# Red Flag > A socialist magazine. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### Topics URL: https://redflag.org.au/topics/ Last updated: 2025-08-15T13:25:20.000Z _No content available._ ### Latest URL: https://redflag.org.au/latest/ Last updated: 2025-08-15T14:20:06.000Z _No content available._ ### Red Flag Radio URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/ Last updated: 2025-10-13T04:14:39.000Z [Subscribe](#) test [test](#) ### Banner sidebar URL: https://redflag.org.au/banner-sidebar/ Last updated: 2026-09-06T10:27:55.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/09/309-cover.jpg) #### Help us build the socialist movement New editions of Red Flag are released fortnightly. Subscribe to a print or digital subscription. 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That’s not unusual: almost every field creates its own vocabulary. Talk to a gardener about gardening, a surfer about surfing, an economist about economics, etc., and you will quickly find that they use a range of words specific to their area. They also occasionally use some regular words differently. The socialist movement is no exception. Throughout our history, socialists, trade unionists, anarchists and others have developed a left-wing vernacular, which we want to preserve. The aim of the A-Z of Marxism is to help readers understand it. Note that this is a work in progress, and the definitions are likely to change as we get feedback. ### [**A**](#a)[**B**](#b)[**C**](#c)[**D**](#d)[**E**](#e)[**F**](#f)[**G**](#g)[**H**](#h)[**I**](#i)[**J**](#j)[**K**](#k)[**L**](#l)[**M**](#m)[**N**](#n)[**O**](#o)[**P**](#p)[**Q**](#q)[**R**](#r)[**S**](#s)[**T**](#t)[**U**](#u)[**V**](#v)[**W**](#w)[**X**](#x)[**Y**](#y)[**Z**](#z) ### # A #### Abolitionist > Someone who was part of or supported the movement to end slavery in the United States. In contemporary use, someone who wants to eliminate prisons and the prison system. #### Abstract labour > Karl Marx defined abstract labour as “the expenditure of human labour power in general” (*Capital*, Vol. 1), which determines the value of a commodity. He contrasted this with concrete labour—the particular activity (e.g., carpentry, weaving, baking) that produces a concrete result (a use value). Abstract labour serves as a standardised, common unit of labour throughout the economy. Reducing all work to a uniform average expenditure of human energy embodied in a commodity allows different goods to be compared and exchanged on the market. See also socially necessary labour time. #### Accord (the Accord) > The ALP-ACTU Accord, or the Prices and Incomes Accord, was a series of agreements, starting in 1983 and ending in 1996, between the federal Labor government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions. The theory of the Accord was that workers would receive lower pay rises but would be compensated for this with lower income taxes and increased social welfare (such as the introduction of Medicare). The reality was a massive transfer of wealth from workers to bosses and the decimation of the union movement. During the Accord years, most union leaders discouraged rank-and-file activism, which was viewed as a threat to the deal they had struck with Labor. They attacked unions, such as the Builders Labourers Federation, that refused to cooperate with the government and the employers. (For more, see the *Socialist Review* article “[The Accord and the state of working class organisation](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-accord-and-the-state-of-working-class-organisation/?ref=redflag.org.au)”.) #### Accumulation (capital accumulation) > The process of reinvesting business profits to increase the scale of production (and to grow the size of a company). “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”, Karl Marx wrote in Capital, where he identified accumulation as the “inner law” or core dynamic of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalists are forced by competition to continuously reinvest their profits (particularly by introducing new technology) and increase the rate of exploitation of workers. If they don’t, they risk being driven out of business by rivals. #### Activism > Efforts to bring about some sort of social or political change. #### Activist > Someone who engages in activism. In trade unions, a “union activist” recruits people to the union and campaigns in their workplace for better wages and conditions, and against bigotry, to unite workers against the boss. #### Alienation #### Ambit claim > An initial demand that significantly exceeds what is seen as “realistic”; a starting point for negotiations that leaves room for counter-offers and compromise. It is a tactic frequently used when negotiating workplace contracts. For example, a union might make an initial claim for a 30 percent wage rise when both the union and the company know that the union will settle for considerably less. Ambit claims can also occur in other types of negotiations. For example, US President Donald Trump’s threats to impose high tariffs against other countries throughout 2025 were sometimes simply a means to reach trade agreements more favourable to the US than might otherwise have been the case. See also bargain, enterprise agreement. #### Anarchism > A socialist current that usually defines itself in opposition to Marxism. This opposition began with the founder of modern anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin. The movement mostly emphasises decentralisation, both as a vision of socialism and a principle of organising: socialism is conceived as a network of small communes freely trading with each other, and socialist organisation is a network of small groups acting largely autonomously. Many anarchists reject Karl Marx’s emphasis on the industrial working class, on mass action and political action, and on the need for a revolutionary workers’ state. However, these anarchist principles have tended to break down during large-scale struggles, resulting in the development of anarchist sub-currents that accept major principles of Marxism. For example, anarcho-syndicalists concede the centrality of the working class and “platform” anarchists concede the need for political struggle and a revolutionary state. This diversity of opinion, combined with a lack of any broadly agreed-upon anarchist theory of human history or society, makes anarchism hard to define, even for anarchists. #### Apartheid > A system of institutionalised racial discrimination and segregation. Most commonly associated with the regime in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s and with Israel in relation to its rule over the Palestinians. (For more, see the *Indiana International & Comparative Law Review* article “[Apartheid outside Africa: the case of Israel](https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/practice/law-reviews/iiclr/pdf/vol2p221.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au)”.) #### Arab Spring (the Arab Revolutions) > A wave of uprisings and revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011-12\. The movement resulted in the overthrow of governments in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen, and civil war in Syria. Other countries were rocked by sustained mass protest movements, including Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain and Sudan (the government of which fell to another revolution in 2019). #### Austerity > A program of government cuts to social services and public sector wages. It can also involve selling public assets (see privatisation), making certain services “user pays” (rather than free), and adding taxes to basic consumer goods. Austerity is invariably about reducing working-class living standards, and is most often implemented in times of recession, high government debt and/or war. #### **Authoritarian** > Usually means hostile to democracy; a person, political practice or political system who/that attempts to limit or prevent open debate and the exchange of ideas, and stifle popular participation or decision-making. #### Award > A legal document outlining minimum pay rates and conditions of work in Australia. Awards are generally industry-based, meaning that different awards cover different types of work. Almost all workers and bosses are covered, and legally bound, by an award. Some workers, usually those in workplaces with trade union members, are also covered by enterprise agreements. (For more, see [the list of awards](https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/awards/list-of-awards?ref=redflag.org.au) at the Fair Work Ombudsman.) # B #### Bakunin, Mikhail > A Russian anarchist and chief rival of Karl Marx in the First International. While Marx and Engels argued for the working class and the oppressed to unite in a workers’ state to overthrow the capitalist state, Bakunin advocated a decentralised network of small communes freely trading with each other. Bakunin said that the capitalist state and the workers’ state are equally objectionable: it did not matter how democratic a workers’ state was for the oppressed nor how necessary such a state was to defend a revolution. Bakunin also advocated secret plots by armed minorities as a means of sparking revolutions. He was expelled from the First International in 1872 for maintaining a secret organisation inside the group. #### Bargain (to bargain) > The formal negotiation process to reach an agreement over issues such as wages and working conditions applying to different groups of workers. In Australia, the resulting employment contracts are called bargaining agreements. Bargaining is usually conducted between employers and unions and often occurs in an individual enterprise (business)—hence the term “enterprise agreement” (EA) or sometimes “enterprise bargaining agreement” (EBA). Less frequently, bargaining results in industry agreements that cover workers in all businesses across a particular sector of the economy. #### Bargaining period > The limited period in which a union is permitted to present, negotiate and take action for a new workplace or industry agreement (contract). Workers can take “protected” (that is, legal) industrial action to support their claims only when negotiating on a proposed enterprise agreement and must apply to the Fair Work Commission for a protected action ballot order. Under Australia’s highly restrictive workplace laws, workers/unions taking action outside the bargaining period, or without a Commission-authorised secret ballot, are severely penalised. #### Bolshevik > Russian for “of the majority”. It was the name taken by Vladimir Lenin’s faction/party following a split in the Russian socialist movement in 1903\. The other, moderate, faction was called the Mensheviks, meaning “of the minority”. See also Menshevik. #### Bolshy > Derivative of Bolshevik. Generally, someone energetically anti-capitalist, passionate and unmovable on a particular issue, or displaying militant tendencies. “She’s very Bolshy—always picking fights with cops”; or: “He’s quite Bolshy about composting, don’t let him catch you putting your scraps in the bin”. See also Bolshevik. #### Boss > Anyone who employs a worker or who has the power to direct their work or fire them. Usually refers to capitalists, but can also refer to managers and bureaucrats. #### Bourgeoisie > It’s just French for “capitalist class”. #### Bureaucrat > Deriving from the French for “office”, a bureaucrat is a pejorative term for an official in a government department (or some other large administrative apparatus, such as a corporation). Unlike public servants and clerical workers, bureaucrats usually have some degree of authority or autonomy. See also union bureaucrat. # C #### Cadre > Derives from a military term for the commissioned and non-commissioned officers of a military unit responsible for training the rank-and-file troops. In the context of socialist organisations, cadre refers to the layer of experienced members with a solid understanding of Marxist politics who are capable of winning others to a Marxist worldview, and of playing a leading role both inside and outside the organisation. (Cadre is traditionally pronounced *Kah-dray*, but Australian socialists mostly say *Kay-duh*.) #### Capital #### Capitalism #### **Capitalist** > A business owner. Perhaps more specifically, a person who is reliant on the labour of their business’s employees for the bulk of their income. When socialists talk about “the capitalists”, we usually mean members of the ruling class who own or control *big* businesses. These capitalists are a tiny fraction of a country’s population—less than 1 percent—and run the major sections of the economy. Capitalists include the directors, CEOs and top managers of the biggest companies. (For more, see the *Red Flag* article “[The ruling class in Australia](https://redflag.org.au/article/ruling-class-australia)”.) #### Cartel > A group of companies that act together to control a market and eliminate competition. See also monopoly. #### Centrism > In mainstream parlance, centrism is the political space between the left and the right, advocating moderate or “balanced” policies and favouring compromise, pragmatism and social stability over radical change. Thus, centrism seeks to overcome (or paper over) real class divisions and interests, and the inevitable conflicts that arise from them. In the socialist movement, centrism refers to organisations that vacillate between reform and revolution as the means to achieve socialism. Generally, however, such organisations may espouse revolutionary rhetoric but tend to be reformist in practice. See also left wing, right wing. #### Civil society > Modern societies are often considered to have three components: the family, civil society and the state. If the family is supposedly the sphere of love and intimacy, and the state the sphere of public politics, civil society is basically the economic sphere. People leave their homes and families in the morning and enter a world in which workers compete for jobs and business owners compete for customers. In the words of German philosopher Georg Hegel, it is “the battlefield where everyone’s individual private interest meets everyone else’s”. In Karl Marx’s paraphrase, civil society is the “war of all against all”. Often, “civil society” is used more broadly. So people sometimes refer to “civil society institutions”, which implies “non-government groups”. A trade union, for example, is a civil society institution. But so too is a sports club. So the phrase is often vague and unhelpful. #### Class > See social class #### Class collaboration > Attempts to reconcile the divisions and conflict between classes, principally between capitalists and workers. Usually takes the form of convincing workers that they have an interest in helping the company that exploits them thrive, and that they should work with their boss rather than against them. Trade union leaders are some of the leading proponents of class collaboration; they mediate between capital and labour, making deals that more often than not benefit the bosses. > > Politically, the most prevalent form of class collaboration is nationalism, the false idea that workers and bosses in a particular country share common interests. But “the national interest” invariably means the subordination of workers’ interests to those of the bosses. It is often invoked to send workers to war or to accept miserable wages and conditions for the sake of “the economy”, i.e. to maintain profits. #### Class consciousness > Consciousness is usually considered an attribute of individuals. So someone is “conscious of their surroundings” or becomes “unconscious” when they receive a hard blow to their head. Class consciousness refers to collective awareness on the part of social classes, or sections of them. Fundamentally, class consciousness is bosses and workers understanding that they have different economic interests—that profits are the result of exploitation, for example. Workers are said to have a high level of working-class consciousness when they develop a political understanding of the nature of capitalism—for example, that racism divides workers and must be fought, that the state is not neutral in the class struggle—and are prepared to fight for a better world (that is, that they are activists). #### **Class struggle** > By “struggle”, Marxists don’t mean “difficulty”, as in “I struggle to get out of bed in the morning”, or “She is struggling to make ends meet”. Class struggle refers to the contest between bosses and workers over the distribution of the economy’s wealth and over who exerts control or influence within society more generally. For example, when we talk about “working-class struggle”, we mean the extent to which workers are standing together to fight for better wages, shorter working hours, democratic rights, and against discrimination and oppression in the workplace and in society, among other things. For workers, class struggle involves strikes or other industrial actions and public displays such as mass street marches, which express *collective power*. #### Closed shop > A workplace in which all employees must join a trade union as a condition of employment. Historically, strong trade unions have enforced closed shops. For example, construction unions at times have been able to impose “no ticket, no start” rules to keep out non-union labour. Closed shops formed in this way have been illegal in Australia since 2009, when the Labor Party federal government legislated the (misnamed) *Fair Work Act*. Some large companies favour informal closed shop agreements with right-wing unions in order to impose deals that benefit the bosses rather than the workers. (For an example of this, see the *Red Flag* article “[Coles-SDA deal fails as Fair Work rules in favour of workers](https://redflag.org.au/node/5320)”.) #### Colonialism > The occupation and control of a country or territory by a foreign power for an extended period. Colonial powers directly control the government and economy, exploit the country’s resources and dominate the colonised population, often imposing their own language and cultural values. Between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, colonialism was predominantly carried out by European states competing for markets and resources. The process led to the creation of vast empires, such as the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British empires. #### Comintern > See Third International #### Commodity > An item (or service) produced for sale rather than for the consumption or use of the person or people creating it. Karl Marx said that a commodity must have both a *use-value* and a value (expressed in its price, or *exchange-value*). For example, a tomato grown in a backyard simply for eating is not a commodity. It has a use-value: the quality of being edible, which is determined by its chemical and biological properties. But if it isn’t produced for a market and never enters one, from the perspective of the capitalist system, it has no economic value. However, a tomato grown to be sold also has an exchange-value (a price), which is not determined by its physical qualities (its use-value), but by the average quantity of labour required to produce it. See also socially necessary labour; abstract labour; value. #### Commodity fetishism > In anthropology, fetishism refers to the primitive belief that supernatural powers exist or are embodied in inanimate objects (e.g. totems). Marx draws on this concept to describe the illusion that the production and exchange of commodities on the market is a relationship between *things* (money and goods) rather than between *people*. Even though a product has value only because it embodies human labour, its value appears to be a natural attribute of the product, like its weight or density. The social relation between people (those producing the things being exchanged) thus assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things \[which\] I call the fetishism ... of commodities”. (Marx, *Capital*, Vol. 1.) See also commodity, value, use-value, exchange-value, market. #### Communism #### Communist International > See Third International #### **Comrade** > A fellow member of a movement. The German *kamerad* meant roommate or barracks-mate (someone who shares your chamber, from the Latin *camera*) and was a term of friendship used in the nineteenth century by soldiers, students and members of clubs. After the 1848 European revolutions, French socialists adapted *kamerad* to *camarade* as a neutral form of respectful and egalitarian address. Subsequently, socialist movements in different countries imported the word “comrade” or selected their native equivalent. The Russian *tovarishch* is related to *tovar*, “commodity”; *tovarishch* was initially used among merchants before coming to mean “travel companion” and then “comrade”. In Germany, *kamerad* came to be more strongly associated with the military and, ultimately, the fascist movement: Nazis called each other *kamerad*, while socialists preferred the word *genosse* or *genossin*, roughly meaning “one who shares the enjoyment”. #### Conservatism > As a political movement or ideology, conservatism is notoriously tricky to define. Perhaps the neatest definition is that conservatism is the defence of hierarchy—the belief that some people should rule over others, be it husbands over wives, bosses over workers, rich over poor, or perhaps whites over blacks (although this last notion has gone out of favour, at least publicly). Conservatives generally oppose movements and political ideas that seek to undermine “traditional” institutions of authority, such as the nuclear family or the church, or that strive for more egalitarian (therefore less hierarchical) societies. See also right-wing. #### Constant capital > Business investment in non-human production inputs, such as raw materials, machinery and equipment, buildings, etc. Constant capital is “dead labour”, i.e. the past labour embodied in the means of production. It transfers its existing value, or part of its value, during the production process (to the things being produced), but does not create new value—hence “constant” capital. See also value, variable capital, means of production. #### Consumerism > Often used pejoratively to describe either a) the excessive and often wasteful level of consumption of material goods and services, particularly in wealthier societies; or b) the corporate ethos that individuals ought to find satisfaction or even meaning through purchasing consumer goods. In economic theory, it’s the idea that consumer spending is desirable as a driver of economic growth and a measure of the “development” of a capitalist economy. See also commodity fetishism, ethical consumerism. #### Contradictory consciousness > A term coined by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) to describe how workers’ experience as an oppressed class—which forces them to unite and fight against exploitation—clashes with “popular consciousness”, the ideology and world view they absorb from living under capitalism. For example, a militant trade unionist may simultaneously hold right-wing ideas, such as racism and sexism. Gramsci wrote: > “One might almost say he \[the worker\] has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness). One which is implicit in his activity and which … unites him with his fellow workers in the practical transformation of the real world, and one … which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed.” > So workers often fight back despite the dominant ideology they might espouse. Noting that every revolution “has been preceded by a long process of intense critical activity, of new cultural insight and the spread of ideas through groups of men initially resistant to them”, Gramsci argued that it is the task of the revolutionary party to lead the working class from popular to revolutionary consciousness: > “One … cannot ask every worker … to be completely aware of the whole complex function which his class is destined to perform in the process of development of humanity. … The party can and must … represent this higher consciousness. Otherwise it will not lead them but be dragged along by them. Hence, the party must assimilate Marxism”. # D #### Deep state > Unelected parts of the state which act in secret to undermine democracy and restrict the actions of elected officials. The deep state may consist of military officers, intelligence officers and civil servants. The term was originally used with reference to countries with a history of coups, or where unelected state officials were intensely hostile to a new regime, such as Egypt after the 2011 revolution. Donald Trump’s supporters popularised the idea that a “woke” deep state was undermining his presidency. In reality, every capitalist state has a large unelected bureaucracy intended to limit the impact of elected officials. This is an openly acknowledged part of the “checks and balances” of capitalist democracy. The so-called deep state is a standard part of a capitalist constitution; it sometimes inconveniences right-wing governments, and often crushes left-wing ones. #### Delegate > A person elected or authorised to represent others in a group or organisation—for example, at a meeting or conference or in an ongoing capacity. In a trade union, a delegate is elected by their workmates to negotiate with their employer and liaise with the union officials on their behalf. See also shop steward. #### Democracy > In ancient Greece, it meant “rule of the people”—a way to organise political life based on collective decision-making. In the ancient world, a small minority of slave-owning men were the only citizens, and they were empowered to discuss and decide on very important matters. Unlike ancient democracy, modern capitalist democracy usually allows most of the adult population to participate, but gives us a say on a narrow set of questions: for the most part, we decide which politicians will be elected. The socialist movement has been associated with trying to expand democracy to more areas of life—into the workplace, for example—to create a more all-embracing version of democracy, where “the people” can decide on all important questions of social life. #### Demonstration > A public protest. When people take to the streets to express an opinion they collectively share (that their government should not join a foreign war, for example), it demonstrates that many people care about an issue and are willing to act on it. In some European languages, protests are called “manifestations”. In everyday life, the fact that many people want the world to change can be concealed. Public protests demonstrate, or prove, this fact: they act as a manifestation, an embodiment, of previously concealed thoughts and feelings. #### Determinism > The belief that all events, including human actions, are inevitably caused or determined by preceding events and in accordance with natural/scientific laws outside human control. “Hard” determinism holds that free will is an illusion (leading to the conclusion that individuals cannot be held morally responsible for their actions). Some interpretations of Marxism are deterministic—the idea that economic development inevitably leads to socialism, for example, or that the class struggle will automatically undermine bigotry among sections of the working class. Marx himself, however, rejected determinism. Humans are not simply the passive objects of historical forces; we actively shape our own history. However, our actions are constrained and limited by existing social, economic and political conditions. He wrote, in *The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte*: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”. #### Dialectic #### Direct action > A form of activism that usually involves groups and individuals disrupting “business as usual”, using tactics such as protests, boycotts, strikes, blockades, occupations and other forms of civil resistance or disobedience. Direct action contrasts with the more “indirect” or passive activism of lobbying or voting, but is not necessarily counterposed (activists can both blockade a fossil fuel extraction site and vote for a person or party that pledges to do something about climate change, for example). #### Division of labour > The way in which tasks (usually to do with production and reproduction) are assigned to various groups in a society or economy. Also, the separation of a complex task into smaller, specialised tasks. There are different types of division, which can overlap. For example: > > The social division of labour refers to the network of relationships that structure a particular society. The primary feature of the capitalist social division of labour, for example, is that there is an exploiting class (capitalists, who own and control the means of production) and an exploited class (workers, who do the work). Other aspects of this social division of labour are: companies are the fundamental economic units (rather than families, for instance); production is organised privately, usually without economy-wide planning; and businesses compete against each other, rather than collaborate. > > The technical division of labour is generally related to the way economic activities are organised within a social division of labour. For example, a factory assembly line that breaks up the production process into a series of simple and repetitive tasks is a technical division of labour. The global division of labour, which reflects varying levels of economic development (with some countries specialising in agricultural production and others in high-tech goods, for example), is arguably both a technical division and part of the social division. > > The sexual division of labour refers to the way society assigns different tasks and responsibilities to men and women within the home, the workplace and the workforce more generally. It also could be said to have both social and technical aspects. # E #### Eight-hour day > Since the Industrial Revolution, workers have tried to resist exploitation by limiting the length of the working day. The eight-hour day movement played a crucial role in shaping labour rights and working conditions. The concept was initially proposed in 1817 by Robert Owen, a Welsh capitalist and social reformer, with the slogan “Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest”. The first workers to achieve this goal were stonemasons in Melbourne in 1856. #### Emancipation > The liberation of an oppressed group from legal, social or political restrictions—for example, the abolition of slavery. It can also refer to the fight to win equality for an oppressed or disenfranchised group, along with full economic, social and political rights. See also self-emancipation. #### Engels, Friedrich (1820–1895) > German philosopher, political theorist and activist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. A lifelong friend and close collaborator of Karl Marx, he is acknowledged as the co-founder of “scientific socialism”, i.e. Marxism. Vladimir Lenin wrote, “After his friend Karl Marx, he was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern working class in the whole civilised world”. Though the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, Engels at a young age became a fierce critic of capitalism, and found a kindred spirit when he met Marx in 1844\. Together, they wrote a series of key texts—including *The Holy Family* (1844), *The German Ideology* (1846) and *The Communist Manifesto* (1848)—and worked as political activists in the Communist League and First International. Engels also wrote several important works of his own, many of which are considered foundational to Marxist theory. His first book, *The Condition of the Working Class in England* (1845), drew on his observations of the appalling working conditions that prevailed following the Industrial Revolution. His pathbreaking book, *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State* (1884), remains one of the best explanations of women’s oppression and how it can be eliminated. Other significant works include his *Anti-Dühring* (1878), *Socialism: Utopian and Scientific* (1880), *Dialectics of Nature* (1872–1882) and *Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy* (1886). Engels supported Marx financially for much of his life and, following Marx’s death in 1883, edited his manuscripts to complete Volumes II and III of *Capital* (1885 and 1894). #### Enterprise agreement (EA) > A contract between an employer and a trade union that enshrines the terms, conditions and entitlements for the workers it covers. Such agreements cover a specific business or a group of companies (as opposed to an industry). EAs, to be valid, generally need to provide for wages and conditions of work equal to or above the legal minimums set out in awards. See also award. #### Ethical consumerism > Making purchasing decisions based on a consideration of the social, environmental and political impact of goods or services, to support fair labour practices, environmental sustainability, animal welfare, etc. Although often described as a form of activism, it is really just a set of market-based moral choices made by individuals based on the money available to them. “Ethical” products are usually more expensive, therefore less accessible to workers and the poor. So ethical consumerism is essentially middle-class conscience-salving. It has also given rise to “greenwashing”—when companies falsely promote their products as ethical to capture this market. (For more, see the *Red Flag* article “[Is it hypocritical for socialists to use iPhones and buy stuff on Temu?](https://redflag.org.au/article/is-it-hypocritical-for-socialists-to-use-iphones-and-buy-stuff-on-temu)”.) #### Exchange-value > The measure of a commodity’s value expressed in what it can be exchanged for, typically the payment of money for a product or service. While related to “price”, Marx argued that exchange-value is not identical to the money price of a commodity, which may fluctuate wildly from its value. See also commodity, price, value, use-value. #### Exploitation > When an individual or group controls and lives off the labour of others, and controls the surplus produced by that labour. (“Surplus” here means the goods and services produced above and beyond what is required to maintain the working population.) Notable exploitative relationships include slave owners and slaves, landowners and peasants, and bosses and workers. Living off a surplus produced by others is not necessarily exploitation: those who cannot work due to injury, disability, age, or unemployment live by consuming part of society’s surplus, but do not exploit anyone. Exploitation necessarily involves having power over others and influencing the labour process. This power generally derives from the exploiter’s ownership or control of the means of production. See also labour power, productivity, socially necessary labour time. # F #### Family (the nuclear family) > A household consisting of two parents and their children. Family forms have varied considerably throughout human history, depending on the nature of the society and the mode of production at the time. The nuclear family is a modern phenomenon specific to the needs of capitalism—the privatised reproduction of future workers and the care and maintenance of the existing workforce. It is the primary source of women’s oppression under capitalism. Even though most women today have paid employment outside the home, they still bear the majority of the responsibility for family care. This benefits capitalism in two main ways. First, women’s unpaid labour in the home is of enormous economic value in itself. Second, that women’s primary role is seen as wife and mother justifies the sexual division of labour in which many women are employed in the so-called caring (and lower-paid) industries such as health care, child care, aged care and teaching. Though the impact of social changes has led to some variations (for example single-parent households or same-sex parents and children), the nuclear family is seen and promoted as the ideal or “natural” family model. #### Fascism > A particularly authoritarian and nationalist political ideology and movement, which usually cloaks itself in radical-sounding rhetoric but ultimately serves the interests of business owners and views the political left and the workers’ movement as enemies to be eradicated. The term is derived from the Latin word “fasces”, a symbol of Ancient Roman authority consisting of a bundle of rods and an axe. It was first used in 1915 by Benito Mussolini, whose regime in Italy (1922–43) was the first fascist state. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany (1933–45) was fascist, and accompanied by virulent white supremacist racism, most notably antisemitism. > > Fascism emerged in response to the political and economic crises that followed World War One, when the European working class was politically organised and generally socialist in outlook. The fascist movement was based on and mobilised the middle classes’ fear of working-class revolution, but (despite some anti-capitalist rhetoric) financed and supported by big business. “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery”, Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky wrote in 1934\. Hence, fascist states attacked the working-class movement by arresting its Communist and Social Democrat leaders and banning trade unionism. > > While some individuals, political movements and states have openly identified themselves as fascist, most don’t. Individuals can consciously or unconsciously recreate fascist political conduct while sincerely believing themselves to detest fascism; right-wingers might stridently deny any association with fascism while knowingly collaborating with and making use of fascist allies as part of a political or governing coalition. Political parties with fascist-like properties have characterised themselves as mainstream conservatives, or even as social democrats. > > Parties very similar to traditional European fascism have formed governments without creating a one-party state that is often viewed as defining a fascist political order. On the other hand, nationalist dictatorships similar to Mussolini’s Italy can emerge without founding themselves on the kind of large-scale middle-class social movement often viewed as a defining feature of fascism. So whether an individual or party self-identifies as a fascist doesn’t necessarily tell us much about their politics. See also right wing, authoritarian, nationalism, Nazi. (For more, see the *Red Flag* article “[Trotsky and the struggle against fascism](https://redflag.org.au/article/trotsky-and-struggle-against-fascism)”.) #### Feudalism > A social, economic and political system primarily based on agricultural production, feudalism dominated Europe from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. It was characterised by a hierarchical social structure based on land ownership and reciprocal obligations between lords (the most powerful landowners) and vassals (lower-ranking members of the nobility, or upper class), who were granted the use of land in return for their allegiance and military service. Vassals did not work the land, but acted as property managers. The work was done by agricultural labourers who formed the peasant class, many of whom were serfs (from the Latin *servus*, “slave”), tied to working on their lord’s estate. See also peasant, serf. #### Fictitious capital #### First International > The International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), founded in London in 1864, was the first international organisation to unite working-class and left-wing forces—socialist, communist, social democratic and anarchist groups and trade unions. The IWA was established during a revival of workers’ struggle following a period of reaction in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. At its peak, the First International had up to 8 million members. Karl Marx was a founding member, wrote the IWA’s program and constitution and served on its General Council. From April 1865, women were accepted as members, but the leadership remained exclusively male until 1867, when Harriet Law, supported by Marx, was admitted the General Council. The IWA held conferences in Geneva (1866), Lausanne (1867), Brussels (1868), Basel (1868) and The Hague (1872). Political tensions and differences emerged, particularly between the socialist forces, led by Marx, and the anarchists, led by Bakunin. In 1872, these conflicts resulted in the expulsion of the anarchists. Subsequently, the General Council, at Marx’s suggestion, moved the IWA headquarters to New York. The IWA was formally disbanded in July 1876. #### First World > Today, this refers to industrialised, stable democracies with high standards of living. But the term emerged during the Cold War, reflecting more the political alliances of the post-World War Two era. “First World” referred to the US-led Western Bloc (NATO) and its allies; “Second World” was the Soviet Bloc (Warsaw Pact) and its allies; and “Third World” was the Non-Aligned Movement, led by Egypt, Yugoslavia, Indonesia and India. The terms became less commonly used after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91\. See also Global North and Global South. #### Forces of production (or productive forces) > The combination of natural resources, labour power, knowledge and technology required to produce goods and services. When Marxists write about “the development of the productive forces / forces of production”, we mean the increasing sophistication and productivity of an economy. # G #### General strike > When the majority of workers, or the workers in a range of key industries, stop work simultaneously (and for a day or longer) in a city, state or country. See also strike. #### Global North > The wealthier industrialised, diversified and technologically advanced countries that dominate global politics, trade and financial institutions. Most, though not all, are located in the northern hemisphere. Countries include the US and Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The term has come to replace the older designation “First World”. See also First World. #### Global South > Developing countries, mostly in the southern hemisphere, usually characterised by poverty, limited industrialisation, poor infrastructure and reliance on agriculture or resource extraction. It includes much of Africa, Latin America and Asia. The term was first used in 1969 by Carl Oglesby, who argued that centuries of northern “dominance over the global south … \[has\] converged … to produce an intolerable social order”. #### Government of the left #### Grassroots > The base of “regular” people in a movement or organisation (as opposed to the leadership, for example). The term was used in 1912 by US Senator Albert Beveridge, who described the Progressive Party as one that “has come from the grass roots … grown from the soil of people’s hard necessities”. Grassroots movements are movements that favour bottom-up, rather than top-down decision-making and maximise the involvement of ordinary people in political activity. #### Guerrilla struggle > Military combat conducted by irregular forces (e.g. the armed wing of a political organisation) against larger and more powerful conventional military forces, usually in an attempt to overthrow a government. Guerrilla struggles involve unconventional tactics, such as hit-and-run attacks, ambushes, sabotage and raids conducted by small, mobile units that often rely on the support of a local population. An example of a successful guerrilla struggle is the Cuban revolution of 1959, when guerrilla forces led by Fidel Castro overthrew the deeply unpopular authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista. # H #### Hegemony > Leadership or dominance, especially by one state or social class over others (derived from the Greek for “authority, rule, political supremacy”). Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of cultural hegemony to explain how the capitalist ruling class employs both consent and coercion to maintain its power. It uses its control of education, advertising, the media, etc., to inculcate the idea that the existing social, political and economic order—capitalist society—is natural, inevitable and beneficial for all. In terms of international relations, Italian sociologist Giovanni Arrighi defined hegemony as the influence a country accumulates not simply from using power to advance its own interests, but by its leadership being in the perceived interests of the countries that fall in behind it. #### Historical materialism #### Hot Autumn > A period of intense class struggle in the industrial centres of northern Italy in 1969–70, when students and workers united in a potentially revolutionary challenge to capitalism. Inspired by the events of May 1968 in France, left-wing students started agitating for educational and social reforms. Workers joined these protests and began fighting for their own demands, including wage rises and a 40-hour work week. This led to a series of large strikes and, in some places, workplace occupations. But as in France, the Communist Party played a key role in quelling the struggle. (For more, see the *Red Flag* article “[‘What do we want? Everything!’: Italy’s Hot Autumn](https://redflag.org.au/article/what-do-we-want-everything-italys-hot-autumn)”.) #### Human nature #### Humanism > A philosophical stance focusing on human flourishing, the development of human potential. Marx’s early philosophical notebooks have a strongly humanist flavour. In these works, he criticises capitalism not just because it creates poverty, violence or war, but because it distorts and limits human potential. These notebooks, rediscovered in the 1930s, had an enormous influence on Marxist philosophy in the twentieth century. See alienation. # I #### Idealism > In common parlance, an idealist is anyone motivated by powerful beliefs, or simply an optimist. In philosophy, the term has had several meanings. It can refer to the notion that ideas are in some way the foundation of reality, and the material world is subordinate to them, or simply their expression. Idealism can also refer to the claim (associated with Kant) that because physical reality is unknowable except through the actions of the mind, it can never be truly understood or accessed. These stances can be counterposed to “materialism”, meaning the physical world is all that exists and that consciousness emerges from it (or is inseparable from it). In Marxism, the idealist-materialist distinction carries another meaning. As Marx and Engels pointed out, many philosophical materialists are “idealists” when it comes to politics: they may deny the existence of spirits, but they believe the genius of a political philosopher can transform world history, and in that sense they uphold the power of ideas over physical reality. The most hard-bitten atheist of the French revolution might still hope that the ideas in their pamphlet would forever transform the planet. For this reason, Marxism is sometimes called “historical materialism”: it tries to link social change to processes that emerge from history itself, particularly the class struggle and the development of productive forces. There is some debate over whether Marx’s historical materialism, which is a theory of social change, can be philosophically derived from the earlier concept of materialism. #### Ideology > A system of opinions, principles or beliefs, especially one on which a political system, social institution or religion is based. Ideologies purport to make sense of the world while obscuring the class interests that underpin them, thereby serving the interests of a particular social group or class, or helping to legitimise the dominant political power. As Karl Marx wrote in *The Poverty of Philosophy*: “The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with their material productivity, produce also principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus these ideas, these categories are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are *historical* and *transitory* products”. #### Imperialism #### Imperialist state #### Industrial action > Action collectively taken by workers to defend or improve their working conditions and wages and/or as a form of political protest. Industrial action can take various forms. For example: bans and limitations (refusing to perform specific tasks at work), go-slows (continuing to work, but doing so at a very relaxed pace), work-to-rule (doing no more than the minimum required in a workplace contract) and, most potently, strikes (refusing to work entirely). Bosses may also take industrial action against their workforce, often in the form of lockouts (preventing employees from entering the workplace and refusing to pay them). #### Industrial muscle > The power that workers can exert in a workplace or industry; the ability to disrupt or halt production by means of strikes or other industrial action. All workers have this power to some extent. Some groups of workers exercise their power more regularly, thereby building their knowledge and practical capacities. Other groups might never go on strike, hence the associated metaphor of industrial muscle “atrophying” for lack of use. Workers in key sectors of the economy—transport and power generation, for example—can bring the whole economy to a standstill by using their industrial muscle. #### Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW; the “Wobblies”) > A revolutionary syndicalist organisation founded in Chicago in 1905, and shortly after in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. By August 1917, IWW membership internationally was estimated at more than 150,000\. The IWW opposed the separation of workers’ unions by craft and argued for “One Big Union”, including unskilled and semi-skilled workers excluded from established trade unions. The aim was “industrial democracy” to unite all workers as a class to fight the bosses. IWW members were heroic fighters and among the few to take a clearly anti-war position in 1914\. Tragically, they underestimated the power of the state and were severely repressed. For example, during World War One, more than 100 Australian Wobblies were jailed on trumped-up political charges. (For the history of the Wobblies in Australia, see the *Marxist Left Review* article “[The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/the-industrial-workers-of-the-world-in-australia/?ref=redflag.org.au)”.) See also syndicalism. #### Insurrection #### Intelligentsia > Professional researchers or academics in universities, think tanks, government departments, trade unions, non-government organisations and so on. Mostly, the intelligentsia is part of the middle classes. #### Internationalism > The unity and solidarity of the working class across national boundaries, a bedrock principle of revolutionary socialism. Today, almost all political parties are nationalist: they argue that all people in a given country, regardless of their social status (whether they are billionaires or bus drivers, for example), share a common interest and should unite as citizens. Socialists are internationalists, arguing that workers in all countries share common interests and should unite across national boundaries against the capitalists of all countries, who collectively exploit them. So Marx and Engels ended the *Communist Manifesto* with the slogan “Workers of All Lands, Unite!” The need for internationalism is not a moral imperative but is rooted in the international character of capitalism itself. As Marx wrote, “The emancipation of the workers is not a local, nor a national, but an international problem”. (For more, see the *Red Flag* article “[Nationalism versus internationalism](https://redflag.org.au/node/5114)”.) #### Islamism > A political ideology holding that the Islamic religion ought to be the basis of the government, legal system and society. Islamists generally oppose the separation of church and state and argue for the imposition of Islamic law (Sharia law). Based on the various Islamic sects (Sunni, Shia, etc.), there is a range of Islamist movements and organisations which seek to achieve this in a variety of ways, and often have ideological differences. Many Islamists are also open to compromise. So in various countries (such as Indonesia, Malaysia and most North African states) Sharia law is limited and operates in conjunction with secular state laws. #### Islamophobia > Hostility towards and prejudice and discrimination against Muslims. Though far from recent, Islamophobia has been systematically fostered by (mainly) Western governments and media since the attacks by Islamist forces against the US in September 2001\. This provided the pretext for the US-led “war on terror”, which involved the invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), the persecution of Muslims and attacks on civil rights. The demonisation of Muslims as real or potential terrorists is a form of racism that serves imperialist interests in the Middle East, as well as stoking divisions in the Western working classes. # J #### Junta > An authoritarian dictatorship (often military) that rules a country after taking power by force. Examples include the military government in Myanmar from February 2021 and the Chilean government led by General Augusto Pinochet following his coup against President Salvador Allende in September 1973\. The Spanish term junta means “meeting” or “committee” and originated in the resistance to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808. # K # L #### Laborism #### Labour > The human activities that sustain and reproduce a society. Almost any activity can be labour: transporting food, writing poems, making a garden beautiful, manufacturing weapons, digging graves. Labour can take different forms in different periods of history. This is part of what defines a mode of production. Although other animals carry out labour-like activities, it appears that only humans can change the form of their labour, creating different historical periods defined by different ways of working. #### Labour aristocracy #### Labour power > A person’s capacity to work (as distinct from the physical act of working), which workers sell to a capitalist in exchange for money (wages). Labour power is the most important commodity in the capitalist economy. The capitalist purchases labour power, directing workers to produce goods or services but paying them less than the value of what they produce. This exploitation is the source of profit (surplus value), which capitalists constantly seek to maximise. As Marx noted in *Capital*, Volume I: “The rate of surplus value depends, in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour power”. See also exploitation. #### Labour theory of value > Originally, the economic theory that human labour is responsible for the creation of all economic value, and therefore that capitalist production is the only truly productive part of the economy. Pro-capitalist economists endorsed this theory to argue that capitalists were more important than landlords. When the working-class movement used the theory to argue that capitalists themselves were economically and socially unnecessary, mainstream economics decided that the theory was “discredited”. Karl Marx drew upon elements of the labour theory of value to construct his analysis of capitalism, although his version differs significantly from those of the early economists. See also value. #### Lecture bash > No, it is not the act of assaulting a professor. It just means “to make an announcement in a university lecture”, usually before the class begins or after it ends. It is a common practice in Australian universities for left-wing activists and members of student clubs to “lecture bash” about upcoming events, such as meetings, protests or BBQs. #### Left wing > Describes ideologies, organisations and people that support the workers’ movement and other progressive causes. The terms “left” and “right” were coined during the French Revolution, referring to the seating arrangements in the National Assembly. Those on the left supported the revolution, the creation of a democratic republic and the secularisation of society, while those on the right supported the monarchy. #### Lenin, Vladimir #### Leninism #### Liberal (a Liberal) > A member of the Liberal Party, the main conservative party in Australia. #### Liberal (a liberal; a small l liberal) > A political progressive. #### Liberalism > Classical liberalism is an economic and political philosophy that developed as the ideology of the rising capitalist class. It emphasises individual rights, small government and free markets. It advocates a *laissez faire* economic regime, i.e. the right of capitalists to run their businesses unhindered by government regulations and taxes, and reliance on market forces rather than state intervention. In Australia such ideas are associated with the Liberals, the main right-wing party. For this reason, people who uphold liberal theories but are not members of the Liberal Party are called “small-l liberals”; a member of the Greens in Australia might be a liberal, though not a Liberal. For many in the United States, where the socialist movement was historically weak and disorganised, liberalism is the leftmost extreme of politics, and no distinction exists between liberalism and leftism. #### Log of claims > It just means “list of demands”. In the workers’ movement, the log of claims is a formal document listing the specific changes or improvements in terms and conditions (e.g. wage increases, break times, entitlements) that are the basis for workers (usually represented by a union) negotiating with their boss for a new or amended contract. See also bargain, bargaining period, enterprise agreement. #### Lumpen > A person from the lumpenproletariat, meaning the unorganised, usually unemployed, often destitute layer of society, lacking class consciousness or loyalty, and often including criminal elements. The term was coined by Marx and Engels who described this layer in *The Communist Manifesto* as “the dangerous class” and “social scum”. They argued that while the working class had the potential to overthrow capitalism and build a socialist society, the lumpenproletariat had no such revolutionary potential and could instead be used as tools by reactionary forces to attack the working class—as occurred in the 1848 European revolutions and in Nazi Germany. Today, the term “underclass” is more commonly used to refer to the chronically unemployed, the homeless and career criminals. #### Luxemburg, Rosa (1871–1919) > Polish-German revolutionary activist and Marxist theorist. Radicalised at at early age, she co-founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) party in 1893\. Moving to Germany in 1898, she became a leading figure in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Her activism led to her being imprisoned several times in Germany, and in Poland during the 1905 Russian Revolution. Her book, The Mass Strike, based on observations of that revolution, presents a powerful argument about the working class’s ability to emancipate itself through its own collective action. As the SPD moderated, she led the fight against reformism with her brilliant pamphlet *Reform or Revolution?*. When the SPD capitulated to nationalism and supported Germany in World War One, Luxemburg, along with Karl Liebknecht, founded the anti-war Spartacus League. They were jailed in 1916 and released following the November Revolution of 1918, after which they co-founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In January 1919, Luxemburg participated in the Spartacist uprising against the SPD government in Berlin, although she (correctly) considered it premature. The uprising was crushed, and right-wing paramilitaries murdered Luxemburg and Liebknecht at the behest of the SPD leaders. # M #### Mao Zedong (1893–1976) > Founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921, de facto leader of the party from 1935, chairman from 1943\. In the civil war that followed World War Two, Mao led a peasant army to victory against Chiang Kai-shek’s reactionary nationalist forces. He founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and led the country until his death in 1976. > > Mao set out to reshape Chinese society, but what he called “Chinese socialism” was actually a dictatorship. All industry was state-owned and farmers were organised into collectives. But workers, having played little role in the revolution that brought Mao and the CCP to power, remained oppressed and exploited, and all opposition was ruthlessly suppressed. In 1958, Mao launched the “Great Leap Forward”—a mass mobilisation of labour to improve agricultural and industrial production. As with Joseph Stalin’s Russia from the late 1920s, this was an attempt to catch up and compete economically with the West. But the result was a massive decline in agricultural output. Exacerbated by poor harvests, this led to famine and the deaths of millions, weakening Mao’s authority. > > In 1966, he launched the “Cultural Revolution”—ostensibly a crusade to challenge bureaucracy and purge the country of “impure” and “counter-revolutionary” elements, but in reality a cynical manoeuvre by Mao to shore up his own leadership of the party. Over the next three years, millions died, were injured or suffered severe persecution, and a great deal of the country’s cultural heritage was destroyed. Following Mao’s death in 1976 and the ensuing power struggle in which his supporters were purged, the CCP Central Committee in 1981 officially declared the Cultural Revolution a “severe setback” for the PRC. #### Maoism > The ideology and politics associated with Mao Zedong, also known as Mao Zedong Thought. Supposedly a form of Marxism-Leninism tailored to the specific conditions of China (and by implication to other developing countries), Maoism is a complete departure from Marxism. “Communist” China—established not by working-class revolution but by a peasant army led by intellectuals—was a police state run by a bureaucratic ruling class. Despite this, Maoism has had a significant (and negative) political influence on the left worldwide. With some variations, common characteristics of groups influenced by Maoism include extreme sectarianism towards other left-wing groups and social movements, voluntarism and substitutionism, Third Worldism, and social conservatism (e.g. homophobia). (For more, see the *Marxist Left Review* article “[Let a hundred flowers wither: the many failures of Western Maoism](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/let-a-hundred-flowers-wither-the-many-failures-of-western-maoism/?ref=redflag.org.au)”.) #### Marx, Karl #### Marxism #### Mass action > Activities involving very large numbers of people, organised in response to an industrial or political issue. For example, the nationwide strikes and marches against the Coalition government’s WorkChoices laws in November 2005, which involved more than half a million people, or the 300,000-strong “March for Humanity” demonstration in support of Palestine in August 2025\. See also demonstration, direct action. #### Mass production > A manufacturing process that creates large quantities of standardised products to reduce costs and increase efficiency. The main features of mass production are the division of labour and automation. It often involves assembly lines, where each worker performs a part of the production process rather than working on a whole product from start to finish. #### Mass strike > See general strike. #### Material interest > Usually means “economic interest”. Take, for example, the sentence: “White workers have a political responsibility to fight against racism. But they also have a material interest in doing so—when the working class is divided, wages are generally lower and working conditions poorer for everyone”. #### Materialism #### May ’68 > Refers to events in Paris, France, in May 1968, when student protests sparked a general strike of 9 million workers, forcing President Charles De Gaulle to flee the country. Many workers expressed a desire to go beyond fighting for reforms and instead abolish capitalism. May ’68 became a touchstone for a generation of left-wing radicals: it shattered the myth that Western capitalism brought only stability and prosperity, and proved that workers in advanced economies still had revolutionary potential. #### Means of production > The tools, facilities, raw materials and other resources necessary to create a product. These may include land, buildings (e.g. factories, offices), infrastructure (e.g. transport, communications, energy supply) and machinery—and of course labour, without which nothing can be produced. #### Menshevik > Russian for “of the minority”. The Mensheviks were a moderate faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), which split at the second party congress in 1903\. In contrast to the Bolshevik (“of the majority”) faction led by Vladimir Lenin, the Mensheviks supported a gradual transition to socialism, and opposed Lenin’s concept of a vanguard workers’ party in favour of a broader mass party. The two factions often worked together, but became distinct political parties during the course of the Russian Revolution. #### Middle class > Perhaps more accurate is middle classes: those generally, but not always, occupying positions between the working class and the capitalist and ruling classes. The middle classes include small business owners (see “petit bourgeoisie”), academics, trade union leaders (see “union bureaucrat”), peasants and middle managers in both private companies and in the state bureaucracy. #### Militant (adjective) > From the Latin, meaning “to serve as a soldier”. Having a radical, combative and confrontational approach to fighting for a political or social cause. Socialists generally favour militant tactics. Often used to describe trade unions that go on strike. #### Militant (noun) > Someone who proposes or supports more radical forms of action to achieve their goals or promote a cause—for example, a trade unionist who argues for strikes and picketing rather than relying on union officials to negotiate with a boss. #### Minimum wage > The lowest rate an employer can legally pay workers who are not covered by an award or enterprise agreement. People under the age of 18, people with a disability, apprentices and trainees may be paid less than the minimum wage, which in Australia is set by the Fair Work Commission. #### Mode of production > A concept in Karl Marx’s theory of history. Each mode of production is a particular way of combining human labour, social classes, technology and social organisation to produce wealth and sustain human society. This is often understood as a specific combination of forces of production and relations of production. Examples are the slave mode of production and the feudal mode of production. Any given mode of production might require a certain level of technology and cultural sophistication to be put in place; once in place, it may last hundreds or thousands of years before technology and culture develop to such a point that it becomes possible to introduce a new mode of production. In Marxist theory, capitalism and socialism are not just ideas, policies or moral values: each is a different mode of production. #### Monopoly > The exclusive ownership or control of the supply of a commodity or service. This lack of competition gives monopolies the power to dictate prices and dominate the market. See also cartel. #### Movement > When large numbers of people organise over time around a particular demand (e.g., abortion rights) or in opposition to something (e.g., a war), a movement is formed. During the period of radicalisation in the1960s and 1970s, several social movements emerged, such as those against racism and for civil rights, and for women’s and LGBT liberation. The largest and most enduring movement is the workers’ movement, which, even at its lowest point, still involves hundreds of thousands of people each year in campaigning or negotiating for better wages and conditions—that is, collectively trying to reduce the level of exploitation at work. # N #### Nation > The term originally derives from the Latin *natio*, meaning “birth”, “origin” or “a group of people from the same background”. In Middle English, *nacioun* meant “a large group of people with common ancestry and language”. Today, a nation is generally understood as a political community (citizens) inhabiting a defined territory under an independent government. In that sense, modern nations and the social consciousness associated with them—particularly the idea that citizens of one nation have more in common with one another than with people of the same social class in other countries—are phenomena specific to capitalism. There are also oppressed nations—peoples who view themselves as nations, but who either lack their own state or live under a state that treats them as second-class citizens. #### Nationalism #### Nazi > Historically, a member or supporter of Adolf Hitler’s fascist National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP, 1920–1945). The word is derived from the German *Nationalsozialismus* (National Socialism). (As the shortened version of *Ignatz*, it was also the standard name of a stock comic character: the Bavarian country bumpkin.) > > The Nazis used the term “socialist” even as they were part of a right-wing nationalist political coalition, attacking Marxist workers both verbally and physically, appealing to big business and ultimately trying to eradicate the entire German left. By using the term “socialist”, the Nazis appealed to millions of Germans who had lost faith in the capitalist system. But Nazis had their own idea of what “socialism” meant: to be a pro-war German patriot who put the military needs of the country before personal interest. > > Certain capitalists were attacked for being treacherous, and politicians for being “bourgeois” if they were too visibly corrupt. But at the same time, workers who fought for their own interests were also denounced as treacherous and misled by Jewish ideology. This “socialist” demagogy was played up in propaganda that targeted workers and disillusioned middle-class activists, but the volume was turned down when the Nazis were appealing to the ruling class. Nazi talk of a “social revolution” ultimately meant replacing worn-out, timid politicians with a new generation of aggressive, pro-war authoritarian activists who would have the guts to crush the left and launch a new war. See also fascism, neo-Nazi. #### Neo-Nazi > Contemporary Nazis who attempt to rebuild Hitler-style fascist movements embracing anti-communism, authoritarianism and deep racism (often white supremacy, but local variants may focus on other forms of ethnic or religious purity). For decades after World War Two, Nazis were mostly confined to marginal secret societies and subcultures, but the rise of so-called “right-wing populism” since the mid-2010s has enlarged their audience and recruiting pool. Neo-Nazi ideas such as Holocaust denial are increasingly common. More than other fascist currents, neo-Nazis tend to glorify violence; they consider street fighting and physically bashing perceived enemies as a key part of their political practice. See also fascism, Nazi, authoritarian. #### Neoliberalism # O #### Occupation > Taking over a building or public space for a period of time. For example, striking workers might occupy their workplace to prevent the bosses from locking them out. Workers can also take over production, exercising self-management/workers’ control. Factory occupations first occurred during Italy’s *Biennio Rosso* (Two Red Years, 1919–20) and have been repeated on numerous occasions since, for example in France in May 1968\. Students and campaign activists can also use the occupation tactic. See also sit-in. #### Occupy movement > A mass international movement that grew out of opposition to social and economic inequality in the years after the Global Financial Crisis. Inspired by a global wave of anti-austerity and anti-capitalist protests in 2010 and the Arab Revolutions of 2011, it began in September 2011 with Occupy Wall Street—a protest encampment in Zuccotti Park in the heart of New York’s financial district. Within a month, the Occupy movement had spread to more than 951 cities across 82 countries. Its slogan, “We are the 99%”, referenced the growing concentration of wealth among the top 1% of the population. Occupy was committed to methods of non-violence and participatory democracy, with decisions made by consensus (as opposed to voting) at general assemblies. Analysis by the Global Language Monitor in November 2011 found that the word “occupy” had been the “most commonly used English word on the internet and in print” over the previous twelve months. Despite this initial impact, however, the Occupy movement had little sustained influence and eventually collapsed, partly due to state repression (arrests, breaking up of encampments, etc.), and partly due to its own limitations and internal divisions. The decentralised and structureless nature of the movement, and its hostility to organisation, made it virtually impossible to establish clear leadership and decision-making processes. #### Oligarch > An extremely wealthy business owner with a great deal of political influence; from the Greek meaning “to rule”. Oligarchs exist in every society, but the term is particularly used to describe those who benefited from the privatisation of state-run industries after the collapse of the Soviet Union. #### Oligarchy > A term coined by Aristotle to mean “rule by the rich”, referring to a government in which power rests with a small number of wealthy people. #### Opportunism > Politically, the sacrifice of principle for expediency or advantage. It involves compromising or even abandoning political principles and long-term goals to gain greater power, influence or popularity. Short-term gains take precedence over ideological consistency and integrity. This is characteristic of most politicians. As former Conservative British PM Stanley Baldwin put it, “I would rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles around my neck”. Opportunism is often used as a synonym for reformism. The triumph of reformism within the German Social Democratic Party led to its abandonment of the principles of internationalism and working-class solidarity, and its support for the ruling class during World War One. #### Oppression > The systematic discrimination against, or persecution or disempowerment of, a social group, based on class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religious belief, cultural practice, age or ability. Capitalism relies on oppression to facilitate exploitation, primarily by creating and fostering divisions in the working class, which is the largest oppressed group in society. # P #### Pacifism > Originally, a principled opposition to all war. The term was coined by the French peace campaigner Émile Arnaud and adopted at the tenth Universal Peace Congress in Glasgow in 1901\. At various times, pacifism has been a distinct political current with its own organisations, publications and leaders. Its activists generally aimed to strengthen international institutions, hoping that more cooperation between capitalist states would make conflict unnecessary. These efforts have repeatedly failed, as the logic of capitalism leads to recurring military conflict. Within the socialist movement, the term has been used to describe those who oppose a given war, but are insufficiently critical of the system that gave rise to that war. During World War One, there was a political split between “pacifists” who aimed to restore the pre-war status quo and revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the capitalist system. In this context, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin denounced “socialist pacifists”, even as he called for peace. See also nonviolence. #### Paris Commune > The name given to a short-lived revolutionary government established by Parisian workers in 1871\. The Commune was brutally suppressed by the French Army, which executed an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Communards. From this experience, Karl Marx concluded that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes”. Instead, he argued, workers must smash the state and replace it with their own forms of political organisation. #### Parliamentarism > The tendency to elevate the goal of winning votes in parliamentary elections above all other questions of political principle or strategy. The approach has frequently led socialist organisations to adapt to, rather than challenge, the status quo of capitalist politics (see opportunism). Friedrich Engels called it “an ailment whose unfortunate victims are permeated by the lofty conviction that the whole world, its history and its future are directed and determined by a majority of votes”. #### Party > A politically organised group of people with shared ideas and goals. Parties generally have elected leaders and membership obligations, such as adhering to formal rules or a constitution, promoting the party’s aims and supporting it financially. #### Peasantry > The social class of agricultural workers and small farmers with limited, if any, land ownership. The most oppressed and numerous class in medieval feudal societies, subject to fees, taxes and/or obligatory service to a landlord. See also feudalism, serf. #### Permanent revolution > A theory developed by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky following the 1905 Russian revolution. Most socialists at the time believed that in semi-feudal and industrially underdeveloped countries like Russia, a long period of capitalist development was necessary before socialism could be instituted. But Trotsky, in the book [*Results and Prospects*](https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/the-permanent-revolution-and-results-and-prospects?ref=redflag.org.au), argued that the Russian capitalist class was incapable of establishing a capitalist republic because it feared the working class more than the tsar (king). Therefore, the working class, rather than the capitalist class, would have to lead the struggle for a democratic republic. But in doing so, the workers’ movement would inevitably be compelled to challenge the power and property of the capitalist class, making the revolution “permanent”. Over the course of 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks implicitly accepted Trotsky’s theory and called on workers to seize political power. After the experience of the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27, Trotsky generalised his theory to apply to other industrially backward and underdeveloped countries. (For more, see the *Red Flag* article “[Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution](https://redflag.org.au/article/trotskys-theory-permanent-revolution)”.) #### Petty bourgeoisie > From the French *petite bourgeoisie* (small capitalists). A section of the middle class, occupying a position between workers and capitalists. The term generally refers to small business owners, shopkeepers, small-scale merchants and self-employed artisans. See also middle class. #### Picket line > A boundary established and staffed by striking workers (and sometimes supporters), usually at the entrance to a workplace. The aim is to maximise the economic impact of the strike by preventing people and products from getting in or out of the workplace. This may also include stopping strikebreakers from being brought in to undermine the strike. Workers who cross picket lines are called “scabs”. See also scab. #### Political revolution > A revolution that overthrows a particular government or type of government but doesn’t fundamentally challenge the existing class structure of society. So a revolution that changes people’s relationship to the state, but not their relationship to the economy. #### Popular classes #### Popular front #### Praxis > An unnecessary word. #### Pre-class society > Human society existed for many thousands of years before the emergence of social classes. Examples are gatherer-hunter and some early agricultural societies. The inability of these societies to produce a surplus of food and other basic necessities above what was needed for immediate subsistence meant that a high degree of egalitarianism and cooperation was required for their survival. This limited the economic basis for the emergence of a social hierarchy. Friedrich Engels described pre-class society as “primitive communism”. #### Private property > In Marxist terms, this refers not to the personal possessions of individuals (such as their homes, cars, jewelry, etc.), but to the private (or state) ownership and control of the means of production—the factories, mines, ports, telecommunications infrastructure, farmland and so on—which is fundamental to the capitalist economy. See also means of production. #### Privatisation > When a government sells or gives away public assets to private companies. Privatisation often results in services that were provided free, having been paid for by taxes, becoming user-pays and run for profit. Among the most important things to have been privatised in various countries are power, water, gas and telephone services, banks, railways, ports, roads, housing and mines. When selling assets is too unpopular, governments sometimes take partial steps: leasing them to private operators, forcing state-owned services to make a profit, or simply reducing funding and letting services degrade until privatisation seems like it could make things better. See also: nationalisation. #### Production > The process of making, manufacturing or assembling goods from components or raw materials. Primary production is the growing or extraction of raw materials, for example agriculture, animal cultivation, mining. Secondary production involves transforming raw materials into finished goods through industrial processes. Tertiary production refers to the services sector of the economy, the distribution and sale of the output of both primary and secondary production. It includes a wide range of activities such as banking, retail, health care, education and entertainment. #### Productivity > A measure of how efficiently inputs (resources, labour time) are converted into outputs (goods and services). Capitalists aim to maximise productivity by reducing the labour time required to produce a given commodity. This may involve the introduction of more advanced technology, automation, speed-ups, etc. The bosses’ constant call to “increase productivity” is code for increasing the exploitation of workers. See also exploitation, socially necessary labour time. #### Profit > Profit derives from surplus value—the unpaid labour performed by workers for capitalists. Profit is what’s left after a boss pays wages and other business costs such as rent, machinery purchases, utility bills and so on. See also exploitation, surplus value. #### Progressive > A person who favours government policies that reduce racial/sexual/gender discrimination, increase the social position of oppressed groups and promote social and economic equality. More crudely, progressives generally think that governments and societies should be (more) caring and inclusive. #### **Proletariat** > An archaic word for “working class”. In ancient Rome, “proletariat” referred to landless free men impoverished by the extension of slavery. In the 1800s, Karl Marx used the word to refer to the growing social class of industrial workers employed by capitalists. There are few reasons to use “proletariat” or “proletarian” (“worker”) today, even when quoting nineteenth-century texts. “Working class” is a more accessible phrase. See also working class. #### Propaganda #### Protected action > Industrial action is only “protected” (i.e. legal) in Australia during a designated bargaining period (usually between an employer and union/s) for an enterprise agreement. Unions must apply to the Fair Work Commission for a protected action ballot order. For action to proceed, a majority of employees must approve the action in a secret ballot. However, the commission can unilaterally suspend or terminate protected industrial action. For more detail, see this [Fair Work Commission fact sheet](https://www.fairwork.gov.au/tools-and-resources/fact-sheets/rights-and-obligations/industrial-action?ref=redflag.org.au). See also bargain, bargaining period, enterprise agreement, industrial action, strike. #### Protectionism > A form of economic nationalism that favours restricting imports from other countries through methods such as tariffs, quotas and other government regulations. Such policies aim to shield domestic businesses from foreign competitors and raise government revenue. Protectionism is generally counterposed to free trade. Socialists argue that both protectionism and free trade are strategies that capitalists have implemented at various times for their own benefit. The working class has little to gain from backing either strategy and should instead fight for its own economic interests. #### Public housing > Housing owned directly by the government and used to house workers, either for free or at a significant discount to privately owned housing. Not to be confused with social or community housing, which are privately owned by companies or non-government organisations. Public housing was introduced in Australia from 1945 and grew from nearly zero to 96,000 dwellings. Unlike in Britain, it was never a significant proportion of the total housing stock. Nevertheless, from 1956, public housing came under attack and began to be demolished. This continued through the 1960s and 1970s, with attempts (some successful) by left-wing workers to defend the housing against demolition or sell-offs. #### Publicly run > Government owned, as opposed to being owned by an individual, private company or non-government organisation. Historically, Australia had a large number of publicly run services including a bank, an airline, and telephone, water, gas and electricity services. Many of these were sold to private companies and investors during the 1980s and 1990s. # Q # R #### Racism > The systematic stereotyping, oppression and persecution of people based on their ethnicity or skin colour. The English term first appeared in the US in 1862, during the Civil War. Modern racism developed in the colonial era (as a justification for European territorial expansion and the slave trade) and was central to the development of capitalism. As Karl Marx put it in *Capital*: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production”. Racism remains useful to the capitalist class today as a tool to divide—and therefore rule—the working class, and to mobilise support for imperialist wars. (For more, see the *Marxist Left Review* article “[Who is to blame for racism in Australia?](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/who-is-to-blame-for-racism-in-australia/?ref=redflag.org.au)”.) See also white supremacy, nationalism. #### Rally > Usually, a public demonstration. Sometimes another collective show of strength: large political parties or other big organisations can hold rallies of their members and supporters to show how many activists support their cause. This second usage is now rather rare in English, but this may simply be because nowadays there aren’t many political parties in the English-speaking world that rely on enthusiastic support of millions of volunteers. See also demonstration. #### Rank and file > The members of a group or organisation, such as a trade union or political party, who hold no official position, as opposed to its elected officials or leaders. The term derives from military usage, referring to the “ranks” and “files” which privates and non-commissioned officers form on parade. #### Rate of profit #### Reactionary > Typically used to describe variants of conservative politics, a reactionary person or organisation wants to reverse social or political progress in favour of a past social order deemed to be superior. The term *réactionnaire* originated during the French Revolution to describe those who wanted to restore the monarchy and the feudal system. See also right wing, conservative, fascist. #### Reform(s) > A problematic term. Reforms are supposed to bring about improvements (e.g. to a law, policy, institution or social system), but whether such changes are actually beneficial depends on your class position. For example, the legalisation of abortion is a positive gain for women generally, and working-class women in particular. Other “reforms”, such as restricting the right to strike, serve to benefit the capitalist class by making it harder for workers to resist employer attacks (also often called “reforms”). Similarly, the “reform” of the higher education system is intended to shape it to the needs of the bosses and the state. Socialists fight for reforms that will improve the lives of workers and the oppressed, and to build workers’ confidence in their ability to change the world. #### Reformism > A term with at least two distinct meanings. It can refer to the belief that socialism will be introduced through legal means, without an insurrection or a social revolution. But it can also mean the belief that socialism is unattainable, and that society can be improved only by reforming capitalism. (For more, see the *Red Flag* articles “[Revolution, reform and socialist strategy](https://redflag.org.au/node/6875)” and “[Reform or revolution?](https://redflag.org.au/article/reform-or-revolution)”.) #### Relations of production #### Reparations > Payments or compensation made to individuals or groups to acknowledge harm, loss, damage or injustice, frequently due to government policy. For example, the Stolen Generations received an apology from the Australian parliament, and some support services and payments, albeit inadequate, were provided. The victors of a war often exact reparations from the defeated country or countries, which may take the form of currency, precious metals, natural resources, industrial assets, or intellectual property. #### Revisionism > Historical revisionism involves reinterpreting or reevaluating historical events (e.g. in the light of new evidence, or from a new perspective) to challenge established narratives. In the socialist movement, revisionism is another word for reformism, referring to the revision of core principles of Marxism. Revisionism is mostly associated with Eduard Bernstein, a leading member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), who argued that socialism could be achieved gradually and peacefully through parliamentary means, and that revolution was therefore unnecessary. (For more, see the *Red Flag* articles “[Revolution, reform and socialist strategy](https://redflag.org.au/node/6875)” and “[Reform or revolution?](https://redflag.org.au/article/reform-or-revolution)”.) #### Revolution > See political revolution and social revolution. #### Revolutionary government #### Right wing #### Riot > A mass public disorder. Riots occur when large numbers of people take to the streets in anger, and may involve violence, looting and other “anti-social” activity. Riots are sometimes reactionary. For example, the antisemitic pogroms in Tsarist Russia, or the 2005 [Cronulla riot](https://redflag.org.au/node/5056), a racist rampage against anyone of “Middle Eastern appearance”. Often, they are a reaction to some outrage by capitalists or the state. For example, the 2004 [Redfern riot](https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/JlIndigP/2007/4.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) or the 2011 [English riots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%5FEngland%5Friots?ref=redflag.org.au). Such riots are the inevitable product and an elemental form of revolt against a barbaric and violent system. (For more, see the *Marxist Left Review* article “[Disturbing the peace: riots and the working class](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/disturbing-the-peace-riots-and-the-working-class/?ref=redflag.org.au)”.) #### Ruling class > The social class which governs a given society through economic and political domination. This includes control over the state, as well as ownership of the key economic goods like factories, infrastructure, natural resources and land. In feudal societies, the aristocracy and landowners were the ruling class. Under capitalism, the the ruling class is made up of the capitalist class, government ministers, the heads of government departments, the top brass in the military and police, the chief justices of the judiciary and so on. See also capitalist. (For more, see the *Red Flag* article “[The ruling class in Australia](https://redflag.org.au/article/ruling-class-australia)”.) #### Russian revolution # S #### Scab > Someone who continues to work during a strike, or is brought in to replace striking workers to keep production going and undermine the unity and effectiveness of the workers taking action. Also known as strikebreakers or blacklegs. Scabs are traitors to their class; they put their (perceived) self-interest above the interests of their fellow workers. (For more, see the *Red Flag* article “[I call it scab](https://redflag.org.au/article/i-call-it-scab)”.) #### Scientific socialism > A term used to describe Marxism, intended to distinguish it from the pre-Marxist socialist movement. Friedrich Engels, in his popular book *Socialism: Utopian and Scientific*, distinguished two forms of socialism. “Scientific” socialism, which Engels also calls “historical materialism”, is grounded in a theory of how one society transforms into another. It views history as a succession of “modes of production”; to move from capitalism to socialism involves a shift from one mode of production to another. A force capable of achieving this shift is identified: the working class. This approach is “scientific” in the sense that it involves an empirical analysis of the forces and laws involved in historical change. To this, Engels counterposes “utopian” socialism: a tradition in which intellectuals drew up plans for ideal societies based on their own preoccupations. See also historical materialism, Marxism, utopianism. #### Second International > Also known as the Socialist International (SI), the successor organisation to the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), or First International. Established in 1889, it included representatives from most of Europe’s major working-class organisations, with the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) the most prominent. It sought to establish common policies for its member parties, and develop and coordinate their strategy and tactics. Though ostensibly Marxist, it included other political tendencies such as reformism and anarchism (until the expulsion of the anarchists in 1893). At its foundation, the SI proclaimed that socialists were “brothers \[sic\] with a single common enemy … private capital, whether it be Prussian, French or Chinese”, and from 1907 right up to July 1914 made numerous strident statements against militarism and war. However, once World War I began, most of the organisations in the SI—led by the SPD—capitulated to nationalism and supported their “own” states in the conflict. The Russian Bolsheviks were among the few who opposed this betrayal, which largely reflected the decisive shift towards reformism in the SPD. The split between the International’s reformist and revolutionary wings led to its collapse. The revolutionary forces regrouped, largely under the aegis of the Bolsheviks who, following the victory of the Russian revolution, established the Third or Communist International (Comintern). #### Sectarianism > Contemporary usage refers to a narrow minded adherence to a particular religious sect. So we hear of “sectarian violence” between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, Hindus and Muslims in India, or Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East. In Marxist terms, sectarianism generally means “to put one’s own organisation’s interests above the interests of the working class as a whole”. It has frequently been used as a term of abuse against anyone trying to build a specifically revolutionary party. Vladimir Lenin, for example, was accused of sectarianism by Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg when, during World War One, he demanded that revolutionaries organisationally split from the reformists who supported the war. Later, Trotsky’s followers were routinely accused of sectarianism for building organisations outside of the Stalinist and reformist parties. #### Sectionalism > In the workers’ movement, sectionalism means prioritising the interests of a particular group of workers over the broader interests of the class as a whole—for example, skilled vs. unskilled workers, white-collar vs. blue collar. #### Self-determination #### Self-emancipation > Friedrich Engels wrote in a preface to the *Communist Manifesto*: “Our notion, from the very beginning, was that ‘the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself’”. Socialism cannot be handed down from above by other forces, such as union leaders, politicians or parties that claim to “represent” the working class. Revolution is necessary, not just to overthrow capitalism, but as the only means by which the working-class majority can transform itself and become capable of creating a new society. As Karl Marx wrote in *The German Ideology* (1845-46): > “\[F\]or the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and becomes fitted to found society anew.” #### Serf > From the Latin *servus* (“slave”), serfs were agricultural labourers in the feudal system of medieval Europe (roughly the fifth to the late fifteenth century). Serfs were obliged to work for a landlord and pay various dues in exchange for “protection” and for the right to farm a plot of land. While peasants were free to move about in search of work, serfs were effectively slaves, forbidden to leave their plot of land without permission. The last European country to abolish serfdom was Russia in 1861\. See also feudalism. #### Shop floor > An archaic term roughly meaning “workplace”—but with connotations of rank-and-file activism. For example, a “shop floor victory” implies that workers have gotten something (a pay rise, for example) through their own efforts, rather than it having been granted through a tribunal or the negotiation of union leaders. See also rank and file. #### Shop steward > Another term for “delegate”; a union member elected (although sometimes appointed) as the workers’ representative in a particular workplace or department. See also delegate. #### Slate system > A type of election in which people nominate and vote for a complete list (a team or “slate”) of candidates, as opposed to individuals. #### Social class #### Social democracy > 1\. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, most socialists and Marxists, including people such as Vladimir Lenin, called themselves social democrats. This was to differentiate themselves from simple social reformers—who wanted workers to have better lives but didn’t want to politically challenge the “old order”, which was often still run by remnants of the feudal ruling class—and those, often capitalists and their hangers on, who wanted more democracy but didn’t care much for the living conditions of workers. A social democrat was for socialism, a society that promised the most democracy and the greatest social reforms. > > 2\. After the Russian revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the Third International, social democracy referred to the reformist socialism aligned to the Second International, typified by organisations such as the Australian Labor Party, the British Labour Party and the German Social Democratic Party. Many social democratic parties have since dropped any reference to socialism, yet retain links to the workers’ movement. #### Socially necessary labour > The average time required to produce a commodity under normal conditions, that is, using the average degree of skill, intensity of labour and available technology in an industry. This determines the value of a commodity. Advances in science and technology increase productivity by reducing the socially necessary labour time, thus lowering the value of the commodity. For example, electronic goods such as washing machines, TVs, cameras and mobile phones were once luxury items but are now widely available and relatively cheap because less socially necessary labour time is required for their production. #### Social revolution #### Socialism #### Solidarity #### Soviet > From the Russian, meaning “council”. Soviets first appeared during the 1905 Russian revolution and became the basis of the workers’ government in 1917\. In the absence of legal unions, they grew out of workers’ committees formed to organise, coordinate and link up strikes across cities and regions, but developed into institutions of workers’ power. In the words of Leon Trotsky, who was elected president of the 1905 Saint Petersburg Soviet, they are “the freely elected parliament of the working class”. Soviets were genuinely representative and democratic: delegates were elected by their workmates, continued to work and were recallable at any time; they received no special privileges and were always accountable to those who elected them. Hence, as the American journalist John Reed observed in 1917: “No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented”. (For more, see the *Red Flag* article “[The soviet in Trotsky’s ](https://redflag.org.au/article/soviet-trotskys-1905)[*1905*](https://redflag.org.au/article/soviet-trotskys-1905)”.) #### Speakout (a) > When people speak in a public place (e.g. a street corner) to argue for a cause or promote an event or activity. In the United States, the term is “soapboxing”. (See “[Harlem’s soapbox speakers](https://drstephenrobertson.com/digitalharlemblog/maps/harlems-soapbox-speakers/?ref=redflag.org.au)” at the Digital Harlem Blog for some history.) #### Stalin, Joseph > Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known as Stalin (1878–1953) ruled the Soviet Union as a dictator from the late 1920s until his death in 1953\. He was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and Lenin’s Bolshevik faction. His contribution to the party was more organisational than theoretical. As general secretary of the Communist Party from 1922, in the context of a working class decimated by civil war, he built a base of support in the emerging state bureaucracy, which enabled him to seize power after Lenin’s death. > What followed was a counter-revolution. Contrary to all Marxist thinking, Stalin proclaimed that socialism could be built in a single country. In reality, his project was to catch up to and compete with the advanced capitalist countries. This required super-exploitation of the working class and the elimination of all political opposition. All the gains of the October 1917 revolution were rolled back. Far from being a socialist paradise for workers, Russia became a brutal state-capitalist dictatorship, with all political and economic power vested in the state. > Stalin’s victory also had a dire effect on the international workers’ movement. Communist parties, rather than fighting against their own ruling classes, became instruments of Russian foreign policy, leading to the defeat of revolutionary movements in China (1925–27) and Spain (1936–37), and the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany (1933), among other atrocities. For more, see this [Red Flag article](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6885/). See also Stalinism, state capitalism. #### Stalinism #### State (the) #### State capitalism #### Strike > When workers collectively refuse to work for a specified or indefinite period in support of demands such as improved wages and conditions, or against employers’ attacks (e.g. surveillance, speed-ups, anti-union measures). By withdrawing their labour, workers stop production and the flow of profits to the boss. Strikes may occur in individual or groups of workplaces, or across particular industries; workers may strike in solidarity with other workers, or as a political protest. See also general strike. #### Struggle > See class struggle. #### Surplus value > The accumulated product of workers’ unpaid labour time. The difference between the value a worker creates and the wages they receive, surplus value is appropriated by capitalists and is the source of profit. (For more, see the *Red Flag* article “[What is exploitation?](https://redflag.org.au/article/what-exploitation-0)”.) #### Swamp (the) #### Syndicalism > A labour movement current that aims to destroy capitalism through revolutionary trade unionism. Syndicalists tend to avoid what they call “political action”—forming political parties, running in parliamentary elections or placing demands on governments. In the twentieth century, syndicalists were often some of the bravest militants (the Industrial Workers of the World in Australia, for example). But they lacked a strategy for dealing with the centralised power of the capitalist state, which resulted in a series of disastrous defeats. # T #### Tactic #### Tankie > A pejorative term originally applied to supporters of the Soviet Union’s crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Since then, it has been used as a term of abuse against socialists who champion regimes—usually dictatorships—that they designate as “socialist” or “anti-imperialist” because they don’t belong to the US-led Western imperialist bloc. An example is Syria before the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in 2024\. See also Stalinism. #### Third International > The Communist International, or Comintern, was an international organisation established in 1919 by the Russian Communist Party (previously the Bolshevik party) to facilitate debate and collaboration between revolutionary socialist parties. It was established to build a revolutionary alternative to the reformist parties that supported the First World War and opposed the workers’ revolutions that broke out at the war’s end. Under Joseph Stalin’s leadership from the late 1920s, the Comintern was transformed from a forum of genuine debate and collaboration into a tool for enforcing the interests of Russia’s state bureaucracy on the world communist movement. The organisation was dissolved in 1943. #### Third period > The ultra-left policy adopted by the Comintern (see Third International) at its Sixth World Congress in 1928\. The concept was initially developed in 1926 by Nikolai Bukharin, but is mostly associated with Joseph Stalin. They argued that the “First Period” of revolutionary upsurge in 1917 and the following years was followed by a “Second Period” in which capitalism stabilised and the international working-class movement was pushed onto the defensive. But, they said, the weakness of capitalism, combined with the intense business competition for markets, would increase pressures to reduce production costs by driving down wages. The consequent lowering of working-class living standards would inevitably lead to a “Third Period” of intensified class struggle and social upheaval. To prepare for this, Communist parties outside the Soviet Union were instructed to purge “reactionary elements” (such as Trotskyists) and to abandon the “united front” policy of 1923–28\. Social democratic parties were now designated as “social fascists” and attacked physically and verbally as enemies of the working class. This disastrous policy led to Hitler coming to power without a fight in 1933, and to the defeat of the Spanish Revolution in 1936. #### Third World > Originally used during the Cold War to describe states not politically aligned with either the Western (capitalist) or Eastern (“communist”) blocs. Over time, it came to mean countries with low levels of economic development and low standards of living. Third World has increasingly been replaced by the term Global South. See also First World, Global South. #### Third Worldism #### Ticket > This has two meanings. 1\. A list of candidates standing in an election as a group. A ticket can represent one party or a group of people who have decided to work together within a party or trade union. 2\. Proof of membership in a union. The slogan “no ticket, no start” was popular in the twentieth century in many workplaces where union membership was a condition of employment (see closed shop). #### Trade union > A membership organisation bringing workers together to defend their rights and to fight for higher wages. Unions generally represent workers across an industry or trade (Hence trade union or, sometimes, industrial union). For example, there are separate unions for construction workers, retail workers, nurses, teachers and so on. The principle of trade unionism is that workers have very little power as individuals to challenge bosses when the latter treat or pay them poorly. But as a collective, workers potentially have much more power than their boss. Because workers do all the work, they can band together and cause economic pain for their employer if they are mistreated. In Australia, unions are officially recognised and have legal rights to negotiate with bosses and produce workplace contracts. Workers join unions by signing up and paying a regular fee. See also strike, enterprise agreement, union bureaucrat. #### Trotsky, Leon > A revolutionary socialist and key leader of the 1905 Russian revolution. Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks during 1917 and led the insurrection at the end of that year. A close collaborator of Vladimir Lenin: contemporaries often referred to the Russian post-revolutionary government as that of “Lenin and Trotsky”, as they were its two most prominent leaders. Trotsky led the military victory of the revolutionary government in the civil war following the revolution and became the most prominent revolutionary leader in Russia to oppose the emerging dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Murdered by Stalin’s agents in 1940. #### Trotskyism > A socialist current established to oppose the degeneration of the Russian Revolution into a dictatorship under Joseph Stalin. Named after revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, who campaigned for the international Communist movement to return to the teachings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. After the death of Trotsky, the movement split into various currents and organisations. (For more, see the *Red Flag* article “[Are you a Trotskyist?](https://redflag.org.au/node/7476)”.) # U #### Ultra left #### Union > See trade union. #### Union bureaucracy > The permanent staff of the trade union movement. Mostly refers to the elected officials, organisers and recruiters whose roles are not necessarily bureaucratic in nature. The networks of paid officials who run trade unions are part of capitalism’s middle classes—so they have different economic interests from those of the workers they represent. Union officials mediate between workers and bosses, and often act in the interests of the latter, rather than the former. #### Union bureaucrat > A pejorative term used to describe someone permanently employed by a trade union to carry out official union work. #### United front > A tactic by which revolutionary parties lead a mass class struggle. The basic premise is that the revolutionary parties will officially propose a set of demands to the leaders of non-revolutionary workers’ parties, with the intent of launching joint actions (e.g. strikes) with the support of the reformist leaders. As a famous slogan put it, the revolutionaries would propose to the reformists that they “march separately, strike together” against the capitalist class. They “march separately” in the sense that they maintain their own identity, their own organisational existence, and their right to criticise their allies: imagine different contingents at a union march, with their own banners and signs. Nonetheless they “strike together”, often in the most literal sense: jointly participating in strikes or other actions aimed at realising specific demands. If the reformist leaders agree, a new round of class struggle commences; if they refuse, their support may be weakened to the advantage of revolutionary currents. This strategy was seen as a breakthrough when first developed in the 1920s, because it allowed revolutionary parties to maintain their political independence, raise the overall level of class struggle, and relate to workers who did not yet politically support them. Precisely because of its power and its status as a Lenin-endorsed tactical breakthrough, the concept has been heavily distorted throughout history, particularly by Stalinists, who use the term to describe its opposite: holding back class struggle to relate to capitalist politicians. This distortion later gained its own name: the popular front. #### Unprotected action > Under Australian law, any industrial action taken outside a bargaining period and without a ballot authorised by the Fair Work Commission is considered “unprotected” (i.e., illegal). Non-compliance is subject to harsh penalties. For more detail, see this [Fair Work Commission Fact Sheet](https://www.fairwork.gov.au/tools-and-resources/fact-sheets/rights-and-obligations/industrial-action?ref=redflag.org.au). See also bargain, bargaining period, enterprise agreement, industrial action, strike. #### Use-value > The practical utility or usefulness of something. Marx wrote that use-value is tied to “the physical properties of \[a\] commodity”, i.e. the intrinsic characteristics of a product that enable it to satisfy a human need or want. For example, the use-value of a pen is its capacity to write; the use-value of a lounge chair is that it is comfortable to sit on for extended periods; the use-value of a cup is that it holds liquids in a way that makes them easy to drink. While all this might seem inane on its own, the importance of the concept of use-value is brought to light when contrasted with “value” and “exchange-value” in Marx’s explanation of how capitalism works. See also commodity, exchange-value, value. #### Utopian socialism > Thomas More’s *Utopia* (1516) describes an imaginary ideal society. The term derives from the Greek words *ou-topos* (“no place”) and *eu-topos* (“good place”), and subsequently became associated with early socialist thought. Some early socialist intellectuals planned out ideal model communities in which the “social problem” would, they hoped, be resolved. In the early nineteenth century, there were a number of such movements, often associated with attempts to sidestep the class struggle. The industrialist Robert Owen (1771–1858), for example, advocated the transformation of society into small, democratic collectives, and set up a community called New Lanark, which provided people with decent homes, schools, free health care and affordable food. > > Friedrich Engels used the word “utopian” to describe these movements. According to him, these projects failed because they viewed socialism purely as an intellectual and ethical ideal: they held, in his words, that “socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power”. This led the utopian socialist movement to develop as an eclectic collection of rival geniuses and sects, all touting competing models. Engels counterposed this to “scientific” socialism, based on an understanding of historical development and the role class struggle plays in social transformation. In the Marxist movement, “utopian” is still used to characterise ideas that draw their power from attractive, but probably unrealisable, plans for a future society, without any plausible argument about how this society might come into existence. See also Marxism, scientific socialism. # V #### Value #### Vanguard > Literally “advanced guard”. Refers to the most class-conscious section of the working class. A vanguard does not always exist—sometimes there isn’t any discernible leading and class-conscious section of a country’s working class. A vanguard is created through a process of class struggle. Examples are Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) metalworkers in the 1917 Russian Revolution and car manufacturing workers in northern Italy in the Hot Autumn of 1969-70. #### Variable capital > The part of capital invested in labour power (wages), as opposed to constant capital (machinery, materials). A portion of the value of constant capital is embodied in a product (materials are used up, machinery eventually wears out or becomes obsolete), but only living labour creates new value. Capital invested in wages is called “variable” because workers’ labour produces more value than the cost of their wages. This surplus value, derived from exploitation, is the source of profit. See also constant capital. #### Voluntarism > The belief that social change can be achieved through sheer willpower and determined action. Some political currents are proudly voluntaristic: certain strains of anarchism reject any idea that “objective conditions” should limit revolutionary action, and consider Marxist “materialism” to be nothing more than an excuse for inaction. In some cases, the lines are blurred, and people who theoretically renounce voluntarism can still express it. A terrorist who thinks their assassination campaign will provoke a mass uprising, a small clique who launch a coup and call it a “revolution”, or a political celebrity who thinks their personal genius can overcome any obstacle, might all be accused of voluntarism. See also substitutionism. # W #### Wages > The money paid to workers in exchange for their labour power. See also labour power, commodity, exploitation. #### White supremacy > The belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore rule society. Its ideological foundations date back to seventeenth-century “scientific racism”, the discredited pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into a hierarchy of biologically distinct races, with white people at the top, and all other races considered inferior. The theory was used to justify slavery and colonialism. It persists today among far-right groups and ideologies in the United States, Europe and Australia, among other places. #### Woke > Derived from African-American vernacular, woke originally meant being “awake” or alert to racial injustice and oppression. Early usage comes from the Black nationalist activist Marcus Garvey as early as the 1920s; by the 1930s, the phrase “stay woke” was popularised. Later usage was broadened to encompass awareness of other issues of social injustice, such as LGBTI oppression. From the late 2010s, and as a backlash grew against the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, “woke” began to be used by the political right as a pejorative term against the left and progressives. For example, people who are opposed to racism and other forms of bigotry, and who argue that society ought to be more equal, are often described as having “the woke mind virus”—which is a rhetorical manoeuvre by right-wingers to make bigotry appear sensible/rational, and anti-racism pathological. #### Worker > A member of the working class. #### Workers’ control #### Workers’ council #### Workers’ government #### Workers’ movement #### Workers’ self-management #### Working class > People whose only means of livelihood is to sell their labour power (their capacity to work) in exchange for a wage. The working class includes those who may not (currently) be employed, but depend on a wage earner, such as stay-at-home parents, children and the sick or elderly. For a discussion of the modern Australian working class, see this [Red Flag article](https://redflag.org.au/article/australias-modern-working-class/). The working class is also the only social force capable of overthrowing capitalism because of its role in production, as explained in this [Red Flag article](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6693/). See also labour power, social class, middle class, ruling class. # X # Y # Z #### Zionism ### Managing an existing subscription URL: https://redflag.org.au/subscription-help/ Last updated: 2026-05-04T02:19:06.000Z We migrated our Red Flag subscriptions to our new subscription system in January 2026\. If you made updates to your subscription prior to this date and they have not been carried over to our new subscription platform, please contact us at [subs@redflag.org.au](mailto:subs@redflag.org.au) with details. Marxist Left Review subscriptions are no longer managed through the same portal as Red Flag subscriptions. 