The defeat of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) led government in the recent German elections and the surge in support for the extreme right Alternative for Germany (AfD) further highlight the bankruptcy of the mainstream reformist parties across the Western world. The SPD proved incapable of providing any positive alternative to the threat posed to workers and all the oppressed by the AfD. Indeed, the SPD’s policies facilitated the rise of the far right.
The “traffic light coalition” government of the SPD with the Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats presided over rising unemployment and falling working-class living standards, with sharp increases in rent and food prices. The capitalists continued, of course, to rake it in, the SPD refusing to increase taxes on the rich. Workers were made to pay the cost of massively increased military spending, much of which was used to arm Israel, with cuts to spending on education and housing.
To compound this appalling picture, the SPD capitulated to the AfD’s vile racist campaign against migrants. SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared in October 2023: “We have to deport more people and faster”.
Little wonder then that the SPD’s vote collapsed by more than a third, to just 16.4 percent—its worst result since the 1890s—while the increasingly fascist AfD doubled its support to 20.8 percent.
It is not just in Germany that the total unwillingness of social democratic and Labor parties to defend the living standards of their traditional working-class supporters from attacks by an increasingly aggressive capitalist class or to provide any alternative to the far right has led to electoral oblivion. 
In Greece, in what became known as Pasokification, the Pan Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) suffered a monumental collapse in its vote, from 43.9 percent in 2009 to a mere 4.7 percent in 2015, after it imposed harsh austerity measures to meet the demands of the European capitalist class.
In France, years of austerity and attacks on living standards under Socialist Party (SP) President François Hollande led to a wipeout, the SP down to a derisory 1.75 percent in the 2022 elections. 
In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party finished in first place in last September’s elections with 28.8 percent. The Social Democratic Party, which in the 1970s regularly polled 50 percent, recorded its lowest vote—21.1 percent—since before World War I.
In the Netherlands, Labour formed governments with conservative parties in the 1990s and embraced privatisation and welfare “reforms” that led to serious protests from the unions. Its vote fell to 5.7 percent in the 2021 elections. 
In Portugal, the Socialist Party, after nearly a decade in government, was swept from office in March 2024, its vote plunging 13 percent to 28 percent. In New Zealand, Labor lost the 2023 elections, its vote almost halving to just 26.9 percent.
In Norway, Labour had an absolute majority in parliament from 1945 to 1961 but polled just 26 percent at the last elections in 2021. The party has been increasingly neoliberal since the 1980s and, inspired by Tony Blair’s New Labour in Britain, carried out the most widespread privatisation in Norway’s history.
In Britain, Labour leader Keir Starmer managed to win office last year. But Labour’s vote rose only a measly 1.6 percent to 33.7 percent despite facing a decrepit and deeply unpopular Tory government in office for 14 years.
Because of its inability to offer any hope of a better future and its attacks on living standards, the tide rapidly turned against Starmer’s Labour. Support for the right-wing racist Reform party surged in opinion polls to between 24 and 28 percent, with Labour down to around 24 percent.
Here in Australia, despite the widespread unpopularity of the previous Morrison government, Labor just scraped into office in 2022 with 32.58 percent of the primary vote, less than it attracted in the previous election. It was Labor’s lowest vote since the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the party had fragmented. Now Albanese’s first term government is hanging on for dear life.
The overall pattern is one of reformist parties responding to the end of the postwar capitalist economic boom in the mid-1970s by a sharp shift to the right. Without exception, they embraced neoliberal policies of privatisation of core public services, substantial cuts to the welfare state, so-called deregulation of the labour market that led to increased unemployment and job insecurity, combined with attacks on workers’ rights to organise.
It led to a marked fraying of workers’ attachment to their traditional parties, reflected at an electoral level but even more sharply in terms of active working-class membership of these at one time mass parties.
It is worth looking in detail at Swedish Social Democracy, for decades held up as the shining example of successful reformism, with low levels of unemployment and a strong welfare state funded by high marginal tax rates. The Swedish model combined strong state intervention into the economy with close collaboration of party and trade union leaders with the employers’ federation.
Sweden was also seen as having a left-wing foreign policy, the country acting as a haven for political refugees and former Prime Minister Olof Palme speaking out strongly against the US war in Vietnam.
In 1967 Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, a sympathetic historian of social democracy, likened the reformist project to the successful social democratic effort to divest the Swedish king of all power except for formal grandeur: “Without dangerous and disruptive internal fights ... After a few decades they [the capitalists] will then remain, perhaps formally as kings, but in reality as naked symbols of a passed and inferior development state.” 
