It was good for former US President Jimmy Carter’s reputation that he lived as long as he did. For those who didn’t experience his administration between 1977 and 1981, Carter was known as an advocate committed to human rights, global public health, and service to the poor. In labelling Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2007/may/27/features.review67">“apartheid,” he even won a reputation as a truth-teller</a>. 
The political amnesia that Carter’s post-presidency created led liberals to view the Carter years through rose-tinted glasses. Reverand Al Sharpton, a civil rights activist who is little more than a Democratic Party shill on the liberal MSNBC network, praised Carter’s trailblazing for appointing one of Martin Luther King’s lieutenants, Andrew Young, as US ambassador to the United Nations.
Sharpton neglected to note that Carter fired Young in 1979—provoking an outcry from civil rights leaders—for the sin of meeting with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. (Young’s ostensible purpose was to convince the PLO to support the shelving of a UN report calling for a Palestinian state!)
For many in the Washington elite and its punditocracy, Carter’s is the epitome of a failed presidency. In their superficial summaries of Carter’s term, images of lines of cars waiting for hours at gas stations, blind-folded US embassy personnel held in Tehran, or a pasty, stumbling Carter gasping for air during a 10k run combine to form an image of a bumbler in over his head. 
By the time Carter ran for re-election, a substantial section of the Democratic Party had rejected him and supported a liberal primary challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy. Carter lost in a 1980 landslide to Ronald Reagan, who many considered too “extreme” to be handed the nuclear codes. When he left office, Carter had the support of just over 30 percent in national opinion surveys.
When looking at the Carter years, we should reject the shallow score-keeping that obsesses the Washington elite. Carter was a terrible president—but not because he was ineffective or preachy in his public pronouncements. He was terrible when he was effective because much of what we have come to call the “neoliberal” era began under Carter, rather than his Republican successor Ronald Reagan.
Two deep recessions signalling the end of the long post-Second World War boom bookended Carter’s term in office. The Democrat-led New Deal political economy that underpinned much of that period unravelled, and Carter’s administration served as a transition to a new paradigm that Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in Britain personified. 
What were the hallmarks of Reaganism? Cuts in social spending. Trickle-down economics based on tax cuts for the rich. A military buildup. Regressive social policy. Carter initiated all of this.
Responding to a concerted business offensive pushing for cuts to social spending, Carter reversed a lengthy period of expansion of domestic programs. His 1978 tax plan anticipated Reaganomics by cutting capital gains taxes for the wealthy while increasing Social Security taxes on workers. It was the first time since the 1930s that Congress—with an overwhelmingly Democratic Party majority—passed an unambiguously regressive tax plan.
Carter appointed banker Paul Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve in 1979. With the president’s support, Volcker jacked up interest rates, engineering a recession and mass unemployment to cut workers’ demands for their pay to keep up with inflation.
In 1979, the Carter administration negotiated a federal government bailout of the bankrupt Chrysler Corp., requiring union givebacks and opening the way for a wave of concessionary contracts from major unions over the next decade. Carter deployed the anti-union Taft Hartley Act to halt the 1977-78 coal miners’ strike. A labour law reform intended to help unions organise went down to defeat in Congress in 1977, with Carter letting it twist in the wind.
