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

Editors

How can we stop the carnage?

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

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


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

James Plested

Why history matters for socialists

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

Tom Sullivan

The irrationality of capitalism

Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign to become the Democratic Party’s mayoral candidate in New York City struck a chord with many people who want a political alternative to the pro-business, pro-war status quo. 
The task for US socialists is to translate this potential into a real movement capable of winning its demands, cutting down the rich and powerful and advancing a radical world view. Unfortunately, only a month after his shock victory, there are clear signs that Mamdani is moving in the opposite direction. 
With the mayoral election set for November, Mamdani is trying to shore up the support of the city’s business leaders. In closed-door meetings with top executives, he has walked back his statement that “billionaires shouldn’t exist”, equivocated on his plans for a rent freeze and repudiated the pro-Palestine slogan “globalise the intifada”. 
He has distanced himself from past criticisms of the New York Police Department and indicated openness to retaining current police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a billionaire heir and ardent defender of police murder. Mamdani’s pledge to maintain current NYPD funding levels is no small problem for a candidate who harnessed the hopes of anti-racists and Palestine solidarity activists. The NYPD is a massive force for repression: with 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian employees, it’s larger than some national armies. This is the force that was brought onto the city’s university campuses in 2024 to crush the Gaza solidarity encampments.
Mamdani’s brand pivot from leftist firebrand to safe pair of hands for Wall Street is a predictable product of his political strategy. Mamdani isn’t running for mayor as a stunt to raise the profile of socialist ideas; he’s serious about winning the position. But the whole notion of a “socialist mayor of New York” is a contradiction in terms. Anyone in this position would be responsible for the actions of the country’s largest police force, and would be one of the city’s largest employers, in charge of negotiating wages with 330,000 government workers. They would have to maintain attractive conditions for business to invest in Wall Street, home to the most predatory corporations on the planet. In short, Mamdani seeks an executive position crucial to the functioning of US capitalism. 
The recent experience of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, propelled by the city’s left and labour movement into office, should serve as a warning. Johnson induced unions to sign a no-strike pledge for the duration of 2024’s Democratic National Convention, while his police force attacked Palestine solidarity protesters outside it. The Chicago left that supported his candidacy has emerged from the experience discredited and demoralised. That was Chicago—the pressures exerted by big business and state bureaucrats will be far more intense in New York City.
Mamdani’s political program doesn’t express any real desire to confront these forces. Though he promotes supportable ideas for social reform, none of this is backed up by class struggle politics, even at a rhetorical level. Compared to previous prominent democratic socialists, Mamdani’s messaging lacks the combativity and sense of struggle that is the basic heart of socialism. 