This utopian vision was never to be. The Swedish capitalist class did not have the slightest intention of surrendering their wealth and power. They asserted themselves forcefully in the 1980s to compel the Social Democrats to make a decisive turn to anti-worker free market policies.
Founded in 1889, the Social Democratic Party (SAP) is Sweden’s oldest and largest party. From the mid-1930s to the 1980s, the SAP won more than 40 percent of the vote, the Communists polling an additional 5 to 6 percent. From 1932 to 1976, the SAP was continuously in office and then, from 1982 to 2022, it was regularly part of coalition governments.
The Swedish welfare state model was underpinned by economic expansion and high profit rates for key Swedish capitalist firms. Unlike most of Europe, Sweden’s economy was not ravaged by World War II. Indeed, it did very nicely out of the slaughter, as, behind a facade of neutrality, it was a major supplier to Nazi Germany’s military machine. 
But by the late 1970s the boom was over. Business profitability had fallen substantially, and investment was low. The bosses went on the offensive.
In response, the SAP initiated a virtual socioeconomic counter-reformation in the early 1980s. Party and trade union leaders determined that wages would have to be held down and profits pumped up.
Social Democrat Finance Minister Kjell-Olof Feldt embraced the neoliberal approach sweeping the capitalist world. Marketisation, privatisation and deregulation became the new priorities.
Speculative capital was allowed to run rampant. A financial crisis in 1991 brought an end to full employment in Sweden, and taxpayers had to fork out 4 percent of GDP to bail out the banks.
Harsh austerity measures that promoted inequality and profiteering were pushed through in the 1990s by both SAP-led and right wing-led coalition governments. Taxes on inheritance, wealth and residential property were cut to zero, social security scaled back and the health system run down.
By the 2000s, Sweden had become a tax haven for the wealthy. Forbes business magazine declared: “Sweden Heads the Best Countries for Business for 2017”.
Economic inequality soared, wealth distribution becoming the most uneven in Western Europe. In 2002, Sweden’s top 1 percent owned 18 percent of all household wealth; by 2017 they owned 42 percent. 
The Swedish “socialist” model had never been as good as it was cracked up to be. It involved a high level of class collaboration with the top bosses by SAP officials and the union bureaucrats, who headed a highly unionised workforce. The centralised system of wage bargaining that the Swedish Trade Union Confederation relied on incorporated promoting business efficiency and productivity as one of its key aims.
The SAP was never a genuine socialist party fighting for the class interests of workers. It had long appealed to Swedish nationalism to incorporate liberals, sections of the middle class and small farmers. As early as 1917 it joined a coalition government with Liberals and did so again in 1936 and 1940.
During World War II Sweden’s “neutrality” involved the Social Democrats in cordial relations with Hitler’s regime. The foreign policy radicalism of the 1970s has long gone, and the Social Democrats strongly backed Sweden joining NATO in 2024.
By 2018 the SAP, along with the four main bourgeois parties, viewed migrants as the main “problem” facing the country, competing with each other to be the one best placed to implement racist measures. This laid the basis for the rise of the Sweden Democrats, which had Nazi roots and gained 17.5 percent of the vote in the September 2018 elections. The SAP’s share of the working-class voted plunged.
At the most recent elections in 2022, the Social Democrats polled just 30.3 percent. The coalition they led lost to a right-wing government propped up by the racist far-right Swedish Democrats that polled 20.5 percent.
The global picture is very clear: the traditional reformist parties are utterly bankrupt. They are incapable of standing up to the threat posed by the far right.
They offer nothing when it comes to defending, let alone improving, working-class living standards and democratic rights. But they have been very successful in propping up the profits of big business and transferring wealth into the hands of the billionaire class.
Reformism is not about to disappear as a political force. The traditional parties still have a base amongst the trade union bureaucracy, and they can gain a vote as a lesser evil to the likes of Dutton and Co., especially if no fighting socialist alternative has been built.
At times the old parties can revive with a left face like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain or new reformist parties can be thrown up, like Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain or Die Linke in Germany. But neither Corbyn nor Syriza nor Podemos nor Die Linke has been able to stand up to the pressure of the capitalist class.
The approach of even the most left wing of the reformists, of working for change within the framework of the capitalist system rather than challenging the system outright, is a dead end. The Western ruling classes have shown over the last 40 years that they are fully determined to roll back the gains of a previous era. They are not about to surrender meekly.
The only road forward is a concerted working-class mobilisation to take on the bosses and the far right. The reformist parties are not going to lead that fight. That makes building a socialist party, which is genuinely up for a fight, a vital task for anyone who wants to see a better world.