The Carter administration <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2011/02/25/lessons-of-the-patco-strike">drew up the plan to fire and replace striking air traffic controllers</a>, which Reagan implemented in 1981, and began the mania for deregulation that became the economic gospel for subsequent administrations. Carter’s deregulation of trucking, air travel and energy prices led to higher prices, worse service and union-busting across key industries.
Considering his post-presidential image as Nobel laureate and international peace envoy, it is essential to recall that Carter launched the military buildup that Reagan pursued vigorously. In 1980, in the wake of revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua, and the USSR invasion of Afghanistan, Carter sharply increased the military budget, reinstated registration for the military draft and created the Rapid Deployment Force for intervention in the Middle East.
His administration also changed US nuclear weapons policy to allow a US “first strike” in a “limited nuclear war” and initiated the arming and training of Islamist guerrillas <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-untold-story-of-carters-fateful-foreign-policy/">fighting the pro-Russian government in Afghanistan prior to the USSR’s invasion.</a> This covert action, later championed by the Reagan administration, nurtured the networks from which Al Qaeda emerged.
Carter established the “Carter doctrine”, a declaration that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force”. This was the pretence for the US war against Iraq that began in 1991 and continued, in one way or another, for another two decades.
On the domestic front, Carter supported and signed the Hyde Amendment barring Medicaid funding for abortion in 1977. It was one of the anti-abortion movement’s first victories after the US Supreme Court legalised abortion nationwide in 1973. 
When a reporter asked Carter why he approved of a provision that disproportionately affected poor women, he responded: “There are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford, and poor people can’t”. It wasn’t the federal government’s role, he said, to make “opportunities exactly equal, particularly when there is a moral factor involved”.
Carter’s sense of Christian morality wasn’t moved in 1980 when <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/03/oscar-romero-el-salvador-junta-jimmy-carter-letter">Archbishop Óscar A. Romero of El Salvador appealed to his</a> “religious sentiments and your feelings for the defence of human rights” to end military aid to that country’s far-right junta, which was carrying out massacres of civilians and murders of activists in its civil war. In the month following Romero’s letter, a far-right death squad assassinated the priest. On his way out of the White House, Carter increased aid to the Salvadoran junta.
No one was more wrong about Carter than Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the Democratic Socialists of America. In a <a href="https://library.iire.org/node/36010">debate with the Socialist Workers Party’s Peter Camejo held on the eve of the 1976 election</a>, Harrington argued: “[T]he conditions of a Carter victory are the conditions for working-class militancy, and the militancy of women, and the militancy of the democratic reform movement. We can actually make victories on full employment, national health, and issues like that”.
The exact opposite scenario unfolded. The Carter years marked a hinge point—not for an upsurge of militancy, but for the beginning of decades of retreat and retrenchment. As Ed Burmila wrote in Chaotic Neutral, “Carter did not merely oversee the collapse of the postwar political and economic order; he actively advanced it”.
Today’s liberals may want to put a halo on Carter and blame the generations-long shift to the right on Reagan and the Republicans. But Carter bears significant responsibility for the paving the way.
Lance Selfa is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Democrats: A Critical History</a> (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality</a>
(Haymarket, 2017).

