The Australian Bureau of Statistics does not collect data on “class”. It collects data on income levels, household wealth and income by industry, all of which shines a useful light on the realities of working-class life. But class cannot be properly captured by statistics. That is because class is a relationship—between people and the productive process they depend on to survive. A shared relationship to production defines a social class. 
In capitalist society, a very small minority own and control the means of production. That is, whatever physical products—equipment, tools and technology—are required for any industry to operate. This minority is the ruling class, and includes those who own or control major corporations, senior bureaucrats, banking executives and media moguls, among others. The ruling class gets to choose what is made, the cost of products or services, who is employed and under what conditions. These economic decisions form the building blocks of society, and shape the conditions under which we all live. 
The working class, who are the vast majority of the global population, don’t own or control the productive apparatus. They don’t make the important decisions about what is produced or under what conditions. Instead, workers sell their ability to work—their labour power—to a boss, in exchange for a wage or salary. 
Workers can be white or blue collar, work primarily with their hands or their minds. They can be early childhood educators, IT assistants, train drivers, nurses, call centre operators or miners. What defines the working class is that they are denied control and decision-making power over the labour process, and they are exploited by their boss. 
Workers are the lifeblood of the economy. They produce every commodity you can think of and carry out myriad services—like maintaining roads and infrastructure, educating the population and caring for the sick—without which the economy could not operate. 
But workers perform all this indispensable labour not as free individuals but under rules and conditions imposed by bosses. You can’t show up to work whenever you please even under the most “flexible” arrangements. Construction workers employed to build a casino can’t decide to build a hospital instead. Workers are reduced to objects in the labour process, mere components of production with little or no agency or democratic right to make decisions about the work they do. 
Importantly for the bosses, workers are not only denied control over how they work, but also over the products of their labour. The value of what most workers produce in a day is far in excess of what they take home in the form of a wage or salary. The bosses keep the rest, a significant part of which ends up as profit. The expression “Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime” encapsulates this relationship, and the theft that is at the heart of it. 
Workers and bosses, then, are in an antagonistic relationship with each other. What’s good for one is bad for the other. The first page of any business textbook will tell you that minimising operating costs will bring in more revenue. Paying workers low wages, denying “benefits” like sick leave and skimping on workplace conditions including safety regulations can mean more in the bank for a company. 
For workers, high pay, job security, greater access to leave and safer working conditions mean a better life. And because workers are human beings, not actually cogs in a machine, they can organise to fight for these things. So the exploitative and antagonistic relationship between bosses and workers gives rise to a constant struggle, taking different forms at different times, but which shapes the capitalist economy. 
Not everyone is a capitalist or a worker. The middle classes form a substantial minority of society, comprising small business owners, general practitioners, senior academics, many freelance artists and writers, sole-trader solicitors and barristers, or mid-level managers and supervisors, for example. The middle classes may own and control sections of production—like a small shop—without being titans of industry. They may have significant control over their labour—the head of human resources doesn’t need to log their bathroom breaks—or might be responsible for exploiting a few workers themselves, despite also having a boss. The middle classes don’t have the economic influence of either workers or bosses, and tend to be pulled in the direction of one or the other politically. 
Capitalism pivots around the exploitation of workers by bosses, and the interests of a group— what is good or bad for them—and their ideas and attitudes, are shaped by their class position. 
The ruling class are driven by endless competition for profit. They benefit from the monetisation of everything, and collective rights for workers and the oppressed being trampled if they stand in the way of profit-making. Members of the ruling class are used to being in control, and treating other people as a means to an end, or a competitor for market share and profit. They can unite around limited demands, but ultimately they are pitted against each other, loyal only to their bottom lines. 
Working-class life, on the other hand, is characterised much of the time by alienation and powerlessness. Workers are taught that there are serious consequences for defying authority. Breaking the rules at work could cost you a job and an income, even if the rules are unsafe like working in hot weather, or humiliating like being expected to carry out errands for superiors. Workers are made to feel like a cog in a machine they have no control over, and face chronic insecurity in the competition for jobs, housing, and the fight to stay afloat as prices rise. 
But at the same time, working-class life is fundamentally collective. Workers have to cooperate with each other for production to function effectively and for the economy to keep ticking over. The injustices of exploitation that can make workers feel the most alone are shared by millions of others. Sharing grievances together, and being exploited by a boss together, time and again push workers to fight back as a class. 
Only through standing together as a group can workers exercise power, by collectively stopping production and the flow of profits to the bosses. Working-class resistance can push back against individualism and the powerlessness engendered by capitalism. It can bring to the fore a sense of solidarity and the collective good, ideas we are told by our superiors are contrary to human nature because they are contrary to the ethos of capitalism. By forcing billions together in exploited labour, capitalism plants the seeds of working-class rebellion that show the hope for a better world.

Priya De

What is social class?

