the BBC. “I’m walking down Pit Lane and a couple of lads who were coming up off shift said, ‘Don, do you know pit’s shutting?’ A bit of a joke, we thought—more rumours. We got down there and ... they were saying, ‘Yeah, it’s been announced that Cortonwood will be shutting’.”
On 5 March 1984, the government’s National Coal Board declared a wave of closures across England, Scotland and Wales—twenty mines were to be shut and 20,000 miners sacked. Cortonwood miners had recently been assured their jobs were safe for another five years; now, the pit was to close within five weeks. 
South Yorkshire had always been a militant area. They’d been among the first to blockade Saltley Gate in 1972. The Cortonwood NUM sent mobile pickets across the Yorkshire coalfields. Kent, Durham, South Wales and Scotland followed. Pit by pit, day by day, the immense network of mines across Britain was being pulled out on strike.
It was the confrontation Thatcher had been waiting for. Faithful to the Ridley Plan, the government had stockpiled 9 million tonnes of coal over the preceding three years. They now unleashed the hell hounds of the state against picketers. Thousands of police from different branches were drafted to patrol roads and pit villages for the duration of the strike. Mike McKay, a BBC journalist at the time, recalled:
“I remember particularly one very early morning, I was driving up the A1, and on the other side of the road was this endless convoy of police riot vans. It just went on and on ... It was like you were watching an occupying army travelling to the front.”
Many who remember 1984 speak of “civil war”. Dave Creamer from the Yorkshire Silverwood colliery described the atmosphere as flying pickets worked to spread the strike in spite of police: 
 “We were setting off at four o’clock picketing, trying to get through roadblocks ... We went through every back alley you could think of, up farmers’ fields, down through woods—everything—just to get to that picket line.”
“It was quite an adventure at first”, Creamer recalled in a BBC interview. “I was 20-odd-year-old, it was exciting. The adventure became a bit of a nightmare later on.”
The miners fought with everything they had, but the mood darkened towards the middle of the year. On 18 June, a mass picket assembled at Orgreave, where fuel was being supplied to a major steelworks. Miners hoped to recreate the victory of 1972 by hitting industries beyond coal. Despite some hesitation from union leaders, thousands of NUM members were ready to confront the police. 
But nothing could have prepared them for the 6,000 officers, dressed in riot gear, who thrashed, clubbed and beat their way through the picketers on that day. Watching footage of the bloodbath will still turn your stomach, even 40 years later. Yet the British media cruelly doctored the scenes, framing strikers as the instigators of violence. 
From that moment on, the civil war against miners was played out on ideological terrain. Thatcher arraigned them as “the enemy within”—with the full backing of the mainstream press. Miners and union leaders were increasingly described as “thugs” and even likened to fascists. Print workers at the Sun newspaper refused to publish the vicious anti-NUM headlines prepared by their bosses.
Pockets of secondary action opened across the union movement. Dock workers struck for three weeks in August 1984 to stop employers transporting coal to the steelworks in Scunthorpe. In Leicestershire, unionised rail workers did not handle coal for 35 consecutive weeks. 
These exceptional cases needed to be turned into a tide of solidarity to face down Thatcher, the police and the media’s combined forces. After all, the Tories wouldn’t stop at smashing the NUM. Every worker had a stake in this fight.
Mainstream accounts of the 1984-85 miners’ strike describe a tragic arc; a losing battle against Thatcher’s inevitable victory. It’s true that the NUM couldn’t have won the dispute alone. A class-wide mobilisation against Thatcher was necessary—and possible. But it never materialised. 
After Orgreave, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock encouraged comparisons between the so-called violence of picketers and the tyranny of the state. Some union officials even helped employers circumvent the strike’s impact, hoping they’d be rewarded with better sectional agreements. The TUC itself dealt the death blow, announcing in December 1984 that it would not endorse promised solidarity action after the High Court ruled the NUM’s strike illegal.
It’s difficult to communicate the gravity of this betrayal and the consequences that the British workers’ movement faced for decades afterwards. Unions have only recently begun to recover strike rates and membership numbers after the devastation of the Thatcher years.
Strikers themselves resisted the trajectory—they maintained their action through the Christmas and winter of 1984. In March 1985, miners reluctantly accepted a recommendation from NUM leaders to end the longest mass strike in British history. Dave Creamer recalls: 
“The night they held that branch meeting, when the orders came through from national level to go back to work ... There was almost fighting inside the club with people that wanted to stay out, people who wanted to go back ... It was one of the angriest meetings I’ve ever seen in my life.”
At the beginning of 1984, 170,000 miners worked across 170 collieries in Britain. Twenty years later, those numbers had dwindled to 4,000 workers in only eight pits. Unemployment destroyed whole communities. The economic power of the NUM—a power that had once disrupted heavy industry and toppled a government—was broken. 
Miners alone couldn’t defeat the arrayed powers of the ruling class. But they’d given Thatcher a serious fight. Because of them, the 1970s and 1980s in Britain are remembered not only as decades when the capitalist state attacked trade unions and working-class people. They are also memorialised as an era of defiant, tenacious and bitter class struggle, full of lessons. 
This history is the miners’ gift to every new generation of working-class resistance. For that, we owe them our gratitude.
Let them exhale
in unity
in hope
in disgust
and let them
remember
that shimmering sad yesterday 
when
people screamed no
—Extract from the poem “The unification” by Patrick Jones.

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