Socialism is having a moment. Polls across the West are showing increased support for the idea, particularly among young people repelled by what’s on offer under capitalism. It wasn’t meant to be like this. In the 1980s and 1990s, every respectable university lecturer, newspaper editor, government official and politician across the West was explaining that socialism was finished. 
The attacks on socialism came from many directions. The right wing, of course, is always hostile to socialism. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher argued in the 1980s that “there is no alternative” to unbridled capitalism and did her best to make it a reality. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 unleashed a right-wing propaganda barrage declaring socialism dead. Liberals, such as US Professor Francis Fukuyama, backed them up.
But it wasn’t just the hard right and liberals attacking the socialist project. Postmodernist university professors, some of whom were former communists, made a name for themselves arguing that “metanarratives”, such as the idea that socialism could defeat capitalism and usher in a better society, were dangerous. This notion came to dominate university social science departments.
Others preached a “third way”, a politics “beyond left and right”, which supposedly forged a path between rampant capitalism and socialism. Tony Blair’s government in Britain used the third way as an ideological weapon to batter socialists in the Labour Party. Former leftists justified their new positions by arguing that the neoliberal offensive of the 1980s and 1990s had destroyed the working class.
But while these ideologues did their best to bury socialism, the brutal reality of capitalist society meant their efforts were in vain. Following the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001, the US invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, killing millions. Who could explain US aggression? Not those who had argued that capitalism was a force for progress, but socialists who had long argued that capitalism bred war and imperialism.
The global financial crisis of 2008-09 soon followed. The crisis ruined millions of working-class lives while governments bailed out the billionaires. Who could explain economic crises and austerity? Not those who argued that capitalism led to prosperity, but socialists who pointed to the system’s inherent crisis tendencies. 
The evidence of capitalism’s failures is mounting. The climate crisis, the pandemic, the housing crisis and Israel’s genocide in Gaza have created a bigger audience for socialism. Those who would bury socialism must now reckon with its re-emergence in the belly of the capitalist beast—the United States.
Cycles of development
This cycle of developments from capitalist triumphalism to socialist revival is not new. 
Capitalism has a series of lines of defence that reinforce its rule. It deploys both force and fraud to justify its existence and crush its enemies. The everyday experience of life under capitalism and the powerlessness that goes with that for most of the time make systemic change seem impossible. Those who have given up on fighting the system can provide the capitalists with arguments as to why the struggle for a better world is futile.
But capitalism cannot exist without attacking the working class. It cannot exist without dragging nations into war. It cannot exist without infringing on democratic rights up to and including installing fascist dictators. And it suffers the objective limit that it also depends upon those it exploits. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put it in 1848, capitalism creates its own gravediggers—the working class.
The experience of oppression and, often, the experience of struggling against that oppression explain why the best efforts of the capitalists and their ideologues often come to nothing. They say capitalism is the best possible system. But they have no credible answers for those looking for a way out of the crises, hardships and wars capitalism creates. Only socialism can provide such answers. That is why every time that socialism is declared dead, it rises once again.
Socialism in the nineteenth century
We can go as far back as the nineteenth century to see how this works. The 1840s were a period of advance for the working class in the few pockets where it had established itself. In Britain, the Chartist movement organised monster rallies of hundreds of thousands to press for the right to vote and to organise. 
In 1848, the spirit of revolt extended to Europe as workers joined the throngs on the streets to demand the overthrow of the reactionary regimes across the continent. Marx and Engels fought to push the working class forward in these struggles, joining the radical movement and furnishing it with the Communist Manifesto. 
By 1850, however, the working-class surge was over. The middle classes, who were supposedly allies of the working class, swung behind the old order, leaving the working class to fight alone. The workers were defeated, and reaction triumphed across Europe. 
But soon, the red flag—a symbol of socialist internationalism—was once again flying as socialists, trade unionists, Marxists, anarchists and others came together to form the International Working Men’s Association, or the First International, in 1864. It supported striking workers and the demand for an eight-hour day, universal suffrage, an end to militarism, the fight for Polish independence and a Union victory against the Southern plantation owners in the US Civil War. 
The First International was also a forum for intense debate among the movement’s different ideological currents. Marx sharpened his ideas in the process and won a wider following for what was at the time called “scientific socialism”.
Then, in 1871, the workers of Paris showed the world working-class power in action as they formed the Commune to take over the running of the city after the capitalists and their government fled to Versailles in fear of an advancing Prussian army. The Commune set about organising production and distribution of essential goods and services through cooperatives. It made all officials and militia officers subject to election and recall and paid a worker’s wage. It declared a moratorium on rent and boosted labour rights. Socialists across Europe rejoiced at the Commune, seeing in it a revival of the spirit of 1848.
The smashing of the Commune by the Versailles government put an end to the high hopes it had aroused. In the following decades, capitalism spread across Europe and the US. The working-class insurrection vanished. 
But as industry advanced, so too did the working class. By the turn of the century, new battalions of the working class had been created across Europe, North America, Australia, Japan and in pockets of the colonial world. And as the working class grew and began to fight for its rights, so too did socialism flourish. Everywhere, new socialist parties were winning the leadership of the working class and drawing in critical minorities of students and intellectuals. Alarmed ruling classes alternated between repression and concessions, but the tide was turning against them. 
War, revolution and reaction from 1914
The outbreak of the First World War in 1914, specifically the betrayal by socialist leaders who opted to back their own ruling classes in the conflict, once more sent socialism into sharp reverse. Those leaders who remained faithful to socialist internationalism, arguing for working-class unity across borders, were a small minority in most countries. 
