In April, US President Donald Trump announced, on what he dubbed “Liberation Day”, a regime of tariffs on every country in the world, based on a sketchy formula that assigned higher tariffs to countries with which the US has trade deficits.
Stock markets went into free fall, there was a huge sell-off of US bonds, and Wall Street and other business titans spoke out against the tariffs. Trump pulled back, said he would make multiple deals over the next 90 days, and the stock market returned to setting records. Wall Street coined a term for Trump’s move: “TACO” for “Trump Always Chickens Out”. 
In early August, with very few deals negotiated, the administration instituted broad-based tariffs. But unlike in April, the market took it in stride, even though they amount to the highest tariffs in a century: a 15-20 percent levy on all imports to the US. Trump carved out some countries for higher tariffs: Brazil at 50 percent, due to its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro for trying to lead a coup after he lost the 2023 election. Trump set tariffs on <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/8/27/trumps-india-tariffs-take-effect-which-sector-will-be-hit-whats-exempt">India at 50 percent, reputedly to punish it for importing Russian oil</a>, but possibly also for refusing to <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/has-trump-lost-india-punitive-tariffs-and-nobel-peace-prize-insults-erode-once-close-relations">support his delusional bid for a Nobel Peace Prize.</a>
Then, on 29 August, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld an earlier decision declaring most of these tariffs illegal. Their fate will now be in the hands of the US Supreme Court.
A tariff is a tax on imports paid to the US government. US importers pay it. In fact, many of them are unable to claim their products until they pay the tariff. Ultimately, the cost falls on consumers who pay higher prices on imported goods such as coffee, or who pay higher prices on products containing imported inputs. Think, for example, of cars or household appliances whose prices increase because tariffs have increased the prices of imported steel and aluminium. Prices may not have spiked much yet, but if the tariffs remain in place, we will likely see prices increase by the end of the year.
The Yale Budget Project estimates <a href="https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-july-14-2025">that tariffs will add about US$2,800 to the average household’s costs over the next year</a>. And some estimates suggest they could add $4,000-$5,000 to the cost of a new car. So much for Trump’s promise to lower prices on day one!
Government statistics are <a href="https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/short-run-effects-2025-tariffs-so-far">starting to show a pick-up in inflation on particular goods and sectors that rely on imports</a>. There are three main reasons why most people have not yet experienced big tariff-fuelled price increases. First, many companies, anticipating that Trump would impose tariffs, “front ran”—meaning that they built up their inventories before the tariffs went into effect. It’s likely that the decline in the first quarter gross domestic product, which most economic analysts attributed to an abnormal increase in imports, reflected front-running behaviour.
Second, companies are eating the costs, eroding their profits, rather than passing them on to consumers. It’s possible that some companies were relying on the courts tossing out the tariffs, or a mercurial Trump deciding to lower them. <a href="https://moneymorning.com/2025/07/23/gm-and-stellantis-lose-billions-as-tariffs-reshape-u-s-auto-industry/">Both GM and Ford reported losses in the billions that they attributed to tariffs. They have yet to raise prices across the board.</a>
Finally, other countries have yet to retaliate with tariffs of their own.
But these strategies merely postpone the tariff shock to the future. Unless companies want to accept lower profits, or lay-offs or bankruptcy, they will be forced to raise prices. 
Much of the neoliberal commentariat treats Trump’s tariffs as an absurdity, akin to RFK Jr’s anti-vax demolition of science or the crackpot beliefs of flat earthers. But the left <a href="https://youtu.be/f1CdbCsetpw">Keynesian economist Yanis Varofakis, the former finance minister in the Syriza government in Greece,</a>
says we must take Trump’s tariffs seriously. Trump has been ideologically committed to tariffs and an autarchic or nationalist view of the US’s role in the world economy for decades. In recent decades, economic nationalism has been rising across the entire US ruling class, as administrations of both major capitalist parties seek to compete with China and to prod the European Union to increase its military spending.
Besides the fact that Trump seems to believe that tariffs will ignite a US “golden age”, he also views them as a way to wield his clout, both domestically and in foreign affairs. He has arguably been more successful on the domestic front, as his on-again, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/07/nx-s1-5318785/tariff-dodging-companies-exemptions-engineering">off-again threats to levy tariffs on certain industries lead those industry CEOs to make concessions or donations to Trump.</a> The opportunities for corruption are endless.
On foreign policy, Trump has reset the US’s average tariffs on imports to somewhere between five and six times what they were in 2024, without yet experiencing widespread blowback from US trading partners. He and other tariff “hawks” in the administration calculate that other countries have more to lose from being locked out of the US than the US has to lose in trade with them.
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods">Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, elected in an anti-Trump “Canada </a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods"></a>strong<a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods">” campaign earlier this year</a>, recently lifted retaliatory tariffs against the US, the destination of 75 percent of Canada’s exports. Canada is now attempting to negotiate a deal that will limit US tariffs on certain targeted Canadian exports, such as lumber, steel and aluminium.
On the other hand, Trump’s impetuous decision to place a 50 percent tariff on imports from India threatens to undermine the decades-long US cultivation of India as a counterweight to China in Asia. The <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/india-alliance-jake-sullivan-kurt-campbell">symbolism of leaders of India, China and Russia meeting together in Beijing</a>
wasn’t lost on mainstream foreign policy hands.
<a href="https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/02/04/on-channel-4-is-donald-trumps-tariff-war-about-to-totally-backfire/">Varoufakis thinks that tariffs may slow the US economy, but the US is still sucking in massive amounts of capital from the world</a>. If that continues, Trump may get away with the tariffs, even if they don’t produce the things he promised: reshoring American industries or replacing income taxes, among some of the more far fetched. But if Trump succeeds in cutting the US trade deficit, other countries will have fewer dollars to reinvest in the US stock market and in other assets.
To Marxists, tariffs are neither good nor bad. They are no better nor worse than “free trade.” They are just one mechanism capitalist states use to gain an advantage over other capitalist states in the international economy.
“Free trade” is most often the policy of the global economic and military hegemon. Britain in the nineteenth century pushed for “free trade” as a way of expanding markets for its industrial economy. Similarly, since the 1930s, it has been a policy of the US government to expand free trade.
The breakdown of free trade today is part of the breakdown of the unipolar US empire that existed in the decades following the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR-dominated Eastern bloc. Now that China is in a close competition with the US, the US government and its business leaders have embraced more protectionist measures against it. Here is where the politics of tariffs enters the discussion.
For now, if most people associate tariffs with higher prices, <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/trump-is-underwater-on-trade-in-40">they are among the most unpopular parts of Trump’s already very unpopular agenda</a>. But one place where they are not condemned—outside of MAGA world and a few favoured industries—is in the US labour movement.
Unfortunately, leaders like <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/04/uaw-fain-trump-tariffs-nafta">United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain</a>, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and the United Steelworkers of America have embraced the Trump tariffs. This isn’t anything new. “Buy American” has been part of the labour movement for decades. But for labour to buy into Trump’s tariffs now, when <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-parliamentary-cretinism-of-the-democrats-opposition-to-trump/">Trump and his administration are waging an existential war against labour</a>, is letting MAGA off the hook.
Industrial union leaders support tariffs to prop up US industries where their dwindling ranks work. But support for tariffs targets the wrong enemy. The socialist labour scholar Kim Moody has shown that declining jobs, unionisation and living standards in the US owe more to automation and speed-up than to trade.
Socialist labour activist Andy Sernatinger’s critique of the <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2025/04/nationalism-workers-power-and-the-myth-of-auto-tariffs/">UAW’s position, titled “Nationalism, workers’ power, and the myth of auto tariffs”</a>, showed that there are as many autoworkers today in the US as there were in 1992 (before the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA). But far fewer of them are in unionised jobs. That’s because the unions have conceded control of the shop floor and have only weakly competed for non-union workers in plants in the southern states, where much of the job growth in recent decades has occurred.
For labour to sign on with policies that are shot through with nationalism and anti-Chinese racism is extremely dangerous. Labour activists <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Vincent_Chin">should remember the 1980s case of Vincent Chin</a>, a Chinese American man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by an auto industry supervisor. Chin’s killing took place at a time when the UAW was leading an anti-Japanese car campaign that featured media events in which union members smashed up Japanese-made cars with bats and hammers. Chin’s killer shouted racial slurs at him while he beat him.
Not only does this sort of politics sow divisions among workers, but it also contributes to the general racist and nationalist climate that the Trump administration is leading from the top. It lays the foundation for political support for further economic, political and military confrontation with China.
Even if tariffs don’t have the catastrophic effects—like COVID-era empty store shelves and price gouging—that many predicted, they will still contribute to a slowing economy, higher prices and potentially mass lay-offs. The jobs economy <a href="https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/hiring-slowdown-spells-a-weakening-labor-market">is already weak</a>—the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/03/job-opening-data-falls-to-levels-rarely-seen-since-pandemic.html">number of job openings is around the level it was during the COVID recession</a>.
It’s not clear that Trump’s tariffs are the cause of all these problems. There is solid evidence that consumer spending was tapped out at the end of last year, before “Liberation Day”. But tariffs are not going to improve the situation. And in the current context, Trump’s tariffs are just another attack on the working class.
First published at the <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-trouble-with-trumps-tariffs">International Socialism Project</a>. Lance Selfa is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Democrats: A Critical History</a>
(Haymarket, 2012) and editor of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality</a> (Haymarket, 2017). He lives in Chicago.

