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.

James Plested

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.

Anneke Demanuele

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.

Louise O'Shea

To end sexism, we need to destroy capitalism

Sandra Bloodworth

Lenin’s theory of a revolutionary party

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, is one of history’s most well-known figures, and one of its most maligned. Mainstream culture vilifies him as a despot. 
But how many of the people who castigate him and deride his legacy have read his works? Five texts help cut through the myths and highlight what he really stood for: a society freed, as he wrote in The State and Revolution, “from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation”.
What is to be done? (1901)
In the last years of the nineteenth century, as Lenin approached his 30th birthday, all hell broke loose in Russia. Thousands of students participating in a national student strike in 1899 were treated appallingly by the police and government, but brutal repression could not prevent the movement from flaring up again and again. In 1901 tens of thousands of workers across Russia joined in protests and riots, and several times drove the police out of the demonstrations. Lenin was in awe. 
The inadequacies of the revolutionary movement stood out starkly against this backdrop. Meetings were regularly smashed up by police and networks destroyed by arrests. Multiple political currents strove for supremacy with no real way of discussing their ideas. In his own words, Lenin “suffered painfully and acutely from the realisation that we were acting as amateurs”. So he got to work. 
His key work of this time, the hastily written What is to be done?, was a call for revolutionaries to rise to the moment. They needed robust methods of underground communication, and networks that could withstand arrests. They needed a mass, working-class party that could guide the revolutionary movement.
Lenin argued against those who attempted to limit the workers’ movement to immediate concerns—factory conditions, state repression and police brutality—and fought for a Marxist party that acted as “the tribune of the people ... able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears”. 
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916-17)
To the question of what the working class should offer an imperialist war, the international socialist movement gave the answer: “not one man, not one penny”. But when Germany declared war on Russia in August 1914, the German Social Democratic Party, the leading party of European socialism, announced that its parliamentarians would vote to finance the war. 
The about-face was so jarring that Lenin initially believed it to be a hoax. When it was clear that the socialist movement had betrayed its principles—and the continent’s labouring classes—he responded energetically, co-organising anti-war conferences, assisting in attempts to encourage fraternisation between German and Russian soldiers, and developing a theoretical analysis of the war. 
In this pamphlet he draws heavily on the work of other theorists to demonstrate that World War One was “imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world”.
Lenin explained imperialism as not simply a policy that governments adopt. Instead, it is a stage of capitalism, in which the world has been fully carved up and occupied by the colonial powers. So their rapacious desires to acquire new territories can be met only at the expense of other powers. Profit-hungry ruling classes need resources and new markets, which makes some kind of conflict inevitable and creates a situation that sooner or later spills over into open warfare. 
Twenty million people were killed in World War One. The disaster and bloodshed it unleashed pushed millions to oppose it. When workers took power in the 1917 Russian Revolution, one of their first acts was to pull that country out of that war. Lenin’s Bolshevik party was one of only a handful of socialist parties that opposed the whole rotten endeavour from day one.
The State and Revolution (1917)
The 1871 Paris Commune had convinced Karl Marx that the “ready-made state machinery” could not be “wielded” by the working class but had to be replaced. Yet Marx’s evaluation had been buried by moderate socialists who called themselves Marxists but were moving toward greater and greater accommodation with capitalism. 
Lenin quoted Marx at length to re-establish these precepts of his thought, reviving the idea that the working class must be “armed and organised as the ruling class”. That is, workers need to centralise their power in an alternative national institution to defend themselves against reaction and to distribute resources. 
This could not be another institution to ensure minority rule, but to guarantee the rule of the majority. He explained that this would be a temporary arrangement, necessary only in the period during which all counter-revolution could be permanently defeated. 