Even in this situation, however, many workers refused to be swept away by jingoism. As casualties on the front rose along with misery in the rear, socialists who had stood against the tide began to win a bigger audience. In February 1917, Russian workers brought down the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and, in October, established the first workers’ state.
Inspired by the Russian Revolution, working-class radicals established communist parties to fight for revolution in their own nations. Within two or three years, they had gathered hundreds of thousands in their ranks. It seemed that socialism might triumph.
The failure of the working class to seize power outside Russia led to the defeat of the workers’ state. Joseph Stalin’s new dictatorship crushed everything that remained of the 1917 insurrection. The Russian leader purged the international communist movement of any genuine revolutionaries and allowed Adolf Hitler to take power in Germany. 
Capitalists in the West took advantage of the ebbing of the revolutionary wave to preach the end of socialism. Big US corporations used posters, films, pamphlets, workplace newsletters and community groups to spread pro-capitalist messages. Hollywood and the mass media joined in. The ideological offensive was backed by violent assaults on union organisers and socialists. In Australia, governments, bosses, cops and courts raided union offices, spied on union activists, broke up public meetings and deported radicals.
Socialism bursts forth in the 1930s
But the working class was not done. The Great Depression and fascism reinforced for millions of workers the belief that capitalism brought only misery for their class. Socialism once again came out of the shadows. Unlike the capitalist ideologists whose only answer to the Depression was yet more austerity, socialists explained that capitalism is a crisis-prone system that cannot serve humanity. 
By the late 1930s, socialism was making deep inroads. In 1936, millions of workers in France and Spain rose against their ruling classes and waged a serious fight with the capitalists and the reactionary forces they backed. Many wanted socialism. 
The socialist revival was also evident in Australia in the 1930s. Socialisation Units blossomed in the ALP, demanding the immediate implementation of socialist policies. The Communist Party (CPA) made headway, winning positions in many unions. University students radicalised by the Depression and the rise of fascism joined the CPA. The tragedy was that this appetite for socialism was then harnessed to Stalin’s authoritarian project, which sent it into a dead end.
We see the same phenomenon in fascist-occupied Europe during World War Two and its immediate aftermath. Workers had had enough of what capitalism was delivering, but Stalinism choked off the prospect of liberation.
Cold War counter-revolution
The Cold War and the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 60s included a sustained capitalist offensive against socialism. In the US, where the Cold War reached its zenith, repressive wartime legislation was used to arrest dozens of Communist leaders, while the House Un-American Activities Committee and FBI drove thousands from their jobs, creating a climate of fear. 
The rightward turn in the West in this period was amplified by university professors, some former radicals, proclaiming the death of socialism and “the end of ideology”. They argued that the basic problems of capitalism had been solved. Workers were dismissed as bought off: “We’re all middle class now”. Socialism was labelled an anachronism.
The relative affluence of the 1950s and early 1960s served to dull the urgency of class struggle in the West for a period. But prolonged full employment fuelled working-class confidence and raised expectations. 
Socialism stirs again in the late 1960s
By the mid-1960s, a new generation of young workers was demanding more. The result was a steady rise in strikes and a willingness to strike for political ends. Newspapers began anxiously to discuss “wildcat rebellions”. The left in the unions began to feel the wind in their sails. In the US, the Vietnam War gave a radical edge to the discontents of this younger generation. As the war dragged on, young workers and students began to turn against it.
Those who had been promoting capitalism had no answers other than to press ahead with the war. It was time once again for socialists to provide answers. Although initially small in number, socialists could explain why the US and Australia were embroiled in a war against a peasant army many thousands of kilometres away. Socialists could explain the connections between the racism suffered by African Americans and the imperialist project of the US and its allies in Indochina. Socialists could tie together the pressure to speed up in the factories and the war drive. Socialism once again came to the fore among young people questioning the system. 
The tragedy was that no coherent revolutionary socialist organisation had been built beforehand to lead the upsurge of strikes and demonstrations in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Communist parties were still too beholden to Stalinism to play a useful role. A new revolutionary left did emerge, but it was too small and too politically inexperienced to have a significant impact.
The downturn in struggle that followed in the 1980s pushed socialism once again to the margins, only for war and economic crisis to open the door to its revival in the 2000s and 2010s. Crisis-ridden capitalism breeds resistance.
Nothing about this is guaranteed, however. We cannot simply fold our arms and wait for history to turn in our direction. In countries without socialist traditions or organisations, decades of capitalist misery need not give birth to a socialist revival; barbarism may be the only result. A socialist organisation of some form is necessary to provide the answers that young people, in particular, will be searching for.
What kind of socialist politics emerges in moments of socialist revival also matters. Unfortunately, in both the 1930s and the 1960s and 1970s, the politics of Stalinism or its derivatives dominated. Working-class independence and leadership were sacrificed in favour of some other social force, whether “progressive capitalists”, the peasantry, guerrillas, students or the most marginalised and jobless sections of society. This distorted the socialist revival and blew it off course, leaving it open to capitalist counterattack.
A new revival? 
Today, we are witnessing a healthy revival of socialist sentiment, but there are limits to the current shift. Left-wing politics today generally takes the form of reformist electoral projects, which puts it at the mercy of the politicians who, like the Syriza government in Greece in 2015, sell out their base within months of taking office. Related to this, identity politics is still widespread, weakening the politics of class solidarity.
Marxists advocate a world in which the working class is in the driver’s seat. In other words, socialism means smashing capitalism. Electoral challenges can be part of that process, but we must go much further than just changing the governing party. The working class must take things into their own hands. That involves mass agitation including strikes and demonstrations, all the way through to workers taking over and running society. 
We currently lack the kind of mass revolutionary parties necessary to harness and build on the new socialist sentiment. In the absence of this, we risk losing the opportunity to challenge capitalism once again. Now, as in the earlier socialist revivals, the task of building a revolutionary organisation is urgent. It cannot be put off; it has to happen now.