Mick Armstrong

Social democracy in a state of collapse

Louise O'Shea

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

Victorian Socialists (VS) is the largest-scale socialist political project in Australia for decades. There is no other project in which hundreds of socialists—including members of Socialist Alternative and many others—have conversations with literally thousands of working-class people and all comers, over a period of weeks in election campaigns like the one the party just waged in the western Melbourne electorate of Werribee. 
We get some idea of how those conversations have gone by looking at the party’s vote. In the case of Werribee, it was high enough to leave pundits and rival political parties scratching their heads. What unfathomable secret, they wonder, can explain how an area with close to zero history of serious socialist political activity could deliver a very creditable 7.1 percent of the first-preference vote to VS’s Werribee candidate Sue Munro (up from 3.7 percent in the 2022 Victorian state election)? 
The final tally of 3,010 votes was fewer than 200 behind the Greens, who had the benefit of a political profile established over decades (as well as, in the case of Werribee, getting the donkey vote—the number one spot on a ballot paper listing twelve candidates in total). At a couple of booths VS scored 14 percent of all votes cast, coming third behind Labor and the Liberals. “It’s not all great for the Liberals, the socialists got a bigger swing”, the Australian Financial Review moaned in an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15ndxHKFYj/">online headline</a>
reflecting on the Werribee result. 
Melbourne’s Age newspaper described our decent result as a “<a href="https://x.com/vic_socialists/status/1888178135075803397">surprise packet</a>”. But it’s no surprise to anyone involved with VS that a socialist message of rage, hope and resistance can strike a chord among thousands of people in the working-class heartlands of Melbourne, and beyond. 
Campaigning for Victorian Socialists gets us into conversations with rage-filled healthcare workers about the state of our hospitals and the slide to privatised health care; with voters appalled at Israel’s genocide in Palestine and Labor’s complicity in it; and with union members disappointed by the lack of fight from what should be the strongest organisations our side has. 
A minority are already committed socialists, delighted to encounter a party that takes working-class politics and working-class people seriously. Many more have never met an active socialist before but can relate to our sincerity, our political conviction and our basic propositions: that it’s crazy that billionaires keep doubling their wealth when it’s working-class people who do all the work around here; that we shouldn’t tolerate being sold out by Labor, which keeps the capitalists’ profits piling up while throwing crumbs (at best) to the rest of us; that everything is the wrong way up in this society; and though we’re not promising to solve every problem, we’re serious about helping working-class people organise and fight back. 
Our Werribee result was no one-off. In Victoria’s 2022 state election, more than 52,000 people voted for VS in the upper house and 48,000 in the lower house. You have to go back to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Victorian_state_election">1940s</a> to find a socialist electoral campaign in Victoria that got anywhere near that number of votes. As the lead VS candidate in the Northern Metro upper house region in 2022, I received just 300 fewer primary votes than the eventual winner of the final of five seats. In the Western Metro region, VS candidate Liz Walsh came even closer to being elected, though both of us missed out after preferences. 
Given how far socialist ideas have been pushed to the margins in this country, this was a real achievement—and a solid contribution to bringing socialism back into everyday political life. We built on our 2022 campaign in last year’s local council elections—winning 67,296 first preference votes, with an average vote share of 10.8 percent for each ward we ran in. Owen Cosgriff was elected as a VS councillor in Bendigo with more than 40 percent of first preferences.
Our goal in winning positions in local councils and parliaments is not to rain socialism down upon a grateful and passive public. Rather, it’s the opposite: we aim to use those platforms to promote every strike, protest and act of collective resistance, and to build the politics of intransigent opposition to capitalism and to the exploitation, wars and oppression that the system produces and feeds off. 
It’s not like we’re waiting around to win parliamentary seats to play a positive role in the resistance though. In 2022, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/reproductive-freedom-precondition-equality-interview-liz-walsh">15,000 people</a> answered a call-out from VS Western Metro candidate Liz Walsh to rally for abortion rights after the US Supreme Court scrapped Roe v Wade. We’ve been <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/campaigns/palestine">active in solidarity</a> with the people of Palestine throughout Israel’s Gaza genocide. When Woolworths workers put out a call for <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/protesters-block-entry-to-woolworths-warehouse-as-grocery-shortages-continue-20241202-p5kv0m.html">picket line support</a> during their recent strike, a couple of hundred Victorian Socialist members and supporters <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DDDp0_3Tbhm/?img_index=4">joined</a> the pre-dawn picket line at Dandenong South. 
All this activity sits alongside Victorian Socialists’ success in waging large-scale and effective electoral campaigns, as a contribution to rebuilding socialist political forces. Our next major opportunity to do this is in the rapidly approaching federal election. 
High-profile housing activist Jordan van den Lamb (aka purplepingers) has become the hero of renters and the scourge of Australia’s landlords through his <a href="https://www.shitrentals.org/">shitrentals.org</a>
website and his viral <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@purplepingers?lang=en">tiktoks</a>. Victorian Socialists is proud to have Jordan as our lead Senate candidate. Anyone across the state of Victoria can play a role in the <a href="https://pingers4parliament.com/">pingers4parliament</a> campaign. We’re also running lower house candidates in the seats of Fraser in Melbourne’s west, Cooper and Scullin in the north, and the regional seat of Bendigo.
We’ve already kicked off the campaigning. Whatever your level of experience, there’s an important role for everyone—letterboxing, doorknocking and helping organise events. <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/join">Signing up to be a member of Victorian Socialists</a> is the best way to contribute and to get involved. Find an event on our <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/join">website</a>
or <a href="https://www.instagram.com/vic_socialists/?hl=en">socials</a>, and bring your friends.
Anyone serious about fighting for socialism needs to take opportunities to expand the reach of socialist ideas, to inspire more resistance to capitalism and to convince more people to become active socialists. Victorian Socialists makes a valuable contribution to each of these projects—so jump on board and get active!