Lance Selfa

The trouble with Trump’s tariffs

After decades of hegemony, the two-state solution is no longer considered a viable or desirable solution to the decades-long oppression of the Palestinians among pro-Palestine activists in Australia. In Melbourne, where I am involved, the phrase “two-state solution” has been essentially banned from the platforms of the regular Gaza solidarity demonstrations. 
This is an extremely positive development. For decades, the two-state solution has served as a means to browbeat the more principled and radical supporters of the Palestinian people. Prior to the 1980s, the majority of Palestinian political parties supported the full liberation of historic Palestine, and the two-state solution was used by Labor Zionism to denounce them as extremists and coopt them into a more moderate position. 
The two-state solution reached its zenith in the 1990s during negotiations for the Oslo Accords between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel. During this period the Palestinian leadership under Fatah abandoned all sorts of rights and principles in exchange for the chimera of a Palestinian statelet in the West Bank and Gaza. While a minority of Palestinian capitalists and politicians have become fabulously wealthy as a result of this process, the Palestinian people have continued to go backwards, losing further rights and territory.
So the clear rejection of the two-state solution by the majority of serious pro-Palestine activists is an important breakthrough. It provides a stronger basis from which to build a movement that can demand real justice. And importantly, it opens up space for discussion about what sort of scenario might actually succeed in achieving genuine liberation for the Palestinian people. 
For most people, the alternative to the perpetual apartheid and oppression entailed by the two-state solution is the creation of a democratic state for all inhabitants of the area. Far from “driving Jews into the sea”, the idea is for Arabs and Jews to live together peacefully, with equal rights in a liberal democratic set-up. In many ways this is a worthy goal, and when it was developed in the 1960s, it was a progressive position for the Palestinian liberation movement to adopt. 
But many of the same issues that make the two-state solution unworkable also apply to one state. Most importantly, the Israeli state will not accept equality between Jews and Palestinians. Its founding ideology is that of an ethno-state: a state that exists for a particular ethnic group, with others as second-class citizens. This means a single state based on equal rights will never be achieved through negotiation or brought into existence through UN mandates or diplomacy. It requires the overthrow of the Israeli state. 
The Western powers, to which Israel is an important strategic and economic ally, would of course never accept this. The only one-state outcome it’s possible to imagine is one in which Israel is in effect allowed to annex the entirety of the Palestinian territory and expel millions of refugees.
Supporters of Palestine often refer to the defeat of apartheid in South Africa as proof that a transformation from a system of apartheid to democracy is possible. But mainstream accounts of this important history tend to downplay the crucial role played by the economically powerful, politically sophisticated and industrially militant black working class, which existed in South Africa but does not in Palestine. By repeatedly bringing the economy to a halt through strike action, these workers made it impossible for South African mines and ports to function reliably, and for capital to profit. This hit the rich where it hurts, and created enormous pressure for change. 
Only when it became clear that the old order was doomed did Western governments impose sanctions to try to expedite the transition so that the vital mines and ports of South Africa could remain functional and be relied on. 
Palestinians have no comparable economic power, excluded as they are from large parts of the Israeli economy, particularly its most strategic sectors. So traditional class struggle at a domestic level cannot create the economic disruption needed to break apartheid and end the occupation of all Palestinian lands.
At a global level, Israel is a nuclear-armed imperial outpost in a central region of world politics and a long-term strategic ally of the US. Far from facing crippling sanctions for its many crimes, it is still being armed, funded and courted by the world’s elites. Indeed, its utility to US empire has been reinforced in the last two years, given the ease with which it has crushed Hezbollah and subdued Iran. 
This alliance is likely to continue as long as imperialist domination remains a central plank of US foreign policy. Even if the US is somehow dethroned, then China or any other rising power would have a strong interest in allying with such a well-armed and strategically important state. China is already the second largest importer of Israeli goods, and Israel imports more goods from China than any other country, $19 billion worth annually according to the United Nations Comtrade database.
So while the apartheid system in South Africa could be ended without fundamentally disrupting the structures of global and regional imperialism, the same is not true in Palestine. In any case, the end of formal apartheid has not fundamentally changed the experience of the vast majority of working class and poor Black South Africans. Their living conditions are actually worse, meaning this is hardly a model to be aspiring to.
The harsh reality is that while many former colonies have been able to achieve some measure of national independence within the capitalist system, there are a number of cases where it is just not possible. In the Middle East, the examples of the Palestinians and the Kurds stand out, where the maintenance of national oppression is absolutely essential to the functioning of capitalism as it has been established over the last century. So just as it is impossible to imagine a capitalist America without anti-Black racism, there will never be a capitalist Middle East without the whole suite of religious, national and caste hierarchies that have been deliberately entrenched in the region. 
It’s long been argued by revolutionaries in the Middle East and elsewhere that overthrowing the Arab regimes, which pose as champions of the Palestinians while simultaneously accommodating to Israel and repressing movements that challenge it, is a prerequisite for a liberated Palestine. But the experience of the Arab revolutions that erupted in 2011 shows that simply replacing one capitalist government with another in no way brings closer the goal of ending the injustices that face the workers and the oppressed of the region. It’s clear now that in a very direct sense the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and that of the masses in the region and beyond, will require a more radical goal. To be precise, only the successful overthrow of capitalism across the region, particularly in key states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, can make possible the liberation of Palestine.
This doesn’t change the fact that the Palestinians will continue to have a central and leading role to play in organising popular resistance to Israel and capitalism, both inside occupied Palestine and in the neighbouring countries. But it does mean that the practice of seeking allies among the Arab regimes, which has been the long-term approach of the leading Palestinian factions, has to be opposed. Not only is it a betrayal of the Arab masses living under these regimes, but it is a dead end for the Palestinian struggle. 
Instead, efforts must be made to link up with the many economic, social and geopolitical grievances of workers and the poor across the region. This can most effectively be done by locating Palestinian oppression in a wider context of regional exploitation, oppression and imperialism, and Israel’s role in maintaining this unequal and oppressive status quo. This involves popularising a systemic critique of Arab capitalism and its role in propping up Western imperialism, and building a movement that can turn this critique into action. 
Those of us outside the Middle East also have an important role to play. Israel can survive and get away with its atrocities only due to endless Western support and funding. We have seen that a mass movement in Australia has been capable of shifting the terrain of discussion and politics, but not core aspects of government policy. It is similar elsewhere. To force Western governments even to begin to break ties with Israel would take immense struggle by workers, the kind of struggle that would make clear to the Albaneses of the world that the choice is between profits and social stability and continued support for genocide.
Standing in the way of this is the existing leadership of the workers’ movement, which has no interest in mobilising workers to make Australia’s support for Israel unviable. Such action would threaten not only the interests of Australian capitalism, which the union leaders do not oppose, but also the electoral fortunes of the Labor Party, which most union leaders are aligned with, and the relatively privileged position of the leaders themselves within the system, not to mention their future career prospects. 
To make the kinds of strikes that could lead to real sanctions against Israel and the arms industry happen today would require a profoundly more radical and organised working-class movement than what currently exists. This in turn presupposes the existence of a serious left in the workers’ movement, both able to lead action and carrying weight ideologically. Socialist-led unions, backed by a militant rank and file, could organise black bans of weapons companies and Israeli shipping lines, and engage in targeted actions to enforce them. The places where this has happened in recent years, for instance the dock workers in Greece, have long traditions of communist influence in the union. 
So both in the Middle East and in the imperialist West, fighting for revolutionary socialist politics grounded in mass working-class organisations is a vital step on the road to Palestinian liberation. This means rejecting both the two-state farce that serves to validate the status quo, and also the sort of liberal utopianism that assumes a single Palestinian state in the framework of capitalism is possible and able to bring liberation. 
Instead, a revolutionary socialist approach means a relentless and uncompromising struggle against all of the institutions that have become so discredited by their response to Israel’s genocide, including every powerful nation state on earth. Only a struggle for a socialist Palestine that unites the revolutionary workers and peasants of the Middle East with an insurgent, anti-imperialist working class movement in the West can hope to achieve liberation.
Omar is a long-time pro-Palestine activist based in Melbourne