Tom Bramble

Why socialism always comes back

Emma Dynes

When Australian workers took on the American war machine

US President Donald Trump’s recent announcement that the US might resume nuclear weapons testing should be a wake-up call. Only North Korea has tested nuclear weapons this century; no major imperial power has done so since France ended an atomic weapons testing program in the South Pacific in January 1996. 
French President Jacques Chirac’s announcement, in June 1995, that his government planned to conduct eight nuclear tests at Mururoa, ending a four-year moratorium, provoked a storm of global protest. Mururoa and its sister atoll Fangataufa, both part of French Polynesia, were subject to a barrage of nearly 200 nuclear tests between 1966 and 1996. Up until 1974, these were atmospheric tests that dispersed radioactive fallout across the South Pacific, including in Fiji, the Cook Islands, Niue, New Zealand, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga and Tuvalu, according to a 1998 <a href="https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1028_web.pdf">report</a>
by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
French nuclear testing followed a secret program of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/70-years-operation-hurricane-shameful-history-british-nuclear-tests-australia">British nuclear testing in Australia</a>, at the Monte Bello Islands off Western Australia, and at Emu Field and Maralinga in South Australia, between 1952 and 1963. Concurrently, between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/marshall-islands/">nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands</a>, exposing 52,000 Marshallese to unsafe levels of radiation.
The largest and most militant protests against the 1995 resumption of French nuclear testing took place in Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia in Tahiti, where indigenous Māʼohi have long demanded independence from France. In Australia, high school students were at the forefront of a wave of protests, including the largest high school walkout since the Vietnam War. 
Soon after Chirac’s June 1995 announcement, Brisbane anti-nuclear campaigners resolved to organise a 5pm protest in King George Square on each day that the French exploded a nuclear bomb at Mururoa. The first protest occurred on 6 September, following the detonation of an 8-kiloton bomb under Mururoa Atoll. 
Protesters condemned the hypocrisy of Paul Keating’s Labor federal government, which opposed the tests but refused to ban the export of uranium to France or to support Polynesian demands for independence. Among the participants were year 11 students from Aspley High School, Leela Cosgrove, Natalie Chapman and Erin Dunn. In an <a href="https://humanparts.medium.com/i-was-greta-thunberg-625829bb7814">essay</a>
published at Medium, Cosgrove explains:
“The protest we attended made us believe that maybe there were other people who cared and wanted change. We thought this experience might be valuable for other students. So, when we returned to school, my friend Erin and I asked to share an update on local protests at our school assembly.”
Aspley High School principal Ian Isaacs not only rejected their request but also gave both students a stern lecture about how “inappropriate” it was for them as high school students to be involved in politics. Isaacs patronisingly demanded to know, “Who put you up to this?” Incensed by the accusation that they had been brainwashed, Cosgrove and Dunn decided to lead a mass student walkout.
The plan was to walk out of school on the following Friday, 8 September, at the beginning of the next whole-of-school assembly. Cosgrove <a href="https://humanparts.medium.com/i-was-greta-thunberg-625829bb7814">recalls</a>
their intention was “to protest both the French nuclear weapons testing, but also to demonstrate to the administration that even though we were teenagers ... we were still political beings with an environmental and social conscience”.
The protest, however, did not go to plan. Instead of entering the school hall from the front door, Isaacs entered from the back, stood on a chair and yelled at students that they should have followed the “right channels”. When students attempted to walk out through the front doors of the hall, they found themselves locked in. In all, ten students defied school authorities and walked out that day. Isaacs promptly informed their parents that the students were suspended for a week. However, Brisbane’s daily newspaper, the Courier Mail, had sent journalists to the school looking for a story and the news soon broke. The students’ suspension became front page news.
When the second bomb was detonated at Fangataufa atoll on 2 October, the socialist youth organisation Resistance <a href="https://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/206/news/45-brisbane-schools-walk-out-against-nuclear-testing">called for</a> a mass walkout of state school students on 5 October. The call came in support of an initiative by students at St Rita’s College to hold a rally in King George Square that day. The message was amplified by a Courier Mail
front-page headline: “Youth group calls for mass walkout at schools”.
In a vain attempt to divide the high school movement, Brisbane Lord Mayor Jim Soorley invited a select group of students from St Rita’s and several other elite private high schools to join him at a Brisbane City Hall meeting on 5 October to voice polite opposition to the nuclear weapons tests. The mayor’s office told the media that security guards would prevent Resistance members from “gatecrashing” the City Hall meeting. 
Unperturbed by threats of suspension, thousands of students from 45 high schools heeded Resistance’s call and rallied in King George Square on 5 October. The square had been the site of many militant protests in the 1970s and 1980s, when Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen imposed a ban on marches. <a href="https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/remembering-brisbanes-big-march--its-still-a-simple-case-of-freedom,10695">According to</a> historian Glenn Davies:
“King George Square was the crucible for the city’s social disquiet and ferment, where thousands of protesters once risked the batons of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s police force, over issues as diverse as the Vietnam War, the Springbok rugby tour, Aboriginal issues, nuclear disarmament and the right to protest. When the protesters went to walk out of the square, there would be hundreds and hundreds of police in military ranks to stop the marchers. As people tried to step out onto the roadway, they’d be strong-armed to the ground by police who would try to push them back into the square.”
In 1989, 32 years of National Party rule came to an end with the election of Wayne Goss’ Labor government. Mayor Jim Soorley, a key ally of Goss, was determined to return a semblance of order to Brisbane’s city streets. However, the high school protest was anything but “orderly”. One student, Jaay Taylor, captured the mood when he told the cheering crowd, “Pigs can fly, kids don’t have sex and nuclear testing is safe ... not!” Another exposed his bum on stage, declaring, “This is a message for Jacques Chirac!”
When reports were received that security guards at the entrance of the adjoining City Hall were confiscating Resistance placards, leaflets and badges from students trying to enter, the crowd marched towards City Hall chanting, “Join us, join us!” A few students managed to get inside and called on their peers to come outside and join the rally. Hundreds poured out of the building, joining 4,000 angry students in King George Square. The students marched defiantly on (or rather ran towards) the French consulate, chanting, “Burn the flag, burn the building!”, according to a Green Left Weekly <a href="https://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/206/news/45-brisbane-schools-walk-out-against-nuclear-testing">report</a>.
When they got there, one student told the crowd that she had smuggled a Resistance placard into City Hall and held it high every time they red-baited Resistance. “They did not mention independence for Tahiti in City Hall”, she said. “They did not mention uranium sales to France. They just kept chanting, ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance’. This is not all we are saying. I’m a member of Resistance and I am saying let’s fight nuclear testing.”
The Courier Mail, however, was not going to let Resistance gain any glory from the protests’ success. Five days later, after planning had begun for another student walkout, the Courier Mail ran an article <a href="https://humanparts.medium.com/i-was-greta-thunberg-625829bb7814">claiming</a>
that six Aspley students had confessed to being “duped” by Resistance. All of the students had faced intense pressure to distance themselves from the socialist youth group, not only from their school administration, but also from the father of two of the students, who was a federal police officer.
The Courier Mail’s hit piece formed part of a hysterical red-scare campaign by Queensland politicians and the media. <a href="https://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/207/news/who-really-manipulated-students-aspley">Reports</a>
filtered in that Resistance members were being hauled into the principal’s office for questioning, and Resistance badges were banned on school grounds. Among those leading the charge against Resistance was, shamefully, Ian Mackie, the president of the Queensland Teachers Union.
Nonetheless, the Brisbane protest spurred organising efforts by high school students across the country, with new coalitions being established. Working with these coalitions, Resistance called for a week of action leading up to the third nuclear test at Mururoa, on 28 October. <a href="https://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/209/news/high-school-students-take-action-against-nuclear-tests">According to</a> Green Left Weekly, 2,000 students from more than 35 high schools took part in protests in Sydney on 25 October, with some students having to scale school gates to get to the rally. Twenty-seven Sydney students were suspended for their participation. In Canberra, 1,000 students reportedly walked out of school on the same day, with 250 rallying in Garema Place. Hundreds of students also took part in rallies in Melbourne and Perth.
The 1995 wave of student revolt had followed dedicated organising among high school students in the early 1990s under the umbrella of the Environmental Youth Alliance. The efforts led to sizeable World Environment Day rallies demanding action on climate change. Brisbane high school students were also at the forefront of another wave of student walkouts in 1998 to protest against Pauline Hanson after she formed the racist One Nation party to contest the coming federal election.
The French nuclear testing protests also drew on the legacy of a strong anti-nuclear campaign in Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which had opposed US bases in Australia, visits by nuclear-armed US ships to Australian ports and <a href="https://commonslibrary.org/leave-it-in-the-ground-union-bans-and-uranium-exports-in-the-1970s/">uranium mining</a>. In 1983, the incoming Labor government had pledged to end uranium mining, but reneged on its promise, allowing three mines to operate. 
Today, Australia remains among the top four exporters of uranium globally, principally exporting to Canada, the US and the European Union. The lion’s share of this uranium comes from the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia, which contains <a href="https://www.ga.gov.au/digital-publication/aecr2023/uranium-and-thorium">the world’s largest deposit of uranium ore</a>. Although the Australian government claims that all exports are to countries that have signed bilateral safeguards agreements, “these [agreements] are self-regulated and the checks and balances are remarkably cursory”, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/not-here-not-us-long-fight-against-nuclear-australia">according to</a> Dave Sweeney, co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
The renewed threat of nuclear weapons testing, and the AUKUS plan to service US nuclear-powered submarines in Australian shipyards (and eventually to build them here), requires a new campaign to end the mining and export of Australian uranium once and for all, and to remove Australia from the nuclear fuel cycle. 
The high school walkouts 30 years ago provide an inspiring example of young people taking a stand to safeguard their future.