Whereas Bernie Sanders framed his 2016 campaign as a confrontation with the power of the billionaire class, Mamdani implores the left to be “passionate about public excellence ... how we can make government more effective”. One of the objectives listed on his website is to “make it faster, easier, and cheaper to start and run a business”. His demands for rent controls and free bus rides, while progressive, are well within the parameters of traditional liberal conventions in New York. In fact, free crosstown buses were previously proposed by billionaire NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. None of Mamdani’s proposals involves wresting away significant wealth and power from the ruling class. 
Mamdani declared in his victory speech that he hopes to be a “model” for the Democratic Party, pushing it to the left. This is the political approach championed by his organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America. In the US’ restrictive two-party system, leftists who prioritise office-holding above other objectives naturally gravitate toward working inside the Democratic Party, which offers the most immediate avenue for electoral success. But experience shows that instead of pushing the party to the left, participation in the Democratic Party pushes people like Mamdani to the right. They end up being coopted as part of the tamed “progressive” wing of a profoundly undemocratic party run by millionaires and billionaires. 
We’ve been here before. Wave after wave of progressives and self-described socialists have run insurgent campaigns inside the Democratic Party, which generate excitement and a sense of possibility, before quickly disappointing the hopes of their followers and finding a comfortable place in the establishment. 
In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory unleashed an avalanche of expectations on the left. But rather than “burning it down”, as one of her staffers promised, AOC instead championed the Biden administration’s right-wing domestic and international agenda, from voting to impose a unilateral employment contract on railway workers and quash their right to strike, to funding Israel’s Iron Dome. Politicians like AOC move swiftly from raising people’s political horizons to restraining them. There’s no evidence that Mamdani’s trajectory will overcome the pitfalls of his predecessors. 
His political strategy, promoted by the DSA, gets things completely back-to-front. Democratic Socialists recognise that public sentiment can be well to the left of the establishment. They see left-wing positioning as a means to win office, useful to the extent that it advances electoral gains. This is why DSA member and Jacobin magazine writer Eric Blanc lauded Mamdani for abandoning the demand to defund the police, which Blanc said would have affected his electability. This whole approach contrasts the radical view that participation in elections is important only to the extent that it can promote left-wing politics and social struggle. 
The DSA strategy envisions socialist organisations as cheer squads for elected officials, not vehicles that can act independently of whoever is in government. A co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America made this explicit in a recent interview: “The fate of DSA, and honestly, I think, the progressive movement in New York, is tied to Zohran’s administration, and we’re aware of that”. 
If the fate of the socialist movement in the heart of world capitalism relies on an individual who’s clearly ready to adapt to the structures of New York’s government, then the movement is in for a world of disappointment and demoralisation. 
Socialists can initiate movements for the demands Mamdani raised, such as rent controls, higher wages and taxes on the rich. But this has to start with a commitment to win people to a distinctly socialist strategy, separate from the major parties of US capitalism. 
Mamdani’s popularity reflects mass enthusiasm for left-wing politics, but this sentiment won’t go anywhere positive if it’s funnelled into yet another attempt to radicalise the Democratic Party.