Omar Hassan

Two-state solution is rubbish, what will it take to liberate Palestine?

Since 2012, Chilean elections have involved voluntary primaries, in which parties or coalitions of parties can run regulated polls to elect presidential candidates, parliamentary deputies, senators and mayors.
The left-of-centre Unity for Chile (Unidad por Chile) coalition, which currently forms President Gabriel Boric’s government in the National Congress, held primaries to select a presidential candidate on 29 June. The candidates included Jeannette Jara from the Communist Party (Partido Comunista de Chile, PCCh), Gonzalo Winter from the Broad Front (Frente Amplio), Jaime Mulet from the Social Green Regionalist Federation (Federación Regionalista Verde Social), and Carolina Tohá from the Party for Democracy (Partido por la Democracia, PPD) in partnership with the Socialist Party, the Radical Party and the Liberal Party.
The 20 percent lower turnout for these primaries, compared to the 2021 primaries that led to the selection of Boric, is a clear indicator of the loss of enthusiasm for a government that watered down what progressive agenda it had after the 2022 defeat of its constitutional referendum. Clearer still was the primary vote for Gonzalo Winter, from Boric’s Frente Amplio, who managed only 9 percent. The PPD’s Tohá got 28 percent, based on a barely disguised scare campaign of anti-communism. The Communist Party’s Jeannette Jara won the primaries convincingly across the entire country, with more than 60 percent (825,835 votes).
This is not surprising, as the few reforms the government has celebrated—in pensions, work week and minimum wage—were largely the work of the Communist Party, with Jeannette Jara leading the Ministry for Work and Social Provision. None of the reforms came for free. The 40-hour week and increased minimum wage both involved trade-offs in labour “flexibility”, and the pension reform was more a capitalist modernisation.
The fact that the Communist Party will lead the centre-left’s parliamentary campaign in the upcoming national election signals an important change in the balance of forces and reflects the growing polarisation across the continent. The mainstay of Chile’s post-dictatorship capitalist stability has been the centre-left forces of the neoliberal Socialist Party and PPD, alongside the historically weakened Christian Democrats. The Frente Amplio was always a swamp without a clear social base or ideological commonality.
The Chilean Communist Party is one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1912 as the Socialist Workers Party. It has a long history of supporting what it variously labelled progressive or nationalist bourgeois forces, participating in governments, and standing at the head of workers’ movements only to lead them into defeats, including the persecution of its own members. 
Most tragically, the Communist Party bears significant blame for attempting to demobilise the workers’ movement during the Allende government and weakening it at its most decisive historical moment, before General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government in a coup in 1973. The Communists were the most conservative, conciliatory section of the Popular Unity coalition, leading attempts to hold back factory takeovers, strike deals with centrist parties and marginalise revolutionary forces.
Throughout this history and to date, it has maintained significant levels of support among workers. The party has the third largest electorally registered membership and, in recent years, has been top of this list. Unlike most other parties, centre-left and right, the PCCh’s 45,000 or so membership is significantly more meaningful, with neighbourhood-level organisation still existent in many parts of the country. 
The PCCh youth organisation probably has more than 6,000 members, who are active at secondary school, university and neighbourhood levels. While this does not compare with the 100,000 organised militants it had in 1972, it is still a significant political force in a country where youth mobilisations have been centre stage for decades. Two of the key figures of the Boric government, Camila Vallejo (government spokesperson and head of education) and Karol Cariola (chair of the lower house), were important leaders of the Jota (as the Communist youth are known).
The Chilean Communist Party has a long Stalinist history and, like many of its counterparts, evolved in a Eurocommunist direction from the late 1960s onwards. However, the defeat of 1973 and the persecution that followed somewhat immunised the party from the precipitous decline and right-wing trajectory of many similar organisations worldwide. By 1984, the PCCh had shifted its perspective, resolving that the most probable road to democracy was a national uprising. It joined with revolutionary forces and, for a period, helped lead the democracy movement. This included setting up armed militias through the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, famed for the attempted assassination of Pinochet.
While relatively monolithic, the PCCh has its historically rooted tensions. The case of PCCh leader Daniel Jadue illustrates the continuation of these. Jadue, a Chilean of Palestinian origin, was mayor of the working-class Santiago district of Recoleta from 2012 to 2024. He became very popular for opening public pharmacies, popular libraries and an open university and for establishing a public housing builder. He contested the primaries in 2021 against Boric, getting almost 700,000 votes, compared to Boric’s million. 
In 2024, Jadue was charged with crimes related to the funding of the public pharmacies, essentially for buying medicines with non-existent public funds. Since then, the entire political establishment has done everything possible to vilify Jadue and keep him off the political stage, including current efforts to prevent him from running in the coming parliamentary elections. In recent months, the PCCh president has engaged in public squabbles with their presidential candidate over whether Jadue would play a role in the election campaign.
The case of Jadue complicates the support the Jara campaign seeks from the centre of Chilean politics. As in the past, the more the PCCh looks in that direction, the more it plays into the hands of the right. In waiting are presidential candidates Evelyn Matthei, supported by two of Chile’s main modern bourgeois parties, National Renewal (Renovación Nacional) and the Independent Democratic Union (Unión Demócrata Independiente), and Antonio Kast, from the more newly established darling of the far right, the Republican Party.
[Red Flag will report from Chile on the presidential elections in October-November.]

Jorge Jorquera

Will a Communist be Chile’s next president?