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[Check out the latest](https://marxistleftreview.org/?ref=redflag.org.au) --- ### Issue 278 URL: https://redflag.org.au/issue-278/ Last updated: 2026-03-26T04:04:50.000Z _This page is for paying subscribers only._ ### Issue 298 URL: https://redflag.org.au/issue-298/ Last updated: 2026-03-30T06:55:02.000Z _This page is for paying subscribers only._ ### Subscribe to Marxist Left Review URL: https://redflag.org.au/subscribe-marxist-left-review/ Last updated: 2026-04-02T06:57:38.000Z _No content available._ ## Posts ### 9/11: How the US turned tragedy into barbarity URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/9-11-how-the-us-turned-tragedy-into-barbarity/ Last updated: 2026-09-10T05:36:05.000Z Twenty-five years ago, the world changed irrevocably. Not because terrorists from the al-Qaeda network attacked the United States, bringing down the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York, hitting the Pentagon in Virginia and killing nearly 3,000 people. It changed because of US imperialism’s response. The day after 9/11, the editors of *Socialist Alternative* magazine, one of the precursor publications of *Red Flag*, warned: “The real threat to people around the world is not terrorism, but the racism, militarism, repression and nationalism that has been unleashed in the wake of the terrorist attacks”. A week later, President George W. Bush, in an address to a joint session of Congress, announced his so-called War on Terror: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”. His administration rode the wave of outrage over al-Qaeda’s assault to open a new era of imperialist aggression that has cost millions of people’s lives. First came Afghanistan in October. It didn’t matter that the ruling Taliban [offered to hand over Osama bin Laden](https://abcnews.com/International/story?id=80482&page=1&ref=redflag.org.au), the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attacks, to a neutral country to face trial. The US was interested only in war. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, admitted as much to the *New Yorker*’s Nicholas Lemann several months later. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, she had asked senior national security staff to think about how to “capitalise on these opportunities”. The Bush administration soon began making a public case for invading Iraq—which had no ties to 9/11—declaring the country part of an “axis of evil” with Iran and North Korea. Undersecretary of State John Bolton soon expanded the axis list to include Cuba, Libya and Syria. The bombs started raining down on Baghdad in March 2003. These invasions would have been followed by more had the resistance in Iraq not bogged down the US military in an intractable counterinsurgency. Nevertheless, Brown University’s [Costs of War research](https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human?ref=redflag.org.au) estimates the direct death toll from US military operations in the post-9-11 era in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan to be close to 1 million people. It estimates a further 3.6 to 3.8 million “indirect” deaths resulting from the “destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment”. The US also set up a global kidnapping network, which it termed “extraordinary rendition”, and a series of “black sites” in which prisoners were held without charge and tortured. [The Open Society Foundation estimates](http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/globalizing-torture-20120205.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) that 54 governments collaborated in the program. Then there is the notorious [Guantánamo Bay torture camp](https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/01/1109472?ref=redflag.org.au), used since 2002 and still holding ageing prisoners from the War on Terror. This all served as notice that the US empire would stop at nothing to maintain its global domination. A more enduring legacy of this era of “forever wars” has been the construction of vast internal security and surveillance states, which have trampled civil and democratic rights. More than 140 governments have adopted “counterterrorism” legislation since 9/11, beginning with the USA PATRIOT Act, which green-lit mass surveillance and delayed-notice search warrants and bolstered spy agency resources. Mega-departments, such as Homeland Security in the US and Home Affairs in Australia, were established as Western states have become more authoritarian. Indeed, Australia is one of the worst offenders. “No other nation can match the volume of Australia’s counter-terrorism laws”, wrote legal academics Rebecca Ananian-Welsh and Keiran Hardy in [a 2021 piece for the University of Queensland’s *Contact* magazine](https://stories.uq.edu.au/contact-magazine/2021/before-9-11-australia-had-no-counter-terrorism-laws-now-we-have-92-but-are-we-safer/index.html?ref=redflag.org.au). They describe the scope of the laws as “staggering”, “unprecedented” and “extreme”, noting that they go beyond even “historical wartime powers”. They include control orders, preventive detention, and compulsory retention of all telecommunication and online data of every resident. The [Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Act](https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2021A00098/asmade/text?ref=redflag.org.au) of 2021 gave law enforcement agencies the power to take control of a person’s individual online accounts, modify or delete their data and even take over entire networks. That is, they can legally alter a person’s text messages. Death and destruction abroad and authoritarianism at home: such is the “rules-based order”, the purported demise of which we are supposed to lament. This post-9/11 era normalised authoritarianism, undermined democracy, outlaid trillions of dollars on military destruction and reconfirmed that Western governments lie and murder with impunity. The 9/11 responses laid the basis for the politics that now dominates the world: Trumpism and resurgent fascism. --- In the latest print issue of *Red Flag*, we revisit some of the arguments and developments from the first decade of the War on Terror. The above is the editorial introduction to several pieces from *Socialist Alternative* magazine (a precursor to *Red Flag*) that we believe have stood the test of time, unlike much of the reporting from those years, which was little more than propaganda and apologies for imperial barbarism. ### **FROM THE ARCHIVE** - [Tragedy in America: how should the left respond?](https://redflag.org.au/article/from-the-archive-tragedy-in-america-how-should-the-left-respond-12-september-2001/) (12 September 2001) - [US imperialism](https://redflag.org.au/article/from-the-archive-us-imperialism-november-2002/) (November 2002) - [War abroad and repression at home](https://redflag.org.au/article/from-the-archive-war-abroad-and-repression-at-home-november-2005/) (November 2005) - [How the US helped to create Osama bin Laden](https://redflag.org.au/article/how-the-us-helped-to-create-osama-bin-laden/) (First published 2007) - [‘End this disgusting war’: an interview with Malalai Joya](https://redflag.org.au/article/from-the-archive-end-this-disgusting-war-an-interview-with-malalai-joya-november-2010/) (November 2010) ### FROM THE ARCHIVE—Tragedy in America: how should the left respond? (12 September 2001) URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/from-the-archive-tragedy-in-america-how-should-the-left-respond-12-september-2001/ Last updated: 2026-09-10T05:33:41.000Z *Today, there is no shortage of mainstream commentators prepared to speak out strongly against the war policy of the George W. Bush era. Even current US President Donald Trump claims to have been an opponent of the Iraq invasion and of the broader orientation of the Republican administration of 2001-09.* *But in the days after 9/11, no major media outlet would hear a word against the US. Those of us who said that US imperialism, not terrorism, posed the greatest threat to the world were vilified, marginalised and condemned as terrorist sympathisers.* *Socialist Alternative is proud that we took an unequivocal anti-imperialist stance, even in those early and dark days when doing so was deeply unpopular. The article republished below was put out on 12 September 2001\. We think its arguments, unlike so much written then and since, stand the test of time.* --- ***Socialist Alternative* magazine editorial** The September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., are a horrific tragedy. The bodies of thousands of ordinary working-class people—of all races, religions and political beliefs—lie in the rubble of New York’s World Trade Centre. But the response of the world’s leaders, and of the media commentators and opinion writers, has been marked by a hideous hypocrisy. US President George Bush, along with others such as Tony Blair, and our own John Howard and Kim Beazley, have fallen over themselves to condemn terrorism, violence and murder. They have vowed to fight the “uncivilised” actions of people who they accuse of having no regard for the sanctity of human life. But it is the likes of Bush, Blair and Howard who preside over a system that condemns millions to death and misery all around the world. Up to 200,000 civilians were murdered in the oil-driven Gulf War in 1991\. More than 500,000 children have died since as a result of crippling sanctions. Around the world—in Indonesia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America—despotic regimes financed and supported by the US government have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. The genocide of one-third of the East Timorese population was directly supported by the US, Australia and Britain. The brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine is propped up by the $1.5 billion in aid it receives from the US every year. And the logic of the capitalist system has condemned millions to death through war and poverty around the globe. 20,000 children starve to death and die of preventable diseases every day because US grain is dumped in the ocean to keep prices up, and because multinationals conspire to stop medical treatments being accessible to the world’s poor. And while George Bush rails against terrorism, the fact is that Bin Laden, accused of being behind the September 11 attacks, shares with Timothy McVeigh the distinction of having been trained in terrorism by the US government. The CIA trained Bin Laden as a commander in its proxy army that fought the USSR after its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979\. Bin Laden was “so effective a recruiter \[for the Afghan guerrillas\] that close comrades at the time actually thought he was working for the CIA”. The same US government that today denounces Bin Laden and the Taliban lauded them as “freedom fighters” in the 1980s. The rulers of the world have no interest in human rights, or in the lives of ordinary people. As Leon Trotsky said over 80 years ago: > “\[We have\] nothing in common with those bought and paid for moralists who, in response to any terrorist act, make solemn declarations about the ‘absolute value’ of human life. These are the same people who, on other occasions, in the name of other absolute values—for example, the nation’s honour or the monarch’s prestige—are ready to shove millions of people into the hell of war.” That millions of people around the world passionately hate imperialist US policies is the fault of the US ruling class; of the politicians and businessmen who grow fat through the suffering and death of ordinary people. The tragedy of the attacks on the US is that ordinary Americans have had to suffer for the genocidal and inhumane policies of their rulers. In answer to the question of where responsibility lies for this senseless loss of life, there can only be one answer: Capitalism. But whilst we understand the anger directed against America, Marxists are not terrorists. We utterly oppose the idea that, by killing ordinary people, a tiny minority can change the world for the better. It is only through the mass, democratic action of ordinary people that we can hope to rid the world of oppression and suffering. Terrorism, far from weakening our rulers, only strengthens them. This attack represents an unmitigated defeat for the left, the working class, and people fighting oppression. Already we have seen Israeli troops rolling into Jericho—unrestrained by world opinion, which has now swung against the Palestinian Intifada. We have seen racism—whipped up by the media and the government—being played out through violent attacks on Muslims and Arabs. Refugees fleeing the oppressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan are now accused of being terrorists. Racist talkback callers are free to argue that refugee boats should be shot out of the water. The Bush administration, previously isolated from other world powers in its attempt to go ahead with the “National Missile Defence” system, has already cobbled together a consensus with NATO, as well as countries like Australia, to attack with impunity any group it sees fit in retaliation for the terrorist attacks. President Bush promised to “hunt down and punish” those responsible, and he was matched, word for word and threat for threat, by politicians across the political spectrum. US conservative Robert Kagan wrote, “Congress should immediately declare war. It does not have to name a country. It can declare against those who have carried out today’s attack and against any nations that may have lent their support”. John Howard and Kim Beasley have feverishly competed to pledge support to any US war effort. These events have created the conditions where it will be easier to crack down on the anti-capitalist movement. There have already been attempts to draw links between this terrorist attack and the anti-capitalist protests coming up against the IMF \[International Monetary Fund\] in Washington, as well as the CHOGM \[Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting\] and CBF \[Commonwealth Business Forum\] protests here.\* So while we utterly oppose terrorism, the real threat to people around the world is not terrorism, but the racism, militarism, repression and nationalism that has been unleashed in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Our target must be the racist scapegoating of refugees, and of Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent in Australia. We must reaffirm our total solidarity with the people fighting against oppression and imperialism around the world, who now face the prospect of horrific reprisals from the military and ideological might of the US state. And most importantly, we must continue to build the movement against CHOGM and the CBF. These protests will be a prime opportunity to stand up against the racism and militarism now being peddled by our leaders. It is only by building a mass movement of ordinary people that we can provide an alternative to the politics of despair and impotence that terrorism represents, and rid the world of poverty, hunger, militarism, oppression and inequality—in other words, the very conditions that made the September 11 attacks possible. --- *\* The CHOGM and CBF were to meet in Brisbane in October 2001\. After 9/11, the meetings were cancelled. Anti-war protests were organised for the same date, in opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the hysterical pro-war atmosphere, several thousand people attended the rallies in Melbourne and Sydney.* ### FROM THE ARCHIVE—US imperialism (November 2002) URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/from-the-archive-us-imperialism-november-2002/ Last updated: 2026-09-10T05:33:27.000Z *Four weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan. By early 2002, the Bush administration began making the public case for invading Iraq, declaring the country part of an “axis of evil” with Iran and North Korea. Undersecretary of State John Bolton soon expanded the list to include Cuba, Libya and Syria. (The name “axis of resistance”, including Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, was reportedly coined in response to all this.)* *It became clear very quickly, however, that the analysis laid out in our 12 September editorial was substantially correct. In March 2022, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, admitted to the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann that, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, she had asked senior national security staff to think about how to “capitalise on these opportunities”, which were “shifting the tectonic plates in international politics” to US advantage. “I really think this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947”, she said. “And it’s important to try to seize on that and position American interests and institutions and all of that before they harden again.”* --- It is obvious to more and more people that the \[impending\] US war on Iraq has got absolutely nothing to do with defending democracy or stopping “terrorism”, let alone with liberating the people of Iraq. It is a good old-fashioned imperialist war—like when the British sent in the gunboats to prove to the locals who was boss. The September 11 terrorist attacks were a godsend for George Bush. They gave the US establishment carte blanche to accelerate military expenditure, crack down on dissent at home and to adopt a much more aggressive posture on the world stage. Following hard on the heels of the Afghan war, the war on Iraq is just another step by the US ruling class to assert its military and economic dominance over global capitalism. But why Iraq? At one level it doesn’t matter all that much to the US who they attack. They are out to demonstrate that the US is the sole superpower that can assert its might right across the globe, and provided they are victorious, the Pentagon planners don’t care whether the next target is North Korea, Sudan, Colombia, Central Asia or Libya. The strategists of Bush’s “war on terrorism” have spelt it out very clearly—they are planning permanent war, with the US military engaged in country after country. They want to establish a US armed presence in every corner of the globe and over the next decade they want to launch a first strike nuclear attack somewhere. The US ruling class increasingly see the enormous military superiority they have over all their capitalist rivals as their key bargaining chip to shore up the profits of US multinationals and to force their economic competitors in Europe, Japan and China to make concessions to them in terms of opening up markets for US goods. Taking out Iraq will be a graphic illustration to all the other powers of the US’s willingness to resort to force to protect its interests. There are of course additional factors. To start with—oil. The Middle East has long been of central importance to US imperialism because of its enormous oil reserves—control over which is vital to the interests of all the advanced capitalist powers. By putting an upstart like Saddam Hussein in his place, not only does the US military defend the economic interests of its multinational oil companies, it also gives the US vital leverage over Japan and the European Union, which are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than the US itself. Partly it is settling scores with Saddam. The US backed Saddam’s brutal rise to power in Iraq to crush the powerful working-class movement there and to secure Western interests. They armed him to the teeth with chemical and biological weapons. But then he got too big for his boots, and as with so many other US-backed dictators—Milosevic in Serbia, Noriega in Panama, the Taliban in Afghanistan—they moved to eliminate him. The problem was that Saddam was more cunning than most; he managed to survive defeat in the Gulf War and has played fast and loose with the US for years. His defiance encourages other lesser powers to stand up to US hegemony. This makes him a marked man whom Bush is determined to eliminate. Cutting Saddam down sends a message to every other US client state—don’t step out of line or you’re next. The other reason that Iraq and Afghanistan are important to the US is China. The US establishment sees China as the rising power that will become its chief economic and military rival over the next 50 years. The US’s wars on Afghanistan and Iraq are aimed at sending a warning shot across China’s bows—don’t get too uppity, the US is still number one. It is also about securing vital US military bases on China’s western borders. The US already had military bases on China’s eastern flank—in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan—and had built up friendly relations with India. Now the US has gained military bases in Afghanistan, the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and significantly increased its military presence in the Middle East. ### FROM THE ARCHIVE—War abroad and repression at home (November 2005) URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/from-the-archive-war-abroad-and-repression-at-home-november-2005/ Last updated: 2026-09-10T05:32:27.000Z *This is an edited version of an article written in response to the 2005 Anti-Terrorism Bill, which was rammed through parliament by Prime Minister John Howard’s Coalition government with the support of the Labor Party the following month (December 2005).* *The legislation gave security agencies the power to detain and question suspects for up to fourteen days without charge; and it made it a crime for people who had been detained to tell anyone about it. It also gave police the power to impose control orders on suspects for up to a year.* *Further, it reintroduced the crimes of “sedition” and “seditious intention”. The latter includes the crimes of intending “to bring the sovereign \[the federal government\] into hatred or contempt” or to “urge disaffection” against the constitution, the government or the parliament.* *Bramble noted that “the Australian government has passed 26 laws that restrict civil rights in the name of ‘combating terrorism’”. By 2021, the* Australian Financial Review *could report that “more than 130 pieces of national security legislation” had been enacted since 9/11.* --- Howard’s latest “anti-terrorism” laws, due to take effect by the end of this year, are a drastic attack on the civil rights of all ordinary Australians and Muslims in particular. These laws are the direct product of September 11, but not in the way that our government would have us believe. Wars do not involve just military forces but ideological warfare as well. The enemy has to be demonised—to be rendered sub-human in order to justify its slaughter. In addition, an “enemy within” has to be created to cement “national unity” at home. Thousands of Muslim residents of the USA, UK and Australia have been subject to police harassment, detention without trial, secret hearings, censorship and torture. Their homes have been raided, their communications intercepted, and infiltrators and provocateurs planted in their communities. At the same time, the climate of anti-Muslim racism stoked by the “war on terror” has resulted in an increase in harassment on the streets, with Muslims being abused and assaulted. Since 9/11, the Australian government has passed 26 laws that restrict civil rights in the name of “combating terrorism”. Howard’s new laws represent the further acceleration of state repression. Their purpose is not to keep us safe on public transport but to foster a climate of fear, suspicion and racism, the better to keep us divided. Such an environment helps Howard push through his unpopular agenda at home of union-busting, locking up refugees, privatisation of Telstra and the destruction of Medicare. Under these new laws, Muslims in particular will be subject to control orders which allow people deemed in secret court hearings to be “terrorist risks” to be electronically tagged. Those subject to control orders will be subject for 12 months to travel bans, restrictions on whom they can meet, and bans on communicating with associates by telephone, internet or email. The government has already announced that it has its eye on 800 Muslim suspects The legal tradition of *habeas corpus*, whereby people cannot be held unless charged with an offence, will be trashed. Preventative detention allows the police and ASIO to secretly lock up people for up to 48 hours and, with the assistance of state police, up to 14 days. Preventative detention applies not to people who have allegedly committed an offence or even alleged to have any information in relation to an offence, but merely on suspicion of what they may do in future. It will be a crime for an organisation to “advocate” terrorism, which includes “directly or indirectly counselling or urging” a terrorist act, or “directly praising” terrorism. The range of groups that can be banned as terrorist will be dramatically widened and any of their members, supporters or financial donors can be imprisoned for years. In order to push all of this through, the AFP and ASIO are undergoing a massive expansion, with ASIO growing from 584 officers in 2001 to 1860 by 2010\. With this expansion in numbers goes ever-increasing powers: use of CCTV surveillance, the power to secretly enter and search premises, intercept communication and seize material. The AFP will have new powers to stop, question and search people on the street, seize documents and obtain airline passenger information. ### **The Vietnam Syndrome** The “war on terror” has a second major purpose: to overcome once and for all the Vietnam Syndrome—the belief that domestic populations would not tolerate a war of aggression against a distant enemy. Overcoming the Vietnam Syndrome is also about destroying the gains won by the Left during the Vietnam War—the right to organise street marches, to challenge government policy in a vociferous manner, and to challenge the idea that Uncle Sam was always right. Our governments want to go back to the days when open dissent was a dangerous exercise, when people were too scared to raise their voice in protest, and when government censors regularly prevented “seditious” literature, such as the *Communist Manifesto*, from arriving in Australia. Bush and Co. hoped that quick victories over Afghanistan and Iraq would create a jingoist fervour that would pave the way for further aggression in the future and allow the rolling back of civil rights at home. However, the occupation of Iraq has not gone according to plan. What was supposed to be a crowning triumph for the Bush administration has turned into a disaster. Thus, measures are needed to undermine opposition to the war. Wars are always associated with suppression of civil liberties at home—during World War II we saw the introduction of no-strike legislation, suppression of the press and of rights of association. Things have not gone this far with the “war on terror”, mainly because it is not a total war mobilising the entire resources of the country, but the civil rights of ordinary Australians, Muslim and otherwise, still have to be attacked. ASIO has made 44,000 “threat assessments” in the past year and we can be sure that several thousand of these related to protest actions organised by the Left and the unions. Harassment of the Left led to the deportation of US peace activist Scott Parkin in September on ASIO’s advice that he represented a “threat to national security”. And so as well as all the “counter-terrorism” legislation primarily aimed at the Muslim community, Howard is also sneaking through legislation to revamp the crime of “sedition”. Sedition will include “urging disaffection” against the constitution, “promoting feelings of ill-will or hostility between different groups”, or urging conduct that is intended to assist “an organisation or country engaged in armed hostilities” against the Australian military. During the Vietnam War, socialists in the West raised the slogan “Victory to the National Liberation Front” (the Vietnamese guerrilla army fighting US occupation of their country). Under Howard’s legislation, those promoting this slogan could be jailed for seven years. Today, the equivalent would be calls of support for the Iraqi resistance in its fight against US occupation. Likewise, the extended definition of what constitutes “terrorism” could see people locked up for participating in peaceful demonstrations which turn violent after being attacked by cops. ### **Our opposition** The sheer range and depth of the attacks on our civil rights has aroused widespread opposition, from talk-back radio to demonstrations. On 22 October, 500 rallied outside State Parliament in Victoria, while 700 attended a public meeting called by civil rights groups in Sydney. In opinion polls, 30 percent express opposition to the new legislation. Given the overwhelming support for this legislation within the political establishment, Labor as well as Coalition, this is a major achievement. However, if we are to combat this legislation and render it inoperable, we cannot capitulate to the arguments that are put up for its defence. Too often the argument from lawyers, Muslim leaders, Greens and Democrats is that “the Howard government is going the wrong way about tackling terrorism”, that “the legislation will only drive more Muslims into the arms of the terrorists”, or that it represents “a victory for the terrorists in destroying our civil liberties”. These arguments will cripple opposition to the legislation because they accept its basic premise—that all Australians face a threat from terrorism and that we have to find a way of combating it. The opposition to this legislation is also hamstrung by the failure of the mainstream critics to situate their criticisms in the context of the entire agenda of US imperialism and specifically the war in Iraq. We have to be clear: our opposition to this legislation is not because we have better solutions to combating terrorism, but because its passage only harms our ability to tackle the real terrorists—our own ruling classes—by dividing our ranks and hindering our rights to organise. We are not opposed only to the “extreme fringes” of it; we don’t want it to be tinkered with, but defeated in its entirety. And we have to always make the connections to the broader imperialist agenda—our civil rights will always be in peril so long as our government is fighting aggressive wars. ### **The capitalist state** The new legislation is just the latest manifestation of a more general process—the expansion of the repressive powers of the state. As capitalism ages, competition between rival capitalist blocs intensifies. The state increasingly intervenes to protect the interests of “its” native capitalist class. Hence the repeated drive to war over the past century. As capitalism ages, however, its ability to ensure an obedient working class by satisfying its material needs also deteriorates. Belief among the mass of the population in the merits of the capitalist order begins to decline as a result. Participation in the structures of institutional politics (e.g. membership of political parties) declines. And, at least among a minority of the working class who sink out of the paid workforce, sometimes for many years, the discipline instilled in it by regular work and its integration into capitalist society also declines. Thus the phenomenon of riots, not just in the Aboriginal population but also in the white, as in Macquarie Fields in Sydney. Depending on the circumstances, capitalism can come increasingly to rely on state force as opposed to social consensus to hold its grip on the population. Thus governments in Britain, the US and Australia, the world’s leading pioneers of neoliberalism, have rapidly expanded the number of police, jails and prisoners in the past two decades. Likewise, the civil liberties that were won progressively by struggle and reform are gradually wound back. The bourgeoisie increasingly retreats from the ideas of civil rights, the separation of executive, legislature and judiciary and the free movement of people, while the welfare functions of the state increasingly give way to the repressive. This process proceeds until and unless there is determined mass resistance to it. Thus, it is no accident that the anti-terrorism legislation is being promoted at the same time as anti-union legislation. Both indicate a turn to greater state coercion in managing the domestic population. Just as the right to remain silent has been stripped away from terrorism suspects, so that same right has been removed from union delegates in the building industry. Just as the AFP is authorised to conduct dawn raids on Muslim families, so Howard’s union-busting goons have the power to do the same to union offices and union delegates. ### **We can fight back** The Howard government is using its parliamentary majority to push through a swag of repressive laws. The anti-terrorism legislation is supported by the state and federal ALP. Howard has been given a major boost in this respect. Nonetheless, the fate of the existing sedition legislation demonstrates the limits of these kinds of laws. Governments, police and spy agencies can only use these powers if we let them. We assume today a range of rights such as marching on the streets, distributing leaflets, organising socialist bookstalls and meetings on university campuses. And yet none of these were considered “rights” until the wave of anti-Vietnam War protests in the 1960s fought for and won these rights. The organisers of virtually every left-wing demonstration in the past century could have been prosecuted for sedition under the old laws but organised regardless. Strictly speaking, there was no right to strike in Australia until 1993, but hundreds or thousands of strikes occurred every year. And, more broadly, no state is able to withstand a revolution if the people are determined to bring it down. Consider the Shah of Iran, who was thrown out of power in 1979\. The Shah had at his disposal thousands of trained torturers, and tens of thousands of informers, all operating without any legal checks. And yet these all came to nothing when the oil workers stopped work, the students demonstrated in their hundreds of thousands, and he was forced to flee the country. A similar fate befell the leaders of the old East German state ten years later. The old Communist government was protected by the monstrous secret police, the Stasi. Nearly 200,000 East Germans were in the pay of the Stasi, equivalent to one in 40 adults. And yet, when the masses tore down the Berlin Wall, the Stasi leaders and staff were forced to scuttle away as the enraged population stormed their offices and ransacked them. The government wins without a shot being fired if we let them intimidate us into silence by these laws. We need to continue our efforts to stop the bloody occupation of Iraq and to defend our civil rights at home. ### FROM THE ARCHIVE—‘End this disgusting war’: an interview with Malalai Joya (November 2010) URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/from-the-archive-end-this-disgusting-war-an-interview-with-malalai-joya-november-2010/ Last updated: 2026-09-10T05:31:23.000Z *Afghanistan was supposed to be “the good war”—the war to catch Osama bin Laden, to liberate the women suffering under the Taliban regime, to bring democracy and rights to the population. It was all lies. The Washington Post reported in October 2001, on the eighth day of the invasion, that the Taliban was offering to turn over bin Laden to a neutral third country to end the US invasion. But the US government rejected the offer.* *Moreover, none of the 9/11 terrorists was Afghan; most were Saudi nationals, including bin Laden. But that country was a key US ally. The elections in Afghanistan, when they came, were a sham. And the country’s women were pawns in a US imperial plan to tear through the Middle East—the Americans moved on to Iraq in no time.* *One of the loudest voices of resistance to both US imperialism and the old and emerging Afghan “order” was Malalai Joya. She sat down with Socialist Alternative’s Liz Walsh in 2010, nine years after the beginning of the invasion and occupation of her country.* --- For nine long years, the United States and its allies have been tearing apart Afghanistan. And still their occupation grinds on. Few Afghan voices have emerged in condemnation of this barbarous war as forcefully as Malalai Joya’s. Joya emerged on the international stage as a fierce anti-war figure and fighter for women’s rights when she was elected in 2003 to the *Loya Jirga*, which was convened to ratify Afghanistan’s constitution. It was here that she used her [maiden speech](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLC1KBrwbck&ref=redflag.org.au) to launch a blistering attack on the warlords present at the gathering. Joya was elected to the Afghan parliament in 2005, which she used as a platform to continue her courageous denunciation of all who oppress the Afghan people, from Karzai’s corrupt puppet regime to the Taliban insurgency *and* the occupation forces. In 2007, Joya was permanently expelled from the Afghan parliament. Not surprisingly, there have been no words of protest at this attack on democracy from the occupying powers. Since her expulsion, Joya has travelled the world to bring the truth of the occupation to Western audiences. She is currently on a speaking tour in Australia, where she has addressed refugee rallies, anti-war vigils and university lecture halls. Willing to speak to whoever will listen, Joya found the time to speak with me about her political activism, views on the occupation and hopes for the future. Joya was not always a political activist. “At first I was a social activist. I didn’t want to be a politician.” For much of the 1990s, while Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban, Joya worked with the Organisation for Promoting Afghan Women’s Capabilities (OPAWC) to set up underground schools, teaching literacy to girls and adult women. She herself was educated in a school run by the [Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan](http://www.rawa.org/?ref=redflag.org.au) (RAWA), while her family lived in a refugee camp in Pakistan, having been forced into exile by the 1979 Soviet invasion. It was here that Joya developed her staunch commitment to the importance of education for girls and women’s rights. But in the aftermath of the 2001 invasion—faced with a mounting civilian death toll from the American warplanes that rained cluster bombs and white phosphorus from the sky, and a corrupt government filled with the very people responsible for terrorising and pillaging Afghanistan during the vicious civil war that erupted in the 1990s—Joya decided that she needed to intervene politically: > “When I was a social activist, I talked a lot with the people. I loved with them. I cried with them. I heard a lot about their stories, about the crimes these criminals committed against them. In 2003, I decided I couldn’t tolerate it anymore.” But then she quips, “In the parliament they couldn’t tolerate me”. Joya argues without hesitation for the troops to get out of Afghanistan: > “The troops only double our misery. We are crushed between two enemies, the warlords and Taliban on one side. They both continue their fascism. And the occupation forces on the other side. They are bombing and doing massacres. In my province, Farah, in one day they killed 150 civilians through bombs. > “It would be much easier for us to fight one enemy than to have to fight two. The occupation gives more money and more guns to these warlords. They are getting more powerful.” She points out that the Australian government too has been directly aiding the warlords, with [recent revelations in the media](http://www.theage.com.au/national/afghan-warlords-men-trained-in-australia-20101028-175pw.html?ref=redflag.org.au) that senior militia fighters of Matiullah Khan, a powerful Oruzgan warlord, were secretly flown to Australia to receive training. Barack Obama has brought no relief. Unable to crush the Taliban-led insurgency, this winner of the Nobel Peace Prize has escalated the war, beefing up troop numbers by over 30,000\. After all, the prestige of American power is at stake. Never mincing her words, Joya denounces Barack Obama as “just another warmonger”. And she points out that “the worst massacres have been in the period of Obama”. Indeed, civilian and military deaths are at record levels. This is the hell to which our government wants to deport thousands of Afghan asylum seekers currently languishing in Australia’s detention centres. Joya also rips apart another central justification used by Western governments and numerous pro-war Western feminists for the invasion of Afghanistan: the “liberation” of Afghan women: > “The US and NATO sent the troops under the banner of protecting ‘women’s rights’ and ‘human rights’. But they’re occupying Afghanistan for their own geopolitical and economic interests. Today, the situation for women in Afghanistan is as disastrous as it was under the domination of the Taliban.” Indeed, in 2009, to bolster his political position, Karzai gave his official stamp of approval to a law that [legalised crimes against Shia women](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghan-leader-accused-of-bid-to-legalise-rape-1658049.html?ref=redflag.org.au). To escape from these repressive conditions, thousands of Afghan women have committed suicide in the past year. Thousands more painfully survive self-immolation. Joya rightly scorns *Time* magazine’s cynical use of the oppression of women to rebuild flagging public support for the occupation. Its front cover on July 29 featured a harrowing photo of Bibi Aisha, a young woman who had been brutally disfigured by the Taliban. Joya commented: > “They say in the title, ‘What will happen if we leave Afghanistan?’ But they should have written, ‘What is happening to women right now while you are in Afghanistan’. But they never write about this.” Joya rejects the lie that this war is about promoting democracy or defending women’s rights; I ask what she thinks are the central motives for the occupation: > “It’s because of the geopolitical position of Afghanistan. We’re in the heart of Asia. By having their military bases there, they hope to be able to control other Asian powers like China and Iran. And they will also have very easy access to the gas in the Central Asian republics.” To this we should add that the Afghanistan war was merely a useful opening shot in the broader goal of securing US hegemony throughout the Middle East. First Afghanistan. Then Iraq. Then Syria or Iran. Or so the plan went. Joya scoffs at any suggestion that the Americans are fighting the Taliban out of any principled opposition. As she says, “They created the Taliban”. For Joya, the move by Karzai and the occupiers to engage the Taliban in negotiations is further proof that “democracy” is not on the US agenda; all they are interested in is “completing the circle of warlordism, druglordism and fundamentalism”. Joya also questions the Taliban’s anti-imperialist credentials. > “The Taliban was never against the US. When the Taliban say, ‘Troops out of Afghanistan’, they only say this from their own point of view. The only reason they’re fighting them now is because of money and power. Sometimes they negotiate with them. Already, there are Taliban in the parliament. Mulla Salam did massacres and he’s now in power.” In September this year, there was another round of parliamentary elections in Afghanistan. But this time Joya refused to participate. She explained: > “We have a saying in my country, ‘It doesn’t matter who’s doing the voting. What matters is who’s doing the counting’. [These elections were fraudulent](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/19/afghanistan-election-fraud-delay-result?ref=redflag.org.au), and I didn’t want this non-democratic mafia government to take any credit for these elections. Any hope I once had for the ballot box to bring about changes has gone now. And my people agreed. Millions of people did not attend these elections.” Instead, Joya places her hope in the grassroots struggle of ordinary Afghans to bring genuine democracy: > “Each time there is a massacre, people come onto the streets. The Afghanistan Solidarity Party, a democratic secular party, they called a demonstration and hundreds of people attended despite the fact that there is no security. But they don’t care. They still come out on the streets. They put the bodies in the truck and come out after the bombings of these occupiers. And they shout ‘US out of Afghanistan!’ They never say ‘Australia out of Afghanistan’, they never say ‘Canada’ because they all do the same job. > “Karzai and the warlords are afraid of the discontent of the people, which is getting day by day stronger. They are afraid of the democratic-minded people \[who\] are the hope for Afghanistan.” Joya is now trying to build up a network of supporters on the ground. She is even considering launching her own political party. Having survived five assassination attempts, and faced with constant death threats, her work is necessarily underground. For protection, Joya employs a bodyguard and she is constantly on the move. Every night she changes the house where she sleeps. Displaying tremendous resolve to speak out no matter what, she says: > “I know life day by day is getting more risky, more dangerous for me, it is getting more difficult for me. Even if I have to give up my life to my people, I am ready to do that.” In Australia, we don’t face these heavy consequences for raising our voices against our own warmongers in Canberra. We too have a responsibility to commit ourselves to anti-war activism. Joya agrees. She sees a central role for international solidarity: > “These Western governments also betray their own people. They’re wasting the blood of their soldiers and their taxes. That’s why you must raise your voice against your own government’s wrong policy. They must end this disgusting war. > “I say we are lucky to have the support of democratic, justice-loving people in America, Australia, and around the world. But we need more solidarity. Be more active. Put more pressure on your governments. Join anti-war organisations. And join hands with those who are struggling and risking their lives in Afghanistan, because your support gives us more courage, more determination and more hope.” I hope people are listening. --- Malalai Joya published an autobiography: *Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of the Afghan Woman Who Dares to Speak Out* (Macmillan, 2009). ### The gambling epidemic that Labor refuses to tackle URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-gambling-epidemic-that-labor-refuses-to-tackle/ Last updated: 2026-09-09T00:40:51.000Z Gambling is a public health crisis. Australians lose more money to gambling than any other nation on earth, per capita. Between March 2025 and March 2026, $36 billion was lost. Another way to put it is that a predatory industry manipulated people out of $36 billion in the space of just one year. The links between gambling and a plethora of issues, including harmful impacts on physical and mental health, relationships, work and education, are well established. That an industry can prey on some of the most vulnerable people in society should be a national scandal. Let’s place this public health crisis in context. Gambling companies sponsor major sporting events and are thus allowed prime-time advertising spots on TV. Their brands are plastered on players’ jerseys and stadiums, and they operate round-the-clock pokie rooms with almost no oversight or regulation. They are allowed to saturate advertising space on TV and online because the government refuses to implement even the most basic reforms, including those recommended by its own review. The slimy gambling industry is a big donor to both political parties; Labor received $4.4 million between 2020-21 and 2024-25\. At its recent national conference, the party allowed one of the big donors, hospitality and pokies giant Endeavor Group, to sponsor a party fundraiser on the side. The gambling epidemic affects the poorest people the most. Existing issues such as financial stress, caused by an impossible housing and cost of living crisis, unemployment or mental health issues converge to make people more susceptible to taking gambling risks. It’s no surprise that western Sydney is the centre of the gambling crisis. In October 2023, the Centre for Western Sydney published a research paper, “Luck of the draw? Inside western Sydney’s gambling harm epidemic”, which found that almost $9 million is lost to gambling in Sydney’s west every day. A third of the total gambling losses in Sydney happen in just three local government areas: Fairfield, Canterbury-Bankstown and Cumberland. Almost everyone knows someone who’s been affected by gambling. Gambling companies engineer highly addictive technology to incite vulnerable individuals to gamble what little money they might have. The pokie machine, an instrument of ruthless profiteering, is designed to entice a player to keep betting. Lights, sounds and big, flashy dollar signs promise an eventual jackpot to keep players mesmerised. The “feature”, also known as a “bonus play”, frequently pops up to keep them going. Importantly, the machine will never play a “losing sound”, even if a player is consistently losing. The visual and aural stimuli from a pokie machine trigger dopamine release in the brain at a rate of two to three hits per second, something that would normally occur only once per day. The intermittent rewards, however tiny, keep the player hooked. The unique jingles from a pokie machine end on a rising note, the effect being that it’s signalling an impending win. Gambling companies have gone so far as to design pokie machines for a target audience, for example, using baby blue to target women and darker colours such as black and red to target young men. If it wasn’t infuriating enough that gambling companies prey on the poorest, working-class communities, this will be: in 2023-24, five of the largest online gambling companies extracted $5.4 billion from vulnerable punters, but paid $0.1 billion in company tax, with three of them paying nothing at all. And gambling companies are hardly popular at the dinner table. In polling conducted by the Australia Institute, 81 percent of respondents supported banning gambling ads on social media and online, and 87 percent supported banning gambling ads during prime-time TV hours for families and children. So why does Labor allow this to continue? The donations are one thing. But more fundamentally, Labor is committed to a system that puts business profits above people. Labor doesn’t deserve the votes of working-class people in western Sydney. The party’s attitude to the gambling industry is just more proof of that. --- *Alma Torlakovic is the NSW Socialists candidate for Granville.* ### Revisiting a Marxist classic: Hal Draper’s ‘Two Souls of Socialism’ URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/revisiting-a-marxist-classic-hal-drapers-two-souls-of-socialism/ Last updated: 2026-09-09T07:42:28.000Z US socialist Hal Draper wrote *Two Souls of Socialism* in 1966 while working as a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley. In the previous two years, student protests had turned the campus upside down. Radical left-wing politics was resurgent in the United States, after decades of stultifying McCarthyism. “For the first time in the history of the world”, Draper supposed, “very likely a majority of its people label themselves ‘socialist’ in one form or another; but there has never been a time when the label was less informative”. Among those carrying the socialist label were European social democrats who had abandoned challenging private property. The Soviet Union was at the height of its power, and Communist states modelled their economies on the one-party dictatorship, willingly or under the violent thumb of Russian imperialism. In the “Third World”, nationalist leaders from Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt to Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana adopted socialist rhetoric, while Mao Zedong in China and Che Guevara in Cuba won young disciples in the West. Then there were revolutionary socialists, like Draper, who insisted that socialism did not exist anywhere in the world, and that the regimes masquerading as socialist were dramatically unequal countries where workers had few democratic and political rights. Swimming against the stream, Draper wrote *Two Souls of Socialism* to salvage the authentic revolutionary tradition from the morass of Stalinism. He argued that working-class self-emancipation was the essence of socialism, and that the history of socialist thought could be understood through the competing visions of “socialism from below” and “socialism from above”. Socialist ideas of one sort or another have existed for a long time. Every society that has produced wealth and privilege for some, and deprivation and misery for many more, has had opponents. Political ideas calling for equality between peoples and freedom from oppression have repeatedly surfaced. So too has popular resistance, from slave uprisings in ancient Rome and peasant rebellions in medieval China to strikes and mass protests in modern capitalism. While “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle”, as the *Communist Manifesto* famously asserts in its opening, the content of socialist political thought has varied widely depending on the social class it is rooted in. Draper locates the origins of modern socialism in the radical political currents that proliferated following the French Revolution. Most eminent left-wing thinkers of this time were sympathetic to the plight of the labouring classes and believed that communism would lift the majority from oppression. However, by and large they did not conceive of the masses leading a socialist transformation of society. An archetype of “socialism from above” was the French revolutionary Babeuf, who believed that an enlightened minority that had risen above the intellectual and moral strangleholds of capitalism needed to seize state power in the interests of the majority. This was a conspiratorial vision of revolution “from above”, one that Draper summarised as being “frankly a dictatorship *over* the people—with very good intentions”. The “utopian” socialists arose soon after Babeuf and were path-breaking political thinkers. Draper highlights Robert Owen and Henri de Saint-Simon as socialists who advanced the first systematic critiques of early capitalism. They were, nonetheless, utopian as they dreamed up elaborate models of socialism and sought to procure resources from the propertied classes and the wealthy to impose their schemes onto the existing society. Owen sought rich financiers for establishing socialist communes. Saint-Simon did believe that popular struggle could exert powerful influence, but wanted to utilise it as what Draper calls a “battering ram”—a lever that could force the existing ruling class towards a fairer society, while leaving political and economic power in their hands. The utopian socialists advanced devastating critiques of inequality, and their dreams were radical. But their vision was nevertheless “socialism from above”, in that socialism was a blessing to be bestowed on the masses. Karl Marx began his political life where the utopian socialists left off, believing that workers would be the “heart” of a revolution while philosophers would be its “head”. Initially, Marx held to what Draper called the “illusion of the Savior-Despot”: of a beneficent ruling class. But through his experience of being a political activist, and witnessing workers’ strikes and bourgeois revolutions across Europe, Marx broke for good from the charitable, paternalistic attitudes towards workers and peasants of the utopian socialists. The apex of Marx’s revolutionary theory (*“Marx’s Marxism”,* says Draper, “not the caricatured monstrosity”) was that workers could achieve liberation only through their own self-activity. As Marx’s close collaborator Frederick Engels wrote, repeating the aphorism of the emerging workers’ movement from the 1840s onwards in Europe, “The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself”. Socialist ideas and popular struggle had crisscrossed for an eternity. Marx’s breakthrough was to fuse them theoretically in the vision of, and commitment to, working-class revolution. This was made possible due to the historically unique position of workers, as a collective, exploited *and* socially powerful class. The great productive capacity of capitalism had created a surplus of resources such that the material needs of all people could realistically be met. The barrier to this kind of equitable distribution was that the ruling class that commanded economic power was driven, not by the objective of meeting human need, but by competition to accumulate profit. The system’s crucial weakness was that it was not the ruling-class minority, but the working-class majority, that operated the tools and machinery that created the immense wealth of society in the first place. Unlike earlier socialists, Marx did not view workers as pathetic and eternally downtrodden, and nor did he approach working-class struggle as merely a tool to exact concessions from the ruling class. Instead, Marx understood that workers had the potential to achieve something no previous oppressed class in history had been capable of. The democratic potential of capitalistic workplaces, and the abundance of resources in capitalism, opened up the possibility that workers could abolish class division and the state by taking control of production and reorganising it. A free and equal society could be brought into existence, not by a messiah or knight in shining armour, but through workers realising their collective power over the course of a revolution. Marx was explicit about this, as Draper quotes: “We say to the workers, ‘You will have to go through fifteen or twenty or fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change extant conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and to render yourselves fit for political dominion”. Self-emancipation is the soul of Marxism, the crux of Draper’s socialism from below. Not kind ringleaders, nor the design of fantastical communes, but a commitment to thoroughgoing democracy, a belief that through rupture and upheaval, workers could transform capitalism and themselves in the process. Draper insists that socialism has always been embroiled in a battle as to whether it will be achieved “from below” or “from above”. Marx and Engels fought for revolutionary workers’ democracy against conspiratorial anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin and state socialists such as Ferdinand Lassalle, who advanced the view that through universal male suffrage the masses could exercise political influence over the existing state and push capitalists to establish workers’ cooperatives. These early reformist ideas shifted the locus of socialism from working-class collective organisation and self-activity to the state. The German revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht would continue the struggle for socialism from below against the socialism from above expressed in the reformism of the Second International (an international association of socialist organisations), which conceived that working-class revolution was unnecessary, if not impossible, in an era of parliamentary democracy. Instead, the state was the change maker and state aid the content of socialism. By the 1960s, socialism from above was winning the battle for the soul of socialism. The combined impact of social democracy and Stalinism had made socialism synonymous with state planning. Draper stresses the historical continuities between reformism and Stalinism as projects based on assuming political power through the capitalist state. This was fundamentally at odds with the principle of revolutionary socialists that the state was an instrument by which one class oppressed another class: the capitalist state was a tool for capitalists to manage their system and keep workers down through violence if necessary. To succeed, a workers’ revolution would need to smash the capitalist state and create a new means of running the economy democratically. Reformists and Stalinists, on the other hand, sought to govern the capitalist state as it existed, maintaining the exploitative social relations it was based upon. Stalinists fetishised state-centric economic planning. Having all decisions made by politicians and bureaucrats was supposedly an alternative to the anarchy of the capitalist market. “The key words are Efficiency, Order, Planning, System—and Regimentation. Socialism is reduced to social-engineering”, Draper writes. Nowhere does working-class initiative factor into these ultra-planned schemas. Rather, the various state-driven economic plans for which Stalinists are renowned, whether the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plan or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, involved extreme authoritarianism. Working-class freedoms were completely subordinated so that every drop of productivity could be squeezed out of them, through institutions such as the gulags where workers did not even have the choice to leave their place of work, or methods including the forced collectivisation of peasant land in China that directly led to widespread famines. And what was it all for? Stalinist regimes directed their economies towards increasing the industrial and military capacity of their respective states. Their supporters posited that this was necessary for collective betterment. But all capitalist states say workers sacrifice for the greater good. It is a lie in the United States, and was a lie in the Soviet Union. The socialism from above of Stalinism had not only abandoned the goal of working class self-emancipation, but removed working-class rights from the political equation entirely. State planning and industrialisation had become the touchstones of “socialism”. Draper usefully highlights that this process led to Stalinists enthusiastically championing Third World nationalists: “It is all right to smash or prevent free trade unions under Nasser, Castro, Sukarno, or Nkrumah because something called ‘economic development’ is paramount over human rights”. This trend continues in the modern day, Stalinists supporting despotic regimes from the impoverished dictatorship of North Korea as a state-driven economy and the Iranian theocracy for being an enemy of the United States. An enduring legacy of Stalinism has been to make it normal for “socialists” openly to support the national interest of capitalist states, however badly workers are mistreated. In the end, the distinction is not so much between “socialism from below” and “socialism from above”, but between socialism and a version of capitalism itself. Even in places where reformists or Stalinists have captured state power, the class struggle continues. As Draper famously concluded his pamphlet: > “When the Hungarian people erupted in revolt against the Russian occupier, the question was: *which side are you on?* When the Algerian people fought for liberation against the ‘socialist’ government of Guy Mollet, the question was: *which side are you on?* When Cuba was invaded by Washington’s puppets, the question was: *which side are you on?* and when the Cuban trade unions are taken over by the commissars of the dictatorship, the question is also: *which side are you on?*” In *Two Souls of Socialism,* Draper compellingly appeals that working class self-emancipation is the strategic and moral heart of revolutionary socialism. ### The case for socialist organisation URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-case-for-socialist-organisation/ Last updated: 2026-09-09T11:53:49.000Z You only need to look at the headlines over an average week in 2026 to see why we need to get rid of capitalism. Wildfires intensified by climate change are raging across Europe and [detonating](https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/wildfires-expose-detonate-buried-bombs-mines-wwi-wwii-135860099?ref=redflag.org.au) buried WWII-era bombs and mines. Drought and economic disruption from war are combining to threaten the [world’s food supply](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/global-famine-fears-as-wars-and-el-nino-fuel-food-shortages/107072816?ref=redflag.org.au). Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz is seeking US approval to forcibly “[depopulate](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/02/israel-seeking-trumps-support-for-plan-to-expel-palestinians-from-gaza?ref=redflag.org.au)” Gaza. The 21st century was meant to mark the final triumph of capitalism, when a civilised, liberal-democratic version of it would spread across the globe, uplift billions and resolve the problems of poverty and war. But people born this century have only seen things go from bad to worse. No wonder the last decade has been characterised by explosive resistance movements involving millions, from France to Nepal. While Australia is relatively stable, there’s no shortage of discontent, especially among young people. Australia had some of the largest and most sustained protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, for example. And resistance has started to emerge to the rise of One Nation, with conservative commentator Rowan Dean recently whining about the anti-Hanson high school walkouts: “You’ve got these school kids linking Pauline Hanson, oligarchs, fascism ... linking that to billionaires ... It’s really dangerous, it’s really sinister, it’s radicalisation of our youth”. So the injustices of capitalism are not just accepted by everyone all the time. Resistance of various sorts has always been a feature of the system. But to be effective, this resistance needs a clear goal and understanding of the adversary it is up against. Socialism has, since even before Marx’s time, been this goal. It proposes to replace the rule of capital, and its drive to accumulate profit ahead of all else, with a society run democratically by the workers who make the things we all need and depend on to live. This can be achieved only by workers taking collective, democratic control of their workplaces and industries and completely destroying the rule of the bosses and their state. In his poem “In Praise of Communism”, the revolutionary German poet Bertolt Brecht called this “the simple thing that’s hard to do”. Simple, because socialism is the rational alternative to the insanity of capitalism. Workers’ democracy could solve climate change by doing what capitalist governments refuse to: expropriating the fossil fuel companies and redirecting resources to renewable energy generation and expansion, regardless of whether it’s profitable. Military build-up and wars between capitalist states for control of markets, natural resources and trade routes would be immediately redundant in a society organised to meet human need rather than generate ever greater profit for the few. Hard to do, because the capitalist class possess immense social power and numerous defences to protect their rule, from repressive laws and armed police to the loyalty of “moderate” political leaders, who will always ultimately defend the system. The power of the capitalist class means they influence what workers think and can demoralise those who do want to fight back. To win socialism, then, we will need to build a force as powerful as the political and ideological institutions of the capitalist class. Socialist organisation is key to this. First, it presents a coordinated ideological challenge to the ideas promoted by capitalist institutions, from the education system to the mass media, that are reinforced numerous ways in our everyday lives. A lot of this is simply creating confusion about how the system operates, obscuring the power and interests that underpin the norms or prerogatives of the system. Take the mainstream economics taught in universities: it’s essentially a religious dogma that exists to justify the rule of the rich. As Marxist economist Richard Wolff explains: “the vast majority of students walk away from their economic courses with little more than free-market ideology”. It can’t explain why the system perpetually spirals into crisis, or why a world built on such abundance still contains so much poverty and desperation. Wars, likewise, and the real considerations driving them, are rarely discussed candidly by those waging them. Marxist theory endeavours to explain how capitalism actually works: why inequality, economic crisis and war are built into the logic of the system, and not just the product of irrational behaviour or bad policy. Importantly, socialists don’t just rely on moral arguments to rally people to our cause, morally bankrupt though capitalism certainly is. We have facts and logic too. This is why Marx put so much effort into developing a systematic study of the mechanics of capitalism. Marx didn’t write *Capital* for his own edification. It was the basis for the political conclusions laid out in the *Communist Manifesto*, which he used to organise and recruit more people to the revolutionary movement. Socialist organisation means each one of us is not starting from scratch: we can pool resources, experience and knowledge, and build on the work of those who have gone before. This history is important and instructive. Whenever a serious struggle to change society emerges, debates *within* the left will inevitably heat up. There will be arguments between revolutionaries who want to take events to their logical conclusion, and reformists, who want to settle for some compromise. Even *amongst* revolutionaries, there will be deep divisions and debates about everything from organising workers’ power to challenging oppression. Organisation is a way to clarify and resolve these debates, and at times test various arguments by putting them into practice in the course of the struggle. Learning from struggles of the past is essential to ensuring the best chance of successful ones in the future. This is why Socialist Alternative puts out a publication, runs educational programs and hosts conferences: so that there are more socialists armed with a solid grasp of history and political theory, ready to analyse, to argue and to organise. All the book learning in the world is useless if it’s not applied to the hard task of organising battles in the here and now. And why we discuss collectively the strategy and tactics of various struggles, because we want to work out what is the best way to win. Real revolutionaries don’t sit around waiting for the day the barricades go up. We are building an organisation of people committed to organising resistance wherever possible. Mass movements give their participants a sense of collective power, and can prove the relevance and necessity of radical change. They are fuel for future struggles to topple this system. Socialist Alternative is about bringing together the people who want to be active in such movements, who want to lead others and fight capitalism wherever they are, from their workplaces to university campuses. Our members are found in the middle of every serious social movement, from the Palestine solidarity campaign to the fight against the far right. There are a plethora of moderate organisations, from social justice NGOs to parliamentary parties like the Greens, that sometimes support protests and progressive campaigns. But they’re ultimately committed to reinforcing the very system they set out to change. And they often limit their demands and stifle initiative out of fear of being seen as unreasonable and alienating the people in power whom they want to influence. This has seldom led to serious victories for workers and oppressed people. Socialists approach social change differently. The recent teachers’ strikes in Victoria are a case in point: in a context of weak unions and falling real wages, Victorian teachers won a vastly improved contract off the back of two days of massive strikes and two historic members’ votes to reject pay offers endorsed by the union’s leadership. As even the liberal *Guardian* newspaper [acknowledged](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/17/australia-victoria-teachers-union-vote-pay-deal?ref=redflag.org.au), the uncompromising, take-no-prisoners approach of socialists was an essential part of winning a better contract. Teachers had to face down a hostile Labor government and their own treacherous union leaders in order to win. Socialist high schoolers led the recent [walkout](https://redflag.org.au/article/students-teach-hanson-a-lesson/) against Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which was denounced hysterically by the right, the media, Labor and not a few school principals. The tone of defiance struck by leading socialist high school activists clearly resonated with thousands of young people disgusted at being lectured on civility and democratic responsibility by the very people who are overseeing a country sleepwalking toward far-right authoritarianism. In both these campaigns, it was important that socialists stuck to their guns and helped raise expectations beyond what the existing powers deemed “reasonable”. With more socialists, we can better connect with the thousands of people who are fed up. The growth of the Socialist Party, which now contests elections across the country, is one indication that there’s an audience out there who want to act and will when given the opportunity. With more than 6,000 members, the party has already grown to be the largest socialist organisation in the country for many decades. The more we can build our forces and deepen our collective political experience, the more possibilities there will be to wage a successful fight back*.* Winning, not just a few campaigns or a few members of parliament, but a revolution against capitalism, will require building a mass socialist organisation. We will need socialist organisers in every major workplace, every campaign and on every university campus. That starts with convincing individuals of socialist politics and arming them with the arguments and conviction to convince others. Nobody is born with the skills and experience to lead mass resistance to capitalism. Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky became known as one of the greatest orators in the history of the socialist movement, but his first attempts at public speaking were so disastrous they ended, literally, in tears. One witness recalled: “\[H\]e got himself so terribly wound up in a sliding network of unintelligible big words and receding hopes of ideas that his audience sat bathed in sympathetic perspiration, wondering if there was any way under the sun they could help him to stop”. It took time playing his part in the organised socialist movement to learn to organise, lead and inspire. We won’t all go down in the history books like Trotsky. But everyone who wants to see the rich and powerful torn down once and for all has a role to play in building a socialist group. The best time to do it is now. ### What we can learn from the Victorian school staff revolt URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/what-we-can-learn-from-the-victorian-school-staff-revolt/ Last updated: 2026-09-07T02:12:44.000Z A major revolt, in which socialists have played a crucial role, has shaken one of the biggest union branches in the country. In this year’s campaign for a new Victorian Government Schools Agreement, Victorian school staff rejected, not one, but two, offers from the state Labor government, in defiance of our own union leaders. Australian Education Union (AEU) members have now agreed to a third, revised, offer, bringing this chapter of rebellion to a close. Our defiance paid off. Each time we voted down an offer, the subsequent revised offer contained important improvements. These included pay rises for education support (ES) staff equal to those of teachers, having one less soul-crushing meeting per week after school, a promise to fund the work required for Disability Inclusion Profiles, a $2,000 pro-rata cash bonus (equivalent to back paying our first 3 percent pay rise to January for some workers), a 1 percent annual bonus for top-of-the-range staff and securing our previous reduction in face-to-face teaching hours into our agreement rather than a separate deed with an expiry date. The government has also felt obliged to commit publicly to properly funding schools according to the minimum standards in the Gonski plan. Importantly, the government didn’t just offer us more because we voted no to its first two offers, but because tens of thousands joined the two statewide strikes and mass rallies to show we were serious about winning our demands. These incredible actions also refuted many of the arguments our union leaders used to de-escalate the campaign, including that there was no appetite for strikes. It also helped focus attention on the government’s failure to deliver necessary funding to schools and school staff, which was a major problem for a weak government. But one of our most important wins has little to do with the detail of the concessions we’ve wrested from the government. It is that we have put rank-and-file revolt in support of real wage rises and workload relief back on the political map. In an all-too-rare example of the sort of action and organisation that is needed to revive and rebuild a decent union movement, our campaign is instructive and an inspiration to workers elsewhere and in other industries. The timid, class-collaborationist approach of our union leaders, which the campaign by Victorian school staff stands in sharp contrast to, is a major factor in the long-term decline of real wages, a trend that economist Greg Jericho has pointed out has gone alongside robust [corporate profits](https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2026/aug/19/australias-drop-in-real-wages-is-a-disaster-but-the-profits-of-major-corporations-are-doing-just-fine?ref=redflag.org.au). In Victoria, Labor has colluded with our union leaders to keep workers’ expectations low. The AEU is no exception. When the AEU leaders agreed to Labor’s offer in May, which would have left education support staff with significantly lower pay rises than teachers and delivered no meaningful improvements to conditions, they parroted the government’s own spin and scaremongering to justify their capitulation. The union leadership called a strike for 24 March this year. The response was enormous, with more than 35,000 school staff and supporters jamming the streets of central Melbourne. But rather than build on this, the union’s leaders immediately declared that there was no point trying to get the government to budge from its existing position. We were told that the same government that’s spending [$1.6 billion on enforcing “Australia’s toughest bail laws”](https://www.budget.vic.gov.au/keeping-communities-safe?ref=redflag.org.au) and more than [$60 million annually on handouts to fossil fuel companies](https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/fossil-fuel-subsidies-in-australia-2026/?ref=redflag.org.au), according to research by the Australia Institute, couldn’t afford to invest more in our schools and educators. They even used the government’s neglect of public education and the resulting staffing shortage, to argue it wasn’t possible to address our burnout-inducing workloads with phased-in reductions to class sizes or face-to-face teaching hours. This is despite there being 34,000 registered teachers not currently working in schools, according to the education department’s 2024 Teacher Workforce Snapshot, many of whom will likely return only once workloads are reduced. Rather than mobilise members in a serious campaign of strikes to pressure the government to concede our demands, the AEU leaders accepted the government’s position and pressured members to abandon ours. When making excuses for the government didn’t work, they fell back on scaremongering about the potential for arbitration or the possibility of a Liberal and One Nation coalition government coming to power in the state election in November. Never mind that these became possible eventualities only *after* we lost months of our campaign due to AEU leaders cancelling our rolling regional strikes in April in an act of “good will” to the government. What our union leaders likely saw as “pragmatism”, the majority of AEU members rejected for what it really was: blackmailing school staff into accepting less than what we need and deserve. By rejecting the lies of our leaders along with the government’s offers, and winning improvements that they’d told us were impossible, we’ve shown that what really stands between workers and winning more than crumbs from our employers isn’t the intransigence of our bosses or a lack of willingness on behalf of members to fight for more. It’s our do-nothing leaders, who are more concerned with maintaining their comfortable seats at the table and future career prospects in the Labor Party than they are with delivering serious gains for their members. This year’s enterprise bargaining was scripted to be a victory lap for Labor. A quick resolution would allow the government to pretend that the crisis-level workloads and criminal underfunding of our schools were on the way to being fixed. Instead, our rejection of two government offers meant that for half the year, the crisis in our schools and the revolt of school staff against our own union leadership were all over the news. And importantly, our second Vote No victory meant that the union leaders followed through with another massive strike in July. All of this is an important platform for the future. An important part of why school staff were prepared to push back this year was our simmering anger over the last agreement, struck in 2022, which failed to make a serious dent in our spiralling workloads and locked in a significant pay cut in real terms. For most teachers, wages went backwards by 11 percent—between $8,000 to $14,000 per year in real terms—as a result of the 2022 agreement. This abysmal deal came off the back of a series of other sub-par agreements, in a period where our union went thirteen years without a single strike. But this pattern is hardly exceptional in the Australian union movement. So why did AEU members break it this time? Anger and demoralisation don’t necessarily lead to rank-and-file organising for something better. Indeed, thousands of school staff quit the union after the 2022 real-wages-cutting agreement was signed. The generally neglected state of public schools and the parlous conditions for support staff, who play an increasingly important role in schools, were important. As was the general unpopularity of the state government. But so too was the emergence of a combative socialist caucus offering a real alternative to the union leaders, which didn’t exist previously. Socialists in Schools started as a group of Victorian Socialists members and supporters in the education unions committed to championing a kind of unionism that is the opposite of the top-down approach of the current leaders. Socialists know that a better world is possible only when workers fight for it collectively. Knowing a different approach is necessary and possible is one thing; making it a reality requires boots on the ground. Socialists in Schools was helped by the pre-existing profile and membership of Victorian Socialists, built through the hard work of previous election campaigns, struggles and union activity. This laid the basis for a serious network of socialists in the AEU. When the union leadership cancelled the rolling regional strikes in April, Socialists in Schools sprang into action, leading more than 50 [“rebel schools”](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gAh1S9EmSC7Mr-le9MFL0KQt2rvm%5FQkP6RRv5O-EzT0/edit?ref=redflag.org.au&gid=1360077323#gid=1360077323) and seven regions to pass motions demanding more strikes and reiterating our commitment to fighting for our full demands, not watering them down, as our leaders were signalling they were prepared to do. In response to the sub-par government offers pushed by the AEU leaders, we organised the Vote No Network, which connected with more than 600 angry school staff from Geelong to Gippsland and beyond. Our [charts](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A9DhI6ldHSBLTBJk0gwwJmgIIQOTnbzeG4hdQFmBzx4/edit?tab=t.0&ref=redflag.org.au) and [explainers](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A2AHHjXykrLLJXTJzTAjKkPa-vqygkJLToPZMJvDUZ4/edit?tab=t.0&ref=redflag.org.au) breaking down the problems of the offers and [arguing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EKmQROYxwdwO2rq9ya0PJRd%5FNIwDkDEo/view?usp=sharing&ref=redflag.org.au) that we could vote no and win more gave confidence to many members outside our ranks and helped raise expectations about what was possible. We even invited AEU President Justin Mullaly to [debate](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZMGJlGprTX/?ref=redflag.org.au) primary school teacher and Socialists in Schools member Ridah Hassan. When Mullaly didn’t show, we role-played how to refute the arguments that he and other members of the AEU executive had been making in support of the offers. When AEU leaders delayed calling a second strike after our rejection of the July offer, we helped the Keilor Downs College sub-branch organise a [defiant rally](https://www.facebook.com/share/v/14w1A8tihpQ/) of more than 120 members representing more than a dozen schools outside then Labor Education Minister—now Premier—Ben Carrol’s office to maintain our momentum. This was an important (and all-too rare) initiative, showing that sub branches could act on their own initiative rather than waiting for the officials to give a lead. AEU leaders reacted to the revolt by attempting to shut down any space for democratic discussion or debate. Regional meetings were turned into AEU executive-dominated “briefings”. Mass members meetings were no longer included at our statewide strike days, breaking with decades of democratic tradition. We openly condemned these decisions and spoke up even when told it was “out of order”. For this, we were pilloried by union leaders and their supporters for our impoliteness, but welcomed and joined by many union members tired of the status quo. Socialists are so often told that we need to put on a more conservative face to reach a wider audience. But our experience shows that defiant and uncompromising socialists can in fact connect with mass sentiment and gain favourable [mainstream media coverage](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/17/australia-victoria-teachers-union-vote-pay-deal?ref=redflag.org.au) while we’re at it. Given the crisis of combativity in our unions and the broader crises of capitalism in our society, this is a very positive development. Unfortunately, our campaign was always going to be limited by the still relatively small number of socialist rebels and the natural advantages enjoyed by the existing hostile union leaders. While we could help persuade members to vote down offers, we were not able to force the leaders to escalate the strike action. This meant that their tactics of delaying and scaremongering could eventually sap our momentum. And the relatively uncharted waters of the campaign likely meant many members felt more out on a limb by the third vote, and therefore were vulnerable to the union leaders’ arguments. In the end, 79 percent voted for the third offer. Since the new agreement will not meaningfully deal with the workload crisis driving staff out of teaching in droves, and will likely bring wages for school staff only back to 2020 levels, this will probably be a temporary pause in what will prove to be a much longer struggle. Socialists have our work cut out for us, both in our union and beyond. We want to carry the momentum built up from this year’s revolt into winning better conditions at every school through the local consultative process and by winning leadership roles in our AEU sub-branches, regions and branch council elections next year. And we need to continue building Socialists in Schools, so that we can play an even more significant role in struggles of the future. We have also taken our anger at Labor’s neglect of our schools and of working-class communities in general, as well as our concern about the prospect of a Liberal and One Nation coalition government, onto the doors and polling booths in the Victorian Socialists’ state election campaign. Socialists in Schools’ thirteen [“rebel educator”](https://redflag.org.au/article/rebel-teachers-taking-their-campaign-against-the-labor-government-all-the-way-to-parliament/) candidates for Victorian Socialists are putting forward the kind of vision for our schools and society that our group has been fighting for in our union this year—one in which the needs of educators and workers are put before the profits of the rich and powerful. While this year’s campaign hasn’t totally turned around the crisis in our schools and in our union, it has made some important progress in both areas. Through our rebellion, school staff have earned a few improvements that we wouldn’t have otherwise won, and a new generation of school staff have learned first-hand the power of refusing to accept the crumbs we’re offered and striking for more. We have forged a path that, hopefully, workers in other places and other industries now will be more likely to follow. ### Edition #309 | Blame the billionaires, not migrants URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/edition-309-blame-the-billionaires-not-migrants/ Last updated: 2026-09-06T21:55:28.000Z The gambling epidemic that Labor refuses to tackle | The case for socialist organisation | What we can learn from the Victorian school staff revolt _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Fed up with FedEx URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/fed-up-with-fedex/ Last updated: 2026-09-07T02:11:17.000Z On any given day, the FedEx facility in the Melbourne suburb of Tullamarine is a hub of activity, as trucks roar in and out of huge warehouses amid clouds of diesel smoke. On 28 August, something new cut through the routine noise. Just after 8am, hundreds of workers walked off the job, along with thousands of others around the country, costing FedEx millions. As the workers marched defiantly up the driveway, they were met by Transport Workers Union (TWU) officials there with flags to show support. The previous week, 91 percent of FedEx workers had voted to strike for two hours, after management offered them a previously rejected agreement without any improvements. The union is asking for an above-inflation pay rise, job security measures that limit AI usage and an end to direct service contracts. FedEx uses these contracts to employ third party drivers without the rights or protections of employees, and they are paid piece rates rather than wages. According to the union, contractors are under pressure to make deliveries every four minutes, which leads to dangerous road conditions not only for the contractors but also for other motorists. Road transport is already the most dangerous industry in Australia—according to the government’s quarterly heavy vehicle road deaths report, in the year to March 2026, 225 people were killed in incidents involving heavy vehicles. In response to workers voting for a two-hour strike and walking off, FedEx locked them out for the entire day. I attended their action to show solidarity as a TWU workplace delegate and socialist. Some of the workers I spoke to had been with the company for decades, while for others, this was their first strike. Consistently, the workers expressed anger towards FedEx management, and a keenness to escalate the fight. “I left Ceva, around the corner, because of bad management” one worker, who was on strike for the first time, told me, “but the same things come up here all the time. Disrespect for the workers”. A longer-term worker said, “I’ve been with this company for 25 years, from when it was TNT to now. It’s always been the same, but especially now this American company thinks they can bring in their model, as if we’re the same as America over here”. The US company, FedEx, bought Australian trucking company TNT in 2016\. FedEx has a long history of anti-union practices and undercutting wages. It made more than $4 billion profit last year. This strike comes right in the middle of a pivotal year for the TWU’s “Our roads, our skies, our futures” campaign. The day before the FedEx strike, I was at a TWU-run delegates training session where Sam Lynch, lead organiser of the Victorian/Tasmanian branch of the union, explained that a key aim of the campaign is to stop the new operators who are entering the industry in significant numbers from undercutting and driving down workers’ conditions. The union wants to organise workers at these new trucking companies to protect wages and conditions across the industry. Another is to improve the conditions in unionised companies. To do this, the union is attempting to line up all the major road transport agreements to expire around the same time. Having them all being renegotiated simultaneously opens up the potential for joint, industry-wide industrial action, and a 24-hour strike co-ordinated across five transport companies already called for 10 September. This will be an important opportunity to push for real wage rises and improved conditions for transport workers. Weakening this campaign at the outset however is that fact that the union has already reached deals with two major companies, Linfox and Team Global Express, which lock in under-inflation wage rises and weaken the coordinated bargaining effort. According to the [union](https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1531683255669187&set=a.647896714047850&type=3&rdid=gZCLHraeBC341HCi&share%5Furl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fshare%2F14oc1UokgZd%2F), these workers will receive between 10 and 11 percent pay rises over three years, which barely keeps pace with current inflation. Transport workers deserve better than this. The sort of fighting spirit we’ll need to win real wage rises and improved conditions was evident in front of FedEx that cold Friday morning. “I kinda thought that two hours wasn’t that much when they first announced it,” a young worker expressed to me, “like, why not 24 or 48 hours? We just got locked out anyway”. The driver who had been with the company for a decade and a half asked me to “imagine if all of these warehouses shut down. Nobody could go somewhere else to fill their order. We’d cripple them”. A FedEx truck drove past as he was saying that, and a yell rose up from the crowd: “Fuck off ya scab!” It was heartening and beautiful to see those FedEx workers standing there, in their hundreds, chanting and yelling with their heads held high. To win against a multinational monolith, we will need more action like it, and demands worth fighting for. ### ‘Working 9 to 5, should be able to make a living’—Sydney Uni staff shut down campus over pay, conditions URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/working-9-to-5-should-be-able-to-make-a-living-sydney-uni-staff-shut-down-campus-over-pay-conditions/ Last updated: 2026-09-03T07:38:56.000Z The first strike of Sydney University staff in our new enterprise agreement campaign was a banger. The campus was a ghost town, with very few people even attempting to enter. Services were disrupted all over because significant numbers of staff were on strike or “absent” in solidarity. All the libraries closed for the day, and classes were cancelled or rescheduled. The picket line was well-attended, jubilant and colourful. About 600 staff and students set up pickets around campus entrances from 7am. Between chanting classic union slogans, talking to passersby and arguing with people to turn around and not work today, we found time to sing and dance. By far the most popular song of the day was “9 to 5”, by Dolly Parton. It’s just what a striking worker wants to hear, and you gotta admit, it’s contagious: > Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living > Barely getting by, it’s all taking and no giving > They just use your mind, and they never give you credit > It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it (but you won’t let it) Parton’s song sums up exactly how we’re feeling at the moment, barely able to keep up with rent, mortgages and bills. With all the added mental and physical stress of counting every dime to make ends meet, we’re somehow still expected to perform our jobs to a high standard. And accept that management doesn’t really care for our lives or opinions. The collective solidarity at the pickets was a natural antidote to the everyday experience of being at work. You look around the campus and see that nothing is moving without us, and suddenly, we don’t feel so disposable. Staff brought their own placards, and food to share. We spent the day sharing stories and reasons for why we’re on strike. At the Parramatta Road main gate picket, we played a fun guessing game we dubbed “The Price is Outrageous!” to highlight the cost-of-living crisis. An all-in rally culminated outside the vice-chancellor’s administration building with more chanting and speeches. The strike was for 24 hours, and we will need many more if we are to win. NTEU Fightback, a rank-and-file group within the National Tertiary Education Union, argues that regular and well-planned strikes are the only effective tool our side has. Management has a suite of proposed attacks on our conditions. They want to make it easier to push through redundancies. They want to deploy AI, threatening job security, the quality of our jobs, and the education and services we provide. And they want us to trust that they’ll do so on an ethical basis with staff rights at heart. They won’t commit to serious action on de-casualisation, instead proposing to introduce more teaching-focused roles that break the teaching-research nexus. The union has a lot to win as well. We are seeking a 20 percent pay rise (notably, we initially voted for 25 percent, but this was quashed by our own national office). We want recognition that staff wages have gone backwards by tens of thousands since 2021 due to sub-inflation pay rises. We are still pressuring management to commit to enforceable targets for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment, improved disability rights, an academic workload allocation policy based on how much time the work actually takes, intellectual freedom, and an increase in severance pay for professional staff. --- *Alma Torlakovic is a member of the NTEU branch committee, the NTEU national council and is the NSW Socialists candidate for Granville in the March 2027 state election.* ### Victorian Socialists election campaign launches! (with Jasmine Duff) URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/victorian-socialists-election-campaign-launches-with-jasmine-duff/ Last updated: 2026-09-07T02:26:41.000Z The Victorian wing of the Australian Socialist Party is about to make history by running a candidate in every seat the state election. Jasmine Duff, the VS candidate for Footscray, joins Chloe to talk about the campaign. ### Labor’s Secret Harbour by-election loss is ominous URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-secret-harbour-by-election-loss-is-ominous/ Last updated: 2026-09-07T02:26:31.000Z Less than eighteen months ago, Western Australian Corrective Services Minister Paul Papalia comfortably held the seat of Secret Harbour, in Perth’s southern suburbs, with a two-party preferred vote of 61.5 percent, in the state election. But the by-election on 29 August wasn’t even close: One Nation won 57 percent to 43 percent on a two-party preferred basis. ON candidate Luke Herdegen’s 39 percent primary vote represents a swing of more than 30 percent to the party since last year. Labor’s primary vote plummeted to less than 25 percent, for a negative swing of 22 percent. Labor’s campaign was utterly tone deaf. Papalia, who retired last month, triggering the by-election, told the *West Australian* days before the vote: ‘‘We live in the best state in the best country on planet Earth, and part of the reason for that is good, solid, responsible government”. Anthony Albanese flew to Perth, not to campaign in the election, but for a $10,000-a-head fundraising dinner in a mansion on a street nicknamed “millionaire’s row”. The party’s candidate selection was no better. Georgia Tree, a government relations adviser to Woodside Energy, was parachuted into what was considered “safe” territory. She previously worked for federal Resources Minister Madeline King. Tree tried to leverage her working-class roots, saying how important Medicare and TAFE were to her parents. But all she could muster was a pathetic $100 fuel payment for motorists as her answer to the cost-of-living crisis. Labor threw its all at the campaign, spending more than $400,000 (of which $14,850 came from Woodside). The premier seemingly never left the candidate’s side, while government MPs from across Perth doorknocked. Labor also spent millions on a pork-barrelling spree and promised finally to start work on a train station it first announced ten years ago. But it was to no avail. Despite what WA Labor tells itself, voters are not happy. A Demos poll in late August asked respondents if the state government was doing a good or bad job managing particular issues. Its *best* result was 0 percent for “net good job” (i.e. the same percentage thought it was doing a good and bad job) for education and schools. On the cost of living, net “good job” was negative 56 percent; for housing it was negative 57 percent. Indeed, the health and education systems are in crisis. The housing situation is thrown into stark relief on Memorial Drive, in the neighbouring Rockingham electorate, where hundreds of homeless people sleep in tents and caravans. Yet funding can be found to build housing for 1,200 defence personnel from the US and UK. In fact, Labor governments are spending billions of dollars on nearby military facilities at HMAS Stirling and the Henderson industrial precinct. Secret Harbour is one of the least diverse seats in the state. There are fewer immigrants than the state average; those there hail largely from the UK, New Zealand and South Africa. Largely working class, more people have vocational qualifications than university degrees. Gym owner Herdegen’s pitch centred on infrastructure, the cost of living, crime, immigration and housing. He told voters that Labor had neglected the area for too long, and this was an opportunity to send a message. Herdegen’s campaign did not shy away from far-right talking points. One social media video, for instance, talked about “saving the family suburb”, blaming a “population explosion” for ruining the “suburban Australian dream”, featuring white faces and nostalgic music. The One Nation campaign also spent a huge amount. The Liberals did badly, coming third with around 17 percent of the primary vote (a negative swing of nearly 8 percent). State Liberal leader Basil Zempilas provoked a stoush with the Liberal federal MP for Canning, Andrew Hastie (whose seat overlaps with Secret Harbour), by claiming that a One Nation win would actually be a Liberal “victory”. The Greens vote held mostly steady at 7.5 percent. The party campaigned on Labor’s neglect of the area, the cost of living, housing and against the AUKUS security pact. So this was a good night for the racist far-right bigots of One Nation. The orange wave is real. Prior to Secret Harbour, it remained to be seen if One Nation could actually win seats off Labor. They can, and “safe” ones at that. Labor had held Secret Harbour and its previous incarnations since 1989\. Only in 2008 and 2025 did Labor candidate need preferences to win. In the COVID-19 election of 2021, Papalia won Secret Harbour’s predecessor seat of Warnbro with a 77 percent *primary* vote. The result is also ominous for Victoria, where several seats resemble Secret Harbour, and the government is less popular than its Western Australian counterpart. Here, Labor still holds 45 out of 59 seats in the lower house. Premier Roger Cook may not be loved, but he is not hated either. His preferred premier result is plus 7 percent, compared to negative 3 percent for Zempilas and negative 15 percent for WA One Nation leader Rod Caddies. This by-election was achoice between Woodside’s candidate or Gina Rinehart’s candidate, as former teal candidate for Fremantle Kate Hulett quipped. In this petro-state there is a revolving door between WA Labor and the big gas and iron ore companies. Former Premier Mark McGowan took advisory roles with Mineral Resources and BHP on leaving politics. Ben Wyatt, McGowan’s treasurer for four years, is a director of Woodside. The purported “alternative” to this is just another front for business interests. We desperately need an alternative. Get involved with the Socialist Party wherever you live. ### Vic premier’s attack on independent unions is an attack on decent unionism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/vic-premiers-attack-on-independent-unions-is-an-attack-on-decent-unionism/ Last updated: 2026-09-07T02:26:22.000Z Organisations that offer workers some choice over who represents their industrial interests should be in the same legal category as violent fascist gangs and listed terrorist organisations. This is the intended effect of [amendments](https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/stopping-workers-being-scammed-and-stamping-out-hate?ref=redflag.org.au) to laws governing incorporated associations, introduced into the Victorian parliament in mid-August by new Premier Ben Carroll’s Labor government. The law threatens to wipe out the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU), which is a challenger to Labor’s largest affiliated union—the notoriously right-wing Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA). Much of the media coverage has presented Carroll’s appalling attack on RAFFWU as a straightforward factional payback, after the SDA-aligned faction within the Labor caucus supported Carroll when he rolled Jacinta Allen as premier of Victoria last month. Factional favours may well be a factor, but there’s more to it than that. As well as being a gift to the SDA leadership, Carroll’s move is part of a nationwide trend for Labor to crack down on any idea that workers should be entitled to seek representation from a union body not currently licensed by the state through the Fair Work Commission. [Similar legislation](https://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/Work-of-the-Assembly/Tabled-Papers/docs/5722t915/5722t915-4640.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) to the current Victorian bill was passed in Queensland in 2022 under the Labor government of Annastacia Palaszczuk. And the *Australian Financial Review* [reported](https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/carroll-accused-of-factional-favours-over-red-union-bill-20260814-p60oan?ref=redflag.org.au) in mid-August that Workplace Relations Minister Amanda Rishworth, a former SDA organiser, moved amendments to the national Labor platform at July’s national ALP conference “to bind the party to target ‘sham unions’”. According to the *AFR*: “The amendments say Labor will legislate to limit unregistered unions’ participation in industrial matters, including acting as bargaining representatives”. Labor figures say that the main target of these moves are the so-called “Red” unions set up in recent years. These “Red” unions are indeed a crime against decent, principled unionism. Their main instigator is Graeme Haycroft, who has a long history in the Liberal National Party in Queensland and was a long-time, prominent member of the notorious 1980s union-busting think tank the [HR Nicholls Society](https://redflag.org.au/article/death-ruling-class-warrior/). But the best remedy against right-wing unions preying on workers is political exposure, along with established unions demonstrating their superiority through organising strikes and industrial action that improve workers’ lives. This is clearly too much work to contemplate for most of today’s union leaders, and would run totally counter to their politics, which emphasises class collaboration rather than class combat. Much easier to just rely on Labor to wipe out any competitors through legal and bureaucratic methods. It’s not just RAFFWU and the “Red” unions that are affected by Labor’s attacks. For a decade from 2015, the farm workers’ organising team of the United Workers Union conducted a series of effective—in fact, [outstanding](https://redflag.org.au/article/mogok-till-we-win/)—organising drives among migrant workers on farms. These workers sometimes made use of the provisions in the Fair Work Act that allow workers to nominate independent bargaining agents to represent them at enterprise agreement negotiations. This enabled workers to get around the dictates of the Fair Work Commission, which enforces a legal monopoly on union coverage for most industries in Australia. In the case of farms, this state-sanctioned monopoly belonged to the Australian Workers Union, which had done zero organising on farms for decades and was utterly opposed to any other union doing this organising either. Removing the ability of workers to appoint an independent bargaining agent in these circumstances, which seems to be the intention of Rishworth’s proposed changes to national industrial laws, would pose a significant problem for workers in situations like this. Migrant farm workers would be able to secure decent representation only by overthrowing the entire national leadership of the AWU, one of the oldest and strongest bureaucratic machines within Australia’s union movement. There’s also the case of the [Independent Transport Union](https://transportunion.com.au/about/?ref=redflag.org.au), a breakaway from the Rail, Tram and Bus Union in Victoria. Unlike RAFFWU, the ITU didn’t start as a project of the left. But the important thing for anyone who supports genuine unionism is that the ITU has become an effective industrial force within several parts of Victoria’s public transport workforce – especially train drivers employed by V/Line, Victoria’s regional rail network.\* The ITU’s existence as an incorporated association is clearly at risk from Carroll’s legislation. There have been various other unions established as breakaways in recent years. For instance the [Municipal and Utilities Workers Union](https://brunswickvoice.com.au/new-council-strike-to-hit-rubbish-collection-services/?ref=redflag.org.au), backed by former CFMEU secretary John Setka, briefly established a presence among some blue-collar local government workers in Victoria before the implosion of the Setka machine. Some operations along these lines can be regarded as pretty cynical factional manoeuvres, intended to weaken or tie down factional rivals within Labor and union politics. But they also point to discontent with the generally weak industrial strategy of many unions. Socialists don’t advocate the endless splitting of unions on principle. Our first approach to tackling the woeful lack of industrial fight in today’s trade union movement is to organise from the ground up *within* a union, rather than abandoning or sidestepping that fight by setting up a new, usually much smaller, outfit. But neither do we support giving limitless state-sanctioned monopoly rights to existing bureaucratic machines—which is the effect of Labor’s current moves. Labor justify their legal crackdown by pointing to the “Red” unions, which are appalling but tiny and essentially irrelevant, and by reciting some version of the mantra that unity is strength. This is disingenuous. Labor’s current legal crackdown has nothing to do with developing the fighting strength of our unions. It’s about shoring up the bureaucratic machines that control unions, and preventing any rivals to these state-sanctioned bureaucracies emerging. A look at the track record of the SDA, the most high-profile beneficiary of Labor’s current legal crackdown, shows that these moves have nothing to do with upholding principled unionism. The SDA’s business model has for generations relied on making sweetheart deals with the giant corporations that dominate the retail industry in this country. In the official history of the SDA’s Victorian branch, pride of place is given to the “national membership agreement” signed by six major national retail companies in late 1971, giving the closed shop (compulsory union membership) to the SDA. “Why the big retailers signed the agreement is not clear”, records the official history. But it’s not too hard to figure out some motives. And of course, concern for the welfare of the retail workforce was not among them. Joe de Bruyn, the national secretary of the SDA from 1978 to 2014, notes in the same history that 1972—the year after the closed shop was agreed—was the beginning of “the massive casualisation of the retail industry”. Along with a union leadership that failed to fight, or even facilitated, attacks on its workers’ conditions, it’s not unreasonable to guess at other motives for the retail bosses to force their workforce to pay dues to the SDA. Australian society at this time was being shaken by a wave of workers’ struggles and social movements, centred on the mass movement against the brutal US-Australian war in Vietnam. A rolling nationwide general strike in 1969 had freed Melbourne tramways union leader Clarrie O’Shea from prison and smashed the legal restrictions that had held unions back for a generation. Labor was set to come to power in 1972, with a flourishing left wing in Victoria being repressed by party leader Gough Whitlam. In these circumstances, massively increasing SDA membership through a closed shop—and thus increasing the factional power of the hardened Cold War right-wingers who ran the SDA—can be viewed as a favour from the retail bosses not only to themselves, but to the entire capitalist class of Australia. This motivation for the employers’ cosy relationship with the SDA is much less relevant today. It’s not like there’s a surging left anywhere in Labor, and the unions generally are at a low ebb thanks to decades of strictly enforced class collaboration, promoted by both the left and the right of the union movement. But Labor’s introduction of enterprise bargaining in the early 1990s presented a new opportunity for the SDA to maintain its closed shop with the employers, and thus its factional power. This involved the union leadership negotiating enterprise agreements that deliberately undercut the supposed legal minimum wages and conditions set out in the retail award. In return for the SDA delivering these illegally low wages, the companies encouraged or compelled workers to be members of the SDA. Everyone’s a winner—except the workers, of course. This business model has been severely undermined by legal cases brought by RAFFWU founder Josh Cullinan. Cullinan is a long-term union organiser and industrial advocate who, in 2015, teamed up with Brisbane trolley collector and Socialist Alternative member Duncan Hart and industrial barrister Siobhan Kelly to wage a successful legal case in the Fair Work Commission. The FWC was forced to [admit](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-5320/) it had wrongly approved the agreement between Coles and the SDA, which set the working conditions and wages of 77,000 Coles retail workers. Widespread reporting—including in [*Red Flag*](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-5135/) and the Melbourne [*Age*](https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2016/shopped-out/?ref=redflag.org.au)—showed just how dishonest the claims of workers being “better off overall” actually was, and how deep the collusion is between Labor’s biggest affiliate and the corporations it deals with. Coles had submitted seven rosters to the Fair Work Commission to show that the agreement with the SDA resulted in workers being “better off overall” than the award, which is the legal test Fair Work is meant to apply to any enterprise agreement. [The only problem](https://redflag.org.au/article/supermarket-worker-challenges-sda-sell-out/) was that these rosters were totally made up. Looking at real rosters of actual workers, it was clear that half or more of Coles workers were worse off compared to the award—many by well over $100 each week. The Fair Work Commission had to admit it had utterly failed to enforce its own act. The Coles agreement was scrapped, and enterprise agreements were rewritten across the retail industry. Well over $1 billion flowed to workers in the years that followed, as companies were finally obliged to pay the award minimums. Cullinan went on to set up RAFFWU, where he is still the director of strategic litigation. Successful legal cases continue (most recently at Domino’s Pizza and McDonalds), as well as some industrial action (including Apple retail stores, Harry Hartog booksellers and the major supermarkets), which had been unknown in the retail industry for decades thanks to the SDA. In the eleven years since the success of the Hart v Coles case, employers have never stopped whingeing—and neither has the SDA. Though RAFFWU is still a minority presence in retail and fast food, they have severely damaged the SDA’s business model. By limiting the ability of the SDA to undercut legal award minimums, RAFFWU has dramatically reduced the benefit the big retail companies get from herding as many workers as possible into the SDA. A detailed [analysis](https://raffwu.org.au/alp%5Fattacks%5Fraffwu%5Fdesperate%5Fto%5Fsave%5Fsda/?ref=redflag.org.au) by Josh Cullinan argues that SDA membership has likely collapsed from around 200,000 members in 2014 to 120,000 today. Labor’s attacks on unions that lack a legal monopoly is an attempt to prop up decrepit union machines—including the SDA—but not limited to them. The attacks should be opposed by everyone who supports unions as organisations dedicated to advancing the interests of workers, rather than as bureaucratic machines that serve Labor and the bosses. --- *\*Correction: This paragraph was amended on 5 September to better reflect that the membership of the Independent Transport Union has always encompassed a variety of workers in Victoria’s public transport industry, not solely train drivers.