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.

Anneke Demanuele

Why capitalism needs poverty

Louise O'Shea

Capitalism can’t end women’s oppression: we need a revolution

In the opening passage of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote of the “uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight” between rulers and ruled throughout history. Under capitalism, that fight is nowhere more evident than in the battle between bosses and workers over the length and intensity of the working day.
Anyone who has worked for a wage has participated, whether conscious of it or not, in this struggle. As workers, we generally want to limit the time we spend at work and reduce the intensity of our labour while there. Bosses want the opposite: they want us to work longer and faster. Most people have been told off by a manager for running late for a shift, taking too long on a break, going to the toilet too often or talking too much to co-workers.
Bosses don’t tell their employees off about such things just because they’re mean people. Many of them are no doubt arseholes—it is a common trait of those who exploit other people’s labour. However, their overriding concern isn’t to make other people’s working lives difficult just for the sake of it, but to maximise the profits being squeezed from them. Arsehole or not, every boss is, as Marx put it in Capital, “capital personified”. “His soul is the soul of capital ... which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”.
A brief chat with a co-worker is a short relief from the stress and monotony of the working day. But the manager views it as money down the drain—because when it comes to work, time is money. 
Profit is capitalism’s lifeblood and is derived from the “surplus value” produced by workers’ labour. Surplus value is the value of a company’s finished products or services minus the value of the ingredients or raw materials that went into them and minus the wages paid to the workers (the value of the “labour power” that went into creating them).
For example, take a barista working in a local cafe for $32 an hour. Assume that they make 60 coffees per hour, which the cafe sells for $5 each. For each hour worked, the cafe receives $300 in revenue. Of that, the worker gets $32, and the owner gets $268. Perhaps $220 of that $268 will pay the costs of the necessary inputs: the coffee beans, electricity and water, building rental, depreciation and maintenance of the coffee machine. What remains is surplus value. 
So, of the new value created in each hour, the worker who created that value receives $32 and the boss $48—a rate of surplus value of 48/32 or 150 percent. Further deductions are required by the contradictions of capitalism—such as advertising and supervisors who keep the workers in line. After those bills are paid, what remains is the profit.
Capitalists want to minimise the portion of the total value produced that goes to workers’ wages and maximise the portion that ends up as profit. There are a few ways they can do this. 
The simplest is to extend the length of the working day. The more hours spent making coffees, the greater the absolute sum of value going to the cafe owner at the end of each day. The barista working a five-hour shift will produce only five-eighths of the surplus value they could produce in an eight-hour shift. The longer the workday, the greater the sum of surplus value and the higher the profits after accounting for other costs. (While the owner will pay more for coffee beans and electricity, the rent will be the same regardless of the hours the cafe is open.)
It’s even more profitable for the boss if they can get you to work an extra half hour or so a day without paying for it. A <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Go-Home-On-Time-Day-2023-The-Australia-Institute.pdf">2023 Australia Institute report</a>—Short Changed: Unsatisfactory working hours and unpaid overtime—found that, on average, Australian workers do 5.4 hours of unpaid overtime a week, amounting to $131 billion worth of unpaid labour a year.