Over the last week, protests have been organised across Indonesia in response to <a href="https://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/out-of-touch-why-an-increase-in-politicians-allowances-triggered-mass-protests/">politicians giving themselves a hefty pay rise</a>. Days of demonstrations, mostly in the capital, Jakarta, faced severe police repression. But they continued to grow. 
On 28 August, after four days of mobilisations, 21-year-old ride-share driver Affan Kurniawan was hit by an armoured police car. He died in hospital soon after. The rage at this is evident among demonstrators and their sympathisers. The protests have grown and radicalised as a result, and many activists are calling for the prosecution of the police responsible, as well as the prosecution of all officers involved in human rights abuses. These new demands add to the existing demand for parliament to be dissolved in response to the politicians’ self-approved pay rise. 
The proposed pay rise would add an extra 50 million Indonesian rupiah (roughly A$4,600) to the monthly allowance of members of parliament, supposedly to help them with housing costs. The increase alone is around ten times the minimum wage in Jakarta, and it would be added on top of the base salary and other perks that politicians already receive. 
Such self-serving greed hit a nerve when it was announced, and it has become the focal point for broader working-class grievances that have been aired for months. Indonesia’s unemployment rate is currently the highest in South-East Asia. Indonesia’s Manpower Ministry reports a 32 percent increase in company lay-offs in the first six months of this year compared to the same period last year. 
This has only added to the trend of underemployment and low-quality jobs dominating the labour market. According to <a href="https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/07/17/indonesias-jobs-boom-is-a-story-of-quantity-not-quality/">a recent article by economists Kelvin Ramadhan and Wisnu Setiadi Nugroho</a>, real wages have not increased since 2018. All of this has created a sense of stagnation and instability for Indonesian workers, especially young workers, while Indonesia’s billionaires and politicians grow richer. 
Police repression has increased the anger driving these protests. Police have used water cannons, tear gas, batons and mass arrests. According to reports from socialist activists on the ground, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DN56NUhD3Hu/">at least 200 people were arrested</a> in Jakarta and Bogor, 50km south of the capital, on the night of 28 August. Police are trying to disorganise and demoralise protesters, particularly students, whom the Indonesian ruling class often call “professional anarchists” to justify police beating and arresting them. 
Politically motivated police brutality has been a feature of Indonesian politics for decades, even more so as protests against corruption, militarism and neoliberalism have grown over the past six years. But there has been a particularly sinister normalisation of human rights abuses by the Indonesian state with the election of Prabowo Subianto last year. President Prabowo is a conservative military figure best known for leading the counter-insurgency campaigns against the independence movement in East Timor and for his role in kidnapping and torturing student democracy activists in the late 1990s. 
Since his ascension to the presidency, he has been promoting allies from the military into high-ranking government positions, despite their sordid past of human rights abuses and murders of democracy activists. For now, the police remain the main target of protesters’ rage. But the military has its own history of human rights abuses and is often relied on to quell protests when they reach destabilising proportions. 
Despite the attacks on this most recent round of protests, students held their ground on 25-27 August. After that, unions involved in the Labour Party (Partai Buruh) <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DN5OK4tj_Wl/">organised their own demonstration</a> alongside the students on the 28th, demanding an increase to the minimum wage. This increased the numbers in the face of police violence, drawing workers and students into action in their thousands on the streets of Jakarta. 
Since Affan Kurniawan’s murder, the anger reached explosive proportions. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DN7tMJ6kd31/">His funeral was held on the morning of 29 August</a>. Thousands of ride-share drivers attended on their bikes and in uniform to pay respects to their colleague. Many more have joined the protests since hearing the news. On that afternoon, <a href="https://en.tempo.co/read/2044333/endless-police-brutality-sparks-massive-protest-at-jakarta-metro-police-headquarters">a mass protest of students and workers</a> formed around the police headquarters in South Jakarta. The Jakarta Post reported that by 4pm, they had entered the front gate and occupied the space in front of the building. Reports from socialists involved in the protests say that by 7pm, the police had <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DN8FjHbD-55/?img_index=1">deployed tear gas again</a>. Many other cities had their own protests that day as well. Reports in the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/30/fire-kills-three-people-in-indonesia-after-protesters-storm-council-buildings-in-the-wake-of-taxi-drivers-death?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other">Guardian</a>
and <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/29/asia/indonesia-protests-police-latam-intl">CNN</a>
indicate that provincial government buildings and official guesthouses have been set ablaze in Makassar, South Sulawesi and Bandung, central Java. 
President Prabowo and the Jakarta police chief have issued condolences and apologies for Kurniawan’s murder and called for calm. An investigation into the officers responsible is under way, and there is enough public pressure that it may even result in consequences for the killers. But the whole system of repression continues to rain down tear gas and beatings on those demanding justice. Meanwhile, the inequality that sparked this movement only worsens day by day. For those reasons, it won’t be easy to appease the movement. But nor will it be so simple to repress it. As the ruling class grasps for a way to stabilise the system and return to the grinding normality of capitalism in Indonesia, the struggle continues.

Nick Reich

Mass protests rock Indonesia

CHICAGO—Two events that occurred within days of each other in early August speak to the state of the opposition to President Trump’s assaults on working people and democracy. 
On 1 August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (supposedly the most liberal circuit in the US) upheld Trump’s March executive order that used “national security” as a pretext to void union contracts in several federal government agencies. Within days, managers across the federal government—most significantly, the <a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/veterans-affairs/2025/08/va-says-its-ended-most-collective-bargaining-agreements/">Veterans Administration</a>—ripped up their union contracts.
The second noteworthy event came a few days after the union-busting court decision. All Democrats in the Texas legislature left the state to deny Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his Republican legislative henchmen a legislative quorum to implement a Congressional gerrymander that would reduce the number of Democratic Congress members from the current thirteen to eight. That would leave the Texas Congressional delegation at almost 80 percent Republican in a state where Trump won 56 percent of the vote in 2024.
Most liberals and Democrats viewed the court-sanctioned union-busting with a yawn, if they noticed it at all. But the threat of losing seats in Congress sent Democrats to battle stations.
California Governor Gavin Newsom pledged a referendum to give the California legislature the power to gerrymander to net at least five and as many as nine new Democratic-friendly districts. Newsom electrified partisan Democrats who viewed him as a rare Democratic politician who would stand up to Trump. Even the ever cautious former President Barack Obama backed Newsom’s plan.
Aside from the details of the redistricting battles that could unfold in multiple states before the 2026 midterm elections, we should ask why Democrats and many of their liberal supporters are so exercised about gerrymandering, but passive about most of the other depredations of the Trump regime.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that politicians would be more concerned about their jobs than about the jobs and rights of their constituents and voting base. But it’s also an indication of the degree to which the logic of what Karl Marx called “parliamentary cretinism” has captured so much of the opposition to Trump.
The liberal opposition to Trump can conceive of defeating him and Trumpism only at the ballot box. So, anything that might impede Democratic electoral gains is an existential question for them.
To return to the labour example, it’s clear that, aside from heroic efforts by the still-small group of activists in the Federal Union Network, the labour movement has hardly responded to Trump’s union-busting. The lawsuits labour leaders have filed and supported have slowed down, but not stopped, Trump’s determination to de-unionise the federal workforce. 
In a labour movement that still counts 14-16 million members, including more than 1 million working for the federal government, the potential exists for mass protest action, including strikes, slowdowns, occupations, organising the unorganised, days of action and the like to galvanise a real opposition to Trump. But for most labour leaders, this is not even part of their thought process. As long-time labour activist and socialist <a href="https://mronline.org/2025/07/16/hard-truths-about-the-us-labor-movement-an-interview-with-chris-townsend/">Chris Townsend put it in a recent interview</a> with Monthly Review: 
“We have slid into a period in our labour movement where decline, decay, stagnation, and timid leadership have become formalized. The ‘leadership’ today in many unions is at best an administrative layer: functionaries carefully tending to the decline, keeping things on track as we are pushed towards oblivion. There are examples to the contrary, but not very many in my experience.”
The atrophy of social movement organisation and reflexive fealty to the Democrats among most non-government organisation leaders have led us to this point. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, fears that the US Supreme Court would overturn legalised abortion led to protests in the hundreds of thousands in Washington. <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-history-of-planned-parenthood-v-casey-and-pro-choice-activism-roe-v-wade/">This mobilisation stayed the hand of the Supreme Court majority—then, as now, </a>Republican-appointed.
But when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, no major abortion rights group called a national demonstration, and protest organising fell to under-resourced groups of dedicated activists in different localities. The implicit (and often explicit) message from the national groups was for supporters of abortion rights to put faith in the electoral process of state-level referenda and the election of Democrats to Congress and the White House. This was during a time when even <a href="https://www.glamour.com/story/why-doesnt-congress-just-make-roe-v-wade-federal-law">pro-choice Democrats struggled to articulate simple promises of passing a national abortion rights law</a>, especially if it required (as it almost certainly would) getting rid of the Senate filibuster.
American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley’s response to the anti-union court decision showed how union leaders are also captive to the Democratic Party’s liberal proceduralism: 
“For sure, we are going to fight for our existence. It’s very unsettling and very disturbing that the Ninth Circuit issued the ruling that they issued. I don’t think that any president should have any unfettered authority that goes unchecked”, <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/unions-battle-for-survival-hit-new-wave-with-trump-termination-of-bargaining-agreements">Kelley told The Hill</a>. “That’s a portion of the reason why unions exist, to make sure there’s checks and balances inside of the agencies.”
Unconsciously, Kelley is echoing the rhetoric of Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who regularly appeals to Congress and the courts to honour the age-old constitutional system of “checks and balances” against the autocrat in the White House.
In a Boston Review essay, “<a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-dead-end-of-checks-and-balances/">The Dead End of Checks and Balances</a>”, political scientist Lisa L. Miller points out how much of Trump’s authoritarian power grab is following the US Constitution’s empowerment of a wealthy minority at the expense of the broad working-class majority. Miller argues that the “checks and balances” that figures like Schumer cite—federalism, the courts, division of the Congress into two houses—have historically served capitalists and the rich to veto popular initiatives like national health insurance, rather than helped ordinary people. 
Periods of popular reform have come only when mass movements have forced the political system to break free from the straitjacket of “checks and balances”.
Some of the more activist sections of unions understand this. A recent article in Convergence magazine co-authored by three leaders of the Chicago and Los Angeles teachers’ unions <a href="https://convergencemag.com/articles/labors-strategy-must-lean-into-synergies/">makes the case for reviving the general strike</a> as part of labour’s strategy to defeat Trumpian authoritarianism. So far so good. But it’s clear that the authors view labour activism as a way also to resuscitate the Democratic Party in time for the 2026 and 2028 elections. So the article notes: “Strikes and electoral work reinforce each other”.
This makes their call to militancy less a bold break with the current labour leadership than a refashioning of the standard “inside-outside” strategy to reform the Democratic Party. That is, organise “outside” the Democratic Party to pressure for reform “inside”. 
The long <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/whatever-happened-to-political-independence/">history of these efforts to reform the Democratic Party</a> has mostly served to accommodate radicals and activists to the Democrats’ status quo rather than shift the Democrats to the left. We saw it last year when self-described democratic socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders went “all-in” for Kamala Harris, despite Harris’ corporate-friendly politics and support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. (By the way, it’s noteworthy that the article by the three teachers’ union leaders and a labour studies professor—all self-described radicals and socialists—doesn’t mention Gaza.)
It’s clear that the left and the labour and social movements are in a very precarious state, and debates about how to fight back against Trumpian authoritarianism will be crucial. But elections and the courts won’t save us, as Townsend pointed out:
“The New Jersey and Virginia elections this November may provide a Democratic Party boost, but Trump couldn’t care less. He obviously plans to expand his unilateral war on working people, and the courts are going to allow it. This guy is governing like any crazy boss that the unions see all the time. Bosses who ignore the contract and do illegal things. Because they know that it is unlikely that you will rise up. They know that time is on their side, not our side. They control most aspects of the situation. So just like when this happens in a union context, we need to reconsider our entire position, our response, our tactics. We need union leadership who will consider bold responses, militant responses, tactics that defy conventional wisdom.”