Nick Everett

When Australian high school students walked out against nuclear testing

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was founded in 1920, with Adolf Hitler not yet a member but a major influence. If, as we all know, they were a fascist party, why did they include the word “socialist” in their name? And how are we to understand that today?
To start with, we must remember that the word socialism has historically been used to represent widely differing political views. Karl Kautsky, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), wrote in 1888 that Thomas More and Thomas Muenzner were two great socialists and that both of them “follow the long line of socialists, from Lycurgus and Pythagoras to Plato, the Gracchi, Cataline, Christ ...”
The common concept is some form of collective management of society—that human needs should be met socially rather than just individually. 
At the time the Nazi party was formed, there were probably dozens of organisations and parties in Europe calling themselves socialist. Most had developed during the nineteenth century. Some advocated a form of socialism to be handed down by the state or, like the Fabians in Britain, a society to be designed by an elite. 
But Karl Marx and others proposed something entirely different: a new society to be brought about by the self-activity of the masses, particularly the working class. The Fabians recognised this distinction and talked about “a distinct rupture between the Socialism of the street and the Socialism of the chair”.
So historically, despite the many forms of socialism being argued for and parties being established, there were, and continue to be, two main currents, which Hal Draper called socialism from above and socialism from below.
This is a way of looking at the history of socialist ideas. But in the period immediately following World War One, there was an extremely sharp crisis in what these ideas meant in practice. On the one hand the SPD, the largest and most influential socialist party in Europe for decades, had repudiated its politics of international solidarity in 1914 and supported the German war effort. On the other hand, the revolution in Russia in 1917 overthrew traditional ideas and presented what at the time was an astonishing new idea of what socialism would look like—workers’ councils and the complete overthrow of the ruling class. And they added a new word, “communist”. So the meaning of words like “socialist” were quite fluid at that time, and therefore ripe for exploitation.
This was the situation when German fascists first set up the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or DAP) in 1919. The party changed its name to National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) in 1920. Why? The reason is that fascists have always attempted to gain influence in the working class, as a way of recruiting shock troops. 
The British Brothers League, a short-lived proto-fascist organisation prior to World War One, had a strategic orientation to the working class in the East End of London, where it could mobilise support by rehashing old charges: that Jews were ousting locals from jobs and houses and that they were the cause of crime. 
Formed in 1932, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) did not initially focus on Jews. Its core ideas at the start were nationalism, corporatism (in which social and economic interest groups control the state) and anti-communism—the corporatism gave it a semi-socialist gloss. In 1935, the party turned to building what David Rosenberg called a “belligerent street-level populist movement of agitation and provocation in predominantly working-class areas surrounding Jewish populations”. This strategy reached its peak in 1936, when their attempted march through the East End led to the mass opposition in Cable Street by more than 100,000 Jews and non-Jews.
Mussolini also had an orientation to a corporatist state and used this to try to coopt workers. The Nazi party and Hitler derived their strategy from him—in the early days, while they were still building a base, they used populist and anti-big business rhetoric to appeal to disaffected workers and the lower middle classes. 
But at the same time, the party wanted to appeal to extreme right, racist, anti-communist and militarist traditions. As a result of this dual orientation, the name of the party is a mishmash: they tried to draw upon both left-wing and right-wing sentiments—socialist and workers on the one hand, and national and German on the other. In doing this, the Nazis were continuing a longstanding tradition of the German right—attempts to gain traction among workers, combined with antisemitism.
Otto von Bismarck was the first German chancellor after unification in 1871. His court chaplain, Adolf Stöcker, set up the antisemitic Christian Social Workers’ Party in 1878. He hoped to foment hostility against non-Christians (i.e. Jews) among the SPD-voting working class. But when this failed, the word “worker” was removed from the party’s title and, instead, they targeted the petty bourgeoisie with their antisemitic message.
After the end of World War One, there was rapid growth among nationalist, anti-monarchist and antisemitic currents in Germany, which provided a fruitful recruitment ground for Hitler. Although the Nazis presented themselves as anti-capitalist, this was largely conceived in antisemitic terms. 
Although they initially relied mainly on propaganda, coercive force began with the creation of an extreme right-wing militia in 1918. It comprised discharged soldiers out of which Jews, leftists and workers were screened, though it was fronted by a Social Democrat, Gustav Noske. The Free Corps, or Freikorps, was 400,000 strong and commanded by officers drawn from the nobility. It was dissolved as an organisation in the mid-1920s, as Klaus Fischer explains, but the members went on to form “the vanguard of Nazism and ... produced the Judeophobic mentality that subsequently defined Hitler’s political foot soldiers”.
There were other roots as well. Anton Drexler, for example, was a militant nationalist who opposed Germany’s loss of land in the Treaty of Versailles. Drexler also argued for a form of national corporatism in which profit-sharing would increase welfare for middle-class Aryans and would override class society by creating a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft). It was these sorts of ideas that they could label “socialist”.
It was Drexler who founded the DAP, but this was just one of many “völkisch” parties that flourished during the early Weimar Republic period of economic chaos and political instability (1918-1933). The party announced its 25-point manifesto in 1920, signposting much of Hitler’s later strategy—German expansion, especially to the east, Jew hatred and subordination of class interests to the state. At the same time, the party moved from discussion group to campaigning and agitation, particularly among disaffected young unemployed men. They were very open to the type of “blood and soil” nationalism of the Freikorps and other right-wing organisations. 
In 1923, the party grew rapidly to 20,000 members, cashing in on a rise in nationalist sentiment after France occupied the Ruhr industrial region. Antisemitism turned from propaganda to action in Berlin in November, with a pogrom in the Scheunenviertel, the area inhabited by poor and working-class Jewish refugees from eastern Europe. The trigger was the failure of the unemployment office to pay out entitlements, which rabble-rousers blamed on Jewish speculation. However, the actions were clearly well planned, as local racists were joined by a mob of up to 30,000 people whipped up by inflammatory speeches throughout Berlin. 
Police stood by while they beat up Jews in the streets and attacked Jewish homes and businesses. When the police did move into action, they arrested not the pogromists but hundreds of Jews on charges such as disturbing the peace!
It is not clear who the leaders of the pogrom were, but it demonstrates the atmosphere of the time: rightists attempting to divert working-class attention towards scapegoating Jews. It is likely no accident that Hitler’s failed coup, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, occurred only a few days later, on 9 November.
The Nazis continued their activities among the working class through their paramilitary Storm Detachment (Sturmabteilung or SA) starting in the early 1920s. One prominent activist was Horst Wessel, a leading participant in the extensive street fighting with Communists and other leftists in “Red Berlin” through the late 1920s. Assassinated by Communists in 1930, he became a martyr for the fascist cause. A song he had written became known as the Horst Wessel Song. Interestingly, the music was taken from a communist songbook. The fighting continued after his death. For instance, Communist Anti-Fascist Action engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Nazi stormtroopers. In Prussia between 1 June and 20 July 1932, street fighting between them killed 30 Communists and 38 Nazis.
The Nazi party never changed its name, but its approach to workers—and bosses—changed completely after it gained power in 1933. Having rammed through enabling legislation to give himself emergency powers, Hitler set about implementing the Volksgemeinschaft. But in no way did this have anything in common with socialism. With his slogan “One People, one Empire, one Leader” (Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer), Hitler attacked and incarcerated communists, socialists, trade unionists, Jews, liberals, queer people and oppositionists of all kinds. He also purged his own Nazi stormtroopers in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
While Hitler was first to last antisemitic, after he gained power, he focused first on the labour movement and only moved against Jews later on. The reason was that he had to destroy the left before advancing his full antisemitic program. He knew he had to destroy the movement that would provide the best defence for his victims. 
Hitler took care to remain securely within the capitalist economic framework, including private property and free competition. This made him very attractive to large sections of the capitalists and the educated classes. In February 1933, Hitler met with 25 leading industrialists, including weapons magnate Krupp and representatives of chemical giant IG Farben, who pledged financial and other support for the Nazis. They were well repaid by Hitler’s suppression of the working class and trade unionism.
By the end of the 1930s, the full name of the Nazi party was less in the public eye than the shortened version—National Socialists. The Nazis themselves only rarely used the term Nazi (an abbreviation of the German pronunciation of the first word in the name). The word was most often used as a term of ridicule by opponents: it already existed as a short form of the name Ignatius, common in Hitler’s home region of Bavaria, and implied a backward peasant.
The NSDAP’s name was therefore a ruse. As historian Ishay Landa says, “The trick was to benefit from the popularity of socialism, which was widely seen as the force of the future, but at the same time to distance themselves as much as possible from its substance”. We should not allow ourselves to fall for the trick.

Janey Stone

Why did the Nazis call themselves socialists?