Anti-capitalists are often accused of a double standard: you hate the system, but want to enjoy its benefits. The latest to employ this supposed gotcha is none other than Meg O’Neill, CEO of Woodside Petroleum. “It’s been a fascinating journey to watch the discussion, particularly amongst young people who have this very ideological, almost zealous view of, you know, ‘fossil fuel bad, renewables good’, that are happily plugging in their devices, ordering things from Shein and Temu”, she said, before lamenting “that human impact and the consumer’s role in driving energy demand and emissions absolutely is a missing space in the conversation”.
That a fossil-fuel CEO on a $7.5 million salary can criticise the avarice of young people with mobile phones and who buy things online shows that “lifestylism”—a set of politics that starts from analysing individuals’ consumption choices—is all about letting the capitalist class off the hook. 
While O’Neill complains about young people charging their phones, Woodside is celebrating a 40-year extension of the North West Shelf gas project, which will release 4.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide over its lifetime. That’s more than 87 million tonnes a year, twice the annual emissions of Portugal. The consumption choices of individuals don’t even register when compared to the consequences of decisions made by big corporations.
For a generation that grew up during the millennium drought of the early 2000s, water conservation was a way of life. Super-soakers were out, three-minute shower timers were in. Memories of these household standards were still fresh in young people’s minds when our government granted Adani an unlimited water licence for its Carmichael coal mine in 2017. The mine uses at least 12.5 billion litres of water annually. 
While capitalists pocket massive profits from these destructive decisions, they want to force a sense of collective responsibility onto the rest of us. It’s why oil giant BP hired an advertising firm to popularise the term “carbon footprint” in the mid-2000s: in order to invoke a sense of individual responsibility for climate change. Corporations can now cash in on the spurious guilt they help generate—by giving you the opportunity to pay them to “carbon offset” your flight. 
Socialists reject the idea that individual consumers are to blame for environmental destruction. We argue that responsibility for the direction of society should be placed on those who control and run it. Capitalists, not consumers, are the ones who decide what is produced, how it is made and how it is distributed—with profit, not the wellbeing of the planet, as their overriding concern. It is their decisions that have the biggest impact on the world around us, and which determine the conditions under which the rest of us live and get what we need, and the choices available to us.
Just think of how the world is clogged with trash because companies like Coca-Cola realised decades ago they could increase profits by replacing refillable bottles with single-use plastics. Or how millions of iPhones end up in landfill every year, leaking toxic chemicals into the soil, because they are designed to be difficult to repair and be made obsolete with the next release.
While many people still attempt to live as ethically as possible within the confines of the system, the operations of capitalism restrict the majority from having the agency and resources to make real decisions about their lives. 
The layout of our cities and the demands of working life mean it’s impossible for most people to ditch their car. The average person spends $20 per day getting to work, and average commute times in Sydney and Melbourne are more than one hour. Thirty years ago, mobile phones were used only by high-powered business executives, but now a smartphone is a practical requirement for most work and study. Most people are busy focusing on how to keep up with mortgage payments and making sure their kids have regular meals. Only a minority of affluent and time-rich people have the resources to reverse-engineer the supply chains behind their Monday night spaghetti bolognaise. 
All the while, ordinary people are up against huge marketing machines dedicated to generating desire for products that we would be better off without. Large advertising firms hire professional psychologists who are experts in manipulative techniques to overcome what they refer to as “sales resistance”. And then they have the gall to blame the people impacted by these relentless marketing campaigns for the damage the business’s production and transport practices do to the planet. No similar resources are dedicated to raising awareness about the harmful impacts of capitalist production and distribution techniques, which might push behaviour in a different direction and generate resentment towards predatory companies. 
Worse still, fossil fuel companies have been burying research about the implications of climate change since the late 1970s. In the decades since the secret got out, they’ve dedicated vast resources to defending the unsustainable status quo, from fighting against emissions regulations to lobbying governments for harsher criminalisation of climate protesters. But they still criticise consumers for not acting on the information that they try to hide or discredit.
The world needs to be transformed. But a focus on “voting with your dollar” and influencing the direction of capitalism by buying ethical products starts from where we are most powerless and frequently ends up appearing more like a marketing campaign for a different brand of harmful products than a strategy to change anything. Too often, the “ethical consumption” industry only helps give the status quo a progressive and socially aware image while taking attention away from the sort of actions that could bring real change. Tesla is a case in point. 
For years, owning a Tesla was the ultimate symbol of ethical capitalism, supposed to frame its buyer as a pioneer of a green capitalist future. Now owning a Tesla signifies something different. There’s a cottage industry of articles about rich people experiencing “buyer’s remorse” after shelling out $80,000 for a vehicle now labelled the “swasticar”. 
The problem isn’t just that Tesla buyers who thought they were funding the green revolution were really funding MAGA reaction. It’s also that Tesla’s business model relies on the same destructive and exploitative practices as all capitalist production. 
Tesla’s reported carbon emissions are 50 million tonnes a year and growing. That’s roughly equivalent to the combined emissions of Ghana and Sudan, home to 85 million people. 
Tesla cars require rare earth minerals: 520 grams are used in every Tesla Model Y motor. Seventy percent of rare earth minerals are mined at Bayan Obu in Inner Mongolia. Areas surrounding the mine and associated processing facilities are poisoned by lakes of toxic industrial by-product, leaking chemicals and radioactive elements into the soil. These places are now known as “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-21545868">cancer villages</a>”. Residents experience high rates of respiratory <a href="https://miningtechnologyinsights.com/2025/04/26/chinas-bayan-obo-rare-earths-giant-with-a-pollution-price/">diseases</a>, cancer and other health issues, as well as impoverishment because pollution makes farming unsafe in the surrounding areas.
There is a trail of brutal exploitation at every stage of the supply chain, from the use of child labour to mine cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to brutal conditions in the factories where cars are assembled. Tesla workers on average receive <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/uaw-strike-tesla-pay-gap-gm-ford-stellantis-labor-hourly-wages-2023-9">$20 an hour less</a> in wages than Ford and GM workers. Workers complain of wage theft, constant safety hazards and injuries, and aggressive company union-busting. 
This is why ethical consumption is so difficult. Modern marketing constricts “ethical” options, which are so often revealed to be complete bullshit. So even if we’re all trying to make the right choices, the likelihood is we’re being scammed. Is it any wonder people give up and just buy stuff on Temu?
As long as we live under capitalism, we can’t purchase our way out of injustice. The majority of us are forced through economic compulsion to participate in the system, by buying products necessary to reproduce life and engage with society, and by selling our labour to bosses. But it’s capitalists who dictate the terms and reap all of the benefits of exploitation, while the social costs are imposed on workers. 
This is why the Woodside CEO’s comments are so insulting. In her diatribe against anti-fossil fuel “zealots”’, O’Neill complained that “most people hit a switch and expect the lights to come on”, suggesting that, unlike her, ordinary people are unable to comprehend the complexities of energy production.
It’s perfectly reasonable for people to expect the lights to come on when they hit a switch, and the technology to do this sustainably has existed for decades. That this still comes at the expense of planetary survival really exposes the irrationality of capitalism, not the hypocrisy of ordinary people who want to be able to see things when it gets dark.
Under capitalism, it’s workers who have to face the consequences of irrational and destructive decisions made outside of our control. It’s the blue-collar suburbs of Melbourne’s west, blanketed in diesel emissions from trucking and smoke from factory fires, that face disproportionately high rates of respiratory illness, heart disease and asthma, not Toorak or South Yarra. 
Of course, the Woodside CEO isn’t truly concerned about the environmental and social impacts of fossil fuels. Her comments are entirely cynical, but there’s a real strain of “progressive” politics that says the world’s problems can be ameliorated by individual action. Lifestyle politics accepts that capitalism is the best that humanity is collectively capable of, and the best we can do is nudge the market in the right direction while leaving society in the hands of the bosses. 
Socialists, on the other hand, recognise that workers don’t just hit a switch; they are the ones who make the lights come on. It’s the collective labour of workers that powers everything, assembles the iPhones and ships the parcels. Socialists don’t want to reject this productive capacity. We want to democratically direct this vast knowledge and social wealth for the good of humanity, not just for the profit of a tiny minority.
But achieving this change is made harder by lifestylist politics. To be able to use their collective power to transform social conditions, workers need to see themselves as a class with common interests against their bosses, not as consumers who identify with particular brands—whether they’re the ones like Temu that promise unlimited cheap crap, or the brands like Tesla that market the lie that they’re saving the world. When these companies are viewed as what they are—giant, exploitative workplaces—the need for change and the source of the problem become much clearer.
Socialists have genuine solutions to the problems raised by lifestylist critiques of capitalism. A socialist society would organise a rapid transition to renewable energy sources. It would redirect research and development away from industries like marketing and weapons that thrive on human misery, toward improving transport, health and infrastructure. It would put an end to the production of endless disposable plastic products that poison the atmosphere and clog the oceans.
That's what being a socialist is about. Pro-capitalist lifestylism is a pathetic attempt by the real criminals to make us feel like hypocrites for even suggesting this. Thankfully, much like Tesla’s latest Model Y, almost no-one’s buying it.