* ### Victory for rank-and-file ticket in Victorian health union election URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/victory-for-rank-and-file-ticket-in-victorian-health-union-election/ Last updated: 2026-08-28T08:57:34.000Z A group of rank-and-file unionists have ousted the leadership of the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association (VAHPA) in a landslide election. The VAHPA Pulse ticket, made up of rank-and-file union activists, gained almost twice the vote of the incumbents, VAHPA Unity, and won all the positions. The VAHPA Unity team has controlled the union for fourteen years and was backed by significant anonymous donations. By contrast, VAHPA Pulse, which I am part of, relied for our support on conviction and our reputations as experienced and uncompromising delegates and activists. Our victory is the culmination of many years of hard work and solid rank-and-file union activity. The outgoing leadership took control of VAHPA with the ticket name “Clean Sweep”. Clean Sweep faced off against cronies of former national secretary Kathy Jackson, who was responsible for disgraceful corruption and whose actions gave bosses and anti-unionists ammunition to attack unions. Defeating them was an important victory. However, after the new leadership stemmed the haemorrhaging of members and rebranded the union from HSU Branch 3 to the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association to signal the beginning of a new era, there has been little in terms of concrete improvements for allied health workers. I started working in public health just a few months after Clean Sweep came into office. Coming from the community sector, I was excited at the prospect of better pay and conditions in the health system. Today, members are leaving public health for the community sector for the same reason. However, it’s not just our pay and conditions that have gone backwards under Clean Sweep. Members have also become increasingly frustrated and angry with the lack of communication and transparency on the part of the leadership, as well as its hostility to rank-and-file activity. After working on the front lines throughout the pandemic, allied health workers had an enterprise agreement pushed on us in 2022 that contained a pathetic 2 percent pay “rise”. As the cost-of-living crisis intensifies and the workload increases in quantity and complexity, VAHPA members increasingly find themselves unable to remain in the sector, whether for financial reasons or their own mental health, often both. At the 2023 delegates conference there was hope that the situation facing allied health workers might start to turn around. A new public sector organising team presented its three-year plan to rebuild delegate structures and networks in the lead-up to our next round of bargaining. There seemed to be a willingness to involve members and an understanding of the central role delegates play in not only recruiting members but also helping them become active unionists. We all left excited. Delegates formed new working groups. In particular, professional reference groups were established to provide a mechanism for different occupational groups within VAHPA to raise their particular issues within the union. Given VAHPA represents around 50 different professions within the complex health system, this work was vital not only to assist the union organisers to understand the issues on the floor, but also to strengthen our identity and ultimately our industrial confidence. All this work was to help inform our strategy before negotiations began on our next agreement. These exciting developments were unfortunately short lived. We were told by the union leadership, and directly by the secretary, that this work was undermining and divisive to the union as a whole. Radiation therapists, arguably our most organised profession within the union, had been taking initiative in organising across the state and reaching out to their interstate counterparts to learn from their industrial victories. This was attacked by the leadership, which accused these workers of leaving other professions behind. The message was clear: the leadership calls the shots. The 2025 delegate conference was very different. Even friendly attempts by members to connect with each other were responded to aggressively by the leadership. I was rudely shouted at by the secretary on the conference floor after I asked for clarification about staffing. Later, I was attacked by an organiser and a delegate (who ran for assistant secretary on the VAHPA Unity ticket) in front of other delegates when I, on behalf of a core group of rank-and-file delegates, offered to start up a rank-and-file WhatsApp chat to increase communication between members. These attempts at intimidation did not have the desired effect. Allied health professionals are a smart lot, and many were outraged by the way the leadership behaved. Members flocked to our WhatsApp chat, and the group of delegates I was a part of became more active and vocal about the direction we were proposing for the union. Despite a revolving door of organisers that followed, we continued to discuss how we could improve connections within the union and to identify the key issues within our sector to form the basis of our upcoming log of claims. From this, we decided to start a members’ newsletter to establish a forum and platform to share stories and learn from others’ victories. It was at this point that we chose to give ourselves the name VAHPA Pulse. Soon after we set up our newsletter, we learnt of [a sexual harassment scandal involving our secretary](https://vahpapulse.substack.com/p/months-of-silence-and-then-this?r=5yfd28), and then we found out that [VAHPA w](https://vahpapulse.substack.com/p/urgent-vahpa-leadership-seeks-to?r=5yfd28)[as looking to merge with the Health and Community Services Union (HACSU)](https://vahpapulse.substack.com/p/urgent-vahpa-leadership-seeks-to?r=5yfd28). Both VAHPA and HACSU are sub-branches of the Health Services Union. Not only were the leadership not seeking to involve members in this decision, but they also spent an awful lot of time and energy trying to deny us input. Plenty has been [written](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-union-that-refused-to-listen-how-allied-health-workers-fought-their-own-union-and-won/) about this attempted undemocratic merger, but thanks to a mammoth effort from VAHPA Pulse and supporters both within and outside of our union, we put a stop to it earlier this year. Watching HACSU officials being forced to leave our special general meeting, and watching the anxiety grow on the HSU national secretary’s face as the meeting progressed and it became obvious there was overwhelming opposition to the merger, will live rent free in my head for the rest of my life! This was a major victory and emboldened both members of VAHPA Pulse and our supporters in the broader membership. After that, our focus shifted to the upcoming agreement negotiations, which is the key way to reverse the deterioration in our pay and conditions over the last few years. At the same time, we also recognised that, with our union leadership elections approaching, we needed to organise seriously an alternate ticket to challenge the current leadership. As our secretary had goaded us at our 2025 delegates conference, “If people aren’t happy with what I’m doing, they can run an oppositional ticket in our election!” We knew that unless we directly challenged the leadership, all our hard work and victories would be for nothing. Without an opposition ticket, the leadership would just be able to roll over their current positions for another four years and with a renewed sense of confidence that when it comes down to it, their authority within the union was unchallenged. In the midst of organising in our workplaces and doing our jobs with their skyrocketing workloads and complexity, VAHPA Pulse members managed to organise a ticket that was entirely rank-and-file members. While the secretary, president and vice-president chose not to stand again for their positions, the incumbent ticket was headed by either current or past members of the union leadership, who were known for their support for the outgoing secretary. Their secretary candidate was Andrew Hewitt. Previously our assistant secretary before retiring several years ago, Hewitt had come back to the union under a seemingly ever changing job title. He previously worked as a sonographer and is widely respected for the work he has done for members in that profession. However, he also is known for covering and enabling some of the secretary’s worst behaviours, including being missing in action for months at a time. VAHPA Pulse didn’t have the large and anonymous donations VAHPA Unity did. All we had was our relationships with members, our reputations as formidable delegates and our track record of leading a democratic campaign to stop the proposed merger. We got the word out about our ticket in whatever way we could—phone calls, text messages, emails, letter box drops, door knocking and using every possible network or connection. Our argument was clear: our union needs to be accountable and transparent to the membership, it should be encouraging members to be active, and it should be fighting to improve our pay and conditions. We represented the future of our union, while VAHPA Unity represented the past. This week, our hard work paid off. VAHPA Pulse won two out of every three above-the-line votes, and a similar result from the below-the-line votes. We have won all positions outright and with a very convincing margin. But as the old saying goes—now the real work begins. Our bargaining campaign is ongoing, and with caretaker mode just around the corner, we have an opportunity once again to ratchet up our industrial action and fight for higher wages and better conditions. VAHPA Pulse is made up of members from different professions, with different levels of experience and different political backgrounds. We are united in our vision for a union with an active and combative membership; however, how we get there strategically is something we will continue to debate. From my perspective, as a member of VAHPA and VAHPA Pulse, I think that now is the time for the gloves to come off. We need to escalate our industrial action in the lead-up to the state election in November, and this must involve further strike action. The teachers’ campaign shows that this is the sort of action that gets results. Allied health professions perform a vital role in our health system, and our pay and conditions should reflect that. VAHPA Pulse’s victory over the old leadership, which not only oversaw but contributed to the deterioration in our working conditions and fought hard to silence any opposition, is something to be celebrated. Now we need to show that a more combative approach can improve our working lives. To do this, we will need to build the membership, involve more members in action and use our industrial power to win concessions from the government. --- *Cecilia is a VAHPA delegate and newly-elected member of VAHPA’s branch committee of management.* ### How politicians and CEOs got addicted to profit URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/how-politicians-and-ceos-got-addicted-to-profit/ Last updated: 2026-09-07T02:26:07.000Z ##### ***Hooked***. By Quentin Beresford. NewSouth Publishing; 352 pages; $39.99 “Of all the prime ministers I’ve known, and I’ve known all of them since Menzies, Albanese is the most gambling-captured prime minister I’ve ever seen”, Tim Costello is quoted as saying in Quentin Beresford’s 2025 book *Hooked: Inside the murky world of Australia’s gambling industry*. Detailing the history of the gambling industry and its tight connection with the Australian political class, *Hooked* provides the case for meaningful gambling reform, something neither major political party is willing to implement. The Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, which passed parliament in August, hardly scratches the surface of an industry that includes sport betting, both at TABs and online, pokies, casinos and more. Australian gambling losses are now at a staggering [$31.5 billion](https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/gambling?ref=redflag.org.au) per year, and have been consistently rising since records began in the mid-1970s. The new legislation doesn’t ban advertising or inducements (like free bets or text messages). It doesn’t remove poker machines from our communities. And it leaves the casinos free to continue operating. Despite being deemed “[the strongest ever gambling reforms”](https://minister.infrastructure.gov.au/wells/media-release/strongest-ever-gambling-reforms-passed?ref=redflag.org.au) by Communications Minister Anika Wells’ office, the bill stops short of seriously impacting the companies making mega-profits. Beresford’s book gives insight into why, despite there being overwhelming popular support for gambling reform, both Labor and Liberal governments have never been willing to do it. The entrance of the poker machine was a major turning point in the history of gambling in Australia. In New South Wales in 1956, pokies were legalised and rugby league clubs were given the sole right to operate them. These clubs, according to one expert quoted in *Hooked*, “‘subordinated their social agenda to economic interests’ and grew wealthy on the back of poker machines”. These league clubs were often the centre of the community. In the 1960s, the South Sydney Junior Leagues Club had 45,000 members. It offered facilities and activities that were not always available to working-class people, like squash courts, a swimming pool, lounge and library. But it also had 111 poker machines, with more on order. The profits that came from these poker machines in clubs all across New South Wales became the key source of income for the rugby clubs. Beresford quotes the CEO of South Sydney, who recalled that they became “fat, dumb and happy” on the profits from the machines. By the end of the 1960s, there were 20,000 poker machines across New South Wales. Today, more than [80,000 are operating across the state](https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/more-machines-more-losses-more-undelivered-promises-labor-s-pokie-pledges-go-bust-20260709-p60dxs.html?ref=redflag.org.au). This is an increase in poker machines that is twice the rate of population increase. The relationship between the sports codes and the gambling industry has continued apace. After the release of Labor MP Peta Murphy’s report “You Win Some, You Lose More” in 2023 following a Senate inquiry, the “heavyweights of free-to-air TV and the football codes went all-out to lobby the Albanese government to prevent an ad ban”. This is because it’s not just sports clubs that rely heavily on a revenue stream from pokies. [The AFL receives at least $30 million from gambling agencies revenue, and the NRL $50 million.](https://theconversation.com/australias-major-sports-codes-are-considered-not-for-profits-is-it-time-for-them-to-pay-up-250914?ref=redflag.org.au) The NRL still has direct relationships with gambling agencies, with half the clubs sponsored by agencies. The revenue they receive is not taxed, as both institutions are not-for-profits. The free-to-air broadcasters get around [11 percent of their](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/it-s-not-just-the-bookies-hailing-the-new-gambling-laws-as-a-win-20260821-p60qhq.html?ref=redflag.org.au) revenue from gambling ads. This amounts to $150 million from gambling advertising each year. These relationships mean that there are multiple institutions lobbying the government; the broadcasters, the clubs and the gambling companies themselves. One chapter in Beresford’s book details the way these lobbying efforts helped to destroy attempts at reforming the industry by Andrew Wilkie, an independent MP from Tasmania. Wilkie had struck up an agreement with then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who was returned to power in a minority government with support from the Greens and independents. Wilkie’s main interest was the gambling industry, which had sucked huge amounts of money from Tasmanians via poker machines and the Wrest Point casino in Hobart. This was Australia’s first legal casino, approved by a Labor government in 1968 following a referendum. Wilkie had previously campaigned against Coles and Woolworths and those companies’ connection with poker machines. At the time, Woolworths had a 75 percent stake in Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group, which ran pokies machines out of its hotels and pubs. Whistleblowers who worked at ALH venues reported patrons urinating at their seats rather than leave and lose “their” machines, and free drinks and food to keep gamblers feeding their money into the pokies. One quote from the book describes the scene: > “Wilkie’s whistleblower was deeply affected by what he had observed of ALH’s behaviour. In a statement to Wilkie, he said: ‘Over the years I’ve seen people crying at their machines or urinating on their chairs because they have been playing for so long, they’ll stay all day and sometimes wet themselves. It’s not right, how can that be right?’” Eventually, the controversy around Woolworths’ ownership of ALH, including rewards programs that encouraged frequent gambling, led both Coles and Woolworths to divest from poker machines. Wilkie had tied his support for Gillard’s government to gambling reform, specifically, to introduction of a mandatory pre-commitment, meaning people would have to commit to a loss limit before money could be inserted into the machines. Beresford writes: > “If it could be made to work, \[mandatory pre-commitment\] had the potential to puncture the profits of gambling companies and shave off a slice of the revenue going to state governments—and, of course, to help addicts.” Despite agreements, Gillard eventually backflipped and refused to introduce any gambling reform legislation. A key reason was the lobbying efforts of the gambling companies. The sheer scale of the gambling industry’s lobbying activity is mind-boggling. The Transparency International study found that the peak gambling body Responsible Wagering Australia had used more than 100 lobbyists, Sportsbet more than 70, Star Entertainment 60 and Tabcorp more than 50. Another factor stymieing reform is the revenue governments, both state and federal, gain from taxing gambling companies, which amounts to almost $10 billion annually. Yet another is the involvement the Labor Party itself has in the industry. The ACT Labor Club, for example, is one of the largest poker machine operators in Canberra and funnels profits directly into the party’s investment arm, the 1973 Foundation. And as Beresford notes, “The New South Wales branch had built up $45 million in assets in the Randwick Labor Club, a venue that had poker machines”. Beresford details the relationship between the Labor Party and the gambling industry: > “Let’s not forget it was a Labor government that set up the clubs industry in the mid-1950s, a Labor government that introduced Australia’s first legal casino in Tasmania, and a Labor government that paved the way for the proliferation of poker machines into hotels.” One stark example of this relationship is in Victoria, where the Joan Kirner Labor government not only introduced 10,000 machines into the state but also spent “$260 000 on television advertisements promoting poker machines”. Selling off public assets and introducing big gambling was a way for the government to increase state revenue in a period of financial downturn. This is the real story of working-class life and the impacts of gambling. Essential services are stripped away. Public services that improve our lives, like a state bank, telecom and government energy provision, and public transport were sold off and privatised. Our communities were flooded with hotels and pubs that made most of their profits via poker machines. Our sports codes were funded by gambling. Money was funnelled from the bottom of society to the top. The human impact is real. Rates of domestic violence increase with the number of poker machines in a suburb. More domestic violence is reported on grand final days. People lose their homes, their jobs and their lives due to gambling addiction. Beresford writes: > “Only recently has it been established that the gambling problem of a single individual has direct negative effects on at least six others, which decreases the quality of life of those affected by between 10 percent and 28 percent.” And it is working-class communities that bear the brunt of this. Beresford details the relationship of the industry to the underbelly of society: mobs, gangs and mafiosos using the casinos as places to launder money, have meet-ups of gangland figures, engage in drug trade and human trafficking. If only this sort of corruption and criminality was as reviled as that of the CFMEU! But the main story of the book is the way that the politicians, especially Labor governments, gave the green light to this disgusting industry. They legalised casinos, poker machines and online betting agencies, and gave their approval for advertising this industry that makes money only by stealing it from patrons. The Albanese government’s paltry reforms will do nothing to stem the bleeding of those who suffer as a result of this parasitic industry. The government won’t act decisively, because it is addicted to the profits that gambling provides. Labor is tied up in an industry that is destroying working-class people. We need real action, including banning gambling advertising and shutting down poker machines and casinos. Until this happens, billions will continue to be lost to these companies. Beresford’s book is well worth reading. ### The University of Queensland is trying to destroy our student union URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-university-of-queensland-is-trying-to-destroy-our-student-union/ Last updated: 2026-08-26T08:22:12.000Z This morning at the University of Queensland, hundreds of students protested management’s attacks on our student union. A proposed “transition plan” would result in millions of dollars of students’ money (collected through the Student Services and Amenities Fee) being channelled away from democratically elected student representatives to bureaucrats who answer to the university’s administrators. This is a huge attack on students’ right to politically organise on campus. Currently, the student union is independent from the university, which gives it the ability to criticise and stand up to the administration when it attacks students. Increasing fees, cutting courses and raising rents on student accommodation are common measures taken by the university to make more money at students’ expense. An independent student union can organise students to oppose attacks like these. Student unions can also organise campaigns about important political issues students care about, such as supporting Palestine or opposing Pauline Hanson. For example, in 2024, 1,500 students demanded the university cut ties with weapons companies and Israel in a meeting called by the student union. University managers despised this rabble-rousing because it called into question their right to take money from companies facilitating the Gaza genocide. The university views protests like these as harmful to its public image and, therefore, to its ability to do business. The radical potential of the student union is exactly why the university wants to shut it down. Students standing against injustice and preventing the university from doing whatever it wants is a huge thorn in the side of the university bosses. Unfortunately, we don’t see the union’s radical potential put into action nearly enough. This is a result of it being dominated by moderate Labor students who want to stay on the good side of management. While students are increasingly squeezed by the cost of living, increasingly indebted to the university and facing a hostile world of far-right maniacs, the union has refused to put up a fight. Years of this passive, moderate leadership have led to the present situation. The university is confident it can get rid of the union because few students even know what it is. We need to fight to defend the union, but it also needs to be rebuilt into a fighting left-wing body that students know will stand up for them. Today’s protest was the first step in what will be a long campaign to defeat the university’s attacks. Convincing students of the importance of the student union and mobilising them to fight back is the best way the union can defend itself. ### Transportation in Sydney is highway robbery URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/transportation-in-sydney-is-highway-robbery/ Last updated: 2026-08-26T07:57:12.000Z Sydneysiders pay, on average, [more than 15 percent of their income](https://www.aaa.asn.au/research-data/transport-affordability/?ref=redflag.org.au) just getting around the city week-to-week. It’s a scam that hits working-class residents hardest. On one hand, there’s the broken public transport system. According to Deutsche Bank’s [*Mapping the World’s Prices* report](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-17/cost-of-living-cities-around-the-world/106929038?ref=redflag.org.au), which compares prices across 69 world cities, Sydney’s public transport is the second most expensive in the world, with residents paying up to $2,600 per year in fares. On top of that, the government pays billions to private companies that provide many of the services. The Greater Sydney Bus contract is worth nearly $8 billion, while a private contractor is being paid nearly $4 billion to operate the Metro. So workers pay twice to fund this corporate gravy train—first with their Opal card and again in taxes to fund the companies that profit from running the services. Yet while costs have soared, the services have gotten worse. Private companies, for example, operate all bus services in the metro area. But the routes are often disrupted, with reduced services and poorer pay and conditions for drivers. The buses are often crowded, if they even show up. In 2023, the ABC [revealed](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-12/thousands-of-sydney-buses-cancelled-under-contract-rules/102213390?ref=redflag.org.au) that Sydney’s bus contractors were earning bonuses by cancelling thousands of services to meet “on time” targets. “Ghost buses”—ones scheduled to arrive but never do—are common. The city’s outer suburbs are the least well-served. A 2024 [Bus Industry Taskforce report](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/22/sydney-transport-buses-western-sydney-worst-routes-data-report?ref=redflag.org.au) found that 235 bus routes failed to meet “minimum service standards”. Most of the routes are in western Sydney. The report said the government needed to invest $10 billion in the coming decades to fix the network. It is no better for those driving their cars: Sydneysiders pay more than $1 billion in road tolls annually. The city’s thirteen major toll roads are often unavoidable. Transurban, the main company involved, is one of many corporate leeches growing fat off public assets. Many major Transurban toll roads feature locked-in annual price increases of 4 percent or the rate of inflation (whichever is higher), ensuring continuous price hikes for drivers. ​ The state Labor government introduced a $50-per-week toll cap in the latest budget, but it is inadequate. Drivers still pay up to $2,600 per year so that Transurban shareholders can enrich themselves. The cap also leaves the toll road racket untouched. Rather than ending the flow of money to Transurban, the government simply reimburses motorists after they have paid tolls out of pocket. The whole system is highway robbery. ​The first steps to solving the problems are abolishing road tolls, and bringing public transport back into public hands and making it free. Workers should not have to pay for the “privilege” of getting around our own city. But these measures should only be the beginning. For decades, the city has been designed to make people dependent on cars. The destruction of Sydney’s extensive tram network in the 1950s was one part of this. But more cars and roads relative to trains and trams made congestion worse as the city expanded. A massive investment in public transport infrastructure is needed to reshape Sydney in the interests of working-class residents. ### The Spanish Revolution: drawing lessons from defeat URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-spanish-revolution-drawing-lessons-from-defeat/ Last updated: 2026-08-30T12:47:35.000Z Spain in the 1930s was ripe for revolution. In 1931, generals transitioned the country from military rule to democracy. However, a Popular Front coalition of the Socialist, Communist and liberal Republican parties, and after that a violently repressive far-right government, failed to halt the rising class struggle. Within the workers’ movement, the dominant force was the National Confederation of Labour (CNT), an anarcho-syndicalist union confederation, explicitly committed to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. There were multiple tendencies within the CNT. One of the most important was the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), which formed in 1927 as the self-declared radical anarchists committed to revolution in opposition to a perceived reformist trend in the CNT. In February 1936, the Popular Front returned to power. The CNT leadership correctly predicted that the military would launch a coup in response and began preparations to resist. On 17 July, the coup began in Spanish Morocco. That same day, FAI members leafleted factory gates with a flyer reading: “The fascist danger, at this moment, is no longer a threat, but a bloody reality...This is no longer the time to hesitate”. The next day, the CNT declared a “revolutionary general strike”. Millions of workers participated. In Barcelona, CNT defence committees emerged to lead the resistance. These were small groups of experienced militants, some having existed for years, operating in their local neighbourhoods. Since the February elections, they had been preparing for this very moment. Just hours after ringing the factory sirens (the agreed signal the rebellion had begun) they were guarding barricades throughout the city. A few days later, a mass uprising had defeated the fascist rebellion in Barcelona, Madrid and other key cities. But the workers did not stop at defensive measures. Without any instructions from their leaders, they began collectivising their workplaces. Metalworkers, for example, furnished thick metal sheets onto requisitioned trucks to convert them into armoured vehicles. The nature of production changed overnight, as the transport union explained: “We do not speak of profits— since after deducting staff wages, repair costs and a small reserve fund, the surplus will be handed over to the people for the support of other organisations that may be in need”. Revolutionary elan took over. Long queues formed outside offices to enlist in workers’ militias. The railway union reported that hundreds of its members had signed up within a fortnight. The General Motors factory sent its first contingent to the front soon after. In the working-class districts of Barcelona, revolutionary neighbourhood committees formed, often expansions of the defence committees. They converted hotels into communal kitchens, enforced price caps, established militias to patrol the streets, collected taxes, set up schools, expropriated stores and distributed their products, and formed revolutionary tribunals. In some areas, money was briefly replaced by a voucher system administered by the committees. In countless Catalan towns, similar committees formed. In many areas, the local government fled, leaving them as the sole authority. In other major cities, the collapse of the state was not as deep as in Barcelona, but the workers’ organisations could still exert control. A police officer’s report from Madrid, where the police returned to duty after a few days, shows how this played out. In the report, he recounts his interaction with a militia leader conducting a property search: > “I told him categorically that we were not leaving, as we had to be present for all proceedings carried out there, and by doing so, we were fulfilling the orders of the Director of Security and the Minister of the Interior. He replied that those gentlemen were nobody to them and that if they had to take anyone into custody, they would do so over the Police, the Director, and the Minister.” The police withdrew. The July days are often described as “spontaneous.” Although there is always an element of spontaneity in any mass movement, the driving force on the ground was the thousands of hardened CNT militants with years of experience, who were following plans drawn up weeks or months earlier. These pre-existing networks, which included groups of dozens or hundreds of members in the biggest workplaces, were what allowed the revolution to move so quickly from the defensive actions of defeating the coup to the offensive actions of collectivising workplaces and forming revolutionary committees to run society. The CNT’s leading role is also testament to the organisation the anarchist leaders had built over the preceding decades. When all other workers’ organisations had failed to halt the rise of fascism across Europe, the CNT had proven that not only could it be resisted, but that to do so revolution was both possible and necessary. When the CNT National Committee met on 29 July, the Catalan delegate reported that the CNT holds “hegemony in all areas in Catalonia. In the towns, comrades are organising life in every aspect. So much so that to travel throughout Catalonia today, one needs authorisation from the CNT”. Thrust into such a position, the question of power, long a matter of theory, became concrete. The Republican zone was in a dual power situation. In Catalonia and other areas, the committees exercised power, almost all of them led by the CNT. On 21 July, a meeting of the Catalan CNT leadership debated whether to seize power or collaborate with the Catalan Republican parties by creating a “Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias” (CCMA). The CCMA was a proposal from Luis Companys, Republican president of the Generalidad, as the Catalan government was known. By incorporating the CNT leaders into a cross-class, ambiguously defined new body for which the CNT leaders would be responsible, Companys’ plan was to salvage any remaining legitimacy the Republicans had, while buying time to reconstruct the capitalist state. Although a wing of the CNT leaders argued for a seizure of power, in the end all but one delegate voted to form the CCMA. FAI leader Federica Montseny explained the decision, writing that a seizure of power “meant establishing a dictatorship, as Lenin and Trotsky had done in Russia, isolating ourselves from the rest of Spain and assuming the responsibility of being forced to eliminate many of those who had shared with us the dangers of the struggle against the enemy”. All the anarchist leaders understood that a seizure of power necessarily implied establishing a workers’ state—a centralised body to coordinate the revolutionary forces, oversee the collectivised workplaces and defeat the counter-revolution—what Marx famously called the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. But as committed anarchists and opponents of all authority, the CNT leaders saw no fundamental difference between a capitalist state and a revolutionary workers’ state. As Montseny said in a speech just weeks later: > “We do not want to impose ourselves on anyone because that is not how the Revolution is made ... we do not believe in any government, regardless of how revolutionary it may be, because they all limit and stifle freedom”. What they failed to understand is that a state is a tool of class domination. This is why the representatives of the bourgeoisie were so determined to revive the capitalist state. To refuse a workers’ state was not an honourable act of anti-authoritarian principle, but an act of surrender— the explicit renunciation of working-class power. But the anarchist leaders had not just rejected a workers’ state. In the context of dual power, anything less than the complete overthrow of the state was, in practice, to support its continued existence. By forming the CCMA, they blew oxygen onto the dying embers of the capitalist state. The 21 July meeting is important, therefore, because it established the CNT’s position on the key question of the revolution: should the working class take power? The CNT leaders answered emphatically in the negative, despite its members in practice ruling in the factories and on the streets. Although some of the CNT leaders tried to maintain the supremacy of the CCMA over the Generalidad, the capitalist state began to impose itself however it could. Its repressive apparatus had largely disintegrated but its economic power remained significant. The national government in Madrid still controlled the Treasury, state banks and foreign trade. Control over these institutions allowed the Republicans to control key financial resources and materials. They wasted no time in starving key factories of raw materials, forcing lay-offs and reducing work hours. The CNT may have reigned supreme on the factory floor, but the state held enormous power over the factories themselves. Next, the Republican parties began to rebuild their forces of repression. In August, the national government set up an inspectorate to oversee the militias in the areas where it still had some authority. Weeks later, it had taken control of wage payment to many militias—a major step in eventually converting them into a reconstituted army under their control. Similarly, the Socialist Treasurer, Juan Negrín, in late 1936, began building up the border police in order to reassert state control over the borders and internal checkpoints, which were under de facto CNT control. The expanded force answered directly to the treasurer and was populated with allies of the government. Within months it had expanded from a relatively small force to 40,000 soldiers. Having accepted that the revolution must be subordinated to the war and that the capitalist state must remain in power, the anarchist leaders could only follow the logical conclusion of this position. In late October, the Catalan leaders joined the Generalidad and dissolved the CCMA. Days later, they supported a decree dissolving the revolutionary committees. Importantly, many of the committees refused to accept their dissolution. It was not the first or last time the leadership would struggle to impose its program on the rank and file. A few weeks earlier, under pressure to give up their guns, the Barcelona committees met and released a statement: > “The defence groups will not lay down their arms while the problem of political power is still unresolved and there is an armed force that obeys the Madrid government and that isn’t under workers’ control. Our weapons are the best guarantee of the revolutionary conquests.” On 4 November, the CNT leadership completed its capitulation when four of them, including Montseny, entered that same Madrid government of Socialist Francisco Largo Caballero. In justification, *Solidaridad Obrera*, the CNT’s main organ, wrote, “At the present time, the government, as the instrument that controls the organs of the State, has ceased to be a force of oppression against the working class”. Months earlier, another of its major papers, *CNT*, had stated that the state “is and always will be a tool of oppression used by one class against another”. Their first act was to abandon the capital as part of the government’s relocation to Valencia as the fascist forces were closing in. In the junta that was left in charge, the Communist Party quickly became the leading force. For Stalin, the potential fall of Madrid was a grave risk to his alliance with Britain and France, so the Communist International ordered that the party’s best leaders and members stay in the capital to defend it. Since July, the Stalinists had been the most antirevolutionary force in the Popular Front, constantly attacking the revolutionary committees. But facing what they deemed to be an existential threat, they were forced to change tack. One of their lines now became: “Every house a fortress, every street a trench, every neighbourhood a wall of iron and warriors”. As in the July days, countless committees re-emerged or formed to lead the resistance, defeating the fascist offensive in weeks. It was a monumental achievement. When the government abandoned the city, it was taken as a sign that Madrid was just days away from being yet another European capital to fall to fascism. Instead, it became one of the twentieth century’s great working-class victories, from which the famous slogan “*No pasaran*” was born. The battle of Madrid was a turning point in the revolution for two reasons. Firstly, the Communist Party’s authority significantly increased. It had won the leadership of the Madrid UGT, the Socialist party’s union confederation; it had close ties with the top echelon of the military leaders, some of whom had become card-carrying members; and, crucially, it had the link to Soviet Russia, which, by late 1936, had some 3,000 military advisers in Spain and was supplying tanks and planes. With this new authority, it reverted back to its counter-revolutionary line and became the main force in the government pushing for a direct confrontation with the CNT to put an end to the rule of the committees and restore the capitalist state. Secondly, the successful defence of Madrid intensified the key division within the anarchist movement, which was over the question of collaboration. There had been a growing movement of “anticollaborationists” since the July Days that now began to push harder for a new approach. They also took confidence from the other defining slogan of the battle: “Long live Madrid without government”. To them, and countless rank-and-file CNT members, the battle of Madrid represented a “Second July,” a moment not only to revive the revolution but to advance it. With the confidence of successfully defending Madrid, from late 1936 the CNT base further radicalised and began pushing the revolution forward against the leadership, which continued to make further concessions. At the same time, the national government and Generalidad in Catalonia, encouraged by the Communist Party, ramped up its repression against the CNT. One example of the radicalisation was in L’Hospitalet, an anarchist stronghold on the outskirts of Barcelona. It was an important area because the main leader was Jose Xena, the only delegate in the 21 July meeting to vote against collaboration with the existing state. Like so many other Catalan towns and Barcelona neighbourhoods, in the early days of the revolution the CNT section in L’Hospitalet established its own local revolutionary committee, although a few months later it succumbed to pressure from the leadership and dissolved, with the local CNT entering the municipal government with the Popular Front parties. However, in December, the L’Hospitalet CNT began a “socialisation campaign” to bring more industries under union control. In response, the Popular Front abandoned the municipal government, leaving it exclusively under CNT control with Xena as the local mayor. A reflection of the internal fracturing within the CNT over collaboration was the struggle over the anarchist press. After the battle of Madrid, the CNT national secretary was ousted and replaced by FAI member Mariano Vazquez. Vazquez immediately began a purge of any editors and writers critical of collaboration. His main target was Liberto Callejas, the lead editor of *Solidaridad Obrera* during the revolution. Callejas had regularly published front-page editorials from prominent anti-collaborationists. But Vazquez was determined to stamp out any trace of critique within the anarchist press. Shortly after Callejas’ ouster, Felipe Alaiz, the editor of the FAI’s key organ, *Tierra y Libertad*, was similarly replaced. This provoked some dissent. At a special congress in Barcelona in February 1937, Vazquez’s editorial pick was confirmed with the support of delegates representing 305,000 members, but Callejas and Alaiz received the support of delegates representing a combined 168,000 members. Increasingly losing control of the membership, the CNT leadership cracked down, threatening to cut funding to critical local sections. But by early 1937, an organisational break had occurred. One of the most important new groups was the Friends of Durruti. The Friends had some 5,000 members in Barcelona not long after forming and staked themselves out as oppositional to collaboration by calling for a “revolutionary junta” to replace the Generalidad. By April 1937, tensions in Barcelona had reached a fever pitch. The CNT base was no longer willing to sit back and let the counter-revolution advance. Increasingly, a section of middle-ranking cadres and some leaders followed suit. On 13 April, for example, Xena told a Barcelona rally: “We cannot be held back by the idea of first winning the war, and leaving the revolution until later, because they are indissolubly connected. Separating them would betray the hopes of the world working class, who see in us the beginnings of their own liberation”. The final straw came on 3 May when the Assault Guard, under the command of the PSUC (the Catalan Communist party), attempted to seize the telephone exchange, a symbol of workers’ power that the CNT had controlled since July. Street fighting broke out between the Generalidad’s forces and the various revolutionary committees and militias. After a few days, the government was victorious. The Communist Party and other forces spent the following weeks unleashing a reign of terror, assassinating dozens of anarchists and members of the anti-Stalinist socialists in the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), who had also fought on the barricades. Although the various anti-collaborationist organisations attempted to regroup in the months after, they couldn’t overcome the defeat of the May Days. The civil war would continue until 1939, but the May Days were the decisive turning point of the revolution. Over the next two years, the CNT leaders drifted further down the path of collaboration, joining successive Popular Front governments. The defeat was by no means inevitable. Instead, it was the result of the politics which dominated the workers’ movement. At the core of anarchism’s shortcomings was a classless rejection of authority. This is what underpinned the CNT leaders’ refusal to seize power in July 1936, which in practice meant leaving the existing state in place. Indeed, their political goal, what they called “libertarian communism,” emphasised individual freedom from any and all authority, rather than collective, democratic control of society’s resources. This meant individual producers or workplaces being “free” of overseeing, centralised bodies. As *Tierra y Libertad*, the FAI’s key organ, wrote: “We accept the collaboration of all, with no one in command—federation without authority, public service without bureaucracy”. The problem with conflating the authority of the organised working class with that of the capitalist class, and consequently abstaining from the battle between the two, is that in practice it means accepting the continued existence and dominance of the capitalist state. As the anarchist leaders discovered after the July Days, the ruling class does not simply concede defeat in the face of revolution—it has to be overthrown and disarmed by an alternative power. Without such a power, the capitalist class can and will rebuild its institutional dominance, just as the Republicans did. This raises the crucial question of what institutions the working class must build in order to win. The obvious comparison is with the Russian Revolution—1917 in Russia and 1936 in Spain demonstrate two very different approaches to revolutionary theory and action. In Spain, dual power took the form of a severely weakened Republican state and a smattering of revolutionary committees that, generally speaking, remained disconnected. The committees were mostly unelected, with delegates appointed by the relevant parties and unions based on their respective strength on the ground. In Russia, dual power took the form of the soviets (workers’ councils) on one side, and the pro-capitalist provisional government on the other. The soviets quickly became mass, democratic institutions of the working class. Within days of the Petrograd soviet forming in the February revolution, there were daily sessions of hundreds of delegates elected in the workplaces and barracks. Just weeks later, more than 70 cities had established their own soviet, and two months later the All-Russian Conference of Soviets met with representatives from 139 different soviets. The lack of a soviet-style, centralised body hamstrung the revolution in Spain, even though Spanish workers dealt a far greater blow to state power than the February revolution did, and the Spanish working class went far further in taking over the workplaces and establishing militias. As Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, wrote, “The Spanish proletariat stood on the first day of the revolution not below but above the Russian proletariat at the beginning of 1917”. Although the CNT leaders responded to Franco’s coup attempt with a call for revolution, they offered no concrete way to achieve victory. This was encapsulated in the CNT’s slogan in February, 1936: “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or libertarian communism”. This contrasts starkly to the slogan of the revolutionary socialist party in Russia, the Bolsheviks, which was “All power to the soviets”. The Bolsheviks recognised that capitalist power could be defeated only by the organised might of the working class. Rejection of all authority, in practice, meant accepting and accommodating to the authority of the capitalist class. Unfortunately, the anti-collaborationists could never overcome anarchism’s theoretical weakness. Although they were correct to break with the leadership and were moving closer to the need for a centralised state authority, they remained trapped in a syndicalist conception of workers’ power. The Friends of Durruti exemplify this. In 1938, the Friends released a manifesto called *Towards a New Revolution*, which began with a scathing critique of the CNT leadership, which had “allowed the revolution to be lost”. It repeated their call for a “revolutionary junta” as “the revolution requires institutions that will safeguard it and, in an organised manner, suppress those hostile elements”. It even recognised this was “a slight modification to anarchism”. In calling for a centralised body to “direct the war” and “safeguard revolutionary order”, the Friends were edging closer to the need for a centralised state apparatus to lead and defend the revolution. But in the same manifesto they could also call for a federation of “free municipalities” because “(s)uch decentralisation would prevent the emergence of a new state apparatus”. The group had been committed to the idea of a “revolutionary junta” since its foundation. Just weeks before the May Days, the Friends pasted posters over Barcelona that read: “All power to the working class. All economic power to the unions. A Revolutionary Junta instead of the Generalidad”. Once again, these calls were a significant step forward. But in the absence of the strategic clarity to back them up, they remained mere aspirations. How could the unions take all economic power without some sort of body to coordinate it? How could a revolutionary junta seize power without it being a conspiratorial and elitist act of a tiny minority? How could the working class take all power without an institution that allowed it to run society democratically? Without a soviet-type body, the Friends’ call for “all power to the working class” remained abstract and unable to advance the revolution beyond the fundamental problem it had faced since July: how could the working class actually take power? What all the anti-collaborationists failed to see is that the basis of workers’ power was in the revolutionary committees. These committees were more than just an embryo of workers’ power; they had exercised control over key parts of society and the economy for months. But no group argued to centralise and unify the committees into a single institution that could challenge the capitalist state. On this critical question, the anti-Stalinist socialists of the POUM failed too. Although the POUM was always much smaller than the CNT, it became a serious force in Catalonia and the rest of the Republican zone. It led several revolutionary committees in Catalan towns, such as Lerida, where its members established a “People’s Anti-Fascist Committee” that excluded the Popular Front parties. Its members also heroically fought on the barricades alongside anarchist militants at every important moment. One of the POUM’s key leaders, Andreu Nin, had spent several years in Russia where he served as Leon Trotsky’s secretary and had been part of the Left Opposition opposing Stalin’s counter-revolution. The POUM therefore better understood the need for a workers’ state than other forces. For example, in March, 1937, Nin wrote an article titled “The problem of power”, in which he argued that the “working class cannot limit itself to taking into its own hands the state machine and putting it into operation as it is for its own ends, but must destroy it, creating its own organs”. He also recognised one of the central weaknesses of the revolution was that the working class had “occupied the factories, mines and shops, destroying the economic power of the capitalists; but they did not complete this action with the conquest of political power”. The article finished with the POUM’s call for “a Constituent Assembly of delegates of the factory committees, of the peasants’ organisations and of the combatants at the front, from which would spring the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government”. But the POUM’s greater theoretical clarity, in the end, served for very little as it constantly tailed the CNT leadership. So when the CNT entered the Generalidad, so too did Nin, serving as minister of justice. Similarly, on the first night of the May Days, the POUM executive met with the CNT leadership and argued to “place ourselves at the head of the movement”. But when the CNT leaders rejected the proposal, the POUM leaders backed down and called for a return to work. If the experience of the POUM teaches anything, it’s that it’s not enough just to be theoretically correct. A revolutionary party must be willing to roll the dice and put theory into action. Although the Spanish Revolution ended in defeat, it nevertheless proves that ordinary people can be inspired to fight for a better world and offers a glimpse of what that world could be. But, above all, it proves that, when a revolutionary opportunity arises, having the right politics matters. ### ‘Mortal danger’: French firefighters battling wildfires and the government URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/mortal-danger-french-firefighters-battling-wildfires-and-the-government/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T04:10:53.000Z Successive heatwaves across Western Europe through May, June, July and August have propelled one of the biggest wildfire crises the continent has ever seen. Extreme dryness and drought, combined with the most severe, prolonged heat ever experienced, created the conditions for Australian-style bushfires in several countries. France was hit particularly hard, with temperatures reaching 44 degrees in the south-west. Hundreds of fires spread throughout the country in July and August, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate their homes, and straining emergency services, which were incapable of dealing with the firestorms and ill-equipped for the extreme conditions. **Joe Allen**, a US-based socialist and author, spoke to French firefighter and trade unionist **Sébastien Delavoux** about the situation and the political fallout as firefighters demand more resources. --- ### **Can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers and describe the working conditions over the last two months?** I am a trade unionist with the CGT (General Confederation of Labour), the second-largest trade union in the country and the second-largest among firefighters, defending the interests of fire and rescue service personnel. I am 48 years old. I have been a firefighter for 32 years, and it has been my profession for 27 years. For some time now, I have been confined to representing my colleagues in the union, but I have field agents on the phone every day, and I work in a rescue centre. Since 13 July, it has been very intense: every day, contacts with journalists to answer their questions or find them an interlocutor to give testimony. ### **The fires in Europe received extensive media coverage in the United States, but without in-depth analysis or historical context. Can you describe how terrible this situation was for civilians and firefighters? This was not a sudden event.** Indeed, this is not a sudden or unforeseen phenomenon; scientists have been warning us for decades. As of 22 August, 160,000 hectares have burned, 450 houses have been destroyed, four firefighters have died in the line of duty, and firefighters have lost 30 vehicles destroyed by fire or accident. At the height of the fires in late July, 72 fire brigades (more than 7,200 personnel) were deployed, which is unprecedented. Even so, this was insufficient, as urban vehicles were ill-suited to fighting forest fires in the middle of the forest! Hundreds of thousands of people, residents and tourists alike, have been evacuated. Since 1973, seventeen forest fires have exceeded 5,000 hectares, including six since 2021; this is the reality of the global warming we were told about, and we are not ready. ### **How have French firefighters and public sector unions reacted to the fire crisis? Some media outlets are reporting a planned national strike to demand more resources and concrete measures from the Macron government.** Before the fires, in an inter-union group comprising the nine representative trade union organisations, we challenged the prime minister (in April) and met with members of his cabinet on 27 May to tell him that the Civil Security service \[the agency responsible for coordinating national emergency responses and disaster relief\] is completely inadequate! We need to increase the budgets of fire and rescue services, increase the number of professionals, increase the number of vehicles, rethink the organisation of Civil Security and establish a real strategy for this public service. ### **What was the physical and mental impact of the fire crisis on French firefighters?** Fatigue and fear: facing 40-metre flames in unbearable temperatures is not done without fear, and that’s natural. Forest fire operations are very physically demanding; we sleep little, and we work day and night. ### **The European and international scale of the fire crisis requires better coordination between firefighters’ unions. Have any political initiatives been taken in this regard?** This year in particular, many countries have been affected: France, Portugal, Spain, Greece; thousands of hectares burned, many houses destroyed, deaths including firefighters. Each country needs to increase its human and material resources because we need to prepare for major fires occurring simultaneously in several European countries. We must have the means to protect the inhabitants without exposing firefighters to mortal danger to extinguish forest fires. ### **Are there any upcoming actions by your union?** To force the government to find funding solutions for our services, we are organising an occupation of the Place de la République in Paris from 26 to 29 September and a large demonstration on 29 September. Other professions also want to carry out actions in support of our movement. There will be further actions after 29 September, and at the moment there are many actions being taken towards local and national elected officials to plead our cause. ### Why One Nation is attacking women URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-one-nation-is-attacking-women/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T04:08:55.000Z Pauline Hanson has spat in the faces of the millions of Australian women who have experienced family violence by describing the crime as a “two-way street”. Returning to a tired victim-blaming rhetoric that women just “shouldn’t put up with it”, she’s trying to turn the clock back on attitudes to women experiencing violence and the real difficulties they face getting support. Hanson has featured on right-wing podcasts asserting that women are treating the family courts and child support payments as a “cash cow”, a system that needs to be “reined in”. These comments not only fly in the face of reality but are also an attack on some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in Australia. The 2025 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics survey found that 34.7 percent of children in single parent households live in poverty. Eight out of every ten of these households are headed by women. Domestic abuse is the main reason women become homeless in Australia, women and children making up nine out of the ten people attempting to access specialist housing services. Hanson’s outbursts are not the result of ignorance. One Nation’s increased attacks against the rights of women, whether on the issues of domestic abuse, abortion rights or parental leave, are part of the intensification of its far-right agenda, and an attempt to integrate a broader range of social issues into it. Women, according to this logic, are just another interest group that gets “special treatment” thanks to wokeism and whose endless demands are a drain on business and wealth creation. In her now infamous speech at the National Press Club, Hanson made this clear, stating “if women take time off \[to have children\] and they are not paid their wages because they’re not working, fair enough ... Why should business pay? They’re not at work”. This parallels her attacks on organisations like the National Indigenous Australians Agency, which she argues should be abolished to save taxpayers from “wasteful Indigenous grants”. She likewise attacks LGBTI people, specifically the “transgender insurgency”, that has “penetrated almost every regulatory authority”. Who is on the other side of this equation? Apparently, as Hanson told parliament in 2023, “the most oppressed and neglected minority in Australia”, is—wait for it—“men”. The positioning around women’s rights is also intended to garner One Nation stronger support with a wider and more hardcore base of potential members and campaigners, most recently on the issue of abortion. While the party has always maintained sexist talking points about the family courts and the evils of feminism, it has not previously actively campaigned against abortion rights. Hanson has been testing the waters on this issue lately though, indicating that she thinks Australia needs to “have a conversation” about abortion and flagging that she thinks abortion rights should be restricted after twenty weeks. She’s rubbed shoulders with the likes of infamous anti-abortion activist and influencer Joanna Howe. When Malcolm Roberts was questioned at a Brisbane Christian conference about whether the party would move to a policy of banning abortion altogether, the One Nation senator said that it was “becoming \[his\] goal” to do so. Barnaby Joyce has been the most explicit in why the change of approach has come now. Speaking to a Sydney crowd of anti-abortion demonstrators, he stated, “What I see before me here is about 1,500 people who can hand out how to vote cards”. One Nation has a clear desire to recruit those sections of the right who are motivated by this issue. And why not—they are an already organised layer of activists who can be relatively easily deployed to campaign, especially if One Nation seems able to deliver and potentially reverse their flagging fortunes. Abortion has, in practice, been a settled issue in Australian politics for decades. Nearly three in every four people support legal abortion in some or all cases. But the right know both that there is a motivated minority available to them, and are confident that an aggressive campaign can swing more people behind the cause—especially when Labor is too cowardly to fight on the issue, as it was during the Voice referendum, for example. And the reality is that attitudes to abortion are already going backwards. A *Guardian* Essential poll found that between November 2024 and July 2026, the percentage of people who agree abortion should be legal in all cases dropped from 41 to 29\. Attitudes towards women in general are becoming worse overall, particularly among young people. A 2026 study by the University of Melbourne revealed that approximately 40 percent of boys aged 13 to 17 agreed that women lie about domestic and sexual violence. Support for the use of violence to resist feminism was highest among adolescent boys at 28 percent, followed by adolescent girls at 21 percent. One Nation is trying to seize on these shifts, accelerate them, and gain electorally from them. They’ve already shown that a sizeable minority of dedicated far right individuals can have an outsized impact on the political landscape. Despite 73 percent of Australians supporting cultural diversity, this has not stopped Pauline Hanson from making “monoculture” a talking point. One Nation can campaign on positions that are generally unpopular at the moment because they’re not trying to win over every single voter. They’re working instead to gather together the most ideologically committed and rabid of the far right to create an organised force of people who can better influence, and potentially govern, society. They understand that providing an integrated right-wing world view that draws together all the issues that mobilise different parts of the far right will create people likely to remain loyal and useful to the party for this purpose. This is the real threat One Nation represents. The far right is dangerous, not simply because Pauline Hanson might win more votes, but because they are building a dedicated and active movement. If we’re going to win, socialists need to build one of our own. ### US imperialism and the war in Iran URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/us-imperialism-and-the-war-in-iran/ Last updated: 2026-08-30T08:46:49.000Z It is now six months since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran. The bloody offensive was meant to demonstrate US military might. It has revealed US weaknesses instead. This could not have come at a worse time for the US, which is facing a rising China, an intractable stand-off with Russia in Ukraine and increasing discontent within the ranks of its allies. The attack on Iran was only the latest instalment of a decades-long campaign by the US and Israel to weaken, if not bring down, the Islamic Republic. The enmity has its roots in the challenge Iran represented to US imperialism in the Middle East following its 1979 revolution. That hostility has endured. As the US stumbled through defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, Iran built a network of allies it called the “axis of resistance”. These included Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, loyal militias in Iraq and the Houthi rebel movement in Yemen, as well as a strong relationship with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. The escalation of Israel’s wars in the region following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack inflicted serious damage on Iran’s regional alliance. Israel’s targeted assassinations of leaders and bombing raids, along with genocide, invasion and land grabs in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria rocked Iran’s allies. The fall of al-Assad in December 2024 took another piece out of Iran’s regional bloc. Repeated mass demonstrations and strikes in Iran itself further undermined the Tehran regime. Israel determined that now was the time to finish off the regime. The Trump administration, despite ruling class reservations, agreed that a renewed war would weaken Iran. It also wanted to use what it expected would be a swift victory to impress upon Russia and China that the US was still top dog in the Middle East and to remind its allies of its role as the region’s security guarantor. US success in deposing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and installing in his place puppet Delcy Rodriguez in January filled them with confidence. The US and Israel have succeeded in one regard. According to the US administration, they have wiped out Iran’s navy and air force along with missile and defence systems. The economic cost to Iran in destroyed infrastructure and damage to the oil industry stands in the tens of billions of dollars. But in most other respects the US and Israel have failed. The US attack will not stop Iran’s progress to nuclear power; in fact, it will only make it more likely. Despite the killing of many top Iranian leaders, the regime has survived and dug in. There is no Delcy Rodriguez figure waiting to take over in Tehran. The war and intensified repression have driven the protest movement off the streets. The US has failed to take control of Iranian oil. Quite the opposite. Iran has demonstrated its ability to weaponise the Strait of Hormuz, choking the world’s oil trade. It is unlikely now to cede this power. The Gulf states, which opposed the US-Israeli attack, are now facing the consequences. Oil prices have fluctuated but are now climbing once again, presenting fresh threats to the world economy. The US and Israel may wield enormous firepower, but the war, coming on top of arms deliveries to Ukraine, is draining US missile and interceptor drone capacity. It is also drawing assets away from other potential theatres; the redeployment of the USS *George Washington* to the Middle East means the US no longer has an aircraft carrier in the Asia-Pacific for the first time since 1944. The US may have built a substantial domestic oil industry in the last couple of decades, but its strategic oil reserves are now down to less than 300 million barrels, close to the minimum needed before storage facilities start to degrade. The cost of the war is climbing. Taking into account not just the direct military outlays but also economic disruption, veteran care and lost stockpiles of missiles, the war is costing the US hundreds of billions of dollars, possibly approaching $1 trillion over time, contributing to the country’s spiralling national debt. The attack on Iran was never popular among a US public wary of a repeat of the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq. Six months on, with victory nowhere in sight and gasoline and heating oil prices rising, public support has dropped further. Opponents of the war now outnumber supporters by 20 percentage points. And according to *New York Times* poll tracking, Trump’s disapproval rating has climbed to nearly 60 percent, among the highest recorded for a US president. November’s mid-term congressional elections are likely to bring home the damage to the Republicans. On the other side of the ledger, Iran’s regional allies have been hit hard, but have not been incapacitated. Hezbollah has been pushed back in southern Lebanon but not disarmed despite commitments by the Lebanese government to do so. The Houthi rebel movement has suffered significant damage but is still threatening to block the Red Sea, the alternative maritime passage for Gulf oil. Meanwhile, China, which is dependent on oil and gas imports, has so far gotten by relatively unscathed. It built the world’s largest oil reserves before the outbreak of war, diversified its oil sources, boosted domestic gas production and accelerated its transition from fossil fuels to renewables. With US armouries significantly depleted and the US navy diverted to the Gulf, China is better positioned to throw its weight around more in Asia. All up, the US is in trouble in Iran. The US recognised its predicament in mid-June when it signed a 60-day memorandum of understanding that heavily favoured Tehran. Likely, this was to give the US time to re-equip and launch a fresh offensive. But the US faces no prospect of a quick victory. Military, financial and internal political considerations limit the US’s ability to ratchet up the war. The US is now trying to squeeze Iran with still harsher economic sanctions. These, together with the bombing and the blockade of its oil exports, are having an effect. But Tehran will not easily succumb to pressure. The prospect of ending the war without Iran being completely humiliated is enraging Israel, which has opposed any moves to scale back the offensive. It has done its best to provoke a wider war, advancing its bloody agenda on a range of other fronts. The Israeli military is entrenching itself in south Lebanon, building seven new bases and carving out dozens of kilometres of logistical roads. In Gaza, it has herded the Palestinian population into more brutal confinement, and its October 2025 “ceasefire” is a joke. Israel has killed 1,300 Palestinians since it began. The Netanyahu government is allowing Israeli “settlers” to grab more and more of the West Bank. And in Syria, it has now seized more territory in addition to the Golan Heights it seized in the 1967 war. Israel has long proven an extension of US power in the Middle East. But the two are not the same thing. While their grand strategies broadly coincide, the war on Iran has exposed tactical differences that are straining relations. More severe strains have opened up between the US and its other allies in the Middle East, which, as much as US aircraft carriers, are crucial to US power in the region. These allies include Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE and Oman, which have been brought together under the US wing to oppose Iran and its allies. The US has offered these states military protection and support for their autocratic rulers for decades, in return for which the US enjoys basing facilities, the free flow of oil and free rein for US business and security forces. The US project in recent years has been to draw these states into a common security pact with Israel, the Abraham Accords. Israeli atrocities in Gaza, by reinforcing popular hostility to the Zionist state in the Arab world, have frozen this gambit. US failure to prevent Iran blockading the Strait of Hormuz and its inability to protect its allies from Iranian missiles have thrown relationships into further disarray. What point is a security pact if it doesn’t work when you need it most? Fearing yet more devastating Iranian attacks, they are demanding the US bring the conflict to an end. These regional powers are now looking to form their own blocs and alliances independently of the US. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey recently signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, which reflects a loss of trust in Washington and disrupts US attempts to normalise Saudi-Israel relations. The US is now even threatening to bomb Oman, its mediator with Iran for the past five years, because it fears a regional effort by Arab states to make peace with Iran. Much preferred by the US are the moves by the UAE and Israel to create a regional alliance to hem in Iran. US failure in Iran is now causing serious concerns within the US ruling class. The Democrats are arguing that the war has weakened the US, strengthened Iran and given comfort to China and Russia. Foreign policy advisers in Washington are suggesting that the US is facing its own “Suez moment”—referring to the failed British-French-Israeli scheme in 1956 to take the Suez Canal from Egypt, which marked the sunset of the two great European empires. Another argues in the journal *Foreign Affairs*: “The American Middle East is finished”. The Iran war, according to Marc Lynch, a politics professor at George Washington University, is “the last gasp of a failed order”. Such takes are common, even if overdone. The US empire is not about to fade into history like the British and French; the US remains the world’s biggest imperialist power. The signatories to the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement remain structurally integrated into US military plans. Nonetheless, the US is certainly facing dwindling trust among its allies. The Trump administration has flipped the traditional maxim of politics—“Unite your allies and divide your enemies”—and sown doubts, disillusionment and even hostility in the ranks of US imperialist allies and recovery in the fortunes of its enemy. Canadian and European leaders are horrified by Trump’s tariffs, his threats to take over Greenland, his reduction of US troop numbers in Europe, his warm relations with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, his administration’s support for far-right parties and his emissaries’ insults directed at European leaders at security conferences. Similar tensions are evident in US imperialist relationships in Asia, where Trump has just cut back joint military exercises with South Korea, stating that they are “totally inappropriate and hostile” to his friend North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Trump’s hot and cold relationship with Xi Jinping is also making the US’s allies nervous. Fragmentation in the US-led imperialist alliance in Europe and Asia will make the world more dangerous. US allies in Europe and Asia are rapidly increasing their military spending, partly under pressure from the US, partly because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s growing ambitions, but partly because they anticipate they will no longer be able to rely on US protection. Without the US standing behind them, European and Asian governments will try to find substitutes for the US nuclear arsenal, which has protected them for decades. France and the UK have proposed a new nuclear umbrella for Europe, and there will be pressure on Germany, South Korea and Japan to become nuclear powers. The shifting tectonic plates of world imperialism are throwing the world into chaos. The victims are not the politicians and generals. Whether in Asia, Europe, the Middle East or the Americas, the rearmament bill will land squarely on the shoulders of the working class, while the militarisation of civil society currently under way means more repression at home. If the peoples of the world are to have a future worth living in, we need to smash the capitalist system that is driving us into this hellscape. Much as the ruling classes and their advisers focus on strains within military alliances, the main division in the world is not between nations but between the working class and capitalists of every country. The capitalists and their state apparatuses fight for supremacy but are united in their desire to exploit the working class. The working class has no interest in perpetuating the injustices of the system. The main question will be who will triumph in this battle. The oil workers and dockworkers of the Middle East hold tremendous power in their hands. They too can seize control of the oil industry, not to blackmail workers elsewhere but to run this vital resource under popular control. But not just these workers. The masses in the Middle East can fight for their interests against a world racked by capitalist greed and imperialist wars. The 2011 Arab Spring, in which ordinary people rose up against their rulers across the region, pointed to a world of democracy and equality. They represented such a threat that they were brutally crushed by the region’s despots, backed by the US or Russia. Suppression of opposition has cast a prolonged chill over the region. But it won’t last forever. ### The hue and cry about the Democratic Socialists URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-hue-and-cry-about-the-democratic-socialists/ Last updated: 2026-08-28T02:35:38.000Z CHICAGO—To US political pundits, a spectre is haunting the Democratic Party. That is, of course, the spectre of “socialism” as embodied in Democratic primary victories for progressives, some of them affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The balance sheet for the “socialist” wave won’t be known until the November mid-term elections. But there is a good chance that DSA members could add Los Angeles and Washington, DC, to New York on the roster of US cities with “democratic socialist” mayors. Democratic primary victories in New York, Philadelphia and Denver could add three to four more DSA members to Congress. And DSA-adjacent progressives like Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed could boost liberal Democrats in the next US Congress. Also, Florida state Representative Angie Nixon recently defeated a “resistance” celebrity, former Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, to become the state’s Democratic nominee for the federal Senate. Nixon reported joining the DSA a few weeks before the election. She won despite being outspent sixteen to one. All of this has caused Democratic establishment figures and long-time DC players like the American Israel Political Action Committee to sound the alarm. Dinosaurs like Bill Clinton adviser James Carville have threatened to leave the party if it doesn’t do something to stop the progressive tide. [A “centrist” Democratic donor group](https://www.truthdig.com/articles/there-is-nothing-moderate-about-the-third-way/?ref=redflag.org.au) composed primarily of investment bankers has announced its intention to spend millions to conduct what amounts to a McCarthyite smear campaign against the DSA and the candidates it supports. Everyone on the left should oppose these right-wing efforts to smear the DSA, just as we should [oppose government snooping and criminalisation of the left,](https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/08/13/feds-spied-on-protesters-left-wing-organizations-and-unions-during-metro-surge/?ref=redflag.org.au) labour unions and liberal non-government organisations. But the disdain that highly engaged Democratic “base” voters are showing towards the party leaders isn’t ideological, apart from a shift among Democratic voters against automatic support for Israel. What’s really driving the support for progressives is the same thing that is driving support for candidates who (rhetorically at least) say they want to “fight” Trump. That’s the assessment among a significant section of Democratic voters that their “leaders” aren’t up to the task of opposing Trump’s destruction of everything they support. That so many of those leaders have been in Congress for decades opens the door for younger politicians making the running on a “generational transition” appeal. This is also a non-ideological way of running for “change” in the Democratic Party. In fact, billionaire Democrat donor Stephen Mandel is [devoting his resources](https://truthout.org/articles/how-a-billionaire-is-using-his-fortune-to-reshape-the-democratic-party?ref=redflag.org.au) to promote a new generation of “moderates” and “centrists” against the progressives. Whether the progressives and “fighters” have a strategy to defeat Trumpism is a topic for another article. In the current anti-incumbent climate, with Trump’s unpopularity trending towards that of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, aspiring Democratic politicians have a low bar to clear to win support. Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, a moderate [who votedfor the anti-immigrant](https://19thnews.org/2026/08/democrats-laken-riley-act-liability/?ref=redflag.org.au) Laken Riley Act, has excited liberals with his [well-curated trolling of Trump](https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6036497-white-house-slams-ossoff/?ref=redflag.org.au) despite his conventional policy stances. The main Democratic watchword during this election season has been “affordability”. That’s hardly a brilliant stroke given that inflation is eroding people’s living standards and polls show that the cost of living is the chief voter concern. But it wasn’t until Zohran Mamdani—campaigning on making New York affordable again—won the 2025 mayor’s race that the Democratic political class took note. That fact should be a tell on just how threatening to the Democrats the socialist wave is. As *Jacobin* and *Nation* publisher [Bhaskar Sunkara, responding to anti-left pundit Jonathan Chait, explained](https://jacobin.com/2026/07/chait-dsa-socialism-harrington-democrats?ref=redflag.org.au): > “\[W\]e lead with affordability, with rent and health care and the demands that look most winnable. Of course we do. If you cannot assemble enough political power to bring down rents or win universal health care, you are certainly not going to socialise the economy.” In reality, what the democratic socialists are promoting isn’t “socialism” understood as workers’ control of society. It’s barely even social democracy as practised in Scandinavia for a century. It’s much more akin to the reformed capitalism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s 1960s Great Society. Michael Greenberg, writing in the [*New York Review of Books*](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/08/20/whose-party-democratic-socialists-of-america/?ref=redflag.org.au)*,* criticised the short-sightedness of Democratic leaders who want to stiff-arm the DSA candidates: > “They would do better to welcome socialists into the party and to adopt some of their ideas, which are no more radical than Social Security was during the New Deal. Our two major parties have moved so far to the right since 1980 that common-sense proposals to rebalance the economy are met with terror, as if they will turn the US into a twenty-first-century version of the Soviet Union. But Democrats currently have no path to becoming the majority party without making room for an outspoken and unambiguous left flank.” Amid all the heated rhetoric, an overall perspective must be kept in mind. Despite high-profile wins by DSA-backed candidates, the Democrats are not about to fall to the socialists. Most Democrats being selected in the primaries are mainstream liberals, even “establishment” Democrats. At best, the democratic socialists and other progressives can form a caucus in an expected Democratic majority in the US House of Representatives. Given that Trump will still be in the White House, it’s possible that they might advance, say, a bill to support a “Medicare for All” universal healthcare system, or a bill curtailing Trump’s immigration thugs. Knowing that Trump would veto it would be a “free vote” on a political messaging bill. But progressives, including well-known supporters such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have proven themselves to cave under pressure: abandoning their positions for the sake of “party unity”, especially when there is a Democratic administration. That was a [recurring theme under the Biden administration](https://internationalsocialism.net/more-loyal-than-oppositional-whats-so-progressive-about-the-progressive-caucus/?ref=redflag.org.au). Ocasio-Cortez’s recent comments distancing herself from [early 2020s “woke” politics are a portent of surrenders to come](https://newrepublic.com/article/214434/transcript-aoc-woke-comments-say-left?ref=redflag.org.au). It’s tempting to explain away Ocasio-Cortez’s comments on “woke” as personal political positioning for higher office. It may be that. But social democratic commentators invested in Democratic Party electoral politics view AOC’s move as a savvy, even necessary, shift to reach a mass audience. That’s the case for DSA members [Eric Blanc](https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/will-dsa-seize-the-moment-or-self?ref=redflag.org.au) and [Paul Heideman](https://jacobin.com/2026/08/hong-wisconsin-primary-loss-lessons?ref=redflag.org.au). Heideman has taken these positions a step further. Not only does he, like Mayor Mamdani, eschew the slogan “defund the police”, but he also justifies spending on prisons and cops as support for lower-income people, as revolutionary socialist [Keith Rosenthal points out](https://keithrosenthal.substack.com/p/the-democratic-socialist-carceral?fbclid=IwdGRzaATyBztjbGNrBPIFlXBkb2YFZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMzUwNjg1NTMxNzI4AAEe2EdjtW55i8F0dCT3-IfRTsCeoHIIkh2b7XDQ9PYocO9oZKOCtH5LBHJ0ctQ%5Faem%5FzOot%5Fv4uezNun78KnSveLg&utm%5Fid=97758%5Fv0%5Fs00%5Fe0%5Ftv2%5Fa1dennhb4ymyl4&sfnsn=mo). It’s important to keep this in mind as progressives and “democratic socialists” celebrate their victories in Democratic primaries, and the Democratic establishment plots to stymie them. The Democratic Party electoral road isn’t leading to “socialism”. It’s leading socialists away from it. ### Old traditions of anti-Catholic hate lie beneath UK race riots URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/old-traditions-of-anti-catholic-hate-lie-beneath-uk-race-riots/ Last updated: 2026-08-28T02:35:21.000Z Summers in Britain now follow a predictable pattern. Southport, England, 2024—racist riots spread after far-right activists falsely blame a stabbing attack on an “illegal Muslim immigrant”. Trafalgar Square, London, 2025—anti-Islam hatemonger Tommy Robinson leads the country’s largest ever anti-immigration march after months of rolling protests target refugees and demand mass deportations. Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2026—arson attacks, mob violence and protests extend to Scotland and England following a murder committed by a man with Indian heritage. For three years in a row, Britain has been seized by summertime racist rioting. Islamophobes and nationalists seem to have laid claim to UK streets for the months of June through September. But this is not without precedent: summer has always been high time for bigots and diehard patriots. It’s the period when Protestant communities in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and the western part of England habitually mobilise in displays of hatred against Catholics and to show their loyalty to the British state. Colloquially, it has always been “marching season”. Protestant “loyalism” is a particularly virulent, pro-empire strain of chauvinism that originated with Britain’s historic occupation of Ireland. Beginning in the sixteenth century, English rulers conducted savage campaigns of land confiscation, slaughter and settlement over the whole island. British authorities sought to displace local Gaelic-speaking populations, who were largely Catholic. In their place, English and Scottish landlords and aspirational farmers were encouraged to occupy stolen land in resource-rich areas. Catholics were subjected to an oppressive legal regime that denied them the right to vote or hold public office, to own land, to purchase weapons or to freely publish literature. From 1690 to 1860, famines and mass evictions of poor peasants from the Scottish highlands compelled large numbers to migrate to the northern part of Ireland. Settlers in the north were explicitly required to adhere to the Protestant faith, speak only English and repudiate any Gaelic heritage they might share with the native Irish population. This was the beginning of the exclusive ethno-religious state that would later become “Northern Ireland”. Most of Ireland won formal independence from British rule in the 1920s after a particularly fierce decade of revolt against the English crown. But reactionary pro-British capitalists and landowners refused to surrender control of the prosperous industrialised north. They armed and mobilised the Protestant population against the Irish independence movement, deliberately painting a struggle over national liberation in religious colours. In 1921, the British state partitioned the island, granting partial autonomy to a “Free State” in the south (later the Republic of Ireland) but establishing a separate administration in the north-eastern region of Ulster that would remain under British protection. The modern state of Northern Ireland was officially founded on a two-thirds Protestant demographic majority. This was imposed through tremendous violence. Hundreds of pro-independence Catholics were murdered in Belfast from 1920 to 1922, and 23,000 were hounded from their homes. At least 11,000 Catholic (and many sympathetic Protestant) trade unionists were ejected from workplaces in the north. British troops oversaw mass evictions of Catholic civilians from previously mixed neighbourhoods, and paramilitary brigades of reactionary Protestant settlers were created under British supervision. Soon after partition, the northern ruling class eagerly agreed to remain under the English crown, joining the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Indeed, many northern “loyalists” hoped (and still hope) for a total restoration of British dominance and for the whole island to be ethnically cleansed. It’s this despicable legacy that modern-day loyalism celebrates: loyalty to the British empire, to counter-revolution and to racial supremacy. This tradition remains one of the key foundations of modern British nationalism. It is not uncommon in Northern Ireland today to see a Protestant child leave the face-painting booth at a summer carnival with the letters “KAT” daubed across their little forehead. “Kill All Taigs” (“Taig” is an ethnic slur for people of native Irish descent) is still a common catch cry alongside “KAC” (“Kill All Catholics”) and “KAI” (“Kill All Irish”). Summer brings a high tide of prejudice because a number of Protestant historical anniversaries fall in early July. On 11 July each year, huge celebratory bonfires are lit across Northern Ireland and in some parts of the south. Anti-Catholic slogans are painted and Irish tricolour flags are attached to the bonfires to be burned. For months beforehand, Protestant communities across the whole of mainland Britain (especially in Scotland, Liverpool and Southport) gather in militaristic garb for parades and demonstrations, often marching directly through Catholic neighbourhoods. These manifestations of dominance and intimidation end in street violence more often than not. Is it any surprise that the UK can explode into periodic race rioting given these national traditions? Is it any wonder that recent anti-migrant thuggery in Northern Ireland has been [concentrated](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/09/theres-wee-girls-inside-panic-as-masked-men-storm-house-in-belfast?ref=redflag.org.au) mainly in anti-Catholic areas like the Shankill Road and parts of East Belfast? Traditional anti-Catholic bigotry can merge seamlessly with today’s right-wing hostility to immigration. Tactics like [arson attacks](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/10/it-was-so-terrifying-care-workers-trapped-belfast-mob?ref=redflag.org.au) on civilian residences, usually reserved for Catholic targets, are now launched against [migrant homes](https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/uk/2026/06/10/masked-rioters-burn-foreigners-out-of-their-homes-in-wake-of-belfast-knife-attack/?ref=redflag.org.au). Bonfires and walls that once bore the letters “KAT” are now [also sprayed with](https://www.belfastlive.co.uk/news/belfast-news/jesus-flag-appears-alongside-paramilitary-34276146?ref=redflag.org.au) “KAF”—“Kill All Foreigners”. One bonfire constructed by a loyalist community in Moygashel last year featured an effigy of a boat, including figures of refugees in life jackets, a banner that read “Stop the boats” and an Irish tricolour flag. All went up in flames when the fire was lit. A social media page linked to the Corcrain estate bonfire (where anti-immigration banners had also appeared) posted in a statement: “This is a coordinated approach because there are legitimate concerns that deserve to be heard ... We’ve enough junkies, criminals and scumbags to deal with as it is ... Legitimate concerns over illegal migration are real”. Summer bonfires also provide regular occasion to glorify past atrocities. In Ballyduff this June, a bonfire site was decorated with emblems of the paramilitary “Ulster Volunteer Force”, a group that murdered hundreds of Catholic civilians between 1966 and 1999\. The flag of the British Army's Parachute Regiment also appeared. The Parachute Regiment was the section of the British Army deployed continuously in Northern Ireland for 38 years between 1969 and 2007\. Their presence was framed as a “peacekeeping” operation, but their purpose was to repress a Catholic civil rights movement that gained ground from the early 1960s. Catholics demanded an end to discrimination in housing and employment, and to electoral laws that maintained Protestant political control over mixed or Catholic-majority areas. In 1971, British troops launched a campaign of mass arrests and dawn raids, purportedly against armed Irish Republican insurgents. Hundreds were imprisoned without trial and tortured. The following year, activists in Derry organised a peaceful unarmed demonstration against the arrests. The Parachute Regiment’s 1st Battalion opened fire, killing fourteen people, most of whom were fleeing or trying to help the wounded. The British army later claimed soldiers had fired in self-defence. No soldier or commanding officer has ever been convicted over the Bloody Sunday massacre. The British state has repeatedly intervened to maintain the oppression of Irish Catholics, long after the official retreat of imperial rule. The display of military and paramilitary symbols at annual celebrations is a way for loyalist communities to constantly revive this history and transmit their chauvinism to new generations. According to Dr Amanda Hall at the University of Reading, bonfires took on more [significance in the 1990s](https://research.reading.ac.uk/research-blog/2022/07/08/northern-ireland-paramilitary-groups-celebrations/?ref=redflag.org.au) after Britain brokered a peace process that curbed open paramilitary activity. As illegal activities like weapon trafficking were increasingly forced underground, paramilitaries turned to “community” initiatives to embed loyalist political sensibilities. Dr Hall notes an increase over the past 30 years both in the size of 11 July bonfires (now often towering above 40 metres) and in the aggressiveness of the political messaging associated with them. The practice of burning tricolour flags, for instance, seems to have begun only in the mid-1990s. The advance of far-right politics in general is fanning the flames in Northern Ireland. Earlier this year, a replica mosque was placed on top of a Moygashel bonfire, along with the words “Secure our borders. End the threat of radical Islam”. A statement from the Moygashel Bonfire Association said it was a response to “uncontrolled illegal mass immigration”. “An absolute work of art” is how Richard Inman [described](https://www.crimeworld.com/ireland/tommy-robinson-sidekick-hails-race-hate-loyalist-mosque-bonfire-as-work-of-art/a/158595135.html?ref=redflag.org.au) the display. Inman is a close associate of English far-right figurehead Tommy Robinson and travelled to Northern Ireland to address a demonstration held at the site of the bonfire in June. “Northern Ireland is the most patriotic part of the UK”, Inman told the crowd. “My fellow Englishmen could learn so much from the people of Ulster. No surrender.” Loyalism, of course, has always shared an affinity with the broader far right. Eyewitness accounts such as Matthew Collins’ 2011 book *Hate* suggest that neo-Nazi organisations like Combat 18 and the British National Socialist Movement have helped smuggle weapons to northern paramilitaries. Loyalist gangs operating on Britain’s mainland have historically intermingled with organised fascists—Scotland’s most prominent member of the 1930s British Union of Fascists, Billy Fullerton, is still memorialised in loyalist songs and football chants: “We are the Billy Boys; Up tae our knees in Fenian \[Irish\] blood; Surrender or you’ll die”. Pogromist traditions lie just under the surface in modern-day Britain. Racial supremacy enacted through street-level violence is relatively familiar political practice. The legacy of Irish oppression and British nationalism are the rotten foundations on which new far-right forces will continue to grow. ### Who are the High School Anti-Capitalists? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/who-are-the-high-school-anti-capitalists/ Last updated: 2026-08-18T23:49:23.000Z High School Anti-Capitalists is the radical organisation that called thousands of students out of class and onto the streets to protest Pauline Hanson on 13 August. It was a historic 15,000-strong [nationwide walkout](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-13/one-nation-students-protest-pauline-hanson/107033644?ref=redflag.org.au) against the far right. In Victoria alone, students from more than 120 schools, from [Wodonga ](https://www.bordermail.com.au/story/9329523/wodonga-students-walkout-in-challenge-to-one-nation-policies/?ref=redflag.org.au)to Traralgon, joined the demonstration. Although Pauline Hanson is deeply unpopular among my generation, the anger of attendees was directed at more than one politician or party. Many high school students were there to denounce the entire capitalist system. Callum Bell, a high school organiser and member of Socialist Alternative, declared [in his speech](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcAcGw2C7oL/?igsh=NmR2bTQ5bW54bHJr&ref=redflag.org.au) at the State Library of Victoria: “I think we need a revolution to tear this system down!” Cheers echoed through the city, probably giving corporate executives in surrounding skyscrapers a headache. Predictably, our protest has driven the political right mad. We’ve been likened to Pol Pot, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and fascists (the last two, incredibly, in the [same article](https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/08/the-pauline-protests-a-day-out-during-maos-cultural-revolution/?ref=redflag.org.au)). James Morrow, co-host of the right-wing talk show *Outsiders*, complained last week: “Mainstream Labor is far to the right of the people who are organising these protests”. James, I’m afraid you’re spot on. The Labor Party has enthusiastically run capitalism in Victoria for 23 of the past 27 years, ensuring that Indigenous children can be incarcerated for life, while leaving our schools and hospitals in states of chronic disrepair. At the end of a recent press conference, Premier Ben Carroll whined about our protest: “The best way to change your future in the world is to get an education and to stay in school”. Really, Ben? If you really cared about the state of our education system, maybe you wouldn’t have secretly cut [$2.4 billion](https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/victoria-secretly-slices-2-4b-from-public-schools-delays-funding-promise-20250507-p5lxem.html?ref=redflag.org.au) in funding from public schools. High School Anti-Capitalists has a radical program that seeks to unite left-wing students from across our schools into a single organisation. We want to channel the anger that young people have towards capitalism into a fighting force. High schools are oppressive institutions that stifle the expression and creativity of students, and transform teenagers into obedient toilers for our future bosses. The practice of calling our teachers by their titles and last names, the need to ask permission to go to the toilet, and punitive and ridiculous uniform policies are there to keep us submissive. The school system entrenches the class divide in society, segregating the poor from the wealthy. In underfunded public schools, horror story after horror story emerges. [Concrete falling through the ceiling](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-02/collingwood-college-falling-concrete-ceiling-damage-closure/106501130?ref=redflag.org.au) of a science classroom in Collingwood College. [A floor collapsing](https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/collapsed-floors-and-safety-risks-public-schools-in-disrepair-close-classrooms-20240305-p5f9v4.html?ref=redflag.org.au) in Fitzroy North Primary School. [An entire school](https://www.michaelaepstein.com.au/post/maths-teacher-shortage?ref=redflag.org.au) was left without maths and chemistry teachers for over half a year. Meanwhile, Scots College, an elite private school in Sydney, built a [$60 million castle](https://www.smh.com.au/cbd/great-scots-the-case-of-the-60-million-castle-and-a-vanishing-camel-20251027-p5n5l0.html?ref=redflag.org.au) before purchasing a $13,000 life-sized taxidermy camel to display in its new library. Then there’s the [$100 million Olympic-sized swimming pool](https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/rooftop-tennis-courts-and-olympic-pools-private-schools-multimillion-dollar-arms-race-20260219-p5o3lw.html?ref=redflag.org.au) at the Methodist Ladies’ College in Melbourne. And Brighton Grammar’s [$59 million centre](https://www.brightongrammar.vic.edu.au/community/st-andrews-tennis-club-x-the-royal-south-yarra-tennis-club/?ref=redflag.org.au) featuring a replica plane and rooftop tennis courts. Yet, for the capitalist class, creating a rift between the rich and the poor isn’t enough. The Victorian Certificate of Examination (VCE) and its equivalents across Australia pit students against each other in a cut-throat competition. This undermines any sense of solidarity among classmates, instilling instead a dog-eat-dog mentality of late-stage capitalism. But high school students don’t always put up with this. We stand in a long tradition of student protest movements, which have been reduced to footnotes—or erased altogether—by the school curriculum. There were demonstrations against the Vietnam War when Victorian Liberal Premier Henry Bolte [threatened to expel](https://vnf.nhan.au/underground?ref=redflag.org.au) students for participating. High school students protested against apartheid as part of the South African Students Movement (SASM), which culminated in the [Soweto Uprising](https://redflag.org.au/article/students-and-the-soweto-uprising/) of 1976. In North Carolina last year, 30,000 high school students [walked out of class](https://www.live5news.com/2025/11/18/over-30000-charlotte-students-absent-school-protest-ice-operation-reports-say/?ref=redflag.org.au) to protest against President Trump’s fascist Immigration Department thugs. In October 2025, Italian high school students [blockaded and occupied](https://redflag.org.au/article/italys-general-strike-shows-the-way-forward/) their schools following Israel’s attacks on the Global Sumud Flotilla. Moreover, high school students overthrew their governments in [Bangladesh](https://redflag.org.au/article/from-hope-to-dismay-what-happened-to-bangladeshs-gen-z-revolution/), [Madagascar](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/17/gen-z-victory-young-protesters-toppled-madagascar-leader?ref=redflag.org.au) and [Nepal](https://redflag.org.au/article/protesting-with-gen-z-in-morocco/) as a part of the “Gen Z” uprisings against austerity, authoritarianism and corruption. For many young people like me, the gulf between our expectations of the world and reality has grown too large to reconcile: while the [targeted bombing](https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/05/14/gaza-israelis-attacking-known-aid-worker-locations?ref=redflag.org.au) of aid trucks in Gaza was livestreamed onto our phones, mainstream parties and politicians jumped immediately to Israel’s defence, and smeared our anti-war movement. The years of experience of our members in campaigns led by Students for Palestine and Socialist Alternative have put the High School Anti-Capitalists in good stead to play a role in various movements. On 11 March, the High School Anti-Capitalists drew hundreds of students onto the streets for the tenth nationwide student strike for Palestine since October 2023\. On 24 March, and again on 23 July, the High School Anti-Capitalists marched in solidarity with our striking teachers and education support staff and their demands for better wages and conditions. Although 13 August was an exhilarating day, we can’t forget that the political situation is pressing and that building the left is an urgent task. With One Nation waiting in the wings and governments around the world bracing for a barbaric imperialist war, attending one demonstration is not enough—we need to grow a movement with permanence and clear aims. We need socialist organisations. This is the project of the High School Anti-Capitalists. We are a radical organisation of school students across Australia that refuses to moderate our politics when our rulers whinge. We lead movements in response to all the horrors that capitalism creates. And we fight like hell for a better world—a world where the rule of a parasitical minority is replaced with a society built according to human need. We call on all left-wing high school students to join their local High School Anti-Capitalists chapter. Let’s make the next walkout on 17 September even bigger, so we can put Pauline Hanson—and along with her, capitalism—into the dustbin of history. ### Students teach Hanson a lesson URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/students-teach-hanson-a-lesson/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T04:11:31.000Z Across the country yesterday, students walked out of their schoolrooms and lecture halls and flooded into the streets to protest against Pauline Hanson and her far-right political project. As many as 4,000 marched in Sydney. Two thousand in Perth and Adelaide and 1,000 in Brisbane. In Canberra, 500 students protested at the Australian National University campus and 200 turned out in Wollongong. High schoolers spontaneously organised protests in Shoalhaven, Lismore, and Albury. In Melbourne, where I was, the march was colossal—about 5,000 people—and the mood was absolutely electric. The chants rang out with righteous rage: “Too young to protest? We call bullshit!” and “High school, uni, teachers too; Pauline Hanson, we’re coming for you!” Undoubtedly the most popular was a two-word refrain: “Fuck Pauline!” Sometimes less is more. The homemade placards were funny and indignant and withering. “I love naps but I stay woke”. “Still got a better attendance rate than Hanson”. “Orange is the new evil”. On the ground I spotted a papier-mache Hanson head that, from the looks of it, had had a run-in with a few too many shiny black shoes. Anyone over the age of 25 knows what it’s like to be roasted by teenagers. Gen Z sarcasm is one of the most devastating weapons humankind has ever known. So just try to imagine how Hanson must be feeling right now. All she could muster as a response was a post on X: “If you want to protest something, protest why your parents’ wages are going backwards and the cost of everything is going up ... Whether you know it or not, One Nation and I are fighting for you”. Please don’t hurt me, kids, I’m actually on your side! Pathetic. The students were protesting against the increasing entrenchment of far-right politics in Australia being spearheaded by Hanson and One Nation. It’s clear to them that Hanson’s reactionary agenda only serves the big end of town. It’s not just Gina Rinehart: more and more wealthy backers are swinging in behind One Nation. Hanson’s project to demonise migrants and attack the rights of women and workers helps to prop up a society where the few rule over the many. Odessa, a High School Anti-Capitalists member from Huntingtower, hit the nail on the head in her speech: “We know she’s a servant for the wealthy”. At the same time, the mainstream parties have ceded more and more ground to One Nation. The Liberals are doing their level best to rebrand as One Nation in neckties. Labor politicians are planning to announce substantial cuts to migration. They too want to run a system based on extreme wealth inequality, hard borders and minority rule, so we cannot count on them to stand up to the far right. One Nation’s rise is part of a broader global shift in politics. Aero, an international student at RMIT and member of Socialist Alternative, spoke about President Javier Milei in Argentina, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Nigel Farage in the UK and Donald Trump in America. Students know what’s going on abroad and know it needs to be fought. “Australia does not need our own orange clown”, read one placard. Around the world, capitalism has less and less to offer people but wage cuts and declining living standards. As governments pour more and more money into war preparations, welfare and social spending are being slashed. The far-right’s authoritarian politics, their championing of social hierarchy and oppression—it all fits the bill for our rulers. In the middle of the State Library forecourt, the haughty statue of Supreme Court judge and first chancellor of Melbourne University Redmond Barry became a rostrum for unruly teens calling out “Pauline Hanson is a fascist!” Old Redmond would have had a fit. The other two statues outside the State Library—St George slaying a dragon on one side and a triumphant Joan of Arc on the other—seemed a little more the vibe of the day. This was a protest of students from schools and universities across the country, but the high schoolers were the heroes of the day. I spoke to students from Melbourne High who reckoned there were 40 of them marching. Another 50 from both Northcote High and Coburg High. There were thousands more, including students from as far away as Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo. Sixty schools were represented at the Sydney rally. In Perth, rally organisers say students from 120 different schools contacted them about joining the strike. Plenty of high schoolers had to fight for their right to even be there in the first place. I’m reliably informed that a Canberra vice-principal tried to stop students from getting on a bus taking them to the protest. But I’m also reliably informed that said vice-principal failed miserably. I’m told one inner-city Sydney school locked the gates to keep students away from the strike. But I’m also told that the students at that inner-city Sydney school are quite handy climbers. Top marks for problem-solving skills. A very honourable mention is owed to the students at a Brisbane school who couldn’t get over their locked school gate so had to dig under it. People like that are the kind of people who change the world. Judging from the numbers, this student strike was even bigger than the nationwide high school walkout against Hanson in 1998, when she first came to prominence. In Melbourne, the *Guardian* interviewed a man who was part of that walkout nearly 30 years ago. He was at the strike yesterday with his 13-year-old daughter Charlie. “I think that everyone should have the same rights and everyone should be able to be treated the same way”, Charlie told the Guardian. That’s a pretty straightforward idea—and absolutely right—but it’s one that every institution of capitalism (including the education system) tries to convince us can and will never happen. At universities and in high schools, this nationwide strike was organised from start to finish by socialists. We think a world of genuine equality—without oppression and exploitation—is possible and necessary. There’s a power in collective resistance and solidarity that, if only it can be organised, could flush away Hanson and her ilk into history’s septic tank. Yesterday, students pointed the way forward. The “kids” are more than all right—they’re schooling us all. ### Rebel teachers taking their campaign against the Labor government all the way to parliament URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/rebel-teachers-taking-their-campaign-against-the-labor-government-all-the-way-to-parliament/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T04:11:24.000Z > “I’m a rebel teacher running against Ben Carroll in Niddrie because I think workers should run the world. I think teachers know how to run schools, and we should be empowered to run the education system ... On the issue of education, the ALP is not just out of touch: they’re on the other side of the picket line, with the Liberals and One Nation.” This is how Brendan Laws announced the Victorian “rebel educator” campaign—a group of teachers and education support staff targeting sitting Labor MPs, including Premier and former Minister for Education Ben Carroll. The eight candidates, all members of Victorian Socialists and the Socialists in Schools union group, have played a role in leading the rank-and-file rebellion in the Australian Education Union (AEU) Victorian Branch that has organised two massive strike days, stared down the state government and fought tooth and nail against the conservative leadership of their own union. The teachers’ fight is the most significant industrial dispute in Victoria in years, with teachers holding the line for a decent contract in the context of falling real wages and deteriorating working conditions. For many on the left, the obstinacy of Victorian Labor in the face of teachers’ demands for decent pay and tolerable working conditions embodies everything wrong with a government which once boasted of running “the most progressive state in the nation”. Labor has governed Victoria practically uninterrupted for more than two decades, leaning heavily on the support of union members to win successive elections. AEU members were a central part of the mobilisation of 2,200 unionists who doorknocked and phone-banked to hand Daniel Andrews a surprise victory in 2014\. Twelve years on, Victoria has the lowest-funded public schools in the country. The government has stolen $16 billion from the system through underfunding in the last seven years alone. Surging workloads, wage suppression and increasing class sizes have created a situation in which less than a third of teachers plan to stay in the sector long-term. Leading teacher unionist and Victorian Socialists candidate for Niddrie Brendan Laws says: > “The school I’m working at right now is relatively well resourced, but the sheer amount of work and stress is overwhelming. You’re writing and rewriting assessments, you’re marking, trying to give individual feedback. There’s this pressure, because the school is competing with over-funded private schools ... I was at a very low-income school in Werribee; you could see all the traps that students get pulled into, not having the resources to read and learn, at the same time as \[Labor\] were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a nearby youth prison. You would just see the kids that were getting pulled out of school into that constantly. Eight teachers quit from my department during one school year so there weren’t enough staff and everybody else had to pull in just to fill in the gaps.” The AEU leadership’s close-knit relationship with the Labor government means many educators feel the officials have worked against members’ interests. Workers went backwards after their 2022 contract negotiation, when the AEU leadership rushed through a sell-out deal cutting real wages by 11 percent. Forty percent of AEU members voted against the offer, at the time a historically unprecedented rejection of a leadership decision in the union. While many left the union in disgust, others waited, and pledged that next time around it would be different Brendan was one of around a dozen Victorian Socialists members who decided to launch Socialists in Schools in mid-2025\. “The biggest indicator that there was an audience for it was how many AEU members were already part of Victorian Socialists”, he says. “We took a survey and found we had almost 100 teacher members, so it just showed that there was already a base to work with.” The campaign started with the modest aim of giving socialist teachers a chance to get together and chat: > “The first part was just meeting up and discussing socialist politics with the people in our campaign. It was the political arguments around militarism, the genocide in Palestine, the Labor government’s austerity and privatisation. Then when we knew that our last agreement was going to expire and the opportunity to have industrial action was going to be there, we really shifted a lot of our propaganda to educate people about striking. It had been 13 years since a strike had happened.” The 2022 campaign for a new agreement had ended in farce and outrage. This time, it was impossible for the AEU leadership to get away with signing a deal without serious industrial action. A strike called for 24 March was a game changer. That strike closed or disrupted an estimated 500 schools, while 35,000 teachers filled the CBD, the biggest mobilisation in the union’s history. Then the rug was pulled. After a pay offer was leaked by the government to the press, the AEU leadership hastily cancelled further industrial action and moved toward endorsing an in-principle agreement which met none of their key demands. Instead of the claim for a 35 percent pay increase over three years, they were offered 28 percent over four, with no improvements to conditions or caps on class sizes. Socialists in Schools sprang into action, arguing far and wide for a “no” vote using every tactic under the sun, from “explainers” online that poked holes in the deal and argued for more strike action online, to calling hundreds of school staff who left their details with the “vote no” network. After rowdy regional and sub-branch meetings got out of control (with one eastern suburbs gathering described by an official as “feral”), union leaders preferred highly controlled Zoom briefings, where they could promote the virtues of the deal unchallenged. As Socialists in Schools [previously](https://redflag.org.au/article/rebellion-in-the-aeu-officials-prevent-debate-as-vote-approaches-on-terrible-deal/) reported: > “All participants’ cameras are forcibly turned off ... Our microphones are muted. The chat function is disabled. We are permitted to ask questions, but have to direct them to moderators who no-one can see and who do not answer.” The spirit of combativity that was built in Socialists in Schools put them in a position to blow past these obstacles. “A big part of how we won the vote was by being in a fighting position”, says Brendan, “poking fun at the lies coming out of the government, poking fun at the low expectations that officials were laying out, and then going to any public forum that we could and using those forums as spaces to wage arguments”. The result: an astonishing 58 percent of school staff voted the agreement down. “The ‘vote no’ success didn’t just come out of polite lobbying, but it came out of a clear, sharp, defiant opposition.” The vote put teachers back on the streets, and a second strike led to a slightly improved offer: mandatory meeting times for teachers were halved, and base salary for education support staff was increased. This deal was put to members in an online vote, and of 50,677 members voting, 51 percent rejected the offer. “It was the first time in the history of these statewide agreements, that started in the mid-80s, that when union officials wanted an agreement to go through, rank and file members voted against it—and they did that twice.” Brendan feels the results have sent an important message to workers beyond the AEU that “when you can’t count on the government, and you can’t even count on your union leaders, you and your workmates can still band together and win something”. In 2026, official politics has shifted sharply to the right. The rise of One Nation has combined with a hysterical campaign from big business and the press to bring down the Allan Labor government. The establishment opposition to Labor is vile. Instead of taking the government to task for privatisation, mass incarceration and falling living standards, they are most outraged that the government would spend money on infrastructure that benefits workers, and that some workers still receive union rates on construction sites. Right-wing outlets like the *Age* that were willing to give teachers a hearing so long as it embarrassed Labor are now showing their true colours. *Age* political editor Chip Le Grand is apoplectic at teachers rejecting the latest offer—accusing them of “industrial Hansonism” and suggesting that the shadowy hidden forces of the radical left lie behind the drive to keep on fighting. Brendan finds this pretty funny. “We put the word ‘socialist’ on everything that we put out. It’s very clearly on the tin. But people listen because we make sense and we speak honestly to the workers in our industry”. Labor’s response is to appease the right and big business. Nothing shows this more than their decision to make Ben Carroll, the former education minister who has spent the year low-balling Victorian teachers, the new premier. Carroll’s message to business: the era of supposedly “progressive” Labor government is over. Spending will be cut and workers’ rights rolled back. His message to workers: I’m the only one who can stop Hanson entering government, so you’d better put up with it. In this right-wing climate, the rebel teachers are hoping they can take the energy and inspiration of their struggle into the state election, as Brendan explains: > “The forces of the far right in a decaying capitalism here and around the world are a pretty scary juggernaut, and a Labor government bent on tacking to the right by boosting up police, attacking construction workers and talking about austerity will just boost them further. We want to put forward a political alternative for workers. Part of it is seeing that it’s not just an industrial question, demanding what we deserve is a political question.” The rebel teachers are calling for the return of $16 billion in stolen education funding, the end of public funding for private schools, the abolition of NAPLAN and the immediate implementation of the AEU’s 2026 log of claims. But a socialist approach isn’t just about putting forward radical solutions to the problems of capitalism. It’s about showing you can change the world by fighting. Socialists in parliament will be surrounded on all sides by enemies: Labor, One Nation, Liberals. To really make an impact, we need people who can organise mass resistance, who don’t take “no” for an answer and who know how to take on both our enemies on the right and the moderates who sell us short because they respect the rules of the game. “We don't accept the parameters that these people put on us”, says Craigieburn teacher and Kalkallo Victorian Socialists candidate Courtney Millet. “We’re the people who are constantly seeking to push for more because we believe that working class people deserve more.” Many of the rebel teacher candidates came into the Socialists in Schools and the teachers’ strikes with a history of political organising. Courtney was involved in helping coordinate a 100-day encampment led by refugees denied permanent settlement by Labor. Cranbourne candidate Reem Yunis is a teacher of 26 years, a Palestinian-Australian and lifelong fighter against Israeli occupation. Sunbury candidate Adam Bremner is leading the fight in his community against the construction of a waste incinerator. Northern Metropolitan candidate Omar Hassan has fronted rallies against Israel and the far right. “I think socialists provide that guiding light and a bit of a spark”, says Courtney. “I was teaching during the agreement in 2022\. The anger and the frustration was there, but there wasn’t a force to lead it somewhere, to tell people that you don’t have to settle. That’s what has been different this time. That’s what we did in the teachers’ union and that’s what we want to do in the state election.” ### Introducing the conveners of the Australian Socialist Party: Omar Hassan and Rebecca Barrigos URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/introducing-the-conveners-of-the-australian-socialist-party-omar-hassan-and-rebecca-barrigos/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T04:11:15.000Z Over the weekend of 18 July, the Australian Socialist Party was founded. Fledgling as it is, we set ourselves the task of ending an increasingly harsh capitalist system and defeating all the parties who defend that system, from One Nation to the ALP. Achieving that will involve recruiting thousands of socialists to the party, and developing them into activists who can channel the rage of working people into a real force that can win against the odds. The Socialist Party’s orientation to its members is unlike any other on the Australian political landscape, where party leaders generally see their members as how-to-vote distribution machines or empty numbers in a faction fight. Socialists aren’t just cheerleaders for parliamentary leaders—our members are fighters. So to help build an active party membership, the Socialist Party founding conference elected two national conveners: Rebecca Barrigos and Omar Hassan. Both Barrigos and Hassan are teachers and union activists, both have been members of Socialist Alternative since the mid-2000s, both have led impressive campaigns in their home states over the past 20 years, and they’ve each played leading roles in establishing Queensland Socialists and Victorian Socialists respectively. Speaking to *Red Flag*, Barrigos remembered the issues that spurred her to join the socialist movement as a uni student: > “The barbarism of the ‘war on terror’, the mass death toll and carnage that was unleashed on the civilian populations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the disgraceful rise of Islamophobia, racism used to justify war crimes, and attacks on civil liberties in the West to quell anti-war opposition, convinced me that I needed to join a socialist organisation that was committed to fighting every institution of the capitalist state.” Similarly, Hassan related that he “became a socialist in the dark days of the John Howard years, furious at the racism and war that characterised that era”. With the resurgence of Hanson’s One Nation and the genocidal wars grinding on in the Middle East, there’s a familiarity to the rage which drove Barrigos and Hassan towards socialism in their youth. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Sticking it out as socialist activists for two decades, in often difficult circumstances, is an admirable achievement in its own right, but those years meant more than just stubborn principles and passing time for Barrigos and Hassan. They’ve drawn lessons and inspiration from their years of organising. Hassan said that his time on the left has taught him “to appreciate the moments where working-class people come together to fight and win against the system: be it on a small picket line in suburban Melbourne or in mass protests against genocide and imperialism”. But mass movements have risen and declined, ebbed and flowed, sometimes scoring small victories but often leaving the fundamental injustice in place. The transience of moments when workers feel their power taught Hassan “how important it is to build a political organisation that can sustain and consolidate the lessons and experiences of those times to build a force that can translate momentum into actual victories”. Barrigos made a similar point when speaking about the movement against the Iraq War: “The Iraq War provoked unprecedented resistance. Millions around the world, in Europe, and here in Australia took to the streets in mobilisations even larger than the anti-Vietnam War moratoriums of the 1970s. But despite the size of these rallies, mass protests were never on their own going to stop the US war machine. If we want to win decisively, we need to build a socialist movement that mobilises the power of workers to successfully resist capitalism, and in that fight, lay the basis for a whole different society based on human need, not profit”. Through their failures and limitations, movements of the past can give their participants a deeper understanding of what’s necessary to win. Not just a firmer conviction, but the right set of politics. Barrigos and Hassan are two among hundreds of experienced socialists who act as conveyor belts for these lessons to a new generation of radicalising young people. There are a few ways they have already been playing this role. They’ve both written insightful theoretical articles for the *Marxist Left Review* on topics like higher education, the Middle East and Australian politics. They both give impressive speeches. Earlier this year, Hassan could be seen leading a mass rally against Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia, and last year Barrigos gave rousing speeches at a number of union rallies against attacks on the CFMEU. They also don’t shy away from the bread-and-butter work of basic organising, like knocking on doors, having one-on-one conversations, handing out leaflets and putting up posters. More important than all of these organising skills is their shared conviction that every socialist should develop and use such skills to build our ranks and fight for our ideas. That’s what the Socialist Party is about—a space to discuss democratically the political lessons of our movement and raise every member’s confidence to fight for socialism. When asked for his thoughts on the founding conference, Hassan said: > “I’ve been inspired by the steady growth of the Victorian Socialists for some years now, but to see us found a truly national party is something else entirely. To see comrades from different traditions and organising experiences come together and commit to building a fighting socialist movement was so uplifting. But it’s just the start”. In her closing statements at the founding conference, Barrigos struck a similar tone—not rosy-eyed about the challenge, but determined to meet it: > “Building this movement will not happen overnight. It will take determined effort by committed socialists all across this country to begin to turn the tide. A core part of this task is to recruit to the Socialist Party and convince more of our already existing members to be active in building the forces of socialism alongside us all. > “It isn’t all up and away, but our class has never run away from the hard things. Workers have met the horrors of capitalism with resistance, and socialists have organised this fight. It is a challenge we are all in for—and better equipped to fight now we have our Australian Socialist Party.” ### Barnaby Joyce—an establishment bigot now serving One Nation URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/barnaby-joyce-an-establishment-bigot-now-serving-one-nation/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T02:55:01.000Z Charles Dickens often created characters whose physical appearance reflected their personal values. Barnaby Joyce, the Akubra-wearing, tomato-red champion of mining and agricultural capital, could have emerged from a Dickens novel set in the VIP section of the horse races. Joyce’s long career in Australian politics is full of scandals and gaffes, including when he was filmed sprawling, drunk, on a Canberra footpath in 2024, or most recently screaming at his dog mid-interview with the ABC. But Joyce is no mere buffoon; he is a calculating politician with strong ties to Australia’s right-wing establishment and some of its most powerful capitalists. The recent defection of the former leader of the Nationals and three-time deputy prime minister to One Nation has been an important boost for the surging far-right party. Most notably, Joyce played a vital role in securing Gina Rinehart’s high profile, and lavish, support. The two have enjoyed a long political partnership. Joyce was flying on Rinehart’s private jet as early as 2011\. In 2017, Rinehart gave him $40,000 as part of a “champion of farming” award. According to Joyce’s 2018 memoir *Weatherboard and Iron,* it’s a real problem that Australia has only one of her—we need twenty. Joyce’s role in bringing establishment connections to One Nation has not stopped at Rinehart. In an interview with the *Saturday Paper* earlier this year, he bragged: “I can assure you of another thing: she ain’t the only one. I’ve got a lot of substantial supporters and they are approaching me. I don’t have to approach them”. The National Party is dominated by agribusiness, mining capital and rural business owners. Joyce wants to bring his connections to these layers, built over two decades as a leading Nationals powerbroker, to One Nation. He is also crucial to the party’s effort to peel off more of the Nationals membership and voter base. That Joyce has walked away from his former colleagues in the Coalition and thrown in his lot with Pauline Hanson comes as no great shock. He has long been one of the country’s most prominent far-right figures. The Nationals are bitterly hostile to workers and the oppressed, and are the political embodiment of rural reaction. Joyce personified this. He championed every piece of anti-worker legislation and pro-rich policy of the Coalition. He, like much of the Australian right, bemoans “big government” and government interference in the personal lives of citizens. But it’s classic right-wing hypocrisy. Joyce wants mining bosses and farmers to be able to do whatever they like, free from any pesky regulation, yet he consistently argues, and votes, to restrict the rights of workers and the oppressed. Joyce has always been an odious bigot. In 2006, he opposed adding Gardasil to the vaccination schedule on the basis it would give his then “twelve-year-old daughter a license to be promiscuous”. Gardasil protects women from HPV, which causes 70 percent of cervical cancer cases. Joyce is one of the most vocal opponents of abortion rights in the country, speaking at anti-abortion rallies as both a Nationals and One Nation MP in 2019 and 2026 respectively. He also campaigned against marriage equality. Joyce was a key opponent of net zero policies within the coalition, fitting his role as mouthpiece for the mining bosses. His hostility to even the most cynical of greenwashing, alongside his relegation to the backbench, was partly behind his shift to One Nation. In 2012, he said even talking about the climate is an “indulgent and irrelevant debate”. In 2019, he posted a [bizarre Christmas Eve video](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/25/barnaby-joyce-sick-government-being-in-my-life-taxes-climate-change?ref=redflag.org.au) claiming that all who do not understand that God is the solution to climate change are “fools” who are “going to get nailed”. He opposes any measures that limit the ability of rich farmers to drain the Murray-Darling for cash crops. This all fits neatly with the drill-baby-drill politics of One Nation. Joyce has long espoused the politics of racial grievance that is core to One Nation. In *Weatherboard and Iron* (in which he comes across as equal parts Donald Trump, John Howard and Boggis from *Fantastic Mr Fox*), he paints himself as a champion of poor white people against the woke inner-city elite. Joyce was a prominent part of the racist “No” campaign against the Voice to Parliament. In an[ interview](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/12/barnaby-joyce-called-on-to-apologise-for-nazi-germany-comparisons-to-indigenous-voice?ref=redflag.org.au) with Andrew Bolt, he compared constitutional recognition for Aboriginal people to Nazi race laws, specifically the Civil Service Act of Germany in 1933—one of the earliest pieces of antisemitic legislation passed by the Nazis. Now in One Nation, Joyce is turning up the bigotry. He recently compared Muslim migrants to cattle in a racist rant, stating: “If you’re getting cattle in from a certain seller, and there’s an unreasonable number that just don’t work when they get off a truck, well, you don’t buy them anymore”. Such dehumanising Islamophobia was Joyce’s attempt to defend One Nation from accusations of racism. Joyce’s defection to One Nation is both caused by and accelerating the recomposition of the Australian right. Sections of far-right politicians, donors and voters who were creatures of the Coalition are now jumping to One Nation, whether through personal grievance, a shift to the right, or the sense that the Coalition is heading nowhere fast. Joyce and those like him are a reminder that there has long been a far-right scene in Australian politics—One Nation is cohering that scene into a more aggressive force. ### Media hysteria shows high schoolers are right to protest Pauline Hanson URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/media-hysteria-shows-high-schoolers-are-right-to-protest-pauline-hanson/ Last updated: 2026-08-23T04:11:06.000Z There’s one thing I’ve learned organising the nationwide student walkout against Pauline Hanson, and it’s something they don’t tell you at school: If you’re a student protester, you cop more criticism from the establishment than if you’re a far-right politician who supports mass deportations and abortion bans. Since we announced that we’re walking out of school on Thursday, there’s been a flood of hit pieces in the right-wing press, furious debates on talkback radio, and denunciations from politicians. The response just confirms why it’s so important for us to stand up—because the capitalist media and politicians aren’t going to. They’re up to their necks in complicity with Hanson’s rise, and they want to demonise anyone who has the guts to call her out. The arguments against our strike are mind-bogglingly stupid. It’s funny to be lectured about staying in school by some of the dumbest people in Australia. Liberal Party nepo-baby and 3AW shock-jock Tom Elliot, who graciously had me on his show, mused to his listeners: “Why underage students, who can’t even vote, are so worried about Pauline Hanson, I just don’t know”. That’s a head-scratcher. We don’t enjoy even the very limited democratic rights afforded to adults, but we’re already seeing the way the rise of the far right is going to change our lives for the worse. We’ve been watching Trump’s rampage in the United States, as he’s slashed social services, threatened entire nations with annihilation and used immigration Gestapo thugs to terrorise and deport residents. We’ve watched as far-right riots have spread across the European continent and throughout Britain. But, according to Tom Elliot, what is there to worry about? Plenty of journalists have said we need to stay in school and focus on our grades. Lucy Zelic asked in the *Daily Telegraph*, “With NAPLAN results sinking, why are we preaching Hanson hate in class?” Let me spell it out. Hanson’s not going to put her racist rampage on pause until we all get our university degrees. The Victorian state election is in three months, and One Nation is building a far-right organisation to go out and win seats. She’s shaping politics right here, right now—putting migrant bashing, misogyny and attacks on workers at the centre of the discussion. If this is what we’re seeing already, what will it be like in five years when we’re entering the workforce? The condescension echoes what we heard throughout the Palestine solidarity movement, when Premier Ben Carroll, who was then the education minister, warned us to leave politics up to our parents, and stay in school if we want to change the world. These people clearly missed a few history lessons. Students have been central to movements for social change forever—from the high-schoolers who challenged segregation in the US South in the 1950s, to the heroic school kids who were massacred in the Soweto uprising in South Africa, to the role that school students have played across the world in the global Palestine solidarity movement. Those of us who have actually studied this history know you change the world by organising together, not by becoming soulless career politicians like Carroll. In the *Herald Sun*, Andrew Bolt said that we are being “played” by socialist agitators, “extremists manipulating \[us\], with violence on their mind”. High schoolers don’t need to be told what to think about Hanson. It’s pretty obvious that it’s racist to call for monoculture. It’s pretty obvious that it’s sexist to blame women for domestic violence. It’s pretty obvious that she’s backed by a coterie of rich creeps who want to roll back workers’ rights and line their pockets further. I’m a member of the High School Anticapitalists in Melbourne, who identify Hanson as a hard-edged outgrowth of capitalist politics, in lockstep with the priorities of competition, nationalism and profit. Although the high school walkout was initiated by High School Anticapitalists, it’s spread far and wide, to places where we have no members. Students from Bendigo to Geraldton to Tasmania are organising their own local walkouts, painting banners, and getting in touch with our group. But it shouldn’t be surprising that socialists are behind the strike. The only political party that has wholeheartedly backed what we are doing in Melbourne is the Victorian Socialists. I think socialist politics is about standing on the right side of history, not cow-towing to what’s considered “reasonable” and “respectable” in our detestable political system. So why is our school strike important? Just ask Rowan Dean, editor-in-chief of the conservative *Spectator*. He warns: “You’ve got these school kids linking Pauline Hanson, oligarchs, fascism ... linking that to billionaires, linking that to Gina Rinehart. It’s really dangerous, it’s really sinister, it’s radicalisation of our youth.” That’s exactly right, Rowan. I think it’s time for high school students to draw the links between Pauline Hanson, billionaires and fascism. When Hanson argues against maternity leave, and to make it easier for bosses to fire “lazy” employees without notice and pay, she’s fighting to make it easier to exploit workers and step down upon the oppressed. We refuse to just adapt to the new “normal” of Hansonism. We’re gonna call a fascist a fascist, because we’re not about sitting back to watch a far-right movement grow in this country. We recognise we’ve got a serious fight ahead of us. That’s why we are building a movement to combat these politics into the future. If One Nation eventually forms a government, we won’t look back on this moment and say, “We should’ve stayed in school”. We’ll look back and say we should’ve built harder; we should’ve brought more people out. We’re living through a defining moment in Australian politics. There’s nothing more important for students to do on Thursday than strike. If there’s any time to rebel against all these far-right freaks and come into the streets, it’s right now. So join your nearest demonstration on Thursday 13 August (and if you are in a regional area, check your social media as local demonstrations are being called as the momentum grows): - **Melbourne**—2pm at the State Library - **Sydney**—1pm at Town Hall - **Perth**—1pm at Forrest Place - **Canberra**—1pm at Kambri, Australian National University - **Adelaide**—1pm at Parliament House - **Brisbane**—1pm at King George Square - **Newcastle**—5pm at Civic Park - **Wollongong**—1:30pm at the University of Wollongong library ### Royal Commission puts pro-Palestine protesters on trial URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/royal-commission-puts-pro-palestine-protesters-on-trial/ Last updated: 2026-08-09T02:52:52.000Z The Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion held a one-day hearing block on protests and policing on 4 August. Like the rest of the commission, it was more a prosecution than an inquiry: the Palestine solidarity movement was on trial, and its opponents were invited to act as judge, jury and witness. The commission has already been filled with unsubstantiated and unchallenged testimony from so-called lived experience witnesses, often from pro-Israel lobby organisations. It is a platform for those wishing to slander the Palestine movement as antisemitic. In this hearing block, the fix was in from the beginning. Despite nearly three years of protests involving many thousands of people, the commission declared that just two protests would be discussed: a Sydney protest on 9 October 2023 that marched to the Opera House and a Nazi rally held by the National Socialist Network outside NSW Parliament on 8 November 2025\. The latter barely warranted a mention in the commission. It was fitting, given that one of the key, and outrageous, arguments pursued by pro-Israel organisations is that the left, rather than the far right, are the antisemites. This is in keeping with Israel’s alignment to extreme right-wing governments and parties around the world. Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal, whose family has bankrolled far-right organisation Advance Australia, failed to put out a single statement of condemnation of the Nazi rally. The Nazis weren’t the subject of the hearing: they were props in an argument about the left. The point of including this rally was not to confront the far right, but to attempt to tarnish the Palestine movement by association. The main purpose of this block was to re-air the lies told about the 9 October Opera House protest, and to rake the police over the coals for “transferring control of the CBD to protesters”. The main two witnesses called were not people who had actually witnessed anything that night. One was David Ossip, president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, a pro-Israel organisation. The other was the assistant commissioner of NSW Police, Peter McKenna. Not a single protester or protest organiser was invited to give evidence. Despite all this, proceedings did not go exactly as planned. Ossip argued that the protest was “appalling” because it took place while Israeli civilians were being killed following the Hamas attack on 7 October. He apparently couldn’t understand why anyone might want to protest, given that Israel had not even begun any military operations by that time. This claim has been made several times at the commission, supposedly showing that people were not really protesting against occupation and a coming genocide, but celebrating the gruesome deaths of Israelis. The problem is that it is not true, and this was pointed out to Ossip in cross-examination by lawyers for the Palestine Action Group (PAG) and the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN). Prior to the attack in October, 2023 was already the deadliest year for Palestinians living in the West Bank since records began, with more than 200 killed in racist pogroms by extremist settlers and Israeli soldiers. For this reason, PAG had already organised five demonstrations by this point in 2023\. By the evening of 7 October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had already declared war, promising “mighty vengeance for this black day ... We will target all of Hamas's positions. We will turn Gaza into a deserted island. To the citizens of Gaza, I say. You must leave now. We will target each and every corner of the strip”. Two hundred and thirty Palestinians were killed by Israeli airstrikes on Gaza on that day alone. By 9 October, more than 400 had been killed in Gaza, a total blockade of food, water, fuel and medical supplies had been imposed, and Israel was openly preparing a ground invasion. Incredibly, when confronted with these facts, Ossip doubled down on his false claim that Israel had not commenced military operations. The right has responded to Ossip's evidence with outrage. Not outrage that he would double down on false claims, under oath, in order to demonise a mass movement against genocide, but outrage that he could be challenged on his false claims at all. Alex Rychvin from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, who has appeared before the commission multiple times and has made the same false claims about the protest on 9 October, complained in the *Australian* newspaper that the commission was “hijacked” by Palestinian organisations. These attacks led to a deluge of racist abuse against APAN's senior counsel, Ragni Mathur. NSW Premier Chris Minns also piled on, saying, “the idea that the focus shifted from antisemitism in Australia to testing a witness on foreign policy by the lawyers representing PAG and APAN is disappointing and doesn’t reflect the purpose of these hearings”. The purpose, evidently, is to be able to lie with impunity, to ignore or deny the genocide in Gaza and to smear anyone who has opposed it. This hearing block took place on the first anniversary of the historic March for Humanity, when 300,000 people marched across Sydney Harbour Bridge in torrential rain to demand an end to Israel’s assault on Gaza and sanctions on Israel. A recent Pew Research poll shows that 79 percent of Australians have a negative view of Israel, while only 4 percent have a strongly positive view. The response of the ruling establishment to this popular outpouring has been to keep selling weapons to the genocidal regime and to concoct a show trial of its opponents—one in which the defendants are not even allowed to appear. ### ‘Ready to fight for a socialist future’: eight hundred attend Victorian Socialists’ campaign launch URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/ready-to-fight-for-a-socialist-future-eight-hundred-attend-victorian-socialists-campaign-launch/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T03:10:19.000Z It was the biggest event the Victorian Socialists (VS) have put on since we formed in 2018\. On Saturday, 1 August, 800 people turned out to the Aborigines Advancement League in the northern Melbourne suburb of Thornbury to help us launch our campaign for the 2026 state election. Tickets were selling so fast in the week leading up to it that we had to scramble to ensure the bigger-than-expected crowd could be properly accommodated. It’s a long time since the socialist movement in Australia has had to deal with an issue like this, and it was hard not to feel, on the night, that something significant has changed. The evening’s compere, VS candidate for Northcote Kath Larkin, expressed the feeling in her opening remarks. “We know that this election will not be easily won”, she said, “but if tonight is anything to go by, we’ve got masses of people who are ready to fight for a socialist future”. For decades now the numbers of people concluding that the major problems in society are caused by capitalism, and that it’s socialist politics and organising that provide the answers, have never really gone beyond a slow drip. But watching the movement of hundreds of people up and down the steps leading into the central part of the launch venue evoked—in this hopeful mind at least—something like a waterfall. I’d have settled for a steady stream, but this felt like something more than that. Despite the multiplying and deepening crises of capitalism afflicting society today, we know the fortunes of our movement won’t change just overnight. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”, as Marx put it in *The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte*. Part of that nightmare, for us, is the widespread sense of hopelessness and passivity in the face of the many obvious problems of society—a product of decades of one-sided class war being waged by the capitalist class and their political servants against working-class people, the poor and the oppressed. There’s no shortage of people who feel, on some level, that something is very wrong with society. The problem is, very few think there’s anything much we can do about it. So, a big part of what we were trying to do at the launch was rekindle a sense of hope for the future and a belief that if working-class people stand up, get organised and fight back, then we can achieve the kind of radical change our society so desperately needs. This was a dominant theme of all the speeches. Public school teacher and VS candidate for Niddrie Brendan Laws, who is running against the former Labor education minister and now Premier Ben Carroll, talked about it in connection with his work as a leader of the Socialists in Schools rank-and-file union group. “We organised Socialists in Schools”, he said, “to be the dogged fighters, to raise expectations, to assuage the fears about striking, \[and\] to let people know what power we have ... This year we’ve had this huge segment of workers get a bit more confidence, and it is now the most urgent task to translate that into the fight for the whole new society that we deserve”. VS candidate for Footscray Jasmine Duff, who as a convener of Students for Palestine has played a central role in the Palestine solidarity movement, spoke similarly. “Socialism is about saying we deserve better”, she said. “We deserve a world of dignity, and we deserve a world where our lives aren’t measured by what we produce for the capitalists.” The path to re-establishing socialism as a genuine fighting force in Australian political life is a long one. It will require the collective intellect and energy of thousands of committed socialist activists devoting themselves to our cause, not just for this election campaign, but for years and decades into the future. As we move along that path, however, it’s important to mark the moments that feel like genuine milestones. The VS launch was one such moment—providing exactly the spark of inspiration needed as we embark on what we hope will be a historic, breakthrough campaign. --- *James Plested is the Victorian Socialists communications director.* ### Europe boils and burns: capitalism’s climate hellscape URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/europe-boils-and-burns-capitalisms-climate-hellscape/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T03:10:00.000Z If you want to know how many lives our rulers are willing to sacrifice to defend the fossil fuel industry, you could start by looking at Europe. A heatwave that swept over huge swathes of the continent in June may have killed as many as [25,000 people](https://archive.md/IBuAw?ref=redflag.org.au), according to one estimate from Indiana University. More than 3,000 in Spain and more still in Germany. The French national health agency has recorded [more than 5,700 excess deaths](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/22/france-recorded-more-than-5700-excess-deaths-during-june-heatwave?ref=redflag.org.au). In many cities and towns, temperatures reached above 40 degrees Celsius. Extreme heat is a major cause of weather-related death, if not *the* major cause. It is a brutal way to die. As the body desperately tries to offload heat by redirecting blood flow to the skin, the heart comes under increasing strain. Internal organs can start to disintegrate and leach toxins into the bloodstream. You can lose more than a litre of fluid every hour through sweat, which can cause a drop in blood pressure and lead to kidney failure. Extreme heat also aggravates existing health conditions, which is why older people are particularly vulnerable. In France, about two-thirds of the excess deaths in June’s heatwave were people aged 75 and older. The effects of extreme heat also intersect with the inequalities entrenched by capitalism. Women spend 30-50 percent more of their working day above heat stress thresholds, according to University of London researcher Laurie Parsons in an interview with DW, and they are [over-represented in heatwave deaths](https://www.dw.com/en/more-women-die-in-heatwaves-but-biology-isnt-main-cause/a-78187451?ref=redflag.org.au). A 2021 study found that extreme urban heat exposure has [increased drastically since the 1980s](https://theconversation.com/dangerous-urban-heat-exposure-has-tripled-since-the-1980s-with-the-poor-most-at-risk-169153?gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=9619528765&gbraid=0AAAAADjcl3f2cjS3-15SYNGDrfBfrbHtV&gclid=Cj0KCQjw-MDTBhCgARIsAKAkdlSN9grHg67DTIf1jyzzOo-QR3CrfhOvDeRYjcmInjHAEkE-ong0WGEaAsaPEALw%5FwcB&ref=redflag.org.au)—mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia. Europe has been trapped under a heat dome: a mass of high-pressure air that traps heat like a lid and prevents clouds from forming. This in turn led to diabolical wildfires across France and Spain in July that forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee for safety. In such extreme weather conditions, wildfires can generate their own thunderstorms. The technical term is pyrocumulonimbus, but NASA calls them “fire-breathing dragon” clouds. This is the hellish world capitalism is creating for more and more of us every day. It’s not just happening in Europe but all over the world. As a result of climate change, formerly extreme and rare weather events are becoming more frequent and more intense under the impacts of climate change. More heat domes, more mass deaths and raging infernos. Analysis by a consortium of climate scientists from World Weather Attribution found that the June heatwave in Europe [would not have been possible](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/26/europe-heatwave-impossible-without-climate-crisis-scientists?ref=redflag.org.au) without climate change. The pyrocumulonimbus cloud produced by the fires in France was the first one ever to be recorded in the country. We know what’s behind all this: the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels, driven by capitalism. The CSIRO states that about [90 percent](https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/climate-change/Climate-change-QA/Sources-of-CO2?ref=redflag.org.au) of the world’s fossil fuel carbon emissions—the main cause of global temperature rises—comes from the burning of coal, oil and gas. In 2024, it was estimated that half of all planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions could be traced back to just [32 companies](https://earth.org/32-fossil-fuel-companies-responsible-for-half-of-global-co2-emissions-in-2024-report/?ref=redflag.org.au), according to figures from the [CarbonMajors database](https://carbonmajors.org/briefing/Carbon-Majors-2024-Data-Update-35466?ref=redflag.org.au). And cooking the globe is extremely good business. According to research by Oxfam, the six biggest fossil fuel companies doubled their profits for the second quarter of 2026, raking in [$46 billion](https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/big-oil-set-double-profits-their-emissions-fuel-deadly-heatwaves?ref=redflag.org.au) compared to a measly $23 billion in the first three months of the year. They’re planning to increase their oil and gas production by 14 percent by 2030. And this is not just a question of a handful of unregulated cowboy companies holding the rest of the world to ransom. CarbonMajors notes that in 2024, [17 of the top 20 carbon-emitting companies](https://carbonmajors.org/briefing/Carbon-Majors-2024-Data-Update-35466?ref=redflag.org.au) were state-owned, rather than private corporations. More to the point, fossil fuels are profitable only because of capitalism’s insatiable demand for them. Energy grids are built around them. Global shipping networks depend upon them. They’re a key ingredient in the production of plastics, fertilisers and construction materials. Militaries could not function without them. The whole system of capitalism is defined by the competitive drive for profit. Capitalists control the world’s productive resources and will put those resources into motion only if they can turn a profit and secure a competitive advantage over their rivals. As long as this remains society’s motive force, the rich and powerful will go on burning fossil fuels to the very last drop. Little wonder, then, that Europe’s far right have nothing to say about the devastating impacts of climate change other than to cast doubt on them. Figures like France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen paint Muslims as a threat to European civilisation while championing the industries that are destroying the basis for human life on Earth. They blame migrants for unemployment and homelessness while hundreds of thousands flee their homes and livelihoods under a pall of black smoke. But this is a crime of a whole system, one defended not just by the far right but by the parties and institutions of the political mainstream. Their beloved flim-flam schemes like emissions trading programs and net-zero pledges have arguably done more to keep the planet cooking than far-right climate denialism. As the continent sweltered, the *Guardian* reported that Europe’s “[most effective method](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/17/europe-emissions-trading-system-greenhouse-gas-risks-weakened?ref=redflag.org.au)” of cutting greenhouse gas emissions—the Emissions Trading System (ETS) in place since 2005—was at risk of being watered down. But the ETS is an utterly neoliberal mechanism with no hope of averting climate catastrophe. Watering it down is like taking a bit of air out of the smallest lifeboat on the Titanic. The only solution is a complete break with capitalism and its competitive, profit-driven logic. Only a system that puts the world’s productive resources under collective, democratic control—placed in the hands of the people who do the work—and harnessed to the logic of cooperation could we even begin to get ourselves out of the hellish mess capitalism has got us all into. The Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg wrote about society being faced with a choice between socialism or barbarism. She may not have predicted fire-breathing dragon clouds, but 21st-century capitalism continues to prove her right. ### Victorian Socialists launch statewide election campaign URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-socialists-launch-statewide-election-campaign/ Last updated: 2026-08-09T00:18:34.000Z *The following is the text, edited for clarity, of a speech by Victorian Socialists secretary Corey Oakley at the party’s state election campaign launch on Saturday, 1 August. The launch, held at the Aborigines Advancement League in the Melbourne suburb of Thornbury, was attended by around 800 party members and supporters from across the state. The party’s state election platform,* A socialist manifesto for real change, *was released at the launch—with the initial print run of 500 selling out on the night.* --- In the last year the Australian political map—as people here will know—has been turned upside down by the rise of One Nation in the polls. First, we saw them smashing the Liberal Party vote. And if you believe the polls that have been coming out over the past few months, they’re now starting to smash into the Labor Party vote as well. The election in Victoria in November is the first major statewide test of how far this development is going to go. And the outcome, I think, will define the terrain of politics across this country for years to come. It’s going to have huge ramifications for the election that’s happening in New South Wales in March next year, and the next federal election \[due by May 2028\]. All of those will happen in the context of what happens here in Victoria this year. Now, we know that every step forward for One Nation is a victory for hatred, a victory for racism and for vicious right-wing politics. And we know that every step forward they take pushes the Liberal Party further to the right, further to attack migrants, and pushes the lunatic right wing in the media to demand even more extreme reactionary measures. But we also know that the Labor Party offer no alternative that can galvanise people against the far right. They are incapable of advancing a vision of how society can be changed for the better. How could the Labor Party do that? Labor is the party of genocide. It is the party of neoliberalism and privatisation, the party of attacks on the poor and the vulnerable. And the new Labor leadership in Victoria, whose education minister refused to give teachers the deal that they deserve and desperately need, is only going to take Labor further to the right. So we cannot accept that those are the only options. What is desperately needed, and what we plan to provide, is a radical alternative that stands against the right, but also throws to the curb any idea that Labor’s corporate centrism can deal with the crisis our society is currently in. We need bold socialist politics that identify and combat the key problem: that our society is ruled by and for the super-rich. And we need politics that stand against the racism and scapegoating that are at the core of the One Nation threat. We need a party that provides a vision of hope and solidarity, and stands for a radical redistribution of wealth and power in this state and in this country. So that is why we are embarking today on the biggest socialist campaign this country has ever seen. When we first set up Victorian Socialists in 2018, we stood just in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. For the last election in 2022, we ran across the west as well as the north—22 \[lower house\] seats altogether. This time we are running in every single seat statewide. We have already preselected candidates in 72 lower house seats. That includes every seat in metropolitan Melbourne and more from across the state. We already have candidates in seats in Geelong, Bendigo, Ballarat and elsewhere. By the end of this month, we will have finalised candidates in every one of the 88 seats across the state. Every voter in Victoria will have a socialist option to vote for, in both the lower house and the upper house. That is something that has never happened before, either in this state or anywhere else in Australia. Now, running a statewide campaign is going to be an enormous undertaking. Since 2022, we’ve put extensive effort into building up our infrastructure and building up local organisation everywhere that we can, and we plan to expand that rapidly in the coming months. There are approximately 1,600 polling booths across Victoria that we will need to staff on election day. To do that, we’ll need at least 4,000 volunteers. The people in this room are a crucial part of how we’re going to make that happen, which I’ll come back to. But while we are extremely excited to be running across the state, I want to make it clear that we have no intention of neglecting our heartland in the north and west of Melbourne, where we’ve run in the past. In 2022, we knocked on 188,000 doors over the course of the 12-14 week campaign. We thought that was pretty good at the time. Now, for this campaign, based on the number of volunteers we have compared to last time and what our expectations are, we’re aiming for half a million doors across Northern Metro and Western Metro combined. Last time we got around 8 percent of the vote in seats like Thomastown, Brunswick and Broadmeadows, and we averaged 5.6 percent across all the seats we stood in. I think those decent results really vindicate one of the ideas we had when we started this, which is that it was possible for socialists, if they campaigned well, to win votes in the inner-city areas—where for years the Greens have been able to win progressive votes from Labor—but also to win votes in the core working-class migrant areas in the middle and outer suburbs, where Labor has never been challenged from the left before. We think we can do that, and we think we can substantially increase our vote in all of those places. If we do that, we will have a serious chance of getting our Northern Metro and Western Metro candidates into parliament. We will also be throwing serious effort into running massive campaigns in particular seats where we know we have a lot of support. Our best result in 2022 was in Footscray, where we got 9.4 percent. We have a much bigger team of members and volunteers there this time, and I think there is significant room for growth in our vote. So watch out on election night for when the results from Footscray start coming in. But in Footscray, and across the whole state, the success of that campaign is going to rely overwhelmingly on the hard work of our members and volunteers. We do not have the millions of dollars that Labor, the Liberals and One Nation will use to absolutely saturate our screens with ads promoting all of their vile politics. Over the coming months we’re going to see an absolute deluge of it, as all the parties pour millions and millions of dollars into this campaign. We will not be doing that. We’ll do what advertising we can, but that is not our strategy for how to grow. What we have instead of that money is you—the people here in this room—and the many more around Victoria who already support our party. We know that when we can get to people, when we can get them to hear our message, it resonates and we can win votes. So what we need is for people here to be on polling booths, to be doorknocking, to be letterboxing over the next few months. And we need you doing that yourselves, but also drawing friends, family and co-workers into our campaign. The moment that we are in, in politics in Australia and in Victoria, is dire and dark. Whatever happens in this election, it will be remembered, I think, for a long time to come. But the power is here, with all of us working together to help make sure that 2026 is not remembered just for the rise of the far right, but that 2026 is the year when a new socialist movement burst onto the political scene and became the challenger—not just to One Nation, but to all of the parties and institutions that keep the wealthy few on the top and the rest on the bottom. That is the challenge in front of us in this campaign. ### Hanson’s middle-class army assembles for Victorian state election URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/hansons-middle-class-army-assembles-for-victorian-state-election/ Last updated: 2026-08-08T23:58:23.000Z Imagine Christmas family lunch, but everyone there is your racist uncle. Or try this: Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece *Seven Samurai*, but instead of skilled swordsmen, it’s people who have spent years honing the art of giving people the creeps—and there are eight of them. Last Monday, Pauline Hanson was in Melbourne to announce One Nation’s first eight candidates for the upcoming Victorian state election. Among them was Warren Pickering, the party’s state leader, who will be contesting the seat of Pakenham. Pickering spent time in the Middle East as a combat engineer with the Australian military, but it was only later that he paid the supreme sacrifice, when he lost his job at mining giant BHP for heroically refusing the COVID jab. His pet conspiracy theory is the “fifteen-minute city”, a fanciful notion that the government is planning to build suburbs where shops, schools, and hospitals are all within easy reach. Keep dreaming, Warren! Then there’s Colleen Harkin, formerly of the Liberal Party, who is One Nation’s candidate for the South-Eastern Metropolitan region in the upper house. She works at a hard-right think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, a natural home for someone who [likened climate change education to child abuse](https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/lib-hopeful-backs-deves-and-says-climate-emergency-warnings-border-on-child-abuse-20220426-p5ag7q.html?ref=redflag.org.au). The IPA does valuable research such as polling public attitudes towards the [Australian national anthem](https://ipa.org.au/research/poll-attitudes-towards-the-australian-national-anthem?ref=redflag.org.au), polling public attitudes towards [Australia Day](https://ipa.org.au/read/new-poll-australia-day-2026?ref=redflag.org.au) and polling public attitudes towards the [Australian flag](https://ipa.org.au/read/poll-attitudes-towards-the-australian-flag-and-national-anthem?ref=redflag.org.au). Many questions still remain unanswered, however. What percentage of the Australian population know *all* the words to pub rock anthem “Khe Sanh”? How many Australians regularly throw a shrimp on the barbie? Harkin’s bio on the IPA website adds that she “enjoys a good steak tartare”. There’s something unsettling but totally plausible about a vision of Hanson’s foot soldiers sitting around a table devouring plate after plate of raw meat. The most disconcerting of the eight candidates is probably former criminal lawyer Mark Nicholson. His claim to fame is being the “brains” behind Pauline Hanson’s animated TV series *Please Explain* and feature film *A Super Progressive Movie*. A sort of third-rate, Third Reich Walt Disney. He shares with his cartoon creations a certain two-dimensional, dead-behind-the-eyes look that’s hard to unsee. Hanson’s first announced Victorian candidates are like stock characters from the far-right universe. For all the talk of being a party of “battlers”—a label which sticks no matter how many private jets and D&G galas Hanson racks up—One Nation’s state election line-up is decidedly middle class. Colleen Harkin hails from the traditional party of business owners big and small. Two of them—Nicholson and Aaron Sandford—are lawyers. Fiona Lopez is an HR manager and Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell a dairy farmer. Natalie Adams is a small business owner, and rounding out the list is Chris Burson, a Geelong councillor and ex-cop. In a word, the sort of people who are the backbone of the capitalist status quo. Nationalism, racism, authoritarianism and exploitation are the air they breathe. Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote incisively about fascism as he watched it come to power in Italy, then in Germany. He understood well the middle-class roots of fascist politics, writing that “a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois” (that’s French for small-business owner). His solution to the problem—a socialist society that sweeps away once and for all the rule of the few over the many—is needed now more than ever. ### By ditching Jacinta Allan, Labor has bent the knee to the bosses again URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/by-ditching-jacinta-allan-labor-has-bent-the-knee-to-the-bosses-again/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T03:09:50.000Z After over a year of relentless campaigning by the capitalist press, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan is history. Few on the left will mourn her passing. She implemented $2.4 billion in cuts to school funding and oversaw the degradation of schools and hospitals. She introduced harsh new sentencing laws, copied from the right-wing Queensland government, which meant children as young as 14 can now be sentenced to life in prison. She spent millions hosting an international arms fair during a genocide, and unleashed riot police and stun grenades on those who dissented. She continued the demolition of public housing and sell-offs of public land started by former premier Daniel Andrews, and when under pressure over budget deficits, continued the privatisation of VicRoads and planned to do the same to Melbourne Water. Despite all this, the capitalist establishment wanted her brought down, and are gleefully celebrating her demise. The Murdoch press is known for its rabid hatred of Victorian Labor, and have made its predictable contribution. But it has been the *Age* newspaper, historically considered a liberal outlet, which led the ruthless campaign to destroy Allan. It ran more than 100 pieces on what they came to call “corruption” in the Big Build (a collection of infrastructure projects announced in 2015), a small proportion of which was real and much of which was simply an attack on effective trade unionism. This campaign continued despite it being clear that the narrative being spun was helping the far-right One Nation rise in the polls. When the news broke that Allan was resigning, the editors celebrated with a front page spread and major feature on their website. The paper’s editorial rightly took credit, referencing the *Age*’s endless and highly partisan reporting on the Big Build. Not satisfied with bringing down an elected premier, they demanded that Allan’s replacement, Ben Carroll, express “contrition” for his predecessor’s sins. The nature of those sins was made clear when Paul Sakkal, the *Age*’s chief political correspondent, defined “[Victoria-style governance](https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/victorian-labor-has-destroyed-itself-albanese-would-be-wise-to-learn-the-lessons-20260729-p60jgz.html?ref=redflag.org.au)” (cue thunderous minor chords) as a government which “scorned business leaders, economists and the media” and cast them as “ideological enemies”. This is a reference to more than a decade of Labor governments in Victoria that, while far from left wing, have not fully embraced the interests and desires of big business. Key to the widespread capitalist hostility was Andrews’ close ties to the unions, particularly the CFMEU, and his stance in relation to the pandemic. The anti-vaxxer, death-desiring mobs that protested the lockdowns were backed by capitalists big and small, and have now congealed around Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Of course, Sakkal’s piece is not merely of historical interest. Rather, it presents Allan’s downfall as a fable whose lesson is that federal Labor must not implement the slightest measure that could cause the rich any discomfort. His focus here is on the minor tax tweaks proposed in the federal budget, which would ask investors to pay the same rates as wage earners (the horror!). This moderate half step back towards a fair tax system “showed signs that habits from Victoria might have spread north”, according to Sakkal. His proof? “Business groups protested for months”. The irony, of course, is that the Andrews-Allan Labor government has been, until recently, the most popular state administration for decades. The fact that Andrews won ever greater support among working-class people for his public health measures, despite the backlash from businesses, stuck in the craw of the capitalist establishment. So too the mass support for Labor’s investment in public infrastructure, including the much-maligned Suburban Rail Loop. It is incredible that in the face of the campaign against it, only 37 percent of Victorians oppose the plan. The bosses and their media shills simply cannot understand why the majority of people value human life and social amenities more than profits. Nor can they accept that Victoria has in effect been a one-party state for nearly 28 years. Carrol, Allan’s replacement, is a robotic right-wing ALP apparatchik from central casting, who has immediately set himself the task of winning back the support of the capitalists. His first announcement was to assuage them that his name was neither Jacinta Allan nor Daniel Andrews, a move which was applauded by the commentariat: “\[Unlike Andrews and Allan\] Carroll belongs to a tradition of Labor pragmatism. His persona is suburban: a Catholic, straight-laced family man with a lifetime love of the Kangaroos who got a taste for marathon running in [middle age](https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/carroll-s-long-run-can-the-boy-from-airport-west-outrun-andrews-ghost-20260730-p60k6g.html?ref=redflag.org.au).” This everyday suburbanite’s first new policy was to announce a sweeping royal commission into the construction sector, thereby meeting the key demand of the *Age* and other business advocates. This would allow developers to make even greater profits by cutting construction costs, and further discredit unionism more broadly. “Victoria’s economy is a [partnership between business, government](https://www.afr.com/chanticleer/victoria-s-new-premier-says-the-five-words-business-wanted-to-hear-20260728-p60jai?ref=redflag.org.au), and working people”, he intoned, before listing a series of changes that would exclusively benefit businesses, including the possibility of watering down the highly popular work from home laws. He also signalled his support for the Victoria Police by announcing that he will reopen closed stations, yet another concession to law-and-order campaigning from the right-wing media. This rightward jag in the face of serious pressure from capital strongly echoes the shift in the Labor leadership from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard while the party was in power federally in 2010\. After intense campaigning from Australia’s richest people—including a [protest](https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/protesters-rally-proposed-mining-tax-20100609-xvwf.html?ref=redflag.org.au) of billionaires and their hangers-on in Perth—Labor ditched Rudd and installed his deputy. Like Carroll today, Gillard’s overwhelming goal was to appease the right. She weakened the highly popular mining tax and displayed even greater cruelty to refugees and asylum seekers. This capitulation in the face of capitalist campaigning did not help Labor in the slightest, and the party faced relentless criticism until eventually being turfed out by the far-right Tony Abbott in 2013, who then proceeded to axe even Gillard’s watered-down mining tax. Labor’s incapacity to stand up to big business, even when it disadvantages them electorally, is no miscalculation, but a consequence of the party’s slavish support for capitalism. Despite their exemplary record as loyal servants of the system, Labor governments face perpetual suspicion from the business elite. Rather than confront capital with the organised power of workers, or even the democratic mandate of an activated working-class electorate, Labor overwhelmingly cowers when put to the test. The exceptions to this approach are rare and by nature temporary, cases where Labor’s relative independence from capital—by virtue of its roots in the union bureaucracy and its working-class voter base—means it is prepared to chart a different course. This is how we can explain Andrews’ stand during COVID. In any case, Carroll has signified his intention is now to do exactly what the bosses want, no questions asked. In doing so, he’s mimicking the approach of Labor Premier Chris Minns in NSW and his counterpart Peter Malinauskas in South Australia. This means that the upcoming state election in Victoria will be a contest between insurgent Trumpite conspiracists, an increasingly hard-right Liberal Party (despite its friendly face) and a rightward-moving Labor machine. Workers will lose, regardless of who wins. Faced with this dire situation, the Victorian Socialists effort to build and organise the audience that exists for a fundamentally different type of politics is even more important. ### Security treaties advance Australian neocolonialism in the Pacific URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/security-treaties-advance-australian-neocolonialism-in-the-pacific/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T03:09:40.000Z Amidst great diplomatic pomp, Australia signed two new treaties with Fiji in July, known as the Ocean of Peace Alliance and the Vuvale Union. Together, they commit the two countries to jointly meet any security threat faced by either party, and announce their hostility to any unnamed “third parties” establishing a military presence in the Pacific. This makes Fiji just the fourth country with which Australia has concluded a formal military alliance, along with the United States, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. The Fiji treaties represent the latest victory for Australia in a diplomatic offensive going back several years. Since 2024, Australia has also concluded security agreements of varying form with Tuvalu, Naoero (Nauru), Vanuatu and PNG. Negotiations with the Solomons Islands over a new security treaty are ongoing. Reading through the treaties, you will find many rhetorical flourishes about mutual respect and shared values. But the single most important word for understanding Australia’s diplomatic agenda does not appear at all. That word is “China”. These new treaties are aimed squarely at maintaining Australia’s dominant position as a neo-colonial power in the south-west Pacific, blocking China from establishing its own security relationships with Pacific island nations. ### **Australia: neocolonial power in the south-west Pacific** The treaties run on a spectrum of deference towards Australia, depending on the relative strength or weakness of the Pacific state concerned. At one extreme, the Fiji treaties commit the two countries to mutual defence, with no further concessions to Australian interests. Fiji has largely avoided the financial problems afflicting many Pacific states and has an established military of its own. At the other end of the spectrum are smaller countries that are financially dependent on Australia, and for which the terms of the security treaties are far from equal. Notably, Australia now has veto power over Naoero or Tuvalu establishing a security partnership with any other country. What’s more, Australia now also has the right to block third parties becoming involved in so-called critical infrastructure in the island nations. These are assets that are primarily civil in nature rather than military, but which have security applications, including ports, aviation, telecommunications, banking and energy—in short, the basis for any sort of modern economic activity. Although maintaining their formal independence, these countries are one step away from becoming Australian protectorates. Vanuatu’s position is slightly stronger, and it has to consult Australia only on third-party involvement in critical infrastructure. It remains to be seen what terms Australia can extract from the Solomon Islands. Former Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare at times tried to play China and Australia off against each other to extract concessions. In 2022, he signed a deal with China to provide training and equipment for local police, precisely the kind of involvement Australia wants to preclude. But China’s involvement in the country has been contentious in domestic Solomon Islands politics, and current Prime Minister Mathew Wale is more inclined to look to Australia for support. From Australia’s perspective, though, the most important security relationship in the Pacific is with PNG. The lessons of World War Two, when Japan advanced across the island of New Guinea before being halted, have deeply ingrained themselves within Australian military thinking. To the generals and strategic analysts, PNG represents a kind of defensive rampart for the Australian mainland. Anything other than a strong Australian grasp on this territory is therefore unthinkable. The Mutual Defence Treaty signed in 2025 formalises this thinking. It declares that an armed attack on either party is considered a collective security threat and entrenches already close defence ties between the countries. This includes intelligence sharing, aligning logistics and defence industries, and developing shared bases, such as at the Lombrum naval base at Manus Island, which is currently being expanded at a cost of half a billion dollars. The established practice of embedding Australian personnel within the PNG military will continue. In addition, the treaty now provides for the recruitment of PNG citizens directly into the Australian armed forces. This offers Australia a way to boost the size of its military, which for decades has lagged behind recruitment targets. Moreover, it means Australian military units would have a built-in reserve of local knowledge in the event that they are needed to deploy in PNG itself. ### **Occupying the Pacific’s empty space** Australia can extract such concessionary agreements from the Pacific nations because of its relative economic strength. Australia is among the top trade partners for most Pacific nations. Australian aid to the region totalled more than $1.5 billion in 2024, dwarfing any other country’s. Australia is now also the leading source of development loans in the region. Australian largesse does not result from humanitarian concern. It is a tool in what Foreign Minister Penny Wong has called “a state of permanent contest in the Pacific”. Having accused the previous Liberal government of slacking off and allowing China to build its influence in the region, Labor has made it a priority to reinforce Australian pre-eminence. Access to the Australian labour market for Pacific workers is another point of leverage, with remittances an important source of income for many Pacific nations. These workers then provide cheap labour for Australian agriculture in particular. Yet it is striking how little the new treaties relate to gaining economic advantage for Australia. With the exception of mining interests in PNG, Australian investment in the region is minimal. PNG is ranked 24th on the list of Australia’s most important export destinations, and 20th as a foreign investment location. Other Pacific states barely rate at all. In recent years, the Australian government has had to persuade Australian banks to maintain operations in the region and has subsidised Telstra’s presence in the Solomon Islands. The Pacific, then, is not a place with much positive purpose from the point of view of Australian capitalism. At best, places like Naoero are a black hole into which refugees can be dumped, out of sight and out of mind. But mostly, capitalists view the Pacific as a series of problems in need of solutions. It is seen as a region of corrupt or incompetent governments, failed economic development and ethnic conflict. All of these must be managed by the Australian state lest “instability” offer a rival power the chance to establish a foothold in the region. In the 1870s, the Melbourne *Daily Telegraph* wrote of the prospects of colonising New Guinea: “\[T\]hough we do not want the island ourselves, we do want very much that no one else shall have it”. A similar attitude continues to prevail today. Above all, the Pacific is viewed by Australia as a kind of empty space. Like any vacuum, it will inevitably be filled by one imperial power or another. Australia is determined to get in first. In 1999, Australia sent troops to Timor-Leste to ensure an orderly transition to independence after Indonesian occupation. Since then, Australian police or soldiers have been deployed to the Solomon Islands (twice), PNG, Naoero, Tonga and Timor-Leste (again). ### **Australian imperialism in the post-liberal world order** Based on Australia’s frenetic manoeuvring in the Pacific, you would be forgiven for thinking China poses an imminent threat. But China lacks either motivation or means to mount any kind of invasion of the Australian continent. Australia’s imperial ambitions, however, go well beyond the defence of the mainland. The 2026 National Defence Strategy aims at denying hostile powers the ability to operate in what it calls “our primary area of military interest—the immediate region encompassing the Northeast Indian Ocean through maritime Southeast Asia into the Pacific. This region includes Australia, its populated offshore territories and its northern approaches”. The need to exclude other powers from this enormous swathe of territory continues a longstanding preoccupation of Australian strategic thinking. With its origins as an offshoot of the British Empire and surrounded by (presumed hostile) Asian peoples, Australia has depended economically and militarily on long and exposed seaborne trade routes. If China were to succeed in establishing a permanent military presence anywhere in the south-west Pacific, protecting these trade routes would become more difficult. It would also expose Australia to what is termed “coercion”: threats and intimidation that fall short of an outright declaration of war, but which can be used to gain leverage over a weaker state. Australian fears have only been fuelled by the decline of the liberal, rules-based international order. For decades, that order provided Australia with a benign security environment underpinned by the United States’ military power, along with expanding trade with economically dynamic East Asian states. Now, international relations are entering an era of “might makes right”, in which diplomacy and free trade agreements take a back seat to the harsh realities of military power. In a world ruled by naked force, the Australian ruling class has no intention of being reduced to a third-rate power in China’s orbit. It fears an Asia-Pacific region dominated by the Chinese military would result in Australia’s trade, economic development and diplomatic relations being conducted on terms laid down by Beijing. One response to this threat is the AUKUS pact, which will provide Australia (in theory at least) with nuclear-powered attack submarines that can engage Chinese forces far from Australian shores. It also further integrates Australia with the US military machine, making it virtually inevitable that Australia would be drawn into any major US-China conflict. For this reason, criticism of AUKUS from within mainstream politics revolves around the idea that Australia is too subservient to the United States. The Greens, for example, call for an end to AUKUS and for “regional defence agreements \[which\] support an independent and peaceful role for Australia in the region”. But Australia’s relations with the Pacific island nations reveal that Australia is a strong, imperialist power in its own right. The new security treaties are in no way dictated by the alliance with the United States. On the contrary, in the south-west Pacific, Australia leads and others follow. The problem is not that the Australian state lacks independence. It is that, whether through AUKUS or through contestation with China in the Pacific, Australia is throwing fuel on the fire of imperialist competition. When the United States, Australia and Japan last battled for supremacy in the Pacific, the conflict tore through Timor, PNG and the Solomon Islands. The exact death toll among Pacific islanders is unknown. No-one even bothered to count how many “natives” were killed. Then, as now, such details were unimportant for the generals and politicians of the imperialist powers. Far from providing “security”, Australia’s regional posture is making the world a more dangerous place for all of us. ### Melbourne tells Hanson where to go URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/melbourne-tells-hanson-where-to-go/ Last updated: 2026-08-06T03:58:09.000Z On the evening of 3 August, around 250 protesters gathered outside the Tower Hotel in Melbourne’s inner east. Inside, the far-right One Nation party was announcing its candidates for the Victorian state election to be held in November. A large police presence was sent to protect the event and prevent protesters from getting near the venue. But our voices easily crossed the police lines, with the One Nation supporters being greeted with chants like, “Migrants are welcome, racists are not!” and “Pauline Hanson go to hell—take your racists there as well!” Party leader Pauline Hanson had slinked out through the adjoining bottle-o to avoid the protest. The crowd heard speeches from a high school antifascist, a Swinburne student and a socialist involved in organising against Hanson when she first emerged as a political figure in the 1990s. The rally was called by the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, which has been key to organising opposition to the far right in Melbourne over the last decade or more. The protest was an important and much-needed display of opposition to Hanson, and something we will need more of in the lead-up to the state election. A campaign both in the streets and at the ballot box is needed to push back her racist, sexist, anti-worker agenda. Victorian Socialists candidate for the state seat of Hawthorn, Tess McEnearney, told the demonstration: > “What that looks like starts with each and every one of you here today—an anti-racist, anti-sexist left throughout Melbourne so big that One Nation can’t organise their campaign events without fear of protests, and so Pauline Hanson knows that if she wants to win this state election she is going to be facing a hell of a fight. And that we’re going to keep fighting and fighting and fighting until we win.” ### ‘Never again is now’: anti-fascist resistance in Germany URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/never-again-is-now-anti-fascist-resistance-in-germany/ Last updated: 2026-08-02T11:20:57.000Z GERMANY—On 4 July, the 100th anniversary of the Nazi Party’s second conference in the German state of Thuringia, the far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) held its federal party conference in a neighbouring city in the same state. Putting the anti-fascist slogan “Never again is now” into practice, more than 17,000 anti-fascists blockaded every entrance to the venue, chanting “Hooray! Hooray! The Antifa is here today!” Given the grim political climate in Germany, these protests are sorely needed. Increased military spending is leading to funding being stripped from health care, welfare, housing, youth clubs and museums. The postwar taboo—German rearmament—has been broken: Chancellor Friedrich Merz now speaks of making the German armed forces the “strongest conventional army in Europe”. His coalition government of the Christian Union and Social Democratic Party has taken the first step to reintroducing conscription for millions of young people. Attacks on the working class are coming hard and fast: on 2 July, the government unveiled tax, pension and labour measures that included [mandating](https://novaramedia.com/2026/07/02/german-workers-cant-take-a-single-sick-day-without-a-doctors-note-now/?ref=redflag.org.au) a doctor’s note for all sick days and raising the retirement age to 70\. The government also plans to extend the working day. Then there is the racism. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt boasts of a “[migration turnaround](https://www.proasyl.de/news/ein-jahr-migrationswende-der-bundesregierung-und-die-verheerenden-folgen/?ref=redflag.org.au)” under the new government, rejecting asylum seekers at the border, denying family reunion visas and increasing deportations. Last year, the government deported [nearly 23,000](https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/zahlen-zu-asyl/265765/abschiebungen-in-deutschland/?ref=redflag.org.au#node-content-title-1) people, a number that will increase with the construction of [deportation terminals](https://theleftberlin.com/ceas-germany/?ref=redflag.org.au) at Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich airports. The far right is flourishing under this increasingly authoritarian government. Having attracted the second-highest vote in last year’s federal election, 21 percent, the AfD is now leading the polls with 28 percent support. In Saxony-Anhalt, where a state election will be held next month, the party could form the first far-right government since the fall of the Third Reich. None of this has happened without resistance. For months, activists have been organising in their neighbourhoods, universities and trade unions to blockade the AfD conference. In the host city of Erfurt, they knocked on 20,000 doors to build local support. On the day, 50,000 people mobilised in a colourful, jubilant wave. More than 17,000 blockaded the conference venue, preventing delegates from entering. From more than 80 localities across Germany, and even neighbouring Austria, protesters descended on the conference venue from the earliest hours of the morning. Locals established the first and closest of the seventeen blockade points. Organiser Nicki Leiphold recounted in a [press conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5RZQ2Vz6lY&t=177s&ref=redflag.org.au): > “When I got up yesterday at 4 in the morning, overtired, I looked out into the window of the apartment opposite mine. That was when I saw the first person putting on their yellow safety vest. And as our group stepped outside, we ran right into another group of people who were also there to resist. The streets were suddenly so full like they otherwise never are in Erfurt at that time. In the blockade, I sat next to a woman with a walker, next to a large group of professors, next to apprentices and high-school students. A married couple danced together in the blockade. An elderly man who told me he was afraid that fascists might come to power in Germany again stood upright in the blockade with me at 5am.” After disembarking from dozens of buses on the outskirts of Erfurt, the Berlin contingent marched in our thousands across fields and along major roads to our blockade point on the A71 highway leading into the city. It quickly became a theatre for political discussion and debate. One socialist group, Socialism from Below, held a teach-in during the blockade to discuss resistance strategies to the far right. Blockades are not a new tactic and have been organised by the group *widersetzen* (resist) to disrupt AfD events since 2024\. This year, they were the largest yet. Despite our efforts, though, the conference started on time, unlike in previous years and despite our bigger numbers. This was because the 600 delegates were escorted into the venue at 2am by police. Coordinated by Thuringia’s Social Democratic Party Interior Minister Georg Maier, the authorities had learnt from previous years’ blockades. On the one hand, this illustrates the strength of our side: the police even spoke of our “immovability”. On the other, it points to a limitation of the blockade tactic. *Widersetzen* prioritises building the widest possible alliance to confront the far right, while rejecting broader debate about the most effective way to fight it. Accordingly, minimal argument was made for the blockade tactic, and political organisations with other perspectives were denied the right to have a visible presence at the actions. This weakens our side, as it prevents the sort of open debate that is needed about what fascism is and what sort of politics and action are needed to win—debates that maximise the movement’s chance of getting it right and give people a sense of ownership over their actions. Inside the conference, the AfD presented itself as professional, unified, disciplined and ready to govern. The election of Stefan Möller, co-chairman of the Thuringian branch, to deputy co-leader represents a strengthening of the fascist sections of the party. He defends the “Thuringian way”, which he defines as “no moderation, no compromises”. This branch of the party is classified as right-wing extremist even by Germany’s domestic spy agency. The AfD shows no signs of moderating its image as the party gets closer to power; instead, it has become more extreme. The symbolic choice of conference date is a case in point. In the capital city of the AfD’s heartland state of Thuringia, where right-wing violence and racist hostility have become part of everyday life, the anti-fascist mobilisations provided an important counterweight. Locals showed their solidarity with the protest through yard signs and snacks and drinks left for protesters in front yards. Residents waved to us and, in one nearby apartment building, almost every balcony was occupied by supporters, who passed a pot of coffee between them as they talked about the protests. In another building, a migrant family gathered at the window, wiping away tears. When we sang out to an elderly couple watching us from their front fence, they sang back enthusiastically. The mass resistance to the AfD in Erfurt offered a message of hope to anti-fascists everywhere. It is crucial that we strengthen this movement. ### Indian students shake Modi’s regime URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/indian-students-shake-modis-regime/ Last updated: 2026-07-29T09:30:48.000Z Earlier this month, more than 20,000 supporters cheered as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood triumphantly with his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium. Modi, who has ruled India for more than twelve years, was repeatedly described by the press during his visit as the popular leader of the world’s largest democracy. By the end of the month, the actions of hundreds of thousands of angry students had forced the Modi regime to make concessions to the most significant mass movement in India in a long time. Following dramatic wins in regional elections earlier in the year, including in the historically left-wing dominated state of West Bengal, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People’s Party) seemed stronger than ever. But the results papered over a growing crack of discontent, mainly among young people. Young people have not benefited from the economic improvements Modi likes to tout. Among graduates aged under 30, 11 million out of 63 million are unemployed. In a now-infamous speech in May, India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, referred to these unemployed youth as “cockroaches” and “parasites” who would rather become activists than join the workforce. These remarks quickly became a meme and spurred the formation of the satirical Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) by US-based student Abhijeet Dipke. Membership criteria for the CJP include being “unemployed, lazy, chronically online, and possessing an ability to rant professionally”. The party gathered millions of Instagram followers in its first few weeks, becoming a symbol of dissent. Online campaigning became a protest movement in June. The catalyst for the protests was the leak of the 2026 National Eligibility cum Entrance Test papers. Around 2.3 million students were taking this exam with the hope of securing one of the 137,000 places at India’s medical and dental schools. For children of working- and middle-class families, this is a pathway to a stable and comfortable life, and their families often incur significant debt to give their children the opportunity to take the test. Instead of the test going ahead, though, students this year were told it would be delayed due to a leak. Such leaks have happened 127 times under Modi’s rule, usually as a result of wealthy people seeking and gaining access to the test questions in advance and the questions then becoming public. This delay pushed many students, already under intense pressure, over the edge, with at least twenty taking their own lives. This tragedy, and the circumstances surrounding it, unleashed the movement. With the help of local communist student groups, such as the All India Students’ Association and the Students’ Federation of India, the CJP organised a series of protests in Delhi, the capital, starting in early June. Despite being referred to as “terrorists” by Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, the protests grew. Then, on 28 June, prominent activist Sonam Wangchuk and six students began an indefinite hunger strike, bringing widespread attention to the cause. Although the movement initially called only for administrative changes and the removal of Pradhan, it broadened to demand the release of detained protesters and the removal of Modi himself, a wide range of anti-Modi chants being taken up by protesters on the streets of Delhi. Like other uprisings over the last few years, slogans to do with the liberation of Palestine and opposing the government’s ties to Israel were raised by the left of the movement. Then, on 20 July, the movement really took off. To mark the first day of the new parliamentary session, the CJP announced it would march on parliament. The government tried to stop the gathering by imposing internet shutdowns, but tens of thousands gathered anyway. Some of Delhi’s largest metro stations were closed to restrict movement, but the trapped participants staged their own protests anyway. Students faced attacks from police with batons, tear gas, water cannons and pellet guns, and several women reported being groped by the officers and other security forces. Despite this, protesters marched all the way to the parliament, where they were stopped by security agents wielding AK-47s. Modi was whisked away to safety as the demonstrations continued into the night. Police violence against urban, middle-class Hindus is not new, but the BJP has tried to avoid it over the past twelve years. Many of the police’s tactics have been refined against “outgroups” in Indian society: left-wing organisations, farmers and, most prominently, Muslims, especially in Kashmir, where the army and the Central Armed Police Forces have been given free rein to terrorise the local population. The events of 20 July sparked a fire across the country. Similar protests occurred in other major cities. Groups of workers and activists donated so much food to the protesters that the CJP had to ask them to stop as it was going to waste. Links were also made to the ongoing farmers’ struggle, as thousands of farmers from Haryana and Punjab prepared to march to Delhi to protest a recent trade deal struck with the US. Solidarity protests also occurred in major cities outside of India. The protests grew, with hundreds of thousands marching in cities throughout India on 25 July. Faced with this, the government had to quickly change course. Out of options, and with the ghosts of the recently ousted regimes in Bangladesh and Nepal acting as a warning of what further repression may unleash, Modi went to the discussion table with the cockroach leaders. Following meetings with Dipke and other leading figures, Pradhan announced his resignation, about 24 hours after government sources had claimed he was defiant and would fight on. The mass protests turned into mass street parties as people celebrated their victory. In the midst of the celebrations, however, some were arguing to demand more—no de-escalation until Modi goes. The movement was faced with a choice: build on the momentum or wrap up the actions. Unfortunately, the leadership opted for the latter. Soon after the resignation, the CJP announced that their demands had been met and it was time to go home. Pradhan was gone, the BJP had agreed to unspecified education reforms, and the arrested protesters would be released—that was sufficient for the CJP leaders. The announcement did not reflect the strength of the movement. Weeks of protests had been powerful and unifying, and many of those who had participated had been radicalised. But the CJP leaders were no radicals. They baulked at the idea of expanding the demands and challenging the government in its entirety. Dipke himself had begun his political career in the centrist, nationalist Aam Aadmi Party as a social media creator. During the protests, the CJP leaders repeatedly emphasised that their intention was not to threaten the system. As early as May, Dipke dismissed comparisons between the cockroach movement and Gen Z revolutions in Bangladesh and Nepal as “insults”, insisting his movement was all about respecting the constitution and the Indian nation. Added to this, the social base of the movement was urban intellectuals and middle-class students and, although this layer could be explosive, without political leadership it was not spontaneously radical. Unfortunately, however, education reforms and a change of personnel at the top are not enough to resolve the problem underpinning the exam leaks. The leaks, along with the exams themselves, are a reflection of the extreme class divide in Indian capitalism—the access to power the wealthy take for granted and the limited opportunities open to the poor. India is a society where Mukesh Ambani, one of the richest people in the world, lives in a $4 billion luxury property built on top of a former orphanage. India is also a society where less than ten kilometres away from this property lies Dharavi, the third largest slum in the world, where around a million people live in poverty. The state in India, like everywhere else, facilitates the accumulation of wealth at the top, while doing the bare minimum for workers and the poor. Reforms can’t change this, only a radical movement led by organised workers can hope to challenge the power of the capitalists and their repressive state, and lay the basis for a more equal society. Unfortunately, the number of people organised around these sorts of politics in India is, as in much of the world, too small to make much of a difference. What has been highlighted, though, is the existing leadership’s limitations. After getting the CJP to demobilise the protests, the state has begun taking its revenge, with 400 protesters now arrested in the state of Bihar, and photos of protesters being published by the police. In response, the CJP has threatened to resume the protests. Regardless of the outcome, large numbers of people in India have been shaken by this movement. The Gen Z protests have proven definitively that mass rebellion in India is still possible today, even under a fascist government. This is a hopeful development. ### Victorian teachers strike again URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-teachers-strike-again/ Last updated: 2026-07-26T06:14:46.000Z At 1.44pm on 21 July, the news broke: Australian Education Union (AEU) members had once again voted to reject a substandard offer put to us by the state Labor government and our union leaders. It was a brilliant moment, even if at the time I was in class and not with my colleagues. Students eating their lunch wondered why I suddenly looked so thrilled. “The strike’s on!” I shouted, and they erupted into chanting, “Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike!” While we could all agree that another day off school was something to be excited about, the significance of the win goes far deeper. This was the second time that AEU members have been asked to vote on an offer that failed to address our key demands, and the second time members said, “No, thanks, let’s keep fighting”. The strike later that week was an incredible display of resistance and solidarity, tens of thousands walking off the job for the second time this year. Given the AEU has called only one strike in the last thirteen years, it represented a significant achievement. The strong vote in favour of rejecting the second agreement and fighting for more was not only a win against the industrial action-averse union leadership, but also against the Labor government, which has continually undervalued our work and underestimated our resolve. The strong attendance at the rally was a testament to the commitment of teachers to win a better deal than last time. The second no vote wasn’t a given, as there were some improvements on the previous offer. One of the most significant was a halving of time teachers can be required to spend in meetings, from 80 to 40 hours per year—an important win for teachers’ dignity and sanity. The other key improvement was the shifting of the “allowances” for education support staff into their base salary. This means that we have now won an equal percentage pay rise for education support staff and teachers. This is significant, as allowances can be scrapped, but it is much harder to undo a pay rise. This gain acknowledges the crucial work of education support staff, and means we are better placed to fight for more together in future campaigns. It also reflects the wonderful unity and solidarity within the union. The government and union leaders thought they could get away with ripping off one section of the workforce, but teachers and support staff stood together and refused to be divided against each other. These gains prove that the arguments our union leaders used to browbeat us into accepting the last offer were simply nonsense. They told us that we had to vote yes to the first deal because it was the best that we could get. They said the next offer could be worse if we voted no. If we rejected the first offer, they told us, it would be “ripped up” and the whole negotiation process would have to restart and then drag out for months. All now shown to be lies and fearmongering by people who want school staff and students to suck up sub-par conditions so they can claim victory and get a pat on the back from the government. And perhaps preselection for the ALP one day. But despite the gains, there were still major problems with the offer. Some of the key ones were that the pay increase was still well below 35 percent over three years, the government had not agreed to fund fully the agreement so it could actually be implemented and, crucially, it did nothing to address workloads—class sizes, face-to-face teaching time, planning time. This would lock in the current crisis-level conditions being experienced by teachers and students in public schools for another four years. This is why it was so important that the activist group Socialists in Schools threw ourselves into campaigning for a no vote. It was a challenge, not least because the window for voting was very narrow—voting links were sent out Friday night with a deadline of Tuesday afternoon. This allowed little time for teachers collectively to discuss the proposal, or even read it and understand the changes. Nevertheless, Socialists in Schools immediately leapt into action. Members combed through the offer and identified errors and issues, produced social media content, engaged in online discussions, answered common misconceptions and questions, wrote email newsletters, contacted colleagues, shared “vote no” explainers everywhere, and organised urgent sub-branch meetings for Monday where possible. It was a marvel to be part of such a cohered and determined group of socialists in their element. In the end, the second offer was voted down by a narrow margin of 48 percent to 51 percent. Participation in the vote was high, reflecting the widespread engagement by school staff in this campaign. In this context, a vote against a second, improved offer, even by a small margin, is extremely significant. The rejection, importantly, meant the union’s planned strike for 23 July would go ahead. The task then was to bring everyone together to make it as successful as possible. Because there was so little time to prepare and the membership was quite divided on the offer, there were worries and murmurs that the strike would be smaller than the first or not as well observed. On the other hand, at my school, like many others, more people had joined the union since the last action so the potential for disruption was greater. More importantly though, is that the general willingness of members to stand together as a union clearly held strong. On Thursday, the streets of Melbourne were overcome with impassioned educators in a sea of red, as were a number of regional centres. The wonderful tradition of each sub-branch \[school\] bringing their own banner gave an idea of the breadth of support. It was heartening to find schools nearby to your own, and possibly more so the banners from schools and places you hadn’t heard of. As usual, homemade placards and signs were on point, and chanting was loud and energetic. For the first time, Socialists in Schools marched together as a bloc, drawing in members and sub-branches that have taken part in or supported our no campaign. It was an energetic, defiant and loud march. “Dedication doesn’t pay the rent”, we chanted. “Strike, strike for 35 percent.” Socialists in Schools has been pushing for strikes not simply because school staff are entitled to better pay and conditions but because stopping work and shutting schools is the key way we can pressure the government actually to do something about the crisis in public education. If we stay passive and accept whatever the government offers us, the state of our schools can continue to be ignored. Strike action makes it no longer the staff and students’ problem, but society and the government’s. The other reason we argue for strikes is that they are empowering, inspiring events. They give workers a taste of their own power and greater confidence in their cause. Standing in the middle of this rally, watching the beaming faces around you fill the streets with our numbers and the air with our voices, it is impossible to feel anything other than joyful and empowered. We are not greedy, inconsiderate or lazy as politicians, the media and pundits like to suggest. We are fighting for something important: our quality of life, that of our students and that of public education in general. Brendan Laws, a high school teacher member of Socialists in Schools and Victorian Socialists’ candidate against Education Minister Ben Carroll, summed it up, telling *Red Flag,* “Our actions can disrupt the status quo; we are more powerful than we think”. This lesson cannot be learned from books alone; workers need to live it and feel it. This is why it mattered that Socialists in Schools activists did all they could to help defeat the second offer. The next day in the staffroom, swapping stories about our strike day, my colleague commented, “I really needed that”. They were speaking for tens of thousands of teachers as well as the millions of other workers watching. Socialists in Schools will continue to agitate for more strikes, and a better agreement that meets our demands. This campaign has surprised us many times, and the hope and determination of AEU members have been awe-inspiring. Whatever happens next, there is so much to be proud of. It was summed up perfectly by a member of Socialists in Schools well before the results were announced and we experienced our second historic strike and the jubilant determination on the streets: “The era of doing what we’re told is over. Regardless of the vote, resistance is the winner”. ### More strikes on the table after Pilbara drought broken URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/more-strikes-on-the-table-after-pilbara-drought-broken/ Last updated: 2026-07-26T06:13:41.000Z An eight-hour strike on 16 July in Port Hedland, Western Australia, has broken a decades-long drought in the Pilbara iron ore industry. About 100 workers at BHP’s port downed tools, including members of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU), Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, and the Western Mineworkers’ Alliance. It was the first strike at BHP since January 2000, and the first in the region’s iron ore industry since 2008\. It represents a significant milestone towards rebuilding union power in what used to be a stronghold of workers’ militancy. The strikers are staring down unrelenting pressure from the company and its friends in the capitalist press. In the lead-up, the pages of the *West Australian* warned of “chaos” and millions of dollars supposedly to be lost from the state budget. Afterwards, it gloated about how apparently little the strike had really mattered. True, there was still iron ore shipped out during the strike. But it was still a major event. And despite the *West*’s spin that the turnout was “dismal”, ETU state Secretary Adam Woodage confirmed that every electrician walked off the site. Most importantly, the striking workers have taken an important step in what could continue to be a significant campaign of industrial action. Twenty-four-hour strikes are on the table as negotiations at the Fair Work Commission have stalled. And the scope of actions is set to expand, with more workers having voted for protected industrial action. The day after the eight-hour Port Hedland strike, a vote of high-voltage workers at BHP returned 97.5 percent endorsement for work stoppages of up to 24 hours. These workers maintain the power network supplying BHP’s mines, worker accommodation and the town of Newman. This is upping the ante after months of targeted work bans during contract negotiations that lasted more than a year. The key demand is for workers to be employed under a real-rates agreement, rather than on individual contracts. These contracts mean workers are often paid different rates for the same work, and conditions are easier for management to change than if a workforce-wide agreement were in place. BHP wants a “minimum rates” agreement that would essentially keep the status quo in place. The scummy circumstances set up by the bosses have been enabled by the union wasteland that is the Pilbara iron ore industry. It doesn’t have to be this way. Pilbara mine workers were once some of the most militant in the country. Small steps are being taken to rebuild, with union membership on the rise and now, finally, a real campaign of industrial action. Much remains to be seen in how everything plays out. For now, the leaders of the unions involved are following through with strike action, and they’ve held the line in a long period of negotiations. However things unfold, the first patch of rain has broken a drought in one of the most important sectors of the Australian economy. Western Australian Liberal leader Basil Zempilas said in the *West Australian* that 16 July was “the darkest day in industrial relations in WA since the bad old days of the 80s and 90s”. Here’s hoping for many more storm clouds to darken future days for Zempilas and the BHP bosses. ### Hanson is hardening up a far-right base—we need to organise against her URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/hanson-is-hardening-up-a-far-right-base-we-need-to-organise-against-her/ Last updated: 2026-08-08T00:52:02.000Z When Marine Le Pen stepped in to replace her Holocaust-denying father as leader of the French National Front in 2011, it was part of a strategy to cleanse the far-right party of associations with Nazism. Le Pen judged that distancing herself from overt racism was the only practical route to electability. The French dubbed this manoeuvre *dédiabolisation* (“de-demonisation”). Fifteen years later, Australia’s homegrown far right is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Pauline Hanson—a creature who initially slithered out of the Australian conservative tradition as a Liberal candidate in 1996—now openly calls for cultural homogenisation and actively seeks out the company of prominent neo-Nazis. Hanson is making no attempt to sanitise her politics for the sake of broad appeal. On the contrary, she is hardening her political positions, becoming more unapologetically fascistic, and encouraging her supporters to follow. If anything, the more “official” endorsement Hanson receives—by way of National Press Club invitations, [corporate donations](https://redflag.org.au/article/far-right-warriors-for-the-capitalist-class/) and ex-Liberal backing—the more brazenly she pushes her extremist agenda. Political commentators are baffled by her apparent inability to judge what might hurt or help her “broad appeal”, but they misunderstand. She couldn’t care less if One Nation’s positions are unpopular (otherwise she would not promote abortion bans, campaign for fossil fuels and oppose parental leave payments). Hanson is advancing a conscious political argument, aimed at disaffected coalition voters: that Australian conservatism needs to become more confident and more extreme. She deliberately flouts every *cordon sanitaire* that is supposed to separate “acceptable” mainstream conservatism from its mutant far-right offspring. Her aim is to create a hard, right-wing base that can be mobilised when necessary and used to push mainstream political discourse further to the right. It was only last month that off-the-rails *Nine News* presenter Karl Stefanovic was sacked for podcasting with UK fascist street agitator Tommy Robinson—a signal from the Australian media establishment about what they currently consider outside of acceptable discourse. But just weeks later, Hanson is revelling in the opportunity to associate with Robinson, joining him for an hour-long podcast interview and walking tour through London’s multiracial neighbourhoods as well as his home town of Luton. “I don’t feel like I’m in England”, Hanson told Robinson in a video shared on his TikTok channel. “I definitely don’t want Australia to become like this.” Hanson used the podcast as a platform to expand on the theme of “monoculture” introduced in her National Press Club address in June. She explained to Robinson that new arrivals entering Australia today are “different” from European migrants who settled after the Second World War. Those people “really assimilated” and “learned to speak English”, she said. Robinson chimed in that he’d seen “some crazy videos” highlighting levels of Pakistani and Somali (i.e. non-white) migration to Australia. “How have you ended up with ... all of these African problems, with violent Africans?” Hanson answered that it all “started” when the White Australia policy ended in 1973—“then they started bringing in the different migrants”. She then launched into a racialised anti-welfare tirade accusing Muslims in particular of moving to Australia “purely for the welfare system”. The obvious implication is that, for Hanson, white immigrants are okay (as long as they speak only English), and everyone else is not welcome. This is the “monoculture” to which she wants to subject us; this is the hellish “one nation” she seeks to build. Such open white supremacist politics is, for now, still rejected by majority establishment opinion—even Nigel Farage (Reform UK leader) refuses to engage with white nationalists like Robinson, preferring to target foreign “culture” rather than biological race and ethnicity. And Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor likewise criticised Hanson for appearing with Robinson. But Hanson is far from being out on a limb. Rather she joins a growing camp of explicit ethno-nationalists who are cohering on the international right. In Britain, MP Rupert Lowe has split away from Reform to set up Restore Britain—a rival electoral outfit that YouGov [estimates](https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/55157-big-yougov-voter-study-2026-what-do-restore-britain-supporters-see-in-the-party?ref=redflag.org.au) is winning over at least 10 percent of Farage’s voter base. According to anti-fascist research centre Hope Not Hate, Restore [welcomes street-fighting thugs](https://hopenothate.org.uk/2026/07/17/meet-remigration-now-the-pro-ethnic-cleansing-extremists-within-restore-britain/?ref=redflag.org.au) and organised neo-Nazis from groups like Remigration Now, Patriotic Alternative and White Vanguard. These organisations have been central to mobilising the pogromist violence that’s erupted in the UK every summer for the past three years. Each wave of racist rioting has culminated in record-breaking mass street marches led by Robinson. It’s with this supremacist wing of the international far right that Hanson has chosen to align herself. Not because she is a “fool” (as hypocritical *Herald Sun* bigot Andrew Bolt [has alleged](https://www.heraldsun.