Ryan Stanton

The rise and fall of the US Congress of Industrial Organizations

The ongoing crisis and faction fighting in the Liberal Party have included repeated calls for the party to get back to what it was like under the reign of its longest serving leader, Bob Menzies. The Menzies years of the 1950s and 1960s are portrayed as enlightened ones of progress and national unity ruled over by a broad-church Liberal Party in which small l liberals and conservatives worked together in harmony for the collective good.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Menzies years were reactionary, dominated by Cold War authoritarianism, union bashing, red scares, murderous wars from Korea to Malaya to Vietnam and, of course, record profits for the bosses.
As prime minister during this era of white picket fences, sexual prudery and fawning over royalty and everything British, it can be tempting to dismiss Robert Gordon Menzies—who revelled in the titles of Knight of the Thistle and Warden of the Cinque Ports and paraded his devotion to the queen, declaring: “I only saw her passing by, but I shall love her ’til I die”—as a pompous fuddy-duddy.
But that would be to underestimate seriously the man who had been an admirer of Adolph Hitler in the 1930s. Menzies was a hardened class warrior for the Australian capitalist class who advanced their interests with relentless determination for sixteen long years as prime minister from the end of 1949 to January 1966. That’s why John Howard, who presided over another vicious Liberal government that sought to transform society in the interests of the rich and powerful, so admires Menzies.
Menzies came to office with two key aims. First, to take advantage of growing Cold War hysteria to launch a concerted attack on workers’ living standards and union organisation, the aim of which was to ensure that the capitalist class were the chief beneficiaries of the emerging postwar boom. That meant savage repression of the left.
Second, to militarise Australian society in preparation for a new world war. Menzies openly advocated a nuclear strike on Russia and sought to develop Australia’s very own atomic bomb.
Just as Howard and subsequent Liberal prime ministers built on Labor’s attacks on workers, Menzies built on the anti-worker policies of the Chifley Labor government before him. 
The immediate postwar years had brought a sharp swing to the left. Capitalism was seen to have failed. Workers had been seared by the horrors of the Great Depression, fascism and war, and were determined not to let that happen again. They demanded the 40-hour week, full employment, higher wages and improved social services, and aggressively went on strike to back up those demands, with some significant victories initially.
However, after a series of bitterly fought strikes, the Chifley Labor government, backed by the top union leaders, gradually wore workers down. In the late 1940s, Chifley resorted to repression, most notoriously using troops to break the 1949 coal strike.
It was this union-bashing legacy that Menzies built on with harsh anti-union laws and the attempt to ban the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). The CPA led many of the militant unions and was the overwhelmingly dominant force on the left throughout the Menzies years.
Menzies’ 1951 horror budget savaged living standards and slashed jobs in the public service by 8 percent. There was a massive redistribution of wealth to the bosses. Workers’ share of gross national product fell dramatically.
CPA leaders were jailed and their offices raided by police. Legislation was passed (with ALP support) to ban the CPA. Menzies drew up plans to establish concentration camps to intern dissidents. In NSW alone, 45,000 people were listed to be interned.
Along with attacks on living standards and democratic rights came preparations for war. Conscription was introduced, and between 1950 and 1953 the size of the armed forces was expanded from 58,000 to 147,000. Australian troops were sent to fight in Korea, Malaya and, later, Vietnam.
Menzies encouraged the British to test nuclear weapons at Maralinga in South Australia, with terrible consequences for the indigenous inhabitants, in the hope that this would enable Australia to get its own nuclear weapons. On foreign policy, Menzies was a pillar of reaction, providing undying support for the apartheid regime in South Africa.
But despite some important victories, it was no cake walk for Menzies. At every step there was resistance.
The postwar vision of a new, more peaceful and fair social order still held broad appeal. By 1953, Menzies was extremely unpopular. There were sharp swings to Labor in by-elections.
So while workers were on the back foot industrially, Menzies was never able to establish a McCarthyite regime as severe as in the US—where the left in the unions was smashed.
Menzies’ 1951 referendum to ban the Communist Party was narrowly defeated after a massive campaign by the Communists, left unions and civil liberties supporters. Indeed, the CPA, after declining in the late 1940s, grew from 6,000 members in 1952 to 8,000 in 1955, despite its Stalinist politics. 
But as the horrors of Stalinism in Russia were increasingly revealed, there was growing disillusionment within CPA ranks, particularly after Russian tanks crushed the 1956 workers’ revolution in Hungary. This severely weakened its ability to lead working-class resistance to Menzies.
There was every possibility that a genuine Marxist party committed to workers’ control could have at least held its ground during the difficult early years of the Menzies government and then grown steadily in the wake of the right-wing Democratic Labor Party (DLP) split from the ALP. This would have put it in a position to play a decisive role when the political situation improved in the 1960s.
Despite the Cold War anti-Russian hysteria, opinion polls at the height of the Korean War showed 73 percent opposition to the use of nuclear weapons. By 1954, polls showed half the population opposed nuclear testing at Maralinga.
1953 was the real turning point in terms of the postwar boom. From then on, the economy surged forward. It was the most prosperous period in Australian history, with economic growth exceeding 5 percent per year for more than 15 years.
Boom conditions led to a rise in home ownership. Workers for the first time got refrigerators, washing machines and eventually TVs. Most workers withdrew from active political involvement, and, after 1956, the level of strike action fell markedly. This led many on the left to write off the working class as a force for social change. Workers were dismissed as bought off, and most intellectuals blamed the dull conformity of Australia in the 1950s and early ’60s on the masses. The problem in their eyes was not the capitalist class and the Menzies government, which in order to ensure an orderly flow of profits was imposing rigid censorship to prop up authoritarian family values. No, the problem for the oh-so-enlightened liberal intelligentsia was rather the mums and dads in the suburbs who were obsessed with their new refrigerator or getting lino on the floor rather than the higher values of life.
But the Protestant wowserism that Australia was notorious for in these years was a predominately middle-class phenomenon. And below the surface, forces were at work that were laying the basis for a revival in working-class struggle that was to explode at the end of the 1960s.
Mass upheavals don’t burst onto the scene from nowhere. They have their origins in long-term economic and social developments. At the time it can be difficult to recognise the developing ferment, but in retrospect the signs of what was to come were there.
The long postwar boom, even at its height, eliminated neither the working class nor the structural features of capitalism that impelled it to resist. There is no doubting the strident anti-Communism of the Cold War years, but underneath there were deep tensions—tensions that sharply intensified over the course of the 1960s.