Another common way to increase surplus value is by making you work harder or faster. If the barista who makes 60 coffees an hour can be forced to make 66 per hour, the effect is the same as increasing each work day by 10 percent with unpaid overtime.
The methods just described create what Marx called absolute
surplus value. They have obvious physiological and social limits to their increase—people can’t be forced to work 24 hours a day every day.
A more important way to increase surplus value is through relative
surplus value. This involves reducing the real value of what workers receive for their labour. Bosses are obviously always interested in reducing wages, but cutting them directly risks provoking mass resistance. Inflation has the effect of reducing real wages without creating such immediate resistance.
In our barista example, they agree to work for $32/hour because that is the best they can get through their negotiations with the boss. If the wages were any lower, they might look for a different job.
If the economy were to increase productivity such that our baristas could now live at more or less the same standard on a wage of $30/hour, they would have less reason to resist such a reduction. A general increase of prices while wages remain unchanged has much the same effect. It means that the benefits of greater efficiency in the economy go directly to the bosses. If the workers want a share of such increases, they have to fight for it.
Bosses are always trying to increase efficiency and productivity because every business is competing against others of the same type. And every national economy is competing again other economies worldwide. It’s a never-ending battle to maximise the surplus value (and therefore the profit) they squeeze from their workers.
More profitable businesses succeed and grow. They have more money to invest in new, productivity-enhancing machinery, to employ more workers and to organise the labour process to increase efficiency. From a capitalist perspective, it is a virtuous circle. The higher the profits, the greater the new investment, and the more surplus value is squeezed from employees each day. 
These dynamics apply to every business, no matter how big or small. In the Woolworths distribution centres where workers have been on strike, the relationship of an individual worker’s labour to the value of the products they handle appears less direct than that of a barista to their coffee. 
Nevertheless, all workers are part of a chain of production that contributes to the final value of goods—farm workers, manufacturing workers, pickers and packers, transport workers, power station workers and so on. At each point in the production process, the bosses’ goal is the same: maximise profits by getting workers to work as fast as possible for as long as possible.
Each worker in the chain will experience similar scrutiny and pressure from management to perform at 100 percent—or more—of their capacity. As soon as one productivity standard has been met, managers will consider how to increase it even further. 
So, under capitalism, no amount of profit will ever be enough—which is why economists and politicians are always focused on economic growth. If they could get away with it, bosses would have us working like people in Marx’s time, before we won things like the eight-hour day and the weekend that are now taken for granted. It’s already like that in many places, and workers are <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3277316/china-man-30-worked-104-days-1-day-dies-organ-failure-court-orders-compensation">sometimes literally</a> worked to death.
As long as capitalism exists, the battle over the working day will never cease. To reduce work hours and reduce workplace stress, we need to organise collectively. The more we do this, the more we can push back against the bosses’ ceaseless productivity drive—making clear to them that we won’t accept being treated like the robots they would prefer us to be.