The pamphlet took on anarchists who rejected the need for this interim body. On the other hand, Lenin rejected the moderate socialists who viewed the capitalist state as an institution sitting “above” society, which can be bent to the will of whoever has the most social leverage at the time. 
The structures of the state, its “special bodies of armed men, prisons, etc.” cannot be taken over by the workers’ movement, because they are integral to maintaining capitalism. 
These insights make it one of the most important works of Marxist thought. But its power lies not just in that, but in the way it outlines a program soon to be implemented with the victory of the Russian Revolution: the dismantling of Russia’s ruling-class institutions and their replacement with institutions of workers’ power.
Left-wing communism (1920)
The barbarity of World War One opened the eyes of the world to capitalism’s darkest tendencies, filling millions with horror and rage. Mutinies, revolts and general strikes spread around the world in response, and when the 1917 Russian Revolution declared its victory, millions of people were determined to follow the Russians’ lead. 
Left-wing communism was an intervention into the international debates that were raging at this time. Lenin began by establishing the position of the Russian Revolution in relation to the world socialist movement, acknowledging that when socialism was won elsewhere, “Russia will cease to be the model and will once again become a backward country”. (Most socialists had thought that socialism would come first in the more economically advanced regions—Germany, Britain, France—and then spread to the “backward” economies. Russia had caught everyone off guard by having the first socialist revolution.)
The next chapters elaborated its most important and relevant lessons.
First was the centrality of the revolutionary party to socialism’s success. The Bolshevik party, without which success in Russia was impossible, was not born but created, Lenin noted. The labour of thousands of workers and activists had gradually built this institution through its many challenges and opportunities. The resilience of the party meant that hundreds of thousands of people could flood into the revolutionary movement and have their energies combined into the most powerful movement possible. 
In later chapters, he argued against the idea that the primary role of revolutionaries was to launch insurrections. The “left-wing communists”, as they were known, opposed participation in mass working-class organisations. They eschewed parliamentary elections, abandoned trade unions and resisted all compromises. 
This approach threatened to isolate the most radical militants from the very groups of workers that they had to influence and win to revolutionary politics if Bolshevik-type parties were to be built in other countries. 
“It would be hard to imagine any greater ineptitude or greater harm to the revolution than that”, Lenin wrote.
Lenin’s last testament (1923)
In May 1922, Lenin suffered a debilitating stroke. He recovered and began writing and speaking in public again, but more health battles were coming. Lenin was dying. 
In his final years, he was focused on the difficulties the young soviet state was facing. He worked through the night, exhausting himself further, determined to keep Russian socialism alive as the country was blockaded and gripped by civil war, while the working class exhausted itself and a new layer of bureaucrats emerged within the state.
He wrote a series of letters intended for wide circulation in the press and to be reported at various upcoming congresses—but they were withheld from all. What we now know as the Lenin’s last testament was not published until 1956. 
In this and in other works he railed against the “deplorable” and “wretched” state of the Soviet apparatus. He devised various measures to combat the bureaucratisation of the institutions. 
He began to understand the specific danger posed by a badly weakened working class, a bureaucratised society and a party general secretary with “unlimited authority concentrated in his hands”. In a postscript to the note “Letter to the Congress”, Lenin made his position clearer, demanding the removal of Joseph Stalin from that post. 
His words were prescient. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Soviet society continued to disintegrate and Stalin led a vile counter-revolution that stripped the revolution of its gains. All of the leaders of the 1917 revolution were executed or imprisoned or fell into line. 
Yet Lenin’s proposals could not solve the fundamental problem—Russia’s international isolation was almost total. 
Ultimately, Lenin’s fate was tied to the revolution he led. Its triumphs were his triumphs, its catastrophes were his defeats. It is only just that this be the case—he was its leading figure and devoted his life to its cause. 
But it is grotesque that the crimes of the counter-revolution that stripped the Soviet state of everything Lenin and the workers’ movement had fought for—and led by the man he had fought to remove from power to his dying breath—are now associated with his name.