Mick Armstrong

Returning to the ‘party of Menzies’ is returning to fascistic reaction

From the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901 until the government of Gough Whitlam in 1973, the “White Australia” policy was in place. Following earlier restrictions enacted by individual colonies, under White Australia, all non-white immigration was in effect banned. Around 7,500 Pacific Islander people who already resided in Australia before 1901 were also deported, many having been kidnapped or misled into servitude on Queensland’s sugar cane fields.
Adopted unanimously by the new Australian parliament in 1901 as one of its first legal enactments, the Immigration Restriction Act was the cornerstone of White Australia. The act used a dictation test in a “European language” at the discretion of the Immigration Department to bar anyone not deemed white enough. The Australian Labor Party, far from opposing White Australia, was its most vociferous champion for much of its history. In 1901, the ALP moved amendments to the act to ban Asians outright, making it explicitly racist.
The White Australia policy in common history is presented as a national shame representing the backwardness and bigotry of the past. The National Museum of Australia, for example, says of the period that “many White Australians feared that non-white immigrants would threaten Australian society”.
White Australia has come up recently, the Nazis behind the “March for Australia” justifying their racist dreams of ethnic cleansing by referring to this supposedly glorious past. Support for the policy has remained a touchstone for the Australian far right, from Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech in parliament in 1997 to Fraser Anning’s in 2018. Whether viewed with horror or nostalgia, the consensus is that “White Australia” reflected the wishes of most people in Australia.
The reality is that White Australia was the product, not of an irrational fear or some broad conservatism among “white Australians”, but of the interests of a new capitalist state operating as a European outpost in Asia. White Australia was formulated by the nation’s leading liberals and humanitarian reformers of the late nineteenth century, who pitched it as “progressive” and “democratic”.
Two main elements drove it: First, the emerging Australian ruling class desired to create a unified and independent state, and second, it wanted to build this state in Asia, facing competition from rapidly industrialising and expansionist Japan.
No ruling class can rule without maintaining “hegemony”, which means presenting the interests of the ruling class as those of the whole of society. The Chinese emperors had the “mandate of heaven”, European feudal monarchies had the “divine right of kings”, and modern capitalism rules under the pretence of the “will of the people” and the “national interest”. Just as older ideas justified the social position of nobles and kings, the notion that capitalism is governed “democratically” or that the “national interest” represents everyone serves to maintain capitalist rule today.
Australia’s colonial ruling class, which developed over the nineteenth century as Australia ceased being just a dumping ground for convicts, viewed White Australia as central to a national and “democratic” ideology for the new state.
Alfred Deakin, the first attorney-general and prime minister on and off from 1903 to 1910, explained that White Australia “was the note that touched particularly the Australian born, who felt themselves endowed with a heritage not only of political freedom, but of an ample area within which the race might expand, and an obligation consequent upon such an endowment—the obligation to pass on to their children and the generations after them that territory undiminished and uninvaded”.
The Australian ruling class understood that “White Australia” bound the interests of workers and bosses together, forging a common nationality. The idea that being “white” was a sign of civilisation pitted white workers against foreigners and helped to butter up the populace ideologically for Australia’s own expansionism in the Pacific, under the guise of “national defence”. Alfred Deakin, again:
“Coloured aliens engaging in any occupation subject white men in the same occupation to an utterly unfair and improper competition. The secret of the coloured man’s success was his complete indifference to the moral and social standards of his white fellow citizens. He worked from dawn to dark on seven days a week, he ate little else than rice, he clothed himself in rags, he lived in a hovel. White men through no fault of their own would be driven from employment and production, simply because they adhered to the most elementary ideals of a civilised society.”
It was argued by liberals—including much of the leadership of the Australian Labor Party and the trade unions—that building Australia as a “homogeneous community” of white civilization would preserve its supposed great qualities. By excluding non-white immigrants, mainly Chinese people who tried to immigrate during the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes, Australia would avoid the problems seen in countries like the United States, where importing African people as slaves led to civil war and segregation.
The ALP’s first federal objective was White Australia, supported in these liberal terms: “The cultivation of an Australian sentiment based on the maintenance of racial purity and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community”.
When modern liberals explain the White Australia policy, they often claim that ALP and union support meant a genuine working-class interest. For example, Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake, in Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality, suggest achievements like protectionism, industrial arbitration and the basic wage (what we today call the minimum wage) were the fruit of White Australia, benefiting (white, male) workers.
But immigration restrictions, past or present, do not benefit workers. White Australia’s purpose was to create a false “national interest” that in reality propped up bosses’ authority and power.
Protectionism—using tariffs to protect domestic industry—was justified as necessary for high wages, much as we hear today that higher wages depend on bosses’ profits. This means workers pay more for basics, as US workers now see under President Trump.
Arbitration was favoured not just by the ALP and union officials but also by most of the bosses. Capitalists backed arbitration (and still do, as with the Fair Work Commission), because it limits workers’ ability to strike and regulates disputes, hoping to avoid large strikes like those in Australia in the 1890s.
The basic wage, which Reynolds and Lake describe as challenging employer power, wasn’t a product of White Australia any more than similar minimum wages abroad. The minimum wage set what a family could survive on—the literal minimum—and paid accordingly. As socialists said at the time, “There is nothing radical about recognising that human beings require the same as a donkey—enough to live on”.
Arguments blaming the working class for White Australia haven’t changed much in over a hundred years. The only difference: liberals back then believed in White Australia to build an “enlightened and self-reliant community”; today liberals still claim it benefited workers, and try to ascribe responsibility for such blatant racism and discrimination not to their own political forerunners, but to “unenlightened” workers.
Besides providing the early Australian state with an ideology that could bind its population together, White Australia was also necessary because the Australian state confronted a rising Asian power in Japan.
Australia was always an aggressive power, pushing for Britain’s and the US’s involvement in the Pacific and Asia. Australia urged Britain to annex Fiji in 1874; Queensland annexed Papua New Guinea in 1884. During the Cold War, Australian governments supported US intervention in Vietnam and applauded the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. This aggressive imperialism continues today, with Labor spending huge sums on nuclear-powered attack submarines as part of the US war drive against China.
While the fear is now about China, for most of the twentieth century it was Japan. From 1894, when Japan annexed Korea and embarked on its own colonial expansion, it was perceived as Australia’s key rival in the region. This view grew after Japan’s military victory over Russia in 1905, the first modern defeat of a European empire by a non-European state. The rise of Japanese imperialism was perceived as a threat to Australia’s capacity to develop as a white state. As George Pearce, Labor senator and later defence minister in World War One, put it: “The only doctrine that these [Asiatic] races respect is the doctrine of force. Our White Australian legislation is so much waste paper unless we have rifles to back it up”.
Despite fighting alongside Japan in World War One, Australia strongly opposed and defeated Japanese efforts to have the League of Nations (forerunner of the United Nations) support racial equality.
By the time Australia went to war with Japan in 1941, the ideological groundwork was done. Sydney Daily Telegraph headlines in 1933 said that “war with Japan is inevitable”, despite Japan being Australia’s second largest export market behind Britain, absorbing 12 percent of all exports. The parallels with China today are clear.
Racist vilification of Japanese people—always central to the White Australia policy—was pushed to extremes in World War Two. A two-week campaign started by the government claimed Japanese people were warlike fanatics, possessed by an irrational hatred of whites:
“The Japs have been educated to hate you from infancy. They have been preparing for a war like this since they were old enough to understand ... Even when they smiled on us and treated us ever so politely they hated us in their souls ... Young Japan learnt to hate while you were playing with marbles and enjoying the freedom and benefits of your democracy.”
This systematic campaign of dehumanisation was summed up in the slogan: “We’ve always despised them, NOW WE MUST SMASH THEM!”
In the Pacific War, this race hatred played out fully: Japanese soldiers were often executed instead of being taken prisoner, Japanese civilians were killed in the hundreds of thousands by US firebombing, and ultimately, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated by nuclear weapons.
The White Australia policy is neither a glorious page in the nation’s past nor merely a symbol of ignorance. It was a deliberate effort by Australian rulers to manufacture nationalism and unity in a new state; a barbaric, dehumanising ideology to replace class struggle with racial hatred for imperialist aims. It stands as another mark of shame in the history of capitalism in Australia.

Duncan H.

What was the White Australia policy?