Lance Selfa

Jimmy Carter’s real legacy

Mannie de Saxe, who lived for an impressive 98 years, inspired many. From his early life in a Jewish family opposing apartheid in South Africa to his condemnation of apartheid Israel’s Gaza genocide, Mannie stood on the side of the oppressed, supporting workers’ rights and the fight for socialism. 
He argued for a fundamental change to society, to rid the world of capitalism’s stranglehold—for a world run by workers for human need. 
After living in a country in which “racism was institutionalised by law and life was based on race”, Mannie thought he was arriving in an egalitarian society when he migrated to Australia in 1978. But he was soon disabused of that notion when witnessing Australia’s treatment of Indigenous people. 
“Australia has institutionalised racism to a degree that almost puts racist South Africa and apartheid Israel to shame”, he angrily noted. “After all, from 1788 onwards a genocide has been practised”.
Mannie and his family’s move to Australia opened a whole new chapter—a mostly positive change, but one that also saw his marriage collapse and his family life disrupted for many years. But he began to get more politically active and felt more confident to come out as gay. 
From then on, he took on cause after cause and met his partner Ken Lovett at a rally in Sydney protesting British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Clause 28 bill, which made portraying LGBTI life to young people a crime. In Sydney, he participated in the Gay Solidarity Group’s many actions. In Melbourne, he was often photographed with Ken at various rallies, holding a Lesbian and Gay Solidarity banner. 
Although he and Ken never wanted to marry, they campaigned to support marriage equality and were very critical of the ALP’s opposition to change. They celebrated with everyone else when the law was finally changed under the Liberal government. It wasn’t lost on them that Labor supported equality only once it was out of government and the issue had become popular.
When HIV/AIDS hit Australia, Mannie and Ken were active in the protests for better care and against the homophobic backlash. They also became carers of many young men dying with the disease before effective treatment was discovered. Mannie also got a master’s degree, studying the role of health unions in the HIV/AIDS pandemic. They played a key role in establishing a memorial park in Sydney—SPAIDS—and helped to save the memorial gardens at the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital in Melbourne.
“If you think activism doesn’t work”, he wrote in one online debate, “you are wrong—lobbying didn’t get legislation changed which decriminalised homosexuality in Australia—activism on the streets did; and the Gay Embassy caravan outside [then NSW Premier] Neville Wran’s house in Woollahra ultimately helped that tardy premier get the law in NSW changed with his private member’s bill in 1984”.
Living in inner Melbourne, he took up local issues. More recently, he supported a campaign to save the Preston Market, a hugely popular marketplace for thousands of working-class people in Melbourne’s inner north. 
Both supported refugee and migrant rights and worked with Meals on Wheels, reaching out to isolated and aged people. Mannie was always outspoken against South African apartheid and was known in the anti-Zionist Jewish community around the world. He proudly wore anti-Nazi badges and commemorative badges with the yellow star symbol overlaid with the pink triangle, the two symbols used by the Nazis in the concentration camps to identify Jews and homosexuals. He refused to accept the invocation of the Holocaust as a justification for the current war on Gaza.
He viewed socialism as the only solution to the world’s problems and joined the International Socialists and Socialist Action. Never one to shirk activity, he regularly sold socialist papers on street stalls and at protests and spoke up in meetings. While he didn’t remain a member after the early 1990s, he remained a socialist all his life.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/MANNIE-FOR-OMAR-23.10.2020.jpg?1732148778696" alt="Mannie for Omar" /><figcaption>Mannie with a Victorian Socialists corflute, 2020 council election in Darebin electorate, Melbourne PHOTO: Liz Ross</figcaption></figure>
When the Victorian Socialists was established, though no longer able to be as active, he was keen to support the party’s electoral campaigns. In 2020, he was particularly pleased to be photographed beside candidate Omar Hassan’s corflute to show his support for the socialist cause and against Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.
Mannie has left a lifetime of memories. He had a vast collection of memorabilia and books and an amazing collection of T-shirts and tops with slogans for every progressive cause. Mannie remained mentally sharp, always up for a lively—and lengthy—discussion about the world. His interests spanned politics, music, film, literature and more. He was a generous, kind, fascinating friend of many, and he was loved by those friends, his daughters, son and grandchildren. 
Along with his partner Ken, he fought for a socialist world right to the end. 
Mannie passed away in Melbourne last Sunday. Rest in Power!