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=HSWEB%5FWRE170%5Fa%5FGGL&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.heraldsun.com.au%2Fnews%2Fopinion%2Fandrew-bolt%2Fbolt-hanson-admit-you-were-a-fool-for-meeting-with-british-farright-thug-tommy-robinson%2Fnews-story%2Fa5a03acd836cd4c9127bbf5ddf7f94bb&memtype=anonymous&mode=premium&v21=GROUPA-Segment-2-NOSCORE&ref=redflag.org.au)), but because she actively identifies with this politics. Hanson told a Channel Seven *Spotlight* special she's “very much on the same page” as Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe. Asked about his policy of forced removal of up to 2 million people, Hanson replied, “I love it”, and stated she would implement mass deportation plans if One Nation wins government. So far it seems Hanson has judged her razzed-up base correctly: Monday’s [Newspoll](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=TAWEB%5FMRE170%5Fa%5FGGL&dest=https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/one-nation-is-not-dead-yet-labor-and-the-coalition-cannot-write-off-pauline-hanson/news-story/6ed8f3c7d62f6f2db0a80bbc5a86c9b3&memtype=anonymous&mode=premium&v21=LOW-Segment-2-SCORE&V21spcbehaviour=append&ref=redflag.org.au) has One Nation recovering polling numbers to reach 30 percent after her defiant weekend performance in the UK. And whatever peaks and troughs may come through in the polling, Hanson and her base are now clearly established as a force in Australia’s political landscape. Like so much of today’s far right, Hanson is a demon conjured up by capitalism’s mainstream. She’s been able to entrench herself only through a longstanding association with the traditional right, favourable media coverage and the backing of some major capitalists like Rupert Murdoch and Gina Rinehart. But none of this support has required Hanson to tame the more extreme aspects of her program or tone down her racism. In fact, it’s only spurred her on to wilder extremes. Our response must be equally determined, unequivocal and unapologetic. Our response must be to build socialist organisation in opposition to Hanson and the system that spawned her. The Greens, the Labor Party and their associated NGOs will not lead a defiant resistance to Hansonism. They’ve already shown they’re afraid to confront her racism, turning focus instead to cost-of-living measures that will supposedly curb One Nation’s growth. But Albanese’s Labor have administered a regime of below-inflation wage rises alongside massive subsidies to big business. Labor has overseen racial injustice from the island of Nauru to the Pacific visa scheme to Don Dale youth detention centre. Labor might not openly say it, but they adopt and implement policies that depend on racism and enrich the already wealthy at the expense of workers, just like Hanson wants to. Labor’s key parliamentary collaborators, the Greens, seek to maintain the same social order—one in which hierarchy, economic domination and structural inequality are simply made to appear less brutal, not eradicated. But capitalism is a social system that needs to be abolished, not sugar-coated. The answer to Hanson’s dog-eat-dog vision of society dominated by money making with no constraints is one of genuine human dignity and solidarity, a society organised to meet the needs of those who work to sustain it rather than a privileged and powerful minority. In other words, socialism. Individuals, however well intentioned, cannot hope to turn the tide against Hanson and her bourgeois backers. Without political organisation and institutional weight, we can only complain from the sidelines. If Hanson’s rise has proven anything, it is that the impact of a political intervention by a determined and unapologetic minority can make a difference. Socialist Alternative and the Socialist Party want to meet this challenge head on. Every oppositional impulse against Hanson must be drawn into an organised fight in our unions, on our university campuses, on the streets and in elections. Every instinct of defiance must be channelled into an organised resistance movement, animated by an uncompromising hostility to capitalism and a socialist vision of a better world. This means immersing ourselves in the history and theory of the Marxist tradition. It means urgently engaging in practical activity to grow the ranks of convinced and mobilised socialists. In a time of capitalist demons, it means making the only decent choice: become an active socialist. ### Victorian Socialists to run biggest campaign yet URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-socialists-to-launch-its-biggest-campaign-yet/ Last updated: 2026-08-08T03:31:34.000Z The Victorian state election will be held on Saturday, 28 November. To date, most of the coverage of the election has been focused on the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. If, as predicted, the party gains a breakthrough vote—perhaps even enough to strong-arm its way into a coalition government with the Liberals—it will be big news. One Nation would likely cement its spot as a genuine third force in mainstream politics and gain further momentum to take it through to the NSW state election in March 2027 and the next federal election, due by May 2028. In the face of this, the increasingly unpopular Labor government is preparing to wage a classic, US Democrat-style “lesser evil” campaign—arguing that everyone who opposes One Nation must vote for Labor as the least-worst option among prospective parties of government. We’ve seen in country after country, though, that attempts by traditionally dominant capitalist parties to head off the threat posed by the far right by doubling down on the neoliberal status quo have only added fuel to the fire. Parties like Labor are incapable of pushing back the far right for the simple reason that they don’t offer anything that will improve the lives of working-class people and address the anger many feel. What’s needed isn’t more of the same from a now almost 12-year-old Labor government that has failed working-class people and the oppressed in so many ways. What’s needed is a political alternative that’s prepared forthrightly to call out the lies of the far right and point the finger at those who are actually responsible for things like the cost of living and housing crises: billionaires, big banks and property investors, the supermarket giants and other major corporations, and, of course, the major party politicians who have made it their life’s work to serve them. That’s the alternative that Victorian Socialists will provide, and we’ll be doing it on a bigger scale than anything attempted by socialists in Australia for generations. We’re aiming to run [candidates](https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates?ref=redflag.org.au) in all 88 of Victoria’s lower house seats, and a full suite of candidates in the upper house, ensuring that all Victorians have a chance to vote for a socialist alternative to the major parties and the far right. And between now and the election, we’ll be mobilising thousands of party activists across the state—talking to voters on their doorsteps, delivering letters, putting up yard signs and, come November, handing out how-to-vote cards at polling booths. [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/07/VS-launch-advert.jpg)](https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/events/2247?ref=redflag.org.au) There are two sides to our campaign. One will focus on issues we know are driving the deep frustration many feel with today’s economic and political set-up. We’ll be talking about the obscene level of inequality in Victoria and Australia that has been growing year on year and decade on decade, no matter which of the major parties has been in power. We’ll be pointing out that while governments claim not to have enough money to spend on things like public housing, education and health care, the wealth of Australia’s billionaire class balloons to greater extremes every year. We’ll be talking about the failures of neoliberal agenda of cuts and privatisation—subscribed to by Labor, the Coalition, and One Nation alike—that has laid waste to working-class communities across our state. We’ll point to the need for much greater investment in things like public transport, schools, hospitals and social services, and for measures—like bringing the energy system and other essential services back into public hands—that will rein in the relentless, out-of-control drive to private profit at the heart of capitalism and prioritise meeting human needs instead. Our approach to the housing question is typical. As socialists, we don’t believe that meeting people’s need for shelter should be left to the whims of the capitalist market. Our goal is a society in which housing is no longer a commodity, but a universal right. As a step towards that, a centrepiece of our campaign will be the demand for the establishment of a public builder to construct 150,000 new, high-quality, sustainable public housing units over the next ten years. Not only will this ensure those currently experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity have a place to live, it will also put downward pressure on rents and home prices in the private market. The other side of our campaign will be a vision of hope and solidarity—of a society run by and for the working class, one free from exploitation, oppression and the many other afflictions of capitalism today. We know many people feel disillusioned with politics and the prospect of winning anything like the change we need. We hope that our campaign can start to break down that sense of hopelessness, and make it clear that if we had people in parliament who would actually stand up to the billionaires and big corporate interests instead of pandering to their every need, things could be very different. Beyond that, though, we also want to give working-class people a greater sense of their collective power—not only to resist this or that attack by the bosses or the government, but to topple their entire rotten system and build a better, fairer society in its place. We got a glimpse of that power on 23 July, when [tens of thousands](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbHbsAsvB0d/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==) of Victorian public-school teachers and education support staff filled the streets in Melbourne’s CBD, striking for the second time this year. Our goal isn’t *just* to see socialists elected to parliament, but to spread the spirit of resistance we’ve seen from the teachers into every workplace, school, university and working-class community. We’re confident our campaign will resonate with many people. Around the world, increasing numbers are realising that the multiplying and deepening crises we see around us—of inequality, the growth of the far right and outright fascist politics, genocide and the threat of global war, environmental destruction, or the epidemic of social dislocation, despair and mental ill health—aren’t unconnected, but are all the product of the destructive dynamics of capitalism. Increasing numbers are voting for and joining parties like Victorian Socialists that want to see a radical break with the rotten status quo. No doubt One Nation’s performance will be a major story on election night. But if we can get the kind of result we think we’re capable of—one that’s impossible for election analysts and media commentators to ignore—it will give a major boost to our movement and our party not only in Victoria, but across Australia. And amid an otherwise bleak political landscape in which the far right is increasingly ascendant, this would be a small but significant win. --- *James Plested is the Victorian Socialists communications director. The party’s* [*election campaign launch*](https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/events/2247?ref=redflag.org.au) *will take place on Saturday, 1 August, from 4pm at the Aboriginal Advancement League in Thornbury.* ### ‘A crack of light through the door’: founding the Australian Socialist Party URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/a-crack-of-light-through-the-door-founding-the-australian-socialist-party/ Last updated: 2026-08-08T00:51:44.000Z On Saturday, 18 July, in the ballroom of the InterContinental Hotel in Greenwich, London, Pauline Hanson took the stage. She was speaking to the British wing of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and her speech—titled “The Australian Fight Back”—hit all the hot button issues of the global far right. She took aim at migration, Muslims, environmental regulation and trans people, and then wrapped it in a bow and called it “the fight back against woke”. Among the attendees at the conference was Australia’s richest person and prominent One Nation Party backer, Gina Rinehart. Over the same weekend, on the other side of the world, 170 or so delegates—elected from among the more than 5,000 members of the newly formed Australian Socialist Party—gathered at venues in cities across Australia (linked via Zoom) for a very different conference. This conference did not play host to billionaires like Rinehart and their pocket politicians. It declared war on them. Socialist teachers, nurses, IT workers, electricians, train drivers, students, writers and activists spent the weekend formalising and giving flesh to a project of building a more serious, mass socialist force in Australian political life. In one of the key motions passed at the conference, “Building a Socialist Party in Australia”, delegates acknowledged that “Australian capitalism—always built on inequality, exploitation and privilege—is getting worse. While workers struggle with rising rents, mortgages, food prices and insecure work, the wealth of the rich continues to soar”. Delegates recognised that, to justify and sustain this inequality, 21st-century capitalism is increasingly reliant on authoritarianism. Far-right parties are becoming the preferred choice of the unelected billionaires who control much of our world. What’s more, the conference recognised that this authoritarian posture fits well with intensifying imperial tensions. The preamble to the Building a Socialist Party in Australia motion also noted: > “The threat of world war is growing. The Australian ruling class is enthusiastically joining the march to war. Military spending continues to rise while anti-protest laws and attacks on democratic rights expand. Australian politicians of all stripes wrap themselves in nationalism and patriotism, fuelling the racism that comes with it.” This motion was passed just hours after another barrage of American missiles rained down on Iran, killing twelve people. In the face of such imperial barbarism, in which all mainstream Australian political parties are complicit, the conference proclaimed that capitalism “must be challenged and ultimately overturned”. This anti-capitalist core was affirmed by delegates as central to the Australian Socialist Party’s theory and practice. The party’s founding documents, discussed and approved at the conference, pull no punches and are designed to ground and guide an organisation utterly uninterested in apologia for the system. The perspectives discussed at the conference were also undeniably ambitious. It proclaimed the necessity of building a party filled with socialists who are active in their workplaces and trade unions, high schools and universities, and in their local communities. We want a party whose members can contest politics in every sphere. The nineteenth, twentieths and (early) 21st centuries have been filled with socialist organisations that assumed that the correctness of their ideas would somehow carry the day. Picture here the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier who, in the wake of his theoretical revelations, was said (perhaps apocryphally) to have stood every day in front of his house at noon to wait for followers to arrive. He did this for ten years without anyone taking up his offer. In contrast, the motions at the founding conference of the Australian Socialist Party urged members to leave the comfort of their own doorsteps, lounge rooms or keyboards. The conference indicated a desire to inspire workers, young people, migrants and students to commit their time and energy to building a real fight back against the bosses and the ALP government—on the streets, in our workplaces and in elections. Delegates weren’t light minded about such a project. As the discussion about challenging the far right noted, One Nation now, reportedly, has more than 50,000 members. Our side has a long path to climb. Nevertheless, we are putting one foot in front of the other—doing what’s necessary to continue building our movement and our party, however unglamorous and mundane that work might at times be. We are starting from a low base. Many working-class people are cynical about politics, even if they are angry about the state of the world. The conference nevertheless concluded that there is space for our movement to go forward—a crack of light through the door that we must push on and widen with all the energy at our disposal. On Saturday, 1 August, the Victorian Socialists will officially launch their campaign for this November’s state election. It is shaping up to be the biggest socialist campaign in an Australian election for many, many decades. In the coming months, VS members will be out and about across Melbourne and many parts of regional Victoria—knocking on doors, raising people’s expectations, encouraging defiance of the current order and building socialism. The party is confident that, come election night on 28 November, it will have achieved the kind of result that will be impossible to ignore—providing another boost to our party as we continue to establish ourselves and grow as a nationwide organisation. The conference concluded with words from the two newly elected national conveners of the Party, Rebecca Barrigos and Omar Hassan. “It isn’t up and away”, Barrigos said, “but our class has never run away from the hard things. Workers have met the horrors of capitalism with resistance and socialists have organised this fight. And it is a challenge we are all in for, and better equipped to fight, now we have our Australian Socialist Party”. --- *Vashti Fox is secretary of the WA Socialists.* ### Royal commission: Israel supporters rationalise child killings, denounce critics as racist URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/royal-commission-israel-supporters-rationalise-child-killings-denounce-critics-as-racist/ Last updated: 2026-07-21T23:59:57.000Z The universities block of the royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion is over. One of the key throughlines in the testimonies of students, lobby groups and vice-chancellors was that criticism of Israel is antisemitic. The first day ended with a witness claiming that the murder of Palestinian children was a matter of “tough decisions”. Not a single Palestinian was given the opportunity to respond, and only two supporters of Palestine were allowed to speak: Yasmine Johnson and Dennis Altman. Both were allowed to testify only because they are Jewish. The argument of many witnesses was straightforward: because most Jewish people are Zionists (supporters of the state of Israel), Zionism itself is a key part of Jewish identity, rather than simply a political ideology. Indeed, Commissioner Virginia Bell interrupted proceedings at one point to query Students for Palestine representative Yasmine Johnson’s Jewish identity, asking three questions: > “Did you grow up in a family that identified strongly as Jewish?” > “Do you have relatives who live in Israel?” > “When you were growing up, did you have an attachment to Israel in the sense of feeling some strong identification with Israel as the nation state of the Jews?” University of New South Wales professor Joseph Keller, representing the Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism, argued that all opposition to Zionism from “out groups” is antisemitic. He labelled this “antizionism-without-a-hyphen”. “Anti-Zionism-with-a-hyphen”, on the other hand, he said, could be part of a legitimate discussion between Jewish people, as it arose from the history of Jewish debates about Zionism. Asked by Australia Palestine Advocacy Network counsel Rachel Doyle SC, “How does one detect the presence or absence of a hyphen in the spoken word?”, Keller appeared first not to hear, and then not to understand the question. Yet Keller’s admission that Jewish people have long debated Zionism confirms that it is an ideological current. But in a sense, that’s irrelevant. Zionism is no longer a fringe ideology, as it was until the 1940s. It is embodied in a real state with a nuclear arsenal. Today, Zionism forces people from their homes, burns down olive trees, arbitrarily imprisons children and kills indiscriminately. Keller asserted that if a law professor were to teach students about a United Nations report into the killing of Palestinian children, they risk being antisemitic if they don’t also teach “other viewpoints” about said report. When pressed by commissioner Bell about whether criticising Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, parts of Gaza and East Jerusalem met his definition of antisemitism, Keller responded: “It depends ... for example, are they considering or at least listening to what are the Jewish concerns about that, I mean Jews in Israel?” Liat, a student at the Australian National University, told the commission that she felt vilified when a professor raised Israel’s bombing of Palestinians: > “He said, ‘Well, Israel’s dropping bombs on heads”. Um, and then I said, ‘That’s not particularly relevant’, you know, as a Jewish Australian and as an Australian Israeli, like, I don’t think that’s necessarily the appropriate thing to say.” A former UNSW tutor, using the pseudonym ACJ, told the commission: “Anti-Zionism has nothing to do with Israel but is just about bullying—just about bullying Australian Jews”. Andy Smidt, a former University of Sydney staff member, was shown a photograph she had taken of graffiti at the campus and submitted as evidence to the commission. At the top of the image was the phrase “from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea”. Smidt had captioned that section, “This is reasonably interpreted by Jewish students and staff as a call for Jewish genocide”. Below, red handprints were accompanied by the text, “Mark Scott, your hands are red”. She captioned this: “bloody handprints which represent the lynching of IDF reservists in Ramallah in October 2000”. And despite confirming that there was not a single complaint of antisemitism arising from the Gaza solidarity encampment, University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Mark Scott gave credence to the idea that it was anti-Jewish. “I still felt the risk of the encampment blowing up by forcibly ending it”, he said. “Police in riot gear taking students away could have seen an encampment 10 times the size the day after. But I can see that our Jewish students and staff paid a price for that.” Counsel representing the Australasian Union of Jewish Students, the Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism and other pro-Israel groups repeatedly tried to push vice-chancellors to go even further in equating opposition to Israel with antisemitism, inventing hypothetical situations and invoking “psychosocial safety”. Together, the pro-Israel groups, students and staff carried out a concerted strategy of portraying the oppressed and their supporters as racist bullies. Israel’s ardent defenders choose this method because they know that their opponents are those with empathy and conscience. They’ve decided to portray us as what we hate. In the end, Keller was the most honest. Doyle brought up a sticker showing the Israeli flag with the text “babykillers”, which had been included in Keller’s submission as evidence of antisemitism. Doyle asked him if it might refer to the deaths of children in Gaza. > Keller: “That’s possible, except for the fact that when you say we stand with killing babies, what you’re basically saying is that we, the Israeli nation, which is half the Jewish population, stand with the idea that we are killing babies in the sense that we approve of it, that we agree with it, which I don’t think, which I think does not capture the real tough decisions that people are actually facing when it comes to what it means to be engaged in a conflict and dealing with harm.” > Doyle: “Sorry, what tough decisions?” > Keller: “I’m saying the tough decisions that happen, that, that happen when it comes to how do you respond…” > Doyle: “Tough decisions made by whom?” > Keller: “What was that?” > Doyle: “Tough decisions made by whom?” > Keller: “Tough decisions by the Israeli government.” Rationalising the mass killing of children, in Keller’s world, seems to be perfectly reasonable. To oppose it, on the other hand, is racist. Only antisemites could point out that five-year-old Palestinian Hind Rajab was a victim of Zionism when the Israeli military killed her entire family by shooting into their van 355 times. The commission exists to listen to people like Keller—not Jewish people in general, but men and women willing to call the mass killing of Palestinian children a “tough decision”. As I previously [wrote](https://redflag.org.au/article/australias-royal-commission-is-a-show-trial/), the commission was always going to be a show trial of the Palestine movement. In truth, it’s become something more. Because in attempting to put us on trial, Israel’s fanatics have exposed themselves to all those with a conscience. ### A Jewish socialist responds to the Murdoch press URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/a-jewish-socialist-responds-to-murdoch/ Last updated: 2026-08-08T00:51:35.000Z Last week, I appeared at the royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion to defend the Palestine solidarity movement against the slanders of the Australian political establishment and an organised and ideologically hardened bloc of pro-Israel students and staff. I did so because our movement has been the only decent human response to the barbarism being carried out by Israel in Gaza. I wanted to defend the 300,000 people who marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the tens of thousands of students who rallied, camped and organised on campuses around the country, and the millions internationally who have refused to stay silent while Palestinians endure genocide. During the commission, witnesses—almost invariably supporters of Israel—have downplayed the scale of death in Gaza, suggested that Palestinian flags, keffiyehs and even Arabic script constitute antisemitism, and repeatedly blurred distinctions between Jewish identity, political Zionism and the actions of the Israeli state. The *Herald Sun* and the *Australian* newspapers, among others, have uncritically reported the testimonies of the pro-Israel bloc, while repeating their lies and slanders against the anti-war movement. They have also distorted the incredibly limited testimony challenging the slanders. [According to a *Herald Sun* headline](https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/activist-yasmine-johnson-tells-royal-commission-the-resistance-of-people-against-colonisation-has-always-involved-elements-of-both-mass-nonviolence-and-also-violent-resistance/news-story/a6fc0c35beb42a88b6286502f657635f?ref=redflag.org.au), for example, I described the “murder of Israelis” as “acts of mass resistance”. It’s a remarkable distortion. What I said was something very different, and historically obvious: people living under colonial rule and other forms of oppressive tyranny, and facing the sort of mass destruction we see in Palestine, have invariably resisted in many different ways. Some movements have relied primarily on strikes, protests and civil disobedience. Many have also included armed resistance. So I stand by the quote that the *Australian* presented as a scandal: “I refuse to hold movements for the justice of the oppressed to a standard that says there can never be any violence”. Were the Jews who were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto wrong to resist the Nazis by whatever means they had at their disposal? I say they were right to resist. The *Herald Sun* and *Australian* editorialists, by contrast, would probably have denounced resistance leader Marek Edelman and his comrades as a bloodthirsty, human-shield using terrorists on reading [his testimony of killing German soldiers](https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Marek-Edelman-The-Ghetto-Fights.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) and proudly declaring that “German blood flooded the street” in Warsaw. Take the following recollection as indicative of the mindset of the ghetto partisans: > “Now something unprecedented took place. Three \[German\] officers with lowered machine pistols appeared. They wore white rosettes in their buttonholes-emissaries. They desired to negotiate with the Area Command. They proposed a 15-minute truce to remove the dead and the wounded ... Firing was our answer. Every house remained a hostile fortress. From every storey, from every window bullets sought hated German helmets, hated German hearts.” Was it not right for Indians to fight against British colonial rule? Does the fact that they used armed resistance invalidate the justice of their cause? Karl Marx, [in an 1857 *New York Daily Tribune*](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/09/16.htm?ref=redflag.org.au) article about the Lucknow uprising, noted that the “outrages committed by the revolted Sepoys in India \[sepoys were Indian soldiers recruited to the British military\] are indeed appalling, hideous, ineffable”. But he went on to say that the conduct of the uprising was of the sort that “respectable England used to applaud” when carried out by the forces it supported. He continued: > “However infamous the conduct of the Sepoys, it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India, not only during the epoch of the foundation of her Eastern Empire, but even during the last ten years of a long-settled rule. To characterize that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human history like retribution: and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself.” Well may we apply this observation to Israel and Palestine, where Zionist barbarity over decades has produced, on a remarkably small number of occassions given the sustained assault the Palestinians have endured since 1948, a reflex aimed at retribution. And what about Indigenous people in our own country? Did they not have the right to oppose the massacres carried out by colonial forces? Is it any wonder that the names Pemulwuy, Musquito, Windradyne and Jandamarra are celebrated as heroes to this day for their uncompromising resistance? Recognising all this is not the same as endorsing every act committed in the name of resistance. And it is certainly not the same as advocating violence in Australia. The Palestine solidarity movement has always been a mass, non-violent movement. Hundreds of thousands of people have marched, protested and spoken out. That is the movement I’ve been proud to be a part of. But I refuse to accept that Palestinians living under military occupation should be judged according to moral standards that defenders of Israeli state violence never apply to Israel itself, even as it ethnically cleanses hundreds of thousands of people. Even as it commits the “crime of crimes”: genocide. In some ways, though, this is giving too much credit to the *Sun Herald*. How seriously should we take the cynical slanders from the Murdoch press, which has backed every major war of Western aggression? As Marx noted of British hypocrisy in 1857, violence is acceptable if it reinforces the unjust brutality of capitalism—in particular, its Western iteration. For example, on 15 March 2003, under the headline, “Boom, boom, boom”, Sydney’s *Daily Telegraph* published a feature cheering on the upcoming invasion of Iraq. It began: > “The only thing missing when the bombs start dropping over Iraq will be the thumping crescendo of the 1812 Overture. Pyotr Tchaikovsky could not have asked for a more spectacular light and sound show to accompany his legendary celebration of military might.” Talk about a celebration of violence. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were condemned to death for the sake of power and profit. But for the *Telegraph*, the only thing missing was an orchestra to accompany the slaughter. These same publications have provided a platform for Andrew Bolt to deny the Stolen Generations (he has [claimed that](https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/andrew-bolts-claim-stolen-generations-a-myth-spurs-press-council-complaint-20150801-gipikh.html?ref=redflag.org.au) “no one to this day has been able to name even 10 of the children allegedly stolen”) and to dismiss the violence of Australia’s colonial history by [accusing historians](https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/andrew-bolt-why-does-the-truth-terrify-our-historians/news-story/14cca35e261106cf64fc8d9c800b456e?ref=redflag.org.au) of inventing this country’s genocidal past. When violence reinforces empire, it is presented as perhaps regrettable but necessary. When oppressed people resist, it becomes evidence that their entire cause is illegitimate. That double standard also shaped much of my questioning before the royal commission. I was repeatedly asked whether I would condemn Palestinian violence. But no comparable scrutiny was directed towards those who have spent the past two and a half years defending or excusing Israel’s assault on Gaza. Supporters of Israel have not been asked to justify or defend the bombing of refugee camps, the destruction of hospitals, the starvation of civilians or the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Those horrors disappear into the passive language of “conflict”. That asymmetry is political. State violence carried out by a Western ally, in the eyes of our political and media establishment, begins from a position of legitimacy, while violence by the oppressed requires endless condemnation before their grievances can even be discussed. Palestinians are expected to continually prove their humanity—and their anti-racist credentials—while they are bombed to smithereens. Those backing one of the most destructive military campaigns of the 21st century rarely face equivalent scrutiny. But framing the debate simply around violence misses the point about how we can win a liberated Palestine. As a socialist, my support for Palestinian liberation is a principled stand against oppression, regardless of whether I support particular political organisations inside Palestine, such as Hamas. I want to see a Palestine free from occupation, siege and apartheid. I am a revolutionary; I believe that freedom can only be won by people liberating themselves. History shows that lasting freedom is won only when millions of workers and oppressed people organise collectively to overthrow the systems that sustain exploitation and oppression. That means solidarity between Palestinians and workers across the Middle East against Israeli apartheid, its Western backers, and the authoritarian Arab regimes that have betrayed the Palestinian cause as they collaborate with imperialist powers. That vision is rarely discussed because it doesn’t fit the simplistic framework promoted by politicians and the Murdoch press. It’s much easier to reduce every conversation about Palestinian liberation to an argument about terrorism. The socialist movement doesn’t rest on an uncritical embrace of violence. It has always been about building a mass political movement to end it. The only lasting solution lies not in endless cycles of military domination and retaliation, but in a struggle from below capable of dismantling both apartheid and the broader system of imperialism that has sustained it for generations. ### Melbourne vice-chancellor undermines his own attempt to slander the Palestine movement URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/melbourne-vice-chancellor-undermines-his-own-attempt-to-slander-the-palestine-movement/ Last updated: 2026-07-26T06:15:18.000Z There isn’t much space set aside for the truth at the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. You have to really look for it, buried in day after day of spurious testimony by prejudiced witnesses who have little interest in the facts. Sometimes a little bit of the truth slips out, though, as in this week’s testimony from the acting University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Glyn Davis. Davis’s own account inadvertently undermined the widespread establishment narrative that Palestine solidarity activism unleashed a torrent of antisemitism on the campuses. The University of Melbourne Gaza solidarity encampment in 2024 was one of the most high-profile of the national wave of encampments that provoked a backlash from the political right and widespread media hysteria. At the time, May 2024, deputy vice-chancellor Michael Wesley, who was tasked with addressing the media and issuing threats of discipline to the protesters, told Radio National that “there is antisemitism on campus”. He condemned the student occupation of the Arts West building as “intimidating” and said he could “only imagine how our students, particularly our Jewish students, would feel having to make their way to class through that”. University Council member Mark Leibler went further in an *Australian* article the same month, demanding recognition of a “crisis” of antisemitism on the campus. Yet on Wednesday, under questioning by Rachel Doyle, counsel for the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, Davis confirmed that not a single disciplinary process against any student Palestine solidarity activist related to the university’s anti-racism policy. When Davis was asked which university rules protesters had broken, the following exchange took place: > Davis: “They are student behaviour questions and they’re about heckling and harassment and treatment of individuals. They’re not necessarily antisemitic and they’re not claimed to be antisemitic”. > Doyle: “Indeed you point to no instance, wherein either the encampment on the South Lawn or the protest activity and encampment in the Arts West Building was found to have constituted a breach of the university’s racism policy. There’s no such instance is there?” > Davis: (After some waffling) “I’m not aware of any complaint of antisemitism in either event”. So the biggest issues stemming from the encampment were related to behaviour like “heckling”. This is proof that the accusations of antisemitism levelled at the encampment had no factual basis. They were attempts to smear and marginalise critics of university and government policy, rather than protect students from racism. Those who haven’t had the time to watch the royal commission’s proceedings have likely missed this entirely, because the media has failed in its basic duty to hold the process to account and subject its underlying framework and claims to scrutiny. No mainstream media outlet is pointing out the massive discrepancy between the claims levelled at the encampment and the facts. Media coverage of Davis’s testimony instead uncritically echoed the line that university vice-chancellors endangered students by showing an indulgent attitude toward rabid protesters. So the *Australian* somewhat predictably reports: “VCs in the dock: unis caught napping when hate came to campus”. But short of indulging protestors, Davis explained in his testimony the lengths the university has gone to suppress legitimate opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza. This included using Wi-Fi services to geo-locate and identify student protesters so that they could be hauled in front of disciplinary committees. Davis admitted as much when the Victorian information commissioner found that the university broke privacy laws. But the university simply modified its terms of use in order to continue the practice. Rachel Doyle’s questioning also unearthed new university guidelines that empower campus security to cover and remove student posters deemed “offensive”. Yet the definition of what constitutes “offensive” material is apparently confidential. So students aren’t allowed to know what they can and can’t say or advertise. While Davis conceded these damning facts, he still did as much as possible to stick to the script. Davis maintained that activists have held the Jewish community collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel: “I’ve found ... distressing the conflation of the Jewish identity with the actions of a nation state”. Some nerve. While the Palestine solidarity movement has worked relentlessly to explain the distinctions between Judaism, Zionism and the state of Israel, institutions and individuals committed to defending Israel have worked just as hard to conflate the three. The University of Melbourne was the first in the country to adopt the discredited [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6394/), which has been criticised by more than [100 human rights groups ](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/apr/24/un-ihra-antisemitism-definition-israel-criticism?ref=redflag.org.au)for blurring the line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. And the entire royal commission has been based on the outrageous premise that identification with the state of Israel is such an inextricable element of Jewish identity that an attack on Israel effectively constitutes an attack on Jews. Like almost every witness called before the royal commission, Davis didn’t really have anything to say about the plight of the starved, bombarded and besieged Palestinian population. Nor did he have much time for introspection about the reasons hundreds upon hundreds of Melbourne University students might have felt compelled to face the threats of slander, academic discipline and arrests to register their opposition to university policy and the federal government. But he does have some regrets. Davis bemoaned the fact that the university lacked its own police force and was unable to convince Victoria Police to take more aggressive action to clear out student protesters. Perhaps he would like to see the importation of the “American model” of university anti-racism, where police keep the community safe from controversial ideas, with [extreme prejudice](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/israel-gaza-protests-columbia-students-police-violence.html?ref=redflag.org.au). ### FROM THE VAULT: Zionist group admits making false accusation of antisemitism against student activists URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/from-the-vault-zionist-group-admits-making-false-accusation-of-antisemitism-against-student-activists/ Last updated: 2026-07-24T05:55:03.000Z *The following article was first published on 4 April 2016\. The author, D. Taylor, is a Jewish socialist and at the time was leading Palestine solidarity activism at Monash University in Melbourne. We republish it today not only to show that there has always been a campaign of lies and slander, on the part of supporters of Israel, calling Palestine solidarity activists, even Jewish activists, antisemites. As Taylor wrote ten years ago:* > \[A\]llegations of this nature, fabricated and promoted by “respectable” Zionist groups, are increasingly common. They are often repeated freely in the mainstream press and used as the basis for discipline on and off campus. The consequences for pro-Palestine activists can be devastating, which is precisely why the claims are made. *We republish it because the lies and slanders have become more brazen and unhinged as more and more people, particularly young people, have come to realise the true nature of the Israeli state and its crimes against the Palestinians.* --- **4 APRIL 2016**—Australia’s largest pro-Israel student group has been caught making false allegations of antisemitism. It is not the first time that the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) has done so. But, for once, it was caught lying and forced to issue a public retraction and apology to Socialist Alternative. AUJS is a large and well-connected Zionist student group. It has a goal of promoting a “positive image of Israel on campus” and a long history of slandering Palestine solidarity activists and the left. In 2014, after Israel’s killing of 2,000 Palestinians led to a brief revival of Palestine solidarity activism, AUJS reacted with fury. Its primary target was the Socialist Alternative club at Monash University in Melbourne, which was subjected to a public campaign of vilification and an attempt to deregister the club for purported anti-Jewish discrimination. This kind of activity is their bread and butter, and the most reliable way to damage the reputation of Palestine solidarity activists. This was despite the fact that a number of Jewish students (including me) are members of the club. The claims of antisemitism were proven to be false, but the club was deregistered anyway. Perhaps this success encouraged AUJS to make more false claims this year, complete with invented photo “evidence”. Or perhaps it was the fact that many former members of the deregistered socialist club continued to engage in public activism on campus in spite of AUJS’ attempts at slander and intimidation. The latest episode began on 8 March, the day that Benny Gantz, a former Israeli general, was due to speak in Melbourne. A small protest had been planned for that evening – although it was not being promoted or discussed by activists at Monash University at all. Despite this, a steady stream of students sought out members of Socialist Alternative and repeatedly asked if they had any leaflets promoting the demonstration. Given that these students gave no indication that they were interested in activism, and actually seemed hostile, it was hard to explain why they were approaching us. The mystery was solved the next day. AUJS issued a public statement (now deleted) claiming that members of Socialist Alternative had been distributing antisemitic literature. It even produced a photograph of the leaflet that had allegedly been distributed. The statement expressed deep concern at these troubling developments, and claimed that AUJS was arranging meetings with a number of university vice-chancellors. It’s not unusual for Zionist organisations to make misleading claims of antisemitism. Indeed, this kind of activity is their bread and butter, and the most reliable way to damage the reputation of Palestine solidarity activists. False testimony is common. But false photographs seemed a new level of dishonesty. Having failed to find evidence of Palestine solidarity activism at Monash, AUJS now had to fabricate it, to give itself something to denounce. But the well-oiled communications machine of AUJS, which allowed it to issue a public statement and press releases, and make contact with every university vice-chancellor in the phone book, seemed to seize up when it came to dealing with socialists. The group never bothered to contact us, and our repeated attempts to get in touch with its leadership went unanswered for days. So we contacted Monash University management and encouraged them to ask AUJS for evidence – that did the trick. Shortly after the university asked for proof, AUJS issued an unprecedented public retraction and apology, finally admitting that the entire story was an invention. AUJS now claims to be “reviewing processes for the reporting of incidents”. We hope the review is useful. From my perspective, having dealt with AUJS over a number of these “incidents”, my first suggested reform would be to stop lying. I wrote to AUJS, asking what the current “processes” are, whether any effort was made to check whether its claims were true prior to going public and why no contact was ever made with the people being accused. National chairperson Michael Fisher did not respond to these questions, although he did assure me that AUJS has “taken steps to ensure the chain of reporting of incidents of antisemitism is streamlined”. This time, AUJS was caught and forced to back down. But allegations of this nature, fabricated and promoted by “respectable” Zionist groups, are increasingly common. They are often repeated freely in the mainstream press and used as the basis for discipline on and off campus. The consequences for pro-Palestine activists can be devastating, which is precisely why the claims are made. This “incident” ended as a farce, not a tragedy. But it serves as proof of just how far campus Zionists are willing to go to smear the reputations of their political opponents. ### Brisbane protest stands against One Nation URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/brisbane-protest-stands-against-one-nation/ Last updated: 2026-07-15T03:56:24.000Z Loud cries of “Racist, sexist, anti-queer, Hanson is not welcome here!” resounded through the streets as more than 1,000 people marched against One Nation in Brisbane last weekend. It was the first protest in Brisbane against Pauline Hanson since her recent rise in the polls. It was called in response to a transphobic rally supported by One Nation, at which Hanson was scheduled to speak—although she was replaced by her Senate colleague Malcolm Roberts. It was later reported that Hanson had travelled to the UK to schmooze with prominent fascist Tommy Robinson. The protest was dominated by young people. High schoolers took to the streets alongside young workers. People came out of shops along the way to wave and show their support for the protest, some joining in. Many trans flags were waved throughout the crowd. So too were Palestinian flags and banners of the socialist left. This was not just a protest for trans rights; it was a protest against the inhumanity of the right and against all kinds of bigotry. The police stopped us from getting close to the far-right demonstration, which attracted maybe 100 people. The protest was called by the Campaign against Racism and Fascism Brisbane and Queer Solidarity Magandjin (an Indigenous name for the Brisbane area). It was the biggest anti-fascist rally in Brisbane for years, and possibly the largest demonstration for trans rights ever to be held in Brisbane. Queensland Socialists Secretary Rebecca Barrigos, addressing the demonstration, said: > “They’ve got 70,000 people who say they want to march for reaction. We need to build a force many sizes larger than that 70,000 people that can funnel all of our power, our collective power as workers, students, and the oppressed, into a fightback against the whole system. We gotta smash capitalism—no one’s coming to save us.” The protest was vibrant and militant, and a wonderful step in the fight against One Nation. ### Fighting One Nation’s far-right insurgency URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/fighting-one-nations-far-right-insurgency/ Last updated: 2026-07-20T22:27:53.000Z The latest episode of Red Flag Radio is all about the breakthrough of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. Chloe and Emma discuss why this far-right party has started polling upwards of 30 percent not by moderating their politics but by doubling down on all the fascist talking points of the global far right. Hanson’s Press Club speech was revealing: she railed against workers, migrants, trans people, mothers on parental leave and climate science. She called for Australia to become a “monoculture” and to “dig baby dig”. They discuss some of the debates about how to respond to the rise of Hanson, from calls to understand the “legitimate concerns” of One Nation voters, to supporting the Labor Party come election time. They also talk about how the socialist left can get organised to take on Hanson and the system that created her. ### Read more [One Nation needs to be fought, not just analysedIt’s one thing to talk about resisting the far right. But what does it mean in practice?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/icon/R_logo_v3-afd717d9-4659-4cd1-af5f-026d5db966d2.svg)Red FlagEditors![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/thumbnail/Hanson-2c23a924-9dd5-4ea0-a4db-685198994fe1.png)](https://redflag.org.au/article/one-nation-needs-to-be-fought-not-just-analysed/?ref=red-flag-newsletter) [Hanson’s shadow looms over Victoria: a serious socialist campaign can galvanise a fightbackA key question in the November election will not be who wins, but how many people the socialist movement can organise.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/icon/R_logo_v3-72113019-24b6-48a0-9a2a-8a7538bb226c.svg)Red FlagOmar Hassan![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/thumbnail/Hanson-4968cad7-c546-4bbd-83f1-265f43c92f60.png)](https://redflag.org.au/article/hansons-shadow-looms-over-victoria-a-serious-socialist-campaign-can-galvanise-a-fightback/?ref=red-flag-newsletter) ### Get in touch We would love to hear from you! Shoot us an email at [redflagradiopodcast@gmail.com](mailto:redflagradiopodcast@gmail.com) if you have feedback or suggested topics, debates or guests you’d like us to feature. ### Help us out If you like what we do and want to help us get more socialist podcasting in your ears, please become a [Patreon](https://redflag.org.au/r/6a77ad6e?m=b52ee736-0686-4549-86be-3d4f0daf9acd)! ### Pilbara workers prepare to shut down BHP ports in historic strike URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/pilbara-workers-prepare-to-shut-down-bhp-ports-in-historic-strike/ Last updated: 2026-07-15T01:52:56.000Z Workers at BHP’s ports in Port Hedland, in Western Australia’s Pilbara, will down tools for eight hours tomorrow. Around 200 electricians, boilermakers, fitters and shiploaders will strike from 2pm to 10pm. Iron ore will not be loaded. The ports will grind to a halt. They will reportedly cost the largest company on the Australian stock exchange $50 million. If this kind of strike action is unusual today, it’s even rarer in the Pilbara iron ore industry. This will be the first legal industrial action since Rio Tinto train drivers struck a handful of times in 2008\. At BHP, the last time was a series of short strikes in December 1999 and January 2000, after union power had been smashed and individual contracts introduced. Throughout the Pilbara iron ore industry, most workers are on above-award individual contracts (BHP and Rio Tinto train drivers are an exception). This means that their regular pay, yearly increase and any bonuses are pretty much completely determined by management. Two workers working side by side can be paid differently—to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a year. Management can also—and does—change crucial conditions, such as sick leave or rosters, as it sees fit. According to unions, BHP is proposing a “minimum rates agreement” that keeps these fundamentals intact. Essentially, this would be an enterprise agreement in name only. Electrical Trades’ Union Western Australia Secretary Adam Woodage told a press conference last week that union members have “had enough of the glacial speed that BHP are moving in negotiations. We do not need a minimum rates agreement for Port Hedland”. “We want a real rates agreement, reflecting real terms and conditions, and reflecting what they currently get paid there today. We’re not going to accept anything less”, he continued. When the votes in favour of going on strike came in, they were overwhelming: 90 percent “yes” from Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union members, 97 percent from Western Mineworkers’ Alliance members (an alliance of the Australian Workers’ Union and Mining and Energy Union) and 100 percent from Electrical Trades’ Union members. Port Hedland is the largest bulk export port in the world, and a few hundred workers can bring one of the world’s largest mining companies to a standstill. As the ETU wrote on social media: > “The profits aren’t made in the boardroom. They are made on the ground by the electricians, maintainers and operators who keep the ports running every single day. If these workers don’t turn up, the shiploaders stop and the iron ore stays grounded. Without workers, BHP has nothing.” The Pilbara mines were not always so tightly controlled by capitalist managers. The region was once a bastion of militant unionism. Throughout the 1970s, workers struck for an average of twelve days a year. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, workers unionised and civilised an industry notorious for “wild west” safety standards, low pay, low hours and terrible food. Union organisers travelled up from Perth for weeks at a time to sign up members. All manner of safety measures, such as strict isolation lock procedures when machinery was being maintained, were opposed by bosses but won through strikes. Through collective action, workers in the 1970s and 1980s won decent pay and conditions and solid safety standards. In the process, they wrested power back from bosses. This power was exercised from the grassroots—union mass meetings decided whether to strike and for how long. Site structures were strong. Combined union committees coordinated between the different unions, and membership was 100 percent of the workforce. Unions influenced staffing levels, overtime and safety. The bosses hated it. Company towns near mine sites were turned into union towns, with good facilities and a sense of community. The eight-hour day—not a twelve-hour day—was the standard. Many workers played sport every night of the week. The contrast to the fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) work so common today couldn’t be greater. This work is characterised by often long periods away from home, and high rates of mental distress. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the companies fought back. In the Robe River dispute of 1986-87, the dominant union strategy against a vicious anti-union offensive was to avoid strike action at all costs, relying instead on industrial tribunals and Labor governments. This failed dismally. Union power was smashed. Mount Newman Mining (part of BHP) tried its luck at de-unionisation in 1988 but was defeated after weeks of strike action. In 1999, however, the company moved most of the workforce onto individual contracts and gutted union strength. The mining lobby calls the days of union power “the bad old days”, a trope repeated frequently in the press. Bad for the bosses, definitely. But the militancy of those days is exactly what needs reviving. ### The socialist who schooled the royal commission URL: https://redflag.org.au/the-socialist-who-schooled-the-royal-commission/ Last updated: 2026-07-15T02:00:55.000Z The university block of Australia’s Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is designed to provide a platform for pro-Israel students to denounce the Palestine solidarity movement on Australian university campuses. So lawyers at the commission thought they were going to “gotcha” Yasmine Johnson, a Jewish student, socialist and one of the national coordinators of Students for Palestine. But by remaining steadfast, she made them look foolish. Her written testimony noted: > My family history is part of what has compelled me to join and stay involved with the fight for Palestine, alongside a general progressive belief in a world without genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. I’m appalled by the idea that the atrocities of the Holocaust—the systematic annihilation of Jewish lives which left my grandmother, like so many others, without remaining family—justify any of Israel’s current actions. The legacy of the historic injustices perpetrated against Jews, the mark of which has been left on my family, has strengthened my resolve to oppose genocide wherever it takes place. ### Watch Yasmine being cross-examined ### Red Flag’s coverage of the royal commission and more [The day the royal commission got schooled by a Palestine solidarity activistLawyers thought they were going to “gotcha” student activist Yasmine Johnson. But by remaining steadfast, she made them look foolish.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/icon/R_logo_v3-9e827ddf-5f5f-405d-a49d-302b5dd63bb8.svg)Red FlagSarah Garnham![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/thumbnail/Yasmine-1-f36ba508-0efd-4bb4-a74e-458eb0ee593d.png)](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-day-the-royal-commission-got-schooled-by-a-palestine-activist/) [The first half day of the royal commission in Melbourne was risibleThe royal commission’s witnesses are unreliable and prejudiced, and the commissioner seems to accept that supporting a religious/ethno-supremacist apartheid state is essential to Jewish identity.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/icon/R_logo_v3-18592155-5457-427d-8460-c40a9cf4468c.svg)Red FlagBen Hillier![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/thumbnail/Melbourne-protest-7cc8d48f-4261-414c-b514-326e127f6122.png)](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-first-half-day-of-the-royal-commission-in-melbourne-was-risible/) [A Jewish socialist defends the Palestine movement at the royal commissionThis article by Yasmine Johnson, a Jewish student, socialist and one of the national coordinators of Students for Palestine, is based on her testimony at the royal commission.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/icon/R_logo_v3-5c63320d-8740-4f40-8994-0fbd1803d366.svg)Red FlagYasmine Johnson![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/thumbnail/Yasmine-806a2cf6-92a5-44cc-9c0e-586ff1fb9f2f.png)](https://redflag.org.au/article/a-jewish-socialist-defends-the-palestine-movement-at-the-royal-commission/) [Responding to the lies against the student Palestine solidarity movementTwo central lies have been leveled against the pro-Palestine student movement. Jasmine Duff refutes them.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/icon/R_logo_v3-d1de56cf-236e-432c-9fd6-9f2729791103.svg)Red FlagJasmine Duff![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/thumbnail/RMIT-4b41500b-0e33-408c-9d0e-d420d0d6ba95.png)](https://redflag.org.au/article/responding-to-the-lies-against-the-student-palestine-solidarity-movement/) [Israel’s long war on Gaza: from 1948 until todayWhile Israel has greatly accelerated its efforts to ethnically cleanse Gaza since 7 October 2023, the settler-colonial state has long desired the expulsion of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/icon/R_logo_v3-3f23a6d9-5f0e-41be-ab42-4040a9c48b4e.svg)Red FlagNick Everett![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/thumbnail/Gaza-50587468-4a0e-44e4-ac58-da9519334e44.png)](https://redflag.org.au/article/israels-long-war-on-gaza-from-1948-until-today/) ### People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine The recently published final report (download below) of the [People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine](https://www.palestineinquiry.com/?ref=redflag.org.au) provides extensive evidence for what Palestine solidarity activists have argued for nearly three years: Australian universities have systematically suppressed criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and sought to silence opposition to their own complicity in the genocide. [Final Report - Erasure in the AcademyPeople’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on PalestineFinal Report - Erasure in the Academy.pdf4 MBdownload-circle](https://redflag.org.au/content/files/2026/07/Final-Report---Erasure-in-the-Academy.pdf "Download") ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/07/en-1000-genocide.jpg) CREDIT: Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor ### EU, UN and World Bank joint report on the destruction in Gaza > \[T\]he escalation of conflict in the Gaza Strip has led to an unprecedented loss of life and a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. Over two years of conflict has resulted in more than 71,000 Palestinian fatalities and over 171,000 injured, and many are missing under the rubble. The conflict has led to widespread displacement, extensive damage to social, physical, and productive infrastructure, and plunged the strip into a deep humanitarian crisis ... > Over 1.9 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been internally displaced to locations inside of the Gaza Strip, many of them multiple times over; and over 1.2 million people—almost 60 percent of Gaza Strip’s population—have lost their homes. Extensive damage to water, sanitation, and waste management infrastructure, a lack of critical resources to operate and maintain the remaining infrastructure, and poor hygiene conditions and food insecurity have left the entire population of the Gaza Strip at risk of disease outbreaks. —From the Gaza Strip rapid damage and needs assessment, April 2026 [Gaza Strip rapid damage and needs assessmentEuropean Union, United Nations and World Bank joint reportGaza strip rapid damage and needs assessment.pdf4 MBdownload-circle](https://redflag.org.au/content/files/2026/07/Gaza-strip-rapid-damage-and-needs-assessment.pdf "Download") ### The day the royal commission got schooled by a Palestine solidarity activist URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-day-the-royal-commission-got-schooled-by-a-palestine-activist/ Last updated: 2026-07-24T05:54:54.000Z Anyone with an ounce of humanity and a pinch of political sense can see that the current Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is a farce. It is an open secret that it is a show trial of the Palestine movement. It is an echo chamber for some of Australia’s most ardent defenders of war crimes and genocide to talk about their hurt feelings. It is a fig leaf for the escalating assault on civil liberties and democratic rights. Given all this, it was surprising that Yasmine Johnson, co-convenor of Students for Palestine and a member of Socialist Alternative, was accepted as a witness after almost all applications from Palestine solidarity groups to appear were denied. As one sympathetic supporter said on social media, “it was like matter meeting antimatter”. The centrepiece of Yasmine’s testimony was that the Gaza genocide matters and that Palestinian lives matter more than the feelings of those who support their extermination (a word used by the United Nations Human Rights Commission to describe just one of Israel’s crimes against humanity). She spoke of the murder of six-year-old Hind Rajab and of [listening to her last words](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGh9fqcty0g&ref=redflag.org.au) before the Israeli military killed her and the medics dispatched to save her. > Hind Rajab (murdered): “I am scared. Please come take me”. > Red Crescent medic (murdered): “My darling, if it were in my power, I would come to you”. As Yasmine said: > “It was that instance, but also many others like it, which compelled us to set up the \[campus\] encampments. Because we felt something had to be done to draw more attention to what was going on in Gaza.” The genocide that Yasmine forced the royal commission to discuss had not been mentioned throughout the previous months of testimony. Yet, it has been right there, beneath the surface. Hours of heartfelt speeches and reflections, tears and tissues and sympathy from the commissioner and counsel have been dedicated to the hurt feelings of those who defend Israel and want to silence any resistance to it. In the royal commission, genocide doesn’t matter—but opposing genocide is like a crime against humanity; a crime against the sensibilities of Zionism. Starving kids and burning cities are not relevant, but flags and slogans that call for freedom are traumatic symbols for those politically committed to the unfreedom and persecution of Palestinians and Arabs. [As *The Shot* described it in May](https://theshot.net.au/uncategorized/the-royal-commission-into-the-hurt-feelings-of-genocidal-psychopaths/?ref=redflag.org.au), an alternative name for it could be: “The royal commission into the hurt feelings of genocidal psychopaths”. Yasmine constantly returned to the genocide, and the decades-long occupation and apartheid throughout Palestine. Yet the commissioner’s counsel never once asked her to elaborate. She seemed totally disinterested in discussing Yasmine’s “lived experience” of empathising with and fighting alongside people oppressed by a Jewish-supremacist state and harassed by far-right Jewish nationalists. Counsel could not have cared less about her compelling personal history and its connection with her activism: > Yasmine: “My grandmother lost every living relative in the Holocaust. This gives me a sense that being Jewish should mean fighting for that to be the end of genocide forever”. Instead, counsellor Zelie Heger returned to the hurt feelings of Israel supporters, interrogating Yasmine on the use of slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “There’s only one solution: intifada, revolution”. On behalf of our movement, Yasmine defended our right to speak these words of liberation and struggle, and condemned those trying to silence us: > Heger: “When you chant ‘Only one solution: intifada, revolution’, are you aware that for some members of the Jewish community, that language of one solution echoes the final solution adopted by the Nazis in the Holocaust?” > Yasmine: “I’m aware that that may be maybe interpreted in that way, but I think it’s a deliberate misinterpretation of what we’re saying. As I’ve said, we are the ones standing up against a genocide that is currently going on, and we’re saying that the solution, the way to end that genocide, is by standing up to it. And I think, in a way, it raises that no matter what slogans our movement raises, whether they be one solution or intifada or resistance, those things are turned into controversial words and phrases by people who oppose our movement for justice”. It is clear that the royal commission is providing “anti-racist” cover for crackdowns on free speech and civil liberties. Just last week, federal antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal used the commission’s platform to further her campaign for a more authoritarian society. Her plan includes potentially denying visas to or deporting migrants who criticise Israel, promoting in schools a definition of antisemitism that equates criticisms of Israel with racism, and cutting funding to universities and arts organisations when Segal herself deems that they “fail to act against antisemitism”. Her latest proposal is to prevent the ABC and SBS from accurately reporting Israel’s crimes. As Yasmine pointed out, universities are aggressively attacking free speech, often in the name of “safety”. The commission’s counsel regurgitated university management talking points in response: > Heger: “What do you say to the suggestion that these sorts of restrictions on protest activity are simply designed so that the universities have advance notice of such protest activity and can take whatever steps may be necessary in terms of planning and security?” > Yasmine: “This is not the way that these measures have been introduced or used. In my view, these measures have been introduced in the wake of legitimate protests for Palestine, and they’ve been introduced in an attempt to codify what is acceptable on university campuses. The restrictions on which words you can say on campus. On some campuses, you can’t say ‘from the river to the sea’. Even campuses outside of Queensland, where that’s banned on a state level now, and you can be arrested for saying ‘from the river to the sea’. But on other campuses, these words have been banned, or the word ‘genocide’ has been banned, or the word ‘intifada’ has been banned. I mean, these are not things that are primarily about protecting people. They are restricting our right to express opposition to Israel’s assaults on Gaza.” The commission’s counsel basically cross-examined Yasmine from the outset. The line of questioning was in stark contrast to the way pro-Israel witnesses earlier in the day were treated. None of their assertions was challenged. And Students for Palestine’s lawyer was denied leave to cross-examine a witness who had included testimony about the supposed racism of a campus meeting featuring anti-Zionist Jewish speaker Rick Kuhn. According to commissioner Bell, “lived experience” is subjective and therefore cannot be challenged. Bell did, however, make it clear that she did not consider Yasmine’s “lived experience” worthy of the same respect. At one point she interrupted her counsel’s questioning to interrogate Yasmine on her Jewishness. It is worth reproducing the exchange in full: > Bell: “Miss Johnson, can I ask you a couple of questions just about your background? Did you grow up in a family that identified strongly as Jewish?” > Yasmine: “We talked about our background and our kind of history and so on. I went to a secular school. I went to a public school”. > Bell: “Do you have relatives who live in Israel?” > Yasmine: “I don’t, no”. > Bell: “When you were growing up, did you have an attachment to Israel in the sense of feeling some strong identification with Israel as the nation-state of the Jews?” > Yasmine: “I never felt that. In fact, my mother went to Israel as a younger person, and at the time felt that what Israel was doing was not right. She witnessed its oppression of Palestinians, and so no, I didn’t feel that this was connected to my background”. None of the other witnesses had their identity interrogated like this. It was a disgrace—the commissioner herself implying, or at least leaning into the idea, that Jewishness might be associated with familial and/or political attachment to Israel. The Zionists might as well sit the rest out: the commission apparently has accepted their central claim that to be Jewish is to be Zionist and to support Israel, and therefore to be anti-Zionist or opposed to Israel is to be antisemitic and/or bring one’s Jewishness into question. Yasmine was then cross-examined by the [hardline Zionist organisation Australasian Union of Jewish Students](https://www.aujs.com.au/about?ref=redflag.org.au). AUJS is a large Zionist student group that seeks to “promote a positive image of Israel on campus” and has a longstanding strategy of making complaints to university managers and federal ministers about Palestine solidarity activism on campuses. The AUJS lawyer, Gabi Crafti, perhaps thought she was about to have some sort of John Grisham movie moment that would expose Yasmine as something other than a principled campaigner for justice. She led her down a long path, asking about the reach of Students for Palestine, the number of campus chapters, its social media presence and so on. Crafti then asked Yasmine to repeat her earlier statements condemning the violence of the Israeli state. The killer blow was supposed to come when she introduced a speech Yasmine delivered at last year’s Sydney Socialism conference, titled “[A socialist strategy to liberate Palestine](https://www.marxtalks.com.au/talks/socialist-strategy-to-liberate-palestine?ref=redflag.org.au)”. Would Yasmine defend her claims that Israel must be destroyed, that the oppressed have the right to fight back, and that Hamas has given up on Palestinian liberation (the implication being that Hamas is not radical enough)? Yasmine held her ground and basically said yes, yes and yes. > Crafti: “You still say to this commission, pardon me, that Students for Palestine are the ones who stand against violence?” (This from a lawyer defending those whose central argument is that they should be able to defend and champion an ongoing genocide without the interference of pesky student activists and morally attuned teachers who oppose it.) > Yasmine: “Yes, the violence going on in the world today, in terms of Palestine, is being carried out by Israel on an extreme scale. I mean, there have been 70,000 people killed in the last two and a bit years. There is a new report by the United Nations that finds that there has been systematic use of violence, including sexual violence, against Palestinian children. That is the violence that is going on right now. I’m for a world where that violence of colonial regimes occupying the land of another people and carrying out genocide and ethnic cleansing. I’m for a world where that violence no longer exists. So yes”. > Crafti: “But violence is okay. If it’s perpetrated against Israel, is that right?” > Yasmine: “I think the resistance of people against colonisation has always involved elements of both mass non-violence and also violent resistance. I think it’s hard to believe that there would be a contention that slaves did not have the right to use violence when opposing slaveholders, that there would be a contention that the struggle of Black South Africans against apartheid was somehow wrong because it was not perfectly non-violent in every instance, that the Vietnam War resistance movement of the Vietnamese people was somehow problematic in opposition to the world’s largest imperialist regime carrying out campaigns of mass murder and targeting of Vietnamese citizens. That those people should have quietly and peacefully only held up signs in opposition to their own oppression.” Again and again, Crafti lunged. And again and again, Yasmine parried with the strength of her conviction: yes, Israel is a racist state whose existence denies the rights of Palestinians. And yes, the oppressed have the right to resist. The task of socialists is to figure out and debate which forms of resistance can liberate Palestinians and all oppressed peoples. Stumbling and scrambling, the hapless AUJS lawyer was handed a note by her co-counsel. We can only speculate that it read something like: “Shut the fuck up. You lost”. Promptly, she ended the cross-examination. And so ended the time that a socialist spoke truth to power at the royal commission. Yasmine is one of only two anti-Zionist Jews who have spoken at the hearings. Sarah Schwartz from the Jewish Council of Australia also spoke to [counter the right-wing lies](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/02/url-royal-commission-antisemitism-jewish-australian-supporting-palestinian-freedom-sarah-schwartz-ntwnfb?ref=redflag.org.au) that underpin the commission. It is unsurprising, but disgraceful, that the voices of genocide supporters have been so amplified and venerated. It is also a disgrace that only Jewish witnesses are deemed worthy and that, to this point, no Palestinians or other non-Jewish members of the Palestine movement have been called to testify. But what would we expect from this echo chamber in which genocide does not exist, facts are labelled as antisemitic tropes, and in which those organising against a genocide are smeared as racists? We should not expect any more socialists or radicals to be called before this farce, because our existence explodes their victim fantasy and exposes the whole thing for what it is. God save the King, because no one can save the royal commission. ### The fight over Palestine in a Canadian museum URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-fight-over-palestine-in-a-canadian-museum/ Last updated: 2026-07-15T01:30:28.000Z The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is the most striking piece of architecture in Winnipeg. Traversing the seven floors with irregular spaces and varied lighting, the visitor is meant to “progress upwards from darkness to light—reflecting our hopes for human rights education”, according to the museum’s website. Originally, it intended to be a private Holocaust museum. But to gain federal funding as a national museum from 2007 required a broader focus on human rights, generating battles over which human rights abuses would be presented. Today, the permanent Holocaust gallery covers an entire floor, the largest on a single topic. A second gallery commemorates five genocides, with the Holocaust again represented together with Rwanda, Armenia, Ukrainian Holodomor and that carried out by Serbian forces in Srebrenica. When I visited in June, I saw exhibitions on a wide range of topics, from labour rights to queer histories, from First Nations to the Polish solidarity movement. Since then, a small new display entitled “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” has opened. Finally, after nearly two decades of negotiation, planning and advocacy, a small amount of light is spared to shine on this suppressed genocide. The twelve-metre-long exhibit, within 4,366 square metres of exhibition space, includes some artwork, a small collection of objects and perhaps 600 words of text. Carefully researched and curated, it takes about fifteen minutes to view. The language is restrained. El Jones, writing at *The Breach* website, describes it as saying that Palestinians are “shaped by wars” in which the perpetrator is not named. And “present-day violence” simply “occurs”, without any agency. Such an exhibition would not normally draw much international attention. But for months, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), right-wing media and the Israeli ambassador have campaigned to delay or cancel the exhibit, to change the wording, to insert what they call “context”. The heritage minister also tried to intervene. On the opening night, hundreds demonstrated outside, holding placards denying the *Nakba* or declaring “Nothing about us without us”, epitomising the Jewish Zionist position that they are the only arbiters of conflicts in the Middle East. Contrary to claims that the Jewish community wasn’t consulted, several Jewish organisations did contribute to the exhibition and supported the Palestinians attending the opening night against the demonstrators. A protestor from a Christian Zionist organisation, complained to the *Canadian Jewish News*: “It’s one side of the story ... Israelis have been completely ignored, discounted”. You have to wonder which planet he lives on. The hysterical attacks have ironically resulted in vastly more publicity than the exhibit otherwise would have achieved. And the fact that the exhibition went ahead represents a small but important victory in the ongoing international culture wars over Palestine. Community organiser Bassam Hozaima criticised the demand for the Palestinian story to be vetted by those who seek to silence and negate that very story: > “The notion that Palestinians should not be able to tell their stories of displacement, suffering, and oppression without the approval of their oppressors is bizarre and a clear example of the racism and chauvinism that the Palestinian community is constantly being subjected to.” A leading member of the Winnipeg chapter of Independent Jewish Voices Canada, Harold Shuster, explained the cause of the hysteria to *Red Flag*. In a recent letter to members, the outgoing chair of CIJA stated that they “have given up on trying to fight antisemitism and instead need to focus their efforts on fighting antisemites”. As Shuster elaborates, “In the minds of those institutions, everybody who doesn’t share their unequivocal support for Israel is an antisemite or motivated by Jew hatred, and they attack them as such”. CIJA has given up fighting antisemitism just as the far right is growing in Canada as it is in Australia and elsewhere and with the same themes—immigration, racist replacement theories, etc. According to an article in *The Conversation*, “cultural, ethnic and social polarization are constantly underlined, and presented in a manner that justifies the repression of various populations deemed to be dangerous”. The attacks on the *Nakba* exhibit fits right in with this approach by far-right groups. From the beginning, the role of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights was contested. As Jones explains, “Winnipeg ... has a storied history of radical labour activism”, starting with the general strike of 1919\. And migrants have been at the centre of these struggles. She continues: > “In tension with this radical strain of grassroots human rights activism, and perhaps specifically in response to it, Winnipeg has also developed human rights institutions that substituted ‘fairness’ and ‘dialogue’ for substantial criticism and action.” Cultural institutions have been the focus of anti-Palestinian attacks worldwide. Museums might like to think they are oases of calm and reflection secluded from a troubled world. But we have seen with the British Museum that this is not so—capitulating to lobbing, that grand old repository recently removed the word “Palestine” from a number of exhibits. The opposition to the *Nakba* exhibition has galvanised activism again to defend those very institutions that considered themselves sacrosanct. Let’s hope with their support it stays open. ### The first half day of the royal commission in Melbourne was risible URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-first-half-day-of-the-royal-commission-in-melbourne-was-risible/ Last updated: 2026-07-20T22:27:43.000Z A cloud hung over the Fair Work Commission in Melbourne today as the fourth hearing block of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion convened in its offices. Not that anyone noticed the shadow it cast. Indeed, very little attention has been paid to the latest United Nations Human Rights Commission inquiry documenting Israel’s crimes against Palestinian children. The report, released last month and titled “[The essence of childhood has been destroyed](https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session62/a-hrc-62-crp-2.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au)”, describes Israel’s security forces’: - “deliberate targeting and killing of Palestinian children”; - “use of torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, including sexual and gender-based violence, against Palestinian children”; - “severe, multi-layered harm to Palestinian children’s survival, health, and development”; and - “plan to destroy the biological continuity of the Palestinians in Gaza” Following previous findings of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity—also mostly ignored, dismissed or denounced as antisemitic—the latest report finds that Israel is guilty of the following war crimes and crimes against humanity. This list is not exhaustive, but it is all specifically about children: > *Extermination; murder; wilful killing; torture; sexual violence; persecution; enforced disappearance; inhuman and degrading treatment causing severe physical and psychological harm; outrages upon personal dignity; wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health through deliberate deprivation and violence.* The public record of charges by human rights organisations grows year by year and month by month, as the facts of the genocide overwhelm all reasonable opposition. Yet the motif running through the first witness testimonies in the commission today was that an attack on Israel is an attack on Jews in Australia—and because the Zionist movement feels this to be the case, it simply is the case. Dr Andy Smidt, an academic, said this outright during her appearance on the stand. Having lost the intellectual and factual argument about genocide, the establishment has found this brush with which to paint opponents of Australian foreign policy as racists, and defenders of barbarism as victims. Australian supporters of Israel—none of them innocent children like those described in the UN report; all of them adults presumably with the capacity to reason and digest facts—complained not once about the destruction of Gaza or the slaughter, starvation and dislocation of Palestinians being carried out in their name by the Israeli government. Instead, the throughline was the inconvenience and trauma of witnessing opponents of genocide protesting on university campuses. We saw this play out previously during the [2024 Senate committee investigation](https://redflag.org.au/article/campus-antisemitism-beat-up-attempts-to-crush-pro-palestine-activism/) into the campuses. The testimonies were transparently tendentious then, and remain so. Today, the adults who testified to their purported lack of safety in the face of the student movement were allowed anonymity and granted immunity from cross-examination (if they appear as “lived experience” witnesses). That is, they received infinitely more protection than the children of Gaza. Commissioner Bell, presiding over the hearing, justified this on the basis that “lived experience” testimonies are inherently personal and subjective. Therefore, any challenge to their veracity would strictly be out of bounds. To state the converse of a phrase made famous by US activist Ben Shapiro: in the royal commission, feelings don’t care about facts. Having been provided this cover and protection, some testimony went much further than outlining subjective unease. They included claims that purported to be factual, and serious charges against Palestine solidarity activists, such as that “people were calling Jews baby killers”. This charge has been leveled more than once over the last few years but is yet to be substantiated on a campus. It feels like the scurrilous playbook used retrospectively [to discredit the anti-Vietnam War movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fspat-on%5FVietnam%5Fveteran?ref=redflag.org.au). In that instance, a reactionary lie repeated often enough—that veterans were spat on by anti-war activists when they returned from combat—became a widely believed cultural myth. Another witness, an adult using the pseudonym “ACJ”, claimed that the University of New South Wales was a “hostile environment” characterised by “vicious protests”. ACJ also claimed that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with Israel and is all about bullying Australian Jews. Because that’s how he feels, the royal commission could give no leave for anyone to challenge this wild and defamatory garbage. At any rate, the focus on “lived experience” (is there such a thing as “unlived experience”?) itself gives the game away. A Royal Commission into the Facts of the Matter would have to contend with reality and allow for arguments to be put and claims to be tested. Under the terms of the existing royal commission a “hostile and unsafe environment” for Jewish people purportedly generated by student activists can be established simply by asking Jewish supporters of Israel how they feel, while disallowing any challenge to their statements. The first witness of the day, Liat, again an adult granted parital anonymity, declared that she was “so scared” and shaking with fear from an Australian National University student meeting that pushed for the university to divest from weapons companies and break ties with Israeli institutions. Yet the meeting, she admitted, was actually on Zoom. Liat described herself as a “proud Zionist” who had become an executive member of the ACT Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS). For those unfamiliar with campus politics, AUJS is the key, and highly aggressive, pro-Israel student group on university campuses, and a key organisation of the political right in the student movement. It held perhaps half a dozen counter-protests against the ANU Gaza solidarity encampment, according to one of the camp’s organisers. One of Liat’s complaints was that people held up Palestinian flags to their cameras when she spoke in the Zoom meeting. This purportedly was a form of antisemitic bullying. Another purported instance of antisemitism was the student meeting refusing to endorse three AUJS motions to affirm that using the term “intifada” constitutes hate speech, to support a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and to condemn Hamas. But Liat admitted that motions affirming the right of Jewish students to participate in and belong to the university community were accepted by the meeting. So AUJS’s political motions about Israel-Palestine failed to gain support, but their motions on inclusivity and antisemitism were supported. What, then, did Liat and AUJS do? They withdrew all the motions in protest—because their main concern was not antisemitism, but defending Israel and delegitimising resistance and/or opposition to it. Two years later, Liat came to the royal commission to denounce the episode as antisemitism. Another of Liat’s examples of purported antisemitism was the following: > Counsel assisting: “At paragraph 57 of your statement you also describe an incident that you experienced in the classroom, on one occasion. Can you tell us about that incident?” > > Liat: “Yes. It was a political philosophy course, and I believe it was the last class of the semester, so I was very excited for the holidays. And we were looking at civil disobedience, and the tutor at the time posited that the encampment was a very exemplary illustration of the concept of civil disobedience. And I noted that the encampment had a very intimidatory and isolating effect on Jewish students, just truly not even a comment on the encampment itself, just saying I’m a Jew and I feel intimidated, and scared by the encampment at times. And the tutor again took a breath, leaned back in his chair, and said ‘Well, Israel’s dropping bombs on heads’. And then I said, ‘That’s not particularly relevant’. You know, as a Jewish Australian and as an Australian Israeli, I don’t think that’s necessarily the appropriate thing to say in that instance.” Facts again. Irrelevant and inappropriate in a political science course. Worse, facts themselves are now evidence of antisemitism according to this idiotic testimony. ACL, yet another adult hiding their identity, started her testimony by recounting her trips to visit family in Israel during the second intifada. It was very scary, she said, and relevant because of how she felt during the Gaza solidarity encampment at a Melbourne university. There was a banner that said people had a “moral obligation to resist” the genocide. She complained to the university about this. That she couldn’t avoid the protests against Israel was the real antisemitic tragedy: when she went home after a hard day at uni, even TikTok was awash with clips of people opposing the genocide. The first complaint of Dr Smidt, who was mentioned above, recounted purportedly latent institutional antisemitism: a fellow staff member at Sydney University had taken a proactive approach to instituting a cross-cultural calendar that included Jewish and other holidays. But—and here was the sinister part—the calendar was never fully integrated into the university system and Smidt had to download it manually. But it got worse, according to Smidt. When Macquarie University Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah came to the Gaza solidarity encampment to host a teach-in for children, Smidt sent her 21-year-old son to video the event. Her son, another adult who can’t be named, was then bullied online as a paedophile. This of course is classic antisemitism, up there with the blood libel. An innocent Jewish mother sends her son to invasively video small children; what follows is a diabolical and tragic twist, and a hurtful and enduring canard: the mother’s son branded a pedo on Reddit. > ***\*\*\*\*\**** While Gaza continues to be bulldozed, Tel Aviv continues to be backed by almost the entire Australian establishment, [just as a previous generation of the Australian establishment backed Adolf Hitler all the way up to 1939](https://redflag.org.au/article/how-do-holocausts-happen/), knowing full well the crimes that regime was committing. Unsurprisingly, the leading figures of that generation, such as Robert Menzies, continue to be lionised by today’s ruling class, which backs Israeli apartheid to the hilt. There is more than an echo with that era—a rising far right being tailed or embraced by “traditional conservatism”, attacks on civil liberties, denunciations of communist conspiracies and enemies within. It is entirely legitimate to criticise a foreign government and oppose war crimes. So the establishment has attempted to use the guise of anti-racism to silence and intimidate opponents of Israel and critics of Australian foreign policy. The commission is part of a broader attack on civil liberties and free speech. It has very little to do with antisemitism, and much to do with attacking opponents of Australia’s bipartisan Middle East policy in general and the political left in particular. ### A Jewish socialist defends the Palestine movement at the royal commission URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/a-jewish-socialist-defends-the-palestine-movement-at-the-royal-commission/ Last updated: 2026-07-20T22:27:30.000Z *The universities block of Australia’s Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, beginning today, is designed to air the grievances of pro-Israel students and to provide a platform for them to denounce the Palestine solidarity movement on Australian university campuses.* *Nevertheless, Students for Palestine—an activist group with chapters across the country, which led the student solidarity campaign—applied to appear before the commission to challenge some of the lies in an official and public setting.* *This article by *Yasmine Johnson,* a Jewish student, socialist and one of the national coordinators of Students for Palestine, is based on her submission.* [*She testified on the opening day of the hearing in Melbourne*](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-day-the-royal-commission-got-schooled-by-a-palestine-activist/)*.* --- My family history is part of what has compelled me to join and stay involved with the fight for Palestine, alongside a general progressive belief in a world without genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. I’m appalled by the idea that the atrocities of the Holocaust—the systematic annihilation of Jewish lives which left my grandmother, like so many others, without remaining family—justify any of Israel’s current actions. The legacy of the historic injustices perpetrated against Jews, the mark of which has been left on my family, has strengthened my resolve to oppose genocide wherever it takes place. I was an organiser of the University of Sydney Gaza solidarity encampment in 2024, as well as the national student referendum on Palestine in 2025\. The Gaza solidarity encampment movement had started at Columbia University in the US, where activists brought tents to campus to protest the ties between their university and companies supplying the weapons used to facilitate Israeli attacks on Gaza. They called for disclosure of and divestment from all such ties, and an end to related research partnerships. The tactic they used—peacefully occupying university space with tents as an act of civil disobedience—was drawn from the movement against the Vietnam War. We were inspired to do the same on our campuses, where universities contribute funding and research capacity to weapons companies like Raytheon, Thales and Lockheed Martin. Our encampment at Sydney University was the first in Australia. A few activists, me included, brought the proposal to begin an encampment to a large, open Students for Palestine meeting, where we voted to set up that same night. Throughout the course of the encampment, mass meetings determined the future of the movement. We were joined on some campuses by representatives from the student unions, political societies and a variety of other clubs, who took part in the decision-making process. We were met with a positive response from students, a large number of whom set up tents, attended rallies or seminars at the encampment or stopped by to hear from activists about the pro-Palestine campaign. The encampment at the University of Sydney, like those around the country, involved regular protests on campus, organising meetings, open forum discussions and cultural events. We were exercising our right to free speech and political expression and joining a longstanding campus tradition of political activism against war, racism and oppression. On most campuses where we set up encampments, however, we were met with attacks on our democratic rights, false claims that pro-Palestine activism constitutes antisemitism and the implementation of harsh campus restrictions on protests. Throughout the encampments, numerous student activists were threatened with misconduct cases by university administrators or presented with demands that their encampments be disbanded. At Deakin University, for example, the deputy vice-chancellor demanded the “immediate dismantling and removal of the current encampment” to ensure the “safety, security and amenity of all campus users”. The university did not, however, allege that the encampment posed any specific threats to the safety or security of students, staff or anyone else. As part of the encampments across the country, students were subjected to numerous acts or threats of violence against them by individuals and groups supporting Israel. At Monash, where the encampment was set up on 1 May 2024, a dozen mostly middle-aged men entered the encampment at around 2am on the first night. One individual told students that he was a serving member of the Israeli military. The group physically damaged a gazebo and threatened activists with violence. On the night of 24 May, at 9.40pm and 10.20pm, makeshift firecrackers were thrown at students at the Adelaide University encampment from a roof. At the University of Sydney, we felt threatened by the presence of hostile individuals, on one occasion wearing balaclavas, who came to the camp at night. Political expression often disrupts the “amenity” of campus life—this, in fact, can be one of its aims. The encampments were a form of public and disruptive action against atrocities that universities across the country continue to facilitate. As Jewish Council Executive Officer Max Kaiser has noted, “Protests may make some students and staff uncomfortable, and even disrupt the normal functioning of universities, but that is not grounds to penalise protesting students—it is a reality of life in a democracy”. This disruption is a legitimate form of political expression, and one which has had a place in countless progressive social movements from the fight for Indigenous rights, to the movement against South African apartheid. Universities should not have the right to deny our free speech on the basis of convenience. In addition to disrupting university life, the main justification used by opponents of the encampment movement to restrict the expression of anti-genocide views is that the encampments constituted a form of antisemitism. We reject these allegations entirely. Criticism of any state is a fundamental tenet of free speech, not an act of racial or religious discrimination. This is particularly relevant given that the state of Israel is engaging in what a UN commission of inquiry has described as a genocide in Gaza. As is the case in all protest movements, particularly those as long running as the encampments, those involved had a variety of political opinions, and serious debates took place between activists. Those running the camp, however, were clear about their hostility to oppression and behaviour that reinforces it. Students for Palestine has always opposed all forms of racism and discriminatory behaviour, including antisemitism. For example, our *Manifesto of the Encampments* included the following: > “We reject all forms of racism and discrimination including Islamophobia, antisemitism, sexism, transphobia and homophobia. Accusations of antisemitism are weaponised to silence us; this is a travesty. Opposition to the state of Israel and to Zionism as an ideology is not antisemitism. Many Jewish students and staff are participants, supporters and leaders of the encampments. We stand alongside Jewish people against discrimination, and we see ourselves as standing on the shoulders of a long line of Jewish pro-Palestine and anti-war activists. It is our opposition to all forms of oppression that motivates our solidarity with both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples.” As part of the encampment, I spoke publicly about my Jewish identity. In one interview with Channel 10, it was asserted that Jewish staff members said they were hiding their Jewish identity because they were concerned about antisemitism. I was present at the encampment for nearly its entire duration. I took part in organising meetings, chaired and spoke at demonstrations, and spoke to students and community members who attended the encampment every day I was present. Despite doing all of this while publicly identifying as Jewish, I did not experience a single instance of antisemitism from any supporters of Palestine at the encampment, nor did they cause me to feel unsafe. In fact, I felt a sense of solidarity across racial and religious lines. On 17 May 2024, I helped facilitate a Shabbat event at the encampment, which had been organised by the Tzedek Collective, a Sydney-based Jewish organisation. This event brought together students of various faiths to make a clear statement that our encampment was not about religious hatred, but tolerance and anti-genocide political views. I felt then, as I do now, that I had become part of a global shift in Jewish opinion in recent years, which has seen so many young Jews stand in solidarity with Palestinians in an attempt to make “never again” a reality. The Tzedek Collective and Jews Against the Occupation ’48 were very warmly received at many of our events, alongside other faith groups and secular organisations. A deep sense of community developed at the camp, because of our shared humanitarian ideals. I felt most at peace with my Jewish identity at an encampment that brought people together in support of freedom and justice for Palestine. We are aware that there are strongly held opinions about Israel and Palestine. Individual beliefs, however, no matter how strongly held, are not a legitimate reason to deny others the right to free speech and expression. Across the country, we were committed to meaningful discussion and debate. Dr. Shiri Krebbs, a scholar who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and served as legal adviser to the chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court (2005-10), noted: > “As a Jewish-Israeli Professor at Deakin, I would like to add that the encampment enabled some meaningful learning activities and teaching opportunities, such as the teach-in activity I delivered to a group of interested students on the legal and historical dimensions of the conflict. Both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students participated, as well as other staff members. During four hours, we had an informative, nuanced, and lively discussion which benefited all.” Krebbs was one of many signatories to an open letter addressed to Deakin University, which called on the administration to cease their repression of the encampment. This pattern was repeated all over the country, with significant staff support for student encampments. In just a week, more than 1,000 university academics signed an open letter in which they “reject\[ed\] the characterisation of these peaceful and urgent student-led protests and encampments by sections of the popular media and politicians as antisemitic. These camps are open spaces of learning, solidarity, and support for everyone, with many organisers and leading activists being Jewish themselves”. The conflation of anti-Zionism or pro-Palestine sentiment with antisemitism denies the broad spectrum of opinion on the issue amongst Jews in Australia and around the world and dangerously associates all Jews with the actions of the Israeli state. This is a dynamic we have seen globally, with the rapid growth of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States. In the context of genocidal attacks on Gaza carried out by Israel, it has been important for groups like ours to make a clear argument that not all Jews support, or want to take responsibility for, Israel’s actions. Following the encampment movement, Students for Palestine organised student general meetings across the country to vote on pro-Palestine motions. At the University of Queensland on 29 May 2024, more than 1,500 students voted overwhelmingly in favour of cutting ties with companies that supply the Israeli military, shutting down the Boeing Centre and financially divesting from Israel. Similar meetings occurred all over the country, largely in August and September 2024\. The results were indicative of what we have seen in polling: the majority of people, particularly young people, are in favour of ending Israel’s genocide on Gaza and the complicity of Australian institutions. On 7 August 2024, I addressed a student general meeting at the University of Sydney focused on supporting Palestine. I spoke in favour of a motion calling on the university to sever its connections with arms companies involved in supplying Israel. And I said: “As a Jewish student, I am incredibly proud to stand with all of you and with Palestine. I am proud to see Jewish activists in the United States standing up to police to say ‘not in our name’”. I also emphasised the difference between Zionism and Judaism, stating that the genocide in Gaza “is not a project of Judaism”. The overwhelming response from the room was supportive. Opposition to my speech queried my right even to discuss my Jewishness if I was not a supporter of Israel. Student media coverage noted that “the Liberal \[Party\] contingent heckled throughout Johnson’s address”. Members of the campus Liberal club interrupted and jeered during my speech. After I had finished and was making my way back to my seat, some of these students shouted at me, asking whether I had ever been to Israel. The implication was that, if I had not, my Jewish identity could be questioned. Like so many Jews around the country and the world, I was having pressure placed on me to identify with the political ideology of Zionism in order to have a right to Jewishness. ### Responding to the lies against the student Palestine solidarity movement URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/responding-to-the-lies-against-the-student-palestine-solidarity-movement/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T05:35:49.000Z Every progressive movement and cause, at some stage, is slandered by its opponents. But the scale and extremity of the lies told to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza are breathtaking. Most people who have become sympathetic to the Palestinian cause have been stunned by the slanders levelled against them by the political and media establishments. Opposition to war, genocide and racism has been painted at every step as racist and genocidal in intent. These lies are used not only to portray Israel’s genocide as defensive and defensible, but also to justify serious attacks upon democratic rights and civil liberties in Australia. Since 2023, the federal Labor government has brought in successive laws and amendments that extend the extraordinarily repressive measures introduced during the “war on terror” and broadened the remit of Australia’s legislative anti-terror framework to include “hate speech” and groups deemed “hateful”. The project of establishing Israel, a Jewish supremacist ethno-state constructed on the historic lands of Palestine, has always been built upon lies. The first lie, told by a series of prominent figures in the early twentieth century, such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky, was that Palestine was “a land without a people”. This lie continued even after Israel was founded through the mass expulsion of some 750,000 inhabitants. So Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1969: “\[T\]here was no such thing as Palestinians”. In 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich echoed her statement, saying, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history”. A second lie is that the Palestinians have brought Israel’s long-term genocide upon themselves. Today, the blame is heaped on the Islamist Hamas. But before Hamas was founded, the target was the secular Palestine Liberation Organization. Before the PLO, it was almost anyone resisting forced displacement and apartheid. The Palestinians are, in [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s estimation](https://www.gov.il/en/pages/statement-by-pm-netanyahu-28-oct-2023?ref=redflag.org.au), Amalekites who [deserve to be annihilated](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-31/biblical-story-amalek-south-africa-icj-genocide-case-israel/103403552?ref=redflag.org.au). (In the Hebrew Bible, the people of Amalek are perennial enemies of the Israelites.) A third lie is that Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonisation is motivated by antisemitism, and that supporters of the Palestinians are also primarily or implicitly motivated by antisemitism. This charge has for decades been levelled against even Jewish opponents of Israel’s brutality, such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein in the United States. Since 2023, many more new lies have been told. For example, during a recent hearing of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, federal antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal challenged the death toll of more than 70,000 reported by Gaza’s Health Ministry, saying, “I believe that it is well known and even accepted by the United Nations that those statistics have been grossly inflated ... when they have done a recount of the numbers, they have found them to be grossly inaccurate”. That is a lie. Even the Israeli military has [acknowledged](https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/30/middleeast/israeli-military-gaza-killed-numbers-intl?ref=redflag.org.au) that the statistics are accurate. Independent estimates put the death toll higher—[a minimum of 75,000 at the start of this year](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/2/18/gaza-death-toll-exceeds-75000-as-independent-data-verify-loss?ref=redflag.org.au). Segal’s highly paid job should require that she know things like this. Other oft-repeated lies are that hospitals and schools are legitimate targets because they are actually terrorist bunkers, that civilian deaths are a result of Hamas using “human shields”, that starvation is a result, not of Israel’s siege of the territory, but of the criminality among Palestinians themselves—and on it goes. ### **Two barefaced lies** Two central claims—lies—have been made about our student movement so far by the political right and pro-Israel organisations and individuals. The first is that our movement is antisemitic. In May 2024, shadow education minister Sarah Henderson denounced university administrators for failing to stamp out “encampments and other protest activity which are fuelling unprecedented levels of antisemitic hate and incitement”. Students for Palestine, the national campus activist group, held high school and university strikes for Palestine in 2023 and 2024\. We established Gaza solidarity encampments across the country in mid-2024, inspired by students who did the same in the United States. We did so not out of prejudice against Jewish people, but to draw attention to the fact that our own universities were engaged in weapons research and development projects with companies that were arming Israel. By then, the Israeli military had killed nearly 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza in just seven months. Research carried out by the office of Jillian Segal, Australia’s special envoy into antisemitism, directly counter Henderson’s claim. Last year, Segal’s office found, after two years of intensive pro-Palestine activism, that young Australians overall “hold a positive sentiment towards the Jewish community, with the community rated second only to Italians in terms of willingness to share social closeness”. The [study](https://www.aseca.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-11/2025-aseca-research-findings.