Luca Tavan

Is it hypocritical for socialists to use iPhones and buy stuff on Temu?

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

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


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

James Plested

Why history matters for socialists

A generation is coming of age scrolling through footage of Palestinians starving to death in Gaza, skin clinging to protruding bones. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Penny Wong assures us that Australia sends only “non-lethal” parts of deadly F-35 fighter jets to Israel, billionaire media moguls tell us that it is pro-Palestine protesters who are the real problem, and police try to stop people standing up to genocide. 
Given all this, it’s understandable that progressives look with hopeful eyes to the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani in New York, and the new left political party initiated by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and ex-Labour MP Zara Sultana in Britain. Both of these developments have shown that there are hundreds of thousands of people who want to get behind politicians who support Palestine, stand up for workers’ rights and fight back against the racism of the insurgent far right. 
But to actually end the horrors of capitalism and win socialism, we will need more than electoral campaigns. The competition that drives capitalism, and the exploitation that is at its heart, cannot be abolished by parliaments. Only a mass movement of workers, taking democratic control of production, can bring about a society organised to meet human need rather than to generate profit for the few. Left-wing representatives can play a role encouraging such a movement, but they cannot bring about radical change on their own. 
The horrors being unleashed in Gaza are accelerating a political polarisation in the Western world. A new generation are turning against the system, and the question of exactly what socialism is and what it will take to get there is relevant once again. 
Socialism, as Marx described it, aims to clear the path to a classless, stateless society that operates on the principle of “from each according to ability, to all according to need”. To get to this form of society, productive resources like factories, mines, warehouses and supermarkets will need to be taken out of the sphere of private ownership by a few and placed under collective, democratic ownership. This is not the purpose of the capitalist state. 
The state is, at its core, a collection of violent institutions that exist to uphold and protect the power of the capitalist class. These institutions, like the military, the police forces and the jails, are structured to serve the ruling class and are run by people loyal to that class. These institutions cannot be simply taken over by socialists; they need to be overthrown. 
Parliamentary elections do not give workers actual power over the capitalists or the state. Elections do not determine who runs the entire state machine, but pockets of it. In Australia, for example, we elect the federal parliament, state governments and local councils. The generals who head our military and the officials who direct police forces are not elected. Nor are the vast bureaucracies that preside over the financial institutions, the energy sector, transport, industrial relations and every other central state-run aspect of society. If a socialist parliament were elected, these bureaucracies would resist any plans to democratise or push towards socialism. 
The ruling class have myriad methods for getting rid of governments they dislike. In 1975, for example, Gough Whitlam’s Labor government was sacked by the unelected governor general, Sir John Kerr. In the lead-up to the Kerr coup, the media unleashed a vicious campaign against Whitlam. Big businesses stopped investing, threatening the economy. Crises like these will plague any government that attempts to stand up to the capitalist class.
Left-wing political parties or leaders that don’t have any plan to directly challenge the power of the capitalists frequently seek compromises with the ruling class in order to avoid being sabotaged by the existing bureaucracies or capital. This process is already beginning to play out for liberal Democrat Zohran Mamdani, who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKL-DlDtI-I">initiated</a> meetings with top business executives immediately after winning the primary race to become the Democrats’ New York mayoral candidate. He has also announced that he <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/31/politics/mamdani-defund-police-shooting">does not plan</a> to defund or reduce the head count of the New York Police Department. 
Before Mamdani, there was Brandon Johnson. Johnson, a former member of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, is the current mayor of Chicago. His electoral campaign was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, and left magazine Jacobin wrote excited articles about his candidacy. Johnson has increased police budgets and backed away from his team’s initial plan to <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2023/5/17/23727315/tax-play-action-center-peoples-unity-platform-brandon-johnson-transition-revenue">tax</a>
the wealthy. Then there’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “s<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/whatever-happened-to-the-squad">quad</a>”<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/whatever-happened-to-the-squad"> </a>of politicians who were elected alongside her to the excitement of American progressives. The squad became cheerleaders of the Biden administration while he helped Israel to slaughter the Palestinians.
And electoral projects well to the left of those mentioned have dashed the hopes of millions repeatedly over the past decade. Corbyn’s leadership of British Labour gave left-wing coherence to a generation enraged by austerity. When his 2015 bid to be prime minister was thwarted by his own party, he refused to break away from Labour and lead those around him into something new. At the time, those enthused by him were left demoralised and aimless. It’s only after being smeared, suspended and finally expelled by the party that he has agreed to form something new.
The Greek left party Syriza took government in 2015 in a context of mass strikes and demonstrations against austerity, creating a wave of excitement among the international left. The following year, under pressure from the international ruling class, Syriza signed a deal with the International Monetary Fund which would impose austerity on Greece until 2060. 
Capitalists own and control all of the key industries and resources that make our world run. That gives them power over the economy, the lives of workers and the state. Our side can hope to defeat them only by taking away that power at the point of production. Workers must wrest their workplaces from the capitalists and bring the power that comes from controlling these industries into the hands of our class. 
Rebellions over the past 25 years have confirmed the radical potential of modern workers. Street demonstrations and mass strikes shook Spain and Greece after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. In 2019, street revolts hit Sudan, Algeria, Iran, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Haiti, Ecuador and Chile. As many as 26 million people are estimated to have participated in the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, which reached the scale of an urban rebellion in Minneapolis. These didn’t advance into revolutions led by the working class, in part because of the decline in class organisation and left traditions. But they show that in vastly different countries, workers can participate in mass struggle. 
Workers in Australia construct the buildings, drive the trains, staff the internet servers and procure the coal and gas that are central to energy production. Put together, those in these industries alone could crash the economy. But the working class needs to go beyond just crashing the economy and begin to organise society along socialist lines by creating new organs of worker democracy.
Soviets, or district-wide workers’ councils, are bodies elected directly at the point of production to coordinate and lead struggles and general strikes, and to wage political arguments. They are democratic institutions that allow the working class itself to lead a revolution. Ultimately, for a revolution to depose the capitalist class, these workers’ councils would need to carry out an insurrection to overthrow the existing capitalist state. 
For the working class to build socialism, it needs to construct its own state to subordinate the capitalist class. A workers’ state is a formalisation of the democratic institutions that have been created through the course of revolution into a new government. Rather than a police force that exists to discipline workers, a workers’ state would require a workers’ militia to suppress the capitalists and enemies of the revolution through armed force. As well as that, a workers’ army would be required to prevent the invasion and suppression of the revolution by other capitalist armies. All of the bureaucracies who compose the state and govern things like water usage, energy and electricity welfare would be democratised, subordinated to the interests and the decision-making of the working class. 
Capitalism is propelling us deeper and deeper into hell, and compromisers won’t drag us out. Now is a moment to be bold, to throw ourselves into political organising for a totally new world. Resistance is happening and will continue to happen: the question is: Will it win? This will be determined, in part, by whether revolutionary socialists can build forces of the scale necessary to take on the power of those individuals and institutions committed to defending the status quo. We have to meet the challenge. The pressing task of socialists in Australia and around the world is to build revolutionary parties that can lead revolutionary struggles for socialism.