Democratic electoralism won’t defeat Trumpism

Over the past six years, Indonesia has experienced repeated waves of mass protest in response to “democratic backsliding”—the erosion of post-1998 reforms and the increasingly visible role of the armed forces in politics. The persistence of these protests, mobilising students and workers, demonstrates a determination to defend democratic rights and economic gains won by the preceding Reformasi generation—those who forced a period of political and social reform after the ousting of the dictator Suharto. Success, however, will require confronting the Indonesian state’s combined military, economic and political power.
Prabowo Subianto, a former commander of the Indonesian army’s special forces unit (Kopassus), secured the presidency in a remarkable political turnaround last year. Twenty-seven years ago, he was expelled from the military after allegations that his unit abducted and tortured pro-democracy student activists. Soon after, he entered exile in Jordan. At the time, Prabowo was married to a daughter of President Suharto, the army general who had seized power amid the mass killing of alleged communists in 1965-66. Many expected Prabowo to succeed his father-in-law, but the pro-democracy Reformasi
movement forced Suharto to resign in 1998, and the dictatorship was ended.
Reformasi, spearheaded by university students in 1997, swelled into a nationwide uprising, drawing in workers and the urban poor. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, coupled with endemic corruption and nepotism, turned economic hardship into political rage. The movement’s demands included Suharto’s removal, the weeding out of corruption, free and fair elections, the abolition of the “dual function” that gave the military both security and political roles, and prosecutions for human rights abuses. Indonesia’s first post-Reformasi direct presidential election in 2004 resulted in the victory of another former general, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
The army never vanished from politics, however. While Reformasi
established civilian constitutional supremacy and direct presidential elections, the armed forces retained far-reaching influence. As Aldi, an Indonesian socialist activist, recently related during a conversation in Java, the country’s most populous island: “There was no trial for human rights perpetrators, and no seizure of military-owned businesses. The military remained central to state-controlled industries”. The election of Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”), a former furniture exporter and mayor of Solo, a city in central Java, in 2014 was seen abroad as a landmark civilian victory. Yet Jokowi reintegrated the military, appointing retired generals to ministerial posts.
Simultaneously, the new president narrowed democratic space. In 2019, parliament diluted the independence of the Corruption Eradication Commission, created in 2002 as a signature Reformasi institution. The 2020 “Omnibus Law”—officially the Job Creation Law—savaged labour and environmental protections to woo investment, provoking large street protests. In the final months of his presidency, Jokowi pushed electoral law changes widely interpreted as paving the way for his sons’ political careers, including lowering the age requirement for vice-presidential candidates to permit his elder son’s nomination alongside Prabowo in the 2024 election.
None of this happened without resistance. Each measure triggered mass protests. In 2019, “Reformasi corrupted” became the rallying cry; 2020 saw “Reject the Omnibus Law”; 2023-24 featured “State of Emergency Warning”. Mobilisations frequently occurred with less than 24 hours’ notice via social media, drawing tens of thousands. But, as Aldi notes, the protests lacked sustained leadership: “Because of the low level of political consciousness and the lack of an organisation that can lead the movement, it’s very easy for these protests to be beaten back by the regime”.
Jokowi’s alignment with Prabowo was the final straw for liberals who had viewed him as a bulwark against authoritarian restoration. His endorsement, and his son’s vice-presidential slot on Prabowo’s ticket, symbolised the collapse of “lesser evil” logic in Indonesian electoral politics.
Once in office, Prabowo moved to rewrite the Reformasi-era military law, allowing more serving officers to take cabinet posts. Protests broke out in more than 60 cities. In Bandung, some clashes with riot police lasted overnight. Lacking central coordination, the movement ebbed once the law passed.
Prabowo’s victory was underpinned by longstanding army-economic integration. “During the [Reformasi] period of political decentralisation, the military was still centrally involved in economic life, so it was easy for them to pick up business projects in local areas”, Aldi says. “The military has big stakes in timber, nickel, coal, palm oil and the wood industry. Because of this, their involvement in policy making has been embraced by civilian elites all this time: it’s not surprising that Prabowo won the 2024 election with their support. His supporters in the military also utilised what is called the ‘territorial command’. This is like a state within a state, where the military has administrative representation at the village, subdistrict, district and provincial levels.”
Put simply, the military is the strongest section of the Indonesian ruling class. The civilian sections of the capitalist class rely on it to organise big economic infrastructure projects and manage the population. This means that any fight against militarism in Indonesia will inevitably be a fight against the entire structure of Indonesian capitalism.
For protesters, the stakes are twofold. One is the fear of a return to New Order–era abuses: arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial killings and military-ordered massacres. The other is a defence of liberal-democratic norms: civil liberties, the rule of law and free elections. A small but growing bloc of leftist organisations and trade unions now advocates a break from both authoritarian nationalism and liberal capitalism. 
Those who are building that kind of organisation face difficult conditions. It remains illegal to build Marxist organisations in Indonesia. Police spies and criminal thugs have a history of infiltrating and intimidating successful leftist groups. The workers’ movement has stagnated for some time and is dominated by conservative union bureaucracies. Sections of the workers’ movement have even supported Prabowo rather than joining the protests against him. 
Still, there are hopeful signs. “Many young people are now attending our meetings”, Aldi says. Whether this politicisation can be transformed into a durable force capable of posing a political alternative remains an open question. There are undoubtedly more challenges to come. Every new showdown raises the stakes, as the military tries to suffocate democratic opposition to its khaki-clad capitalist empire. But every skirmish allows revolutionaries to test their arguments and build independent organisations.