Luca Tavan

Can Zohran Mamdani advance socialism in the United States?

The following is a summary of the new introduction written by Nick Reich for a reprint of <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/revolutionaries-they-could-not-break">Revolutionaries They Could Not Break</a> by Ngo Van, published by Red Flag Books.
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Colonial rule in Indochina stands as one of the most grotesque monuments to capitalism’s capacity for systematic torture, cruelty and humiliation of masses of people. The price paid by the Vietnamese people for the forceful imposition of French imperialism was desperately high. 
During the war of occupation in the mid-1800s, the French dispossessed tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants of their only means of subsistence: their land. As they vanquished the much less well-equipped Vietnamese defending armies, they concentrated that stolen land into the hands of French settlers and Vietnamese collaborators. Those peasants lucky enough to hold onto their farms suffered the economic burden of much greater taxes, rents, debts and forced labour for the French colonial authorities. Under the new colonial regime, the French managed the inevitable resistance stoked by their system of exploitation through a sprawling network of police spies and torture prisons. 
But French colonisation also laid the social basis for its own demise. In order to make as much profit as possible from the colony, the French state encouraged investment and urbanisation. Under torturous working conditions, a modern rural working class developed in the mines and rubber plantations alongside an urban proletariat and middle-class intellectuals in the cities. With increased education, compact organisation and social power, these forces provided leadership to the hyper-exploited peasantry in their struggle against colonialism. 
The Vietnamese intellectuals were barred from any serious advancement in the colonial state bureaucracy. The French suffocated the development of a free press, independent schools or any other associations they suspected could become subversive. This left only low-level teaching or civil service jobs open to educated Vietnamese. Urban intellectuals articulated their frustrations at being held back and their anguish at the humiliation of their people through nationalism. 
The early modern nationalists in Vietnam looked to advanced countries like France or Japan as models to emulate. They sought to supplant the French as ruling class through elitist methods. One camp embraced conspiratorial terror and the other advocated gradualist lobbying for reforms, hoping France would honour its ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Both methods stalled by the 1920s. 
In the inter-war years, many Vietnamese students in France searched for ways to overcome the failures of the earlier generations of nationalists. They found inspiration in the 1917 Russian Revolution. They viewed it as an answer to the unique problems they faced in a colonised and underdeveloped country. Workers’ taking power in Russia demonstrated that even a small but concentrated industrial working class in a majority peasant country could seize and hold state power to begin the transition towards socialism. 
But the Russian Revolution was an inspiration not just because it was an underdeveloped country. Tsarist Russia was an empire in its own right, often referred to as “the prison-house of nations”. The new workers’ state inherited this imperial structure and almost immediately affirmed the right for all oppressed nations to self-determination, up to and including secession. The Russian revolutionaries also established the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 to attract, lead and organise revolutionaries in other countries to foment workers’ revolutions elsewhere. The early Comintern congresses, in appealing to revolutionaries in colonised countries, laid out their support for national self-determination as a fundamental democratic right and as a means to build international workers’ revolution. They also emphasised the importance of maintaining the independence of revolutionary workers’ parties from pro-capitalist, nationalist forces. 
Unfortunately, international workers’ revolutions did not follow in the footsteps of the Russians, so by the mid-1920s, the revolution was isolated and degenerating under the weight of invasion, famine and economic collapse. Over time, a state bureaucracy came to substitute itself for mass workers’ democracy. This counter-revolutionary process expressed itself politically in Joseph Stalin’s rise to power. Stalin rationalised the increasingly undemocratic, state-capitalist form of rule and turned Communist parties around the world from organisers of international revolution to geopolitical satellites for Soviet Russia. 
This was cruelly demonstrated when a revolutionary struggle broke out in China in 1927. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was prepared to play a leading role in organising workers to challenge for power just as the Russian workers had a decade before. Stalin ordered that they subordinate themselves to the pro-capitalist, anti-colonial nationalist party, the Kuomintang. This was a cynical reversal from what the Comintern had propagated in early congresses. Tragically, the Kuomintang betrayed the Communists as soon as they took power and slaughtered tens of thousands of them. 
Among the Vietnamese students in France, the success and then degeneration of the Russian Revolution created two hostile camps of Vietnamese communists in the 1920s. On one side were the followers of Nguyen Ai Quoc, who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh. His politics were more influenced by the Comintern during its degeneration into a foreign policy arm of the Russian state than by its revolutionary period. He was a die-hard Stalinist. He adopted the perspective that the socialist revolution in Vietnam was not on the immediate agenda, and so the key task for communists was to support and develop the forces of nationalism. Where he did fight for “socialism”, he identified that with the one-party dictatorship of Stalin: a powerful state exploiting workers and peasants to drive industrial development.
On the other side were the followers of Ta Thu Thau. He began as a nationalist, leading the Annamite Independence Party in the mid-1920s. Ta Thu Thau watched the revolution of 1927 closely, and was repelled by the Kuomintang and the Comintern’s directions to the CCP demanding servile submission. His reading of Leon Trotsky’s critiques of Stalinism, particularly his articles about the tragedy of the Chinese revolution, converted Ta Thu Thau and his followers to the politics of Trotskyism. 
Both of these camps attempted to build mass parties to fight for their politics in Vietnam during the 1930s, particularly in the most industrialised city, Saigon. Initially, both Trotskyists and Stalinists agreed to unite around the newspaper La Lutte (The Struggle) and a joint electoral ticket in the local municipal council. This Stalinist-Trotskyist alliance was tested in a major struggle that broke out following the election of a Socialist Party-led government in France in 1936. 
 