Jerome Small

Victorian Socialists: putting socialism on the political map

Should deference to oppressed people be the basis for solidarity? Among progressives, the answer is increasingly yes. 
At the University of Melbourne’s sizeable Gaza solidarity encampment last year for example, events were in effect dictated by a group of about six individuals—the only people involved with “lived experience” of colonial occupation—and who therefore unilaterally decided who could participate in the action and what strategy and tactics participants were allowed to use. 
It is likewise now routine for organisers of events like Invasion Day rallies to draw up authoritarian rules that attendees are expected to adhere to, many of which violate democratic rights in a way that would be vigorously objected to if imposed by the police or government. 
But because they are the dictates of the oppressed to be adhered to by the “privileged”, they are not only accepted by most attendees; they are actively enforced by large numbers for whom deference to such demands has become both second nature and a badge of honour. At Invasion Day, this means in practice white people aggressively policing the rallies.
This fawning approach to oppressed people is so unquestioningly accepted as a moral virtue that it generally escapes interrogation. But in an effort to give it a more solid ideological footing, two UK academics, Kerri Woods and Joshua Hobbs, last year published a journal <a href="https://www.theglobaljusticenetwork.org/index.php/gjn/article/view/274/211">article</a>
titled “The Normative Demand for Deference in Political Solidarity” with the explicit aim of better thinking through this “prevalent” but chronically “under-theorised” practice. The article didn’t make much of a splash, and it’s not likely to enter the canon of journal articles, if there is such a thing. But it is of interest because, in attempting to draw out the theory behind this ubiquitous practice, the authors inadvertently make a compelling case against it.
The problem, according to Woods and Hobbs, is this: “Allies of those experiencing injustice or oppression face a dilemma: to be neutral in the face of calls to solidarity risks siding with oppressors, yet to speak or act on behalf of others risks compounding the injustice.” 
The solution to this dilemma is “a normative demand for deference” to those with “lived experience”, which means “accepting the authority of a given speaker’s testimony or guidance and accepting normative demands arising from that as prima facie action-guiding”. In other words, whatever the oppressed say or say to do about their oppression should be accepted unquestioningly as a matter of principle. 
This, they argue, is “an important corrective to the tendency of the privileged to erase and to fail to understand the experience of oppression, and, alongside this, to deny and diminish the agency of those in disempowered positions”. 
This tendency of the non-oppressed doesn’t just mean that they might sometimes be insensitive or imperfect opponents of inequality, and therefore should exercise caution and be respectful when showing solidarity. Such an approach is denoted by different academic jargon: “epistemic humility”. 
The Normative Demand for Deference, by contrast, involves understanding the “distinct limitations” to the “knowledge or authority to speak and act” on the part of those who do not have “lived experience” of oppression, and therefore the likelihood that any attempt by them to challenge oppression will “compound the injustice”. Only through the complete relinquishing of agency in thought and action on the part of would-be “allies” can there be “authentic” solidarity and the perpetuation of oppression avoided. 
There is no doubt that there is a need for humility, sensitivity and respect in political spaces where people’s experiences of life and society are likely to differ. But the assumption underpinning this argument—that perfect knowledge of the experience of a particular form of oppression is a precondition for effective solidarity and necessary to avoid generating further injustice—does not stand up to scrutiny. Nor does the converse: that first-hand experience of a specific oppression provides the sufferer with some sort of portal into truth and strategic infallibility not available to others.
Oppressed people simply do not uniformly demonstrate a greater understanding of or tendency to challenge their oppression. The very experience of oppression, which by definition degrades and disempowers people, can mean that those experiencing it more readily internalise the ideology of inequality that shapes their reality. Just think of the phenomenon of refugees or new migrants who oppose refugee boat arrivals on the basis that the actions of those refugees attract hostility to already arrived refugee and migrants. 
Or women who spend endless money and time on products and procedures to make themselves look younger or more “attractive”, and who influence or shame other women into doing likewise. 
Oppression can of course also lead to resistance and rebellion, and struggles against oppression almost always are led by members of that group. But even then, the ideologies and strategies those leaders gravitate towards are not necessarily the most effective, “lived experience” notwithstanding. Take some of the early gay rights activists, who argued that invisibility (remaining in the closet) was the best way to be accepted by society. Or the many national liberation struggles that have adopted counterproductive terrorist tactics that have more often than not advantaged the imperialist power that was oppressing them in the first place. 
Then there are countless examples of non-oppressed people demonstrating meaningful solidarity even when their experience and understanding, or likely understanding, of those they’re standing up for is quite limited. The international solidarity movement against apartheid in South Africa, which provided important encouragement to the struggle within South Africa, is one example. The solidarity meetings and actions in support of the 1966 strike by Aboriginal stockmen and domestic workers at the Wave Hill station in the Northern Territory, which eventually won important gains, including the first iteration of land rights, is another. 
In fact, gains can be won for the oppressed even when there is no understanding at all nor any conscious intention to win gains for the particular oppressed group on the part of the people whose actions win them. When the Family Code was abolished in Russia shortly after the successful workers’ revolution in October 1917, it opened the door to greater acceptance of lifestyles outside the nuclear family. But this was not primarily because people with “lived experience” of homophobia in Russia demanded workers take this action. It was because the workers came to view as intolerable all forms of ruling class social and economic control. This made them natural allies of all the oppressed, whatever they thought they were doing.
If “lived experience” is uniquely able to bestow insight and political wisdom on its subject, and this knowledge is unavailable to those without it, how can we understand how and why all this happens and has happened?
If meaningful solidarity can be measured in its contribution to winning greater rights for the oppressed, the latter examples would have to count as very meaningful, despite the notable absence of deference. If instead solidarity is only “authentic” when those taking part in it are deemed to have prostrated themselves sufficiently to guarantee moral purity regardless of what it means practically for the struggle to end oppression, then solidarity is no longer particularly relevant to the pursuit of social justice. 