Resisting militarism and capitalism in Indonesia

Countless mass demonstrations in cities around the world over the last two years have shown the residents of Gaza that, while governments everywhere have abandoned them, “the people” on every continent nevertheless are with them in spirit. Reports from on the ground in Palestine have confirmed that this has been important for morale, if nothing else. 
The several hundred thousand people who marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge this month changed the political narrative in Australia, opening the space for more activism and less state repression and dealing a political blow to both the state government and the police. It showed that mass mobilisation is more powerful than the most radical-sounding phrases shouted by only a few people. 
Ultimately, however, nothing we have done thus far has challenged Israel’s resolve. This is not a denigration of the effort but an acknowledgement of reality: the opposition is simply not powerful enough. 
The previously widely touted Axis of Resistance—Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran—when they even bothered with a show of military force in support of the Palestinians, have proven to be, at best, minor irritants to Israel. Activists in the West still placing their hopes in these groups are deluded. 
If Israel were simply an outlier state—some middling, independent settler colonial project—stopping its grotesque violence might be easier. But Israel is not that. It is an integral part of the US-led global imperialist order. Membership in that order defines its character more than anything else and is the basis of its power and impunity. 
The global imperialist order has long since ceased to be defined by race or colonialism. It includes not only “white” Western states but also a range of regional powers and previously colonised nations. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt all play key roles in the Middle East as part of the US-led order (just as Japan, the Philippines and Thailand do in Asia). 
The ruling classes of various countries—those who control the states and most economic resources—have shared interests in being integrated into the US-led nexus of power. Some states might appear dependent or servile. But the global capitalist order is more akin to a series of exclusive golf clubs. Ruling classes sign up for the prestige, privileges, networks and deal making opportunities membership offers. In return, they agree to all the “gentlemanly” dress and decorum codes—and not to rock the boat of existing relationships. 
It doesn’t matter whether the rulers are Arab, Asian, African or Latino—what matters is that they run a capitalist state in the interests of one of the competing imperialist blocs. Indeed, the United States ruling elite for decades has been a practitioner of “affirmative action”, with a keen sense that its informal empire needs to be as multiracial as possible if it is to have any popular legitimacy in a postcolonial imperial order in which white people make up maybe 15 percent of the globe’s population. 
States like Israel and Australia need to be viewed in this light: components of the larger capitalist whole. Their governments cannot easily be disentangled from empire, which means that to defeat them, the entire edifice of global ruling class alliances must also be challenged. 
There is either victory for all the oppressed and exploited worldwide, or any victory will be short-lived as the ruling classes coordinate to nullify the gains of any one group of people. And genocide, mass slaughter, oppression and exploitation will continue, just as they did throughout the twentieth century. 
Because the abolition of capitalist imperialism is essential for securing fundamental and lasting social change, Marxists try to build revolutionary political organisations in every country. We need to build a counter-power to the elite imperialist clubs of the ruling classes—a global anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist network of revolutionary parties.
The last 150 years of left-wing political activism have shown that anything else either fails on its own terms, exhausts itself or is undermined, incorporated or smashed by the capitalist ruling classes. 
It’s true that building a revolutionary party today, as Socialist Alternative is attempting, has not stopped the carnage in Palestine (or anywhere else for that matter). But once the scale of the task is recognised, it becomes clear that simply taking a stand or bearing moral witness, though an important step in the right direction, will never be enough to defeat imperialism. 
Without the smashing of the global capitalist order, history will repeat itself again and again. If there were an easier or more realistic path, we’d take it. Unfortunately, there isn’t. We have to rebuild an international socialist movement—a network of mass revolutionary parties in opposition to the ruling classes in every country. 
We have no other choice. Join us—we have a world to win.

Editors

How can we stop the carnage?