James Plested

Why there is a constant battle over the working day

One of the core activities of any even vaguely serious socialist organisation is recruiting people. The reason should be obvious. You can’t change the world with ideas alone. To think that you can is to be like the “valiant fellow” Karl Marx refers to in the <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/preface.htm">preface to the German Ideology</a>, one who “had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity”. 
Just as you can’t protect yourself from drowning by fighting against “the illusion of gravity”, so too is it impossible to overcome capitalism with the idea of socialism. Capitalism, like gravity, exists as a reality independent of our individual ideas and intentions. We could spend our whole lives imagining, writing and talking (or, these days, creating Instagram reels) about how things could or should be different, but if we leave it at that, we’re unlikely to make even the smallest dent in the edifice of the status quo.
Ideas are important. Marx himself famously spent many years of his life researching, thinking and writing about the dynamics of capitalism and how it can be overthrown. He realised early on though that, as he put it in 1844 in his<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm">
draft introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right</a>, “The weapon of criticism cannot ... replace criticism by weapons”, and that “material force must be overthrown by material force”.
How then to create the kind of “material force” that could pose a challenge to the capitalist system? Theory, Marx went on to say, “also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses”. If your anti-capitalism is restricted to the inside of your own head, it’s useless, but if you can join together with enough people of a similar mindset you can start to do things like organise protests, strikes and other potentially powerful “material” expressions of socialist politics.
Socialist ideas, in other words, become a material force through socialist organisation. And the bigger the organisation, the more powerful the force.
Organisations can draw on the collective knowledge and experience of their membership to educate and train new layers of activists (hence <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/britain/wibg/ch08.htm">Leon Trotsky’s comment</a> “the memory of the working class is in its party”). They can debate and test political strategies and coordinate actions to maximise their effectiveness. They can pool resources and skills to increase the reach of their organising, publicity and recruitment efforts (the capacity to regularly produce a publication like Red Flag is an example). 
It’s because they understood this that Marx and his long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels were serial joiners, and builders, of organisations. In 1847 they joined the London-based group the Communist League. The league, Engels wrote, “consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress”. It had a set of rules and produced socialist publications. Most famously, as of February 1848, it had a manifesto, written by Marx: the Manifesto of the Communist Party (more commonly known as The Communist Manifesto).
Later in their lives, in 1864, Marx and Engels helped form the International Workingmen’s Association. The International, like the Communist League before it, was a formal, membership-based organisation with a constitution, a program, various levels of leadership, regular congresses and publications. It aimed to draw together the various strands of the socialist movement in Europe into a single, cohesive and thus more powerful whole.
Marx and Engels and Co. may well have done this with a little more flair than (unfortunately) many of today’s socialist organisations can muster. The basic principles, however, remain the same. Socialists don’t want just to sit around thinking or talking about changing society; we actually want to change it. And just as in Marx’s day, the main prerequisite for that (beyond the reality of capitalist exploitation that first creates the conditions for working-class resistance) is to bring together a critical mass of like-minded people into an organisation.
Of course, you don’t need to be a Marxist to understand the importance of building political organisations. The Greens, the Labor Party, trade unions, environmental NGOs—all of them put time and resources into recruiting new members and supporters. It’s one of the ABCs of rank-and-file trade unionism, for example, that you should make notes about conversations you have with your co-workers to keep track of issues that come up and individually tailor your recruitment efforts.
The more recruitment is going on among organisations of the left like trade unions, the better. The fewer and smaller we are, the easier it is for the established institutions of capitalist society to govern in the interests of the rich and powerful. Their side is highly organised. In addition to the capitalist state, with its army of bureaucrats, its police and prisons and its many instruments of ideological control (state-funded media, the education system etc.), there’s a mass of industry peak bodies, think tanks, conservative NGOs and so on to help defend the status quo. The more disorganised and atomised our side is, the less potential there is for us to challenge that imposing edifice in any serious way.
Organisations recruit people in ways appropriate to their circumstances. Parties like the Greens can recruit in large part merely through the high profile they have in political life. That doesn’t work so much for revolutionary socialists because, for now at least, we don’t have much of a profile. The pool of people who might be open to getting involved with a revolutionary socialist organisation, with the relatively high level of commitment that entails, is also much smaller than for parties like the Greens. That’s why socialists concentrate our efforts among students (who, historically, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/the-role-of-students-in-radical-struggles">have played a key role</a> in many radical struggles), participants in protest movements and existing trade union activists. 
Complaining, <a href="https://x.com/hierobadge/status/1842732951420940761">as some do</a>, that it’s inappropriate for socialists to try to meet and recruit people at rallies, whether opposing the genocide in Gaza or around any other issue, ends up just being an argument against socialists recruiting, full stop. Protests attract the most radical and committed layer of people in society, and these are exactly the kind of people socialists want to recruit. We don’t want to do this out of a desire to “profit from the movement” or “impose an outside agenda” or any of the other anti-socialist tropes that come up. We want to do this because—taking the question of Palestine as an example—we think building a bigger socialist movement in Australia and around the world is key to taking on the immensely powerful military, economic and ideological forces standing in the way of Palestinian liberation.
If you oppose socialist politics, and think, for example, that there’s a better way to win Palestinian liberation, then argue, organise and recruit on that basis. If you’re right, then you will hopefully be able to prove it in practice. If, instead of doing that, you just want to complain about socialists recruiting as if it is in itself something reprehensible, then (assuming you’re not actually just a reactionary aiming to defend the existing order from challenge) you’re not damaging just socialists; by casting suspicion on the idea of recruitment and organisation in general, you’re damaging the entire left.