Strengthening the fight for liberation and to end oppression notably does not feature in the case Woods and Hobbs make for deference. Instead, they point to deference’s potential to facilitate emotional repair of the psychological damage caused by oppression. As they put it, “There is also an element of moral repair in adopting the appropriate (deferring) attitude or response to persons affected by injustice. To not accept as authoritative the testimony of those with lived experience is to disrespect the person as a knower”. By elevating the “testimony” of the oppressed, their dignity is accordingly restored and trauma to some degree ameliorated. 
The problem with this that the non-oppressed become the potential saviours of the oppressed, despite their ostensible commitment to being dominated by them. The hierarchy might be artificially inverted in the world of deference, but the “privileged” still hold the key to liberation, or, more accurately, the psychological recovery of the oppressed from their oppression. This denies the agency of the oppressed. Oppressed people simultaneously shouldn’t be engaged with as equals, argued with or debated because it takes away their agency, but only the action of allies properly elevating their voices and listening to their “moral knowledge” can alleviate their suffering. 
Another glaring problem with what Woods and Hobbs advocate, and which they acknowledge to be a problem but don’t address, is that it is not even possible to do what they suggest. The reality is that oppressed groups are not homogeneous, and rarely agree on even basic questions. Just think of the referendum about establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament—an utterly bland gesture that was nevertheless a chance for the population to express some minimal sympathy with the plight of Aboriginal people. The referendum was strongly supported but also vehemently opposed by different Indigenous people, for a range of reasons. 
If the task of an ally is to do as an oppressed group says, this situation presents a problem. To decide who to defer to, the non-oppressed must exercise their agency, but the limits of their “lived experience” mean that, in doing so, they are only likely to add to the injustice according to the “deference” schema. When there is no consensus among the oppressed then, there is no possibility of deference and nor therefore of meaningful solidarity. 
The argument for deference also can’t accommodate the overlapping oppressions under capitalism, all with their own peculiar dynamics and manifestations. Working out which combination of oppressions commands the greatest authority within this matrix at any one time, assuming the would-be ally can legitimately make such a determination, is no straightforward task.
A problem with deference that Woods and Hobbs do attempt to solve is the unfairly onerous burden it places on the oppressed to educate and direct the non-oppressed. This has generated its own peculiar backlash in the form of resentment at the “work” the oppressed are expected to do to facilitate solidarity, the nasty flavour of which is encapsulated in the title of this popular 2017 Medium article “White people, stop asking us to educate you about racism. Signed, every POC [person of colour] you’ve burdened with this question”. 
In keeping with their deferential approach, Woods and Hobbs get around this problem by advocating what they call “second order engagement”, an alternative to active solidarity which relieves the oppressed of this burden. They define this type of engagement as “reading ethnographies, narrative work of any kind (fact or fiction), watching films or listening to podcasts, that offer testimonies or reflections on lived experience—which, to some extent, may be taken as a practice of solidarity that expresses deference to those with lived experience of oppression. This may evolve into not just reading or watching material, but promoting and distributing material: organising exhibitions, screenings, readings (though it may not).”
But even this becomes a minefield, because to work out what material to best engage with should legitimately be done by the oppressed, not those without lived experience. But then that places yet another undue impost on them. So, consistent application of the deference approach leads logically towards disengagement as the ultimate expression of real solidarity. If the first rule is “do no harm” to the oppressed by exercising agency or requiring the oppressed to do the work to fill the void said agency has left, disengagement is the safest bet to ensure authentic solidarity. Happy news for the supporters of the status quo. 
For those of us not keen on the idea that activism is best done by withdrawing or spending inordinate time in front of a television set, there is an alternative: one that involves moving away from the idea that the subjective experience of individuals is the holy grail of truth and that listening to and “elevating” the right ones the pinnacle of political virtue. 
Sensitivity to the reality of oppression, and success in challenging it, is much more effectively forged through the practical and collective experience of fighting society’s various injustices and finding common ground between groups that face the same enemy. The process of developing and testing strategies aimed at achieving a clear and common goal has the potential to build bonds of solidarity between people and groups that otherwise might not have had reason to interact. This is precisely why the bosses and governments so frequently deploy divide and rule strategies to undermine the strength of campaigns or industrial campaigns. 
Working together in this way, whether to maintain a picket line, maximise numbers at a rally or prevent an eviction or deportation, brings people together as equals, in a way the practice of deference cannot. Deference engenders more of a disciple-prophet type relationship than one of comrades as equals in a common struggle. 
This matters, because the type of society we are fighting for is connected with the means adopted to achieve it. If a revolution is brought about primarily through military struggle, for example, it usually does not develop the level of working-class organisation necessary to ensure the resulting society is genuinely democratic and that production is under collective control. 
The way workers’ struggle, and ultimately revolution, rests on the collective power of the oppressed majority is what makes socialism—a society of mass, democratic control over production by the working class—possible. The collective fight against a common enemy necessary to achieve this itself changes people and shapes their political ideas—no-one, not the oppressed or anyone else, starts out with all the answers. The rigid hierarchical nature of the deference model leaves little room for this dynamic to develop. 
Of course, people’s experience of oppression should be respected. If it is not, and activist spaces or struggles just seem to reproduce the same demeaning conditions that the rest of society foist on people, this weakens the struggle. But the deference Woods and Hobbs talk about doesn’t help get us there. It condemns us to a never-ending vigilance over who is where in the pecking order of suffering in order to decide whose perspective should dominate our political thought and practice. 
The accumulation of experiences of fighting alongside others, the conclusions drawn from victories and defeats, and the obvious strength that unity confers shape the consciousness and understanding of all involved, and provide a material reason to be concerned with and sensitive to the suffering of others. The passivity and atomisation inherent to “second order engagement” cannot do this. Nor can deference. Woods and Hobbs have done us a service in highlighting why this widespread practice leads us nowhere.