Liz Ross

Vale Mannie de Saxe

On 22 October, at the age of 96, one of the key figures of liberation theology passed away. Gustavo Gutiérrez was born and died in Lima, Peru. He was a philosopher, theologian and Dominican priest. Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation, published in 1971, remains a pivotal text, not only for Christianity, but for all theological reflection. Faith in the infinite justice of a god and their compassionate and loving solidarity with the downtrodden runs through many religious traditions and movements.
In my youth, I was a liberation theologist. We arrived in Australia exiled from Chile, and at a certain point our family’s lives inevitably became intertwined with the Catholic Church. Not just for food packages and other financial support, but for community and a sense of mission. Far from Latin America, while active in St Vincent de Paul Society as a teenager, I discovered Gustavo Gutiérrez and the Christian mission of liberation.
I was already familiar with many of the radical priests who had emerged in the context of postwar national liberation movements. I especially remember having many conversations as a kid with my father about Camilo Torres, an ordained Colombian priest, communist revolutionary and, together with Orlando Fals Borda, co-founder of the sociology faculty at the National University of Colombia. Torres died in 1966 in combat, as a member of the guerrilla organisation Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army).
By the mid-1960s, the Second Vatican Council had opened the door to a widespread radicalisation among Christian communities throughout Latin America. The effects of this on the church hierarchy were almost immediate. In 1968, the bishops’ Second Episcopal Conference of Latin America recognised poverty and inequality as “institutionalised violence” and sanctified the church’s “preferential option for the poor”.
Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation explored the tensions in Christian theology between spiritualist and rationalist traditions, much as his Marxist contemporaries focused on debating subject versus structure. Gutiérrez drew on the so-called humanist Marxism of intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre to argue for the centrality of the subject. The “preferential option for the poor” was a theological argument for revolutionary praxis:
“The social praxis of contemporary humankind has begun to reach maturity. It is the behaviour of a humankind ever more conscious of being an active subject of history, ever more articulate in the face of social injustice and of all repressive forces which stand in the way of its fulfilment; it is ever more determined to participate in the transformation of social structures.”
Liberation theology was part of the rise of the anti-Stalinist left throughout the continent. It aligned itself with movements that rejected the class collaborationist politics of the old Communist parties and sought to bring to bear the leadership of the working classes. Gutiérrez regarded “developmentalism” as “synonymous with reformism and modernization, that is to say, synonymous with timid measures, really ineffective in the long run and counterproductive to achieving a real transformation”. 
In a sense, and perhaps knowingly, Gutiérrez interpreted the Christian mission through the lens of historical materialism. He understood that “to a large extent due to Marxism’s influence, theological thought, searching for its own sources, has begun to reflect on the meaning of the transformation of this world and human action in history”.
The “preferential option for the poor” was not just a moral or spiritual commitment. Gutiérrez understood class. He concurred with Marx that consciousness is “indissolubly linked to the transformation of the world through work”.
Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation was a revolutionary text, a call to arms:
“Attempts to bring about changes within the existing order have proven futile. Only a radical break from the status quo, that is, a profound transformation of the private property system [and] a social revolution that would break this dependence would allow for the change to a new society, a socialist society ... The goal is not only better living conditions, a radical change of structures, a social revolution; it is much more: the continuous creation, never ending, of a new way to be human, a permanent cultural revolution.”
In that postwar era of revolutions, many of the new left in Latin America, like Camilo Torres, interpreted the “option for the poor” as a calling, not just to guerrilla struggle but to a life lived for emancipation, echoing the words of Che Guevara:
“Vanguard revolutionaries must idealise this love of the people, of the most sacred causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice ... There is no life outside of the revolution.”
Many years after I read Theology of Liberation, I would come across a similar sense of conviction and commitment, written decades earlier. The American communist James P. Cannon never had any time for dilettantes. You cannot visit the revolutionary cause every now and then, descending from the comforts of another class. Revolutionaries must “merge themselves completely” with the working class, turning their “back on the bourgeois world and joining the proletarian revolutionary camp, that is, by ceasing to be a petty bourgeois”.
Capitalism has certainly changed in the last half century, but only now to reveal fully the human and ecological catastrophe it leads to. The sense of revolutionary mission seems as relevant to me as it did 40-odd years ago.
Jorge Jorquera is a Maribyrnong City councillor and member of the Victorian Socialists.