Jess Lenehan

Lenin in his own words: five key texts

This special supplement of Red Flag newspaper is designed for those coming to socialist politics, and Socialist Alternative as an organisation, for the first time. It contains articles on the fundamentals of Marxist theory and politics, the history of the socialist movement, and how socialists approach questions of race, gender and identity. It can be purchased from our online bookstore <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/collections/red-flag-newspaper/products/what-socialists-say">here</a>.

'What Socialists Say' special supplement

Mass protests change people. The act of collectively standing together pushes aside the powerlessness we experience in everyday life, builds confidence and generates a sense of strength.
This experience lies at the heart of all famous movements against tyranny and oppression, all social action which has won radical reforms or ended wars. Protests are not just some strategy to pressure politicians to grant our demands, even though at times they do. They are essential if fundamental social change is to be achieved.
Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin summed up a process which he observed during mass strikes across the Russian empire more than 100 years ago:
“The masses, which have ... often been ignored and even despised by superficial observers, enter the political arena as active combatants. These masses are learning in practice ... are taking their first tentative steps, feeling their way, defining their objectives, testing themselves.” 
That is, they were learning that they could run the world themselves and that they didn’t have to just put up with the rich and powerful running society in their own interests.
We glimpsed very tentative beginnings of this process in the weekly marches of tens of thousands and other protests in solidarity with Gaza around Australia. A minority have been shocked into passionate activity by Israel’s genocidal war. It is important to recognise what makes such developments precious.
Demonstrations are really a form of a “people’s assembly” in which participants can debate and discuss politics, strategy and tactics, and strengthen their collective resolve. Public spaces we have sat in or walked across, never exchanging more than a glance or a smile with others, are transformed by demonstrations. Now, the space is ours. Others gather around, considering whether to join in, whether to spill into the streets and march.
As the famous art critic and novelist John Berger put it in a 1968 essay:
“A mass demonstration distinguishes itself from other mass crowds because it congregates in public to create its function ... It is an assembly which challenges what is given by the mere fact of its coming together ... By demonstrating, [the protesters] manifest a greater freedom and independence—a greater creativity ... than they can ever achieve individually or collectively when pursuing their regular lives. In their regular pursuits they only modify circumstances; by demonstrating, they symbolically oppose their very existence to circumstances.”
At protests, people browse information stalls, some of which raise many issues, not just the issue about which the protest has been called. People read leaflets, buy radical papers and books they’ve never encountered before and which both confirm and challenge many of the ideas they bring with them. Their political horizons are broadened.
At the end of 2023 and into this year, smaller protests spiralled out from the confidence generated at the central weekly marches against Israel’s war. Hundreds rallied at local council meetings, demanding they pass motions of solidarity with Gaza and fly the Palestinian flag. Local suburban rallies, pickets of arms suppliers to Israel and of Israeli ships at the wharves attracted hundreds. Banners, stickers and posters have appeared around city streets in numbers not seen for years.
A new generation of university students has rejuvenated Students for Palestine, which was originally formed in previous Israeli wars on Gaza. They have mobilised large, lively protests with fresh energy. Teenage organisers of high school walk outs in November demolished in a few scathing sentences the insults hurled at them by school principals, politicians and the media.
“I’ve learned a lot coming here, meeting people and standing up with others for justice”, one of them said; another that she learned more being at the strike rally for two hours than “in an entire semester of history”. “Kids in Gaza can’t go to school and haven’t been able to for weeks”, a student from Pascoe Vale Girls’ School said. “Missing one afternoon seems very unimportant when you think about that.”
As individuals, many of them probably instinctively drew conclusions about Israel’s terror. But the big protests created an incentive to get together. This then built their confidence to defy the principals, and then to confront the media’s hostile questioning.
No amount of respectful lobbying of MPs or petitioning of the UN can demonstrate so clearly how society operates. The students discovered, and demonstrated to others, that democracy, free speech and the right to protest are really only meant for those who go along with whatever barbarity our governments enact or support.
Such grassroots protests pose the questions: whose democracy? Whose order? They ask of others: help us disrupt the “order” that entrenches the power of the already powerful.
Disrupting business as usual through protests can build a sense of power by participants taking back some control over circumstances that are normally beyond our control. Disruption says: this movement is one worth taking risks for. Defying those who wield authority in this hideous system enhances democracy and free speech.
The activity of organising rallies, sit-ins, media appearances, strikes and much more promotes debate. It helps to clarify political issues, reveals the truth about our society and shows what the mainstream political parties really stand for. And activists able to inspire wider layers to rebel and build an ever expanding and powerful movement emerge as leaders—leaders with genuine courage and conviction, unlike our purported “leaders” in parliament, who do only what’s best for their careers.
Yet, as Vincent Bevins, author of If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, argues: “It should be obvious that humans do not spontaneously adopt the correct response to a given set of injustices”. So the debates such movements generate are vital.
Socialists want to win more people, especially leading activists, to an anti-capitalist perspective; one recognising that the root cause of pretty much every problem in the world is that society is divided by class and organised to enrich a minority at the expense of the majority. We publish our ideas in Red Flag and hold public meetings while organising beside other activists so our perspectives can be tested in practice.
Ultimately, workers’ strikes are the most powerful protest. Trade unions can challenge the right of capitalists to exploit us, to dominate us, to make profits—the very basis of this society. They can inspire others even more than even large demonstrations. Mass demonstrations of striking workers embody power, not just symbolically, but in reality.
Workers have been ground down by four decades of attacks that have led to increased wealth inequality and degraded public services. Unions are weakened by defeats and the policies of their leaders, who spend most of their time sucking up to the powerful and the politicians, rather than fighting them. But workers can at times be convinced to act even when their own leaders refuse to. 
A vital aspect of the art of politics is learning how to link the vitality of student and other street protests with workers’ power. A movement of radical militancy, one noted for supporting every oppressed group and opposing attacks on democratic and union rights can, in the right circumstances, convince workers to take a stand.
Writing in a jail cell in early 1915 after being imprisoned for anti-war activity, Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish revolutionary socialist, argued that the world faced a choice: socialism or barbarism. 
Her words about World War One strike a chord today as we witness the atrocities in Gaza enabled by Western imperialist powers—and while leaders of the trade union movement refuse to lift a finger to end the bloodshed despite so many trade union members wanting to take anti-war action.
Imperialism’s “bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery”. “But”, she went on, “we are not lost, and we will be victorious if we have not unlearned how to learn. And if the present leaders of the working class ... do not understand how to learn, then they will go under to make room for people capable of dealing with a new world”.
If Luxemburg is to be proven right, these fundamental aspects of mass movements and of how people become capable of challenging capitalism is of vital importance.
This is a revised version of a 2019 article, “<a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6891">Strike, rally, occupy: building a mass movement</a>”. It has been updated for the 2024 Red Flag campus supplement.