Jasmine Duff

We can’t reform away this hellish system: we need revolution

You push a button on your phone and, minutes later, an Uber appears. Hidden behind this seemingly simple action is the labour of millions of people: cobalt miners in Congo, assembly line workers in Shenzhen, software engineers in Silicon Valley and the driver in your city. These workers will never meet one another, speak different languages and work in vastly different conditions. Yet, through a vast web of global market relations, what appears as disconnected labour is unified into a single product.
This is the dynamism of capitalism, one of its defining features that even its earliest critics recognised. In The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels noted that the capitalist class, “during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together”. The statement is even more accurate today. Modern capitalism can produce enough food to feed the entire global population twice over. It has the technology to draw energy from the sun and transfer it to every household on the planet. Medical advancements have eradicated diseases that used to claim millions of lives. 
Why is it, then, that so many people go hungry every day, live with little or no access to electricity and die from totally preventable diseases?
The answer lies in the very functioning of capitalism. A small minority of individuals control what is produced, how it is produced and who gets access to it. Behind every decision they make lies a single motivation: profit. This is the condition every product must meet before it will be produced. If it fails this condition, it isn’t produced. Or if, after production, the product becomes unprofitable, then it likely is destroyed rather than distributed: Why pay to put it on the shelf? Human need is not only not a second thought, it is not even a thought.
Such a system, in which all production is subordinated to profit, leads to irrationality, absurdity and outright barbarity. 
A good harvest can become a bad thing because it creates an oversupply that pushes down prices. In some cases, it makes more sense, from the capitalist’s perspective, to destroy some of the crop than to send it to be consumed. This happened on a mass scale during the COVID pandemic. In the US, demand from restaurants and other hospitality businesses plummeted almost overnight as people stopped eating out. In response, farms all around the country began destroying food that was no longer profitable to sell. At one point, farmers were tipping around 5 percent of the country’s milk supply down the drain, according to the International Dairy Foods Association. This was at the same time that millions of people were losing their jobs and facing food insecurity.
Just as depraved is the way that corporations use patents to block cheaper versions of medicines, as happened in South Africa with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 1997, some of the world’s major pharmaceutical companies sued the South African government to stop it from producing a generic (and cheaper) version of a drug that could combat the epidemic. To the corporations, the protection of their intellectual property was a far greater concern than alleviating the suffering of the millions of people with the virus/disease. While the court case was pending, estimates suggest that up to 20,000 people per month were dying. 
For years, the corporations fought tooth and nail, claiming that allowing generic versions of their drugs would threaten all medical innovation by destroying the patent system. It was only in 2001, under extreme international pressure, that they dropped the lawsuit. Hundreds of thousands of people died who could have survived had they had access to the medicine. An industry representative later made light of the lawsuit, saying, “People ask me how we could have been so stupid as to sue Nelson Mandela. I tell them: We had to. Mother Theresa was already dead”.
Finally, consider the absurdity of planned obsolescence, in which companies design products to break down after a few years to force you to buy a new one. The classic case is the light globe. Since at least the late nineteenth century, the technology has existed to produce globes that last tens of thousands of hours. In fact, the famous centennial light globe in California has been running continuously since 1901. But products that last a long time, meaning you don’t have to buy as many, do not fit the logic of capitalism. This was the story behind the infamous Phoebus Cartel in 1925, which included General Electric and Phillips. The cartel agreed to produce light globes with a one-thousand-hour lifespan, forcing customers to purchase extra globes. Two years later, an executive bragged that sales had increased five-fold. 
Ironically, it required significant engineering innovation to design a light globe that would break after 1,000 hours. To do it, the Phoebus companies shared technology and know-how. But when one company thought it could break the agreement, the head of Phillips sent a dire warning: “After the very strenuous efforts we made to emerge from a period of long-life lamps, it is of the greatest importance that we do not sink back into the same mire by ... supplying lamps that will have a very prolonged life”.
Today, there are countless examples of this practice. Major phone manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung have paid millions in fines for all sorts of things that force you to replace your iPhone or Galaxy: apps that don’t work on older models, software updates becoming unavailable after a few years, batteries that make the phone eventually unusable but are not replaceable with a generic battery, new charging cables that make older chargers redundant, monopolistic control over parts; the list goes on.
All of these examples are part of the perverse logic at the heart of capitalism: people go hungry because there is too much food, are homeless because there are too many homes, are sick because their treatment isn’t profitable and are forced to repeatedly buy the same product because it is designed to stop working.
Capitalism, in this sense, is different from every human society that came before it. In all pre-capitalist societies, production was for people’s use. The feudal landlord took what his peasants produced and ate it. Where there was hunger and starvation, it was because there was not enough food. It is only under capitalism that people lack something because there is too much of it.
Modern capitalism is the first system in history with the technical capabilities to overcome the misery that has plagued humanity for millennia. Yet, at the same time, it has produced one of the most unequal societies history has ever known. This is not an aberration or capitalism gone wrong. It is the system working perfectly in the interests of its rulers.