Jorge Jorquera

Gustavo Gutiérrez’s revolutionary mission

A collection of tributes for Tom O’Lincoln

Tom O’Lincoln, who died on 13 October 2023 aged 76, was a committed Marxist and revolutionary virtually his whole adult life.
Born in Walnut Creek, near San Francisco, Tom became interested in politics during the eventful 1960s. He joined a civil rights picket aged 14 and campaigned to stop right-winger Barry Goldwater’s presidential nomination. The anti-Vietnam War movement awakened more serious political interest. But it was as an exchange student in Germany in 1967-68 that Tom became radicalised. He joined the SDS, the German socialist student organisation, and started to read Marx and Lenin. He protested against the Vietnam War, participated in an attempted blockade of the right-wing Springer Press and saw the first round of the student movement in Paris in February 1968. 
In August 1968, I met Tom completely by chance at a youth hostel in Paris. I will never forget him coming downstairs one morning to say breathlessly, “I’ve just heard on the German news that the Russians have invaded Czechoslovakia”. From the beginning, our relationship was conditioned by the political environment.
By this time, Tom considered himself a Marxist; as he says, he had “crossed a boundary in attitude”. Quite characteristic of his life as a political activist he goes on: “I took [an] interest in listening to political argument and ideas back with me to Berkeley”.
The following year I joined Tom in the US. Tom was looking for a politics that would “make revolution inseparable from democracy”, which he found in the International Socialists in Berkeley, where he was a student. 
This was the major turning point in Tom’s political life. In the Berkeley IS, he became committed to the principles that guided his political activity, his values, his beliefs and his intellectual life until his death. 
Crucial was the concept of socialism from below and an understanding of the central role of the working class, support for movements against oppression, internationalism and the importance of struggle. Tom acted on these principles throughout his life as a rank-and-file trade unionist, as an activist, as a leader in the various forms of the Australian IS, as a supporter of socialists in Indonesia, as a writer, and in all his political positions.
Not long before his death, when asked about the political highlights of his life, Tom responded: “The key experiences share the common element of seeing the process of radicalisation in action. Examples include the actions against the war in Vietnam, the growth of the New Left and later the mobilisations against the Fraser government. For me, what made these so important was that the level of rebellion was high”.
Tom did not look, however, like a typical rebel. Most of his life his hair was relatively short and his glasses made him look rather conservative. He was once able to get out of an attempted bottling of demonstrators by straightening his collar and calling a police officer “sir”! Even with a beard he didn’t look like a rabblerouser. His speaking style was not flamboyant, his voice was not loud and his gestures were restrained. 
<img alt="Tom O'Lincoln" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/img226.jpg" />
This contrasted strongly with the radical content of what he said. In his arguments, Tom pulled no punches. But also in his personal reactions to radical people and events he showed his radicalism. His enthusiasm for the Black Panthers in Berkeley, with their jaunty hairdos and radical stance, was infectious and I sported a Jewish-Afro for a while under this influence. Tom always cheered on striking workers, street protests of the oppressed and national liberation struggles. 
Tom and I came to Australia in November 1971 intending only to stay a couple of years before resuming travel. But again, circumstances intervened that changed the course of our lives and those of many others. At Mayday 1972, we encountered the very small Melbourne-based Marxist Workers Group and started to work to create an organisation which would reflect the politics that we stood for. Although he did travel again, Tom settled permanently in Australia and devoted himself to Australian politics for the rest of his life.
At first, Tom worked as a teacher and later he became a public servant. He also worked for a while as a sheet metal worker, and had stints doing full-time political activity. Wherever he was, Tom followed the news, read widely, talked to people and made friends.
Tom didn’t worry very much about his reputation. In the mid-1970s, he attended a demonstration for what was then called gay rights, wearing a very conspicuous jacket. When his pupils at school recognised him on TV, they asked disingenuously: “Are you a poofter, Mr Lincoln?” Tom just smiled.
Many people have attested to Tom’s lasting intellectual impact on them. For decades, he led reading groups to study Marx’s Capital, gave talks on subjects ranging from political economy to Australian labour history, wrote articles about international and local events and developed position papers on subjects such how we understand the role of Israel. Tom was always ready to discuss politics with people whose political position was different from his own. His patience in explaining issues to new comrades is remembered by many.
Tom said to me that he was not an innovator in terms of Marxism, but rather a populariser. And it is true that he had a special talent for explaining complex material in a very accessible way. A recent example is the translation earlier this year into Korean of a pamphlet he wrote in the 1980s about state capitalism. This piece is exemplary in its clarity, conciseness and purposeful exposition. It is not surprising that a Korean group would find this fairly obscure piece of writing useful today.
<img alt="Korea" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/img138.jpg" />