Intellectuals, workers and peasants expected a more liberal colonial policy from this government. La Lutte used these raised expectations and relative freedoms to propose “action committees”. These committees were bodies in which Vietnamese workers and peasants discussed their grievances and formulated demands. Just as the action committees began to stall, a strike wave spread across all major industries in Vietnam from mid-1936 to mid-1937. La Lutte played a leading role in this strike wave. But as it spread, the French government shifted decisively towards repression. 
Friction grew between the Stalinists and Trotskyists in these years. Ta Thu Thau and the Trotskyists wanted to denounce the mass arrests and reactionary policies of the rightward-moving French government. But the Stalinists, loyally following Moscow’s orders to help keep the French government as a Soviet ally, refused to condemn it. In late 1937, the Stalinists were directed to leave La Lutte.
Freed from the Stalinists’ conservative influence, the Trotskyists grew their prestige. In the 1939 Saigon Municipal Council elections, the Trotskyists won 80 percent of the vote. 
Unfortunately, the outbreak of World War II, the ascendancy of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime in France and Japan’s occupation of Vietnam all combined to suppress and break up the Trotskyists’ organisation after 1939. These historical developments also created a revolutionary situation in which Ho Chi Minh’s forces rode to power.
In the dying days of their doomed war effort, the Japanese redirected rice from the Mekong Delta to use as fuel for their power stations. As a result, about a million Vietnamese peasants died. Seeing that the war was coming to an end, Ho Chi Minh called on starving peasants to storm rice warehouses and resist taxes, winning mass support. That support enabled his forces, organised in the Viet Minh, to enter Hanoi unopposed after Japan’s surrender in August 1945. On 2 September, Ho declared independence to a crowd of half a million. 
But they fought the French attempts to take back their colony with one arm tied behind their back. Stalin had agreed with the US and Britain to restore French rule in Indochina. Since France lacked troops, the Allies agreed that the British would take over in the south as a stopgap. When British forces arrived in Saigon, the Communist leaders, acting on Moscow’s instructions, welcomed them as anti-fascist allies. 
Needless to say, freeing Vietnam was the last thing on the minds of the British. The British commander, General Douglas Gracey, turned on the Communists and their nationalist allies. Gracey freed and rearmed Japanese forces and French colonials, then drove the Viet Minh and its nationalist allies out of every government building, killing all who resisted. In response, the people of Saigon rose in revolt. Workers, Trotskyists, Buddhists and communists who rejected compromise with the British seized weapons and held the working-class suburbs for days. Ultimately, the French would overpower them and retake the city, but even as they retreated from French attacks, the Stalinists continued to arrest and kill thousands of Trotskyists. Under the political leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh wiped out the entire Vietnamese Trotskyist movement along with many militant workers.
Revolutionaries They Could Not Break documents this history. It is a tragedy written by an exiled participant, Ngo Van, four and a half decades after the events took place. His attention to naming so many of the Trotskyists who fought and died, and his careful account-keeping of the crimes of the Stalinists, all read like a cry for the world never to forget what happened. Such an appeal we must heed. The heroism and sacrifice of the Vietnamese Trotskyists represent more than just a footnote in the grander narrative of Vietnam’s history—they fought for a path not taken and embodied a spirit upon which the counter-revolution had to pile mountains of scorn and rubble in order to suffocate it for future generations. 
Ngo’s book is a political argument about the lessons of their experiences as much as it is a demand to remember.

Nick Reich

Revolutionaries against capitalism and colonialism: a history of the Vietnamese Trotskyists