Tom Sullivan

The irrationality of capitalism

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

Tess Lee Ack

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

The Victorian Socialists have a policy to put politicians on an average worker’s wage. Federal parliamentarians currently get a base salary of $230,000, which puts them in the top 5 percent of Australian income earners. Ministers get more than $350,000, putting them in the top 1 percent.
On top of that, they get heaps of benefits like a travel allowance—which lets them claim $310 per night spent in Canberra for parliament even if they stay in their own house while they’re there.
We think all this is too much and that they should get something resembling an average full-time worker’s wage. After all, if politicians had to live more like the rest of us, they might think differently about their decisions in parliament.
We think politicians’ base salary should be no more than that of a sixth-year nurse, which is currently just over $92,000. To show that we’re serious about this policy, other VS candidates and I have pledged that if elected, we’ll accept only $92,000 out of our salary and donate the rest—around $140,000—to local campaigns to make our communities a better place for working-class people.
In response to this policy, a few people have noted that the workers’ movement historically fought for parliamentary salaries: the Chartists in early nineteenth-century Britain, for example. 
The thing is, we’re not saying politicians shouldn’t be paid at all. Not paying politicians at all would mean, as it did then, that you could be a politician only if you came from money and could support yourself.
We’re just saying politicians should be paid an average worker’s wage. It’s strange in that context to say working-class people couldn’t get by as politicians earning only $92,000 when most workers are getting by on less than that now.
Another objection is that politicians deserve to be in the top 5 percent of income earners because their job is very hard and stressful. Here’s an example from one of our social media channels: “It’s a pretty shit job at times. Someone is always upset with you, even when you do your best. You have to give up a lot of privacy, and the job requires you to work at all kinds of hours”.
I’ll just quote one excellent reply someone gave: “Ex hospo worker here. Can confirm someone is always upset at you, even when you try your best. Work all kinds of hours, get doxxed by the creep you wouldn’t go out with. $18.70 an hour”.
Millions of workers in Australia are doing work just as hard and stressful as what politicians do—and doing it for less than half of what politicians are being paid. 
Just because being a politician can be hard and stressful at times doesn’t mean the financial reward should be greater than that of 95 percent of other workers.
Another objection is that politicians need to be paid a lot so that parliament can attract the most talented people. An example from a comment on X responding to our policy: “Nonce. The salary needs to be properly paid to try and attract good people from the private sector”.
The problem is that there’s zero evidence that higher salaries mean better, more talented people. The absolute worst people in Australia are billionaires like Clive Palmer and Gina Rinehart. The heads of banks and other big businesses earning multimillion-dollar salaries are all anti-working-class scum. And the current crop of well-paid politicians is hardly an advertisement for “talent”.
The most genuinely talented, creative and energetic people aren’t usually those in it for the money. They’re the people who have a genuine passion for something and are prepared to work for it even if it doesn’t result in massive financial rewards.
Politics is perhaps the worst career to get into for the money. It means you’re likely to think more of yourself and your prospects than the people you’re supposed to be serving.
We want parliamentarians to stand up to the powerful vested interests that dominate politics today—not join them. We want people who want to work to build a better society. You’re unlikely to do that if you’re the kind of person who would rather be a real estate agent, a banker or a lawyer instead because you’d make better money.
This relates to people’s third main objection: paying politicians less will make them more susceptible to bribery and corruption. For example, one person argued: “It’s important that politicians are paid extremely well so that money has less of an effect on politics”.
What is it about the state of the world today, though, that makes you think that earning a lot of money is protection against corruption? If anything, the opposite is the case—the higher up you go on the income scale—all the way to billionaires like Rinehart and Donald Trump—the more likely you are to engage in various dodgy or corrupt practices to boost your wealth further.
And, again, it isn’t like the massive salaries we pay them now have been any protection against political corruption. If they earned even more and were even more integrated into the elite world of the Australian ruling class, they’d likely become more subservient to their interests.
So none of these objections stacks up.
I want to finish on a positive note. A lot of people love our policy. They’re the kind of people who work hard day in and day out in stressful, massively underpaid jobs and are sick of politicians lecturing workers about the need for “wage restraint” when they’re earning hundreds of thousands of dollars and passing tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations.
One says: “5th year midwife/nurse here! Every $ that goes into my bank account I know I’ve worked hard for serving my community and looking after those most vulnerable—what a joy it would be to have someone in parliament doing the same”.
These are the kinds of people this policy is for, and I’ll be fighting for them if I’m elected to parliament.
This is an edited version of a video made by Victorian Socialists Senate candidate Jordan van den Lamb.