Why socialists recruit

“The Communists disdain to conceal their
views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the
forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes
tremble at a Communistic revolution.” This was how Marx and Engels closed the Communist Manifesto, the central text of the socialist movement.
Socialists and communists will be the first to tell you that to solve issues
like the climate crisis, the genocide in Palestine or the constant squeeze on
working-class living standards, we’re going to have to end capitalism.
But
today among online leftists and campaign activists, there’s an idea going
around that socialists have some secret, nefarious hidden agenda. It’s the
“progressive” version of the Trumpist conspiracists who dismiss every social
justice initiative as the work of George Soros and cultural Marxism. 
For
these people, political purity is synonymous with concern about only one issue.
Making connections between injustices, or drawing attention to the overarching
social system within which they occur, is highly suspect. This agenda, of
policing the political outlook of others in a movement and valorising a
compartmentalised view of society, reflects just as much of an agenda as that
of Marxists.
Treating
society’s various problems as discrete phenomena reflects a reformist or
liberal world view. It implies that the causes of most injustices are bad laws,
poor military judgement, ignorance or the individual misuse of corporate or
state power. It follows that a change to laws in one area, or the ending of one
particular military adventure, or the removal of a particularly bad boss, will
solve most social problems. This can be done by sympathetic representatives in
parliament, the United Nations, the corporate sector or whatever it is. Some
outside pressure might be needed, but not wider social change. Activists
aligned to reformist parliamentary parties or NGO lobbying groups are often the
ones most hostile to the socialist agenda of connecting discrete atrocities to
the broader system. 
If
changing the system is ruled out, we have to settle for whatever concessions
the powerful are willing to make. The climate crisis is a good example of where
this logic gets you. Climate NGOs and Greens parties around the world seek to
implement climate legislation to curb emissions. This means lobbying
politicians, writing reports and launching glossy marketing campaigns. Things
that might put centrists and politicians offside are rejected as too
radical—such as disrupting corporate mining conferences. This strategy has,
sadly, not got us closer to solving the environment crisis. 
Or take
the example of people who argue we should look to Arab states, Iran or
Hezbollah to liberate Palestine. Their agenda is backing one imperialist power
over another, which will not lead to liberation, but strengthen a different
group of repressive, warmongering capitalist states. Critiquing liberal or
reformist approaches to change and offering an alternative are therefore not
only legitimate but necessary if we are serious about winning.
Sometimes
the way the “socialist agenda” argument comes up is the claim that, by talking
about broader issues or capitalism, socialists are “silencing” the voice of the
oppressed. The idea is that political arguments made in the course of struggle
somehow take away the agency of the oppressed or perpetuate their oppression.
But a plurality of opinions within a campaign among people committed to winning
common demands does not disempower anyone or cause oppression. On the contrary,
free political expression better ensures that a variety of strategies and ideas
can be engaged with and tested in the course of struggle, putting us all in a
better position to win. 
Often,
what underpins these criticisms is a basic hostility to socialist ideas and
radical politics. Business owners, those with aspirations to power, as well as
those who have innocently absorbed capitalism’s “common sense” that appealing
to those in power and having better “conversations” gives you the best chance
of winning change, are hostile to socialist politics for obvious reasons. They
are invested in the system. Others just want their ideas or strategies to
dominate in a particular campaign, and look for easy ways to disparage rivals.
Rarely are people open about this being their agenda, which makes accusations
of socialists’ “hidden agendas”, which are not even hidden, both hypocritical
and absurd.
Socialists
and revolutionaries are committed to participating in social movements even
when many within them have world views that are different to ours. We want to
fight to win reforms within the system and push the struggle of working class
and oppressed people forward. We do not make agreement with broader socialist
politics a condition of cooperation, nor do we consider other viewpoints
necessarily “problematic”. This is different from the approach that many
involved in social movements today take, who seek to rubbish socialist
arguments in order to maintain their own political dominance. 
As a
socialist, my agenda is clear. I believe that genuine human liberation is
possible only in a world run on the basis of need, not profit. For this we need
revolutionary struggle by the working class to overthrow capitalism and create
a new, democratic socialist society. Partial reforms on their own will not be
enough to solve the problems facing humanity; for that we need a broader
challenge to the profit-driven logic that causes them. 
Socialists
also recognise that oppressed groups will not be able to overcome their
oppression alone. The Palestinian movement will require uprisings all across
the Arab world and in the imperial core like the United States in order to
break the power of the Israeli state. In Australia, the Indigenous struggle
will necessarily need to combine with the power of organised labour to win
against the ruling class, the bosses and the government. That is why I believe
it is strategically necessary to draw different social struggles together and
extend solidarity between them. 
None of
this agenda is secret or hidden. What is hidden is that disdain for such an
agenda is usually the expression of support, somehow or other, for the system
and its various institutions. We’re all better off when we can see that for
what it is.