Socialism is a state of affairs in which the working class governs society over the whole of the Earth. The people whose labour produces the vast bulk of the wealth— the people who build, operate and maintain the extraordinary productive network that spans our globe—will rule. 
As soon as we describe such a society, it’s clear that it will never come into existence by merely voting for it. Regardless of the outcome of elections, the Gina Rineharts, the Elon Musks, their political servants like Albo or partners like Trump and the totalitarian rulers of China, are not going to simply hand power to the billions of workers who work to create the wealth they control.
So if elections aren’t going to usher in socialism, what’s the point of socialists participating in them?
Measuring forces, building forces
Good ideas don’t just grow legs and start wandering around in the world, changing things for the better. History, for good and for ill, is made by organised political forces. Helping to build such a movement that can fight for socialism is one important reason for running electoral campaigns.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels talked about socialists participating in elections in order to “measure our forces”. This is good advice in general, but there’s not a great benefit in following it if our forces are small enough to fit into a single, not-very-large room. And more fundamentally, there’s something that isn’t quite captured by the idea of elections being a passive “measuring” of socialist forces or a “thermometer” of the class struggle, as Engels put it.
Part of the joy of Victorian Socialists is that the party involves enough dedicated socialist campaigners to actually win a credible vote. Most recently, we won 7.2 percent in the by-election in the Victorian state seat of Werribee, with booth results as high as 14 percent.
This matches our results from the 2022 Victorian state election. We won an average of 6.2 percent of votes in the eleven seats in Melbourne’s north (8 percent in Broadmeadows, 7.7 percent in Thomastown, and 8.1 percent in Brunswick), and 5 percent in the eleven seats in Melbourne’s west (including 6.6 percent in St Albans, 6.8 percent in Kororoit, and 9.3 percent in Footscray). In the upper house, we won more than 50,000 votes: our two main candidates won more primary votes than several successful upper house candidates in other parts of Victoria, though both of us missed out on a seat on preferences.
The fact that a socialist electoral project could win this sort of vote—the highest number of votes for a socialist outside of Labor since the 1940s—has been an important contribution to the project of hauling socialism off the margins of political life in this country and into the daily and weekly political discussions of many thousands of people.
Our federal campaign is now kicking off in earnest and is already clearly having the same effect—both through our campaign activities, and through engagement with many of those familiar with our excellent Senate candidate Jordan van den Lamb (aka Purplepingers), the scourge of every scumbag landlord through his shitrentals.org site.
All of our campaigning—letterboxing, doorknocking and talking with voters wherever we can—plays a role in normalising socialist campaigns and building support for socialist political positions. This activity also gives essential training for the campaigners themselves as we engage with all sorts of people with a listening ear and a socialist message of hope and resistance.
In other words, we run in election campaigns not just to “count our forces” but to build socialist political forces. Victorian Socialists has been quite successful in doing so, as the growth of the project—already by far the largest socialist political project in this country in decades—continues to show.
What would a socialist member of parliament do?
Victorian Socialists’ purpose in winning a parliamentary seat is not to be first in line for the daily buffet in the parliamentary dining room, nor to rain socialism down upon a grateful public. In keeping with a long-held socialist principle, our elected representatives will take only the wage of an average worker, with the rest going to build community and worker campaigns.
One of the main jobs of our elected representatives will be to build every act of workers’ struggle and collective resistance outside the parliament. And inside the parliament? We’ll be there to take on the major parties, not just to make pious speeches.
Though socialist MPs are a rarity in Australian history, we can get some idea of what’s possible from past practice.
Percy Brookfield was elected to the New South Wales parliament as the representative for the militant mining town of Broken Hill in 1917, during the greatest social and political revolt in Australia’s history. Expelled from Labor in 1919, he was re-elected as an independent in 1920 despite a statewide red scare against him.
Brookfield worked tirelessly to support the NSW general strike of 1917, and the epic eighteen-month “Big Strike” for shorter hours by 4,000 Broken Hill miners, which started in May 1919. He was outspoken in support of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and was part of the discussions that led to the formation of the Communist Party of Australia.
In addition to building strikes and socialist organisations outside of parliament, Brookfield used his position in parliament to build the class struggle. He used parliamentary privilege to reveal how police had fabricated evidence against the IWW Twelve, members of the militant Industrial Workers of the World who had been jailed in a frame-up case.