Few things can match the feeling of hope generated by the sight of millions on the streets of Italy demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine. With a general strike at its heart, with industry after industry shut down, it gave a glimpse of the usually latent power of the working class. 
While there have not been similar scenes in Australia recently, there is nevertheless a history of mass political strikes against apartheid regimes here. The target was South Africa, an anti-apartheid action reaching a high point in mid-1971, when the all-white South African Springbok rugby team toured Australia.
The tour was fully supported and aided by the Australian government. Initially, 85 percent of the population were in favour of it and only 7 percent opposed.
Yet by the tour’s end, more than one-third had come around to opposing the government maintaining sporting ties with South Africa. The cricket tour of South Africa scheduled for the following year was cancelled, the chair of the cricket board explicitly saying, “We will not play them [South Africa] until they choose a team on a non-racist basis”. That position held right up until apartheid formally ended in 1994. Bold working-class action, with the left taking the lead, was integral to bringing about this shift. 
The campaign against the apartheid team received unprecedented union support. The long campaign against the Vietnam War had legitimated political strikes amongst a wider layer of workers. As a result, more union activists had some experience of working with student radicals and were less likely to dismiss them as “long-haired ratbags”. The level of strike action in general had surged, raising working-class confidence and combativity. 
This shift in mood began to affect even the conservative upper echelons of the trade union bureaucracy.<a href="https://d.docs.live.net/de8e2d30993e856c/Documents/PC%20Backup/Diane%20Fieldes%20PhD%202002.docx#_ftn1">
</a>While the ACTU had refused to support strike action against the Vietnam War, its moderate leader, Bob Hawke, now initiated action against the Springbok tour, urging unions to “take whatever action is necessary as an act of conscience to obstruct the tour”. It took off.
Transport union members, especially Qantas staff, refused to carry the Springboks. Liquor and hospitality workers and Miscellaneous Workers Union members made sure drink supplies were cut off from hotels that allowed them to stay. Laundry workers refused to wash their clothes, and their mail deliveries were stopped. Maritime workers delayed ships carrying South African goods, and the entire Melbourne port was shut down by strike action for a week. 
Union opposition even included a one-day general strike in Queensland on 21 July. Forty unions took part in the action. The issue that galvanised them was the month-long state of emergency declared by the state’s far right Bjelke-Petersen government on 14 July. This was ostensibly to bring in hundreds of extra police and take over the well-fortified Brisbane Exhibition oval for the games. Ballymore Oval, the traditional Brisbane home of rugby union, needed extra facilities built to accommodate the expected crowds, and the unions would not cooperate.
Bob Anderson, an Aboriginal man and a communist, was an organiser in Brisbane with the Building Workers’ Industrial Union (BWIU) at the time. He gives a wonderful account of persuading building workers not to build facilities for the tour:
“There was a big team of plumbers working, installing temporary urinals, wash troughs and things like that. So I had a discussion with them, and said ‘the union policy is that we’re against apartheid, we’re not supporting the playing of this game here’, and I explained what it is to be black in your own country, and the workers said: ‘Well, if that’s the case, let them piss on the ground’ and walked off.”
The Amalgamated Meat Industry Employees Union banned the transport of police horses to the Brisbane demonstrations. Workers at the Alice Street workshop of the Department of Public Works let the union know they had received an order to make 500 extra-large riot batons for the police. Bob Anderson and BWIU president Hughie Hamilton went to argue with the workers not to make them. Union policy prevailed and the damage the cops could inflict, while still brutal, was somewhat minimised.
Then maintenance workers at the exhibition grounds struck, refusing to work while the police cadets were there putting up barbed wire around the oval. The fence itself then remained in place for a month as unionists refused to take it down. As their letter in response to a request to do so put it: “The coppers put the fucking fence up, the coppers can pull the fucking fence down”.
There was a reinforcing effect between the defiant mood amongst important groups of workers and the militant student protests. Outrage at police violence deployed against a largely student protest outside the Springboks’ motel led to a packed meeting at the University of Queensland the following day. Dan O’Neill, a lecturer in the English department argued: “We can no longer beat the ... tour and fight racism in the streets ... The only way is ... to bring the industrial system to a halt”. To cries of “Strike now!” 3,000 staff and students voted to stop work and turn the campus over to anti-racist agitation. 
When Nelson Mandela visited Australia in 1990, a few months after his release from 27 years of imprisonment, he made special mention of the power of union solidarity:
“It was the labour movement of this country, in the early ’50s, the dockworkers in this country, who refused to unload South African ships ... which gave the people of South Africa in their struggle a lot of strength, and a lot of hope. It was difficult to understand how workers, thousands of miles from our shores, could take the initiative, the lead, among the workers of the world to pledge their solidarity with the people of South Africa. The feeling that we are not alone, that we have millions of workers behind us.” That legacy of working-class internationalism is one we have to continue to build on today.