Deference to the oppressed gets us nowhere

Conferences about colonialism aren’t unusual today. Universities host them regularly. But the one that took place in September 1920 was different. When the delegates set off for that conference, they were taking their lives in their hands. 
As boats from the east made their way across the Caspian Sea towards Baku, they were strafed by British Army warplanes: two delegates were killed. Participants travelling from the west through Russia found that anti-Communist militias had ripped up the tracks, burned down the stations, and threatened to besiege their trains. Borders were closed, and delegates had to sneak through.
The British had good reason to worry about this conference. It was called not just to discuss colonialism, but to end it. The participants were representatives of the international Communist movement and the various national and anti-colonial movements, particularly through Asia and the Middle East. 
“The European working class sees now, at every step, that the course of history has united the working people of the East with the workers of the West”, said Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International. That organisation, which united the post-revolutionary Russian government with Communist parties around the world, had called the conference. Zinoviev spoke of two “streams”: the “workers’ proletarian Communist struggle” and the “movement of the oppressed nationalities” that was challenging British and French colonialism. Those two streams, Zinoviev said, must be united into “one single tumultuous, powerful stream that, like the sea, will sweep all obstacles from its path, clearing the land of all the evil from which we have suffered so long”.
European colonialism existed before capitalism, but the two would become inextricably linked, and the growth of each would drive the development of the other. Precious metals from the Americas and slaves from Africa fed the growth of early capitalism in Europe. By the late nineteenth century, industrial capitalism had driven European powers to acquire colonies around the world. 
The unending pressure to compete and accumulate profits meant there was no end to the need for raw materials, export markets and armed outposts to ward off rivals and terrorise “the natives”. Continents were carved up and “zones of influence” determined by treaties between Western powers: plans for the division of Africa were finally settled at the Berlin Conference of 1884, without reference to the opinions of any Africans themselves. 
In the same period, as capitalism transformed Europe and expanded throughout the globe, the modern anti-capitalist movement came into existence. When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, it was impossible to ignore capitalism’s global spread—and its opponents’ necessarily internationalist strategy. 
The capitalist class, Marx and Engels wrote, “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the capitalist mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst”. In the broad outlines of this foundational document—more a declaration of principles than a worked-out theory—Marx and Engels still emphasised that capitalism had become a world system, and the socialist movement would be a world movement: the workers had “a world to win”.
But it was over the next decade that Marx and Engels would come to fully understand the promise of anti-colonial movements. At the time of the Manifesto, Europe was entering a wave of revolutions, and colonial questions were not at the forefront of Marx’s mind. When those revolutions receded, leading activists like Marx and Engels became political refugees. Marx made a living writing on world affairs for English-language newspapers. Through this work, as Kevin Anderson traces in his work Marx on the Margins, the 1850s became a time of political discovery for Marx.
The European revolutionary movement was in retreat; many of its key leaders were drifting away from their principles. Marx famously spent this time doing the research that would become Capital. But his journalistic obligations led him to study movements in Asia. During this time, he came to see that not only the global spread of capitalism but also the native populations’ resistance to colonialism could be a powerful revolutionary force.
The Indian rebellion of 1857, in which army officers trained by the British mutinied to lead an uprising against colonial rule, made a powerful impression—especially in comparison to the then dormant European socialist movement. “India”, he wrote to Engels, “is now our best ally”. The uprising in India, Chinese resistance to the British and other anti-colonial movements showed the possibility that world capitalism could be simultaneously challenged on two fronts: a revolutionary socialist workers’ movement combined with rebellions in the colonies. 
Marxist anti-colonialism was not simply a matter of supporting the “native” ruling classes, who could try to maintain their own rule under the guise of protecting traditional ways of life. But nor was it a matter of waiting for capitalism to “civilise” the natives and bring them into the world socialist movement. Socialist workers in Europe would have to oppose the oppression wrought by the colonial powers. When, in the 1860s, Marx and Engels helped found the International Workingmen’s Association to bring together the socialist parties of the world, they fought stridently for it to take a position in solidarity with colonised peoples—struggling in particular to encourage English workers to act in solidarity with the Irish national liberation movement.
This strategic position was based on the idea of an international revolutionary movement of workers, which respected no borders and aimed to overthrow all capitalist states. Naturally, such a movement would be the enemy of any nation that tried to extend its state power to rule over colonies and steal their wealth. But over the coming decades, the socialist movement, organised in the Second International, split into two wings. 
On the one hand, figures such as Eduard Bernstein—often described as “moderates”—would argue that revolution was impossible and unnecessary, and that socialists should avoid conflict and work through existing institutions. They would also become supporters of colonial projects. Opposing them were figures like Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, who put opposition to colonialism at the centre of their revolutionary politics. Both saw colonialism—and competition for overseas influence—as central to the logic of capitalism, its drive to war and its tendency to economic collapse.
When World War One broke out in 1914, these revolutionaries also saw anti-colonialism as central to the strategy for socialist revolution. Luxemburg, writing from jail, condemned capitalism not only for its contemporary war, but for its atrocities in the colonies: “This same imperialism doomed tens of thousands of Hereros to destruction”. 
Lenin—exiled from Russia—wrote to revolutionaries at home, advising them to put this question to the working class: “Are you willing to pay these gentry, the capitalists, hundreds of millions of roubles [the Russian currency] every year for a war waged for the division of the African colonies, Turkey, etc.?” He proposed “workers and peasants’ peace terms” to end the war: “liberation of all colonies; liberation of all dependent, oppressed and unequal nations”.
When the Russian workers seized power at the end of 1917, this program was put into action. Almost immediately, the new revolutionary government published its Decree on Peace, describing “this war over the issue of how to divide among the strong and rich nations the weak nationalities they have conquered” to be “the greatest of crimes against humanity”. To the German state, Russia’s negotiators, led by Leon Trotsky, proposed peace on the basis that “colonial questions” be resolved by removing all troops and organising referendums of the colonial populations to decide their future. 
Unsurprisingly, the terms were not accepted by the German imperialist powers, or any others. Instead, the Marxist movement—which was being reorganised into separate revolutionary Communist parties inspired by the Russian example—would have to reach out to the oppressed colonial populations themselves.
“We do not want to become like the ‘heroes’ of the Second International”, Zinoviev told the anti-colonial conference in Baku in 1920. “We are mindful that in this world live not only people with white skin ... We want to put an end to the rule of capital everywhere in the world. And this will become possible only when we have lit the fire of revolution not merely in Europe and America but throughout the world, and when all the working people of Asia and Africa march with us.”
Of course, this was easier said than done—and even saying it was difficult, when the world’s imperialist powers were trying to eliminate the new Russian revolutionary government using the same techniques of mass slaughter and starvation they had learned in their colonial territories. 
But there were serious political challenges, too. The anti-colonial movements were based in economically underdeveloped countries and could be strongly influenced by local landlords and capitalists. Outside Russia, the European revolutionary movement was still too small and weak to challenge its own ruling classes. The global alliance between socialists and anti-colonial movements was an important strategic goal; implementing it required a level of strength and organisation that had not yet been reached. 
“If the struggle in Persia, India, and Turkey were merely to bring to power the capitalists and landlords of those countries, with their national parliaments and senates, the masses of the people would have gained nothing”, argued a Russian delegate, Pavlovich. “Every newly formed state would be rapidly drawn, by the very course of events and the iron logic of the laws of capitalist economy, into the vicious circle of militarism and imperialist politics.”
This vision of communist anti-colonialism inspired generations of fighters—but it has not yet been realised. The imperialist blockade of Russia had the desired effect: the revolutionary movement was starved out and replaced with the bureaucracy of Joseph Stalin. Zinoviev himself ended up in Stalin’s prisons, as would “all the speakers from Asia at the Baku congress who were within Stalin’s reach and whose fate is known”, according to the historian John Riddell. 
Stalin’s “Communist” movement retained the language of anti-colonialism when it suited its interests. But the idea of a simultaneous global movement to wipe out capitalism and colonialism in “one single tumultuous, powerful stream” of resistance became an occasional rhetorical device, not a strategic reality.
Now, the “vicious circle of militarism and imperialist politics” has absorbed most of the post-colonial nations. Some, like India, are happily supplying arms to Israel. Others, like Iran, collaborate with Russia’s foreign military adventures. China even pursues its own internal settler-colonial project in Xinjiang. The world remains in need of the strategy shaped by Marx: a global anti-capitalist revolution to liberate the oppressed all over the world.