During Berlin’s Internationalist Queer Pride on Saturday, 26 July, more than 15,000 people marched through the streets of the German capital under the slogan “None of us are free until all of us are free”. Our numbers grew as we marched through the working-class neighbourhood Neukölln, picking up many locals watching from the footpaths who were drawn in by the parade’s central demand: end the genocide in Gaza. It was not long before riot police, stalking us in massive numbers from the start, launched an unprovoked attack. Dozens of us were beaten and arrested, myself included, and the march was forcefully dispersed well short of its destination.
In Germany, this sort of police response has come to be expected at Palestine rallies, especially in Berlin. As in most other countries, there has been a steep rise in support for the Palestinian cause, especially among young people, and the German state is resorting to desperate and draconian measures to stop the rising tide.
Since October 2023, the German state has cracked down on Palestine activism by raiding homes, shutting down events, cancelling art exhibitions, cutting off funding to cultural institutions and issuing deportation orders to foreign nationals who dare to criticise Israel.
More than 30 raids on activists have taken place since October 2023. These raids—which usually happen at night and involve dozens of heavily armed police—serve one purpose: intimidation.
In April 2024, the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace was raided by the Berlin police. A three-day conference they were hosting was shut down, and several organisers were arrested, including Udi Raz, a Jewish Israeli living in Berlin. Only months earlier, Raz had been fired by the state-funded Jewish Museum for describing Israel’s actions in the West Bank as apartheid.
In another case in December 2023, the Berlin home of Salah Said, a German-born Palestinian activist, was raided by police, who confiscated personal items and electronic devices. He was raided two more times over the following eighteen months, despite never being accused of any crime.
Since October 2023, several cultural organisations and exhibitions have been cancelled, and artists threatened with deportation. The Folkwang Museum in Essen cancelled a planned exhibition curated by Haitian artist Anaïs Duplan, citing his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In Berlin, the cultural centre Oyoun lost all public funding after hosting a Jewish-led pro-Palestine event.
Several academics have been fired or had their professorships rescinded after voicing support for the BDS campaign, including Nancy Fraser, a Jewish American who was stood down by Cologne University for calling Israel an “ethno-supremacist state”. 
But possibly more disturbing than all of this has been the criminalisation of everyday acts of resistance by ordinary people, especially Arabs and Muslims, showing solidarity with the Palestinians.
In February 2025, Berlin police implemented a racist ban on Arabic chants at demonstrations, citing “public order” concerns. Despite this ban, and despite arrests, protesters have defiantly continued to chant in Arabic. During the Pride march, “Al-Hurriya li-Filastin” (Freedom for Palestine) was chanted by thousands of Arabic and non-Arabic speakers alike. The phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” has been criminalised, and Palestinian flags and keffiyehs are banned in all schools across Berlin.
However, none of this has stopped the movement from growing.
At the start of Israel’s latest assault on Gaza in October 2023, pro-Palestine rallies were banned and several attempts to march were met with arrests, pepper spray and hundreds of riot police. In the days and weeks following Israel’s ground invasion, protesters continued to defy the ban. A candlelight vigil held by Jewish Voice for a Just Peace was a protest form that the authorities hesitated to crush, which created space for demonstrations immediately afterwards that managed to reclaim the streets.
In Neukölln, “illegal” spontaneous gatherings in support of Palestine turned into organised demonstrations, and on the night of 18 October 2023, riot police cracked down on a large pro-Palestine gathering. This time, the protesters—mostly young, local residents of Middle Eastern background—fought back. Protesters used fireworks, stones and Molotov cocktails to fight the police, and built barricades in some places. Over the next three nights, police used water cannons, pepper spray and mass arrests to subdue the protests. The police were subsequently forced to soften somewhat their hardline stance, fearing further rioting.
By 21 October, demonstrations were allowed, and about 5,000 attended a protest in Berlin. The right to protest had been won on the streets.
In the following weeks, rallies were mostly limited to major cities like Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg, and usually numbered less than a few thousand. In the past twelve months, however, hundreds—sometimes thousands—have repeatedly protested in other major cities including Leipzig, Freiburg, Stuttgart, Münster and Cologne.
In Berlin, the rallies have grown into the tens of thousands over time, reaching a peak on 21 June this year, when a demonstration called by two influencers on Instagram drew more than 50,000 people. These are numbers never before seen for Palestine protests in Germany.
The growth of the protest movement mirrors a recent change in public opinion. Despite the rabidly pro-Israel German media, public opinion has shifted strongly in favour of the Palestinians.
The newspaper Die Zeit found that support for Palestine among under-30s has risen from 53 percent in 2019 to 63 percent today. In the same poll, 43 percent of respondents said they would support a pro-Palestine demonstration, even if Hamas flags were present. 
A poll conducted by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
newspaper this year found that 57 percent of Germans now hold a negative view of Israel, up from 23 percent in 2022. Another poll conducted by the public broadcaster ZDF in May found that only 13 percent of Germans support Israel’s actions in Gaza, and 80 percent think Israel’s actions are unjustified. It cannot be overstated how big a shift this represents in a place like Germany.
Germany is arguably the staunchest supporter of Israel after the United States. The term Staatsräson, or “reason of state”, is used by politicians to argue that Germany can atone for the Holocaust only by making the survival, security and success of the Israeli nation a core reason for its own existence. Exactly why the Palestinians should have to pay the price for the Holocaust is never clarified. But unwavering support for Israel is much more about the priorities of German imperialism than about atoning for the Holocaust. 
As the post-World War Two geopolitical map shifted from rivalry between European colonial powers to the Cold War stand-off between the US and the USSR, Germany became America’s key European ally. Even after the fall of the USSR, the US maintained more troops and military bases in Germany than in any other European country—and still does. Germany is one of the most powerful countries in the world. It leads the European Union, the world’s largest economic bloc, and benefits immensely from the geopolitical status quo. Reining in Israel would mean reducing the West’s influence in the Middle East, which is unacceptable for Germany, America and its allies.
The German state justifies its violent repression of pro-Palestinian protests by labelling participants as antisemitic. And if you label something antisemitic in Germany, you can do whatever you want to it.
There has also been a long and steady campaign of Islamophobia and anti-migrant sentiment in Germany (particularly towards Middle Eastern migrants), led by mainstream parties. It’s a convenient scapegoat tactic when the economy is stagnating, housing is becoming unaffordable and public services are crumbling. When an entire religious and ethnic group is dehumanised, it becomes that much easier to meet its protests with outright violence.
While most political parties, including the Social Democratic Party and the Greens, have backed this genocide, the left party Die Linke has moved in the right direction. Die Linke has at times acted shamefully by suppressing pro-Palestinian voices within the party, insisting that Israel has a “right to defend itself” and hesitating to use the word genocide. But there is a growing pro-Palestinian movement within Die Linke that has forced it to call rallies and field pro-Palestinian candidates for election.
In this year’s federal election, Die Linke built a strong grassroots campaign in parts of Berlin, led by activists who had been involved in local struggles for Palestine, against police racism and against evictions and deportations. The Die Linke candidate for Neukölln (one of twelve Berlin boroughs), Ferat Kocak, won 30 percent of the candidate vote and was elected to parliament. This was a 17-point increase from the 2021 election, in which Die Linke won just 13 percent of the same candidate vote.
Berlin-wide, Die Linke increased its vote by nearly 8 percent and won the overall party vote with 20 percent, easily beating all other parties. There was a surge of support in neighbourhoods with high Arab, Muslim and Turkish populations, as well as increased support from young people.
In the mainstream media, a shift has taken place in the past few months towards accepting some criticism of Israel and allowing support for the Palestinian cause. News organisations that until recently parroted Israeli talking points have started to change, ever so slightly, their coverage of the war on Gaza. The horrifying images of starving children are difficult to spin and defend. But the Palestinians’ determination to live, along with the growing protest movements, have surely also played a part.
In Germany and elsewhere, something is happening that is rare to see: the realisation by masses of people that the entire facade of Western democracy, freedom and human rights is nothing more than a bunch of lies that can be discarded at a moment’s notice. People will not soon forget how the entirety of the Western world’s political and media establishments aided and funded this live-streamed genocide.
The Germans have a phrase regarding the Holocaust: “nie wieder”, or never again. Never again will we allow genocide to happen. More people in Germany are coming to realise that “nie wieder ist jetzt”. Never again is now.

Eric Oliver

Repression and resistance: the Palestine movement in Germany

On 30 June, Al Jazeera reported that the death toll of Palestinians killed at aid centres had reached 583. Images of desperate, emaciated people crammed into cattle yards, and footage of soldiers shooting at pot-wielding civilians, were rightfully outraging the world. 
The same day, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied territories, Francesca Albanese, handed down a report outlining how, for some, this genocide has been the business opportunity of a lifetime. 
Since 7 October 2023, the Tel Aviv stock exchange has grown by a staggering 213 percent, totalling US$225.7 billion in market gains. Corporations from across the world have lined up to cash in on Israel’s genocidal offensive. 
Albanese’s report outlines this chain of profiteering, concluding, “The forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and big tech—providing boundless supply and demand, little oversight and zero accountability—while investors and private and public institutions profit freely”. It details profiteering in a range of sectors, including weapons production, technology, finance, construction, agribusiness, retail, education, transport, tourism and insurance. 
Weapons sales are a big part of it. At least 85,000 tonnes of bombs—equivalent to six times what was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—have been used in Gaza, according to the report. Every shell, tank, fighter jet and missile used against the Palestinians comes with a price tag attached. The report outlines:
“For Israeli companies such as Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, the ongoing genocide has been a profitable venture. The 65 per cent surge in Israeli military spending from 2023 to 2024—amounting to $46.5 billion, one of the highest per capita worldwide—generated a sharp surge in their annual profits. Foreign arms companies, especially producers of munitions and ordnance, also profit.”
In August 2024, Israel spent US$20 billion in a single purchase, and US aid has contributed handsomely to its war chest, amounting to US$19 billion in the year to October 2024 alone. According to research from the American Friends Service Committee, the onset of the war in Gaza brought bullish gains on the stock market for weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing and General Dynamics. Two years on, buoyed by international military spending, they remain elevated. 
But it isn’t just the arms dealers. According to the report, banks such as BNP Paribas and Barclays have stepped in to underwrite Israeli government bonds, ensuring Netanyahu’s ability to borrow more and double the genocide budget. Shipping lines profiteer from handling weapons and goods bound for use in Palestine. And so the links in the chain begin to take shape: the Israeli state borrows from banks, for a price, so that they can buy bombs, for a price, which are transported, for a price. 
Construction companies are just some of these beneficiaries, the report stating: “Israeli military operations rely heavily on equipment from leading global manufacturers to ‘unground’ Palestinians from their land, demolishing homes, public buildings, farmland, roads and other vital infrastructure. Since October 2023, this machinery has been integral to damaging and destroying 70 per cent of structures and 81 per cent of cropland in Gaza”.
While Gazans line up with empty pots for meagre rations, suffering malnutrition and now contending with a deadly heatwave, a fountain of state spending cascades through the private sector. The purpose of this spending is to help shore up Western domination of the Middle East, but it has also provided critical stimulus to the Israeli economy and to many US companies. 
Occupation, apartheid and militarism have long acted as an economic spur in Israel and enabled its technology sector to become highly competitive by international standards and a core part of the economy—amounting to 64 percent of Israel’s exports during the genocide. Known to the world’s investors as the “start-up nation”, Albanese points out that “Israeli tech firms often grow out of military infrastructure and strategy” such as the NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware. 
Bankrolled by Israeli government spending and US aid, this has made Israel an attractive destination for tech firms like IBM, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft, which all maintain significant operations there. Genocide has turbocharged this, leading to a 143 percent growth in military technology start-ups in 2024, a key component of steeply rising stock prices for Israel’s corporate sector. In 2022, on the eve of this new boom, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade already described it as a “flourishing tech sector” and boasted that “Australian companies are making gains” there. 
In a right-wing diatribe against the Albanese report, Reason magazine’s J.D. Tuccille decries it as “a masterful mishmash of leftist gibberish” and complains of its “hostility to free markets”. Freedom, for capitalism’s apologists, is epitomised by profit-driven companies enjoying a feeding frenzy brought on by a genocide. 
And nor is this profiteering going on independently from the state, as the free marketeers champion. Rather, it is emblematic of a particular era of capitalism in which the wealth of industry is backed up by seemingly endless cash injections from the state—just as insolvent banks were bailed out to the tune of trillions during the Great Recession and mining companies are subsidised by billions every year. 
Many of these corporations rely on government spending, from huge military budgets to state investment in tech, construction and research. And so, the quest for profit not only destroys the lives of ordinary people through imperialist rivalry, housing crises and climate disaster, but also depends on large outlays of public money that might otherwise be used to fund essential, life-sustaining services like health, housing and education. 
It is symptomatic of the deep sickness in the system, both moral and structural, that resources are allocated in this way. If you are a child in Gaza, with the misfortune to have been born on a patch of earth that the biggest empire in world history seeks to dominate, then you will be starved, dehydrated, shelled and displaced. If you are a rich company helping the imperial powers expand their domination of territory and markets, there are endless reams of cash available. 
The human catastrophe in Gaza should already have been a rallying cry to tear down the capitalist system. That it is being used to gild the palaces of industrial barons should only strengthen our resolve.