Do socialists have a hidden agenda?

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

Jasmine Duff

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

Sexism is so fundamental to our existence that we are not even aware of it much of the time. 
It starts from before we are even born. An experiment described by Annie Murphy Paul in her book Origins highlights the different ways pregnant women interpret the movement of their babies in utero. Those who knew they were expecting a boy were more likely to use words like “energetic”, “vigorous” and “jabbing” to describe the movement, while for girls it was “gentle”, “rolling” and “quiet”. 
This sort of unconscious bias shapes and curtails women’s potential throughout their lives. In her book Delusions of Gender, neuroscientist Cordelia Fine describes an experiment which showed that simply reminding university students about whether they’re a man or a woman at the beginning of a test, by asking them to tick a box, reduces women’s performance on the test compared to that of men; in the absence of such a reminder, men and women perform equally well. Even the “feminine” or “masculine” nature of the décor in the room where the test is held has a measurable impact on performance. If such subtleties can have a statistically significant effect, just imagine the cumulative effect of this conditioning over a lifetime. 
The sexist bias that plagues data collection and design has been documented by Caroline Creado Perez in Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men. Every area of design and technology is affected, from medical testing and drug development to building design, workplace temperature and tool size, all of which have wide-ranging and material effects on women’s health and lives. The male bias built into car safety testing, for example, means women are 49 percent more likely to be seriously injured in car accidents and 17 percent more likely to die than men. 
Then there are all the manifestations of sexism that we are conscious of, like unequal pay, lack of adequate maternity leave, limited access to child care, greater poverty on average for women throughout their lifetimes, greater risk of violence and death from intimate partners, sexualisation and objectification in daily life as well as in popular culture and advertising, to name just a few. 
There is not an aspect of life that isn’t affected by the gendered, and therefore sexist, nature of society in some way, from the most personal to the most public. 
So what can be done about this so all-pervasive form of inequality?
First, we—women and men—need to become as conscious as we can of sexism in our daily lives and strive to minimise it as best we can. We want women to be able to reach their potential and participate in whatever area of society, work and culture they want as equals. That means being sensitive to how the minutiae of behaviour—things like who dominates conversations and who gets listened to and taken notice of—affect women, who are used to being ignored, dismissed and generally treated as less important than men. It means treating women as equals, not sex objects, there merely to be admired or preyed on by men. And it means taking pro-active measures to push against the various subtle ways sexism shapes all sorts of human interactions. 
But even if we do everything we can to be alert to everyday sexism, it doesn’t alter the social reality around us that is reinforcing sexist ideas and norms as fast as we can reject them. 
So we also need a strategy for changing society and the inequalities that are structured into it and which every day normalise the subordinate position of women. 
In the immediate term, this means policies and services that enable women to participate as equals in paid work and the public sphere as much as possible—free, accessible child care and aged care, unlimited maternity leave, greater scrutiny of hiring and promotion to reduce discrimination against women, as well as higher wages in industries dominated by women, to name just a few. 
But on their own, these measures merely support women to undertake paid work more easily while they continue to take primary responsibility for caring as well. Hence the notorious “double burden” that plagues working women’s lives. In themselves, such reforms don’t challenge the idea that women are naturally nurturing and better suited to caring for others than men, who, by their nature, belong in positions of power. 
So, important as measures that enable women to participate fully in paid work and the public sphere are, they are not sufficient to bring about genuine equality or liberation. To achieve this, we need more radical change. In particular, we need to transform the way work is done, including breaking down the division between work in the formal economy and caring work, and the subordination of all work to profit making and capital accumulation. 
As long as most of us are expected to spend 40 hours or more a week performing waged labour—during which our “real” lives are on hold and we are under the control of a boss and doing work to generate profit for those who hire us rather than doing what is needed to keep ourselves and those around us alive, healthy and happy—the division of labour that so effectively supports this economic model will endure. Indeed, this is why it persists more then 50 years after most formal rights for women were won, including the right to equal pay, the right to work while married, the right to financial autonomy, the right to divorce and reproductive freedom. 