When Labor needed his vote to stay in government after the 1920 election, Brookfield made his support conditional on Labor releasing the IWW Twelve and meeting the strikers’ demands for shorter hours in the ongoing Big Strike in Broken Hill. Both demands were achieved within six months—thanks to months and years of organising and struggle involving many thousands of people, and aided by Brookfield putting his political weight on the scales at a crucial time.
Two decades after Brookfield, in 1944 Fred Paterson became the only member of the Communist Party elected to a parliament in Australia. Paterson represented the seat of Bowen, south of Townsville, in the Queensland parliament. Bowen at this time included major coal centres, a large meatworks, sugar plantations, rail and ports—and twelve CPA branches.
Paterson was on the central strike committee of the massive Queensland rail strike, which started in February 1948, helping to coordinate the distribution of 850,000 leaflets supporting the strikers and visiting the pickets each day before attending parliament. When police tried to disperse the pickets, Paterson pointed to a loophole that allowed the pickets to remain as long as they kept moving.
The Queensland Labor government rammed an anti-strike law through parliament; they described it as the “Paterson bill” because it was designed to undermine the legal strategies he had advised. Paterson returned the compliment, describing the new law as “the greatest scab-herding strike-breaking piece of legislation ever introduced by a Labor government anywhere in Australia”.
On 17 March 1948, while observing workers being dispersed by the police, Paterson was bashed unconscious from behind by a cop. Paterson’s bashing sparked a Brisbane rally of 15,000 to 20,000 in support of the strikers. Protests, stop-works and meetings were held in Townsville, Bowen and Collinsville, and coal miners in NSW struck for 24 hours. The rail strike was settled a few weeks later, with the government conceding wage rises of 77 percent of the initial claim for trades workers and 95 percent for labourers.
Our short roll call of socialists outside of the Labor Party who have been elected to Australian parliaments should also include George Petersen. Petersen was part of a Trotskyist group when he became active in Labor Party politics in Wollongong and was elected to the NSW parliament in 1968. One of the most radical members of an Australian parliament, Petersen was an agitator for homosexual law reform, abortion law reform and prisoners’ rights. He used parliamentary privilege to expose the reign of terror exercised by guards in NSW prisons. Petersen campaigned to expose the frame-up of the alleged Hilton bombers in 1978 and was a staunch supporter of the Palestinian struggle.
Petersen worked closely with union members in the Illawarra, and his reminiscences contain plenty of thoughtful reflections. Petersen developed a political relationship with Brian Phipps, an electrician who was secretary of the Combined Mining Unions committee at Huntley Colliery in Petersen’s electorate of Illawarra. Petersen recalled of Phipps:
“He is a militant socialist and we worked together harmoniously for seventeen years promoting the cause of these workers, and, in return, receiving their total support ... I often thought that the relationship between Brian and me was the relationship I would like to have with all worker militants. That would have required me to be a member of a Leninist-type party, combining my work in a bourgeois parliament with that of fellow party members who occupied the same sort of position in the trade union movement as Brian did at Huntley Colliery. My great problem was that there was no such party to which I could belong.”
In 1987, Petersen voted against the Unsworth Labor government’s attacks on the NSW workers’ compensation scheme. Automatically excluded from the Labor caucus, Petersen contested his seat as an independent but lost despite a spirited campaign.
Of course, circumstances in Victoria in the 2020s differ in various ways from the examples above. Notably, the reformist and Stalinist political forces that dominated working-class politics for the past century have decayed or collapsed. For this reason at least, any newly elected, radical socialist MP will have to focus on building socialist political forces rather than just providing expression to pre-existing forces.
All of this lies in the future, along with the many challenges and opportunities that having a socialist MP will bring. In the meantime, no-one in Victorian Socialists plans to just sit around waiting for a socialist movement to rebuild itself. Rather, this is our central project.
Like many political campaigns and projects, Victorian Socialists includes revolutionaries (such as Socialist Alternative members) as well as non-revolutionaries who are just sick of Labor’s sell-outs, and many people engaging with socialist politics for the first time. We’re an electoral front in which no-one has to hide their politics and in which anyone who wants to help rebuild a socialist political current is welcome to join.
Our party program popularises socialist political positions—for the right to strike, for pulling out of the US alliance, for a punitive tax on billionaires to fund the services we need, for taking over empty houses to ease the housing crisis. Many of us are knee-deep in community campaigns, worker organising and other socialist political projects.
All of us are serious about fighting for the socialist future we need: joining Victorian Socialists and getting active is a positive contribution to that project.

Jerome Small

Why do socialists run in elections?

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!

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.

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