The importance of a mass movement

Kim Bullimore

Debunking the myths of Israel/Palestine

Socialist Alternative is the largest left-wing revolutionary group in Australia. We are the only socialist group with a national presence and an expanding membership. 
We’re known for leading campaign groups against racism and fascism, for Palestine, for refugee rights, for climate justice, for workers’ rights and against education cuts. 
We led the successful street movements for marriage equality and a militant student movement that defeated the Liberals’ plan to impose $100,000 university degrees. Just in the last few years, we’ve led demonstrations of tens of thousands in response to the bushfire crisis of 2019, brought out even greater numbers in support of abortion rights in Melbourne, and helped to organise the recent Palestine solidarity movement in every city. 
Ultimately, socialism is about taking power away from the billionaires and putting it in the hands of working people, so rebuilding our trade unions is vital. The organising efforts of Socialist Alternative members in workplaces across the country have won them respect and recognition across a range of industries. Sometimes this has been the consequence of our leadership in strikes and other industrial campaigns. A recent example led to the defeat of a plan to impose a 15 percent wage cut on every worker in the university sector, a plan that was being pushed by the university union itself (yes, you read that right). 
Our most significant effort in recent times has been the campaign to get the first revolutionary socialist elected to an Australian parliament in more than 50 years. This gargantuan effort involved reaching out to more than 190,000 voters across the north and the west of Melbourne, through door knocking, public meetings, protests and more. We just missed out on winning a seat, but we were proud to get more than 8 percent in a range of working-class suburbs, an historic result that has been widely acknowledged—even by the mainstream parties. 
All of this has been possible due to the growth in size and experience of our organisation. Without committed socialists working tirelessly, Australia would be a more passive, more right-wing place. 
Every person reading this article has a role to play in building a socialist movement that can make a difference to the world, right now. If we had a few hundred or a few thousand more members, the possibilities for action would multiply. 
Having said that, the sort of people who consider joining a socialist organisation are not motivated only by the fight to build a union at work or combat sexism in everyday life. There are other groups whose sole focus on those issues. The point of a socialist group is to fight to overthrow the capitalist system. 
While that is a big task, there’s some good news: according to researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the United States, the 21st century has witnessed more mass demonstrations and revolutionary events than any era of modern human history, even adjusted for population growth. Protests, strikes and even revolutions have swept the world, from Chile to Egypt, Hong Kong to the US. This peaked just before the pandemic, when 2019 saw sizable protests around issues as varied as climate change, democratic rights and economic equality. 
These movements are inspiring to observe and exhilarating to participate in. In them, the downtrodden and the unseen burst onto the stage, demanding a better world for all. Their energy and militancy awaken society to injustices that had once gone unchallenged, and offer hope that change is at hand. 
Those who have participated in such events never forget the sense of communion, strangers united in solidarity; a tantalising glimpse of the power of humanity at its best. They confirm all the basic arguments of Marxist theory: that capitalism is a system of crisis, that workers will fight back, and that their struggle contains within it the seeds of a better world. 
Yet for every heroic revolutionary struggle there is a story of tragic defeat. The crises that generate mass resistance—economic, social or political—do not last forever. The politicians and billionaires adjust to the new situation and find ways to respond. So if immense social movements and revolutions spring seemingly out of nowhere, they can often recede or be put down even more suddenly. 
The repeated failure of such movements is a result of the lack of strong and radical working-class institutions, most important of all being a mass socialist party. The billionaires and politicians have a million ways to shield themselves from the rage of the exploited and oppressed: from repressive laws and armed police all the way to having in their pockets the moderates (usually self-described “realists”) who work to undermine our movements from within. Here I’m talking about NGOs, reformist politicians and union bureaucrats, who are always eager to contain and diffuse popular anger. 