D. Taylor

Communists versus colonialism

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

For left-wing people, it has long been uncontroversial to welcome into Australia refugees and migrants. 
Perhaps not any more. In a recent Instagram post, Keiran Stewart-Assheton, president of the Black People’s Union, an Indigenous activist group, claimed that “economic migrants” (those seeking a better life away from poverty in the underdeveloped world) participate in the colonial occupation of Australia and therefore “reap the fruits of colonialism and imperialism themselves” and are “agents of empire”. 
The post was particularly bizarre, given the context in which it was made. In recent months, refugees have set up protest camps outside government offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The encampments are attempts to highlight the federal government’s inhuman treatment of refugees. Stewart-Assheton’s post was in response to an Indigenous activist’s speech at the Melbourne protest, welcoming both refugees and migrants to Australia. 
Stewart-Assheton’s anti-migrant prejudice is shameful. Indeed, the label “economic migrants” has long been used by the political right to generate hostility toward immigrants and to turn working-class people against each other, distracting them from the crimes of big business and politicians. 
Yet hostility towards so-called settler migrants isn’t a random quirk of the Black People’s Union. It flows from some of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary “anti-colonial” politics. 
The dominant framework on the left for understanding anti-Aboriginal racism is settler colonial theory, first popularised by the academic Patrick Wolfe. Activists influenced by that framework present the main divide in Australia as being between Indigenous people and a homogeneous “settler” population. Anyone who is not Indigenous—no matter how exploited or oppressed they may be themselves—is considered to be a privileged settler and coloniser reaping the benefits of Aboriginal people’s oppression. 
This idea downplays the fact that the majority of so-called settlers suffer from gross forms of exploitation and oppression. After all, can we really believe that poor migrants working shitty jobs in the outer suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne have more in common with CEOs or politicians than they do with refugees and Aboriginal people, just because they happen to have moved to Australia? 
What utility does the concept of “settler” have when it can be equally applied to Peter Dutton, who calls for people waving Hezbollah flags to be deported from the country, and people of Lebanese heritage who defy the pervasive racism of the politicians and the media—and harassment from the cops and the security services—to protest against Israeli terrorism? By the logic of modern “anti-colonial” politics, whatever the differences between them, both are part of a privileged settler population.
The movement of people worldwide has been a constant feature of human society, particularly in modern times. Some migrants move to flee poverty, only to be met with horrendous racist treatment in their new country—if they are admitted at all under the many migration laws that determine whether or not they will be of use to capitalists. 
Migrants can be horrendously paid and work in precarious workplaces, while their rights as workers are not respected at all. On top of this, they are often used as scapegoats to cover for the failures of the capitalist system. 
For example, in Australia, the Liberals are now blaming the housing crisis on migrants, when it’s the government-designed housing market that has turned shelter into a vehicle for making one section of the (disproportionately Liberal-voting) population incredibly wealthy through perpetual asset-price inflation. 
The housing crisis affects almost all working people, particularly those with lower incomes and families lacking accumulated wealth. Yet supporters of settler colonial theory would have migrants slaving away in shitty jobs and living pay cheque to pay cheque “pay the rent” as though they are no different from Rio Tinto. 
Of course, there have been periods when migration has occurred as a part of brutal processes of colonisation—as in the history of colonial Australia. However, to condemn anyone as an evil settler and coloniser for having left the country in which they were born to go somewhere else that has an indigenous population—that is foolish in the extreme. As in the case of Stewart-Assheton, it can just dovetail with the anti-migrant bile of the racist right. 
The problem isn’t just that it can lead activists to counterpose the interests of refugees and migrants. To follow the logic of the argument would mean condemning the hundreds of millions of workers living in Canada, the US, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand as lackeys of imperialism and capitalism.
In some situations, the strident denunciation of settlers has been used to justify the most reactionary crimes. In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalists have unleashed waves of violence and forced expulsions of Rohingya, who have been categorised as “migrants” rather than native to the country. 
In her book Home Rule, Nandita Sharma shows that conflicts in Africa have often been framed as racialised struggles between supposed “Black African natives” and “light-skinned Arab migrants”. Sharma argues that the infamous 1994 Rwandan genocide had its roots in “the self-identification of Hutus as the National-Natives of Rwanda and the categorization of Tutsis as colonizing Migrants” who had to be violently removed from a country that they apparently did not “belong” to. 
Sinhala chauvinists in Sri Lanka similarly argue that Tamils are basically foreigners, and far-right Hindu nationalists in India want to expel Muslims from the country on similar grounds. 
None of this is to deny the very real oppression suffered by indigenous peoples in many countries around the world, particularly here in Australia. However, when activists and theorists try to set up a world view based on the idea that the whole planet is a struggle between settlers on the one hand and radical indigenous peoples on the other, it can only lead to absurdity. 
Many activists influenced by settler colonial theory would reject Stewart-Assheton’s conclusions. But conceptualising the fundamental divide in the world as a battle between indigenous peoples and settler populations makes it easy to see why people can dismiss the rights of migrants and the struggles of workers.
In many ways, settler colonial theory is a form of indigenous nationalism. Like all forms of nationalist politics, it views the world in a classless and sectional manner. This is clear from Stewart-Assheton and the Black People’s Union argument that the key divide in Australia is not between bosses and workers but between Indigenous people and settlers, and that, therefore, an anti-colonial revolution by Indigenous people (who make up just 3 percent of the population) is supposedly the first step to both Indigenous liberation and socialism. 
It’s on this basis that Stewart-Assheton says that all anti-racist, progressive and working-class struggles should be subordinated to Indigenous struggles (and therefore subordinated to the Black People’s Union) and that any failure to agree with such a program or its theoretical underpinning springs from a settler mindset.
This so-called radical program is incapable of securing either Indigenous liberation or socialism. In the end, all it does is take the focus away from the capitalist class and pit the struggles of oppressed people against each other in an Olympics-style game of identity politics, in which the starting point is figuring out who is most oppressed, rather than thinking about how we can best unite to beat our common enemy—the capitalist ruling class and its repressive state.
Oskar Martin is the Indigenous representative on the Student Council at the University of Melbourne Student Union.
Jordan Humphreys is the author of <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/indigenous-liberation-and-socialism">Indigenous Liberation &amp; Socialism</a>.