Jordan van den Lamb

Why socialists think politicians should be on an average worker’s wage

Jerome Small

Socialist Alternative’s record of workplace organising

“Driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion”. That’s how Lee Zeldin, the new head of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/lee-zeldin-epa-ends-the-green-new-deal-aa81de06">describes his mission</a>. Zeldin is cutting a large number of environmental regulations, including those restricting companies from polluting waterways, emitting toxins like mercury and releasing smog. 
He is also overturning the EPA’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, the legal underpinning of much climate-related regulation in the US. The idea is simple—companies should be able to do whatever they want to turn a profit, regardless of the damage they inflict. For Zeldin, environmental justice “has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activists”, and now it’s all about energy dominance, which, according to Zeldin, “stands at the center of America’s resurgence”.
Combating climate change is well and truly out of favour in the age of Trump. There has been a <a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/war-on-woke-banks-macquarie-joins-mass-exit-from-net-zero-alliance-will-australias-big-four-follow-suit/">mass exit of banks</a> from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, and companies from Starbucks to Meta have been dropping climate goals and <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f100bedb-16cb-4f5e-8f64-9a10d5c43a51">purging their websites</a> of references to climate action. This is having effects beyond the US: EU officials are currently considering a range of measures to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-is-looking-to-roll-back-climate-accounting-rules-32c72856">water down its Green Deal</a>.
And it’s not like the situation was all that hopeful before Trump came to office. Only 15 of the signatories to the Paris Agreement (a miserable 8 percent) met the five-year deadline this February to update their climate goals (Australia was not one of them). In an irony appropriate to our twisted world, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is currently <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-17/climate-change-religion-trump-zeldin-epa-wind-back-rules/105057538">clearing miles of the Amazon rainforest</a> to build a four-lane highway for the next UN climate change conference, COP30, this November.
The commitments in the Paris Agreement (most of which have not <a href="https://www.unep.org/resources/production-gap-report-2023">been kept</a>) were aimed at limiting warming to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century. That goal is now a distant dream, with the planet likely to suffer temperature increases of 2.6 to 3.1 degrees by 2100, according to the United Nations’ “<a href="https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2024">Emissions Gap Report 2024</a>”. With a new wave of environmental destruction under way, we can expect an even warmer world. 
A 2021 report by the Australian Academy of Science tells us what that world might look like. “<a href="https://www.science.org.au/supporting-science/science-policy-and-analysis/reports-and-publications/risks-australia-three-degrees-c-warmer-world">The risks to Australia of a 3°C warmer world</a>” predicts that the Great Barrier Reef, along with 99 percent of the world’s corals, will be gone. There would be a 100 to 300 percent increase in extreme fire days like those that created the Black Summer bushfires. “Once in a century” coastal floods would happen almost every year by 2100, and fruit and vegetable crop yields would be reduced by 14 percent. Meanwhile, the number of days each year over 35 degrees would increase from an average of 3, 12 and 11 in Sydney, Brisbane and Darwin respectively to 11, 55 and 265—meaning Darwin would face heat stress days for nearly three quarters of the year.
There is no question about who is to blame for this catastrophe. Just 57 companies were responsible for 80 percent of all global emissions between 2016 and 2022, according to last year’s “<a href="https://carbonmajors.org/briefing/The-Carbon-Majors-Database-26913">The Carbon Majors Database: Launch Report</a>”. These companies are run by executives whose first priority is increasing their profits and gaining an advantage over their rivals; concern for the environment only gets in the way of that. Most of us do not get to decide whether society’s resources are put towards new coal mines or wind farms, decisions that are made behind closed doors by people looking to maximise their bottom lines, supported by politicians who want to maximise their country’s economic growth. 
Liberal climate activists have at times believed that certain capitalists could come to the planet’s rescue—after all, Elon Musk is building electric vehicles, and the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation put over a billion dollars towards climate philanthropy. Yet today Musk is Trump’s DOGE lieutenant in the war on climate, and he’s profiting from it—Zeldin’s deregulation will allow Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas to carry out more freely its <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/189275/elon-musk-climate-change-industrial-policy">regular environmental violations</a>. In March, Bill Gates <a href="https://centrist.nz/bill-gates-backs-away-from-climate-change/">shut down</a>
his climate philanthropy organisation Breakthrough Energy, soon after describing himself as “frankly impressed” by Trump.
The fundamental problem is that protecting the environment costs money. Back in 2021, Gates introduced the idea of <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c11bb885-1274-4677-ba05-fcbac67dc808">“green premiums”</a> in his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, by which he meant the additional cost associated with a business doing anything clean, whether that’s using renewables rather than fossil fuels, or sourcing something locally rather than shipping it around the world. Gates was tackling a problem that is insurmountable under capitalism—it is almost always cheaper to pollute and destroy than go “green”. So this is what businesses tend to do. 
The same logic applies to states. Energy scientist Vaclav Smil estimates that affluent economies would need to spend 20 to 25 percent of their annual GDP on transitioning to clean energy for 25 years to achieve net zero by 2050. Given that many, including Australia, are currently heavily dependent on fossil fuel production and export for their revenue and economic competitiveness, the idea they would jeopardise that and channel resources towards environmental protection is fanciful. Just how fanciful is demonstrated by the huge gap between what politicians say they are committed to and what actually happens in relation to environmental policy. 
States are themselves also major polluters. According to the Carbon Majors Database, only a quarter of emissions between 2016 and 2022 were attributed to investor-owned companies, with the rest attributed to states and state-owned companies. These companies want to remain competitive and minimise costs just like private companies do.
The argument that fossil fuel companies have “captured” states, and all we need is strong governments willing to stand up to them, therefore clashes with reality. States and corporations have a vested interest in ignoring or reducing environmental regulation when it stands in the way of profit. As the most valuable exporter of coal and LNG, Australia enjoys big revenues and gains important leverage over other countries. It has no interest in giving that up so long as the system of competing nation-states endures.
Increasing military competition makes fossil fuel production still more indispensable. We are now entering a new era of imperialist tensions, with Europe rearming and the US entering an arms race with China. No military can operate without oil (the US Army, for instance, is estimated to use <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/12/elephant-in-the-room-the-us-militarys-devastating-carbon-footprint">269,230 barrels of oil a day</a>), and no state will give up its military. In this context, ruling classes will seek to increase oil and steel production, while wars themselves will devastate the climate. In two years Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is estimated to have produced more greenhouse gas emissions than the Netherlands does annually, according to a report by the <a href="https://en.ecoaction.org.ua/climate-damage-by-russia-24-months.html">Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War</a>. You can only imagine what effect a new world war could have.
Advocates of climate action have often applied the analogy of wartime mobilisation to show that that sort of social and economic reorganisation is possible if the political will exists. During World War II, for example, military spending soared to over 40 percent of GDP in Europe and the US and massive economic restructuring was imposed on society. Yet today, instead of a climate mobilisation, we face the beginnings of yet another horrifying war mobilisation.
The point nevertheless stands: a green transition is technically possible; it is the logic of capitalism that makes it a political impossibility. One estimate for the cost of the global green transition is given by the McKinsey Global Institute. In its 2022 report “<a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/the-net-zero-transition-what-it-would-cost-what-it-could-bring">The net-zero transition</a>”, it estimates an annual average of US$9.2 trillion, about 8 percent of global GDP. This is a fraction of what the combatant nations spent during WWII. Today you could take the world’s $2 trillion current military spending and $7 trillion fossil fuel subsidies and you would hit this figure. This would also greatly reduce the ability of states to carry out genocide and oppress other countries.
In a rational society, this could only be a good thing. But for capitalism, it is suicide. 
The alternative is simple: socialism. A world without war and waste, in which society is built for human need rather than the power and profits of a tiny few. In a socialist world, the challenges of a green transition would be practical rather than political: What are the problems we face, and how do we deal with them?
In Australia, the first thing to do would be to stop building new coal mines and instead build solar farms and wind turbines. Take the military budget over the next decade and you could fund thirteen major rail projects like Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop. A mass expansion of public transport like this could take millions of cars off the roads, freeing up hundreds of kilometres worth of lanes and parking spaces to begin greening our cities with trees. This would reduce emissions and dramatically reduce urban heat islands, reducing peak summer temperatures by up to 5 degrees. It would also just be nice.
Globally, such a transition would mean transforming the insane operation of trade and manufacturing, to make production and distribution more efficient. It would mean getting rid of planned obsolescence, a capitalist lunacy whereby companies design products with a limited life span so that they can sell more of them. And it would mean scrapping pointless industries, like military production, that are a drain on the world’s resources for no gain. 
The psychopaths who run the world are not going to let us seize their factories, transport networks and machinery and run them for people rather than profit. They won’t let us disarm their militaries either. To save the planet, we need to build a global movement capable of overthrowing them and creating a democratic alternative to this destructive system.