The bosses rely on the existence of a sub-class—women— to take responsibility for ensuring workers are looked after and fit for work, and that new generations of workers are produced who are willing and able to work. Women perform the majority of this work for free out of a sense of duty and because they genuinely care about the wellbeing of those around them. But the value to the bosses, who rely on that work to provide a productive workforce, is nevertheless enormous. 
A 2017 PWC report, “Understanding the unpaid economy”, found that unpaid work is worth $2.2 trillion to the Australian economy, equivalent to a third of GDP. Unpaid child care is the largest contributor, worth 25 percent of GDP, and would be by far the biggest industry in Australia if it was part of the formal economy. Domestic household tasks, including cooking and cleaning, are the next biggest category of unpaid labour. 
Having more women in the halls of power won’t be enough to change this. The halls of power are dedicated to strengthening the economy—i.e. generating more GDP through better exploiting workers and maximising the profits of business—and are dominated by the economic interests of the powerful few who control major corporations and industries. Waged labour and the status quo that ensures exploitation continues smoothly serve their interests, and those who challenge that soon find themselves on the outer. So while women have as much right as men to occupy parliaments and boardrooms, this is not a strategy for liberating women. 
To bring about the radical change that is necessary, we need to orient to an alternative source of power: the power the working class has collectively to challenge and transform society by mobilising at the point of production. Workers make everything, and they do it together. Rather than bosses directing this process, workers have the potential to decide democratically how and what to produce and for what purpose. 
Work and production could and should be reorganised to meet need—including the social need to care for everyone as well as the need to protect the planet from destruction. And because it could only be done collectively, cooperation, solidarity and fostering mutual respect are necessary to help strengthen working-class power. This is why we can be confident that the prejudice and inequality that are so rampant in capitalist society would be organically challenged and eventually overcome in the course of workers fighting for a socialist society, as has happened historically at high points of workers’ struggle. 
Working-class women aren’t necessarily conscious of the need for this sort of radical change to solve the problems they experience as a result of capitalism’s need both to exploit them and maintain their caring role. And nor are most male workers, who likewise have an interest in challenging waged labour and exploitation. But the reality is this is the only way to bring about a society of gender, as well as broader, equality, and to have a society that can meet people’s needs as a matter of priority, not as an afterthought or a ritualised hand-wringing every year on International Women’s Day. 
To get there, we need to start with rebuilding working-class consciousness and power from the bottom up. This is the radical origin of what was originally known as International Working Women’s Day when it was founded by socialist women in 1910 and celebrated under the slogan “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism”. 
There is no easy way to do that, and we are currently a long way from the sort of consciousness and organisation needed to overthrow this system of inequality and prejudice. But if we want to avoid the cynicism or despair that comes from watching politicians carp on about women’s empowerment while they maintain policies that keep women down, or CEOs raising champagne glasses at International Women’s Day breakfasts while women languish on low wages in low-status jobs, we need some idea of what could actually transform the position of women. And we need to fight for those ideas wherever we are—at work, on university campuses and in every other area of life—and get together with other people doing the same, so that we can maximise our impact and form a larger pole of attraction for people who are continually pushed to radical conclusions by the injustices and atrocities of the capitalist system. That is the small but important step we can take towards women’s liberation, and the liberation of all humanity, in the here and now.

Socialist Alternative’s record of workplace organising

Why only socialism can save us from climate catastrophe

Why capitalism needs poverty

Capitalism can’t end women’s oppression: we need a revolution

Why there is a constant battle over the working day

Why socialists recruit

Do socialists have a hidden agenda?

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

To end sexism, we need to destroy capitalism

Lenin’s theory of a revolutionary party

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