Challenging these types of politics is crucial to building effective campaigns around all sorts of issues. Moderates often oppose the most minimal social and industrial activism, for fear of alienating their “friends” in high places. The climate and refugee NGOs, for instance, are the most typical examples of this trend. They have gone into total hibernation, not because climate change has been addressed properly, but because they want to avoid undermining the Labor government. This explains why a small socialist group is responsible for far more progressive activism in this country than much larger organisations like the Greens, Amnesty International and so on. 
These same political debates unfold in revolutionary moments, but the stakes are much higher. Should people demand everything they need and want, or do they put up with crumbs? Should workers self-organise and take disruptive action, or instead place their hopes in gradual change via the official channels? A socialist party is vital to combat the latter arguments, which are backed up by both the carrot of appearing “respectable” and the stick of police and military repression. To put it bluntly, socialism will never win unless we can break the stranglehold of reformists over the workers’ and student movements. 
This isn’t just about simply swapping the old leaders for better ones. In that scenario, the new leaders could just as easily sell-out as the current lot do. When revolutionaries talk about leadership, we are talking about a radical, democratic type of leadership, in which hundreds of thousands of working-class militants are supported to be effective radical leaders in their workplaces and wider society. 
In the climactic moments of a revolution, a mass socialist party is necessary to popularise the arguments for workers’ power and to smash the police, the jails and the armies that defend the dictatorship of capital. Only then can workers begin to reorganise society to meet human needs, which will include an end to oppression and exploitation as well as a reorganisation of our abusive relationship with nature. 
For now, we’re a long way away from that point. 
There are two big traps that socialists can fall into in moments when revolution is not on the immediate agenda. One is to lose sight of this long-term goal and just focus on lifestyle changes, charity provision and accepting that tokenistic reforms are the best we can get. The other is to daydream about a revolutionary future while doing nothing to bring it any closer. It’s easy to make the first mistake when there isn’t much going on—something is better than nothing, right? There is also a temptation to make the other error, as demonstrated by the internet left, where seemingly ultra-radical anarchists and Stalinists happily coexist in glorious isolation from any real-world resistance. 
A socialist organisation, even a relatively small one like Socialist Alternative, can help avoid these traps. It’s a self-selecting group of people who are committed to organising resistance right now while also preparing politically and theoretically for the bigger challenges to come. The more people involved in such a group, the more likely it is that the skills, knowledge and political principles accumulated through generations of class and social struggle can be passed on and built upon in a way that can shape the future of the workers’ movement. And ultimately, it will determine whether our side wins or loses. 
That’s why the most important task of any socialist organisation is to grow. It is only by building a mass socialist movement that we can begin to have a real impact on society. Small groups of radicals can occasionally punch above their weight by going viral or by calling well-timed demonstrations. But to seriously organise a challenge to capitalism, we need socialist activists and organisers embedded in every workplace, campus and social struggle. 
For this reason, every serious revolutionary socialist has to be a recruiter, winning others to the ideas of socialism and to an organisation that can make those ideas a reality. 
Capitalism encourages us to be self-centred: to focus on our image, our studies, on paying the bills. Socialists prioritise building a movement that has a shot of fixing the root causes of society’s problems once and for all. The other option is that creeps like Elon Musk will continue to rule the world. Who wants that? 
This is a revised version of a 2022 article, “<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/why-you-should-join-socialist-alternative">Why you should join Socialist Alternative</a>”. It has been updated for the 2024 Red Flag campus supplement.

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

Lenin in his own words: five key texts

'What Socialists Say' special supplement

The importance of a mass movement

Debunking the myths of Israel/Palestine

Who is Socialist Alternative?

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