Cormac Mills Ritchard

Why only socialism can save us from climate catastrophe

Today, 2.33 billion of the world’s approximately 8 billion people face food insecurity. According to a<a href="https://docs.wfp.org/api/documents/WFP-0000162840/download/?_ga=2.29482812.227984222.1739075536-913231167.1739075536">
World Food Program report</a>, 200 million more people are acutely hungry and 1.9 million more are facing catastrophic hunger compared with pre-pandemic levels, just in the countries where the WFP operates. Globally, billions of people struggle to meet their daily needs. Almost 700 million people, or 8.5 percent of the world’s population, live on less than $2.15 per day, according to the World Bank. This is not because of a lack of resources—in Nigeria, nearly<a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/nigeria/overview#:~:text=The%20poverty%20rate%20is%20estimated,largest%20poor%20population%20after%20India.">
40 percent of people live below the poverty line</a>, while the country’s richest man has a net wealth of<a href="https://www.pulse.ng/articles/lifestyle/richest-man-in-nigeria-2024072703141057049">
$15.9 billion</a>.
Developed countries are not as different as is usually assumed. In the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, 11 percent of the population live in poverty. In Australia, if you are part of the<a href="https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/inequality/"> wealthiest 20 percent</a>, you have more than 90 times the wealth of the bottom 20 percent. In the course of two decades, the wealth of the rich has tripled, from 8.4 percent of GDP in 2004 to 23.7 percent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/13/the-rich-are-getting-richer-australias-wealth-divide-continues-to-widen">in 2024</a>. In the United Kingdom,<a href="https://www.jrf.org.uk/uk-poverty-2024-the-essential-guide-to-understanding-poverty-in-the-uk">
22 percent of people live in poverty</a>. 
From the global north to the global south, poverty and inequality are endemic. 
There’s nothing natural about this. In pre-class societies, there was no wealthy elite that flourished while others suffered. In their book The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the State for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus discuss the Caribou Eskimo society, a community where “as with so many foragers, no one amassed a surplus. No one claimed exclusive rights to the land. Traps and weirs were communal property. During famines, all food was shared with neighbours”. 
Instead of history being a war of all against all, humanity existed for tens of thousands of years in societies like those of the Caribou Eskimo—as a collective and social species. Indeed, this is what marked us out from others. The divisions based on wealth and control of society’s resources that are supposedly so natural emerged only relatively recently, and not without resistance. There are examples uncovered by archaeologists of people overthrowing burgeoning elites and turning their<a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-origins-of-womens-oppression-a-defence-of-engels-and-a-new-departure/">
temples into trash heaps</a>. A historian of one, located in neolithic Anatolia, reports: “On a certain day 9,200 years ago the manorial houses were burnt down ... The temple was torn down and burnt, and converted into a municipal waste dump. The slums in the west disappeared for good ... There were no more houses or shacks built to an inferior standard ... All hints to social differences were erased”.
But despite such outbreaks of resistance, ruling classes nevertheless emerged and came to dominate the mass of people. This marked the end of communities based on collective control and egalitarianism, and the beginning of societies ruled by a privileged elite, concerned almost solely with protecting their elevated social position. Jump ahead a few thousand years and a few different versions of class society, and we have capitalism: a society that has spread globally, destroys the planet it relies on to exist, has brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war and leaves people to starve to death while supermarkets destroy unsold food to protect their profits.
Today, corporations and nation-states hold a virtual monopoly on society’s wealth, and their main goal is to accumulate more wealth so as to better compete with rival corporations and nation-states. They best do this by forcing down wages, flouting environmental and safety regulations and reducing the quality of the materials they use. Walmart and Amazon are good examples. <a href="https://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/press-releases/amazon-and-walmart-driving-economic-inequality-in-the-us-oxfam-says/#:~:text=Oxfam's%20analysis%20highlights%20key%20ways,pay%20to%20$14%20an%20hour.">An Oxfam report</a> into how Walmart and Amazon increase global inequality argues that “the companies’ outsized control empowers them to depress average wages, creating a disastrous reality for the American worker at a time when many already struggle to get by”. These are particularly high-profile examples, but every business aims to achieve this sort of “success”. 
The ideology of capitalism claims that, as the wealthy elite become wealthier, the rest of us ultimately benefit. This idea is popularised in cliches like “a rising tide lifts all boats” and in the concept of “trickle-down economics”. This obscures a basic reality of capitalism: that unless the majority of people are denied access to the goods and services they need to survive or an independent means to procure them, they will not be compelled to work for the capitalist class, and there will consequently be no profits. Capitalism cannot exist if the majority of people are not compelled to work for a boss, and the prevailing form of compulsion is relative poverty. 