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In his lifetime, Karl Marx witnessed the establishment of capitalism as an all-encompassing, global system, and with it the international working class—a force capable of radical social transformation. As this system of exploitation and ruthless competition developed, Marx studied it closely, becoming well known for his theories of class, exploitation and value. 
The power of Marx’s economic writing means that frequently, and sometimes deliberately, his political insights are overlooked. But Marx was, first and foremost, a revolutionary, an activist and a radical. Coupled with an understanding of his economic insights, the evolution of his political writings demonstrates most clearly how Marx became a Marxist, and founded a movement that continues to fight for radical social change more than 140 years after his death.
In February 1848, Marx published The Communist Manifesto with collaborator Frederick Engels for the Communist League, a recently formed revolutionary party based in London that both were part of. The manifesto was a bold call to revolution and an assertion that it was the working class that must lead it. Immediately, historical events provided a test and, ultimately, vindication for the manifesto.
The 1840s were racked with mass hunger and poverty for those at the bottom of society. At the top, rifts and ruptures were emerging between the rulers—the old nobility and the conservative bourgeois states—and the liberal bourgeois reformers who were challenging them. 
In 1848 a wave of popular uprisings and revolutions crashed over Europe. Beginning in France, upheavals went on to rock the Habsburg, Russian and Prussian empires. It was the last radical gasp of the emerging bourgeoisie.
The uprising in France began in February 1848. Initially successful, it toppled the unpopular regime of Louis Philippe through an alliance of the liberal reformers and radical workers in the cities. It ended only a few months later when the capitalist forces turned on the workers and drowned their struggle in blood. The capitalists installed a military dictatorship with a liberal veneer, and in so doing laid the basis for the brutal dictatorship of Louis Napoleon that followed. The workers, although outnumbered and outgunned, erected barricades and fought heroically in the streets of Paris.
In the German principalities, the bourgeoisie were far more acquiescent to the old nobility. They undermined their own nationalist project of uniting Germany into a modern capitalist state by refusing to confront the German kings and princes. They abandoned the working-class forces, leaving them vulnerable to brutal defeat.
Marx and Engels were keen observers of these developments and were closely involved in the German uprisings. Engels fought to the bitter end in south-west Germany, while Marx participated in the Rhineland with the Communist League.
Marx was engaged in debates about strategy and organisation within the league at this time, and emerged from these heady days with two key insights: first, that the bourgeoisie was no longer a revolutionary class and could not be relied upon to confront the old feudal ruling classes; and second, that the working class must organise independently as a class.
After experiencing the brutal backlash of the old order in alliance with the new capitalist ruling classes, he concluded that the liberal bourgeoisie was not willing to pursue democratic reforms, including those they themselves would benefit from as a class, like political freedoms. He compared the approaches of the French and German bourgeoisies in an article written in November 1848: “In France it [the bourgeoisie] played the part of a tyrant and made its own counter-revolution. In Germany it acts like a slave and carries out the counter-revolution for its own tyrants”.
Following from these revelations were organisational implications, namely, the urgent need for working-class independence. He argued that the working class must act in its own interests and needed independent organisation to do so. He was beginning to see what this could look like as he took inspiration from nascent forms of working-class organisation, from the Silesian weavers’ strike to the Chartists in Britain and the workers’ clubs in Paris. 
He outlined these arguments most clearly in his Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League in March 1850, known as the March Address. He explains, “[T]he workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organisation of the workers’ party ... the League must aim to make every one of its communes a centre and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence”.
As the 1848 upheavals were crushed, Marx and Engels were exiled to London. There, they found themselves at the heart of the British Empire—the centre of industrial capitalism—and surrounded by the most developed working class in the world at the time. This working class was, by the 1860s, rallying for abolition of slavery in response to the US Civil War and in support of Irish independence. Much of Marx’s political life was preoccupied with how the working class could develop the political consciousness necessary to take power, and the 1860s provided an opportunity to better understand this through close observation of the workers’ movement happening around him.
Civil war broke out in America in 1861. On one side was the Confederacy, fighting to secede in order to maintain slavery in the interests of the southern landowning elite. On the other side was the northern bourgeoisie, the Union, for whom industrial development was key and slavery dispensable.
The British ruling class came down on the side of the Confederacy, certain sections pushing for Britain to intervene. Slavery provided Britain and Europe with cheap cotton and was an integral part of industrialisation and world trade. It’s estimated that the livelihood of one quarter of Britain was based on the cotton industry. On the other hand, European and English workers by and large supported the Union, even those in Lancashire, who were devastated by the cotton famine.
The Civil War signalled new political possibilities after a decade or so of retreat following 1848. Meetings of workers in support of the Union were called by the London Trade Union Council. This renewed internationalism became the precursor to the International Working Men’s Association, better known as the First International, which Marx helped found in 1864. The International brought together unions and radical political currents from across Europe.
Unlike many other radicals at the time, Marx landed firmly on the side of the Union. He understood that slavery needed to be opposed because the presence of slavery anywhere undermines the conditions of labour everywhere. In his words, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded”. Although Abraham Lincoln and other conservative Union leaders initially denied the war was about slavery and refused to promise abolition, Marx identified that a Confederate victory would mean an expansion of slavery. He could see that the war was a contest between two economic systems, and only one side could win out. 
In a similar vein, the Irish struggle for independence from the yoke of British occupation gave Marx an opportunity to deepen his understanding of how political questions were central to working class self-emancipation. In the 1860s, Fenianism, a radical expression of Irish nationalism, emerged, inspiring many Irish workers and English workers to take up the cause.
A high point of this was the campaign to save the Manchester Martyrs in 1867. Three Irish nationalists were put on trial and publicly hanged for the death of a police officer. The ruling class whipped up a hysterical campaign to inspire anti-Irish sentiment. A campaign for the release of all Irish political prisoners was then spurred on.
Although Marx and Engels criticised Fenian terrorist tactics in private letters to one another, they championed the Irish cause and pushed for the International to take up the fight. Marx fought the more conservative union leaders to his right and the ultra-lefts around Bakunin, who were hesitant to support Irish independence. He argued that the impoverishment of Ireland was a great source of wealth for the British Empire, and that anti-Irish sentiment amongst English workers undermined working conditions and their ability to fight the English ruling class. He urged, “[I]t is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland ... to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation”.
Marx and Engels’ enthusiasm for and affinity with working-class struggle is captured in Engels’ words to Marx in a letter the day after the execution of the Manchester Martyrs in 1867: “To my knowledge, the only time that anyone has been executed for anything similar in a civilised state was the case of John Brown at Harpers Ferry. The Fenians could not wish for a better precedent”.
Marx first articulated a theory of working-class self-emancipation in the 1840s. Decades later, in 1871, this theoretical assertion became a reality. For 71 days, Paris was under workers’ control, a heroic experiment in radical democracy and the first of its kind.
In The Civil War in France, a pamphlet Marx wrote in June on behalf of the International, Marx describes it as a “glorious harbinger of a new society”, one of many emotive descriptions throughout.
The backdrop to this uprising was the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. France was losing, and Adolphe Thiers, the head of the new French republic, refused to defend Paris if it meant arming the working class. He sent soldiers into the working-class neighbourhood of Belleville at dawn on 18 March to disarm the National Guard, a workers’ militia. By midday, the soldiers had fraternised with the guardsmen, barricades were erected, General Vinoy—who was leading the operation—had fled Paris, and crowds of men, women and children were taking to the streets in anger and building barricades. The Paris Commune had begun.
Over the subsequent months, workers constructed a new state out of radically democratic institutions, with recallable, elected delegates of the working class. Workers envisioned and enacted radical change in every aspect of society, from the family to the workplace. Everything was up for debate, from political strategy and defence of the commune to science, the church and even the arts. Marx got to see, if only briefly, humanity flourishing under workers’ control. He wrote: “For the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and ... without any police of any kind”.
In order to re-establish bourgeois rule, the ruling class carried out a brutal massacre. Thirty thousand Communards were killed within a week. The privileged classes and their newspapers delighted in the torture and imprisonment of countless more.
Marx responded to the counter-revolution with equal parts rage and theoretical clarity about the need to smash the capitalist state in order for workers to take power and create a socialist society. He explained that the working class in power naturally meant the abolition of exploitation. The Commune was “the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour”.
The Paris Commune showed, Marx argued, that workers couldn’t simply take hold of the existing state. There needed to be new radical forms of democracy. And the capitalist state must be confronted—his only criticism of the Commune was that they took up arms too late; they needed to defend their fragile, embryonic institutions of self-government against the might of the bourgeois state.
Marx’s political legacy offers invaluable lessons for us today. He developed and refined his theory of social revolution by engaging in the debates of his time and by taking part in the most important struggles of the day. This approach—learning and developing theory through the practical experience of the working-class movement—remains the guiding principle of the Marxist movement today.

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