The ability to present complex ideas to a new audience is no mean talent—it is not “only” being a populariser as it requires a very profound understanding of the material. But I would argue that Tom in fact was a path breaker in his books and not just a populariser. His short history of nineteenth century Australian labour history, United We Stand, was published in 2005. In the preface to the forthcoming new edition, historian Terry Irving comments that Tom was writing from within the working-class movement—“the first book of this kind since Brian Fitzpatrick’s Short History of the Australian Labour Movement (1940) to be able to claim this distinction”.
Tom developed his analysis of Australia as not simply a colony subject to the UK or (later) the US, but as being a “boutique” imperialist power in its own right in the region. He presented this argument in his books The Neighbour From Hell and Australia’s Pacific War. This was also breaking new ground.
Tom had a talent for languages. He spoke German fluently and studied Hegel, Marx and others in the original. He taught himself sufficient Portuguese when we were in Lisbon in 1975 to be able to speak to workers occupying factories. His fluent French proved very useful in Beirut in 1980. Tom had political discussions with workers and leftists in Spanish in Nicaragua and Peru in 1985. At this time, he also was reading in Spanish about the Peruvian Marxist José-Carlos Mariategui.
<img alt="Middle East" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/img131.jpg" />
In the 1990s, Tom studied Indonesian, eventually knowing it sufficiently well to set up Suara Sosialis (Socialist Voice), a six-year-long project to produce Marxist material in Indonesian. He not only read and spoke the language but made a special effort to master colloquial expressions. His knowledge proved useful in June 2001 when the Asia Pacific Solidarity Conference near Jakarta was raided by police. Tom acted as interpreter for many of the foreigners in the group and helped negotiate the release of those arrested.
But it was Tom’s English language skills that influenced so many. From the beginning, Tom taught members to write simple, concise English which set forward Marxist ideas clearly. Editors of the publications from the Battler on were strongly influenced by Tom’s style; I and many others turned to Tom for advice when writing longer articles and even books. His skills as an editor, and his ability to improve a piece by shortening it, have repeatedly been enlightening to me. Tom’s influence lives on today in a wide network of political writing that does not bear his name, but is indebted to his example and guidance.
Tom was not just interested in political writing. His engagement with literature enriched his appreciation of Marxism and political theory, of history and of the world. In an unpublished essay on Faust, he wrote:
“Great literature is valuable even if it’s written by bilious right wingers. A famous example is the work of Balzac ... Engels wrote that he had ‘learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together’.”
Tom’s political influence on me was profound. I joined with him and others in building political groups in the 1970s and 1980s and remained close to him politically after I ceased to be a member in the early 1990s. We experienced many political highlights together. In Portugal in July 1975, we joined in mass working class demonstrations. Back in Australia later that year, we were part of the protest again the dismissal of the Whitlam government that marched down Bourke Street in Melbourne. 
In the following period, we were together in many actions against Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. We visited Lebanon, Syria and Israel/Palestine in 1980 together with Mick Armstrong, and in 1985 we travelled through South America and Nicaragua. Tom encouraged and inspired me—he helped me to learn to speak in public, to write about the activities I was involved in, such as women’s liberation, to develop political interests of my own, such as the radical Jewish movement, to write and to be an activist.
<img alt="Tom and Janey Stone" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/img354.jpg" />
In 2012, Tom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. Sadly, as the disease slowly took hold, he went into care and became unable to write. His last published <a href="https://overland.org.au/2019/07/dementia-is-not-a-democracy-looking-for-freedom-in-an-old-folks-home/">piece</a> was “Dementia is not a democracy: looking for freedom in an old folks’ home”. But he continued his political activity as long as he could—he attended meetings of Socialist Alternative from his aged care facility, he watched the news, he talked about the political situation and enjoyed the new editions of his books. Almost the last thing he said to me just four days before he died was about the war in the Middle East.
Tom was my political mentor virtually all my adult life. He was my partner for nearly twenty years and after that was one of my closest friends. Throughout, I looked to him for guidance and comment in my writing and political activity.
But we were more to each other than comrades. When we parted, we agreed that we would look out for each other and support each other in life. We did that until the very end.
Tom began his political memoirs with a quote from William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It is not even past”. Although I now say good-bye to Tom, he does not seem really gone. He lives on, not just in me but in the dozens and hundreds of people who learnt from him, cared about him, were politically active with him, read his books, listened to his talks, and are now reading his obituaries. When asked, “Why be a revolutionary socialist today?”, his answer was that it was a life worth living.
His life was truly a life worth living.