Diane Fieldes

When Australian workers struck against apartheid

Australian history is riddled with strikes. Here are four that don’t get talked about as often as they should.
Rockchoppers’ strike, 1908
Beneath Sydney lie 27,000 kilometres of sewage and water pipes keeping the metropolis from descending into a pigsty. Few know about the hundreds of workers who hewed the sandstone to build this labyrinthine network. Even fewer know about the heroic struggle they undertook to tame Sydney’s underground concrete jungle.
The dangerous nature of this work meant it attracted only the tough and the desperate. Cutting into the sandstone produced a fine—and deadly—dust that caused silicosis. Explosives produced toxic fumes that caused crippling headaches. Most workers were drawn from the poor Irish community. The morality of the employers was summed up by a contractor’s evidence to a 1901 board of inquiry: “A contractor does not take a job to slaughter men but at the same time he has to make a living like other people”.
In 1908, the Rockchoppers Union formed and quickly recruited almost all 500 people working in the sewage network. A series of strikes on individual jobs followed as the rockchoppers pushed for higher pay, shorter hours and, most importantly, workers’ control over workplace conditions. In October, this erupted into a general strike in the sewers. The Water Board quickly moved to prosecute the strikers under new anti-union legislation.
The rockchoppers felt they had nothing to lose. When strike leaders were hauled before the arbitration court, hundreds of sewer workers surrounded the courthouse shouting, “You’ll have to jail the lot of us!” and then marched to the prison to cheer on their comrades. 
Many were influenced by revolutionary syndicalism, which championed independent working-class activity. Labor politicians were banned from speaking at strike meetings, although independent socialists like Harry Holland were welcomed. The workers requested solidarity from other unions but were deeply suspicious of attempts by the NSW Labor Council to take over and moderate their struggle.
After three weeks, the Water Board surrendered to all their demands. The most astonishing victory was securing the six-hour day, the first of its kind in the country and perhaps the world. 
Read more: <a href="https://ozleft.wordpress.com/2003/10/22/rockchoppers/#chop49">“Job control for workers’ health: the 1908 Sydney rockchoppers’ strike”, Peter Sheldon, Labor History journal</a>.
The Balmain ironworkers’ strike, 1945
Left-wing accounts of strikes in Australia often look favourably on the Communist Party, which was the major force in the unions outside of the Labor Party for much of the twentieth century. 
The Balmain ironworkers’ strike of 1945 shows a different side to the Communists. It took place during the Second World War, which the Communists strongly backed. It was largely a revolt against the Communists’ bureaucratic control over the ironworkers and their attempts to service the war effort by limiting strikes.
While strident anti-war sentiment was isolated, there was a widespread feeling amongst workers that the war effort shouldn’t lead to lower living standards. When the Soviet Union entered the war in June 1941, the Communist Party campaigned to convince workers that more sacrifices must be made to support the war against fascism. For a period, working-class sentiment converged with the Communist Party’s position due to the rapid advance of the Japanese imperial forces. By 1943, however, the Japanese offensive was declining, and war fatigue amongst workers was setting in.
These issues came to a head in Sydney’s Balmain. The Balmain branch of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association of Australia (FIA) was the only one not controlled by the Communists. It organised a motley crew of Old Balmainers, including Labor left socialists, supporters of the ousted Labor Premier Jack Lang, syndicalists and a few Trotskyists. Throughout the war, tensions built up between the Communist leaders of the national Ironworkers and the Balmain branch. 
An unofficial strike of Sydney metalworkers kicked off 1943 when the New Year’s Day public holiday was cancelled. The strike was condemned by the Communists. “[A] day’s production has been lost and the trade union movement has been held up to ridicule for lack of discipline”, argued the Ironworker. “[N]o gain of any form whatsoever will flow from this stoppage.” Much criticism focussed on the Trotskyist Nick Origlass, who had been elected a delegate for the Mort’s Dock boiler shop. 
Further stoppages followed the New Years’ Day strike. Eventually, the federal leadership of the Ironworkers moved to remove the Balmain branch leaders after accusing them of financial irregularities. Hundreds of rank-and-file workers rallied around the local leadership at mass meetings. The Communists won a narrow victory in the branch elections of 1943, although they were accused of stuffing ballots.
With the old Balmain leadership deposed, opposition to the Communists was organised by a small band of Trotskyist agitators led by Origlass, who built a base of support in the metal shops at Mort’s Dock and on Cockatoo Island. 
In March 1945, Origlass was removed from his position as delegate. At a mass meeting to elect new delegates, no-one in the boiler shop nominated, in solidarity with him. The union leaders appointed three new delegates, and the boiler shop workers announced they would stop work unless Origlass was returned. Within two days, most of the ironworkers at Mort’s Dock were on strike. The next union meeting ended in uproar when the chair and 100 supporters of the Communists walked out, declaring the meeting void. Five hundred ironworkers stayed and supported a motion to expand the strike. 
By April, almost 3,000 ironworkers were out on a strike that would last six weeks. By the time the strike ended, not only was Origlass reinstated, but the Communists abandoned Balmain, leaving the opposition in control over the local branch for years to come. 
Read more: <a href="https://ozleft.wordpress.com/2003/08/13/ironworkers/">“The Balmain ironworkers’ strike of 1945”, Daphne Gollan, Labor history journal</a>.
Rubber workers’ strike, 1969 
The jailing of tramway union leader Clarrie O’Shea in May 1969 triggered the largest general strike in postwar Australia. It was a watershed moment that broke the anti-union penal powers and initiated a new strike wave that involved increasing numbers of low-paid and poorly unionised workers.
In October 1969, strikes organised by such workers rocked the rubber industry in South Australia. More than 1,000 workers struck for three weeks in defiance of their employers and the manoeuvres of right-wing trade union leaders. 
These workers were mainly migrants, mostly Greeks, and hundreds were women. A change in the way that wage increases for highly unionised workers flowed on to low-paid workers meant that they were falling far behind. In October 1969, a workplace meeting launched a strike for higher wages. In response, the rubber bosses refused to negotiate with the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union (MWU). Instead, they told the workers to talk to the Chamber of Manufactures. 
“At the second strike meeting a call was made for a march of protest to the Chamber of Manufactures”, reported Tribune, the Communist Party’s newspaper. “Almost to a man [and woman] the workers responded and marched fifteen abreast to the Pirie Street Chamber premises.” Once there, the workers invaded the building and sat in the board room’s red leather chairs waiting for the bosses’ negotiators to arrive—they never did. 
Striking workers, police and scabs regularly confronted one another on picket lines outside the rubber factories. “A driver was told to drive over the bastards”, reported Tribune. The bosses threatened to shut down workplaces across the state, leaving thousands without work. Maintenance crews at Rubber Mills then walked out in solidarity. Notably, migrant workers at Ford Broadmeadows in Victoria, who would stage their own strike in 1973, walked off the job in support of the rubber strike.
At this point, the local Trades and Labour Council—controlled by right-wing unions—moved to take control of the dispute. They organised a meeting in which the MWU had the same number of representatives as smaller right-wing unions and pressured the workers to end their strike and wait for a court ruling. 
Rank-and-file rubber workers resisted this takeover, the Greek workers playing an important role. Many of them were connected to Platon, a Greek workers club led by migrant Communists. Platon had created a εργατική επιτροπή (industrial committee) in 1969 that played a key role in encouraging the strike in the first place. Nick Robakis, one of the strike organisers and a local MWU leader, was a Platon member.
Under the influence of these activists, a stormy strike meeting rejected the Labour Council proposal to return to work by 300 votes to 283. However, the pressure from the bosses, the courts and the Labour Council continued to build. A few days later, another strike meeting reluctantly voted to end the strike.
Despite only a partial win on their demands, the strike left an important legacy. For years afterwards, the rubber industry in South Australia was rocked by protests and strikes led by the workers—men and women, migrants and Australian born—who went through the struggle of 1969.
Read more: <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/237504824">“Profile of a strike” by Hal Alexander, Tribune, December</a> 1969
Warilla teachers’ strike, 1976 
It wasn’t just low-paid migrant workers moving into struggle in the wake of the Clarrie O’Shea strike. There was also a growing movement amongst white-collar workers, many of whom previously considered themselves professionals.
In October 1968, the first ever state-wide strike of NSW teachers took place. Eighty percent of teachers took part, and more than 10,000 attended a mass meeting. This opened the space for strike action at particular schools, the most important of which was the Warilla teachers strike of 1976.
This remains the longest teachers strike in Australian history, lasting 28 days. Warilla High School in the steel town of Wollongong educated many children from poor working-class families. The strike began when the Department of Education transferred a science teacher out of the school and refused to provide funding for a replacement. Seventy-five of the 77 staff walked out in protest on 10 February.
The strike quickly raised the wider issue of inadequate staffing for schools in working-class areas, winning community support. At the time, the NSW South Coast was a radical hub. A left-wing rank-and-file group had won the local union leadership of the BHP steelworks and organised large strikes throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Eighteen thousand steelworkers had launched a strike just days before Warilla. Left-wing activists were influential amongst the dockworkers in Port Kembla and the Illawarra coalminers. The South Coast Labour Council was known for supporting left-wing currents in the region’s trade unions.
On 17 February, a mass meeting of 400 parents and students unanimously endorsed the strike, after a left-wing opposition overthrew the local P&amp;C branch leadership. A series of sympathy strikes by students broke out at the Warrawong, Port Kembla and Berkeley high schools. On 25 February, 300 school students marched through the streets of Wollongong. The cleaners at Warilla high walked out on strike. The waterside workers at Port Kembla held a stop-work to hear from the striking teachers and discussed a sympathy strike. High school teachers in Sydney began a series of rolling solidarity strikes. 
At this point, some of the Warilla teachers were drifting back to work, but 40 voted to continue the strike. Victory came when members of the Firemen and Deckhand’s Union walked off the job, shutting down tugboats at Port Kembla. “Driving down Mt Ousley that night”, recalled South Coast teacher Jim Bradley in an interview with Illawarra Unity, “looking at those boats tied up off the Illawarra coast, we stopped the car and screamed in delight and knew we were close to winning”. The Education Department rapidly gave in to most of the strike’s demands. 
Read more: <a href="https://archivesonline.uow.edu.au/nodes/view/14203#idx124982">“The Warilla High School Strike—a veritable class struggle” by Anthony Ashbolt, </a>Illawarra Unity, July 2006.

Jordan Humphreys

Four important strikes that you (probably) don’t know about

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

Why socialism always comes back

When Australian workers took on the American war machine

When Australian high school students walked out against nuclear testing

Why did the Nazis call themselves socialists?

The rise and fall of the US Congress of Industrial Organizations

Returning to the ‘party of Menzies’ is returning to fascistic reaction

What was the White Australia policy?

When Australian workers struck against apartheid

Four important strikes that you (probably) don’t know about

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

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us