Jack Mansell

Corporations gorge as Gaza starves

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has declared that Australia will vote to “recognise” Palestinian statehood at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly next month. This is a cynical response by his government to mounting public pressure and mass starvation in Gaza.
The government’s cynicism is reflected in Albanese’s spurious claim that “this is about much more than drawing a line on a map—this is about delivering a lifeline to the people of Gaza”. If his government were serious about providing a lifeline, it could start by ending Australia’s ongoing export of weapons components to Israel, including armoured steel in Israeli armoured vehicles and F-35 aircraft components.
The government could cancel deals with Israeli weapons companies (such as the $917 million contract signed last year with Elbit Systems) that facilitate the Israeli war machine. And the government could expel the ambassador, cut all diplomatic ties and impose sanctions on the Zionist state. 
When Defence Minister Richard Marles was asked, on the ABC’s Insiders program, about Australia’s ongoing military exports to Israel, he clarified the government’s position. Marles repeated the lie that Australia does not supply weapons to Israel (a statement premised on the claim that only fully assembled arms count as weapons), described Australia as an “F-35 nation” and said that the exports of parts and components would continue.
As Amal Naser from the Palestine Action group <a href="https://archive.is/eYz66">pointed out in an 11 August article for the Sydney Morning Herald</a>: “You cannot ‘recognise’ a state while you allow Australian-made components to help arm the regime destroying it. You cannot fight for the dead while helping make the weapons that kill them”.
Less than a fortnight ago, Albanese declared that he would not recognise Palestine anytime soon. But after widespread anger over Labor’s complicity in the genocide was expressed on 3 August in the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/making-history-on-sydney-harbour-bridge-massive-march-for-humanity">massive march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge</a>, his government has been trying to contain those sentiments, following the lead of the other US-aligned imperial powers that had already made such moves.
Australia now joins a chorus of Israel’s Western collaborators—the UK, France and Canada—that have announced plans to recognise a Palestinian state in September. All these countries continue to support and participate in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians through arms sales, intelligence sharing and the repression of pro-Palestinian protests. 
But the starvation of 2 million people by Israel in Gaza is now too politically embarrassing for many Western governments that have supported Israel’s slaughter from the outset. As Israel commits new atrocities every day—starvation, murder, annexation—its claims to uphold “humanitarianism” grow increasingly thin. Israel’s self-image has long been that of a liberal democracy. But the horrors of genocide mean increasing numbers of people are seeing through the West’s sham commitment to “humanitarianism”. 
The vote on recognition will do nothing to obstruct or halt Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, nor the extension of its ethnic-cleansing operation in the West Bank. This was bluntly asserted by Israeli Prime Minister and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, who declared that the recognition announcements are “not going to change our position”. Netanyahu’s proposed plan for the permanent occupation of Gaza City has made it clear that the only solution it will “recognise” is the conquering of the entire territory and the ethnic cleansing of its inhabitants.
The move to recognise Palestinian statehood has taken place under the banner of the so-called two-state solution—the recognition of a Palestinian mini-state alongside that of Israel. Albanese argued that it “is humanity’s best hope to break the cycle of violence in the Middle East and bring an end to the conflict, suffering and starvation in Gaza”.
But neither Albanese nor any of the other leaders calling for a “two-state solution” have any intention of forcing Israel to allow the Palestinians to have a genuine state of their own. That is because any sovereign Palestinian state—one in control of its own security, borders, trade and a host of other functions typically carried out by a state—is practically impossible as long as Israel exists as an apartheid ethno-state. 
Israel is an aggressively expansionist state that is intrinsically hostile to Palestinian national self-determination. Israel has been in a permanent state of war against the Palestinians since it was established through a project of mass ethnic cleansing and genocide in 1948. It is the only state in the world that refuses to define its own borders—precisely because it is premised upon the permanent expansion into, and occupation of, Palestinian territory.
According to its proponents, the territorial basis for a Palestinian state consists of the West Bank (the area to the west of the Jordan River), East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. But ever since Israel invaded the West Bank in 1967, Zionist settlers backed by the Israeli military have been relentlessly seizing land and expelling Palestinians from their homes. That process has accelerated under Netanyahu’s far-right government and during the genocidal war on Gaza. The two-state solution of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is unviable. 
Proponents of a “two-state solution” are fully aware that the trajectory on the ground is not towards the establishment of a Palestinian state, but towards the annihilation of the basis for one. Labor Foreign Minister Penny Wong herself noted as justification for fast-tracking the recognition process that “there is a risk that there will be no Palestine left to recognise”.
The false promise of a Palestinian state existing alongside Israel has also been used to extract concessions from the Palestinians while Israel has continued their dispossession. This can be seen in the demand, issued by all the governments pushing for recognition of a Palestinian state, that such a state must have no weapons or army. Israel, of course, is not expected to disarm. 
Indeed, most of the world is engaged in an enormous, terrifying arms race. But the Palestinian people are expected to be satisfied with a so-called state that lacks the capacity for self-defence, and is entirely dependent on Israel for fiscal, energy, resource and trade access to the outside world.
As well, the project of “recognising” Palestine is an attempt to rehabilitate the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/palestinian-authority-complicit-occupied-west-bank">Palestinian Authority</a>, which collaborates with Israel to repress any resistance to the occupation in the West Bank. It has little credibility left—just 19 percent of those in the West Bank approve of the authority’s performance, according to a May poll for the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research.
For years, the PA has been a corrupt and pliant puppet of the US and Israel. But Albanese has indicated that the recognition discussions are being used to render it even more subservient. The PA has pledged to halt payments to the vulnerable families of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. The organisation has also committed to “demilitarise”.
In the unlikely event that some token Palestinian state were created under these conditions, it would be a state of rubble in Gaza and a West Bank under Israeli control, with no armed forces and a puppet government hand-picked by Israel and its imperialist backers.
Such a state would not deliver peace but only continued Israeli domination and terror. It would do nothing to challenge Israel’s position as a watchdog state for Western imperialism in the Middle East, armed to the teeth by the US. 
Until Israel is recognised for what it is—a genocidal, terror state—any talk of a Palestinian state existing in its shadow is simply cover for those complicit in ethnic cleansing and genocide.

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