Janey Stone

Vale Tom O’Lincoln: a life worth living

Tom O’Lincoln, one of the key founders of the revolutionary socialist current from which Socialist Alternative originated, has sadly died in Melbourne after a long illness.
I first met Tom in 1974 when I joined the Socialist Workers Action Group (SWAG). Tom was the leading political figure in the group—doing everything from public speaking to running internal educationals, writing scores of articles for our soon-to-be re-launched paper, The Battler, and drawing up perspective documents. In a small group like SWAG, which only had 16 or 18 members when I joined, leaders like Tom had to be a jack-of-all-trades, combining political tasks with more “hum drum” ones, such as typing up newsletters and spending hour after hour, in the pre-photocopier age, running off interminable leaflets and documents on a Gestetner machine that was prone to repeatedly breaking down. Tom combined all this incredible activity with his work as a school teacher, through which he was a prominent activist in the militant rank-and-file group in the secondary teachers’ union at the time.
Tom had developed his Marxist politics in the US International Socialists (IS). The IS had a distinctive political orientation compared to the many other socialist groups that existed in the early 1970s. While resolutely hostile to Western capitalism, the IS also opposed the Stalinist tyrannies that paraded as socialist in countries like Russia and China. Its slogan was: “Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism”.
The IS stood for workers’ power and the overthrow of the bosses and ruling bureaucrats in every country. It based itself on the core principle of Marxism: that the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself.
There were going to be no liberators from on high, whether Labor politicians, union bureaucrats, Russian tanks or guerrilla bands; workers had to liberate themselves. Reflecting that perspective, the IS championed industrial militancy and direct action, the formation of rank-and-file groups in workplaces, and the building of a revolutionary party to challenge the reformist political leaders.
After moving to Australia in 1971 with Janey Stone, who had also been active in the IS (US), Tom joined the small Marxist Workers Group (MWG), a loose group whose politics were evolving. Over the following two years, Tom and Janey played a key role in winning the MWG to explicitly IS politics.
They also successfully argued that the MWG had to become a more coherent and disciplined Leninist organisation with a more interventionist and activist orientation. Reflecting this shift, the MWG changed its name to the Socialist Workers Action Group (SWAG) and put out the first edition of its paper, The Battler, for the December 1972 elections that brought the Whitlam Labor government to office.
Over the next few years, SWAG began to grow despite some setbacks. Then, in the wake of the mass working class revolt provoked by the Kerr Coup of 11 November 1975, SWAG set itself the task of breaking out of Melbourne and building a national revolutionary organisation.
Tom and a small group of comrades, including myself, moved to Sydney to establish a branch there. The group had been renamed the International Socialists following a regroupment conference at which we united with a small revolutionary group in Hobart and made stronger connections with a group of comrades in Canberra, who were soon to join.
As part of an attempt to break into the working class, Tom argued for a perspective of industrialisation—student members taking blue-collar factory jobs. He led by example, taking a job in the metal trades, the key centre of industrial militancy in those years.
With various shifts in orientation, the IS continued to grow in the course of the 1970s. Branches were established in Brisbane, where we played a leading role in the civil liberties campaign against the right-wing Bjelke Petersen government’s ban on street marches, as well as in Adelaide, Canberra and Sydney in addition to Melbourne.
In late 1979, Tom, Janey and I visited Lebanon and stayed with members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Tom could speak a wide variety of languages, including German, Franch, Russian and, later, Indonesian. We relied on his French to communicate with our hosts. Tom was a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, and in Lebanon and Syria we saw the realities of life in refugee camps for Palestinian refugees and we also visited occupied Palestine and met up with revolutionary opponents of the Zionist regime.
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="Tom O'Lincoln (right) on a visit to Lebanon in 1979" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/Mick%20and%20Tom%20O.jpg" /></div>
<div class="article_inline_caption">Tom O'Lincoln (right) and Mick Armstrong (left) with Palestinian activists on a visit to the Middle East in 1979</div>
The 1980s were a much more difficult period for the revolutionary left. There was a sharp downturn in industrial militancy, a shift to the right in broader society, and an abandonment of revolutionary politics by large sections of those radicalised during the mass struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A number of socialist groups collapsed.
This led to sharp debates and an eventual split in the IS, in which Tom and I were on opposite sides. However, by the end of the 1980s we had re-united as the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), in which Tom and I both served on the national leadership.
The ISO grew substantially in the early 1990s, but then went off the rails. Reflecting the ISO’s degeneration, a number of comrades in Melbourne were expelled in 1995 and went on to form Socialist Alternative. Tom took a principled stance opposing those expulsions but did not initially leave the ISO. He still hoped the organisation could be reformed. But despite writing some insightful documents, Tom was unable to convince the ISO leadership to change course. Impressed by the consolidation and growth of Socialist Alternative, he joined us more than 15 years ago.
He remained an active member of Socialist Alternative, until the deterioration of his illness made that impossible. Right up to the end he remained a committed revolutionary and a Socialist Alternative member and followed, to the best that he still could, developments in the organisation.
Tom leaves an important legacy in his writings, as well as numerous articles and pamphlets, and a series of important books. His books include Into the Mainstream, an important critique of the Stalinist politics and decline of the Communist Party of Australia; Years of Rage, an analysis of the social conflicts and debates on the left during the Fraser years; two studies of Australian imperialism The Neighbour from Hell and Australia’s Pacific War; a study of the early Australian working class movement, United We Stand; and a collection of his writings, The Expropriators are Expropriated. And as part of his contribution to developing socialist ideas about women’s liberation, he co-edited Rebel Women with Sandra Bloodworth.
Tom’s life and commitment is an inspiration for all of us fighting to overcome the horrors of capitalism. Without comrades like Tom Socialist Alternative would not have become the organisation it is today – with over 500 members the largest revolutionary socialist group in Australia since the 1920s with an active, committed and growing young membership.
His patience, insightfulness and generosity will be keenly missed. Tom never tired of helping people to learn about Marxist politics, and always encouraged others to speak and write.
It is our task to build on his legacy by putting all our energy into the vital task of establishing a socialist movement that is capable of tearing down the existing order and building a new society of genuine freedom in its place. Tom would have endorsed the famous words of Joe Hill: “Don’t mourn, organise”.

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