The people systematically denied access to society’s wealth so that they can be exploited by the capitalists are collectively referred to as the working class. It includes all those who work for a wage and exercise little or no control over their labour or the labour of others, and all those dependent on waged workers for their survival—children, the elderly, sick and those who care for them. The working class exists in every country in the world and includes the majority of members of every oppressed group. It is the majority of the population in most countries in the world today. 
At work, workers are exploited. Not because they wear rags or live in the gutter, but because the value of what they produce at work is far in excess of what they are paid. The capitalists keep the rest, using some of it to cover operating overheads, some of it to expand their production operations and some of it for themselves. This gives them not only enormous privilege in terms of living standards, but also the ability to make decisions about society, what it produces and how, which workers are denied. 
The relative poverty and lack of power and control that characterise working-class life and working-class communities mean they are more likely to experience social problems, like crime and violence. Because capitalism can’t solve these problems, it instead criminalises the behaviour and creates industries, like the prison system, to “deal” with it. The United States’ annual <a href="https://www.vera.org/publications/what-policing-costs-in-americas-biggest-cities">police</a>
and <a href="https://ijrd.csw.fsu.edu/sites/g/files/upcbnu1766/files/media/images/publication_pdfs/Economic_Burden_of_Incarceration_IJRD072016_0_0.pdf">prison budge</a>t amounts to nearly $200 billion. The existence of an extensive criminal “justice” apparatus both serves to intimidate working-class people into submission and to create a profit-making opportunity out of those who don’t submit to capitalism’s authority.
And while all workers suffer oppression by way of poverty and exploitation, poverty exacerbates distinct forms of oppression like racism and sexism, and amplifies them. In his book Not So Black and White, Keenan Malik shows how poorer Black Americans are more likely to experience police violence than their college-educated counterparts: “Studies show, unsurprisingly, that police violence is correlated with poverty—the poorer a neighbourhood, the greater the risk of an individual being killed by the police. African Americans are disproportionately poor and working class; poverty and class location must also play a role in their being victims of police violence”. 
In the United States, 56 percent of those living in poverty are women, and in Australia older women are one of the fastest growing homeless populations. <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-peoples/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-life-expectancy/latest-release">Indigenous men</a> in Australia are likely to die nearly nine years earlier than their non-Indigenous counterparts, and in the Northern Territory this balloons out to nearly two decades earlier. Indigenous people live in poverty at a much higher rate than the rest of the population, 43 percent of Indigenous people earning less than <a href="https://www.indigenoushpf.gov.au/measures/2-08-income#keymessages">$500 a week</a>. Refugees in Australia are likewise disadvantaged, <a href="https://asrc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/ASRC_Policy_Through_Poverty_Finalv1.pdf">82 percent of those seeking asylum</a> having no source of income and relying on charity services to survive. 
The experiences of oppression are different between these groups. But there is a common thread underpinning these marginalised groups, which is poverty and lack of power. All are under-represented in the ranks of the billionaire class and over-represented in those socially disadvantaged and marginalised. All are materially worse off than average.
The capitalist class doesn’t rely on poverty only to exploit people at work. It also helps them ensure cooperation with the worst excesses of its brutal agenda. An example is the military, one of the most savage institutions in the world. The majority of people don’t join their country’s military because of patriotism or a desire to fight, but out of economic necessity or because it is a way to access services they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. Writing in <a href="https://jacobin.com/2018/10/military-recruits-full-employment-welfare-state">Jacobin</a>, Meagan Day argues that the US military provides for poor people what a strong welfare state should: “In fact, it’s a comparatively attractive option for many people, in particular because it offers a steady income, free college and job training, and a lifetime of public health care”. This is often referred to as economic conscription. Instead of drafting people into the military, people are coerced into it through relative deprivation. 
Poverty also functions to keep workers weak and divided. The capitalists want to ensure that a section of the population is unemployed so that workers don’t have too much power vis-a-vis their bosses and so that there is what Marx referred to as a “reserve army of labour” to mobilise in times of industrial action or other labour shortages. For the Reserve Bank of Australia, having around 4 percent of the population denied access to an income is ideal. The real prospect of unemployment also acts as a discipline on workers: concern about losing work can make workers put up with low wages and bad conditions. 
The world we live in seems like a never-ending series of injustices. But there are threads that tie these injustices together, and the most important one is the relative impoverishment of the majority of the population. Relative poverty underpins exploitation and social inequality and is indispensable for social control. Capitalism simply could not function without it. 
If we want a more just and equal society, we need to eradicate poverty. To do this requires the overthrow of capitalism. Charity balls and LiveAid concerts are not going to cut it. The answer to poverty and the solution to oppression are one and the same: revolution and the construction of a socialist society.

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