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=Thus%2C%20many%20participants%20expressed%20support,as%20a%20political%20movement%20which) of young people (especially students) went on to note that participants in the solidarity campaign: > “... did not perceive Jewish individuals as collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli government ... many participants expressed support for Jewish communities while also criticising the actions of the Israeli state. They differentiated between Judaism, as a religion, and Zionism, as a political movement which they associated with colonialism and so could be condemned.” The survey showed that young people are adept at distinguishing between Judaism and Zionism. Surprisingly adept, given the desperate attempts to conflate the two by Israel’s government, Segal herself, the Murdoch press and pro-Israel student groups. For years, supporters of Israel have themselves promoted what could reasonably be called an antisemitic narrative: that Judaism is synonymous with Zionism. In doing so, they have attempted to make a person’s ethno-religious identity conditional on whether they politically support Israel, an ethno-nationalist, Jewish supremacist state. During the encampments, Jewish members of Students for Palestine were specifically targeted by supporters of Israel and slandered as “self-hating Jews”. Making Judaism conditional on support for Israel also helped universities to justify bizarre crackdowns on freedom of expression by Jews under the guise of preventing antisemitism. For example, the University of Queensland attempted to block a screening of the film *Israelism*, which was directed by two Jewish filmmakers. At Monash University, security officers told students that using the words “Zionist” or “Zionism” or accusing anyone of supporting genocide contravened university policy. Students for Palestine has the opposite approach. Instead of automatically conferring a person with an entire political world view based on their ethno-religious identity, we have insisted on distinguishing between Zionism as a political ideology and Judaism. This should not be controversial. Indeed, the political right are often at the forefront of making similar arguments—for example, when defending right-wing Aboriginal figures, they make the valid point that it is racist to suggest that someone’s politics could or should be determined by their skin colour or indigeneity. We have produced several written documents expressing our outlook and orientation since 2023\. Not a single one contains anti-Jewish prejudice, and many of them contain explicit statements of opposition to antisemitism. So the 2024 *Manifesto from the Encampments* [states](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-BbgGm1GK3mCD18khWPu9AxISzUgiLma/view?pli=1&ref=redflag.org.au): “We stand alongside Jewish people against discrimination, and we see ourselves as standing on the shoulders of a long line of Jewish pro-Palestine and anti-war activists”. This statement was not written by only one individual, but put together through a collective process of discussion and revision in open meetings at twelve of the Gaza solidarity encampments on Australian university campuses. Not a single campus objected to including statements of opposition to antisemitism and solidarity with Jewish people. If you look at photos of the Gaza solidarity encampments, you’ll see the faces of Jewish students like Yasmine Johnson, Jaan Schild and Raphael Duffy who helped to lead and politically shape the protests. You’ll see cardboard signs reading, “Jewish students against genocide”, signs proclaiming opposition to Islamophobia and antisemitism and banners with the slogan popularised by Jewish activists drawing on the historical legacy of opposition to the holocaust: “Never again for anyone”. Jewish students and members of non-campus Jewish groups such as the Tzedek Collective organised Shabbat events. And not a single member of Students for Palestine has been found to have said or done anything antisemitic by university disciplinary processes, despite pro-Israel students flooding the university disciplinary bodies with spurious complaints. The second lie is that the student movement created a climate of fear and intimidation. In a 2024 statement, the then-president of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS), Noah Loven, [claimed](https://aujs.com.au/aujs-statement-on-encampments-at-universities/?ref=redflag.org.au): “\[I\]t’s simply not safe for many Jewish students on campus at the moment, and it’s unacceptable that many feel they cannot attend their lectures and classes in person without fear of intimidation, harassment and violence”. This was categorically untrue. Right-wing media outlets intent on demonising the encampments were unable to find any examples of violence by pro-Palestine students during the encampments or our student protests. Instead, when students faced university discipline, it was for things like breaking local rules about using megaphones on campus or protesting inside university buildings. In my own university hearing, I was found guilty of refusing to pack up the encampment when instructed to by management. The AUJS submission to a previous Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities provides the following as an example of unsafe behaviour at Monash University: > “A lecturer supported a group presenting on a social cause in a sociology class, suggesting the ‘pro-Palestinian movement’ as their topic. The lecturer reportedly guided the group before and during their presentation and mentioned that his friend organises pro-Palestinian rallies in the city on Sundays and that he supports ‘Free Palestine’. This created an unsafe and discriminatory environment for a Jewish student due to the overt preferential treatment given to the group presenting the pro-Palestinian topic.” Obviously, a teacher encouraging a project topic related to a contemporary political issue is not unsafe or discriminatory. By contrast, Luka Kiernan, a student with a Jewish background, [wrote](https://redflag.org.au/article/defending-the-monash-gaza-solidarity-encampment/) of raids on the Monash Gaza solidarity encampment by supporters of Israel, including members of AUJS: > “On the first night, around a dozen men, mostly middle-aged, invaded the camp at 2am. One claimed to be a serving member of the Israeli military. They smashed a gazebo and threatened activists with violence. They played Hebrew songs calling Palestinians ‘swarms of rats’ who ‘will die in the dungeons’ and sang ‘Advance Australia fair’. Eventually, police removed them. Four nights later, they came back ... Zionists have constantly harassed the camp in daylight hours, often taunting activists with statements such as: ‘What genocide? There is no genocide happening’ and ‘Palestine does not exist’.” Mimi, a student at the Deakin camp, woke up in their swag one night to see a man in a balaclava standing directly over them. He tore down the Palestinian flag above their bed and then proceeded to join his friends wrecking as much of the infrastructure of the camp as they could. Those responsible posted videos publicly to brag about the incidents on an Instagram page titled “australians\_for\_israel”. Another pro-Israel student walked up to two Muslim women students at Deakin, accused them of supporting Hamas and spat on them. At the University of Adelaide, supporters of Israel shot fireworks at the camp. These were real acts of violence. It’s no surprise that supporters of Israel would resort to violence and racist intimidation. Their world view already excuses racial apartheid, mass murder, torture and sexual violence against Palestinians. The royal commission is a sordid attempt to bury Australia’s Palestine movement beneath a pile of petty, tendentious and baseless complaints. The hundreds of thousands of us who have stood on the right side of history in this country won’t fall for it. ### Albanese’s favourite fascist URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/albaneses-favourite-fascist/ Last updated: 2026-07-12T01:36:24.000Z The Prime Ministers of India and Australia embraced in front of 20,000 people at Melbourne’s Docklands Stadium on 9 July. Some might interpret this as a moving statement of inclusivity in a time of rising anti-immigrant hate. Except Narendra Modi is a fascist and the crowd greeting him were Hindu nationalists. Albanese, between them, stood as a hypocrite. India is leveraging new-found clout on the world stage through these splashy international spectacles. The West has extensively courted India to join the US-led imperial camp against China. India is a formidable naval presence in the Asia-Pacific and therefore would be an important military ally if the US and China ever came to blows. It was not guaranteed that India would pick a side, given that the country led the “non-aligned nations” during the Cold War and still maintains deep military relations with Russia. But since Modi’s [2023 Australia visit](https://redflag.org.au/article/albanese-and-fascist/), it has become clear that India has definitively bet on the West. One expression of this new connection is that India has signed a flurry of free trade agreements with Western countries, most significantly with the USA and the UK, but also Australia. During Modi’s Melbourne visit, it was announced that Albanese has agreed to extend uranium sales to India to help power, among other things, artificial intelligence data centres, introducing yet another circle of hell to the country. Celebrating this trade deal, Albanese told the crowd gathered at Docklands that “the Indo-Pacific is not just the confluence of two oceans. It also symbolises the shared aspirations of like-minded democracies like India and Australia”. This statement is not just puerile; it is also a lie. Modi is a Hindu supremacist. His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, or Indian People’s Party) is the parliamentary wing of a Hindu nationalist movement. India is hugely diverse in religion, language and ethnicity. The modern conception of Hinduism as a unified religion with an unchanging lineage stretching back to ancient times is driven by far-right ideologues. Although this has taken root in common sense in the West, historians of India such as Romila Thapar insist that India has never been a “Hindu nation”; that no such singular “Hinduism” has even existed, and instead a multitude of intermingling religious strands have coexisted in India, borrowing and sharing from each other. Yet the BJP claims that India is rightfully a Hindu nation; that this Hinduness was stolen and corrupted by Muslims (and to a lesser extent the British during colonisation). Their goal is to recapture India for Hindus and expunge so-called outsiders. If Pauline Hanson were Indian, the BJP would be her party. It shares the politics and principles of the international far right: in particular, anti-immigrant hatred and authoritarianism. Since taking power in 2014, the BJP has built fascist politics in the state and on the streets. At a parliamentary level, the Indian state has stripped [citizenship from millions](https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/15/india-activates-discriminatory-citizenship-law?ref=redflag.org.au) of people and forced the [deportation of hundreds](https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/07/23/india-hundreds-of-muslims-unlawfully-expelled-to-bangladesh?ref=redflag.org.au). In recent elections in the state of West Bengal, the BJP excluded up to 9 million people from voting on the basis of questioning their citizenship; the majority were Muslims in areas unlikely to vote for the BJP. Large Hindu nationalist outfits operate throughout civil society; the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) coordinates militias modelled on the brownshirts of twentieth-century Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. It is possible that more than a million people are organised in these violent bodies, and millions more participate in women’s organisations, a trade union network, indigenous people’s groups, charities and schools, spreading Hindu nationalist ideology throughout Indian society. Billionaires have bankrolled the BJP’s rise. Modi could not have come to power, and held it, without the support of India’s capitalist class. After Modi proved his business acumen as chief minister of Gujarat in the early 2000s, and despite the anti-Muslim pogroms for which he was responsible in that state, important sections of capital shifted their political allegiances from the Indian National Congress towards the BJP. Today the heavyweights of Indian business support the BJP, bar none. This is the project that Western capitalism is assisting and Albanese is embracing. The international free trade deals, including the one signed by Australia, are part of a vicious class war Modi has launched against Indian farmers and workers. In 2025, Modi changed labour laws to supercharge industrialisation, for which he is soliciting international investment. If Modi succeeds, this process will benefit big capitalists, and could force millions of low wage workers and small vendors into destitution. India’s free trade deal with the USA has given the green light to privatisation in agriculture, which still employs most of India’s labour force and is seen to be an unproductive sector. If the USA’s agricultural capitalists get a foothold into India, they will wipe the floor with India’s farmers, who already face a crisis of poverty. The BJP has broad popular support and deep social roots. Nonetheless, there are cracks in its reign. Five years ago, a militant and prolonged farmers’ protest defeated a series of laws aimed at agricultural privatisation. In recent months workers have formed new trade unions in a wildcat strike wave. A satirical political party, the Cockroach Janata Party, has become wildly popular on social media, protesting youth unemployment and the brutal competitiveness of India’s education system. Albanese told the media that people should “chill out a bit” and he wouldn’t “pass comment on some of the internal politics of India”. The truth is that Labor is willing to ignore the brutal politics emanating from India in the interests of profit or military alliances. If Labor had any integrity, it would condemn Modi and the BJP. Instead it is normalising India’s particular brand of fascist politics. ### Israel’s long war on Gaza: from 1948 until today URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/israels-long-war-on-gaza-from-1948-until-today/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T05:35:38.000Z Palestinians in Gaza marked the grim milestone of 1,000 days of Israel’s genocidal war on 7 July. Since October 2023, more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including at least 20,000 children. These are just the victims identified by the Gaza Ministry of Health: the real death toll could be double that, with tens of thousands buried beneath the rubble. Last month, a United Nations [report](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/06/israel-continues-commit-genocide-and-other-atrocity-crimes-deliberately?ref=redflag.org.au) documented the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children, killed by single sniper or drone shots, often in the head or upper torso. The report also documents targeted attacks on hospitals, schools and orphanages, contributing to preventable child deaths, long-term disability and educational collapse. Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has documented the appalling conditions faced by Palestinian prisoners. In August 2024, it published a [report](https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408%5Fwelcome%5Fto%5Fhell?ref=redflag.org.au), titled “Welcome to Hell”, which draws on the testimony of 55 former prisoners to unearth “unrelenting physical and psychological violence, denial of medical treatment, starvation, withholding of water, sleep deprivation and confiscation of all personal belongings”. A follow up [report](https://www.btselem.org/publications/202601%5Fliving%5Fhell?ref=redflag.org.au), “Living Hell”, released in January, provides further testimony demonstrating that Israeli prisons operate as a network of torture camps in which “physical and psychological abuse, inhuman conditions, deliberate starvation and denial of medical care” are rife, and lead to numerous prisoner deaths. Together these reports evidence Israel’s utter barbarism. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Yet, around the world, governments continue to roll out the red carpet for Israel’s genocidists. Israeli President Isaac Herzog was welcomed in Australia in February, while Netanyahu met US President Donald Trump in Washington a week later. On 26 May, Defence Minister Israel Katz restated Israel’s intent to implement a plan for large numbers of Palestinians to leave Gaza “at the right time and in the right manner”. Two days later, Netanyahu declared his troops would take direct control of 70 percent of Gaza, in defiance of a ceasefire US brokered by the Trump administration in January 2025 that Israel has routinely ignored. Gaza’s 2 million residents are now confined to just a third of the Gaza Strip—an area of just 365 square kilometres. The vast majority are forced to live in tents and have little access to clean water or basic amenities. Malnutrition in children is now widespread and growing at an alarming rate, [according to](https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/more-5000-children-diagnosed-malnutrition-gaza-strip-may?ref=redflag.org.au) UNICEF. While Israel has greatly accelerated its efforts to ethnically cleanse Gaza since 7 October 2023, the settler-colonial state has long desired the expulsion of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, which it has occupied continuously since 1967\. In the subsequent decades, Israel has sought to tighten the noose on Gaza in numerous ways, including a succession of military offensives, bombardment, settlement and siege. ### **The origin of oppression** Before the May 1948 declaration of the State of Israel, Gaza was a subdistrict within British mandate Palestine. British rule paved the way for the creation of Israel. During the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt, British troops brutally quashed a strike wave, working with the Haganah (Zionist paramilitaries). When the revolt ended, an estimated one in ten Palestinian men had been executed, wounded, imprisoned or expelled. This left Palestinians ill equipped to resist the Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing that followed. During the 1948 *Nakba* (Catastrophe), the Haganah (subsequently incorporated into the Israeli military) launched a campaign to expel Palestinians from more than 500 villages. Around 750,000 people—two-thirds of the Palestinian population—were forced to flee their homes. Many in the south of Palestine arrived in the Gaza Strip, a small sliver of land that remained under Egyptian administration after the British exodus, following an armistice agreement with the new state of Israel. In April and May 1948, Gaza alone received 10,000 refugees from Jaffa, a coastal city to the north. By the end of 1949, Gaza’s population had more than trebled with the arrival of at least 200,000 refugees from across Palestine. Eight refugee camps were established across the Strip. The largest, Jabalia, had a population of 35,000 in 1948\. Nuseirat, a former British Army camp, sheltered 16,000 refugees on less than one square kilometre of land. Like Gaza’s contemporary tent cities, these camps were plagued by overcrowding, hunger and disease. In the winter of 1948, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that ten children were dying every day in the Khan Younis camp. With the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in late 1949, refugees received some relief. However, any attempt to return to their home villages inside Israel was fraught with danger: those discovered could be shot on sight. In 1955, refugee camps across Gaza were rocked by a series of demonstrations, referred to by Palestinians as an *intifada*. The demonstrations were provoked by an Israeli raid that killed 36 Egyptian soldiers and two Palestinian civilians, including a young boy. Palestinians were incensed that Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime had failed to protect Palestinian refugees or allow them to be armed. Additionally, the mass protests thwarted an Egyptian plan, with US backing, to resettle 12,000 Palestinian refugees in the Sinai, in violation of their right of return. In November 1956, Israel invaded and occupied Gaza for the first time. Its stated objective was to remove hostile militants. During the four-month occupation, “the Israeli army imposed a brutal regime on Gaza characterised by war crimes and massacres”, according to Anne Irfan, author of [*A Short History of the Gaza Strip*](https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/A-Short-History-of-the-Gaza-Strip/Anne-Irfan/9781398552906?ref=redflag.org.au). Some 1,500 Palestinians were killed by Israeli occupation forces. In scenes reminiscent of today, the army lined up men and boys against the wall and shot them; others were forcibly disappeared, their bodies later discovered in mass graves. Prior to Israel’s creation, the Zionist movement’s principal imperial sponsor was Britain. In the aftermath of World War Two, with the British Empire in rapid decline, the Soviet Union and the United States competed for influence in the oil-rich Middle East. The USSR backed Israel’s foundation, but it was ultimately the US to which Israel turned. In June 1967, Israel launched the Six Day War on three fronts, capturing Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Palestinians in Gaza now found themselves cut off from Egypt but allowed access to other parts of historic Palestine for the first time in two decades. The US came to view Israel as its key strategic partner in the Middle East, having demonstrated its military prowess against much weaker Arab armies. In the years leading up to the Six Day War, an increasingly confident Palestinian guerrilla movement, known as the *fedayeen*, had carried out numerous raids into Israeli territory, many of them from Gaza. In this period, Gaza was connected to the outside world via Cairo. Argentinian/Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, African American activist Malcolm X and French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir all visited Gaza’s refugee camps in the mid-1960s, pledging their support for the Palestinian liberation movement. Many Palestinians had suffered persecution from Nasser’s regime, but, after the Six Day War, their situation became immeasurably worse. While Israeli citizens were subject to civilian law, Palestinians in the occupied territories were, and still are, subject to military law. Restrictions on travel, trade, land ownership and building permits ensured that both Gaza and the West Bank could not develop economically independently of Israel. Furthermore, Zionists had long regarded Gaza and the West Bank as integral parts of Greater Israel. However, they could not annex the Palestinians territories without first expelling their populations for fear that they posed a “demographic threat”. Thus, genocidal language has long been the vernacular of Israel’s leaders. In the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War, musing over the problem of what to do with Gaza’s Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Levy Eshkol [said](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n01/ilan-pappe/israel-s-message?ref=redflag.org.au): “I was there in 1956 and saw venomous snakes walking in the street. We should settle some of them in the Sinai, and hopefully the others will immigrate”. However, Israel’s depopulation efforts came up against regional resistance and the refusal of Palestinians to comply. The Nakba had burned into the Palestinian psyche that emigration would be permanent; that Israel would never cede their right to return. ### **Intifadas and compromises** During the 1970s and 1980s, a growing number of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank entered Israel as guest workers. From the perspective of Israel, Palestinians were a cheap labour force, and their integration into the Israeli economy was seen as a means of pacification. However, working days for Palestinians were long and arduous, and their jobs were concentrated in low-waged service industries. Palestinian workers paid Israeli taxes yet received none of the benefits: state investment in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) went not to Palestinians but to serve Israeli settlers. In Gaza, simmering discontent exploded on 8 December 1987, when an Israeli vehicle crashed into four Palestinians near the Jabalia refugee camp, killing all of them. Widely seen by Palestinians as a revenge attack for the earlier killing of an Israeli settler, the incident proved to be the spark that ignited the First Intifada. Across the OPT, Palestinians went on strike, refusing to work for Israeli businesses, boycotted Israeli goods and refused to pay the occupiers’ taxes. Demonstrations became widespread. For a period, the First Intifada relaunched the Palestinian struggle on the international stage, winning enormous public sympathy, especially in the Arab world. However, the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose leaders had been forced into exile in Tunisia following Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, began to reassert itself in the diplomatic arena, having been relegated to a back seat by the grassroots uprising. In 1988, PLO chair Yasser Arafat announced the declaration of the State of Palestine in the territories Israel had occupied in 1967, giving de facto recognition to Israel. In September 1993, the first of the [Oslo Accords](https://redflag.org.au/article/farce-oslo-20-years/) was signed, the PLO renouncing “violence and terrorism” (i.e. armed struggle) and agreeing to establish a Palestinian Authority deprived of any control over borders, trade or airspace and with no defence capability. This was the beginning of a policy of “security coordination” in which the PA was tasked not with defending Palestinians but with policing them as subcontractors for the occupation. The Oslo Accords were aptly [described](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n20/edward-said/the-morning-after?ref=redflag.org.au) by Palestinian author Edward Said as “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles”. All matters in contention—the right of return, the status of Jerusalem (which Palestinians long viewed as their capital) and final borders—were postponed to the indefinite future. This historic betrayal set in motion greater integration of the OPT into the Israeli economy, and a massive expansion of Israeli settlements and, with them, Israel’s security apparatus. In 1998, Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon encouraged Israeli settlers to seize ever more Palestinian land, [telling](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/11/ariel-sharon-israel-warrior-death?ref=redflag.org.au) a radio audience: “Everyone there should move, should run, should grab more hills, expand the territory”. ### **The twenty-first century** Two years later, Sharon became prime minister. In September 2000, he provoked a storm of protest when he visited Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The harsh repression that followed provoked the Second Intifada, a new Palestinian uprising that proved far more violent than the first. Between 2000 and 2005, the PA’s security forces battled to contain armed Palestinian factions, while Israeli occupation forces killed at least 4,973 Palestinians, [according to](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/9/28/palestinian-intifada-20-years-later-israeli-occupation-continues?ref=redflag.org.au) the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. Inside Gaza, the situation had become dire. In 1996, Israel built a 60-kilometre-long “security barrier” along the Strip’s perimeter and banned any entry from Gaza, depriving tens of thousands of Palestinians of work in Israel. By 2000, nearly a third of the population was living below the poverty line, increasingly dependent upon foreign aid. During the Oslo years, child labour increased while school enrolment rates dropped. Child beggars began to appear on Gaza’s streets. Doron Almog, then the chief of the military’s southern command, [boasted](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n01/ilan-pappe/israel-s-message?ref=redflag.org.au) that Israel was policing Gaza’s perimeter: “We established observation points equipped with the best technology and our troops were allowed to fire at anyone reaching the fence at a distance of six kilometres”. In 2005, Sharon ordered the unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli settlements from Gaza, not as a gesture of peace, but to remove them from the line of Hamas rocket fire and to facilitate subsequent Israeli military incursions. Meanwhile, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s failure to agree to a further capitulation at Camp David talks in 2000 led to him being sidelined by the US and placed under house arrest by Israeli occupation forces. Under US pressure, Arafat agreed to Mahmoud Abbas becoming the PA’s first prime minister. In 2004, after Arafat died, Abbas succeeded Arafat as PLO chair and Palestinian president. He faced an election only once, in 2005, but has continued to govern without a presidential mandate ever since. In the wake of the Second Intifada, Abbas was tasked with rebuilding the Palestinian Authority as a repressive force. On 25 January 2006, legislative elections were held across the OPT, largely at the behest of the US government, which (wrongly) calculated that elections would lend legitimacy to Abbas’s quisling authority. Despite an influx of US$2.3 million in US aid, Fatah lost the elections to the Hamas “Change and Reform” list, which secured 44 percent of the vote and 74 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, compared with 41 percent and 45 seats for Fatah. Hamas had boycotted the 1996 election on the grounds that it did not recognise the PLC and other governing institutions established under the Oslo Accords. Abbas was determined that Fatah would not cede power to Hamas. Tensions between the two factions mounted. In June 2006, pitched battles ensued between Hamas and Fatah fighters in Rafah, in southern Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel used the pretext of rocket fire from Gaza to launch a four-month military offensive in 2006 that killed 526 Palestinians. In early 2007, following Saudi-sponsored negotiations, Hamas and Fatah agreed to establish a national unity government. The initiative, however, did not last long. The US refused to provide aid to any administration in which Hamas had a role, and Israel declared it would not pass on Palestinian tax revenue (around US$55 million a month). Determined to oust Hamas, the US approved a covert initiative to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The Bush administration armed 1,400 fighters under the command of Fatah security chief and Abbas loyalist Mohammed Dahlan. Hamas, in turn, secured Iranian support to boost its fighting force. Predictably, another armed conflict erupted. The outcome, however, was not what the US intended: Hamas secured control of Gaza, driving out Fatah. Abbas responded by dissolving the national unity government and forming a Fatah-dominated cabinet headed by the neoliberal technocrat Salam Fayyad. Two rival Palestinian authorities now ruled over the OPT: one in Gaza, led by Hamas leader Ismael Hanieh, and another in Ramallah, which administered the West Bank, led by Abbas as president and Fayyad as prime minister. From this point onwards, Israel imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza by air, land and sea, denying entry and exit of both people and goods. Gaza’s fishermen were prohibited from venturing more than three nautical miles off the coast under threat of being fired upon by Israeli patrols. Israel employed new technology to enforce its open-air prison. As Irfan observes, Gaza’s blockade was now imposed “not only by razor-wire fences, concrete walls and military watchtowers, but also by drones, CCTV, radar sensors, spy balloons, sonic imagery, and remote-controlled machine guns, bulldozers and boats”. All “non-essential” goods were [banned](https://www.gisha.org/UserFiles/File/publications/Products060610%5FEng%281%29.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au), including numerous construction materials, notebooks, newspapers and even musical instruments, allegedly on security grounds. Israeli government adviser Dov Weisglass [explained](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/apr/16/israel?ref=redflag.org.au): “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”. The US-allied Egyptian military dictatorship also played its part in Gaza’s collective punishment, routinely closing the southern Rafah crossing. Palestinians in Gaza now relied on a comprehensive network of secret tunnels to smuggle goods and people in and out of Gaza. By 2021, after fifteen years of blockade, UNRWA [reported](https://www.unrwa.org/gaza15-years-blockade?ref=redflag.org.au) that more than four in five of Gaza’s population lived below the poverty line, and unemployment stood at 47 percent. As a consequence of Israel’s deliberate destruction of water infrastructure, 81 percent of water extracted from Gaza aquifers did not meet World Health Organization standards. Dramatically compounding Gaza’s woes was the cumulative impact of a series of Israeli military operations in 2008, 2009, 2012 and 2014, during which the territory was carpet bombed and invaded. Israel’s successive military interventions were dubbed “mowing the lawn”, a deliberate strategy of degrading Hamas’ military capability while keeping them in power. On 7 October 2023, when Palestinian militant groups, led by Hamas fighters, broke through Gaza’s perimeter fence to launch a series of deadly attacks on both military and civilian targets in southern Israel, the Netanyahu government seized upon the moment to impose a “final solution” upon Gaza’s population. Since 2023, the Gaza genocide has wreaked an unprecedented toll of death and destruction upon Palestinians, more deadly and destructive than the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Six Day War and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon combined. The cities of Gaza, Khan Younis and Rafah are no more. Gaza now resembles a hellscape with its entire population displaced and infrastructure destroyed. Yet, the tragedy that has befallen the Palestinians was a deliberate act, a crime decades in the making. Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi has described Israel’s war on Palestine as a “hundred years’ war”, dating its origins back to the 1917 declaration of Lord Balfour that promised British support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Many others have drawn connections between ethnic cleansing of Palestine during the 1948 Nakba and Israel’s present-day genocide. Many countries—not only the US, but also Australia and many others—are deeply complicit, providing both the military hardware and diplomatic cover to make Israel’s crimes possible. In Australia, Israel’s supporters in the corridors of power and in the media have sought to smear Palestine supporters as “antisemites” to hide their own role in aiding and abetting a genocide. If “Never Again” means never again for anyone, we must not only tear down the walls that imprison and oppress Palestinians but the very system that perpetuates such madness. --- *Nick Everett is the chair of Friends of Palestine WA.* ### We won’t stop Hanson by rallying around Labor URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/we-wont-stop-hanson-by-rallying-around-labor/ Last updated: 2026-07-16T05:35:28.000Z Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club appearance confirmed what a vile reactionary she is and what a threat her far-right party poses to all working-class people. She has nothing but contempt for workers, denouncing them as “lazy” and “on their phones” too much, complaining they are too hard to sack, and expressing opposition to paid maternity leave. She wants to create a monoculture of white nationalists and a country of low-paid and subservient workers whose only purpose is to further enrich bosses both large and small—the big banks, the supermarket chains, the Murdochs and Gina Reinharts plus every shonky property developer, spiv and rip-off merchant. Hanson is out to take away the rights working-class people have fought for. She wants to slash welfare and health care, severely restrict abortion rights, further undermine union rights and increase military spending to prepare for war. All of this is on top of climate denialism and her racist attacks on Aboriginal people and migrants, who form a substantial section of the modern Australian working class. The monoculture Hanson wants to impose on us is one that obliterates all our basic freedoms. Her program is explicitly to the right of even US President Donald Trump, and shares much in common with the extreme racist nationalism of the pre-World War II fascist dictatorships. Indeed, Hanson is openly promoting the violent British fascist gang leader Tommy Robinson. More people are starting to wake up to the threat that One Nation poses. That immediately raises the question of how she can be pushed back and eventually defeated. Hanson can’t simply be wished away. We can’t rely on appeals to middle-class opinion that assume mainstream norms should and will prevail. She has to be fought, and it is going to be a long and serious battle. To have a chance of winning it, we have to build a powerful working-class movement that can abolish the conditions that breed far-right reaction. That means fighting to overturn the exploitative capitalist order, not backing lesser-evil mainstream parties that merely prop up the oppressive status quo. The proponents of lesser evilism argue that, while parties like the ALP and the US Democrats are far from perfect, workers need to hold their noses and vote for them in order to keep out worse alternatives like Hanson and Trump. But while voting Labor might temporarily prevent One Nation forming government, it will definitely notstop the advance of the far right over the longer term. Experience shows it will only fuel it. In country after country where liberals and social democrats have called on workers to vote for the supposedly lesser evil candidate to defeat the fascist threat, it has singularly failed to see off that threat. In France, many left-wing people voted for the supposedly moderate Emmanuel Macron to stop Marine Le Pen, head of the white nationalist and fascist National Rally, becoming president. In office, Macron has ruled in an extremely authoritarian and racist manner little different from extreme right nationalist governments like Meloni in Italy, Orban in Hungary or Trump in the US. Macron has forced through harsh neoliberal measures and waged blatantly racist campaigns against Muslims and migrants. Democratic rights have been savaged and unions attacked, all to serve the interests of the big end of town. Far from support for the National Rally being undermined, the party’s vote in the first round of the French assembly elections surged from 18.7 percent in 2022 to 33.2 percent in July 2024, peaking at 37.06 per cent in the second round. And this extreme nationalist fascist party is the front runner for the 2027 French presidential elections. So the lesser evil option has not only led to the sorts of policies people who voted for it were trying to avoid, but has also strengthened the evil it promised to act as a bulwark against. It is similar in Britain. The Starmer Labour government thoroughly demoralised its working-class supporters with its program of swingeing cutbacks to boost the profits of big business. British Labour ramped up military spending and implemented a concerted racist campaign against migrants and refugees. No wonder racist pogroms erupted and Nigel Farage’s far-right nationalist Reform UK and the blatantly fascist Restore Britain surged in the polls. Labour won the 2024 general election with 33.7 per cent of the vote compared to 14.3 per cent for Reform. But for the last year, Reform has consistently led Labour in the polls by at least 4 or 5 percent and often considerably more, with Restore Britain polling another 3 to 7 percent on top of that. Similarly, voting for the Democrats in the US did not stop the rise of Donald Trump. The lesser evil Joe Biden, like every other Democratic president, sought to advance the wealth and power of the US big business establishment. Far from combating reactionary racism, Biden’s administration carried out mass deportations of migrants and refused to rein in racist police. Biden increased military spending, backed Israel’s war on Gaza, and did nothing to improve working-class living standards. The Democrats therefore merely prepared the ground for Trump’s return to office. Even if the Democrats win the presidency next time round, the far-right nationalist and fascist forces will not simply disappear. They are likely to become even more extreme, as they have everywhere from Germany to Italy to India. In Australia, decades of both Labor and Liberal governments ruling for the corporate rich, attacking workers’ rights, privatising core services, running down the health system, demonising Muslims and refugees have likewise created the soil in which support for One Nation has grown as the supposed anti-establishment party. When Hanson first shot to fame in the 1990s, there was outrage at her unbridled racism. Thirty years later, she has been normalised by the media and the mainstream parties, which have adopted large chunks of her reactionary agenda. Labor has recognised the challenge posed by One Nation and is beginning to talk up its supposedly pro-worker credentials to appeal to progressive voters. However, Labor in government has not advanced the interests of working-class people. Quite the reverse. The ALP consistently works to undermine any serious fight by workers to stand up for their rights. One of the worst crimes of Labor politicians and the trade union leaders that are allied to them is that for decades they have undermined working-class cohesion, class consciousness and workplace organisation. In doing so, they have severely weakened the very forces that could have blunted Hanson’s impact and led the fight against her political influence. Another term of Labor in office will further compound this problem, and do nothing to resolve the growing alienation and bitterness in society or turn it in a progressive direction. ALP MPs at times criticise Hanson’s racism. But it doesn’t land because it seems so insincere given that Labor’s track record is one of locking up refugees, overseeing record levels of Aboriginal deaths in custody, introducing harsh laws targeting Aboriginal and African youth, apologising for migration, supporting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and demonising its opponents. Labor is highlighting Hanson’s blatantly anti-worker agenda on wages and conditions. However, the impact of Labor’s criticisms is weakened by the reality that the Albanese government and ALP state governments have consistently championed the interests of the banks, the property developers, the mining companies and the rest of big business. Labor has presided over declining wages and imposed anti-worker laws with some of the most severe restrictions on the right to strike in the Western world. Labor may not be as right wing as One Nation, but the lesser evil is still an evil. Instead of clinging to it out of fear of the alternative, the oppressed need to build and vote for a socialist party that will actually stand up to all the evils of capitalism. In the US, it has been the concerted mass mobilisations against ICE, in particular the sustained protests and strikes by workers in Minneapolis, that played a key role in pushing back Trump, not anything the Democrats have done. In the UK it has been the mass protests in response to the pogrom against migrants by loyalist gangs in Belfast that helped isolate the far right, not anything the Labour government did. It is that sort of mass action that needs to be built over the coming years in Australia. But as well as street mobilisations directly against the racist far right, there needs to be a fight back on every front, from the defence of living standards, opposing the military build-up, defence of women’s rights, concerted action on climate change and much more. A key part of that will be rebuilding fighting unions that are prepared to take on the big corporations and the governments that back them. Even more importantly, we need to build a socialist political alternative to the far right and to the ALP and the Greens. A socialist party that organises in every workplace, every school and every university for the liberation of workers and all the oppressed. A socialist party that offers hope of a better world to the misery of capitalism and far right despair. A socialist party that unapologetically demands a complete overhaul of the capitalist status quo and its oppressive tyranny over workers. A socialist party that counter-poses working class solidarity and democracy to One Nation’s racism and authoritarianism. Socialists are not just out to make capitalist society a little bit fairer, slightly less racist and sexist. We are fighting for a society in which workers have democratic control over everything and have no other agenda when exercising that control than meeting the needs of the mass of people rather than the super-rich, as under capitalism. Such a thoroughgoing democratic society will have no room for wars, racism and bigotry, no room for billionaires and the likes of Hanson. It will strive in a planned way to improve the lives of all in terms of health care, housing, education, child care and meaningful and enjoyable work rather than soul-destroying drudgery, all without ravaging the environment. We need this radical vision if we are to defeat the likes of Hanson, Trump, Farage and Modi. Most of the other opposition to Hanson, including the ALP, are apologists for the capitalist status quo, which means they are totally incapable of providing a thoroughgoing alternative to far-right reaction and the unequal conditions that breed it. So while we want to see Hanson’s momentum checked in the Victorian election this November, re-election of the state ALP government—or Albanese in 2028—will not end the far-right threat. A fighting alternative has to be built to One Nation and to the very foundations of the capitalist system that is the breeding ground of racism and the far right. ### The world is changed through struggle, not civility URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-world-is-changed-through-struggle-not-civility/ Last updated: 2026-07-14T06:49:10.000Z Once the tear gas had lifted from, and targeted students were punished for participating in, Palestine solidarity encampments across the United States, universities returned to the pretence that they welcome “dialogue” between political opponents. College administrators across the country are now flocking to so-called civility programs, which have been established at more than 100 universities and are run by organisations such as the Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI). As the *Guardian* recently [reported](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/28/university-campus-civic-dialogue-industry?CMP=Share%5FiOSApp%5FOther&ref=redflag.org.au): > “\[M\]ore than 200,000 students across the country have taken ‘[Perspectives](https://programs.constructivedialogue.org/program/higher-ed-33-full-integrated-with-p2p?testDrive=true&ref=redflag.org.au)’, an online course by the CDI. Universities like Harvard, Yale and New York University have made it a requirement for incoming students.” Although the new “civility industrial complex” is dominated by right-leaning and pro-Israel foundations, their arguments find an echo in many liberal circles, particularly those concerned with propriety—i.e. not appearing “shrill” or “intolerant” in the realm of mainstream opinion. There is even a trend developing among the newest generation of elected Democratic Party socialists: to engage respectfully with political adversaries. Newly elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani led the way in November last year when he met with Donald Trump at the White House—where the two exchanged friendly banter and pats on the arm. That same month, Mamdani also endorsed establishment Democrat Hakeem Jeffries to be speaker of the House if the Dems won a majority. In February, he endorsed mainstream Democrat Kathy Hochul for re-election as governor. These are all clear signals that, while Mamdani seeks to rock the boat, he does not plan to sink it. This approach has divided members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), to which Mamdani also belongs, and other progressive Democrats. Justice Democrats co-founder Corbin Trent [argued](https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/how-to-beat-the-democratic-party-establishment?ref=redflag.org.au) in response to Mamdani allies Brad Lander, who is running for Congress, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez following Mamdani in endorsing Jeffries: > “Jeffries is the establishment. He’s the status quo. He’s the leader that has presided over a party that’s failed to beat Trump. He is the same type of Democrat that led to us losing thousands of seats over the last decade. A party leadership that is still less popular than [Donald Trump](https://www.commondreams.org/tag/donald-trump?ref=redflag.org.au). When you are trying to transform a party you can’t back down ... Jeffries promised him nothing and meant to promise nothing, and Lander handed over his support for free anyway. That’s the saddest habit in our movement. Our people give up before the fight even starts.” Unfortunately, “giving up before the fight even starts” happens all too often. Avoiding confrontation, even when fascists turn up, is usually justified by claims that “if we ignore them, they’ll go away” and “don’t give them the attention they want”. Worse, as was the case when pro-Democratic Party organisations organised recent “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration, is refusing to raise pro-Palestinian or other radical demands because doing so might alienate the political establishment. None of these are winning strategies. In fact, abiding by proper etiquette has never won social change of any significance: victory is achieved only through determination—and confrontation. As Bethany Moreton, a member of Uncivil—an organisation of academics opposed to “civility” programs—told the *Guardian*, “No one really believes that somehow we’d have the Voting Rights Act if Martin Luther King had just sat down with the wizard of the KKK and they had hashed out their disagreements”. As is well known, Rosa Parks was both “impolite” and a lawbreaker in 1955, when she refused to give up her bus seat for a white passenger in Alabama. Her arrest spawned the Montgomery bus boycott, a 381-day well-organised and massive protest of African Americans led by Martin Luther King, Jr. This protest led directly to the 1956 US Supreme Court ruling striking down segregated seating on city buses. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass summarised in an 1857 speech why struggle is necessary: > “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” It took an armed struggle and the Civil War to win an end to slavery in the US. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels enthusiastically supported the north in the Civil War, recognising that slavery provided the economic foundation that enabled capitalism: “the veiled slavery of the wage labourers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World”. They likewise recognised the centrality of struggle as the motor of progress in human society. The first chapter of their 1848 *Manifesto of the Communist Party* begins: > “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes ... > “The modern capitalist society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.” When Marx and Engels referred to class struggle, as they noted above, they also included the broader struggles between “oppressor and oppressed”. Combating oppression advances the class struggle by breaking down divisions between workers. But the class struggle also is the most effective strategy to combat oppression, because using the social power of the working class strengthens the fight against all forms of injustice. The Montgomery bus boycott showed the power of the Black working class outside of the workplace in striking an enormous blow against Jim Crow apartheid in the south. In the 1960s, the struggle of Black workers spread to factories. All-Black workers’ organisations not only used the strike weapon to fight racism in the union and on the factory floor, but their strike actions also gained the support of a significant layer of white workers. The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), for example, an organisation of Black autoworkers that grew out of a wildcat strike at General Motors’ Dodge main plant in 1968, lasted just a few short years. But during its brief existence, DRUM showed the potential for African-American workers to strike against racism, while gaining solidarity from many white co-workers. Unfortunately, too few people today are aware of this history. And while socialists welcome every successful progressive reform, like free child care or rent control, such reforms are not evidence that incremental reform can win a socialist society. While democratic socialists might sincerely believe in “respectful discourse” between political opponents, this actually signals political weakness, not strength. Just as slavery did not end because plantation owners suddenly developed a conscience, today’s ruling class will fight tooth and nail against making concessions to workers and the oppressed until they are forced to, from below. ### Far-right warriors for the capitalist class URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/far-right-warriors-for-the-capitalist-class/ Last updated: 2026-07-12T20:53:00.000Z Behind all the culture war bluster and appeals to rural reaction, Pauline Hanson’s key function in Australian politics is to popularise policies and measures that guarantee the further enrichment of the capitalist class and its authoritarian power. Her main enemy, then, as much as migrants and Muslims, is the Labor Party and the labour movement. Hanson claims to be against the two-party political system—what One Nation calls “the uniparty”—but the ALP and broader labour movement are consistently the main target of her attacks. In One Nation’s eyes, the ALP is one step short of being an enemy to the nation, a front for subversive forces that threaten the fabric of the country. One Nation associates the labour movement with communism or foreign interference. So Hanson described the May budget as “Marxist, socialist, communist”, out to strip wealth from “hardworking Australians”. Senator Malcolm Roberts usually accuses Labor of being soft on, if not in league with, “Communist China” and, more broadly, with the “globalist agenda” of organisations like the United Nations, which supposedly want to use “mass immigration” to swamp white-majority nations. In the same vein, net-zero climate policies are, according to One Nation, “a vehicle for creating a socialist Australia in which citizens are forced under comprehensive government control”. Labor’s links with trade unionism are a large part of One Nation’s hostility to the party. Trade unions are a threat to the small businesses Hanson champions. Hanson told the Senate earlier this month, “Labor’s project to hijack the Australian economy for corrupt union bosses is becoming relentless”. She has joined in the hysterical media campaign to demonise the Allan government in Victoria as a tool of the CFMEU, and calls for a ban on union donations to political parties. If an illegitimate government has seized power and is proceeding to wreck the country, the ordinary rules of parliamentary democracy can be dispensed with. In her National Press Club speech, Hanson called for the governor-general to sack the Albanese government, just as Whitlam was sacked in 1975\. That both governments had only recently been re-elected, and in the Albanese government’s case with a massive majority, apparently means nothing to these supposed people’s representatives. One Nation’s hostility to Labor and the labour movement has been bread and butter for the right throughout Australia’s history. Much as Labor may rule for the rich, its associations with the trade unions and its very faint identity as “the workers’ party” make it suspect, a foreign entity. The ruling class in most cases works with Labor governments, but that doesn’t change the fact that Labor is not its natural and preferred party. For decades, the capitalists could rely on the Liberal and National parties to fight for them. Now that the right-wing parties’ electoral support has plummeted, the capitalists are tolerating Labor but casting an eye over One Nation to see what it might viably offer. Hanson’s agenda of popularising anti-worker policies and attitudes aligns with their interests. The class prejudices of One Nation are woven through the very constitution of the party. Its leading representatives overwhelmingly come from middle class or small capitalist backgrounds. Hanson herself owned a fish and chip shop and several investment properties. Malcolm Roberts was general manager of the Gordonstone coal mine in central Queensland. Recently elected MP for Farrer in NSW David Farley is a wealthy agribusiness consultant and commodity trader. Western Australian Senator Tyrone Whitten, elected last year, owns an earthworks and construction business with a $200 million turnover, while Victorian upper house MP Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell is a dairy farmer. One Nation has consistently raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the party’s base, particularly small business owners. Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person, has been an important exception to this pattern. For years, Rinehart has supplied One Nation with in-kind support, such as use of her private jets. With Barnaby Joyce coming on board last December, Rinehart has increased her support. Two executives at Rinehart’s business empire, Adam Giles and Ian Plimer, have each donated $500,000\. Rinehart has also opened doors for Hanson on the international far-right circuit, including flying Hanson to a CPAC conference at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and hosting fundraising events aboard her luxury cruise ship The World. With One Nation becoming a serious political force, hefty business donations have now begun to come in. Stockbroker Angus Aitken and his wife Sarah have donated $1 million. In Victoria, where One Nation may hold the balance of power after November’s election, some former Liberal donors are now switching to One Nation. Property developers are leading the charge, outlaying hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations in return for Hanson’s promise to scrap the Allan government’s property taxes. Small and middle-sized businesses are also lobbying Hanson for reductions in “business red tape” and the cancellation of work-from-home policies (even though small businesses are already exempt from them). The media either openly boost One Nation or make only mild criticisms. All of this is happening as Hanson becomes ever more brazenly fascistic, most recently recording a podcast with British fascist and street thug Tommy Robinson. One Nation’s meteoric rise over the past nine months is extremely dangerous. Even if it does not form government in its own name or as part of a coalition, it is hardening up what was an already growing far right movement and pushing mainstream politics to the right. The party can no longer be dismissed; it must be fought. But to fight One Nation, we need to understand that it is peddling more than just bigotry, but also a coherent and well-resourced ideological and economic agenda. For decades, the far right in Australia has been relatively marginal. Now, as capitalism decays and the mainstream parties that have ruled for nearly a century lose much of their popular bases, One Nation is seizing its moment. It wants to smash working-class solidarity and impose a hard right agenda, and the capitalists are accordingly eyeing it as a potential player in government. To fight it effectively, we need to understand what makes it tick, and the system it aims to serve. ### Myths of the US constitution URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/myths-of-the-us-constitution/ Last updated: 2026-07-12T20:52:51.000Z If there is one part of what might be called the US’s “civic religion” on which liberals and conservatives agree, it’s the fundamental importance of the US constitution, passed in 1787\. Perhaps that’s understandable, given that the constitution lays out the blueprint of the government that has remained largely intact since. But when figures as disparate as [Senator Bernie Sanders](https://newrepublic.com/post/202601/bernie-sanders-caving-trump-betrayal-constitution-shutdown?ref=redflag.org.au) or [Senator Ted Cruz](https://www.cruz.senate.gov/about/issues/constitution-and-bill-of-rights?ref=redflag.org.au) wax on about the constitution, it’s clear that the eighteenth-century document has taken on the aspect of scripture, as if it were written on stone tablets handed down from the Framers. In reality, the country’s founding document emerged from grubby political machinations through which the post-revolutionary elite aimed to consolidate its rule over the state. The US Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1776 uses some radical language: “all men are created equal”; governments derive “just powers from the consent of the governed”; “the right of the people to alter or to abolish” government; and so on. The colonial elite used this sort of rhetoric to mobilise the broader mass of the population to cast their lot with independence from Britain. But the founders, mostly drawn from the leading merchants and plantation owners, weren’t about to turn their newly independent state over to artisans and farmers. One of the most class conscious of them, Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury secretary and main writer of the *Federalist Papers*, a series of popular essays justifying the constitution, put it succinctly: “\[T\]hat power that holds the purse strings absolutely must rule”. Their target was the national government under the 1777 Articles of Confederation, which held the republic together as a compact between the thirteen states. Under the articles, the national government had no authority to raise taxes. It depended on the unanimous agreement of each state legislature to decide any policy. Bankers and other wealthy holders of public securities, who loaned money to the new government, clamoured for a strong central government with revenue-raising powers to repay their loans. They wanted a stronger military to protect American commerce from British marauders. And they desired a uniform national set of tariffs to aid young American capitalism. In September 1786, delegates from five state legislatures met in Annapolis, Maryland, to discuss the USA’s economic problems. It was clear, however, that for some of them—such as Hamilton and James Madison, a Virginia slaveholder—more was at stake than simply tariff regulations. They issued a call for a meeting of state delegates in Philadelphia the following spring to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation. When the delegation of 55—most of them merchants, finance capitalists, slaveholders and landlords—met in secret in May 1787, Madison proposed a set of “amendments” to the articles, the effect of which was to scrap the articles altogether. Throughout the summer. Madison’s proposals for a strong executive, a two-house legislature, the subordination of the state governments to the federal government and the like set the terms of debate. Hamilton proposed a plan that went further than Madison’s. It argued for the imposition of a monarch elected for life. The structure of the US government is designed to fragment power, with two houses of Congress, elected at different times and serving different terms. Powers are divided among local, state and federal governments, and among the executive, legislative and judicial branches. All of this aimed, as Madison put it in *Federalist* #10, to guard against, among other things, “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project”. Left unsaid was the key “improper or wicked project”, which ultimately amounted to the largest expropriation of wealth in US history: the abolition of slavery. Madison, of course, hailed from the Virginia elite whose economic and political power was based on chattel slavery. Throughout the summer of 1787, the delegates reached compromises that helped patch together agreement on the new government. The most rotten of these was the so-called three-fifths compromise devising a method of representing the southern slave states in the House of Representatives by counting each slave as three-fifths of a person. In return, the constitution gave special protection to the institution of slavery. Amid all the horse-trading between the delegations, the Framers agreed on the need for a strong state to curb the democratic “excesses” of the mass of the population. Madison warned the delegates: “In future times, a great majority of the people will not only be without land, but any sort of property”. Thus, he said, it was necessary to design a government that would stop the majority from expropriating the propertied minority. The convention’s finished product, the US constitution, included clause after clause that limited even formal democracy: a six-year term for senators, appointed by state legislatures; an electoral college system for choosing the president; the lifetime appointment of judges. Only one part of the government, the House of Representatives, was to be open to direct popular vote. And due to the various state limitations on voting rights (which were granted on the basis of property ownership rather than citizenship) and the denial of voting rights to women and most non-whites, most Americans had virtually no ability to influence this “most democratic” of governments. By the standards of accepted government practice, the Framers’ meeting was illegal. The delegates not only disregarded their charge to simply propose amendments to the articles, but also ignored the amendment procedures the articles themselves laid out. When the constitution was presented to Congress in September 1787 for submission to the state legislatures, it appeared as an accomplished fact that the confederation was finished. The states approved the new document over the next year, but only after its supporters promised a “Bill of Rights” to limit the new government’s power to encroach on individual civil rights and liberties. Today, when most Americans think of the constitution’s most important parts, they think of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights codifying freedom of speech or religion, or the right to own firearms. But the Framers considered the Bill of Rights as a secondary feature of the document, added only to dampen opposition to it. In the first years under the new constitution, the new ruling class consolidated its hold on state power and enacted laws organising a national banking system, investments in canals and roads and protective tariffs aimed at establishing a modern capitalist economy. Moreover, the strong state under the new constitution provided for the armed force that the ruling class desired for “stability”. With the eruption of the Whiskey Rebellion, a 1794 insurrection of western Pennsylvania farmers against taxation, supporters of the constitution looked to the federal government’s response as a test of the document’s strength. The new government did not disappoint its ruling-class backers. It mustered a huge invasion force to crush the rebellion decisively. So the constitution the Framers envisioned preserved the rotten class and racial status quo. For many antebellum abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, it was “a covenant with death” and “an agreement with hell” because it protected slavery and preserved the political power of the southern slaveocracy. This arrangement collapsed when the election of President Abraham Lincoln precipitated the secession of the southern states and the 1861-65 Civil War. The Confederacy’s defeat presented the victorious Union with an opportunity to “reconstruct” the state and to enfranchise millions of the formerly enslaved. The Radical Republicans—the members of Lincoln’s party most committed to a democratic reconstruction of the state—alongside millions of African Americans, spearheaded passage of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the constitution. These amendments outlawed chattel slavery, established citizenship for all persons born in the US, guaranteed “equal protection of the laws” and barred racial discrimination in voting rights. These “Reconstruction amendments” amounted to what historian [Eric Foner called the US’s “second founding”](https://www.npr.org/2019/09/17/761551835/second-founding-examines-how-reconstruction-remade-the-constitution?ref=redflag.org.au): > “The whole question of what is citizenship, who is a citizen and what rights come along with it—that was central to the political conflict in Reconstruction. And these amendments are the effort of the Republican Congress, and indeed of African Americans themselves, to put into the constitution the basic idea of equality for all Americans. It’s important to remember that ideal didn’t exist before the Civil War. Remember, the Dred Scott decision, 1857, said no Black person can be a citizen. Only white people can be citizens of the United States. > “This was a country with strong belief in liberty but with a strong racial barrier excluding non-whites from enjoyment of many of those liberties. And so Reconstruction is an effort to shatter those boundaries and to create a new—really, a new republic. I mean, that’s why I call it the ‘Second Founding’. It really transforms the constitution, not just adding a few things here and there, you know, to try to implement this principle of equal rights for all Americans.” Reconstruction lasted until 1877\. It marked the US’s first experience with some form of multi-racial democracy. But a concerted campaign of white supremacist terror and the national government’s retreat from enforcing civil rights led to the era of racial apartheid known as Jim Crow. For almost a century, the federal and state governments, the Supreme Court and the Republican and Democratic parties collaborated to neuter the egalitarian and democratic aspirations embodied in the Reconstruction Amendments. Only the 1950s and 1960s movements for civil rights, women’s rights and LBGTQ rights pushed the government to affirm and enforce civil rights through legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA) and the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). As the just-concluded Supreme Court term showed, the conservative super-majority is moving to [deconstruct the “civil rights state” that emerged from the 1960s](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/opinion/voting-rights-act-supreme-court.html?ref=redflag.org.au). Decisions eviscerating the VRA or ruling that the CRA doesn’t apply to trans people—to take two examples of many egregious recent decisions—illustrate that. And that [only a bare majority of justices could affirm the constitutionality of “birthright citizenship”](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/06/supreme-court-birthright-citizenship-scandal-brett-kavanaugh.html?ref=redflag.org.au), despite the Fourteenth Amendment’s crystal-clear language establishing it, shows that Trump and the Supreme Court majority want to return US constitutional law to the time before the “second founding”. Throughout US history, conservative and reactionary forces have taken advantage of the perfectly legal ways that the constitution allows political minorities to veto or derail the popular will. That was how the Jim Crow Democrats maintained their control over the south and the federal government for a century. It’s how the loser of the popular vote became president five times, including twice in the last quarter century. The liberal side of the US political elite and its followers view a brief period in US history—roughly from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, during which [the Supreme Court supported civil rights reforms](https://www.history.com/articles/earl-warren-supreme-court-civil-rights?ref=redflag.org.au)—as the logical outcome of the constitutional order. That ignores the entire history of the Supreme Court, which has always been the most reactionary section of the US government. But the idea that the Supreme Court dispensed justice flowing from the constitution allowed liberals to duck fights to defend the rights that the court seemed to have assured. If anyone wants to know why the Democrats and liberals seemed to be so unprepared for the long-foretold 2022 *Dobbs* decision overturning the federal right to abortion, a good [place to start is the ideological disarmament that liberals’ trust](https://daniellazare.com/2022/05/05/the-constitutions-revenge/?ref=redflag.org.au) in the court and “the constitution” fostered. If history shows anything, it’s that the constitution isn’t some holy document whose “truth” can be discovered the way religious leaders cite verses from the Bible, the Talmud or the Quran. What the constitution legally enables or forbids is determined by class and political struggle. Even the most enlightened words on a page are not self-executing. The rights that workers and the oppressed have won depended not on their reliance on the constitution, but on their willingness to fight against bosses and politicians who often hid behind the constitution to protect their power. The great people’s historian Howard Zinn put it well: > “The constitution gave no rights to working people; no right to work less than twelve hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organise, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance ... Those rights only come alive when citizens organise, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel and violate the law in order to uphold justice.” ### Wollongong Uni corruption the product of a corporate sector URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/wollongong-uni-corruption-the-product-of-a-corporate-sector/ Last updated: 2026-07-12T04:47:28.000Z Our universities are run by corrupt, entitled grifters. While the key reports from the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s (ICAC) investigation into the University of Wollongong (UOW) are yet to be released, the hearings have made this abundantly clear. The probe into UOW was sparked by questions about favouritism in the appointment of several highly paid managerial positions, as well as dubious awarding of contracts to private consultancy firms that may have been conflicts of interest. UOW has been embroiled in controversy for years. From its revolving door of vice-chancellors, a Fairwork ombudsman finding that staff were underpaid $6.6 million, an attempt to establish a new campus in Saudi Arabia, cuts to more than 200 academic and professional staff and the liquidation of several courses—it’s been scandal after scandal. The inquiry shows that the rot runs deep. At the centre of the probe is the role played by chief governance officer and university secretary Alyssa White. Breaking down in tears on the final day of the hearing, White defended giving plum jobs to people in her friendship circle and developing a new role that she hoped to occupy herself, with a $389,000 salary attached. Then there was former interim Vice-Chancellor John Dewar admitting to helping his consultancy firm Korda Mentha win a $2.2 million contract from the university while he was vice-chancellor. With Korda Mentha’s help, Dewar did a major hack job on staff and courses last year, euphemistically labelled the “transformation”. Dewar’s admission of guilt might get him in trouble, as it contradicts his statements at a previous NSW parliamentary inquiry into the same issue. The multitude of scandalous details would make for a good Netflix drama. Chancellor Michael Still, who, like White, resigned days before being brought before the inquiry, denied impropriety in awarding contracts and managing conflicts of interest. Socialist student activists at UOW are familiar with Still, having had our Palestine club disaffiliated for questioning him at a campus cafe about the university’s relationship with Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We are yet to hear whether that disaffiliation will be revoked in light of this corruption scandal. At least we can take solace in the fact that Still is now disaffiliated. This inquiry raises serious questions about the corporatisation of universities. First, no-one should believe university managers when they talk about “necessary” job losses. During a supposed hiring freeze, John Dewar was still giving jobs to mates. Second, universities are run as corporate institutions that are at odds with the broader interests of students and staff. Like any other corporate workplace, universities are run by beefed-up management teams that have little connection to the actual work that makes universities run: work done by tutors, librarians, cleaners and so on. Third, the corporatisation of our universities brings with it all the corruption of capitalist profit making. If we want to stop universities becoming cesspools of corruption, we need to radically overhaul the entire education sector. ### What to do about One Nation URL: https://redflag.org.au/what-to-do-about-one-nation/ Last updated: 2026-07-05T01:10:24.000Z Australian politics is at a turning point. One Nation is in a position to form coalition governments in several states and, possibly, even at the federal level. But it’s not just the polling: the party is establishing branches, recruiting wealthy backers and attracting support from every corner of the right, from disaffected Liberals and Nationals to fascists and neo-Nazis. **One Nation now reportedly has the largest membership of any political party, with 60,000 to 70,000 recruits nationwide**. More are joining every week. The growth of One Nation has coincided with an extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a parasitic minority. That’s not a coincidence. And it’s not by accident that Hanson is backed by Gina Rinehart and a growing coterie of wealthy business owners who want nothing more than to become even wealthier at the expense of everyone else. They can see that One Nation would take a wrecking ball to social services while cutting taxes for business owners. They can see that, despite her professed love of country, Hanson wants Australia to be more like America: more dog-eat-dog, more unequal, more of a paradise for corporations and more of a hellhole for workers, with attack after attack on oppressed groups as well. It’s clear that Hanson and her far-right minions will win a significant and unprecedented share of the vote in upcoming elections—Victoria this November and New South Wales in March 2027\. Then there will be a federal election sometime between August 2027 and May 2028, followed by Queensland and the ACT in October 2028. While it would be a disaster if One Nation formed some sort of coalition government in Victoria or NSW, the re-election of Labor will only further fuel the far right’s growth. To change the equation in the long run, we need a stronger socialist movement. So the key question coming out of upcoming elections will not necessarily be who wins, but how many people the socialist movement can win to our side in the face of Hanson’s far-right tsunami. **The Socialist Party, formed last year, now has more than 6,000 members**. It’s a good start, but it’s not enough. With the far right coalescing into a major party with major capitalist backing, the socialist movement needs to build its own party in response. Not only to challenge the far right, but to challenge the status quo politics of all the pro-capitalist parties. [Join the Sociaist Party](https://www.socialists.org.au/?ref=redflag.org.au) 0:00 /2:27 1× Protest against One Nation in Moonee Ponds, Melbourne, 12 June 2026 CREDIT: Red Flag ## Taking on Hanson—and the capitalists The November Victorian election is shaping up as a decisive poll, with ramifications well beyond the state. The surge in support for One Nation opens the way for Victoria to be governed by a far-right coalition come December. The only real alternative—a fourth term for the current right-wing Labor government—is about as enticing as a reheated Big Mac. The legacy of four years of a federal Labor government and twelve years of a state Labor government can be neatly summed up in a startling projection in the [Altrata World Ultra Wealth Report 2026](https://altrata.com/reports/world-ultra-wealth-report-2026?ref=redflag.org.au): between now and 2030, **Melbourne is set to become the fourth-fastest-growing city in the world for multi-multi-millionaires.** The city’s ultra-high-net-worth population—individuals with more than US$30 million in wealth—is predicted to surge by more than 10 percent per year (what was that about the state going communist under the ALP?): ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/07/image.png) SOURCE: Altrata World Ultra Wealth Report 2026 [Join the Victorian Socialists](https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/?ref=redflag.org.au) In this volatile situation, Victorian Socialists are planning the most serious election campaign by a left party in decades. They aim to challenge the idea there is no alternative but to choose between the Labor status quo and the far right. Instead, Victorian Socialists want to offer working-class people across the state the chance to vote for a party that doesn’t advocate more of the same, and that equally doesn’t blame migrants or climate science for society’s problems. Victorian Socialists are offering a vision of society in which the interests of working-class people—the great majority—are prioritised over corporate greed and the market. ## Come along to the campaign launch [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/07/VS.jpg)](https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/events/2247?ref=redflag.org.au) ## Red Flag’s recent coverage of One Nation [Hanson’s shadow looms over Victoria: a serious socialist campaign can galvanise a fightbackA key question in the November election will not be who wins, but how many people the socialist movement can organise.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/icon/R_logo_v3-990835e6-c2f2-45d4-8e16-1544648431bd.svg)Red FlagOmar Hassan![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/thumbnail/Hanson-1216ffd9-41e1-4639-8660-a68849d77a21.png)](https://redflag.org.au/article/hansons-shadow-looms-over-victoria-a-serious-socialist-campaign-can-galvanise-a-fightback/) [What happened to ‘social cohesion’?The phrases “social cohesion” and “psycho-social safety” seem to have magically disappeared as Hanson goes mainstream.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/icon/R_logo_v3-1f1496d5-d81c-46ef-8eb6-c5cfe2751778.svg)Red FlagBen Hillier![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/thumbnail/Red_Flag_og-1-48bdde8e-024a-4db0-b66e-c56be214df1b.png)](https://redflag.org.au/article/what-happened-to-social-cohesion/) [Protesting Pauline Hanson then and now: what we can learn from the 1990s movementBut how should the socialist movement organise against the new far-right menace?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/icon/R_logo_v3-d61e6a8f-a64b-4a7b-ab6b-f17de206cc54.svg)Red FlagNick Everett![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/thumbnail/Hanson-Adelaide-8f194a43-86ac-4c03-a140-856b32ab91f7.png)](https://redflag.org.au/article/protesting-pauline-hanson-then-and-now-what-we-can-learn-from-the-1990s-movement/) [One Nation needs to be fought, not just analysedIt’s one thing to talk about resisting the far right. But what does it mean in practice?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/icon/R_logo_v3-b924eeeb-150a-4842-8f4d-b4f241092011.svg)Red FlagEditors![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/thumbnail/Hanson-fdb6c1fb-e10d-46b4-a47a-dbe14faef48e.png)](https://redflag.org.au/article/one-nation-needs-to-be-fought-not-just-analysed/) [Protesters stand against Hanson in MelbourneUp to 1,000 people joined an anti-fascist rally in Melbourne’s Moonee Ponds on 12 June.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/icon/R_logo_v3-670b6d82-851a-47f2-b5a2-56d238f0c6b4.svg)Red FlagRed Flag Staff![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/thumbnail/Moonee-Ponds-f897c285-8f46-4bd3-96f2-b9459fd78162.jpg)](https://redflag.org.au/article/protesters-stand-against-hanson-in-melbourne/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/07/304-cover.jpg) #### [Subscribe to Red Flag](https://redflag.org.au/subscribe/) ### The four biggest lies they tell about US history URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-four-biggest-lies-they-tell-about-us-history/ Last updated: 2026-07-12T01:25:51.000Z The Trump administration has hijacked the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence not only for its crass grifts but also to promote its ideological view of US history. This view rests on comforting myths about the history of the nation that conservatives and many liberals embrace. ### **1\. The US is the ‘world’s greatest democracy’** The US Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1776 uses some radical language: “all men are created equal”; governments derive “just powers from the consent of the governed”; “the right of the people to alter or to abolish” government, and so on. The colonial elite used this sort of rhetoric to mobilise the population to cast their lot with independence from Britain. But the founders, mostly drawn from the leading merchants and plantation owners, weren’t about to turn their newly independent state over to artisans and farmers. One of the most class conscious of them, Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury secretary, put it succinctly: “that power that holds the purse strings absolutely must rule”. Given that the colonial population had fought a revolution to win independence, the founders realised that it was impossible simply to junk democracy. But they wanted to ensure that the government did not allow the many to unite to threaten the property of the few. Shay’s Rebellion of 1786, an armed uprising of western Massachusetts farmers against the confiscation of their property to pay state debts, shook the post-colonial elite. The latter decided to scrap the Articles of Confederation (the original national government) in favour of a stronger federal government under the US constitution. General Henry Knox said of Shay’s rebels: > “Their creed is that the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscation of Britain by the joint exertions of all and therefore ought to be the common property of all ... This dreadful situation has alarmed every man of principle and property in New England.” Much of the 1787 constitutional convention focused on the question of preventing the majority from asserting its will. The founders created a system in which, initially, only one part of the government (the House of Representatives) was directly elected. Until only a bit more than 100 years ago, state governments, not voters, picked US senators. Today, under the electoral college system, US voters still don’t directly elect the president. The constitution’s “checks and balances” fragmented power so that the majority could not push its representatives to enact any “improper or wicked project” against the propertied, as James Madison, the main drafter of the constitution, wrote. The key “wicked project” that the framers feared later amounted to the largest expropriation of wealth in US history: the abolition of slavery. Future President Madison hailed from the Virginia aristocracy, whose economic and political power derived from plantation slavery. Other features of the US system, such as the electoral college and the equal representation in the Senate of states regardless of size or population, represented “compromises” with the slave owners’ power that even the Civil War didn’t eliminate. The constitution initially counted enslaved people as “three-fifths” of white people for purposes of representation in Congress. Women could not vote until the twentieth century. To the framers, the Bill of Rights (to freedom of speech, freedom of religion and legal due process, among others) was an afterthought added only to assure the constitution’s ratification in the states. ### **2\. The USA stands for ‘liberty and justice’ for all** The end of slavery with the 1861-65 Civil War could have—but didn’t—bring about racial equality. Congress passed and states ratified the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the constitution, which abolished slavery, granted citizenship and equal protection to former slaves and explicitly prohibited voting rights discrimination against citizens on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”. But the Reconstruction era after the war opened a new power struggle to determine whether those rights would become a reality. The former Confederate states fought to preserve the system of white supremacy, while former slaves and radical Republicans championed an end to racial discrimination. Newly freed African Americans made clear their intention to transform the southern plantation society into a participatory democracy. Poor whites in southern states began voting Republican for the first time in the early years of Reconstruction, based on common class interests. African Americans embraced political activism and challenged corporate rule. Florida’s Black legislators, for example, collectively stated their opposition to a pro-corporate bill in 1872: “Capital needs no legislation in order to provide for its use. Capital is strong enough to take care and provide for itself, but corporations are a dangerous power, especially large or consolidated corporations, and the American people fear them with distrust”. On the other side, white supremacists’ slogan for the defeat of Reconstruction was “Redemption”. The Redeemers did not attempt to overturn Reconstruction at the federal level, but by defeating Republicans at state polls using violence and voting fraud. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was the Redeemers’ primary vehicle for lynching, home burnings and other forms of racial violence used to defeat Reconstruction. Leading members of the Democratic Party used the KKK to drive out radical Republicans, both Black and white, after the Civil War. Historian Jack Bloom described the situation in Alabama: “In one county, the polling place was stormed as the ballots were being counted; the judge who was counting was fired upon, his son was killed, and the ballot box was stolen”. But the Republicans shared common class interests with Democrats, including a strong allegiance to manufacturers’ right to make their profits with workers “free” from labour unions. The Republican Party establishment ultimately defeated its own radical wing, uniting with Democrats to enact the Compromise of 1877, withdrawing federal troops from the south—dealing Reconstruction its final blow. Southern lawmakers passed segregation laws (nicknamed “Jim Crow”) and voting restrictions disenfranchising African Americans across the south as the century drew to a close. Jim Crow banned all forms of racial integration, forbidding poor whites and poor Blacks from having any social contact. White racists went on the rampage after the defeat of Reconstruction, using lynching, castration and other mob violence to impose a reign of terror on the African American population. As historian Lee Sustar noted, “Between 1882 and 1903, 285 people were lynched in Louisiana, 232 of them Black, and many of the rest immigrant workers”. This example demonstrates how the violence of Jim Crow was directed against not only Black people but also other racially oppressed parts of the population. Racial discrimination, including racist violence, remains ingrained in the legal system. The US today has the highest incarceration rate of any self-proclaimed “democracy” in the world, with a prison population that is disproportionately made up of Blacks and other people of colour. But racial segregation was also a tool to “divide and conquer” the entire US working class. White southern workers and poor sharecroppers did not benefit from the extreme level of racism. In fact, the higher the level of racism, the more they lost. When the racist poll tax was passed in the south, imposing property and other requirements designed to shut out Black voters, many poor whites also lost the right to vote. After Mississippi passed its poll tax law, the number of qualified white voters fell from 130,000 to 68,000. The effects of segregation extended well beyond the electoral arena—and empowered only the rule of capital. Wherever employers have been able to use racism to divide Black from white workers, preventing unionisation, both Black and white workers earn lower wages. The south today remains a bastion of low wages and anti-unionism. ### **3\. The US fights for ‘freedom and democracy’ around the world** As a state whose origins lay in a war of independence against the world’s most powerful empire at the time, the US has often deployed the rhetoric of “freedom”, “democracy” and “self-determination” to justify its actions on the world stage. President Woodrow Wilson famously promoted US intervention in the First World War as necessary to “make the world safe for democracy”. When President James Monroe proclaimed his “doctrine” in 1823 against “old world” meddling in the Americas, the newly independent states of Latin America applauded it. During the 1898 US war with Spain, indigenous independence forces in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines initially believed that the US would support their causes. After ending Spanish rule, the US fought bloody (and in the case of the Philippines, genocidal) wars of occupation to establish the US empire beyond its shores. The period of the Spanish-American war is often considered the time when the US emerged as an imperial power. But that forgets that the US “forged” the US empire, in the phrase of socialist Sidney Lens, in the conquest of the continent—taking most of northern Mexico in the 1847-48 war—and the extermination of the native population. Having achieved domination of a large part of the North American continent by the end of the nineteenth century, the US looked outside its borders to establish its global reach. Although it arrived late on the empire-building scene, the US operated no differently than the European empires. It turned the Caribbean into a virtual US lake. In the more than a century since the Spanish-American War, the US has invaded Cuba five times, Honduras four times, Panama four times, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua twice each, and Grenada once. General Smedley Butler, who headed many US military interventions in the early part of the twentieth century, later provided a stark account of his career: > “I have spent 34 years in active service as a member of the Marine Corps. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.” The First and Second World Wars resulted from the struggle between rival capitalist classes over the division of the globe. For example, the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France after the First World War set boundaries for most of the countries of today’s Middle East. Even the US claims to have fought the Second World War for freedom and democracy wane when one considers that the US largely closed its borders to Jewish refugees, imprisoned US citizens of Japanese descent, fought with a segregated army and quickly rehabilitated Nazis and their European collaborators to aid the US in its postwar struggle against the Soviet Union. The Second World War ended with the division of the world into two rival empires—the US-led Western bloc and the Russian-led Eastern bloc. Until the Eastern bloc collapsed in 1989, the Cold War competition between the US and the USSR threatened nuclear war. To “stop the spread of communism”, the US fought wars in Vietnam and Korea. And it used the same excuse to destabilise and overthrow regimes it opposed—from the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953 to the Allende government in Chile in 1973. US officials have justified wars and interventions with rhetoric about “protecting democracy”, “stopping aggression” or, more recently, performing “humanitarian” duties. But these merely cover the real aims of US policy—to make the world safe for big business and to establish, as President George H.W. Bush said after the 1991 Gulf War, that “what we say goes”. ### **4\. The ‘American Dream’ is attainable for all who work hard enough** “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ... I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” These words, etched on the Statue of Liberty, have greeted generations of arriving immigrants. But that is where the welcome ends, which they learned as soon as they entered Ellis Island for processing. Migrant workers, especially Black and Brown migrants, quickly find themselves on the receiving end of discrimination in every walk of life, from open racism to poverty wages. And when capitalist politicians find it financially or politically expedient, they just slam the door shut on immigration while carrying out mass deportations. Trump’s deportations are not the rare exception that they might seem. The country’s first Black president, Barack Obama, for example, also drastically raised the number of deportations via executive order. The “red scares” of the 1920s and 1950s were ruling-class responses to periods of working-class struggle and radicalisation—whipping up anti-communist and anti-immigrant hysteria to justify persecuting and crushing the left. Large-scale deportations featured prominently in both. The constitution, as argued above, is designed to protect, not democracy, but rather the wealth of the capitalist class. Its framers feared nothing more than rebellion from below, having personally witnessed uprisings of slaves, indigenous people and poor farmers. The so-called checks and balances that allegedly prevent any one branch of government (executive, legislative or judicial) from exceeding its authority act as a collective brake on the popular will in order to preserve the class and social status quo. Social inequality—including racism, xenophobia, sexism, discrimination against LGBTQ-plus people (all reinforced with violence)—strengthens the class inequality and exploitation that capitalism requires by keeping working-class people divided. Historically, democracy in the US has also been expanded only through mass struggles. The most important included the overthrow of slavery through the Civil War; agitation for women to win the right to vote; the struggle for referendums, the recall and the direct election of senators from the populist and progressive movements; the struggles for union rights in the 1930s and for civil rights in the 1960s; and the struggle for same-sex marriage and transgender rights in the 21st century. And although the myth of the American Dream has persisted far longer than the bygone era of rising working-class living standards, history has shown that the only way that workers have ever won gains is by uniting through class struggle. This is the most important truth that our rulers prefer to hide from us. ### German students continue to mobilise against militarism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/german-students-continue-to-mobilise-against-militarism/ Last updated: 2026-07-12T01:25:40.000Z With the threat of conscription looming over their heads, tens of thousands of young people have built an impressive anti-war movement in Germany over the last year. School Strike Against Conscription, a student movement, has held three nationwide protests, each drawing about 50,000 people. Following demonstrations in December and March, a protest in May attracted up to 150,000 people taking a stand: 10,000 in Berlin and rallies in more than 150 cities. Several international solidarity actions were also held across Europe. A “die-in” protest that disrupted the National Veterans’ Day celebrations in Berlin on 21 June gained a lot of attention. Immediately after Defence Minister Boris Pistorius finished his speech, young leftists wearing red-splattered T-shirts lay down on the ground and shouted anti-militaristic slogans. The next major strike is planned for (northern) autumn. The immediate issue is the Military Service Modernisation Law, brought in by the German government last November. Under the new rules, every 18-year-old German receives a compulsory questionnaire to assess their “interest” in military service. While enlistment is voluntary at this stage, there is widespread agreement that formal conscription will be the next step. This is supported by the latest data. Until now, the government has distributed almost 300,000 questionnaires—but only 530 people have volunteered to join the army as a result. The questionnaire is accompanied by a school and university visiting program by the Bundeswehr (German army). In the first three months of this year, soldiers made more than 2,000 visits, more than double the number for all of 2025\. Targeting students approaching recruitment age, the “youth officers” join classes in political subjects such as social studies, history and ethics and lead discussions on such topics as “national and alliance defence” and “collective security”. The energy the movement has unleashed is impressive. Many in the movement are completely new to political activism, and for many these protests were their first demonstration ever. The numbers on the streets are the result of serious organising efforts by activists in the Nein zur Wehrpflicht alliance (“No to military conscription”). Nessa, one of the leaders in Berlin, told the website *The Left Berlin*, “We worked our asses off trying to reach as many people, as many schools, as many students as possible”. They postered and leafleted schools, and talked to student representatives, principals and parents’ committees. The alliance has multiple committees based in different localities, with stronger schools helping the weaker schools to organise. The activists plan to keep up the pressure with a range of activities over the summer to build for the next strike. They hope to reach a wider audience through social media promotion and by hosting networking activities and workshops covering areas such as media production and dealing with the police, plus fun activities for bonding. There will also be a conference in Essen this month. One achievement has been the close cooperation with the teachers’ union GEW (German Education Union), which is part of the planning meetings. The Teachers Alliance, which includes both unionised and non-unionised teachers, plays an important role in educating and supporting the students at school. They facilitate anti-war projects such as panel talks and therefore reach more students in spite of opposition from principals and parents. A May protest was scheduled for Victory in Europe Day to connect the anti-war sentiment to anti-fascism and the rise of right-wing extremism. (VE Day marks Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender at the end of World War Two.) Hannes Kramer, spokesperson for the movement, told the *Guardian*, “We use this date to make clear the consequence of war and what the consequences of rampant militarisation can be”. The slogans on the banners show the strength of feeling. “The rich want war, the youth want a future”, “Dying is not on the timetable”, “Friedrich Merz to the front!”, “Our only war is the class war” and “Education instead of army physicals”. A popular chant in March was “Merz, lick my balls”, referring to the Chancellor Friedrich Merz. This riled the police so much that a student was arrested for holding a sign with the slogan. He is currently facing criminal charges for insulting the chancellor. Meanwhile, the slogan continues to appear, including as graffiti on the offices of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union, the country’s main conservative party. As documents released in April demonstrate, the recruitment drive is to support planned massive changes in the Bundeswehr. The government plans to increase the number of active-duty soldiers from 185,420 to 260,000 by the mid-2030s and more than triple reservist numbers from 60,000 to at least 200,000. The move towards conscription comes as part of a major militarisation push. Announcing the package in November, the defence minister framed the plans as a historic turning point. Entitling its plans “Responsibility for Europe”, the government deems Russia the main military threat and foresees potential attacks on North Atlantic Treaty Organization members. Uncertainty about the US’s future role in the region contributes to a general atmosphere of alarm in the government. Overall, Germany aims to position itself as the leading player in European power relations and as the strongest conventional fighting force in Europe by 2039. Germany is already the world’s fourth largest military spender, with an increase of 28 percent to €77.6 billion in 2024\. The government recently amended spending rules to allow for a new increase to €152 billion by 2029, equal to 3.5 percent of GDP and more than the projected defence budgets of France and the United Kingdom combined. With Germany now the largest European military supporter of Ukraine, the so-called Operation Deutschland plan situates Germany as a logistical hub for NATO operations in Europe, with military resources and related infrastructure being developed to ensure a “war-ready” Germany. These developments also tie in with Europe’s highly militarised and guarded borders. Known as Fortress Europe, these operations officially target asylum seekers and refugees. But they add fuel to the continent’s increasing militarisation. All of this constitutes the greatest cultural transformation in Germany since World War Two. In the postwar decades, anti-militarist politics predominated. But in 2022, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats declared a pivot in national priorities, which he termed a “Zeitenwende”, or turnaround. In March last year, a BBC reporter published an article with the astonishing headline “Germany decides to leave history in the past and prepare for war”. It was astonishing because Germany is supposed to pride itself on its memory culture, its awareness of what German militarism has led to in the past. But the German state, backed by the whole establishment, is now gearing up for the new orientation. Scholz committed €100 billion to boost the country’s military, supposedly to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin in check. But the German generals now say that that was just pennies—a report to parliament last year declared that the Bundeswehr has “too little of everything”. The present government under Merz is trying to soften up the population to go along with this militaristic turn. Reports and announcements are released almost every day. Senior military figures claimed in April, for instance, that the threat from Russia represents the most serious challenge since the end of the Cold War. As commentator Gabriel Helfenstein notes in *The Left Berlin*, the idea that war is coming has now been normalised—41 percent of Germans fear the outbreak of a third world war. The direct military preparations are accompanied by a range of proposed social transformations. For instance, the government plans to reshape the healthcare system for military purposes, diverting resources from civilian care, tying medicine to warfare and developing plans on comprehensive civil-military cooperation. The government has also announced a €500 billion climate and infrastructure package that includes war-related measures such as a network of public shelters and upgrades to the country’s transport systems to facilitate troop movements. Bundeswehr officers have been travelling around Germany identifying war-related infrastructure such as bridges, restoring bunkers and establishing evacuation plans. In a large-scale military exercise in Hamburg, the scenario simulated the city as a hub for troop transports and used mock demonstrators to train for the suppression of civilian protests against militarisation. The students protesting in the streets are very aware of this environment. “The government and industry are preparing for war and we, the young, are supposed to become the cannon fodder. Neither have we even been consulted”, Hannes Kramer, the movement spokesperson, told the *Guardian*. “Currently almost half of the federal budget is being spent on tanks, bombs and infrastructure to prepare the country for war”, he continued, adding that, then as now, “big German companies, arms factories as well as banks, stand to gain ... we are very afraid that we have not learned the lessons from our history”. The political circumstances in which the protest movement operates have led to a shift away from a single-issue focus. While the threat of conscription gave the initial impulse, it is clear that other issues must be addressed. As Nessa, the student leader in Berlin, said: “Often there are single-issue demos, and people have one topic which they care about very much, so they only go to those kinds of demos. We try to build the bridges”. One feature is the involvement of various political forces, including the youth group of the political party Die Linke, and climate activists from Fridays for Future. A consequence of this approach has been the increased visibility of demonstrators wearing keffiyehs and holding Palestinian flags. The two topics are linked by much more than general sympathy among participants. Germany is Israel’s second-largest supplier of major arms after the United States. And the relationship will expand after a formal agreement of cooperation between Berlin and Tel Aviv was signed in February. A recent partial embargo imposed by the government, to protest military actions in Gaza, will be little more than token—“high value” products such as tanks are exempt, and German manufacturers are threatening to shift production abroad to circumvent the restrictions. Perhaps even more importantly, the highly militarised Israeli society is increasingly a model for Germany. Its much-vaunted Staatsräson (Reason of State), which prioritises support for Israel, is undergoing a shift in meaning. Today it is less a supposed politics of morality or support for Jewish life than a return to a politics of strength. As scholar Daniel Marwecki has said, German Staatsräson was “never pro-Israeli, but it was and is pro-German”. Both school strikes and the antiwar movement have significant histories in Germany. During the German revolution of 1919, students set up councils modelled on workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which called for a large-scale school strike to demand the abolition of corporal punishment and improved school conditions. More recently, Fridays for Future drew large numbers of school students into climate activism. In the 1980s, there was a huge movement against the deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe, linked to the movement against nuclear power. The largest protest wave in German history occurred in 1981, with 350,000 people protesting in Bonn (then the capital of West Germany). In 1983, more than 1 million people joined four simultaneous protest rallies. In East Germany, a pacifist and anti-nuclear movement carried out significant acts of civil disobedience that, in the latter part of the decade, developed into the movement that eventually brought down the East German regime. Anti-militarist sentiment remains strong among the population. On top of the students’ organising, many other anti-war activities are coming up. This month, for example, there are actions planned against Rheinmetall, Germany’s biggest arms company, building new weapons factories in central Berlin for the first time since World War Two. With the likely introduction of conscription, we can expect this anti-war movement to grow and broaden. ### Hanson’s shadow looms over Victoria: a serious socialist campaign can galvanise a fightback URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/hansons-shadow-looms-over-victoria-a-serious-socialist-campaign-can-galvanise-a-fightback/ Last updated: 2026-07-12T01:25:31.000Z The November Victorian election is shaping up as a decisive battle, the outcome of which will have ramifications well beyond the state. The surge of support for One Nation has created the real possibility that Victoria will be governed by a far-right coalition come December. The only real alternative—a fourth term for the current right-wing Labor government—is about as enticing as a reheated Big Mac. In this dangerous situation, Victorian Socialists are planning the most serious election campaign attempted by a left party in decades. The party aims to disrupt the false binary that tells people there is no alternative but to choose between the status quo and the far right. Instead, Victorian Socialists want to offer working-class people across the state the chance to vote for a party that doesn’t advocate more of the same, and that equally doesn’t blame migrants or climate science for society’s problems. Victorian Socialists are offering a vision of society in which the interests of working-class people—the great majority—are prioritised over corporate greed and the market. One Nation’s performance in the election will be decisive to the outcome and to the party’s wider momentum. Support for Hanson nationally has surged from just 6.5 percent in the last federal election to over 30 percent today—a startling development in a country where the two major parties have managed to dominate the electoral sphere even while many of their counterparts internationally have collapsed. There has always been an organised far right in Australia, but, until recently, most of their would-be constituents have been prepared to stick with the Liberal and National parties. Those days are over. This constituency is radicalising, whipped into a frenzy by the Murdoch press and algorithms designed by social media executives. Hanson’s rise—funded and sponsored by a number of billionaire backers—has emboldened far-right freaks and intensified every pre-existing reactionary sentiment: Islam is a cancer; abortion is murder; left-wing protesters should be banned; climate change is rubbish; workers are overpaid, lazy and should be easier to sack. These sorts of fascistic positions are now being sanitised if not openly promoted by Australia’s media establishment. Case in point: Hanson’s speech at the National Press Club, a prestigious forum that the media establishment like to think of as intellectually rigorous. There, she repeated all her far right talking points in a stumbling, blundering rant, and was praised to the rooftops for it. “Hanson’s formidable Press Club performance proved her enemies wrong”, declared the *Sydney Morning Herald*. News.com.au described the tirade as evidence of “a politician ready to rule”. “Hanson is sharp in every sense, from her political antenna to her rhetoric”, gushed the associate editor of the *Australian*. Evidently, the media establishment, and the capitalist class it takes its lead from, are warming up to the prospect of a fascist government. The establishment parties are not offering any real resistance either. Opposition leader Angus Taylor just puts Hanson’s speeches through Chat GPT with a filter for private school pomposity. Victorian Liberal leader Jess Wilson presents a more modern image in Victoria, but will likely preference and govern with Hanson if necessary. Labor is rhetorically more oppositional but utterly cynical, championing multiculturalism while taking every opportunity to punch down, most recently by launching an Islamophobic trial by media of Muslim women and children fleeing prison camps in Syria. Meanwhile, Labor oversees a society in which banks, mining companies and bosses are getting rich at workers’ expense. Even when they do something vaguely progressive, like some of the measures in the budget, they can’t defend them when attacked from the right, instead abandoning some in the hope they will be left alone. This weak, hypocritical stance is exactly what creates the conditions that help the far right grow. The Greens try to challenge Hanson, but the party’s technocratic, pro-capitalist politics means it cannot lead the fight that’s needed. Socialists have a totally different strategy to fight the far right. Unlike every other political party, which support and want to govern the same system One Nation does, we want to challenge capitalism and the ideology that underlies it. The mainstream parties can’t consistently oppose One Nation, because they too rely on bigotry and backwardness to deflect attention from the inequality, brutality and destructiveness of capitalism. and none of them are committed to building a fighting working-class movement that could win serious gain for workers, let alone smash the system. Such a movement, in their eyes, represents an intolerable threat to the status quo and the mainstream politicians’ privileged position within it. The Victorian state election represents an important opportunity to mobilise and build the sort of socialist forces needed to challenge both the far right and Labor’s status quo. To resist the rise of Hansonism in our neighbourhoods and fight for a working-class politics based on solidarity and class struggle, Victorian Socialists will be organising thousands of volunteers to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors, with the goal of convincing working-class people that voting socialist is the best response to the shitshow that is Australian politics today. We’re not the only ones preparing for this kind of mass campaign. Barnaby Joyce recently spoke at an anti-abortion rally in Sydney, explaining that the thing he needed most to defeat abortion rights was to build an army of people prepared to hand out how-to-vote cards. One Nation now has between 60,000 and 70,000 members nationwide, with more joining every week. They are setting themselves for an historic push to take power in Australia’s traditionally most left-wing state. That some on the left continue to be squeamish about openly recruiting to socialism and organising people is a huge problem when the far right is rapidly signing up tens of thousands to its cause. We need to be thinking and acting on the same scale—it will take a socialist party of tens of thousands of working-class people to defeat this far right and the establishment that bred them. A party that is not a glorified email list, but a network of educators, agitators and organisers with serious roots in society. This election campaign is a moment to take a big step towards building that kind of organisation. It is a chance to convince more workers than ever before to vote socialist and to join a movement to abolish capitalism and all the horrors it breeds. There is a real possibility that this movement could finally get a socialist elected to parliament, a voice for our class and for every movement against injustice. It’s clear now that Hanson and her far right minions will win a significant and unprecedented share of the vote. While it would be a disaster if they were able to form some sort of coalition government, the re-election of Labor will only further fuel the far right’s growth. To change the equation in the long run, a stronger socialist movement is needed. This means the key question coming out of this election will be not who wins, but how many people the socialist movement can win to our side in the face of Hanson’s fascistic tsunami. A strong result would offer a counter-narrative about the direction of society, indicating that there is a working-class left that wants transformative change. And a substantial growth and spread of the Socialist Party would put the left in a better position to fight, regardless of the outcome in November. ### Why are Australia’s union leaders the most enthusiastic defenders of the status quo? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-are-australias-union-leaders-the-most-enthusiastic-defenders-of-the-status-quo/ Last updated: 2026-07-12T01:25:24.000Z Everybody seems to agree that something has gone badly wrong for workers in Australia. Everybody, that is, except the leaders of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). Reading communications from the peak body representing Australian unions is like visiting an alternate universe in which we’ve never had it so good. Today’s top union leaders seem uniquely unmoved by the stagnating living standards and frustrated hopes that are driving popular anger at the status quo. Instead of organising a fight back, the ACTU acts like a meek liberal NGO. Worse, it acts as a lobby in reverse: rather than lobbying the government on behalf of its members, it lobbies its members on behalf of the government. The fundamental issue in recent years is that wages have failed to keep up with inflation. After a decade of wage stagnation beginning in the early 2010s, real wages fell amid the supply shocks of the early 2020s. A series of below-inflation wage rulings and interest rate hikes has ensured that the costs of these shocks have been borne by workers. [The Reserve Bank projects](https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/04/australian-real-wages-to-fall-hard/?ref=redflag.org.au) that it will take until 2028 before real wages return to 2011 levels—the biggest sustained drop in living standards anywhere in the OECD in recent times. Add to this a broken housing system that means renters need an income of $130,000 for an average rental property to be deemed “[affordable](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/18/staggeringly-high-australian-renters-need-130k-income-to-afford-average-property-report-shows?ref=redflag.org.au)”. Plus, an underfunded health system results in half of people skipping [necessary care](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-31/australians-delaying-health-care-due-to-cost/106511170?ref=redflag.org.au). Through all this, ACTU leaders have maintained their enthusiasm for a government that has allowed workers’ living standards to nosedive. Union leaders can’t credibly claim that their inaction reflects the prevailing sentiments among workers. A June Redbridge poll found a record 63 percent of people think that society is headed “in the wrong direction”. A recent ANUpoll found that 70 percent think the government should definitely or probably reduce income differences between the rich and the poor. Nearly 80 percent think that governments definitely or probably should provide decent housing for those who can’t afford it. No wonder young people are moving to the left in large numbers, and [staying there](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-26/millennials-rewriting-the-rules-of-australian-politics/106050836?ref=redflag.org.au). The ACTU has hosted conference after conference about the importance of organising young workers. It’s obvious that the most basic way to do this would be to organise a massive campaign to raise wages. So why is ACTU Secretary Sally McManus instead lauding paltry nominal pay rises from the Fair Work Commission? McManus called the commission’s recent annual ruling a “positive real wage increase”, adding, “It means relief is on the way for lower-paid workers to help keep up with price pressures and avoid the need to cut back on essentials like food or seeing a doctor”. While the leader of the workers’ movement focused on the purported positives, the Fair Work Commission itself [said something substantially different](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/wage-reviews/2026/2026fwcfb3500.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au): > “The ‘real wage gap’ which has opened between the rate of the CPI and modern award wage rates has particularly affected living standards of the low paid, the majority of whom are modern award-reliant, and their capacity to meet their needs ... \[W\]e have concluded, regrettably, that it is not practicable in the current uncertain circumstances to award a real wage increase for employees reliant on modern award wage rates that would be sufficient to close the real wage gap entirely.” The ACTU leaders have spent years promoting Labor’s piss-weak tweaks to tax and industrial legislation and assuring unionists that they don’t need to fight for anything better. ACTU communications read more like Labor ads than calls to action. Take the following: A December 2022 email to union members promised: “New workplace laws will help get wages moving again” Another, from June 2024, announced: “The Albanese government’s tax-cut plan ... will provide every Australian taxpayer with a cost-of-living bonus. That’s an extra $28 in their pocket each week”. The email added, with the energy of an infomercial presenter: “But that’s not all! The Albanese government’s Budget includes a $300 energy bill relief payment to every Australian household.” Forget that between 2023 and 2025, power costs surged 27 percent above the consumer price index. A statement in June 2025 again touts as a “union win” a ruling to give 100,000 workers on the minimum wage a pay cut in real terms. The same approach is embodied in the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC), the representative body for Victorian unions. The VTHC describes itself as “the voice of Victorians at work”. But it doesn’t spend much time trying to find out what workers want or helping them raise their voices. The VTHC has bigger things to worry about—like turning over its headquarters to a massive effort to re-elect the unpopular state Labor government. VTHC Secretary Luke Hilakari recently [issued a public broadside](https://www.afr.com/politics/trades-hall-boss-blasts-complacent-victorian-labor-mps-20260616-p6078g?ref=redflag.org.au) against “complacent” Labor MPs. Don’t get too excited, though. The complacency Hilakari criticises them for has nothing to do with wages, schools or hospitals. He’s just upset that many of them are refusing to campaign seriously for another term in parliament. How urging absentee MPs to fight for another four years of seat-warming on the public purse counts as “union business” is anyone’s guess. The job of selling Labor’s garbage offerings to workers is also taken on by affiliated unions. The Australian Education Union leadership has been locked in a battle with its[ own members](https://redflag.org.au/article/rebellion-in-the-aeu-officials-prevent-debate-as-vote-approaches-on-terrible-deal/), urging them to accept a government offer that would have failed to address the crisis facing public schools. Right now, it’s a losing battle for the union leaders, in part because they blew much of their credibility by forcing through a massive pay cut in the last agreement. Or take Labor’s 2026 federal budget, which contains $63.8 billion in cuts, including through the elimination of 28,000 public service jobs. At the centre is the government’s planned “overhaul” of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which aims to save $36 billion. While the government has sold this as necessary to confront shonky private providers rorting the system, only $900 million of these cuts will come from crackdowns on fraud. The overwhelming majority of savings will come from cutting 240,000 people from the scheme. Incredibly, the unions that represent the most workers in the disability care sector have helped to sell this. The Health Services Union initially celebrated the cuts as “a genuine turning point for the scheme” and “an important step in the right direction”. The Australian Services Union issued a mealy-mouthed statement that euphemistically referred to funding “changes”, while its social media commentary described the budget as “massive slay”. Many union leaders also act as enforcers for the bosses. They can be in blatantly right-wing unions such as the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, which has a record of[ colluding](https://redflag.org.au/article/sdas-vote-rigging-farce/) with the supermarket giants to slash penalty rates. They can also be in supposedly progressive unions such as the National Tertiary Education Union, which in recent years proposed a Jobs Protection Framework that would have allowed university bosses to slash wages by 15 percent. ### Why the complicity? How did the leaders of the union movement become cheerleaders for such a crap state of affairs? Why are they so indifferent to attacks on their members? First, the decline in working-class living standards and weakening of union power haven’t affected the lives of those who lead the unions. Sally McManus takes home more than $200,000 a year—and she is far from the highest-paid union leader. United Firefighters Union National Secretary Peter Marshall’s annual salary averages around half a million dollars. The Australian Education Union’s Victorian branch president, Justin Mullaly, is preaching prudence to teachers fighting to catch up on years of lost pay, but receives an annual package of $228,678\. Just as MPs who pass legislation to gut school and health funding receive salaries that insulate them and their families from the impact of those decisions, so too are union officials inoculated against the effect of declining wages and workplace organisation. As union activism has declined, generating fewer trade union militants with real organisational experience, the ranks of the union bureaucracy have been increasingly drawn from the middle classes. Unions today are more often than not staffed by former lawyers or student politicians. Past Labor leader Bill Shorten’s path is typical—from joining Labor at Monash University, he volunteered and served as an adviser for various Labor MPs, then got a job in a Labor-aligned law firm, before working his way up the ranks to lead the Australian Workers’ Union. Just as important as the social origins and pay packets of union leaders are the opportunities that come from their proximity to power. There is a well-worn path from union offices to parliamentary benches and beyond. The current deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, was an assistant secretary of the ACTU; Greg Combet was parachuted from ACTU secretary to Rudd-era defence personnel minister. Some, like Martin Ferguson, go even further. From being president of the ACTU, he leapt to opposition benches in 1996, before later becoming the resources and energy minister, and going on to plum jobs at Channel 7, BP and various industry groups. He has spent the last decade advocating for expanded uranium mining, energy privatisation and [wage cuts](https://insight.thomsonreuters.com.au/legal/posts/martin-ferguson-steps-out-of-labors-shadow?ref=redflag.org.au)—all while remaining a paid-up Labor member! You really *can* have it all. This revolving door reflects and reinforces the approach to unionism that has dominated since the 1980s: prioritising proximity to government and business—having a “seat at table”—over organising workers collectively. This is why union leaders urge loyalty to institutions such as the Fair Work Commission, which they claim can replace strike action with “expert” decisions made by ruling-class judges and economists. It also means that maintenance of a Labor government is always a top priority for union leaders. No wonder they pull so many punches when Labor attacks union members, and attempt to generate hype for so many meaningless and symbolic Labor policies. This is an especially marked problem today when the most unionised workforces—nurses, teachers, civil servants—are in the public sector, meaning their employer is the same government that the union leaders are often unwilling to challenge. Finally, to stay in the good graces of the powerful, union leaders frequently try to prove they can act as industrial police, imposing discipline and sacrifice on their members. Take the aforementioned NTEU Jobs Protection Framework debacle. In explaining the rationale for this proposal at an RMIT University Q&A session, Secretary Matt McGowan said that the framework would give the union “a form of authority that it hasn’t had in over three decades ... And this will significantly improve the union’s ability to impact on the future structure and direction of the sector”. Translation: they were willing to trade away their members’ conditions for more influence for themselves. Thankfully, the proposal was defeated by a [rebellion among the members](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-7198/). Even after decades in which union leaders have managed the decline of their institutions while eroding workers’ consciousness and expectations, there is still a willingness to fight for something better when an opportunity arises. The current campaign of Victorian public-school teachers to catch up on years of lost pay shows this. In March, 35,000 teachers participated in a historic strike rally. Thousands of teachers choking Melbourne’s CBD and shutting down a vital service was a vivid illustration that unions are still the largest, and potentially most powerful, organisations of social change. Since then, the battle has been against not just the state Labor government but also the leaders of the education union. The victory for a “no” vote against the latest offer, underpinned by determined campaigning by socialists in the union, shows that the union leaders don’t always get their way. The model of unionism that socialists argue for in the teachers’ union—based on collective action rather than lobbying, on raising people’s expectations rather than telling them to accept crumbs—will be an essential part of rebuilding a left pole of opposition to the status quo. This is the only way we can start to shift the dial towards a society that puts workers first, rather than the rich and powerful. ### The US’s strategic defeat in the Gulf URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-uss-strategic-defeat-in-the-gulf/ Last updated: 2026-07-02T23:25:54.000Z It’s been only a short time since President Trump signed a fourteen-point memorandum of understanding with Iran to supposedly end the war that the US and Israel launched on 28 February. “Supposedly” is the most definitive word we can use to describe the agreement, since Trump has insisted that the US wasn’t really at war, has vacillated between threatening genocide and accommodating Iran, because the fighting has started again, and because Israel doesn’t want to end the war at all. On 25 June, Iran attacked a ship in the Gulf, announcing that the Strait of Hormuz was closed. Within days, the US had struck Iranian infrastructure, and Trump was back to talking about being “forced to militarily complete the job” of overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Still, the signing of the MOU with Tehran marked a defeat for Washington. For all the death and destruction it rained down on Iran, the US was surrendering and suing for “peace”. Assessing the “settlement” as a US loss is hardly controversial. A broad spectrum of opinion, from Iran hawks like neocon Robert Kagan to [revolutionary socialists](https://www.leftvoice.org/iran-memorandum-end-of-us-hegemony/?ref=redflag.org.au), considers Trump’s war to be a strategic defeat for the US. The MOU’s terms, which may never come to fruition, show a US willing to offer multiple “carrots”, from a US$300 billion reparations fund to ending all economic sanctions, to induce the Iranian government to lift its *de facto* closure of the strait through which one-fifth of global petroleum transits. In a move that might also signal a US intention to blunt Iran-China relations, the US [agreed for the first time in decades to allow Iran to sell oil for dollars](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/vance-says-iran-agreed-to-allow-nuclear-inspectors-back-in-209?ref=redflag.org.au). The US deferred all discussions about its ostensible reasons for the war— “regime change”, Iran’s nuclear program or its support of regional allies—to an undetermined future, if they are considered all. In diplomatic practice, deferring “hard questions” to future negotiations is often a way of never resolving them. Not that “resolving” those US-Iran frictions is anything more than US-Israel goals towards a Middle East in which Israel retains its status as the main regional power backed by the US as the main global hegemon. Trump hopes that reopening the strait will get oil flowing again, bring down prices and redound to his political benefit. But oil analysts have thrown cold water on this scenario. Ships moving through the strait are months away from delivering their oil to market. And the war left major petroleum processing sites, including an important liquid natural gas processing site in Qatar, damaged. [Qatari authorities said](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/iran-attack-qatar-lng-capacity.html?ref=redflag.org.au) it might take five years to repair the damage from Iranian attacks. The US has managed to moderate the increase in petrol prices by dumping millions of barrels from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) onto the market. The SPR is now at its lowest level since 1983\. Countries outside of North America, particularly those in Asia and Africa, have faced even bigger [economic disruptions from the war](https://www.wsj.com/economy/global/hormuz-reopen-economic-impact?ref=redflag.org.au). Absent a major escalation in the war that Trump and the US appear neither prepared for nor interested in, the conflict has reached a stalemate that is unlikely to change. So, what has Trump’s fiasco in Iran revealed about global politics? First, it challenges the US’s claim to global hegemon status, which rested on its guarantee of petroleum transit out of the Gulf. The US, as the world’s largest producer of crude oil, is not dependent on Middle East oil. Yet its traditional allies in Europe and Asia (particularly Japan) and its Chinese adversary depend far more on imported hydrocarbons from the Gulf region. So, the US “blue water” navy’s assumed guarantee of safe passage from the Gulf has been a key lever of power the US has exercised for (and over) its allies and against its adversaries. With Iran’s closure of the strait and the US’s inability or unwillingness to forcibly open it, Iran has taken that lever out of the US’s hands. Trump was even reduced to [cajoling China and the US’s (former) European allies to send warships to the Gulf to help](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-03-18/trumps-failed-strong-arming-of-allies-on-iran-shows-that-pressure-is-losing-its-effect?ref=redflag.org.au). If the real power to control energy flows from the Gulf lies with Iran and Oman—and not the US—then the US has lost a major element of its claim to be a global superpower. The US will try to replace the leverage it lost in the Gulf with its [relatively recent role as top global oil and gas producer and exporter](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/once-an-arab-oil-embargo-victim-us-becomes-worlds-top-oil-exporter-2026-06-11/?ref=redflag.org.au). But after years of tariffs and regulatory conflict, even the European Union is wary of becoming overly [reliant on the US](https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/europes-reliance-us-gas-set-rise-research-report-says-2026-05-13/?ref=redflag.org.au) for energy. The war also depleted the US’s expensive missile arsenal and forced it to move military assets from the Asia Pacific region to the Middle East. Iran’s drones and missiles, constructed at a fraction of the cost of US weapons, caused serious [damage to major US military bases](https://truthout.org/articles/report-many-middle-east-us-bases-all-but-uninhabitable-due-to-iran-strikes/?ref=redflag.org.au). Iran-backed Iraqi militias drove the US to abandon its Camp Victory in Iraq. The Pentagon [may be trying to hide the extent of the damage](https://truthout.org/articles/trump-administration-covering-up-extensive-damage-done-to-us-bases-by-iran/?ref=redflag.org.au) to its bases in the region. In other words, this short war against a third-rank military power revealed several underlying weaknesses behind the Pentagon’s façade. Second, the US’s failure may change the alliances on which its power in the Middle East rested. Washington—under both the Trump and Biden administrations—has tried to push the Gulf autocracies into a working partnership with Israel and the US. Promising billions in investment, Trump has courted the Gulf petrostates to join the Abraham Accords with Israel and against Iran. Rather than accelerate the momentum towards a pan-Gulf alliance with Israel, the war split the Gulf states between the “Abraham” group led by the United Arab Emirates, and a Saudi-led group [that is seeking some kind of working relationship with Iran.](https://mondoweiss.net/2026/06/what-does-trumps-defeat-mean-for-the-middle-east/?ref=redflag.org.au) Already, Iran and Oman are collaborating to extract tolls from ships passing through the strait, which traverses each country’s territorial waters. Iran’s attacks on the Gulf states punctured their belief that US protection underwrote their role as global business hubs and luxury playgrounds for the rich. Suddenly, the US presence seemed to invite the “instability” they had assumed away. No doubt, there will be many twists and turns in the US’s future relations with the region’s petrostates. But it is hard to see relations resetting to the pre-war status quo. “The new regional order will be defined less by American primacy than by multipolarity, with China an increasingly central player and Iran an integral rather than a marginal actor”, wrote Johns Hopkins international policy experts Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr in *Foreign Affairs* Magazine. Third, the war revealed a sharp divide between the US and its Israeli “[watchdog](https://isreview.org/issues/04/Israel%5Fwatchdog/?ref=redflag.org.au)”. For decades, Israel has considered Iran its main challenger for regional hegemony. Regime change in Iran, or turning the country into a “failed state”, has been one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s obsessions. Netanyahu opposed all US diplomatic outreach to Iran, including the 2015 multilateral nuclear deal that the Obama administration completed. So, the Trump-signed MOU is a real sign of failure for Israel, whose political and military leadership opposes it. For these reasons, Israel has every incentive to try to undo the deal. If Iran succeeds in forcing the US to tie an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon to a final agreement, then a rift between Israel and the US will open wider. It’s too early to say if a US-Israel rift will become a permanent divide. Israel has been a cornerstone of US policy in the region for two generations; much more will need to transpire for the US to kennel its watchdog. In fact, away from the social media-driven clamour, the Pentagon may be moving [to fully integrate Israel into the US military supply chain](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/30/us-congress-advances-american-israeli-military-integration-plan?ref=redflag.org.au). Outside of Israeli action that might undermine the MOU, the US shows no interest in stopping the Zionist state’s quest for “Greater Israel” in the West Bank, Gaza or Syria. Fourth, China emerges stronger from the US debacle in Iran. For the past two decades, any war Washington fights that doesn’t involve China (e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan) has tended to weaken the US. [China gains strength by default.](https://revsoc21.uk/2026/05/11/china-and-the-iran-war-a-provisional-assessment/?ref=redflag.org.au) China shrewdly operated to provide Iran with logistical support for its war and facilitated its ally Pakistan’s role in the negotiations that forged a ceasefire and the MOU. The US proved its unreliability (launching the war while still negotiating for peace with Iran) and its amateurishness. China emerged as a stable player on the global stage. [This can only help to boost China’s global political strength](https://now.tufts.edu/2026/04/13/how-war-iran-has-weakened-us-great-power-game?ref=redflag.org.au). The fact that China has transformed itself into the world’s largest [“electrostate”](https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-with-david-roberts) provides another advantage. The biggest shock to the global oil economy in 50 years will impel states to seek alternatives to oil. And those who want to produce electricity from solar, wind or hydropower will come calling to China, the world’s leader in those technologies. While the US under Trump appears to be “doubling down” on the nineteenth-century fossil-fuel economy, China is surging ahead with the energy economy of the 21st century. It may be too facile to compare the [US’s fiasco in the Gulf with the 1956 Suez crisis](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/11/iran-trump-suez-crisis-strait-of-hormuz?ref=redflag.org.au), when the US forced Britain, France and Israel to stop their military action against Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. The 1956 events were a key hinge point showing that the region’s old colonial powers were spent forces, and that the US was the new imperial boss. The US remains a power, but a diminished one. And whether Iran in 2026 proves to be the US’s 1956, it’s clear that the US can no longer enforce President George H.W. Bush’s command in the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War: “what we say goes”. ### What happened to ‘social cohesion’? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/what-happened-to-social-cohesion/ Last updated: 2026-07-04T00:25:30.000Z For several years, we’ve been told that campaigning against the Palestinian genocide has undermined “social cohesion” and been terrible for the “psycho-social safety” of Australia’s entire Jewish population. Indeed, the Palestine solidarity movement has routinely been compared to or mentioned alongside Nazism. People opposed to a foreign government’s war crimes purportedly ripped Australia’s social fabric to such an extent that the government has convened a year-long royal commission. But those words—cohesion and safety—seem to have magically disappeared as the far-right presence in official politics has grown. Pauline Hanson, now the preferred prime minister according to at least one poll, has questioned whether there are any “good Muslims”, demanded that Australia become a “monocultural” society, and called for mass deportations, a blanket ban on Muslim immigration, and property expropriations of temporary visa holders (some senior members of her party briefly said they were for expropriations of all non-citizens’ property). In her 17 June National Press Club address, Hanson was clear about what all this meant: people who cannot speak English and/or are not from “Judeo-Christian” societies should not be allowed in the country. Some of what Hanson says and proposes echoes various aspects of the German Nazis’ 1920 25-point program—only with Muslims/Islam, rather than Jews/Judaism, as a key target alongside non-citizens. That program included provisions such as: “no Jew may be a member of the nation”, “A non-citizen may live in Germany only as a guest”, “If it should prove impossible to feed the entire population, foreign nationals (non-citizens) must be deported”, and “\[the party\] combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us”. The program also called for expropriations for the common good—although, to avoid any gotcha moments from the press about potentially sweeping attacks on private property, Hitler clarified eight years later (not nearly as quickly as Barnaby Joyce), that these would be “directed primarily against Jewish real estate speculation companies”. Commentators and politicians have spent the last few years warning of the terrible return of bigotry and even Nazism. Yet many of the loudest voices demanding a crackdown on free speech to silence the anti-genocide movement have fallen silent in the face of Hanson’s racist far-right onslaught. Many, unsurprisingly, are as sympathetic to it as [Robert Menzies and the broader Australian establishment were to Hitler himself](https://redflag.org.au/article/how-do-holocausts-happen/). ABC reporter David Speers described the Press Club speech only as a “fiery, action-packed ... display of defiance”. All the talk is about listening to the “legitimate grievances” of the people saying they will vote for One Nation. Widespread grievances about the Australian government supporting an apartheid state and facilitating the growth of the billionaire and investor classes are, of course, illegitimate. But as soon as the grievances tend toward fascism, they miraculously demand a fair hearing at the Press Club. It is a gobsmacking situation, drooling with hypocrisy. Imagine for a moment that an elected official, at any level of government, asked indignantly live on air, “How can you tell me there are good Jews?” Imagine if a challenger for the country’s highest office demanded an end to Jewish immigration? Imagine if a major daily newspaper published a cartoon depicting Jewish secondary school students beheading a teacher for suggesting they read a book about Palestinian oppression? Actually, the *Australian* newspaper did just this, but with Muslim students depicted doing just that, at a teacher’s suggestion that they read the diary of Anne Frank. Don’t expect Johannes Leak, the cartoonist, or Michelle Gunn, the paper’s editor in chief, to be hauled before a royal commission to explain why they are creating a hostile environment for Muslims. Imagine a civil court found a Muslim man, on the balance of probability, guilty of murder and war crimes. Imagine he was later criminally charged. Imagine he was then let out on bail. Of course it wouldn’t happen. But so it is for the war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith, who walks among us. Contrast his treatment with that of the women returning from Syria, having gone to join the Islamic State several years ago. Arrested on arrival in Australia, some have been denied bail after being charged with lesser crimes than Roberts-Smith. Or take Australian citizens who joined the genocidal war in Gaza. In the last three years, Israel has killed more Palestinians than the Islamic State has killed worldwide in its entire existence. We know that Australians left the country specifically to serve in the terrorist Israeli military and have since returned home. Where is the concern for social cohesion and psycho-social safety when there are terrorist killers walking among us? Protecting the feelings of supporters of the Palestinian genocide remains one of the most important considerations in Australian political life—along with tiptoeing around the words “racist” and “fascist” when dealing with racists and fascists. The royal commission continues doggedly to [dig up sob stories](https://www.facebook.com/reel/998144449386070) from Zionists who, to great distress, discover that some people won’t abide living in a share house with apartheid-supporting ethno-supremacists. As with proponents of the “anti-white racism” derangement, in Australia there will always be wells of establishment concern for the “psycho-social safety” of those who support Jewish supremacy in Palestine. The establishment will even allow citizens to join the conflict—as long as they fight on the side of the oppressor nation. It all goes to show that concerns about “social cohesion” and “psycho-social safety” were bullshit to begin with. ### Keir Starmer and the banality of evil URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/keir-starmer-and-the-banality-of-evil/ Last updated: 2026-07-01T01:36:34.000Z No-one really wants to watch a 63-year-old man break down in tears on the road outside his house. Unless that man is Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, announcing his resignation to the press outside 10 Downing Street. There’s been nothing particularly remarkable about Starmer’s centrist brand of neoliberal managerialism, nor is there anything much of note in the manner or timing of his departure. Probably the only person shedding a tear during his resignation speech was Starmer himself (possibly also his family, who he has threatened to spend more time with after leaving the top job). The one-time “landslide” election winner has in fact never been popular: an exit poll following the 2021 local elections found that, even then, the most common reason people weren’t voting Labour was “Keir Starmer/leadership”. Starmer won the 2024 general election only because Nigel Farage’s Reform party split the conservative vote; Labour’s actual vote share was lower than that of any British government since the Second World War. With Reform now leading in every YouGov voting intention poll since April 2025, disastrous local election results in May and the Greens threatening Labour’s electoral left flank, it was only a matter of time before Starmer was cut loose. The real conundrum is how this person managed to remain leader for so long. But, as Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour sang in 1973, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way”. Starmer will leave office having made an enemy of every decent left-wing person in Britain. His key purpose over the last six years has been to reverse the party’s social-democratic tilt under previous leader Jeremy Corbyn. Investigative journalist Paul Holden revealed in his 2025 book *The Fraud* that a circle of Blairite apparatchiks around Morgan McSweeney had been plotting to oust Corbyn from 2017\. This involved establishing multiple not-for-profit fronts to feed false allegations of antisemitism against Corbyn to the media. McSweeney’s group also deliberately misallocated campaign funds to undermine Labour’s performance at the 2019 general election and create a pretext for a leadership challenge. That December, Corbyn capitulated in the face of sustained pressure from the Labour right, ruling class and liberal media and stepped down as leader. McSweeney had already identified Starmer months earlier as the contender best placed to restore ruling-class confidence in Labour. Ironically, Starmer had to pose as a kind of Corbyn continuity candidate in order to win over the Labour membership, promising to raise taxes on the top 5 percent of earners and reverse Conservative corporate tax cuts, among other pledges. Once elected leader, he dropped those assurances one by one, telling the *Economist* magazine in 2023, “We’ve been having intense discussions with business. This is about building new relations with business ... We’re pro-business”. As leader of the opposition, Starmer oversaw a widespread campaign of expulsions, suspensions and sackings based on slanderous claims of antisemitism inside the Labour Party. Then as now, the accusation of antisemitism was hurled at anyone identifying with the left, opposing US imperialism or questioning the actions of the Israeli government. The witch-hunt atmosphere drove hundreds of thousands from Labour’s ranks. Starmer also sacked shadow transport minister Sam Tarry for showing solidarity with rail workers during the strike wave of 2022\. A party spokesperson explained that Tarry’s visit to a London picket line was not appropriate for a “government-in-waiting”. Upon becoming prime minister in 2024, Starmer signalled his allegiance to business by attacking family welfare payments and trying to cut pensioners’ winter heating subsidies. Meanwhile, his government’s latest Strategic Defence Review promised to lift military spending to 3 percent of GDP by 2030, invest at least £15 billion in nuclear weapons and make the British army “ten times more lethal”. The movement against Israel’s war on Gaza helped consolidate anti-Labour sentiment among a layer of young people and activists. Starmer responded with repression, most notably against the campaign group Palestine Action. Starmer remains shameless about his role in driving out the left and grovelling to capital. “Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt”, he gloated during his resignation speech, “but ... we changed our party. Ripping out the poison of antisemitism, restoring trust on the economy, defence and national security”. It’s precisely this legacy that’s turned so many voters against Labour. According to YouGov’s analysis of the 2026 local election results, the government is now losing one in five voters to the Greens, who are positioning themselves as anti-corporate and socially progressive reformers. A sizeable constituency is growing to the left of Labour. But the prime minister has only doubled down on the most reactionary parts of his program, accusing migrants of putting “pressure on housing and ... public services”, restricting visa rules further and increasing persecution of refugees. Starmer’s resignation speech celebrated the fact that his government stands “proudly with, not against, our national flag”. Starmer’s promotion of British nationalism, as well as his actual state-sanctioned tyranny against migrants and refugees, has encouraged more extremist elements around Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. There have been three consecutive summers of racist street violence under Starmer’s watch. Starmer is blamed by many in the media for losing sections of Labour’s base to Reform UK. In fact, hardly any ex-Labour voters say they’re considering voting for Farage. Those who voted Labour in 2024 are four times more likely to abstain altogether than to flip to Reform, and a similar proportion will vote for the Greens. Starmer isn’t losing voters to Reform, but he’s enabled them all the same by shifting official British politics even further to the right. Starmer’s likely replacement, Andy Burnham, has indicated he will maintain the current government’s “fiscal rules” and support Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood moving forward with further restrictions on migration. He has welcomed as advisers the former head of the Office of Budget Responsibility (a Conservative-era austerity oversight committee), along with two former bankers. Burnham served as a junior minister under Blair and held multiple roles in Gordon Brown’s cabinet and treasury. This is not the “soft-left” challenge it’s made out to be. Starmer’s assignment as leader was to sanitise the Labour Party and present it as a viable option for the ruling class. There is no reason why Burnham would reverse any of that, coming as he does from Blairite heritage himself. Instead, we should expect more prostration to capital and neoliberal orthodoxy. ### The economics of US imperialism, part one: from boom to AI bubble? URL: https://redflag.org.au/the-economics-of-us-imperialism-part-one-from-boom-to-ai-bubble/ Last updated: 2026-07-04T21:15:09.000Z *American economic resilience, imperialist aggression and class polarisation have far-reaching implications for socialist perspectives in the US and elsewhere. In this guest piece for the anti-empire notes newsletter, *G. Stewart*, a New York-based socialist journalist and activist, examines the dynamics of US domestic economic expansion since the pandemic. A second contribution will analyse the US in the world economy in the context of Washington’s imperialist aggression and its rivalry with Beijing. A third instalment will explore the state of the US working class, organised labour and the social movements.* --- The US economy is undergoing its biggest ever capital investment boom, driven by government industrial policies, corporate tax cuts and AI data centre spending. Profits as a share of the economy are at their highest in 80 years. The stock market routinely smashes records, and the unemployment rate remains near historic lows. Such economic upswings normally spell political success for a US president. But Donald Trump’s [poll numbers are miserable](../../../../Users/leesustar/Documents/To%20be%20filed-3%20/Tasks%201-29-17/Economy/Red%20Flag%20economy%20series%20June%202026/v), not only because of outrage over his reactionary policies but also because of working-class frustration about the cost of living and worries about AI-driven job losses. What’s more, the [unpopular](https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5911100-iran-war-americans-poll/?ref=redflag.org.au) US war on Iran and its [global energy disruption](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/21/oil-price-iran-war-middle-east.html?ref=redflag.org.au), along with the trade war with China and other countries, have affected the US, driving up inflation. Meanwhile, the gains of the economic expansion have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthy—the richest 10 percent of the population now account for [more than half of all consumer spending](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-10-earners-drive-nearly-191500198.html?ref=redflag.org.au). The [top 0.1 percent](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSTP1300?ref=redflag.org.au) hold roughly $22.5 trillion—about 13 percent of total household wealth and around 5.5 times the wealth of the [bottom 50 percent combined](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSB50215?ref=redflag.org.au). When the boom ends, corporate debt amassed in the [murky private credit market](https://www.fsb.org/uploads/P060526.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au)—estimated at up to $2 trillion—could worsen any subsequent recession. At the time of writing, however, the US economy is powering ahead. To understand why, it’s helpful to look at the turn towards economic nationalism and economic stimulus [initiated](https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2018/july/statement-us-trade-representative?ref=redflag.org.au) in Donald Trump’s first term (2017-21) and [embraced by Joe Biden’s administration](https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/04/27/remarks-by-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-on-renewing-american-economic-leadership-at-the-brookings-institution/?ref=redflag.org.au) (2021-25). Whatever their political differences, Trump and Biden reflected an emerging policy consensus that a trade war with China was inevitable and necessary to revive US industry, that Washington should prioritise military might alongside tariffs and that economic stimulus is key to reviving the US economy. ### The post-pandemic economy The [excruciatingly slow recovery](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/43707?ref=redflag.org.au) from the Great Recession (2008-09) enabled Trump to tap working-class discontent as he eked out a victory in the 2016 election. His [$5.5 trillion in tax cuts](https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2019/10/11/stock-repurchases-and-the-2017-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act/?ref=redflag.org.au) favoured corporations and the wealthy but failed to deliver the promised boost to economic growth. In part, that was because companies used their tax breaks on share buybacks to benefit investors. At the same time, Trump levied tariffs on China, with the promise of rebuilding heavy industry, but the [trade war fizzled and manufacturing job losses continued](https://www.aaronflaaen.com/uploads/3/1/2/4/31243277/flaaen%5Fpierce%5Fdec2021.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au). On the eve of the pandemic in early 2020, the economy was growing at a respectable [2.3 percent](https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/gross-domestic-product-fourth-quarter-and-year-2019-third-estimate-corporate-profits?ref=redflag.org.au); the unemployment rate of [3.5 percent was a 50-year low](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE?ref=redflag.org.au). When the pandemic produced one of the fastest and deepest recessions in US history, Trump and the Congress pushed through the [CARES Act](https://www.crfb.org/blogs/whats-2-trillion-coronavirus-relief-package?ref=redflag.org.au), injecting $2.2 trillion into the economy and preventing a collapse. Unemployment [peaked at 14.8 percent in April 2020](https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/economic-letter/2021/11/comparing-pandemic-unemployment-to-past-us-recoveries/?ref=redflag.org.au), the highest level since the Great Depression, but had been pushed down to 6.7 percent by the time of Biden’s election victory in November 2020. Next came a series of stimulus packages: post-election Covid relief spending of [$900 billion](https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/w-028-9421?transitionType=Default&contextData=%28sc.Default%29&firstPage=true&ref=redflag.org.au) in the December 2020 budget, followed by a series of measures by the Biden administration. The American Rescue Plan Act of early 2021 injected $1.8 trillion into the economy, and was credited by Wall Street analyst firm [Moody’s](https://www.moodys.com/web/en/us/insights/resources/global-fiscal-policy-in-the-pandemic.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=In%20this%20paper%2C%20we%20focus,construct%20a%20counterfactual%20scenario%20in) with avoiding a second recession. Profit rates as measured by the US government [hit their highest](https://brp-prod-bcc.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-30/2021-was-best-year-for-u-s-corporation-profits-since-1950?ref=redflag.org.au) since 1950. More big spending followed: the $1.2 trillion [Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act](https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/%5Fcache/files/d1342923-d8e8-4c82-b1ea-6818a9253e25/econ-benefits-of-bipartisan-infra-deal-fact-sheet.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) in 2021 and, in the following year, the $52.7 billion tech-focused [CHIPS and Science Act](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/employment-impacts-of-the-chips-act/?ref=redflag.org.au) and the [Inflation Reduction Act](https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/the-inflation-reduction-act-heres-whats-in-it?ref=redflag.org.au#/), which included $500 billion in new spending and tax breaks with a climate change and infrastructure focus. The result was the biggest fixed capital formation in the US in decades as [manufacturing construction soared](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Rb7p&ref=redflag.org.au). A writer for the Brookings Institution, a think tank, called this trio of legislation a “[national pivot](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/bidens-big-bet-on-place-based-industrial-policy/?ref=redflag.org.au)”. The business magazine *Fortune* called it a “[headlong dive into industrial policy](https://fortune.com/2023/02/08/biden-state-of-the-union-industrial-policy/?ref=redflag.org.au)”. The Democratic administration’s stimulus-and-build program was a more sophisticated attempt at industrial policy than Trump’s crude tariffs-plus-tax-cuts method. But it wasn’t enough to lift the political fortunes of Biden and his vice president and would-be successor, Kamala Harris. Not only was it overwhelmed by the global inflationary wave that sent living standards backwards, it was [too little and too late to create enough ](https://www.bruegel.org/first-glance/manufacturing-jobs-boom-isnt?ref=redflag.org.au)[well](https://www.bruegel.org/first-glance/manufacturing-jobs-boom-isnt?ref=redflag.org.au) paying jobs to revive and energise a Democratic base by election day in 2024. Microchips and other high-tech manufacturing require huge investments but create few jobs. So Biden’s program lacked the immediate social and political impact of the 1930s New Deal jobs programs of President Franklin Roosevelt. And while promised manufacturing jobs awaited the building of new factories, the Biden-Harris administration hammered workers, ending pandemic income relief by cutting the expanded child tax credit (CTC). As journalist Ryan Cooper [noted](https://prospect.org/author/ryan-cooper/?ref=redflag.org.au), “\[T\]he end of the brief CTC expansion made for a terribly toxic combination with the end of the pandemic pop-up welfare state”. That helped smooth Trump’s path back to the White House. Trump inherited this economy—along with an established get-tough-on-China and rebuild-America bipartisan policy context—when he took office in January 2025\. He then dramatically upped the stakes with the “Liberation Day” announcements of steep tariffs on scores of countries, including an island inhabited only by [penguins](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump-tariffs-antarctica-uninhabited-heard-mcdonald-islands?ref=redflag.org.au). Since then, [tariffs have](https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-april-2-2026?ref=redflag.org.au) fluctuated based on various agreements and a US Supreme Court decision invalidating many of them. But they remain on average the highest import duties since the 1940s. Many [leading US capitalists](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jpmorgan-chase-jamie-dimon-economy-considerable-turbulence-trump-tariffs/?ref=redflag.org.au) considered the Liberation Day tariffs destabilising, even if they were sympathetic to tariffs as a negotiating ploy. But Trump wanted to force a quick shift in business behaviour. The goal was to reshape global trade and investment patterns to benefit the US while allowing him to posture to his electoral base as a defender of the working class. [Manufacturing jobs](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP?ref=redflag.org.au), however, declined by 91,000 between January 2025 and January 2026, before rising modestly in the first quarter of 2026 to 12.6 million. Yet Trump isn’t relying on tariffs alone to stimulate investment. Building on Biden’s pro-manufacturing policies, Trump’s budget bill allows businesses to fully deduct from their taxes the costs of [building new factories](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-businesses-and-manufacturers-will-benefit-from-trumps-big-bill?ref=redflag.org.au). Tariffs are just one front in a trade war fused to several imperialist power plays, from US threats to annex Greenland and, less seriously, Canada, to the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro. However, Trump failed in his central aim of forcing China to cave under sky-high tariffs of 145 percent after Beijing retaliated by cutting rare earth exports critical to US manufacturing. This led to a [trade truce largely on China’s terms](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/trump-xi-south-korea-rare-earth-tariff-trade-war-nvidia.html?ref=redflag.org.au). Trump’s much-hyped May 2026 visit to China with several tech CEOs in tow, including Elon Musk, yielded modest results in promised US exports to China, chiefly soybeans and a smallish order of Boeing jets. “Trump and top CEOs leave a more self-reliant China with few deals to show for it”, [CNN observed](https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/15/business/stock-market-china-us-deal-trump-xi-business?ref=redflag.org.au). After the Supreme Court tariff decision, the baseline was [10 percent](https://www.newbuyingagent.com/resources/2026-china-tariff-update-how-new-us-section-301-rates-affect-importers?ref=redflag.org.au) with higher duties on steel, autos, pharmaceuticals and more that pushed the average to [about 30 percent](https://www.china-briefing.com/news/us-china-tariff-rates-2025/?cs=0&hl=en-US&biw=1179&bih=962&ref=redflag.org.au). Meanwhile, the Trump administration was compelled to pay importers [$94 billion](https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/tariff-refunds-may-soon-cover-more-entries-but-not-without-a-fight/822581/?ref=redflag.org.au) in tariff refunds. The US had been moving away from the supposed rules-based trade order for years, going back to the Obama era [sabotage](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50681431?ref=redflag.org.au) of the World Trade Organization and the [“buy American” requirements](https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/buy-american-bad-america-and-everyone-else?ref=redflag.org.au) of the Great Recession government spending of 2009\. These were a precursor to Trump’s 2017 tariffs that Biden kept in place. Today, Trump is replacing the old trade blocs and dispute systems with a hub-and-spoke model with the US at the centre. There is now a broad consensus across political parties for an economic nationalism that puts AI, aerospace and tech-driven rearmament at the forefront of a program for US industrial revival to counter China and rebuild the US defence industrial base. The stimulus and pro-manufacturing tax breaks have accelerated the turn to US domestic production, with energy production and AI at the centre. Republicans and Democrats embrace this approach. Biden’s Department of Defense issued the first-ever [National Defense Industrial Strategy](https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3643326/dod-releases-first-ever-national-defense-industrial-strategy/?ref=redflag.org.au) in January 2024 to “catalyze generational change from the existing defense industrial base to a more robust, resilient, and dynamic modernized defense industrial ecosystem”. Trump put his own stamp on this effort, insisting on a “golden share” for the US government as a condition for a Japanese company’s takeover of US Steel, and investing billions in multiple other companies in what a leading foreign policy journal calls “[Trump’s state capitalism](https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/01/14/trump-state-capitalism-equity-stakes-list-companies/?ref=redflag.org.au)”. Big business leaders sometimes grumble about Trump’s heavy-handed interventions, but embrace his economic nationalism. “It has become painfully clear that the United States has allowed itself to become too reliant on unreliable sources of critical minerals, products and manufacturing—all of which are essential for our national security”, [Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase](https://www.jpmorganchase.com/newsroom/press-releases/2025/jpmc-security-resiliency-initiative?ref=redflag.org.au), the biggest US bank, said when announcing a $1.5 trillion investment fund for key minerals and technologies last year. A few weeks later, the US Council on Foreign Relations, the top foreign-policy think tank, weighed in with a book-length report, [*US Economic Security: Winning the Race for Tomorrow’s Technologies*](https://assets.cfr.org/images/TFR83%5FEconomicSecurity%5FFull%5F2025-10-30%5FFinal%5F350051e0ae7/TFR83%5FEconomicSecurity%5FFull%5F2025-10-30%5FFinal%5F350051e0ae7.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au). It declared: “\[T\]he United States is engaged in an unprecedented competition with China across military, political, economic, and technological domains. It is therefore imperative that we address the most immediate challenges facing US economic security”. Notably, Biden’s former commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, was a key author. Thus, by the time Trump’s Pentagon proposed a [$1.45 trillion military budget](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-presidents-1-5-trillion-pentagon-budget-will-not-make-the-country-safer/?ref=redflag.org.au) amid the Iran war, the military-industrial complex that [President Dwight Eisenhower warned against](https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address?ref=redflag.org.au) was shifting into high gear. ### The AI economic accelerator The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 set in motion the [greatest investment boom in US history](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-spending-tech-companies-compared-02b90046?ref=redflag.org.au), surpassing the national railroad expansion of the 1870s and the dot-com internet investments of the late 1990s. In the first half of 2025, spending on AI data centres accounted for nearly all US economic growth, according to a leading liberal economist. Much of the data centre spending is on AI chips imported from Taiwan. But it also [radiates throughout the economy](https://www.bis.org/publ/bisbull120.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au), from construction companies and electric power utilities to the revenue of big cloud computing companies that sell AI services to businesses at premium prices. Competition compels such investments, as AI requires power, cooling and networking that older data centres cannot handle. The AI investment in 2026 could be the equivalent [of 2 percent of US GDP](https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/06/05/artificial-intelligence-investment-will-hit-2-of-us-gdp-in-2026-analyst-says-nearing-defense-spending-levels/?ref=redflag.org.au), which may seem modest until one considers that [US GDP was $30.8 trillion in 2025](https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product?ref=redflag.org.au). The AI spending dovetails with the wider favourable conditions for investment in manufacturing created by Biden’s policies, including new semiconductor plants, which drove [two-thirds of manufacturing construction](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-ira-and-chips-act-are-supercharging-us-manufacturing-construction/?ref=redflag.org.au) by 2024\. Trump’s tax cuts of 2025 provided still more incentives, cutting the cost for machinery, fleet and equipment [by 21 percent](https://www.rbc.com/en/economics/us-analysis/us-featured-analysis/one-big-beautiful-bill-act-whats-changing-and-why-it-matters-in-2026/?ref=redflag.org.au). Sceptics have compared the AI investment boom to the tech bubble of the late 1990s and predict a bust. While the boom will certainly end, as all capitalist expansions inevitably must, there are important differences this time. The concentration of technology markets in the hands of a handful of Big Tech companies allowed them to fund their initial investments with their own cash. Only more recently have they begun to issue bonds— totalling [$121 billion in 2025](https://sa.marketscreener.com/news/ai-hyperscalers-will-drive-higher-us-corporate-bond-supply-in-2026-analysts-say-ce7e58dedb8af326?ref=redflag.org.au), a nearly fourfold increase over the previous four years. This figure does not count off-books “shadow debt”, much of it from private credit, making AI-related financial risk impossible to assess. “The hidden risks are building, we don’t know if that’s ever going to come up”, a [prominent Wall Street economist](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/big-techs-ai-bond-binge-shatters-unspoken-contract-with-investors.html?ref=redflag.org.au) noted this year. A key feature of the AI economy is tens of billions in [circular financing](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-ai-circular-deals/?ref=redflag.org.au) among chip manufacturers NVIDIA and AMD, cloud computing giants Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, and AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar scorpion dance, as established Big Tech firms sell computing capacity to fast-rising AI rivals while holding on to their corporate customers as well as the consumer market, which Meta aims to dominate with its own AI efforts. If excessive spending ever does get Big Tech and its AI frenemies into trouble, they have a reliable backstop in the US government. The US semiconductor industry has always been central to the US military, and the AI generation is now cashing in. Elon Musk thus merged his X.ai venture with SpaceX, a company critical to [US military](https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/how-spacex-became-embedded-in-americas-war-machine-ca4878e8?ref=redflag.org.au) and civilian space programs. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is [reviving the military-Silicon Valley nexus](https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-212136319.html?ref=redflag.org.au) that gave rise to chip maker Intel, in which the Trump administration took a [10 percent stake](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-economic-and-policy-experts-think-about-the-u-s-governments-stake-in-intel?ref=redflag.org.au). Marc Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz, billionaire tech venture capitalists and Trump backers, are focused on AI and defence. “The technology landscape that we will be investing into is ... intensely competitive with China ... At this moment of profound technological opportunity, it is fundamentally important for humanity that America wins”, [Horowitz said in an interview](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/andreessen-horowitz-raises-15-billion-130217803.html?ref=redflag.org.au). The exemplar of this trend is Palantir, an AI company holding contracts with US [intelligence services](https://www.palantir.com/offerings/intelligence/?ref=redflag.org.au) and [immigration agencies](https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/contracts/palantirTechHSCETC15C00001.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) and the provider of [targeting technology](https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/palantir-spacex-allegedly-complicit-in-war-crimes-amid-israels-war-in-gaza/?ref=redflag.org.au) for the Israeli military to assist the genocide in Gaza. Trump’s AI policy chief, [David Sacks](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/technology/david-sacks-white-house-profits.html?ref=redflag.org.au), is big tech’s agent in the White House. The godfather of the tech-Trump-AI alliance is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who is [close to both Trump](https://www.npr.org/2025/10/06/nx-s1-5560216/who-is-larry-ellison-the-billionaire-trump-friend-whos-part-of-the-tiktok-takeover?ref=redflag.org.au) and Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu](https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-on-vacation-at-island-owned-by-larry-ellison-a-witness-in-graft-trial/?ref=redflag.org.au), and whose company has deep relationships with the [US](https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/the-department-of-war-announces-agreement-with-oracle-to-deploy-ai-capabilities-on-classified-cloud-networks-2026-05-01/?ref=redflag.org.au) and [Israeli](https://theintercept.com/2025/02/18/oracle-tiktok-israel-palestine-gaza/?ref=redflag.org.au) militaries. The entry of AI into the longstanding Pentagon-Silicon Valley network underscores the role that AI will play in the wider economy. While US policy wavers between a hands-off approach and some nominal regulation as a concession to the growing anti-AI backlash, there is no question that AI is central to corporate America’s drive for competitiveness and the projection of US imperial power. If the AI bubble bursts, the biggest players will get a bailout. ### Stocks, profits, debts, deficits and doubts Tech companies’ disproportionate weight in the US stock market is unprecedented. Just seven—Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Tesla—account for [more than 30 percent](https://www.fool.com/research/magnificent-seven-sp-500/?ref=redflag.org.au) of the value of the S&P 500, an index of the biggest 500 publicly traded companies in the US. All have market values exceeding $1 trillion as investors hope to cash in on AI. Certainly, their share prices will fluctuate and may even dive sharply when the AI boom runs its course. But the current stock price surge is based not only on AI, but on record profits. Consider the US government’s own measure of profits before and after taxes. Corporate profits before taxes have reached [$4.2 trillion](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A053RC1A027NBEA?ref=redflag.org.au), or 13.7 percent of GDP. Since 2021, corporate profits before taxes have been at their highest since the Second World War and the Korean War, when military production was the driver. Trump’s biggest gift to capital—an [effective tax rate of about 16 percent](https://www.pgpf.org/article/six-charts-that-show-how-low-corporate-tax-revenues-are-in-the-united-states-right-now/?ref=redflag.org.au)—funnelled the great majority of these profits into corporate coffers and benefited shareholders, adding to a concentration of wealth in the US [more extreme](https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/meet-the-new-bosses-worse-than-the) than even in the days of the robber baron capitalists of the late 1890s. While technology companies were central to these profits, other sectors also scored big: financial services, oil and gas, and infrastructure-related industries benefited from the investment boom. [Manufacturing profits](https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categories=survey&%5Fgl=1%2A1yals0d%2A%5Fga%2ANTc0MDk1MzMyLjE3ODA4NzI4ODI.%2A%5Fga%5FJ4698JNNFT%2AczE3ODIyNjgzNjAkbzgkZzEkdDE3ODIyNjkyNDckajQ3JGwwJGgw&ref=redflag.org.au#eyJhcHBpZCI6MTksInN0ZXBzIjpbMSwyLDNdLCJkYXRhIjpbWyJjYXRlZ29yaWVzIiwiU3VydmV5Il0sWyJOSVBBX1RhYmxlX0xpc3QiLCIyMzkiXV19) were beginning to flow strongly in 2025, even if the promised jobs boom was more of a trickle. It is too soon to say whether this represents a long-term restoration in the rate of profit and a sustained increase in the average US economic growth. Following the Great Recession, US GDP growth averaged 2.4 percent per year, jumping to an average of 3.3 percent from 2021 into 2025 amid the post-Covid recovery and economic stimulus. Nevertheless, it marks a big turn in the US economy—a boom driven by industrial capital investment for the first time in decades. Whether this is sufficient to counter China’s challenge is a separate question. But the US economy is being reshaped by a revived industrial sector. This boom has several contradictions. Some are chronic, others are Trump-induced. Deficit spending by Congress has been amplified by Trump’s tax cuts, while the high level of government borrowing since the Great Recession and immediately after the pandemic has pushed [federal debt to more than 100 percent of GDP](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S?ref=redflag.org.au). Some of this is the result of the calculation by successive US administrations that the lack of a credible international alternative to the US dollar as a universal trading currency means that buyers will always be found for US government bonds to finance that debt. Trump wants to double down on this bet by [pressuring the Federal Reserve](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trump-jerome-powell-federal-reserve-pressure-interest-rates/?ref=redflag.org.au) to lower interest rates to fuel an even hotter economy, tolerating higher inflation as a means to reduce government debt in real terms over time. The other factor is that even US capitalists who oppose Trump have mostly kept their mouths shut while benefiting from his smash-and-grab agenda of cutting taxes and slashing social spending. They may complain about Trump’s government deficits but see them as political cover for still more cuts in social programs. ### From boom to bust? The AI spending boom looks unhinged, and the associated debt could detonate a financial crisis and undermine US economic growth. But from the standpoint of the companies involved, the decision to undertake vast investments is perfectly rational if it allows them to retain market dominance. In the view of US government officials across successive administrations, tech companies are the flagships of a new wave of industrial investments encouraged by government policies, demanded by national security considerations and serving as economic engines, with serious regulation unlikely unless popular pressure or a crisis forces the issue. Debt is the wild card in this high-stakes AI investment poker. The novelty of private credit’s big role in the financial system—along with shadow banks and cryptocurrency outfits—makes it impossible to do more than speculate about the impact of an AI bust. And the ripple effects of the energy crisis created by the US war on Iran have disrupted global supply chains and hit consumer demand in the US, which could also drag down growth despite the uneasy war settlement. When the AI expansion finally ends, working-class people already soured by the current economy are likely to turn bitter. ### Students and the Soweto uprising URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/students-and-the-soweto-uprising/ Last updated: 2026-07-01T01:36:04.000Z *In June 1976, thousands of Black schoolchildren in Soweto—a portmanteau of South Western Townships, vast urban residential areas south-west of Johannesburg, apartheid South Africa’s largest city—walked out and rallied against the introduction of Afrikaans as a language of instruction. Nearly 200 students were killed that day as police viciously attacked the protesters, who did not want to be taught in the language of their oppressors. The rebellion spread and lasted months, transforming the political situation, inspiring the international solidarity movement, and becoming one of the defining moments in the ultimately successful anti-apartheid struggle.* --- **A HEART-RENDING PHOTO** of 13-year-old Hector Pietersen—the first student killed by the live fire unleashed by police on students peacefully protesting in the South African township of Soweto—sent shock waves around the world on 16 June 1976\. The photo became the symbol of a rebellion which intensified the struggle against apartheid and brought students to the fore of that struggle. Sowetosits near the mining belt south of Johannesburg. The students who lived there had witnessed poverty and repression all their lives—54 percent of Soweto’s 1.25 million inhabitants were unemployed in 1976, 86 percent of homes had no electricity, and 97 percent had no hot water. Even when I visited in 1992, in some areas, dozens of homes still relied on a single tap for their water supply. The education system was changing rapidly and, just as in other countries where student rebellions erupted, schools were overcrowded and education was inadequate. All that was overlaid with the racism of Apartheid: in 1974, the state spent $440 on every white student, $25 on every Black student. Starting in 1972, campuses had been shaken up by protests initiated by the fledgling Black Consciousness movement, resulting in expulsions, jailings and students being banned. Before that, and playing an important part in shaping consciousness, there had been the Sharpeville massacre. The massacre took place on 21 March 1960 at a peaceful protest of about 7000 people against the hated pass laws, which controlled people’s movements. It was organised by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). At 1:30pm, police opened fire without warning while the crowd was waiting outside a police station to be addressed by a government official. At least 69 people were killed and a further 180 seriously injured. As a woman told a BBC documentary team, the shock of the massacre and its aftermath caused a “blanket of fear” to fall over the people. Protests erupted in response and ferocious violence was unleashed by the state. On 30 March, a State of Emergency was declared, after which 18,000 people were detained, and the African National Congress (ANC) and PAC were banned. The South African Communist Party (SACP) and its trade union leaders had already been declared illegal in 1950\. Totalitarian legislation gave almost unlimited powers to the police. Thousands were jailed, many for life on Robben Island, while others, including many trade union activists, were executed. Sharpeville marked the end of an upward trajectory of struggle. For ten years, repressive labour laws meant strikes were virtually unheard of. Many activists fled into exile in surrounding countries. Apartheid wasn’t just a white supremacist state. The draconian security apparatus, justified with anti-communist rhetoric, created conditions of stability which underpinned a sustained economic boom from 1963 to 1972\. White South Africans had one of the highest standards of living in the world, and international capitalists drank like pigs from the vast wealth extracted from the misery of the Black masses. But as Karl Marx argued, capitalism creates its own grave diggers. New industries meant an inexorable movement of Black workers, both men and women, into and around the cities, despite the pass laws. The next turning point was a strike wave in Durban in 1973\. The strikes began in January at a Brick and Tile factory outside Durban, and quickly spread to packaging, transport and ship repairs, textile, metal and chemical plants. Dock workers were critical, holding up trade. By the end of March, approximately half of all the Black workers employed in Durban were out on strike. Companies, as always, resorted to repression, sacking militants after they returned to work, threatening others. A government minister told the media, “I want to bleed the trade unions to death”. But the blanket of fear had been thrown off. Savage repression, unlike after Sharpeville in 1960, increasingly provoked an anger that could not be quelled. Between January and June 1974, 300 strikes involved 80,000 workers. Strikes in many mines ended in riots as police tried to bludgeon workers back underground. In just one mine, 132 were killed and 500 wounded. In 1974, Mozambique’s victory over Portugal, the colonising power, and later the defeat of South African troops in Angola, considerably raised the confidence of Black workers. The strikes of 1973-74 had inspired the restless students, and the killings in the miners’ strikes enraged them. Then the white government ordered that from now on, classes would be conducted in Afrikaans, the language of their oppressors. This unleashed a storm of pent-up anger and bitterness at the same time as Black pride and confidence were rising. It was an explosive mix. The slogan of the Soweto students became: “Dialogue no! Confrontation, yes! Yes! Yes!” When workers returned from work on the first day of the massacre, they were confronted by a police reign of terror, shooting people at random. Bodies were piled on trucks and taken away with no record of names or numbers, which only fuelled the anger. And so very soon, adults joined with the students in destroying every symbol of white power. A plume of smoke hung over the township, illuminated by huge flames. Students were targeted by police so that they had to stop wearing uniforms to stay alive. The rebellion spread like wildfire. In the days and weeks that followed, students everywhere organised in their townships and took to the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town, bringing many more into the struggle. The uprising inspired township rebellions from one end of the country to the other. In August and September, the students organised massive strikes. This was a new high point and an inspiration to socialist activists around the world. The International Socialists (precursors to Socialist Alternative), for example, toured Barney Mokgatle around Australia in August 1977\. Mokgatle was an exiled secretary of the Soweto Students Representative Council and a leader of the Soweto uprising. As Mick Armstrong recorded in the *Battler*, the organisation’s newspaper at the time, Mokgatle described how in Soweto, “We organised the demonstration ... The police organised the rioting ... We didn’t think that afternoon that some of our friends would be dead”. No one really knows the number of students killed that year, but according to Mokgatle, “it was much greater than the official toll of 618 ... there were mass graves outside the townships”. Even in exile, the thousands who fled were pursued by South African security forces. Just three months before his visit, Mokgatle’s friend had been beaten up by them in London. Inside South Africa, he reported that the crackdown was intense: “Forty Black schools have been closed. The Black-produced Soweto paper *The World* is being closed down”. But, he argued, students were determined to keep fighting—Mokgatle predicted the struggle would intensify in spite of ongoing jailings and killings. And students did continue to play a militant role in the townships. By the mid-1980s, the Black working class, backed up by township revolts and youth rebellions, brought South Africa to the brink of revolution. The overthrow of not just racist laws, but capitalism itself, was a real possibility. Whether such a movement achieves victory depends on political leadership. Unfortunately, there were serious weaknesses in the politics of the Black consciousness movement, which led the initial student uprising. And in the workers’ movement, activists who generally identified as socialists but with syndicalist tendencies had and continued to play a crucial role in Durban and the East Cape. The Workerists, as they were known, were influential in unions of metals and manufacturing, clothing, textiles and retail. They correctly argued that Black capitalism would continue the exploitation and oppression of Black workers, so capitalism needed to be overthrown and replaced with socialism. But they underplayed the question of political organisation, relying on strong, militant, democratically structured trade unions, which they did marvellous work organising, but which were insufficient on their own to achieve their goal. Related to this, they never cohered the most class-conscious militants around a clear program to defeat the ANC and SACP, which had no intention of overthrowing capitalism. This left the more conservative forces’ influence largely unchallenged. As Mokgatle predicted, students continued to play an important role in the townships. In November 1984, they called for three stay-aways, and would continue to organise workers. But a critical mass of them backed the ANC’s moderate politics. Debates raged in the movement between the workerists and the populists, as supporters of the ANC and SACP were known. Then, in July 1987, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), in which socialists had played a big role, signed the anti-socialist Freedom Charter of the ANC. This was a devastating blow to those who wanted to carry the revolutionary struggle through to the overthrow of capitalism. It enabled the ANC to consolidate its authority as the sole representative organisation of the Black masses, and fostered disarray among its opponents. There were unions like the retail workers, where support for the Charter was strongly resisted. But the tide had turned, and Nelson Mandela and the SACP successfully negotiated an end to apartheid, but limited it to a transition to Black capitalism. So, tragically, one of, if not *the* most inspiring working-class movement of the twentieth century left the Black masses disoriented, exploited and oppressed by a new Black capitalist class. It matters that we draw lessons from the struggles of the workers and students in South Africa. Otherwise, the narrative goes unchallenged that no amount of bravery, courage and suffering, all of which were features of the movement, can end capitalism. In the student movement, the PAC posed as a more militant alternative to the ANC, and its activists initiated the June 1976 rebellion. But their politics were just a Black version of the ANC and SACP’s moderate position. The PAC demonstrated the dead end of what we now call identity politics—just excluding whites did not change the fact that their vision was not liberation, but one of Black capitalists in charge. A second important lesson to draw is about the importance of students to the struggle. Many on the socialist left dismiss the idea of organising among students. But Soweto showed how important it is. If socialists had had a base among the students, at least a minority could well have been trained in the struggles they inspired and often organised, and therefore been in a better position to win arguments with militant workers. They might have stood a chance of influencing the workerists, marvellous trade unionists who ultimately lost the battle against the well-oiled machine of the populists. The student rebellion of Soweto in June 1976 shows very clearly that, while they can’t lead a successful socialist revolution in the way workers can, students can play an important role when workers are on the move. However, in the final accounting, even the most militant and determined students and workers can’t win if they aren’t clear about what they are fighting for and what it will take to win. Revolutionary political organisation therefore remains crucial if we are to defeat capitalism, end racism and win liberation for all. ### The British state’s plot against Palestine Action URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-british-states-plot-against-palestine-action/ Last updated: 2026-07-01T01:35:54.000Z It was virtually inevitable that, once the British government decided to [actively support](https://caat.org.uk/publications/how-the-uk-arms-and-supports-israels-genocide-in-gaza/?ref=redflag.org.au) Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, an unprecedented, authoritarian crackdown on [dissent back home](https://www.972mag.com/uk-protests-palestine-london-gaza/?ref=redflag.org.au) would follow. That climate of official repression culminated this week with the Court of Appeal—the UK’s second highest court—[upholding](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/15/uk-court-says-proscribing-palestine-action-as-terrorist-group-was-lawful?ref=redflag.org.au) the government’s proscription last year of [Palestine Action](https://www.972mag.com/elbit-weapons-britain/?ref=redflag.org.au) as a terrorist organisation. The need to crush opposition to the British state’s complicity in Israeli atrocities in Gaza—which a consensus of international [legal](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds?ref=redflag.org.au), [scholarly](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/01/israel-committing-genocide-in-gaza-worlds-top-scholars-on-the-say?ref=redflag.org.au), and [human rights](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/?ref=redflag.org.au) experts has determined amounts to a genocide—has led to many firsts in British legal history. But the proscription of Palestine Action is perhaps the most foundational, and the most dangerous. It is the first time that a direct-action group, whose form of civil disobedience is damaging property rather than using violence against people, has been declared a terrorist organisation, on a par with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. Under this new interpretation of the law, the Suffragette movement—which fought to gain women the vote in Britain over a century ago, and whose members are uniformly extolled as role models by [the very politicians](https://x.com/zarahsultana/status/1940754655891673325?ref=redflag.org.au) who support Palestine Action’s proscription—would undoubtedly have been declared a terrorist organisation. It is sometimes forgotten, [often willfully](https://news.sky.com/video/cour-of-appeal-judge-rules-palestine-action-ban-was-lawful-13554299?ref=redflag.org.au), that the Suffragettes operated underground cells that [organised](https://eghammuseum.org/terrorists-the-suffragette-arson-and-bombing-campaign/?ref=redflag.org.au) hundreds of bombings and arson attacks in pursuit of their goals, killing four people and wounding at least 24\. Palestine Action, by contrast, has explicitly eschewed this kind of life-endangering violence while being far more transparent about its activities. It has restricted its actions to property damage, chiefly targeting the Israeli company Elbit Systems’ weapons factories in the UK that make drones used in Gaza. The group [admits](https://gcnchambers.co.uk/jury-discharged-in-700000-palestine-action-criminal-damage-trial/?ref=redflag.org.au) that it causes damage to property but argues its attacks are warranted by a higher duty to international law, which [places an obligation](https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10482/?ref=redflag.org.au) on third parties to prevent atrocities and genocide rather than collude in such crimes. And given how deeply enmeshed the British state is in Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, this duty is particularly acute. The UK [sells arms](https://www.oxfam.org.uk/get-involved/campaign-with-oxfam/gaza-israel-crisis-sign-petition-call-for-ceasefire-now/does-the-uk-sell-arms-to-israel/?ref=redflag.org.au) to Israel. It [allows](https://www.declassifieduk.org/why-were-trying-to-shut-down-israels-arms-factories-in-britain/?ref=redflag.org.au) Israeli arms manufacturers such as Elbit to operate factories in the UK that build killer drones (one of which [was used](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-arms-aid-workers-gaza-drone?ref=redflag.org.au) to kill seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza in April 2024, including three British citizens). British planes [transport](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5F61YK9Dl3l4&ref=redflag.org.au) US and German weapons to Israel. And the UK has been carrying out [endless surveillance flights](https://www.declassifieduk.org/revealed-uk-military-has-flown-200-spy-missions-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/?ref=redflag.org.au) over Gaza to supply Israel with intelligence used in its obliteration of the enclave. That is not all. Britain has provided Israel with diplomatic cover for its crimes, [including](https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/2024/no-respite-for-children-and-families-in-gaza-as-un-security-council-ceasefire-resolution-fails-to-pass-?ref=redflag.org.au) at the UN Security Council. Israeli generals and politicians suspected of war crimes in Gaza are [welcomed](https://www.declassifieduk.org/israeli-air-force-chief-given-special-immunity-to-visit-britain/?ref=redflag.org.au) in the UK. And as foreign secretary in the previous government, David Cameron [threatened](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/exclusive-uk-confirms-threatening-call-between-cameron-and-iccs-karim-khan?ref=redflag.org.au) to pull funding from the International Criminal Court (ICC)—in violation of Britain’s legal obligations under the Rome Statute—over the court’s decision to [issue an arrest warrant](https://www.972mag.com/raji-sourani-icc-arrest-warrants/?ref=redflag.org.au) for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. British collusion in Israeli crimes is the reason Palestine Action was originally founded six years ago, and it stepped up its attacks, particularly on Elbit factories, when Israel began its current onslaught on Gaza in October 2023\. Its actions were designed not only to interrupt the supply of weapons to Israel but to provoke a debate in Britain about why the government should stop actively aiding these crimes against the Palestinian people. Instead, the British state has worked strenuously—through the establishment media, the police, and the courts—to redirect popular attention away from its own criminal actions under international law. The goal has been to keep the public fixated on the faux-illegality of opposing genocide rather than the British security state’s all-too-real criminal collusion in that genocide. Among other things, this has extended to [endless condemnations by politicians and the media](https://www.972mag.com/uk-antisemitism-british-jews-london/?ref=redflag.org.au) of peaceful mass demonstrations against the genocide as “hate marches” and “antisemitic”—despite the protests including a [large contingent of demonstrators](https://www.vashtimedia.com/photos-eruption-british-jewish-solidarity-palestinians/?ref=redflag.org.au) who make their Jewishness explicit. ### Architecture of repression In proscribing Palestine Action, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has brought out of the shadows a legal architecture of repression—mostly squirreled away in recent amendments to counter-terrorism laws—that seems to have been prepared for just such a moment as this. The police and courts appear only too willing to conspire in vaguely worded legal formulations, creating a dragnet in which the government can ensnare as a terrorist anyone who challenges the legitimacy or legality of its foreign policy. That has been most obvious in the now routine sight of police officers [hauling away](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp38z9lylddo?ref=redflag.org.au) thousands of British citizens—many of them retired lawyers, doctors, vicars, and army veterans—for the crime of holding up a placard that reads: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. Under Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act, anyone expressing an opinion, even inadvertently, that might “encourage support” for a proscribed organisation can be arrested and potentially faces a jail term of up to fourteen years. Waves of highly visible defiance, often taking place in the square adjacent to Britain’s parliament, have been deeply discomfiting to Starmer’s government—as well as to him personally, given his credentials as a former leading human rights lawyer. Starmer [once argued](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=562455326640280) before the ICC that a sustained Serbian attack on the Croatian city of Vukovar was a genocide, yet he has repeatedly rejected the same label for Israel’s destruction of Gaza, which is many orders of magnitude worse. Earlier this year, it briefly looked as if the placard protests might have won Palestine Action a reprieve. The High Court [ruled](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3wleezq73no?ref=redflag.org.au) in February that the government’s proscription last July was “unlawful”, on the basis of its disproportionate chilling effect on free speech and the right to protest. However, the police were allowed to carry on arresting people for holding the placards, thereby giving no practical remedy to the chilling effect that had supposedly concerned the High Court. With the Court of Appeal now overturning that lacklustre decision, the High Court’s earlier ruling against proscription looks more like misdirection—a piece of cynical, legal theatre. The February ruling is better understood as the British judiciary creating the impression that it had carefully weighed the balance between protecting long-cherished, basic rights of free speech and assembly, on the one hand, and supposed “national security concerns”—that is, Israel’s right to commit atrocities—on the other. In truth, however, there was no real likelihood that Britain’s highest judges, pillars of the establishment, would agree to place limits on the UK’s participation in the genocide. That would set the British state on a collision course with Washington, which has been fully on board with the genocide under both the [Biden](https://www.972mag.com/biden-harris-democrats-israel-genocide/?ref=redflag.org.au) and [Trump](https://www.972mag.com/gaza-trump-ethnic-cleansing-refusal/?ref=redflag.org.au) presidencies. Faced with widespread condemnation from [human rights groups](https://www.amnesty.org.uk/latest/uk-banning-palestine-action-disturbing-legal-overreach-uk-government-amnesty/?ref=redflag.org.au), [international legal organisations](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/07/uk-palestine-action-ban-disturbing-misuse-uk-counter-terrorism-legislation?ref=redflag.org.au), and prominent sections of the British public, the Starmer government desperately needed to breathe life into its improbable claim at the High Court and Court of Appeal that Palestine Action should be treated as equivalent to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State group—no simple task. But help came in the form of a high-profile court case against some of the two dozen Palestine Action activists awaiting trial. The problem for the government was that they had all been arrested for involvement in [damaging property](https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-much-damage-did-palestine-action-really-do-at-brize-norton/?ref=redflag.org.au) related to the genocide—from Elbit factories to two Royal Air Force war planes—before the group was declared a terrorist organisation. Though they were not charged retroactively with terrorism offences (the prosecution understood there was little chance of persuading a jury to convict them of such charges), they were held in pre-trial detention three times longer than the normal maximum and in particularly harsh, restrictive conditions. In effect, they were already treated as if they were terrorists. This led to a prolonged hunger strike by several of the detainees. Notably, the strike received [almost no coverage](https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/the-hunger-strike-is-not-being-televised) from the UK media, presumably out of fear it might draw attention to their mistreatment and the reasons why they were ready to risk their health and potentially their lives. ### No normal trial The trial of the six Palestine Action activists started in November 2025, running in parallel to the deliberations of the High Court and Court of Appeal on whether the government was justified in declaring the group a terrorist organisation. The government used the trial to [bolster its case](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/yvette-cooper-palestine-action-article-trial-b2978390.html?ref=redflag.org.au) for proscription, and in the process [prejudiced the proceedings](https://www.declassifieduk.org/palestine-action-ban-risked-activists-right-to-fair-trial-documents-reveal/?ref=redflag.org.au) against the six accused before they had even begun. Yvette Cooper, who, in her previous role as home secretary, proscribed Palestine Action almost a year ago, [argued](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj0yyvj7jmmo?ref=redflag.org.au) at the time that the trial [would prove](https://www.declassifieduk.org/palestine-action-ban-risked-activists-right-to-fair-trial-documents-reveal/?ref=redflag.org.au) the group was engaged in terrorist activities, even though the prosecution never pressed any terrorist charges against the defendants. Meanwhile, rumours began circulating in the British media—[reportedly planted](https://novaramedia.com/2025/11/05/palestine-action-iran-media-story-planted-by-israel-linked-pr-firm/?ref=redflag.org.au) by a PR firm working for Elbit Systems—suggesting that Palestine Action was secretly funded by Iran. No evidence for this claim was ever forthcoming. The six defendants in the so-called Filton trial, named after the suburb of Bristol where Elbit’s drone factory—which they broke into on 6 August 2024—is located, were accused of three charges: aggravated burglary, violent disorder, and criminal damage. Crucially, one of them, Samuel Corner, was also accused of grievous bodily harm with intent: After police arrived at the scene to arrest the activists, Corner struck one of them in the back with a sledgehammer the activists had been using to smash up Elbit’s drone production line, causing a small fracture in the policewoman’s vertebra. When the media did cover the case, which was rare, it was to [focus almost](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70dv0ln4g4o?ref=redflag.org.au) [exclusively](https://www.gbnews.com/politics/zack-polanski-palestine-activist-elbit-systems?ref=redflag.org.au) on the injury to the policewoman, framed in such a way as to suggest that her back had been “shattered”. (In fact, the fracture was so small it was [not evident](https://realmedia.press/the-filton-trial-3/?ref=redflag.org.au) in an X-ray and missed on a first MRI scan; the [recommended treatment](https://realmedia.press/filton-trial-april/?ref=redflag.org.au#Injuries2) was six weeks of mild rest and over-the-counter pain killers.) The police were also allowed to [release](https://www.channel4.com/news/police-release-footage-of-palestine-action-activists-in-alleged-attack-on-bristol-factory?ref=redflag.org.au) a highly selective video of edited scenes of confrontation between the activists, Elbit security guards and police—another abuse of legal process in the case designed to whip up the public mood against the “Filton Six”. It was clear that this was no normal trial. The government was determined to secure convictions that would prove the six activists had engaged in intentional and planned violence against people, and thereby stand up its proscription of Palestine Action. The job of the presiding judge, Jeremy Johnson, was to make sure the jury arrived at the right verdict. He was certainly the man for the task. Johnson made it to the bench after years serving as the most favoured barrister of the “secret state”, representing the intelligence services, the Defence Ministry, and the police. His working environment of choice as a lawyer had been [behind-closed-doors prosecutions](https://www.declassifieduk.org/julian-assange-judge-previously-acted-for-mi6/?ref=redflag.org.au) held out of view of the public or proper legal scrutiny. During the trial, Johnson [oversaw](https://realmedia.press/unjust-filton-trial/?ref=redflag.org.au) an extraordinary number of [legal manipulations](https://novaramedia.com/2026/06/05/palestine-action-defendants-apply-to-remove-biased-judge/?ref=redflag.org.au) that helped the government. The defendants were denied the right to refer to their motives in attacking the Elbit factory (the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” [were](https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2026/05/palestine-action-scottish-judicial-review-stitch-up-incoming/?ref=redflag.org.au) [barred](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZgZGMDgAxs/?ref=redflag.org.au) from the proceedings). The type and use of the weapons damaged in the attack was concealed from the jury. The defence was given no opportunity to cross-examine Elbit staff. Video evidence was introduced by the police that had been in the sole custody of Elbit for a year after the attack. But most egregiously of all, Johnson [ruled](https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/barristers-powerful-speech-at-filton) that the jury must not be informed of its right to acquit on the basis of conscience. Under a principle known as jury equity, established in British law hundreds of years ago, juries are allowed to defy a direction from a judge that a defendant has no legal defence. In fact, Johnson actively encouraged the jury to think they had no such right. The lead defence barrister, Rajiv Menon KC, used his closing speech to defy the judge and [alert the jury](https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/barristers-powerful-speech-at-filton) to this right. Johnson responded—in another legal first—by instituting contempt of court proceedings against Menon, which would ultimately be [overruled](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgp5k0ex1zo?ref=redflag.org.au) by the Court of Appeal on procedural grounds amid mounting disquiet from the legal profession. ### Weaponising justice Despite these many legal manipulations, Johnson was unable to secure the convictions sought by the government. In February, the jury [acquitted](https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/the-jury-were-right-to-acquit-the) the defendants of the most serious charges of aggravated burglary and violent disorder, and could not reach a verdict on the less serious one of criminal damage, or on Corner’s charge of grievous bodily harm. The jury’s inability to reach a decision on criminal damage left the way open for the prosecution to initiate a second trial of four of the activists (the “Filton Four”): Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio, and Fatema Rajwani. Those proceedings ended last month, with the jury [finding](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/05/four-palestine-action-activists-convicted-of-criminal-damage?ref=redflag.org.au) the four guilty of criminal damage and Corner of grievous bodily harm over the injury sustained by the policewoman. Disappointingly for the government, however, the jury refused to convict Corner of inflicting such harm intentionally, as the prosecution had wanted. The jury were presumably influenced by the evidence: Testimony and video footage showed that Corner had been blinded by pepper spray moments before the tussle, and that he had been trying to protect a fellow female activist who, the footage showed, was being viciously assaulted when Corner was sprayed. Notably, this had been the messiest of all the Palestine Action attacks—in large part, as the two trials showed, because Elbit security guards had decided not to withdraw and wait for the police to arrive but to launch a sustained attack on the activists, beating them and grabbing their sledgehammers to use against them. One of the defendants, Jordan Devlin, acquitted in the first trial, was shown to have been so [badly beaten](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/palestine-action-defendant-guard-assaulted-multiple-times-elbit?ref=redflag.org.au) by the guards that it was difficult to understand why the Elbit staff themselves had not been charged. In short, as Yvette Cooper, the former home secretary, had suggested, this was the government’s best shot at propping up its narrative that Palestine Action used violence and should be treated as a terrorist organisation. But neither the criminal damage nor the GBH without intent convictions helped in this regard. Another solution was needed. Before the verdict, Judge Johnson had stated that, should the Filton Four be convicted of criminal damage, he would—in yet another legal first—use his powers of sentencing to add in a “terrorism connection”. He was able to do so under a highly controversial 2021 Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Act that [allows](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/longer-jail-terms-and-stricter-monitoring-as-new-terror-laws-gain-royal-assent?ref=redflag.org.au) judges to “upgrade” criminal offences to terrorism offences during sentencing. Yet Johnson withheld that information from the jury and [issued a gag order](https://novaramedia.com/2026/04/23/zarah-sultana-exposes-attack-on-civil-liberties-that-british-media-cant-report/?ref=redflag.org.au), meaning no one could make it public. It was not hard to work out why the judge did not want the jury to know his intentions. Its members would have been highly unlikely to convict the Filton Four of criminal damage had they known the judge would treat that verdict as effectively a license to convict the activists of terrorism. This may explain, in part, why a trial for criminal damage by activists to another weapons factory, this one in Wolverhampton, saw four defendants [walk free](https://www.declassifieduk.org/jury-fails-to-convict-four-palestine-activists-accused-of-arms-firm-raid/?ref=redflag.org.au) this week after the jury could not reach a verdict. Unlike the Filton case, the judge allowed the jury to hear the defendants’ reasons for attacking the site, operated by US aerospace firm Moog. The four are likely to face a retrial. The anticipated underhand manoeuvre in the Filton trial provoked an application from a civil liberties group, Defend Our Juries, backed by thousands of legal professionals, for Judge Johnson to [recuse himself](https://novaramedia.com/2026/06/05/palestine-action-defendants-apply-to-remove-biased-judge/?ref=redflag.org.au) from the sentencing hearing. He refused to do so. The same group of legal professionals [submitted a petition](https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/convicted-palestine-action-activists-judge-bias-pqyi7okq?ref=redflag.org.au) demanding that the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office investigate the judge’s “manifest bias and discrimination” during the trial. Discussing the petition, David Whyte, professor of law at Queen Mary University of London, [observed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rOzoQAjAhg&ref=redflag.org.au) that Johnson had acted with exceptional “cruelty and vindictiveness”, noting the highly irregular length of the activists’ pre-trial detention when even the prosecution had not requested remand. During the Filton Four’s sentencing, Johnson made good on his promise to add a “terrorism connection”, increasing the activists’ jail sentences to between five and eight years. Additionally, they will be ineligible for normal parole, held in harsher conditions in prison, and face years of punitive restrictions after their release. Judge Johnson’s official reasoning for adding the “terrorism connection” was that the four activists had tried to “influence the government” with their act of criminal damage to a factory making killer drones. That was clearly music to the ears of an embattled government struggling to sell its complicity in a genocide to the British public. It finally provided a rationale to treat as terrorism any practical attempt by groups such as Palestine Action to stop the supply of arms to Israel’s genocidal military. As Huda Ammori, the co-founder of Palestine Action, [observed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCd-a7ylIgc&ref=redflag.org.au) this week: “The legal system is being weaponised to attack our movement”. ### A dark precedent But Judge Johnson’s terrorism upgrade sets a much larger and darker precedent, too. It effectively gives the British government the power to declare any disruptive civil disobedience group a terrorist organisation, even if the government is unable to secure a terrorism conviction through a jury trial. And all of this is happening as the UK government, in another unprecedented step, presses ahead with [plans to scrap juries](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn5lxg2l0lqo?ref=redflag.org.au) in many trials—leaving judges like Johnson exclusively in charge of deciding the fate of defendants. It is a recipe for more political show trials like that of the Filton Four. As Amnesty International [warned](https://x.com/AmnestyUK/status/2066532751667245541?ref=redflag.org.au) after this week’s Court of Appeal decision upholding proscription: “The banning of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is a grave misuse of counter-terrorism powers with serious consequences for human rights. It is a huge overreach to treat direct action protest as terrorism”. It added that the decision “leaves the door wide open for governments to suppress other protest movements in the future”. Undoubtedly, the Starmer government will be selective about how it uses this new suppressive power. For example, while followers of the far-right provocateur Tommy Robinson have been regularly found to break the law—not least in the recent [race riots](https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/13/belfast-southampton-riots-racism-why-is-the-uk-burning?ref=redflag.org.au) in the cities of Southampton and Belfast that included arson attacks on homes and injuries to police officers—it appears unlikely that those committing these kinds of crimes will be sentenced as terrorists, even though they are clearly seeking to “influence the government” to crack down harder on immigration. Similarly, the government seems determined to make sure [more than 2,000](https://www.declassifieduk.org/over-2000-britons-served-for-israel-amid-gaza-genocide/?ref=redflag.org.au) British citizens who have recently served in Israel’s genocidal army face no consequences—[including](https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/uks-chief-rabbi-gives-his-blessing) the son of Ephraim Mirvis, Britain’s Orthodox chief rabbi. These soldiers are not even being investigated, let alone arrested or charged with terrorism offences. Indeed, the British security state appears to have no problem with the gravest violations of international law—refusing to prosecute them entirely—precisely because it is already violating such laws itself through its deep complicity in Israel’s genocide. The authoritarianism of Starmer’s government should be terrifying in itself. But it is likely to soon lead to an even more dangerous place: His deeply unpopular Labour Party risks being ousted at the next general election by the far-right Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage. Starmer’s abuses of Britain’s terrorism laws have paved the way for Farage and Reform to unleash a whirlwind of repression. And be sure: Like Starmer, they will frame the crackdown on the most fundamental of civil liberties as vital to protecting “national security” from the threat of “terrorism”. --- *Jonathan Cook is a British-based independent journalist. This article was previously published at his website,* [*jonathancook.substack.com*](https://jonathancook.substack.com/)*.* ### Why Victorian teachers rejected the union-government contract URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-victorian-teachers-rejected-the-union-government-contract/ Last updated: 2026-06-27T02:40:27.000Z School staff cannot carry the burden of the broken public school system any longer. Our paltry pay and unbearable workloads deserve to be front-page news and a political crisis for the government. And in Victoria, right now, they are! This is thanks to an internal union rebellion in which the group Socialists in Schools played a crucial role. Last week, 58 percent of Australian Education Union (AEU) members in Victoria made history. Going against our union leaders’ advice, tens of thousands of school staff voted down an [in-principle agreement](https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-teachers-betrayed-by-union-agreement-with-government/) the union had reached with the state Labor government. The rejection is historic. The first statewide agreement reached between the left-wing teachers’ union, the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association, was in 1982\. Since then, rebellious school staff have never been organised or confident enough to win a majority of their workmates to vote against their own union leaders’ advice, to reject an agreement and demand more. Until now. There are many reasons for the “no” vote. The disastrous 2022 agreement, which union leaders rammed through during the pandemic, resulted in an 11 percent pay cut. There is a lot of catching up to do, and the latest proposed agreement would not get us there. While the media was fixated on talking up the offer, for most teachers in the middle years of their career the agreement was not close enough to the 35 percent pay increase over three years that we voted to fight for at the beginning of the campaign. It’s also unclear whether the proposed pay deal would keep us ahead of current and recent inflation. We simply can’t afford another union sellout. The question of solidarity with education support staff was also key to convincing people to vote “no”. ES staff perform essential work in schools, and the pay rise they were offered was lower than the percentage pay rise teachers were to receive. Rather than base salary increases, much of the pay rise for ES came in the weaker form of bonuses. It’s important to remember just how low-paid ES staff are. Range 2-1 (entry level for the most common band) is currently $56,580, which works out to just $28.54 per hour. Most classroom support ES get paid for only six hours per day (and work through their unpaid 30-minute lunch break), so entry-level ES get paid just $846 for a five-day week. Even the top of range 2 (2-8) working those same hours are paid only $1,096.50 per week, before tax. And yes, this is the top pay for most classroom support ES. As the union leaders themselves argue, we are “stronger together”—and 58 percent of us demonstrated this by rejecting a deal that would have left ES base pay even further behind teachers, and thus drive another wedge between us. Finally, the offer did nothing to address our impossible workloads, which are pushing 38 teachers per week to leave the profession, or the state to teach elsewhere. Recent research has indicated that less than one in three mid-career teachers plan to stay in the profession until retirement. In response to the union leaders’ fearmongering that rejecting the deal would lead to an intractable campaign and a worse offer, Socialists in Schools activists cited the example of Victorian nurses who voted down an offer that their leadership had endorsed in 2024\. Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation officials were completely unprepared for the anger and confidence of nurses to speak up against their proposed deal at a mass meeting. At the time, rather than hear out their members, union Secretary Lisa Fitzpatrick condescendingly told nurses that they clearly “hadn’t been able to grasp” the wage deal. In reality, members understood perfectly that they were being ripped off. They stood their ground, voted no, and received an improved offer merely a month later. The AEU leaders similarly disregard their own members’ opinions. They ignored motions from 54 schools and 6 regions to escalate our campaign with more industrial action. Instead, they implemented largely toothless “work bans” and cancelled the half-day, regional strikes they organised. Those strikes were themselves a de-escalation from our previous statewide 24-hour stop-work, despite being dishonestly branded as an “escalation”. Going above and beyond, the union leaders also deleted critical social media comments and banned dissenting union members from the union’s channels. The union presented us with a low-ball offer, presumably out of deference to the Labor government. This is a government that talked enthusiastically about “essential workers” during the pandemic but has deliberately let our wages fall far behind inflation, and has constantly skimmed funding from public schools, leading to the crisis we see today. How dare our unions accept these insulting “offers” from one of the best-funded employers and one that we are well placed to put under serious pressure? Interestingly, following the vote, our officials tried a different tack. Speaking to the media, a red-faced Justin Mulally, the union president, initially tried to distance himself from the offer and claimed that he and the union had not endorsed or recommended the deal to its members. Mullaly stated that the union’s supposedly democratic decision-making body, the branch council, was responsible. But the branch council was elected in 2024, well before the campaign started, and is largely made up of members allied with the leadership, and who follow their lead. And Mullaly’s statement that the union hadn’t recommended it is an outright lie—as demonstrated by the torrent of one-sided emails, social media content, and countless one-sided lectures in union meetings about why we should accept the deal, while describing any counterargument as “misinformation”. So, Mullaly sells out workers and lies to us, to the media and to the wider community in the process. Ticking all these boxes, he would make a great Labor Party politician one day. We should not view the calcified branch council as the key to the future of public education, but rather the rank-and-file union members everywhere who know better. ### The role of Socialists in Schools [Socialists in Schools](https://www.instagram.com/socialistsinschoolsvic/?ref=redflag.org.au), a campaign group within the union, played a decisive role in activating more radical union members to build and win the “no” campaign. We produced materials for AEU members to take to their schools to educate others about why it’s right to have high expectations and maintain our demands, and why the only way to win was through a militant industrial campaign. [Before the 24 March strike](https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-teachers-fight-must-continue/), our [Strike zine](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jZMgJtgfg-arm8tQdopO-ylZ3M8lprn5/view?usp=sharing&ref=redflag.org.au) tackled a series of questions we thought needed addressing, from “Do strikes work?” for the many members who had no experience striking due to the union’s inaction for many years, to “Can the government afford to pay us?”, given the media’s beat up about the state government being broke. Later in the campaign, we responded to common arguments and fearmongering from union leaders against further strike action and voting “no” in our [campaign FAQ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EKmQROYxwdwO2rq9ya0PJRd%5FNIwDkDEo/view?usp=sharing&ref=redflag.org.au), such as “Will we be starting from scratch if we vote no?”, “Are we going to be forced into arbitration?” and “Do we need to accept a deal so we don’t have to risk bargaining with the Liberals or One Nation following the state election?” When calling through the hundreds of school staff who left their details with the “Vote No network”, many said they had already printed these documents and distributed them at their school or used them to decorate their union noticeboards. This material was extremely effective, because the union’s materials were deliberately unclear. Members had questions that the officials just would not hear out or answer adequately. In addition to speaking at regional and online briefings, officials visited many schools to spruik their offer. It was a joy to hear that at many of these sub-branch meetings, teachers and ES stood up to the officials and, at times, even walked out on them. One official went so far as to describe as “feral” a school in the eastern suburbs where a Socialists in Schools member helps to lead the sub-branch. Long live the feral schools. We are immensely proud that our materials found their way into countless staffrooms and helped frustrated union members everywhere stand up for themselves, knowing they were not alone. This is extremely important in a union that deliberately silos members and schools off from one another. Socialists in Schools hosted multiple meetings online and in person, with some between 70 and 150 union members. It’s now an active campaign with dozens of impressive union militants. We have discussed a socialist approach to schooling and education, built our school’s sub-branches, faced off with the officials, produced vital social media content and resources for union activists, and fought for a set of politics in the union to counter the conservative, defeatist approach of the AEU leaders. Towards the end of the campaign, we received messages from dozens of union members giving us information about their school’s vote. Before the official results were announced, we had collected voting data for nearly 200 school sub-branches. Many of these messages included anecdotes about how their schools fared—sharing surprise at how many at their school voted no, frustration at the lack of democracy in the union’s process and asking us for advice, or disappointment in the result at their own school but hoping for a better result overall. We thank everyone who sent us these messages and made connections during the campaign, and we urge everyone to stay in touch and get involved. Unlike the opaque leadership, we aimed to share results from the “no” voting schools—both primary and secondary, metropolitan and regional—to give others the confidence to do the same. ### The next stage of the campaign We are aware of the challenges ahead. The government says it is in no rush to resume negotiations with the union, and the latest union email indicates that the leadership will continue to waste our time and energy with an unnecessary survey, so they will have more of our opinions to ignore. We don’t need a survey. We know the problems and their solutions. Socialists in Schools is calling for all the “no” voting schools and AEU members to pass motions demanding the union restart our industrial campaign and organise a strike for the first few weeks of term three. This is going to be an uphill battle. But our determined campaign has kept open a door the officials wanted to slam shut—we must be determined over the next few weeks to make the most out of this opportunity. Despite the many challenges ahead, it is worth reflecting and celebrating what a significant win our side has achieved. For decades, union officials in every industry have normalised conservative ideas in the workers’ movement: unions are not about organising our side of the class struggle but are about service provision and individual protection. We can’t have strikes because members are too passive and conservative. They also developed undemocratic structures to protect their own power and ensure workers had no way to organise against them or challenge their arguments. The “no” vote in the AEU is an example of the opposite orientation. We did not passively accept the arguments of our union leaders; we educated ourselves, argued to others and passed motions to express our opposition to the sellout. We went from office to office arguing with our coworkers, attended regional meetings, swapped numbers with activists at other schools, and forced discussion and debate everywhere to find critical members of the union to get active. We didn’t accept the bureaucratic and stifling meeting rules and used every avenue open to us to argue our points. We also didn’t shy away from identifying as socialists, but connected our campaign to the question of capitalism, inequality and other injustices like racism and war. All of this was to create a network of socialist union activists who could make coherent arguments across the school system. On an average day, the words you might use to describe working in education would include “exhausting” or “demoralising”. Today, it’s exciting and inspiring. Teachers and ES should hold their heads up high for the historic stand we have taken, and the example we have set for the rest of the union movement. Officials everywhere should be sweating, and unionists everywhere should take heart. Despite the lies and fearmongering of our so-called representatives, when a clear lead is given, it’s possible for socialists to win a wider audience, to reject the passivity and low horizons our union leaders set, and keep open the possibility of a fight for something more. ### Protesting Pauline Hanson then and now: what we can learn from the 1990s movement URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/protesting-pauline-hanson-then-and-now-what-we-can-learn-from-the-1990s-movement/ Last updated: 2026-07-04T00:29:37.000Z Few people on the left would dispute that Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party represent a real threat to the working class and to oppressed groups. Backed by Australia’s wealthiest capitalist, Gina Rinehart, and given the red-carpet treatment by the corporate media, One Nation has overtaken the Coalition and is polling neck-and-neck with Labor. One Nation’s program is vile; a grab-bag of far-right policies to enable bosses to more easily sack workers, to cut wages and working conditions, to attack democratic and civil rights. The party is committed to “slashing wasteful government spending” on programs that seek to address social and economic disadvantage and instead massively increase military spending to 5 percent of GDP. With a track record of backing every tax break for the rich, that can only mean devastating cuts to health, welfare and education. In Victoria, traditionally seen as home to the labour movement, One Nation is now outpolling Labor. There is a real prospect that One Nation could lead a coalition government after the November poll. In this context, recent demonstrations at One Nation events, including a 500-strong protest in the Perth suburb of Midland and a 1000-strong demonstration in Melbourne’s inner north (prompting a last-minute venue change), are a breath of fresh air. It therefore came as something of a surprise to see Lisbeth Latham, whose blog is entitled “Revitalising Labour”, [argue](https://revitalisinglabour.substack.com/p/what-the-anti-hanson-movement-of) that a series of articles in Red Flag’s sister publication *Marxist Left Review* (MLR) get it fundamentally wrong in arguing that the 1990s mass protests against Pauline Hanson contributed to driving One Nation into the political wilderness for years. While acknowledging that “counter-mobilisation still matters”, Latham argues that what is needed is “sustained community organising”. But what kind of “community organising” are we talking about? Latham’s advice is that we must “\[start\] from where people actually are, \[demand\] what their situation actually requires, and \[trust\] that the process of organised struggle for real demands develops the consciousness and the capacity that transformation requires”. Latham falsely presents Socialist Alternative as singularly focused on a “reactive model”—countering Hanson’s public meetings—while making no mention of the sustained organising that Socialist Alternative members have been involved in: public meetings, suburban anti-fascist mobilisations, letter-boxing and door-knocking campaigns alongside many hundreds of [Socialist Party](https://www.socialists.org.au/?ref=redflag.org.au) members across the country over the past year (and for several years before that in Victoria). In all these activities, we have drawn in hundreds of people who want to do something to challenge the rise of the far right and to build a socialist alternative both to the fascists and to the pro-capitalist mainstream that has enabled One Nation’s rise by destroying living standards and normalising bigotry. Our orientation is quite simple and should not be controversial: we have to orient to the people repulsed by the far right, to the subset of them who want to do something about its rise, and to those among them who can be organised into a larger socialist movement. One Nation has grown to around 60,000 members. The Socialist Party has around 6,000\. We need to recruit more socialists so that we can engage in more sustained on-the-ground organising in more suburbs and cities across the country. A reflection on the 1990s movement—what it achieved, what it didn’t achieve and what we can learn from it—is indeed important. Latham argues that Mick Armstrong’s [MLR article](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/why-pauline-hansons-rise-is-different-from-the-last-time/?ref=redflag.org.au), and a previous [article](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/how-we-stopped-pauline-hanson-last-time/?ref=redflag.org.au) by Tess Lee Ack, are Melbourne-centric and fail to discuss in any depth the Resistance-led national wave of high school student walkouts in mid-1998\. According to Latham, it was these walkouts, not the protests outside her meetings, that were the “most significant popular expression of opposition to One Nation”. That Socialist Alternative’s analysis has been Melbourne-centric is perhaps hardly surprising, given that the vast majority of its membership lived in Melbourne in the 1990s. But how could Resistance have possibly initiated a 14,000-strong national high school student walkout in July 1998, were it not for the many protests outside Hanson’s meetings around the country in the preceding eighteen months? As someone who organised protests in Brisbane between 1996 and 1998, I can attest to the hard work that far-left organisations, including my own (I was then a member of the Democratic Socialist Party, or DSP), put into staging them. Our intent was never to try to win One Nation members over one at a time, but to demoralise and defeat them as a political force by demonstrating in large numbers. At the time, I was working in the Goodna Centrelink office, in Hanson’s electorate: the formerly safe Labor seat of Oxley, west of Brisbane. Ipswich, in the centre of the electorate, had been hit hard in the early 1990s by the loss of hundreds of jobs in the local railway workshops. While many Queensland Nationals jumped ship to One Nation, Hanson was also able to swing behind her some disenfranchised Labor voters, angered by the neoliberal policies of state and federal Labor governments. When Hanson delivered her maiden speech in September 1996, it gained wall-to-wall media coverage. Her claims that First Nations people constituted a “privileged class”, and that Australia was being “swamped by Asians”, produced widespread revulsion. We were determined to ensure Hanson’s message didn’t go unanswered. In late 1996, we formed the Antiracism Campaign (ARC). We weren’t the first to protest Hanson, however. On 7 March 1996, less than a week after Hanson’s election, a crowd of several hundred First Nations people rallied in the Ipswich mall. As Hanson began touring the county, establishing a network of Pauline Hanson Support Groups, protests spread. In November 1996, a “Unite against Racism” rally in Ipswich attracted 4,000 people. Six trade unions endorsed the rally, which was addressed by the president of the Queensland Council of Unions, Dave Harrison. Rally material was translated into Chinese, and hundreds of the local Chinese community attended, as well as many Aboriginal residents. Rallies also took place that month in Sydney, Canberra, Perth and Melbourne. The Melbourne rally, organised by the Victorian Trades Hall Council and the Ethnic Communities Council, drew more than 30,000 people. A key message that the left sought to convey at these demonstrations was that newly elected Liberal Prime Minister John Howard was Hanson’s enabler, and Hanson served as his Trojan horse for a wave of anti-worker and racist attacks. Howard refused to rebut Hanson’s racist claims, defending her “right” to freedom of speech. At the time, Howard was keen to distract attention from his anti-worker industrial laws. Additionally, stoking the flames of racism towards Aboriginal people prepared the ground for winding back native title rights and, later, abolishing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. In April 1997, Hanson launched One Nation at the Ipswich Civic Centre. ARC initiated a counter-protest that forced Hanson and her supporters to run a gauntlet of angry protesters. In the coming months, similar scenes were repeated around the country. The next month, Hanson travelled to Perth to launch One Nation at Challenge Stadium. She faced a 2,000-strong protest in what she later recalled as the “worst 24 hours of my life”. A One Nation launch at Hobart City Hall the following week proved even more disastrous for Hanson. The *Sun Herald* reported that before the event organiser had finished introducing Hanson, “a surge of protesters flooded the hall, drowning out his opening remarks with a deafening chant of ‘Pauline Hanson has to go’”. At her Newcastle launch at the end of May, Hanson hoped to appeal to a community reeling from the announcement that the BHP steelworks would close. However, the meeting faced a protest of 2,000 people chanting, “No White Australia!” and “Racist scum, go home!”, according to a *Sydney Morning Herald* report. Protests also took place in numerous regional centres, wherever One Nation tried to establish a branch, including Toowoomba, Rockhampton, Bathurst, Orange, Dubbo and Queanbeyan. In Geelong, 500 protesters stormed the venue of a One Nation meeting, forcing it to disband. Latham disparagingly refers to these tactics as “venue chasing”, which is described as “exhausting and demoralising”: > “When inner-city activists travel to outer suburban or regional communities to protest One Nation events ... they arrive as outsiders declaring who is welcome, confirm every suspicion One Nation cultivates about who the left represents, and go home having built nothing.” Yet, my own experience was that when we travelled to Toowoomba, an hour and a half west of Brisbane, to protest a One Nation launch, we were able to link up with local protesters, building each other’s confidence. Together, we chanted, “Say it loud, say it clear, racists are not welcome here!” Nonetheless, sharp debates emerged within ARC about protest tactics. At a Gold Coast protest, International Socialist Organisation (ISO) members attempted to block the path of those entering the One Nation meeting, leading to physical confrontations, despite One Nation supporters vastly outnumbering us. Within ARC, the ISO argued we needed to “nip fascism in the bud”, and therefore, the disruption of One Nation meetings was more important than the number of protesters who attended. DSP members countered that we should avoid physical confrontations with Hanson supporters as this would be an obstacle to growing our numbers and assisted the media’s campaign to frame us as “violent” and opposed to “free speech”. We argued that protests should be angry and that we should condemn Hanson as a racist. But we also argued that demonstrations needed to draw in broad layers of people, especially workers, and that we should make every effort to draw in the campaign, trade unions, and migrant and Indigenous organisations. Were the protests effective? By the end of 1997, One Nation had recruited around 18,000 members and established 250 branches nationwide. The party proved a magnet for the far right, with the antisemitic League of Rights and openly fascist National Action involved in the establishment of local branches. With Coalition preferences, One Nation secured eleven seats in the Queensland election in June 1998. However, the protests were the best tool we had to demonstrate opposition to Hanson’s rise. And they shifted the terrain of the debate. In the wake of the Queensland election debacle, protests escalated. The mass high school walkouts, which drew tens of thousands of students into the streets, put pressure on the Coalition not to preference One Nation in the October 1998 election, resulting in the party failing to win a single seat. In 2001, *Green Left Weekly* writer Alison Dellit [observed](https://www.greenleft.org.au/2001/437/how-can-hansonism-be-destroyed?ref=redflag.org.au): > “When hundreds of people demonstrated outside every meeting Hanson spoke at, Coalition ministers started to openly condemn Hanson’s racism. In 1998, when tens of thousands of high school students organised by the socialist youth group Resistance walked out of school and took to the streets in protest, the Liberals announced a preference swap deal that amounted to an electoral lockout to ‘destroy’ One Nation” ... These demonstrations had a real effect. They forced Hanson off the political scene for a while, and damaged the political value of the race card for her.” While the 1990s anti-racist movement forced Hanson to retreat for a time, the neoliberal policies that contributed to Hanson’s popularity have only intensified. After four decades of neoliberal onslaught, Australia today is a much more unequal and authoritarian country. As well, anti-refugee racism has been normalised in federal politics With the far right on the march internationally and support for Labor and the Coalition continuing to erode, it is hardly surprising that Gina Rinehart, other right-wing ideologues, and sections of the corporate media have backed the return of One Nation. Today, we need not only protests but the revival of working-class struggle, led by a socialist party that can challenge the pro-business, anti-worker policies of the traditional parties and the politics of hate and far-right reaction spearheaded by One Nation. That’s why Socialist Alternative members around the country are knocking on doors, hosting meetings and plastering the suburbs with posters to build [the Socialist Party](https://www.socialists.org.au/?ref=redflag.org.au). The protest against Hanson’s Midland fundraiser on 10 June was the first item on the national news on every TV channel that night. For the first time in decades, the media debate shifted to discussing Hanson’s racism. Moreover, the WA Socialists were widely acknowledged as the organisers of the protest. The brand recognition this coverage generates is of enormous value when we knock on doors to discuss the threat One Nation poses. Of course, this protest—and others like it—won’t stop One Nation. But they offer the message that there is an alternative. That alternative is not the politics of a bland multiculturalism devoid of any meaning, but a socialist alternative: one that argues for a profoundly different society where working people—not bosses—decide how our society is run. ### Speaking out for Palestine is still illegal in Queensland URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/speaking-out-for-palestine-is-still-illegal-in-queensland/ Last updated: 2026-06-21T00:58:07.000Z The banning of pro-Palestine speech in Queensland has resulted in the arrest of another seven activists at a “Six Words for a Free Palestine” rally on 14 June. They join around 30 people in Queensland now facing up to two years in prison for reciting or displaying “prohibited phrases”. Sam Woripa Watson, an Indigenous socialist and recent participant in the Global Sumud Flotilla, was the first arrested at the event after recalling his capture and torture by Israel: > “I was in the detention of the Israeli Occupation Forces for 80 hours, where I heard them laugh and chuckle and joke and jeer as they abused and raped and humiliated my comrades for daring to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians. My ribs were broken as I was escorted into Ashdod port and we were put into a stress position for four hours as Itamar Ben Gvir paraded around us and humiliated and kicked us. All that I could think was that this was nothing compared to the 10,000 Palestinians who are held hostage by Israel. They experience that every day. So when I say, ‘From the … to the ...’, I mean that I have seen firsthand what the occupation does.” Anger swept the crowd as the riot squad made its way through the protest to arrest Watson. There was a notable increase in the extent of the violence used by the cops at the rally. [Stephen Heydt](https://redflag.org.au/article/when-palestinians-get-killed-the-world-doesnt-even-blink-interview-with-stephen-heydt/), an anti-Zionist Jewish activist, was attended to by paramedics after being pushed to the ground and trampled by the police as they made their way to the platform to arrest another speaker. It should be no surprise that the cops feel more confident to use violence against protestors. The treatment Watson and other Global Sumud Flotilla activists faced at the hands of Israel was barely acknowledged, let alone denounced, by the Australian government, despite the announcement of an official investigation. As Watson said later in his speech: > “Our government is responsible for the abuse that we endured; they enabled it and emboldened it and made it so that Israel operates with a level of impunity only achieved through years of not being held responsible for committing genocide against the Palestinians.” To some, the police’s actions were a surprise. A week earlier, police had not arrested activists displaying the banned slogan at the “River to Sea” fun run. When questioned, police told organisers that because the event was not explicitly a protest, they did not make arrests. It appears they are targeting only people’s right to political expression, an argument that will surely strengthen the upcoming challenge to the laws in the High Court. But this campaign will also need to be won in the streets. More defiance will be essential to making these laws a dead letter and continuing the fight for a free Palestine. ### Hundreds shut down Wollongong factory for Palestine URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/hundreds-shut-down-wollongong-factory-for-palestine/ Last updated: 2026-06-21T00:49:59.000Z Hundreds of Palestine activists in Wollongong held a 72-hour blockade of the Bisalloy Steel factory in Unanderra on 14-17 June. Bisalloy has been a target for the Palestine campaign in Wollongong since 2017\. It is the only Australian manufacturer of high-strength quenched and tempered steel suitable for armouring military vehicles. The company has contracts with Israeli companies such as Plasan Re’em, which use Bisalloy steel to produce armoured “killer Toyotas” suitable for covert Israeli military operations. The June picket was the longest ever against the company and drew in widespread support. Organisations that held a presence at the picket included Students for Palestine, the Greens, the Gong Commune and Socialist Alternative. It was clear that more groups were keen to throw in their support, including the NSW Teachers Federation, who visited the picket, and Palestine Action Bega Valley, who made the four-and-a-half-hour trip up the coast. The police mobilisation at the picket was also the largest yet. At 5:30 am on Monday morning (15 June), the riot squad forcibly cleared the road. They assaulted one woman at the first gate and arrested another at gate two. The second activist, who is trans, was called “it” by the police in their report of the incident. For the rest of the morning, the riot squad threatened to arrest anyone who set foot on the nearly empty road. Although Monday morning had the most intense police intimidation tactics, they were a constant presence, behaving in a hostile and threatening manner for the duration of the picket. Their behaviour encouraged at least a handful of people to attend the picket for the first time. One older woman told us she had seen a video from Monday morning of a cop throwing a woman to the ground on the local evening news. She was so appalled that she came to the picket the next morning with her walking stick and camp chair, despite never having been to a picket or even a Palestine protest before. It is to the credit of the picketers that their numbers remained strong over the 72 hours. There was a lively atmosphere in the evenings and throughout the days with teach-ins, live music performances, lantern parades, documentary screenings and craft workshops. In the future, we could make these events even bigger, like at the Rising Tide blockade in Newcastle. Having an ambitious approach to organising the picket paid off, but the campaign in Wollongong faces new challenges. Bisalloy’s more “hands-off” approach to the community pickets, which has been due to management wanting to avoid controversy, appears to be coming to an end. But activists were able to overcome these challenges and hold a successful, peaceful community action because our numbers grew compared to previous pickets. If we want to continue to campaign to break Bisalloy’s contracts with Israeli companies, Palestine activists must recognise the prospect that next time the police presence could be more serious. The community campaign has no intention of abating while this blood-soaked company operates in our town. For the campaign to go forward, we need the next picket to be bigger, with more organisations on board and greater determination to shut the company down. ### Canberra teachers strike URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/canberra-teachers-strike/ Last updated: 2026-06-21T00:26:32.000Z On 11 June, every public primary school, high school, college and specialist school was shut down across the ACT by a full-day strike of the teachers’ union. Coming after an initial two-hour work stoppage in May, these were the first industrial actions of the Canberra Australian Education Union in fifteen years. Andrew, a maths teacher and member of the Canberra Socialists, recalled the atmosphere in the union meeting during the initial work stoppage: “The energy in that room was immense. There definitely is a willingness to fight”. The protest formed a sea of red, the union’s colour, in front of the Legislative Assembly. About 2,000 people were there, coming from 93 schools. Hoots and cheers went up for the Jervis Bay school teachers who drove 200km to be there. There was frustration with the ACT government, which had been stone walling in negotiations. It had refused to propose a new contract despite the existing one expiring in March and talks having begun twelve months ago. When a speaker mentioned support from some members of the Legislative Assembly, or when a speaker from the United Workers Union spoke favourably of Yvette Berry, the ALP education minister, they were met with silence from an otherwise enthusiastic crowd. But the frustration was about more than the enterprise agreement negotiations. The main grievances were about working conditions, echoing the grievances of teachers across the country. Chronic understaffing means teachers regularly take split and merged classes of more than 50 students. And teachers routinely have to take on more work, and work overtime. No wonder there were frequent mentions of burnout and high staff turnover in schools. There has also been a rise in workplace violence against teachers, which is related to the understaffing and lack of support. A school psychologist at the protest said he worked across two schools in one week—two days at one school, three days at another—with 1,100 students to one psychologist. Another point of frustration was the position of learning support assistants (LSAs). Andrew related: > “They’re gonna be put anywhere. LSAs at my workplace can work in student support, but they can also work in technical support in the art department, or they can work in admin, at the front of the school, as receptionists ... and they deal with students with the highest needs.” Despite this, LSAs are among the lowest paid public servants in the ACT, and receive minimal training. This was the first time support staff went on strike alongside teachers. And they received solidarity from the teachers, too. When an LSA went up to address the protest, the crowd started chanting, “LSA! LSA!” while a section started up a new variation: “Hey, hey, LSAs, we have got your back today!” Less than a week later, the union leaders announced there would be no further strikes, after they received an offer from the government. Considering there has been no substantial increase in the recent budget for public education, it is difficult to see how the government would be willing to address the concerns of teachers. “It is not the first choice of the union \[leaders\] to strike. It was absolutely the last resort, despite it being our strongest weapon”, Andrew said. The fight cannot end here for a deal that could genuinely improve the conditions for our teachers. ### Cannibal capitalism eats the World Cup URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/cannibal-capitalism-eats-the-world-cup/ Last updated: 2026-06-23T04:58:47.000Z FIFA has managed to turn the beautiful game into an ugly spectacle. With the US playing host to the World Cup alongside Mexico and Canada, Trump has discovered the power of sports to wash away the blood and dirt of empire. This month, billions of people will watch men kick a ball around a field as 48 national teams play a record 104 matches in the FIFA World Cup. I’ll be one of them, but what price are we paying to enjoy these international football festivities? The cost of entry to the games is higher than ever. For this year’s tournament, FIFA came up with the genius idea of running their own scalping system alongside a “dynamic pricing” process. This is the let-the-market-rip version of access to sports, where the richest win every time. At the 2022 World Cup, the cheapest category tickets cost around $69, with Qatari resident tickets available for as little as $11\. In the current competition, you can expect to pay at least $1,000 for the nosebleeds in the group games and seats at the final on sale for as much as $2 million per ticket. Even billionaire Trump said he wouldn’t [pay](https://www.si.com/soccer/president-trump-slams-world-cup-ticket-prices-us-opening-match-unsold?ref=redflag.org.au) for his own ticket at those prices. Fan groups are so angry they have filed a formal complaint with the European Commission, accusing FIFA of abusing its monopoly over ticket sales. Tickets are just the beginning. Fans travelling to matches at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey face train fares of more than $100 from Manhattan, a route that normally costs $12.90 return. Unlike Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022, where fans benefited from free travel between host cities, supporters will have to cover the costs of navigating hundreds of kilometres between games. The host city agreements originally required free transportation to all matches. That was quietly renegotiated away. Meanwhile, FIFA is expected to make a record-breaking $14 billion (up from $7.5 billion) in revenue this World Cup cycle. Although FIFA is officially a nonprofit organisation, it holds reserves of more than $4 billion and has reduced the proportion of its budget for development of the game to 36 percent. So where does the money go? Corruption, bribery and the expenses bill of the boss would be a good guess. FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s claim of $5,000 a month for the schooling of one of his daughters in Miami gives you a sense of the rorts. Prosecutions of high-ranking soccer officials in 2015 over sales of broadcast rights did not slow down the dirty deals. A recent statement by prominent figures in the world of soccer administration suggested that the situation has actually become worse since those legal cases. In an effort to bury the human rights abuses of the Qatar event in 2022, Infantino promised this would be the most inclusive World Cup ever. Instead, Canada and Mexico are co-hosting with an authoritarian regime where fans are too afraid to attend games for fear of detention and deportation by ICE. Trump is using the “world’s game” to project an image of openness and excitement that sits in stark contrast to the day-to-day life of millions of Americans. This is a country where the right to protest has been criminalised, immigrants are rounded up in workplace raids, and the president has deployed the military against his own cities. For Trump, the World Cup is a welcome distraction from inflationary hikes in fuel prices and record low personal approval ratings. Internationally, while US armed forces continue attacking their country, the Iranian team is scheduled to play in the group stage of the World Cup on US soil. Until ten days before their first match, Iranian officials were unsure about whether the team would even be allowed to gain entry to the country. Fourteen support staff were refused visas. The Iranian players have been told they will need to enter and leave the US on the same day of their matches and stay in Mexico in between. We’ve also witnessed Africa’s leading referee, Omar Artan from Somalia, being denied entry to the US without the right to appeal. This has never happened during a World Cup before, even in fascist Italy, which hosted in 1934, or in 1978 under the Argentinian military dictatorship. It shouldn’t come as a surprise—Trump is on record calling Somalia a “disgusting country” and claiming Somali immigrants are “garbage”. Amnesty International has even issued an explicit travel warning ahead of the tournament, flagging serious risks of racial profiling and intrusive searches for fans, players and officials. Teams arriving from Senegal and Uzbekistan have already allegedly been subjected to harsh and humiliating treatment by airport security. Even before a ball has been kicked, around a quarter of competing nations face some form of US travel ban or tight visa restriction under the Trump administration. The relationship between Trump and FIFA boss Infantino is a love story of aspiring oligarchs. Three weeks after Trump was passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize, Infantino invented the “FIFA Peace Prize”, with no selection criteria and apparently no consultation with the FIFA Council. Trump joyfully received his medal at the World Cup draw in Washington. At last year’s Club World Cup final, Trump joined the Chelsea team on the field to hand out the winners’ medals and then refused to leave the celebrations despite being booed at the beginning of the game. Football is a glorious game with feats of skill and athleticism to match any sporting code. But in FIFA’s hands, the sport has become an instrument of spectacular distraction and outrageous corruption. While ordinary fans are priced out and profiled at the border, the forces of reaction are using it to boost their egos, persecute Muslims and further enrich the already obscenely wealthy. ### Data centres: enriching tech giants at our expense URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/data-centres-enriching-tech-giants-at-our-expense/ Last updated: 2026-06-23T04:58:37.000Z When I see data centres—huge warehouses full of servers—I think of the scene in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film *Blade Runner* in which the protagonist, Deckard, approaches the Tyrell Corporation building in his hover car. The building looms menacingly over the city, casting a shadow in the already dark environment, the atmosphere long since polluted by the unfettered growth of industry. The corporation and its tech founder, Dr Eldon Tyrell, dominate this dystopian world, producing cutting-edge technology to service off-world colonies, including the production of replicants. These robots are designed to be “more human than human”, replacing jobs previously done by human labourers. Many of the workers the replicants replace cannot afford to relocate to the cleaner, more habitable off-world colonies. Thrown on the scrap heap by technological advance, they are reduced to scrounging in the filthy streets to make ends meet, in the shadow of the Tyrell Corporation, a constant reminder of their industrial overlord, and of their own dispensability. It’s hard not to feel like we are one step closer to this dystopia as artificial intelligence, and the environmentally destructive data centres that service it, proliferate around us. The recent boom in data centres worldwide has been driven predominantly by the massive computing requirements of generative AI. There is big money in this technology. A look at the stock market shows the top five companies ranked by market capitalisation are NVIDIA, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Apple, Microsoft and Amazon—all companies involved in the AI sector. Workers are already feeling the consequences, as many companies use the technology to justify mass lay-offs. Earlier this year, Atlassian [cut 1,600 jobs](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-12/australian-tech-atlassian-cuts-1600-jobs-from-global-workforce/106445334?ref=redflag.org.au) from its global workforce, Amazon announced [16,000 job cuts](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-29/amazon-accidentally-announces-layoffs/106280800?ref=redflag.org.au), and Meta plans to [reduce its workforce by 20 percent](https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/meta-planning-sweeping-layoffs-ai-costs-mount-2026-03-14/?ref=redflag.org.au), all to make way for AI. It’s not just workers’ livelihoods being affected by the growth of AI. Much of this technology is being developed for military purposes, such as faster targeting systems. AI can rapidly crunch data from satellites, intelligence agencies, drones and sensors, enabling the grotesquely named “kill chains”—decision-making processes about where to drop bombs—to be reduced from days to seconds. The human cost of this advance in military technology is horrendous. In February, at the start of the US-Israel-Iran war, the US military mistakenly bombed a school for girls, killing 180 people, mostly young children. The targeting decision was [made](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying?ref=redflag.org.au) by an AI system called Maven, developed by Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies. Instead of retiring the deadly technology, the US secretary of defense subsequently [declared](https://www.reuters.com/technology/pentagon-adopt-palantir-ai-as-core-us-military-system-memo-says-2026-03-20/?ref=redflag.org.au) that Maven would be permanently incorporated into military operating systems. This technology requires large data centres, which use immense quantities of electricity and water. The warehouses are also a significant source of noise and light pollution, and emit substantial heat to the surrounding area, according to the Environmental Health Project. This is placing extreme stress on the power and water supply of communities where they are built. In Australia, this tends to be in working-class communities like western Sydney. New South Wales has 90 data centres already, with sixteen more in the pipeline. In a [press release](https://www.nsw.gov.au/ministerial-releases/data-centre-investment-sustainable-development?ref=redflag.org.au) on 27 March, state cabinet ministers indicated that all but three of these new facilities will be built in western Sydney and three of those will be in Fairfield, the poorest local government area in the city. Despite the impact on working-class neighbourhoods and the environment, state governments are competing to attract investment from these tech corporations, NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey [advertising](https://www.nsw.gov.au/ministerial-releases/data-centre-investment-sustainable-development?ref=redflag.org.au) the state as a “premium destination for data centres” and fast-tracking their approval. One of the most pressing issues surrounding data centres is their energy consumption. We are already on track to at least three degrees of global warming by the end of the century, and most countries are [well behind](https://www.wri.org/insights/g20-climate-progress-reports-BTR-analysis?ref=redflag.org.au) in meeting their emissions reduction targets. Add data centres and their insatiable thirst for electricity into the mix, and the future of the Earth’s climate is looking pretty grim. A recent [report](https://www.greenpeace.org.au/news/energy-vampires-greenpeace-calls-for-moratorium-on-data-centres-as-new-report-reveals-frenzied-rollout-would-derail-energy-transition/?ref=redflag.org.au) by Greenpeace on the climate impact of data centres in Australia puts this into perspective. Australia’s biggest proposed data centre in western Sydney will generate the same annual emissions as 560,000 petrol cars or all domestic flights. Some of the largest centres being planned could emit more than the entire city of Adelaide. While the government is requiring data centres to account for their emissions by investing in renewables or offsetting their carbon footprint, the reality is that this happening is looking very unlikely. The Greenpeace report found that no project adequately proved the data centre developers’ claim that they were investing in more renewables in Australia above what was already going to be built. Worse, many are turning to the gas industry as a cheap source of energy to power their facilities. In the US, instead of waiting for connection to the already stretched electricity grid or building renewable energy plants, data centre operators are more and more building off-grid gas-fired power plants to power their facilities. According to a report in January by Global Energy Monitor, installed gas capacity in the US tripled last year to meet data centre demand. OpenAI’s Stargate project in New Mexico has its own dedicated gas plant, which has been estimated to [generate](https://www.greenpeace.org.au/news/energy-vampires-greenpeace-calls-for-moratorium-on-data-centres-as-new-report-reveals-frenzied-rollout-would-derail-energy-transition/?ref=redflag.org.au) fourteen MTCO2-e per year, equivalent to wiping out 20 years of climate progress in that state. Absurdly, this is happening in a place with more solar and wind power potential than nearly anywhere on Earth. This trend is also happening with data centres in the UK, Europe and now Australia. A Sydney-based company called Cloud Carrier is appealing to the NSW government for permission to build three off-grid gas-fired power stations to generate electricity for their massive data centres in Moss Vale. The three plants combined would generate enough energy to power the equivalent of 70,000 homes and would become the third largest gas plant in Australia. If approved, this would override the desires of the local community, which rejected previous proposals for smaller off-grid gas plants. Cloud Carrier can bypass the local council and appeal directly to the state government because the size of the current proposal, twenty times larger than the original, means it qualifies as a significant project. The data centre boom has given the gas industry a second wind. Nefarious relationships between fossil fuel companies and data centre developers have blossomed in this environment. It’s little wonder that Origin Energy (a major gas producer), Jemena (a high-emitting utility provider) and Siemens and Caterpillar (both gas turbine constructors) have become listed members of the Data Centres Australia lobby group. In a drought-prone country like Australia, the demand on fresh water supply of data centres is another major concern. Data centres require fresh water in their cooling systems to prevent their servers overheating. Sydney Water has projected that, within the decade, these facilities will use a quarter of all of Sydney’s drinking water. What’s more, data centres that do connect to the electricity grid will put upward pressure on energy prices. A recent Climate Council report estimated that, if not matched with an increase in renewable energy infrastructure, data centre growth could cause wholesale electricity prices to increase by more than 20 percent on average. This translates to a 26 and 23 percent increase in NSW and Victoria, respectively, significantly impacting household energy bills. If the government’s refusal meaningfully to address the rising cost of fuel for ordinary people since the outbreak of war in Iran is anything to go by, we shouldn’t expect any cost-of-living support when data centres drive up the price of electricity. Corporations like Apple, Microsoft and Google are like Ridley Scott’s Tyrell Corporation. They are run by capitalists who want to maximise their profits without concern for the environmental or human cost of their operations. The Labor government has welcomed these corporations with open arms. In June, federal ministers attended a lobby event, the Australian Data Centres Power and Water Summit, which boasted “event partners” like Origin and Beach Energy, both of which have large stakes in the future of gas. The government is bending over backwards to invite investments from these wealthy corporations, no matter the cost, because Labor, just like the Liberals and One Nation, are dedicated to maximising the profits of Australian capitalism. Yet it will be workers, and the environment, that inevitably pay the price of these decisions, all to increase the obscene wealth of tech giants and the fossil fuel industry. But working-class communities are starting to fight back. In the US, several campaigns have succeeded in stopping data centres from being built. According to Data Centre Watch, US$64 billion of data centre projects have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition. Pro-data centre officials have been voted off local government bodies by angry communities that refuse to bear the cost of building them in their neighbourhoods. Other communities have organised protests and petitions that have received tens of thousands of signatures. In Virginia, a state that has seen tremendous growth in data centres, there are 42 opposition groups campaigning to halt further data centre development. While data centres continue to be built, widespread opposition is becoming a political problem for politicians, especially at the local level. In Australia, Moss Vale residents recently [protested](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-26/moss-vale-locals-oppose-plans-gas-powered-data-centres/106718446?ref=redflag.org.au) Cloud Carrier’s plans to build off-grid gas-fired power plants. Locals rallied at the proposed site, just five years after the council declared a “climate emergency” and stopped a coal mine being developed on the very same site. While climate change is a key concern, residents are also worried about respiratory health from increased air pollution due to burning fossil fuels in their neighbourhood. Residents are demanding the state government reject the proposal and instead force the company to power its data centre entirely with renewable power. Instead of building much needed public housing, investing in schools and hospitals, developing green spaces in working-class areas and rapidly transitioning to renewables, politicians would rather hand over precious water resources and continue burning fossil fuels to enable the profits of giant tech corporations. Despite significant opposition to the construction of data centres in working-class communities, they continue to be built. Governments around the world will continue to allow these corporations essentially free rein over energy and water resources in exchange for investments. Imperialist superpowers, like the US and China, salivate over the advanced weapons technology and military superiority that AI promises. Data centres, for all the suffering they will impose on working-class communities and the environment, is to them the acceptable cost of doing business. *Sign the NSW Socialists’* [*petition to stop the expansion of data centres*](https://www.megaphone.org.au/petitions/halt-the-expansion-of-data-centres-in-nsw?ref=redflag.org.au)*.* ### ‘When Palestinians get killed, the world doesn’t even blink’: Interview with Stephen Heydt URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/when-palestinians-get-killed-the-world-doesnt-even-blink-interview-with-stephen-heydt/ Last updated: 2026-06-23T04:58:23.000Z I spent nine hours in a Brisbane police watch house cell in April, having been arrested along with twenty others for wearing a T-shirt with a pro-Palestine slogan. The police treated us with the distaste you would expect and it was boring, but the experience was not all bad. For one, I had lots of time to chat with other activists who’d found themselves on the wrong side of the Queensland police. One such activist was Stephen Heydt, a 73-year-old retired psychologist. Steve is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist who has been fighting for a free Palestine for more than five decades. He grew up in South Africa, where he was a part of the underground movement against apartheid. Steve was arrested at the demonstration last April for wearing a T-shirt which read “Jews for a free Palestine from the ... to the ...”. Following our release, I sat down to talk with Steve about his lifelong commitment to the Palestinian struggle, the recent attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement and the campaign against the Crisafulli government’s anti-free speech laws in Queensland. ### **You grew up in a pro-Zionist family in South Africa. How did you come to support the Palestinian cause?** Stephen Heydt:I’ve supported Palestine for very long time. It started in 1970, when I went to Israel for immersive study (*ulpan*) to become a rabbi. And the racism against Palestinians was so bad that, even then, it was worse than in South Africa. So I left early after being there for only three months. I was supposed to be there for a couple of years. After returning to South Africa and particularly following the 1976 Soweto uprising, I became more active. Having to leave in 1981, I arrived in Sydney. In 2005, I got a job with UNRWA \[United Nations Relief and Works Agency\] in Gaza, running their mental health program. Between 2005 and 2010, I spent three and a half years in Palestine and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. That’s the back story anyway. I was there through three Israeli wars in Gaza: 5,000 people were killed. Islam and Judaism have many practices in common: one of which resulted in me helping to collect body parts for burial. In 2010, I was kicked out by Israel and banned from going back for ten years. I returned to Australia. It was harder to find pro-Palestinian people here, back then anyway, so I was mostly involved in organisations in London and the UK. ### **Recently in Australia, we’ve experienced a wave of attacks on the pro-Palestine movement. They all attempt to equate pro-Palestine activism with antisemitic hatred, neo-Nazi symbols and so on. How do you respond to these kinds of attacks?** I’ve even been called “*treyf*”, which means un-kosher, which I find very funny. I’ve been watching the issue for 55 years, and this has always been the trick. When \[Israeli President\] Isaac Herzog was here, Mark Leibler \[head of the Zionist Federation of Australia\] claimed that “anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism”. Flipping the conversation— it’s what they’ve been doing for at least 55 years. Leibler stated, “false accusations of genocide and apartheid are not legitimate critique. They are a verdict. They are a moral inversion designed to strip Jews of legitimacy”.Of course, the real moral inversion is Leibler’s, in stating that \[true\] “accusations of genocide and apartheid” are akin to antisemitism. I saw earlier today that Yair Netanyahu \[Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, a far-right podcaster\] has “from the ... to the ... will be Israeli” on his Twitter/X page. But Palestinian supporters use it and are told, “Oh, you can’t say that” you know. I’ve read the manuals on this stuff. It’s not strange, so I just expect it and it’s why I think we must confront it. We have to wear the T-shirts, we have to say the phrases, we have to say “this is bullshit”. If you don’t call that bullshit, what can you do? ### **That leads in well to my next question, which was about why you thought it was right for us to resist Crisafulli’s laws and risk arrest.** To me, it’s the fact that the law itself, and this is my absolute trigger point, is fundamentally racist. It is aimed at a very narrow segment of the population and treats Palestinians and their supporters as different and worthy of attack. And to me, that’s just the absolute definition of racism. The preference of one group of a population to another. And I grew up in South Africa, I know racism. You know, I really do. And really, that’s my trigger point for these laws. I’m surprised there hasn’t been an outcry about the fact that the Shahada has been effectively outlawed in Australia. And, I mean, it’s maybe the most important tenet in Islam. I can even recite it, you know, I’ve heard it so often. It is astonishing that this is the country we’re in today. And I just think we need to fight it. And once this fight is over, as far as I’m concerned, the Shahada is probably going to be my next fight. I just think that there needs to be pushback. There has been too much sliding backwards recently. ### **There has been a real turn towards authoritarianism and Islamophobia in recent months.** It’s a partial authoritarianism, towards a certain section of the population. We need a fight, not just in Brisbane. I did a search, and it came up that there are 600 pieces of legislation in Australia that are contrary to human rights principles. ### **Recently, we’ve seen lots of laws going after so-called hate speech or terror, but the most hateful, violent people in society are on the front cover of the newspapers and in parliament.** Well, they own the newspapers. Greg Craven, Jillian Segal’s appointed representative to police universities, wrote to criticise Sarah Shwartz \[from the Jewish Council of Australia\] for her “Dutton’s Jew” comments, and said the *Australian* would keep an eye out for more antisemitic hatred. So, the *Australian* gets to decide what’s hate speech and what is not. And now Craven will be paid $200,000 a year to give universities antisemitism scorecards. ### **The *Australian* is publishing articles warning of a “clash of civilisations”, approvingly citing Japan’s “ethnic purity” and defending racist conspiracy theories like the great replacement theory. Hardly an authority on anti-racism.** I thought the clash of civilisations thing died out. One of my heroes, and I don’t have many, is Robert Fisk. He wrote a book called *Great War for Civilisation*. I met him, in fact, on a rooftop in Gaza at a dinner with some others. We stayed up after dinner talking until four or five in the morning, just listening to these people talk about their lives. Robert Fisk’s *Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East* is all about how war has been justified against Muslims and people overseas, or people in oppressed demographics. And what wars and what people get attention. Two hundred thousand people killed in Iraq or whatever it was. When they get killed, the world doesn’t even blink. It’s a hard read, because it’s very graphic. ### **Reading about the Iraq War and the fact that everyone responsible for that crime got away with it politicised me as a teenager. It made me hate America, which I think is a healthy thing for a young person.** It’s heartening, and I mean this genuinely, it really is nice to see young people coming forward because for a while I just despaired, it was like everyone had drunk the Kool-Aid. Young people I worked with seemed so apolitical, even if they mostly voted for the Greens. ### **I wanted to ask you where you think we should go from here and if you could give your take on the role that activism and resistance can play in fighting for a better world.** I said this to someone recently and it wasn’t taken very well, but it’s almost like we’re \[the Palestine movement\] too polite and we’ve kind of adapted to our environment. In South Africa, we would organise times and places to appear, and we’d pull out pictures of Steve Biko \[a murdered anti-apartheid activist, part of the Black Consciousness movement\]. We got tear gassed. Maybe we need to be open to being tear gassed here. ### A tale of two Banyules URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/a-tale-of-two-banyules/ Last updated: 2026-06-18T00:02:39.000Z There is a corner of Melbourne’s Banyule City Council that is sliced in two, the major arterial of Bell Street marking its middle. North of that divide is West Heidelberg, home to a diverse working-class community. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, West Heidelberg has a median weekly income of $1,257, with 27 percent of households being classified as low-income. Thirty-four percent of households are in public or social housing, and almost 40 percent of the population was born overseas. In a poorer, multicultural suburb like this, public services that give people space to socialise, exercise, learn and grow are essential to quality of life. People living week to week can’t furnish their lives with all these private luxuries, so they rely on public amenities to live well. The Olympic Leisure Centre was a modest but meaningful sanctuary for the people of West Heidelberg. Kids had their swimming lessons there, older residents with chronic illnesses did water therapy there, and Muslim women relished the women’s only fitness programs that let them access services in a culturally appropriate way. Not bad for a pool that was built for Olympic athletes in 1956\. But on 23 June 2025, Banyule council voted eight to one in favour of shutting down this sanctuary. The reason they gave for the decision was that the council did not have the money to maintain the facility—it had degraded due to years of neglect and would cost tens of millions to revitalise if they did want to break the pattern of accumulating disrepair. Instead, the council chose to close this vital community space. They must have known the scrutiny they would face, because they gave just five days’ notice of the vote. Even so, they got more than they bargained for from the irate community. As soon as they heard about the slated closure, residents mobilised to save their beloved pool. They collected more than 2,500 signatures, held community rallies, wrote open letters and drew support from various advocacy groups. Even the Australian Medical Association, not known for its radicalism, [pointed out](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-06/doctors-urge-council-to-keep-melbourne-pool-open/105740624?utm%5Fsource=abc%5Fnews%5Fapp&utm%5Fmedium=content%5Fshared&utm%5Fcampaign=abc%5Fnews%5Fapp&utm%5Fcontent=other) the potentially dire consequences of losing the pool. In the face of all this, the council still went ahead and closed the Olympic Leisure Centre last summer. Now let’s look south of Bell Street—to the Ivanhoe side of Banyule. The median weekly income in Ivanhoe is $2,232, only 2 percent of housing in that suburb is public housing, and the median three-bedroom house price is $1,285,000\. Ivanhoe is home to a prestigious private high school, Ivanhoe Grammar, numerous parks, a well-stocked public library and, at its southernmost point, two golf courses side by side. It also ranks 80th of Greater Melbourne’s 481 suburbs for the highest number of backyard pools according to analysis by Nearmap (West Heidelberg comes in at 426). All that luxury prompted a question for Banyule City Council—what gift could they give the suburb that has it all? Well, at a council meeting on 4 May, the council answered that question by voting to upgrade the Ivanhoe Aquatic Centre to the tune of an estimated $46.3 million. That’s right: precisely what was denied to residents north of Bell Street is being given to those to its leafy south. Lucas Moore, a member of the Victorian Socialists and local resident involved in the [Save Our Pool ](https://www.saveourpool3081.com/?ref=redflag.org.au)campaign, said of the decision: “A lot of people are pretty furious with Banyule council about the Ivanhoe announcement. I mean it’s class warfare really”. Both Ivanhoe Aquatic Centre and the Olympic Leisure Centre were constructed for the 1956 Olympics, and both require expensive upgrades to continue functioning. But only one will get an upgrade. Moore recounts, “\[The Save Our Pool campaign\] were told straight to our faces that council couldn’t afford to even keep Olympic Village open for one more summer. We argued they should take out a loan and act on plans to revitalise the centre. We were told that wasn’t possible, and now they’re doing just that for Ivanhoe”. Governments, from the local council all the way up to the federal level, deflect blame for their policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor onto seemingly unchangeable circumstances detailed in reports written by expensive consultancy firms. But neglect and deprivation are not passive realities we have no choice but to accept. They are the long-term accumulation of decisions like this one. Moore puts it well: “It’s heaping disadvantage on disadvantage, privilege on privilege. Labor, Liberal, Greens, everyone on Banyule council should be ashamed of themselves”. But the people of West Heidelberg did not take this lying down. They fought to defend their pool and to hold their representatives to account. To have defeated the council decision, the campaign would have had to raise the stakes through tactics like mass occupations, physical disruption and coordinated resistance by workers tasked with carrying out the closure. But what the campaign did achieve was systematically to rebuke every piece of propaganda the council put forward. They made it clear, through their petitioning and rallies, that the decision had no democratic mandate, and made sure the council wasn’t able to cover up its class bias and contempt for its poorest constituents. The campaign also brought people together, which will be important for the next battle. Moore gives perfect voice to the community’s spirit of defiance: > “There were times when I thought the fight might be over, but people kept turning out. The petition exceeded all expectations. I lost count of how many council meetings we protested outside of. We hosted a pool party at the centre and hundreds of people came. We couldn’t save the pool, but we put up a hell of a fight.” ### Mater privatisation proves deadly URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/mater-privatisation-proves-deadly/ Last updated: 2026-06-17T08:04:14.000Z In a private room at the Mater Hospital in Newcastle, a mother listened to her daughter’s anguished cries: “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!” The daughter later died. “Her room had towels over the windows. I asked the nurse why, and she said, ‘It’s because of the mould’”, the mother related. This and similar stories were told at a public meeting on 29 May, where people shared their grief and demanded answers about the *Aspergillus* mould that appears throughout the hospital. The mould can cause pneumonia. In vulnerable people, it has a mortality rate of [between 40 and 90 percent](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/medicine/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.756237/full?ref=redflag.org.au). A grieving family member [told the *Newcastle Herald*](https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/9195712/taylor-north-shares-story-of-dad-bradleys-death-at-the-mater/?ref=redflag.org.au)earlier this year: “We were never told there was any kind of mould infestation going on”. In 2005, the NSW Labor government approved a public-private partnership to redevelop the Mater, a cancer hospital. Novacare (a consortium of Westpac, Abigroup, Medirest and Honeywell) was engaged to construct and operate the facilities on behalf of the state government for 28 years. It was a decision with devastating consequences. A whistleblower, Luke Carroll, [revealed to a parliamentary inquiry](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-13/mater-hospital-mould-parliamentary-inquiry-newcastle/106450528?ref=redflag.org.au) that it was common practice at Honeywell to shred documents and falsify mould testing results. The state government’s own list of victims came to light only after it was mistakenly included in a list of unclassified documents for a court hearing. In addition to the mould, the inquiry heard a litany of other complaints. Maggots fell from the ceiling onto patients. A plumber repeatedly raised the alarm that sewage could mix with drinking water. [A nurse reported](https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/9290621/mater-inquiry-hears-of-300m-dispute-with-novacare-and-nsw-health/?ref=redflag.org.au) that HEPA filters had been “bought from Bunnings” and were “not commercial grade”. Despite all this, the Minns Labor government has refused to bring the Mater Hospital back into public hands. Novacare offered to sell its stake in the hospital for $2 to offload liabilities. Instead of making Novacare pay its debts and honour its responsibilities—and then putting the hospital back in public hands, Labor continues to treat Novacare as a business partner. “When government has these contracts with these operators”, [Health Minister Ryan Park told journalists](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-20/calvary-mater-hospital-maggot-infestation/106247526?ref=redflag.org.au), “then we have to honour those contracts, otherwise the taxpayer is up for a very significant sum of money”. Hunter New England Health chief executive Tracey McCosker [has admitted](https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/9287806/novacare-healths-177-million-in-mater-hospital-fines-unpaid/?ref=redflag.org.au) to “putting a hold” on $300 million in fines “to try and get the relationship on the ground better”. What are the agonising deaths of cancer patients, when there’s a contract to be honoured? What does the grief of dozens of families matter when there’s money to be made. ### Victorian Socialists gain ground in Thomastown URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-socialists-gain-ground-in-thomastown/ Last updated: 2026-06-17T07:36:37.000Z While One Nation climbed the polls to be the most popular party in the country, something else was stirring in the Melbourne suburb of Thomastown: a grassroots campaign to elect socialist activist Sarah Garnham to the Whittlesea City Council. In a nine-horse race, Sarah won 18.4 percent of the vote, just behind the winning ALP candidate Chaman Tiwari, who received 20.4 percent. Thomastown is one of Labor’s safest seats. But, as in much of its heartlands, Labor treats the people who elect it like dirt, running down infrastructure and services, and overseeing cuts to workers’ living standards. Tiwari embodies the modern Labor Party. She owns several businesses and was an HR manager for aerospace and weapons giant Lockheed Martin. Huge resources were put into her campaign, including obnoxiously large billboards throughout the suburb. She had the backing and preferences from other Labor candidates, and lucked out by being first on the ballot. Yet there were only 193 first preference votes between Tiwari and Garnham. Sarah’s campaign was organised by the local Victorian Socialists branch in Thomastown, whose members spent hours letterboxing and talking to residents. While most candidates talk endlessly about advancing the interests of the “business community”, we proposed reversing the privatisation of childcare and aged care, standing up to property developers and big retailers, and putting workers first. We also critiqued the far right and One Nation. Our campaign coincided with a [statewide anti-Hanson initiative](https://redflag.org.au/article/untitled-2/). So when we doorknocked in Thomastown, we led with this. We slammed One Nation for its racism, its billionaire backing and its plans to trash workers’ rights even further. This resonated with people. Though One Nation didn’t run in this by-election, a Freedom Party candidate was strongly associated with them. He received 10.6 percent of the vote. Together with the Liberal Party-aligned candidates, the right won 33.1 percent. So while we should not downplay what One Nation could achieve in Thomastown in the upcoming state election, these results show that there could be a real contest. While Victorian Socialists’ anti-capitalist politics and activist-centred approach to organising won most of our votes, I think it is undeniable that fighting the far right will be an important part of our election campaigning. Unlike the Greens, who tend to ignore working-class areas like Thomastown, socialists prioritise them. In the last few state elections, we’ve gone from 2.9 percent to 7.7 percent of the vote and as high as 11 percent some parts of Thomastown, Lalor and Epping. We also got 15.5 percent running Omar Hassan in a recent Lalor council by-election, while Sarah’s vote is up from 10.4 percent two years ago. This November, Victorian Socialists plan to run all 104 upper and lower house seats across the state. Get involved at [victoriansocialists.org.au](https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/?ref=redflag.org.au). ### The socialist movement needs money URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/2026-socialist-alternative-fund-drive/ Last updated: 2026-06-17T23:45:59.000Z [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/06/Fund-Drive.jpg)](https://buy.stripe.com/eVq4gy62a1ZGfTbafk63K00?ref=redflag.org.au) From the genocide in Gaza to the relentless, profit-driven climate crisis and the rise of the far right, world capitalism is truly horrifying. But there is hope amidst the horror. A new generation is responding with anger and looking for an alternative. And for many, that alternative is socialism. The growth of the socialist movement is limited today in large part by our ability to get our message out there. We don’t have the help of the likes of Gina Rinehart or Rupert Murdoch. We do not have 24-hour television stations or own Instagram. We don’t have a private jet, and nor do we need one. But what we do need is to print more left-wing books, publish the *Marxist Left Review* journal and *Red Flag*, make advertising material for rallies and events, produce banners and placards for every protest and pay the inflated rent for sufficient space to meet, write, make and discuss. All this costs money, and more than ever. Socialist Alternative’s annual fund drive is the main source of revenue for our organisation. This year, we are making a public appeal for donations from our supporters. Financial contributions are a key way that those who can’t be active themselves can stand with those who are. With rising costs due and expanding political opportunities to tap into, the need to raise money is particularly urgent. At this moment, four Socialist Alternative branches are in the throes of organising the annual Socialism conferences, now established alongside the Marxism festival as Australia’s most significant sites of radical discussion, debate and education. These vital events cost an enormous amount to put on. Socialist Alternative is growing and now has almost 800 members. But our membership is overwhelmingly young. And while this is a great thing, it also means we struggle to raise the money we need from our members alone. Which is where you come in. We are coming up to tax time. Donations to those wanting to bring down capitalism are generally not tax deductible. But tax refunds can be put to good use. For example, $2,500 would cover the airfare for one of the international speakers at Marxism 2027, $1500 would cover 10,000 posters to advertise a conference or protest, $650 would pay for a month’s hire of an office photocopier, $200 would provide 1500 pamphlets and even just $100 would cover two months of the cost of having the internet in one of our activist spaces. Any amount is an important contribution to rebuilding a socialist left in Australia. Socialist Alternative has no corporate donors, no advertisers, just you. Please support the cause of rebuilding a socialist movement in Australia and [donate as much as you can](https://buy.stripe.com/eVq4gy62a1ZGfTbafk63K00?ref=redflag.org.au). ### One Nation needs to be fought, not just analysed URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/one-nation-needs-to-be-fought-not-just-analysed/ Last updated: 2026-06-23T04:58:13.000Z Australian politics is at a turning point. One Nation’s polling numbers have gone from disturbing to disastrous in just a few months. The party is now a serious electoral challenger, and its leaders are moving quickly to build a serious far-right movement. Across the country, it is establishing branches, recruiting wealthy backers and attracting support from every corner of the right, from disaffected Liberals and Nationals to neo-Nazis. In November, Pauline Hanson visited US President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Trump is unpopular in Australia, [even among those considering voting for One Nation](https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/hanson-s-support-for-trump-a-drag-on-one-nation-vote-poll-20260505-p5ztuj?ref=redflag.org.au). But the visit signalled that One Nation is the official Australian section of the global far-right revival, the political kin of its most influential leader and every bit as prepared to smash the left, migrants and workers. Barnaby Joyce’s appearance at a recent anti-abortion rally in Sydney was [similarly revealing](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/02/barnaby-joyce-rallies-anti-abortion-activists-as-they-target-nationals-mps-in-nsw-vote-ntwnfb?ref=redflag.org.au). As he admitted from the platform, opposition to abortion rights is not currently popular. It is, however, a favoured cause of the far-right lunatic Christian fringe—the rally-goers Joyce urged to sign up as One Nation activists. Socialists are the natural enemy of the far right. We reject everything they stand for, as well as the system that cultivates them. We need more people to stand up and be part of the fight against fascism. That fight has to be waged everywhere: in street protests, at elections, in our workplaces and in our neighbourhoods. It’s one thing to talk about resisting the far right. But what does it mean in practice? In recent weeks, there have been important protests against One Nation fundraisers in Perth and Melbourne, which attracted hundreds of people at short notice. Protests matter because they demonstrate active opposition. It is not enough to oppose the far right only in conversations among friends or at the ballot box. They need to be challenged in the public square. One Nation is being given a red-carpet welcome into the mainstream. Hanson is treated with respect, if not [deference](https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2026/jun/12/one-nation-fire-the-liar-donations-fundraising-news-corp-ntwnfb?ref=redflag.org.au), by most of the media. Protests are a way to challenge this normalisation. They give a voice to everyone sickened by everything Hanson and her band of far-right creeps stand for. In contrast to the endless liberal commentary about this or that policy, this or that candidate, this or that poll, protests are a way of democratically and actively mobilising the people who reject everything One Nation represents. The left has a long history of fighting the far right through street mobilisations. At times, this has meant outnumbering them and undermining their organising efforts. Sometimes, protests are an effective way to peel away less ideologically committed people who are gravitating towards the far-right nucleus, preventing it from gaining a critical mass. For example, big and ongoing mobilisations played an important role in checking One Nation’s rise in the 1990s. Today, One Nation is too strong for protests alone to seriously undermine it, although we should still mobilise opposition when we can (Hanson and Joyce being forced to skulk away to another venue at late notice in response to the Melbourne protest was a sweet moment—see page 4). Yet protests matter for another reason. Think how differently the world would view Trump’s presidency without the sustained resistance and bursts of mass protests that have opposed him. The left must find ways to enable the large numbers of people who oppose the far right to resist it visibly and meaningfully. The most important aspect of protests is often their effect on our side. Collective action breaks the isolation and despair that capitalism creates. The ruling class would prefer that we remain spectators while they make decisions and politics plays out around us. Protests—often called “demonstrations” because they demonstrate that many people care about an issue and are prepared to act on it—can increase participants’ political confidence and help build and strengthen traditions of resistance, as well as organisations. This is crucial to laying the basis for future struggles. We also need to fight the far right in elections. Elections have always been important arenas for testing public opinion and the strength of various political currents, although it is only recently that socialists in Australia have rebuilt organisations strong enough to participate more seriously in this arena. We are not going to defeat One Nation overnight, but building a pole of serious opposition to them is crucial. So the expansion of Victorian Socialists into a nationwide Socialist Party of more than 5,000 members is not only the most significant development on the far left in generations, but also a crucial pole of opposition around which we can build a serious alternative to establishment politics. The November Victorian election is a major challenge. Victoria, the most left-wing state in the country, could, by November, be governed by a One Nation-Liberal coalition. That would represent a seismic shift in Australian politics. We need to challenge the far right while refusing to line up behind the appalling Labor government. Victorian Socialists are determined to make that intervention this November. Fighting One Nation is also a battle of ideas. We need to be clear: Hanson wants to make society more authoritarian, more unequal, more dog eat dog; a more opulent paradise for capitalists and a closer approximation of hell for workers. She does not represent people with all manner of economic and political “grievances”—hers is the party of *far-right* grievances. One Nation is undoubtedly attracting more than the hard-core far-right sections of the population behind it. But its base, its orientation and its ambition are hard-right reaction. Until recently, there was widespread complacency, both on the progressive left and in the political mainstream, about the rise of One Nation. We were repeatedly told that it was merely a temporary blip. The ALP set the tone. Many people view Labor as a lesser evil and Labor governments as a firewall against One Nation. Labor’s initial relish at One Nation taking a wrecking ball to the Liberal Party had a demobilising effect on the left. So too did Labor’s self-congratulatory spin about its supposedly historic electoral successes that put it in office federally and in almost every state. Yet even a cursory understanding of Australian politics reveals Labor’s primary vote has been declining for decades, and its support is increasingly shallow. The complacency is now beginning to lift, largely because One Nation is no longer simply smashing the Liberals. It is increasingly threatening Labor electorally as well. As a result, Labor politicians have become more willing to talk about One Nation’s racism, its billionaire backers and its record of voting against working-class interests. But anyone with a nose can smell where this comes from. It is not motivated by genuine political opposition to these scumbags, or concern for migrants or workers and the damage One Nation’s politics would inflict on them. The ALP has repeatedly shown itself willing to attack workers and the oppressed—often more effectively than the conservatives. Labor is primarily concerned about losing votes and seats on the parliamentary gravy train. The unions should be using their muscle to build a working-class fightback against declining living standards. They should be offering an alternative to the far right based on class solidarity. Instead, they are little more than a cheer squad for right-wing Labor governments—and the biggest defenders of the capitalist status quo that so many workers are fed up with. The Greens are no solution either. They mouth some of the right phrases, but they have spent so long positioning themselves as Labor’s soft-left conscience that they are incapable of mounting serious resistance either to Labor or to the far right. At the root of this is their acceptance of capitalism and the idea that some people—business owners, managers of the state bureaucracy, the professional classes—should rule over others. Unfortunately, many on the left take their political cues from the dominant forces of the centre and centre left. This has contributed to the lack of serious opposition to One Nation so far. It has also encouraged a range of misguided political conclusions, including endless agonising about the workers who vote for One Nation. Workers have always voted for the Liberal Party in significant numbers. Yet left-wing commentary about the Liberals rarely begins by agonising over this fact. To make it the starting point for analysing One Nation is to concede one of the far right’s central claims: that it represents battlers, the forgotten and the left behind. Of course we should analyse why some workers are attracted to the far right. But this is not the central political question. Much more important is the nature of One Nation’s social base, its cadre and its political project. Even more important is what we do to fight them. The sides are not evenly matched—our forces have a long way to go before they can win. But confronting the far right and building our side go hand in hand. If we are to rise to the occasion, we need to get serious about both. We need to challenge the far right wherever it appears, while building a socialist organisation capable not only of resisting One Nation, but of challenging the system that produced, and continues to foster, it. ### Rebellion in Bolivia against austerity URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/rebellion-in-bolivia-against-austerity/ Last updated: 2026-06-18T00:20:53.000Z Since early May, the Bolivian government has been on the ropes. Workers and peasants have blockaded roads, protested and struck against a series of austerity programs pushed by the newly elected government of Rodrigo Paz. On 8 June, Paz prepared to escalate state repression by passing a law that would allow him to declare a state of emergency, deploy the military to the streets and suspend constitutional guarantees. But despite the harsh repression already meted out, there are no signs of the movement backing down. This round of struggle in Bolivia is the latest in a series of intense class conflicts in the country since at least 2019, when a successful right-wing coup ousted the reformist Movement to Socialism (MAS), which had ruled since 2006\. Coup leader Jeanine Anez, representing a bloodthirsty far right, which had been locked out of power for over a decade, unleashed extreme state repression. One of her first acts was to issue a decree removing criminal liability from the police and military in dealing with protesters. This gave free rein to the state security apparatus, resulting in the Senkata and Sacaba massacres, in which security forces murdered at least 21 people. Anez then went on to attempt a severe austerity program and attack the trade unions and peasant organisations. But her rule was always unstable and, in October 2020, after multiple delays, elections were held and the MAS returned to power with 55 percent of the vote from an 88 percent turnout. However, the MAS government faced its own problems. Its historic leader, Evo Morales, who served as president from 2006 to 2019, was constitutionally barred from running. Instead, his economy minister, Luis Arce, led the MAS presidential ticket. Arce, however, would go on to govern in very different circumstances to the early period of MAS rule. During the 2000s and early 2010s, Latin America experienced a resources boom. Leaders like Morales used the boom to fund social programs, which lifted the living conditions of the poorest sections of society, without fundamentally attacking the wealth and privileges of the capitalist class. This period was known as the “Pink Tide”. With rising living standards, the MAS won the loyalty of a large section of Bolivia’s working class and peasantry, securing it large election majorities, including 64 percent of the vote in 2009\. But when the boom began to slow down around 2012, largely due to a downturn in China, which was the main buyer of Latin American resources, Morales and the MAS began to wind back some of their social programs. The long period of MAS rule, therefore, explains the intense reaction of the far right in 2019 under Anez, but also the willingness of the working class and peasantry to defend the real gains it made under Morales. But when the MAS returned to power in 2020, under Arce, it no longer had the revenue from the resources boom to continue lifting living standards. Further, Arce faced the dual crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic impact. In 2025, inflation reached 25 percent, and fuel shortages made long lines at petrol stations a common occurrence. At the same time, during Arce’s presidency, a major internal split opened up in the MAS between supporters of the new president and Morales. Largely over whether Arce or Morales would be the MAS’s next presidential candidate, the split extended to the MAS in parliament, pushing the government into a congressional minority. By the 2025 elections, the MAS was so divided that Morales attempted to run with a new party, but was constitutionally barred, and instead called for a null vote. Arce, for his part, was so unpopular that he did not seek re-election. The result was a paltry 3 percent for a party that only a few years ago commanded the loyalty of huge sections of workers and peasants. The decline in the MAS vote was what allowed Paz to win the election. He did not run as a far-right candidate. Instead, he made a direct appeal to former MAS voters by promising pension increases, protection of certain gains of the MAS period and more dialogue with MAS voters. His campaign slogan was “Capitalism for all”. Almost immediately after winning the elections, however, Paz showed his true colours. One of his first acts was to travel to the United States to secure a US$3.1 billion loan from the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean. He also immediately aligned himself with the regional far right, supporting Javier Milei, Argentina’s self-declared “anarcho-capitalist” president, and Maria Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan far right. His real plan, though, is to accomplish what the Bolivian far right has failed to do since the early 2000s: wind back the gains of the MAS period, smash the workers’ and peasants’ organisations, and implement neoliberalism. Paz’s agenda should be understood in the broader regional context. In many other Latin American countries in recent years, the far right has returned to power after being locked out of government during the Pink Tide period. But the far right has itself been radicalised over recent years. It seeks to unwind both social and economic gains, and is prepared to use extreme state violence to do so. Imperial tensions are also playing a role. Many of the Pink Tide governments aligned their countries more closely with China, which increasingly became their main trading partner. With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, there has been an attempt to realign the region under US hegemony. Bolivia is particularly at the sharp end of these tensions. It has one-fifth of the world’s lithium reserves, a crucial resource for key industries of the twentieth century, like electric vehicles. Paz’s first major attempt to begin this process came in December when he removed fuel subsidies, causing prices to nearly double overnight. Almost immediately, large protests broke out, forcing the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB, the main trade union federation) to call an indefinite general strike. By early January, the protests had resulted in a truce. Paz and the COB leadership agreed to the elimination of the subsidies in exchange for a 20 percent wage increase and lifting the street blockades. But for large sections of the rank and file, the agreement was a betrayal. Many local organisations ignored the order to lift the blockades and openly criticised the COB leadership. The pressure the COB leadership faced is particularly important given that a challenger ticket recently won control of it in October 2025\. The challenge originated in the powerful miners’ union. With mining one of Bolivia’s major industries and an important source of foreign currency at a time when the domestic currency is rapidly devaluing, miners have significant industrial power and are a vanguard section of the Bolivian working class. From early 2025, a rank-and-file movement developed within the miners’ union that was explicitly aimed against the MAS leadership, specifically calling for Arce’s resignation. This movement eventually led to a new leadership that called for “class independence” and a break with the MAS, both Morales and Arce. With a challenger leadership winning control of arguably the country’s most powerful union, the same process then ousted the old COB leadership, which was closely aligned with the MAS. However, the agreement the new COB leadership signed with Paz in January shows that, although they may be a break with the old MAS leadership, they remain similarly committed to a strategy that collaborates with the government to find a peaceful, negotiated solution to the crisis, rather than push for more class conflict. The latest round of protests and strikes, which began in early May, is therefore a continuation of the intense class struggle in Bolivia. Various groups of workers—teachers, miners, transport workers, among others—began protesting and striking in the weeks and months leading up to May, largely over immediate economic demands. These actions culminated in a rally in El Alto, followed by a mass meeting led by COB leaders on 1 May, where they declared an indefinite general strike beginning the next day. Another important development came a few days later, on 6 May. Leaders of major unions and peasant organisations met to sign an “Inter-institutional Act of Unity and Loyalty” that recommitted the COB and other organisations to the indefinite general strike and to maintaining road blockades. The COB leader dubbed it a “Pact of No Betrayal,” as it has now become known. Since then, the protests and strikes have only grown, while dozens of blockades all over the country are impeding traffic on major highways and roads. The government’s response has been increased repression. Paz has also directly gone after the COB leadership, issuing arrest warrants for several of them, although the courts have suspended some. The situation remains very open. Paz is under pressure to bring the protests to an end, as even sections of the establishment and the right are beginning to break with him. His latest legislative move to give himself the authority to declare a state of emergency—something Arce placed restrictions on after the 2019 coup—is a clear indication of his willingness to continue escalating the repression. The workers and peasants also show no signs of giving up. Their challenge is to go beyond the COB leadership, which continues to seek a safe, negotiated exit from the crisis. ### No good news: an interview with Martin Hirst URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/no-good-news-an-interview-with-martin-hirst/ Last updated: 2026-06-14T03:16:33.000Z Martin Hirst started his career in journalism at the University of Sydney student newspaper *Honi Soit* during the heady years of student radicalism in the mid-1970s. From 1984 to 1990 he worked at the ABC, before joining the SBS press gallery team. One of the most impressive achievements of his career was leading one of the longest journalists’ strike in Australian history, in which journalists downed pens for more than a week in 1990\. He spent much of his career fighting against cuts, bad pay deals and sellouts by union officials. After leaving the industry in 1993, Hirst taught journalism at universities until his retirement in 2016\. Over that time, he has written numerous books, mostly Marxist analyses of the media and journalism. His latest is *There is No Good News: Journalism, Crisis and Philosophy of Praxis*, an urgent and necessary exposé of contemporary journalism that not only condemns the mainstream media but argues for an alternative to it. *Red Flag*’s Nick Reich spoke to him recently in Melbourne, where he now lives. --- #### **The title you chose for the book has a double meaning—it both highlights the nature of the modern news cycle as a seemingly endless stream of horrible stories about genocide, inequality, natural disasters, war and the rise of the far right, and it says something about the nature of journalism and the production of news under capitalism. You use the mainstream media’s coverage of the Gaza genocide to demonstrate this. Can you talk a bit about how mainstream journalism in the West has responded to the Gaza genocide?** I think that the mainstream media has totally discredited itself. There’s a number of aspects to that. One of the most glaring ones is the almost total silence of mainstream journalists, particularly in Western countries, about the deaths of probably close to 400 journalists in Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and Iran. The silence of Western mainstream media damns it to hell, as far as I’m concerned. They have this belief that they are the fourth estate, speaking truth to power and all that liberal ideology. Yet, in the face of the deliberate murder of hundreds of their colleagues by a powerful state actor, most have nothing to say. The second thing is that the framing of the genocide has been through the use of terms like “war” or “conflict”. Language has been used that seems to indicate that there’s equal or comparable responsibility on both sides for what’s happened. With a small handful of honourable exceptions, the conflict is reported from the perspective of Israel and the West. So it’s a pro-imperialist viewpoint. One of the ways this manifests is through what I call in the book “atrocity propaganda”. The supposed mass rapes, beheaded babies and other lies that were told about what the Hamas fighters did on 7 October are an example of atrocity propaganda. I’m not ruling out that there may have been sexual assault by some Hamas fighters on 7 October. But if it did happen it was not on anywhere near the scale that Israel claims. As I document in my book, they’ve provided no forensic evidence, they’ve provided very few eyewitnesses, they’ve provided no documentary evidence, autopsies, or anything like that, to support their allegations. But the evidence against the allegations is significant. There have been serious investigations, piecing together the eyewitness accounts, and they don’t add up. Most of them are based on one or two people who weren’t even there, and who are known to have lied in testimony in other situations. But the atrocity propaganda is still being reported in the media today, nearly three years later, as if it were fact. It has been said that journalism is the first draft of history. Well, this is how history gets made by journalists; when lies don’t get any pushback. #### **You say in the book that everything is propaganda. Explain what you mean by that.** People come at the word propaganda with a value judgement. Propaganda is bad, right? Propaganda is what they do. We don’t do propaganda. But if you take that value judgement out of it, the basic definition of propaganda is information put into the world to convince people to act in a certain way. Anti-smoking campaigns. Slip, slop, slap. Seat belts. Those are all examples of propaganda campaigns that I can get behind. *Red Flag*, where you’re reading this article, that’s our form of socialist propaganda. So, when I say that all journalism and all news is propaganda, I can justify that argument quite simply. Whether you’re reading stock market reports or crime stories, or anything from the mundane, everyday journalism, it all has a particular political point of view attached to it. It is propaganda. For example, when a teachers’ strike is reported, a certain tone is adopted: “teachers shouldn’t go on strike, they should be thinking of the poor children!” They don’t make the argument that giving teachers higher wages and better working conditions actually improves the education your child is going to get. They choose what perspectives to foreground, which frames their reporting of events and how they encourage you to react. #### **You critique many of the normative and liberal assumptions that underpin bourgeois journalistic practices. But you also use the concept of “common sense”, as deployed by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, to go beyond a critique of journalistic propaganda as crude lies. What do you mean by common sense? And what did Gramsci have to say about it?** Gramsci points out that common sense ideas stick in people’s minds, because elements of them help you make your way in the world. So, for example, things like navigating by the stars or by the direction of the sun. Things like herbal medicines and other pre-scientific treatments for wounds were all based on common sense. But by the time we got to the formation of capitalist relations of production, common sense started to develop a more scientific basis, and that resulted in the bifurcation of knowledge. Knowledge was something that the ruling class could control, whilst common sense was just left to wither. Ultimately, it became a basis of ideology. Take the example of a strike again. There is truth to the fact that a strike will inconvenience people. Of course—services are disrupted and ordinary people have to adjust. This seemingly simple and obvious truth is what ruling class intellectuals seize upon to argue their propaganda, avoiding a thorough investigation of the facts. Journalists act as these ruling class intellectuals. Journalism, as we know it today, did not exist before the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t until you could connect a printing press to a steam engine that you could churn out mass-produced daily newspapers. And so the rise of capitalism produced mass media, meaning the capitalists could consistently shape what message is churned out by this means. That’s why journalists are hopelessly beholden to the system. Because their class position is such that they adhere to and popularise ruling class ideas. They are disseminators, if not generators, of ruling class ideology. But Gramsci also argued that common sense is not all-encompassing. Yes, it helps to produce consent from the oppressed classes to be ruled by the capitalist class. But class consciousness also grows out of common sense, because common sense ideas must actually help people to navigate the world and tend to bind people together. Very contradictory ideas can therefore exist in people’s minds. This can get to a point that Gramsci calls good sense, which is probably where people are at when they come into the orbit of a socialist organisation. Our role as socialists is to develop the size and spread of our organisation to the point that we can lead others and realise our goal of a society without class division and everything else that goes with capitalism. We’re nowhere near that yet—we’re a handful of people in the scale of things, but we’re moving in the right direction. ### Why Stalinism should stay dead URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/why-stalinism-should-stay-dead/ Last updated: 2026-06-18T00:20:45.000Z Our latest episode tackles the Stalinist ideas that have become trendy in online left spaces. We focus on debunking three common Stalinist arguments: - That leftists should recognise and support “actually existing socialism” in countries like China and Vietnam - That “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, i.e. that any country opposed to US imperialism is “anti-imperialist” and must be defended - The slander that anti-Stalinists in the West are bought-off imperialist shills We also delve into a bit of the history of Stalinism and Maoism, why they’re heinous distortions of genuine Marxism, and the dismissiveness many Maoists and Stalinists have towards the Western working class. ### Read more [“The Marxist alternative to fake communism” by April Holcombe in *Red Flag*](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-marxist-alternative-to-fake-communism/) [“The Fraud of Stalinism” by D Taylor in *Red Flag*](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6286/) ### Get in touch We’d love to hear from you. You can reach me and Chloe at [redflagradiopodcast@gmail.com](mailto:redflagradiopodcast@gmail.com). We welcome feedback! Let us know if you have suggested topics, debates or guests you’d like us to feature. ### Help us out If you like what we do and want to help us get more socialist podcasting in your ears, please become a [Patreon](https://patreon.com/redflagradiopodcast?ref=redflag.org.au)! ### Protesters stand against Hanson in Melbourne URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/protesters-stand-against-hanson-in-melbourne/ Last updated: 2026-07-04T00:27:14.000Z Why Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce chose Melbourne’s inner north to book a fundraising soiree for their burgeoning fascist enterprise is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they thought Moonee Ponds was nothing but Dame Edna Everages and white suburban traditionalism. Perhaps they didn’t understand just how close it was to the city’s left-wing heartlands. Whatever the reason, it didn’t work out for One Nation—at least not in this part of town. Earlier in the day, Giorgio Casa, an Italian restaurant that had agreed to host the group’s cocktail party, cancelled Hanson’s booking. Police told the *Age* newspaper that no threats had been made against the premises. Perhaps the looming anti-racist protest was drawing too much negative attention to the venue. Perhaps there was a broader community backlash against the restaurant for accommodating far-right anti-migrant filth. At any rate, the tussle was on as soon as Hanson announced her event. From that moment, socialists and anti-fascist activists went into organisational overdrive, calling a protest, putting up posters advertising it, holding information stalls and making phone calls. They did all the bread-and-butter things that activists do. With their venue gone, Hanson and Joyce headed south of the river to a more accommodating host—some place that would shelter the two millionaires and their new wealthy backers from the hustle and bustle of street-based political criticism. Despite One Nation’s eventual absence, up to 1,000 people joined the anti-Hanson protest in the centre of Moonee Ponds. There were speeches from Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi and Victorian Socialists state election candidates Omar Hassan and Anneke Demanuele. There was a march from the central junction to Giorgio Casa and back. The usual left-wing chants echoed along Mt Alexander Road. Passing cars honked in support. Locals joined the march. 0:00 /2:27 1× Marching along Mt Alexander Road It was a good night. And it felt like a genuine win. Not a win that will stop the far-right juggernaut. Not a win from which a counter-power to fascism will emerge. But a win nevertheless. We didn’t change the world. We didn’t alter history. And we’re staring down the barrel of bad times. But you take small victories. You take what you can get. A long-time socialist organiser, Jerome Small, addressing the rally, talked about the last time we had to fight Hanson in Victoria, back in the 1990s. He, along with a couple of others in Moonee Ponds last night, had helped to organise some of those protests. A lot has changed since then. The far right and fascism are ascendant across much of the world now. And protests can no longer prevent One Nation from organising a base. Hanson has become the established expression of far-right politics in Australia. Indeed, her party could well form government with the Liberals in Victoria later this year. But some things haven’t changed. People who have heard Jerome Small speak in various protests and forums over his decades of activism will know that he is fond of repeating what he calls rule number one: “you show up”. If you don’t show up, you can’t win a thing. If you do show up, who knows—you might just have a fighting chance. If nothing else, you’ve had a go. In a sense, that’s the issue of One Nation today. It’s not that a quarter of the population say that they are going to vote for Hanson. It’s not even a question of how to defeat her and the far right more generally. Given the global balance of forces between the far left and the far right, we simply can’t beat them anytime soon. The issue is how to build a political alternative; how to organise the masses of people disgusted by the reality of Hanson’s rise and all the racism, bigotry and pro-billionaire politics that come with her. The thing holding us back on that front is not the number of people who already agree that Hanson is odious; it’s the number prepared to show up—to protests, to meetings, to discussion groups, to doorknocks in the suburbs, and to electoral campaigns for socialist candidates who oppose the entire political establishment, of which Hanson and Joyce are a part. In Moonee Ponds last night, nearly 1,000 people showed up. That’s what made it a good little win. But there’s much more to do if we are to turn all the left-wing, anti-racist disaffection into something politically organised. ### Perth takes the fight to One Nation URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/perth-takes-the-fight-to-one-nation/ Last updated: 2026-06-14T03:27:16.000Z The first large display of anti-racist opposition to One Nation since the party’s rise in the polls occurred in the Perth suburb of Midland on Wednesday night. A protest drew hundreds outside a fundraising event for the far-right party, at which Pauline Hanson was the guest of honour. Socialists, migrants, students, Palestine solidarity activists, families and other anti-racists all chanted, “Pauline Hanson go to Hell, take your racists there as well!” and “Migrants are welcome, racists are not!” On the other side of the street, a small number of Hanson supporters stood outside the cafe where the fundraiser was being held. Disparate chants of “Ban the burqa!” and the inspired “Pauline, Pauline, Pauline!” were drowned out by speeches from Bundjalung and Kamilaroi socialist Oskar Martin, Dr Mohammed Mustafa (a Palestinian doctor who has [volunteered in Gaza throughout the genocide](https://redflag.org.au/article/eyewitness-to-genocide/)) and Greens state MLC Sophie McNeill. Rally chair and organiser Alevine Magila told *Red Flag*: > “WA Socialists organised this protest to say that migrants are welcome and racism is not. Pauline Hanson is a Trump-style politician; she’s a far-right racist Islamophobe, and she has nothing to offer working-class people. We need to build a socialist movement to stop the far right.” The demonstration was the initiative of WA Socialists, who have been out on the campaign trail—not for an election, but to build an anti-One Nation movement. WA Socialists members have spent weeks postering, leafleting and doorknocking working-class suburbs like Maylands, Victoria Park and Cannington. One of the doors was answered by Maria. She came to Australia as a refugee from El Salvador in 1991 and now works four jobs well past her retirement age just to make ends meet. She is one of the most affected by the cost-of-living crisis, and also the target of One Nation’s scapegoating. She arrived for the protest an hour early, ready to stand against racism and not at all intimidated. Maria told *Red Flag* she attended “because I see the parallels from Pauline Hanson to Donald Trump wanting to stop migrants”. When asked how the protest made her feel, the answer was simple: “It’s empowering”. As for her thoughts on Hanson, Maria invoked a classic anti-fascist slogan: “*No pasaran*. It means she won’t go further”. Giving people like Maria the confidence to defy the racist crap flung at her is one of the reasons it’s so important to loudly oppose One Nation at every turn. The common refrain that protesting against Hanson “gives her oxygen” and that we should ignore the threat of the far right to make it go away is like suggesting burying your head in the sand during an earthquake. It rings even more hollow now that One Nation is consistently polling a higher primary vote than the major parties, while capitalist media empires give Hanson daily airtime and Gina Rinehart funds her campaign. The fact is that One Nation is being taken seriously by Australia’s ruling class. The main occasion for Hanson’s visit to the west was not just one fundraiser but a meeting with the Swan Chamber of Commerce, a networking body for business owners in Perth’s outer east. She’ll be back in July at the invitation of the *West Australian* newspaper for a corporate breakfast, with tickets priced at $185 per seat. One Nation is becoming part of the political mainstream. We can’t just sit back and do nothing as this far-right menace entrenches itself. So demonstrations against Hanson are essential. If WA Socialists had not called the protest in Midland, her visit to Perth would have gone unchallenged. Instead, the fact that she was opposed by hundreds was the headline story in just about every news outlet that reported it. But protesting alone will not be enough. We have to build a political alternative that can challenge Hanson and the rest of the pro-capitalist status quo in every arena. You only have to look at the international surge of the far right—Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Donald Trump’s US administration, the wave of fascist politics gaining popularity across Europe—to see the potential paths Australia could go down and the urgency of the situation. After Perth, Hanson’s next stop is Melbourne on Friday. The Campaign Against Racism and Fascism has [called a protest](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZWOmNXy9am/?ref=redflag.org.au) for 5:45pm at Moonee Ponds Junction, near where she is holding another fundraiser and networking event. After that is Canberra on Wednesday 17 June, where Hanson will be addressing the National Press Club—Canberra Socialists are [organising a protest](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZHilWgpfxt/?ref=redflag.org.au) there at 11am. ### Public housing demolitions in NSW a disgrace URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/public-housing-demolitions-in-nsw-a-disgrace/ Last updated: 2026-06-08T06:57:33.000Z Late last month, the NSW Labor government began fencing off the first block of 150 homes at the Waterloo South public housing estate as part of the first stage of its redevelopment plan. At least three tenants were still living on site, and none of them knew the fences were going up until they woke to find construction workers outside their doors. One of the residents, Julie, an aged pensioner who has lived in Waterloo since 2001, told the ABC: “Waterloo is my home, I want to stay here”. Activists from Action for Public Housing have set up camp at the site to protest against the demolition. Since then, Housing Minister Rose Jackson has gone on the offensive to justify the redevelopment. She told the ABC that the remaining people on site were “not tenants”, and that [estates](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-25/waterloo-public-housing-estate-fenced-off-ahead-of-demolition/106718016?ref=redflag.org.au) like Waterloo are “not functional communities”. This is the language of a government that has spent years running down public housing in order to justify handing it to developers. Any deterioration of the Waterloo estate is the result of deliberate neglect. Fund nothing, fix nothing, then point to the decay and say, “See, it has to go”, as justification for giving it to the private sector. The “not functional” argument is a euphemism for concentrated poverty. But instead of doing anything to address poverty, the government would rather hand over prime real estate to developers to build homes for the already wealthy. In the process, they are displacing public housing tenants from their established communities, severing them from their support networks and pushing them further from services and employment and to the outskirts of the city. Waterloo has been home to Indigenous people, pensioners and workers for decades—people who built social networks and maintained community life despite chronic underfunding. But the government has decided the land is worth more than the people on it and their histories and communities, and so they will be destroyed. Before the 2023 state election, NSW Labor ran on a “Hands Off Waterloo” platform. Labor MP Ron Hoenig wrote to Waterloo tenants promising they could “stop the sell-off” by voting Labor. Jackson herself toured public housing and told residents she would not allow the privatisation of public housing to continue. Once Labor came to power, the party backflipped and the sell-off happened anyway. The plan for Waterloo estate is to demolish 750 public housing units that serve the most vulnerable in our society, with the headline of building 3,300 new homes. What Labor doesn’t say is that at least half of these properties will be sold at market prices and therefore unaffordable for those currently living there. According to real estate site Domain, the current median price of a two-bedroom unit in Waterloo is more than $1 million. The rest of the dwellings will be divided between “social housing” and “affordable” housing. But “social housing” is not public housing. It’s an umbrella term that includes community housing, in which private organisations manage housing owned by either the government or private companies. Tenants have fewer rights, and the rent charged by social housing providers is higher than in public housing. According to the [ABC](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-05/higher-rate-of-eviction-for-community-housing-residents-in-wa/103417084?ref=redflag.org.au), in the last two years the rate of evictions from community housing has been around five times higher than from government-run public housing. “Affordable housing” in NSW is worse still. It refers to housing that is rented at 75-80 percent of the market rate. In a city where rents have risen roughly 48 percent in five years, that will not be affordable for the displaced Waterloo public tenants. In high-priced suburbs, government-subsidised affordable apartments built by private developers are so expensive that only a high-income earner could afford to live there—which highlights that this plan involves an elaborate transfer of public money from the poorest to the wealthy. Even the window dressing on this privatisation plan is not guaranteed—when asked directly whether the affordable housing component would be protected in perpetuity, Jackson admitted she couldn’t say. It was “yet to be finalised”. So it is likely to revert to the full market rate at some point anyway. This conduct is typical of NSW Labor. Planning Minister Paul Scully recently accused the campaign to save Bellambi public housing in the Illawarra of running a misinformation campaign, insisting “public housing in Bellambi is not being sold off, pure and simple”. But the Bellambi rezoning proposal says otherwise. While Bellambi estate currently sits at 93 percent public housing, under the proposal, just 30 per cent will be “dedicated to social housing” (not even public housing). Trashing the lives of public housing residents simply doesn’t have the political overhead of appeasing developers and opening more land to the wealthy. This is no way to solve the housing crisis—it is a way to increase the profits of property speculators, developers and the banks. The housing crisis is not caused by a shortage of homes; it is caused by the market treating homes as investment assets. Over the past ten years, the number of new homes has been growing faster than the population, yet rents and house prices have risen regardless. The Waterloo redevelopment, which will take ten to fifteen years to complete, will result in a net gain of roughly 240 social housing units. And when you compare this with the NSW social housing waitlist of 69,051 households, the logic of demolishing existing public housing to increase the net total slightly over a ten-year period doesn’t make sense. The real winner in Waterloo’s redevelopment will be Stockland, one of Australia’s largest property developers. The total project is valued at $4 billion, and Stockland is set to make profits of up to $600 million, according to [Citi](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=TAWEB%5FWRE170%5Fa&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2Fbusiness%2Fproperty%2Fstockland-back-in-the-apartment-business-with-waterloo-estate-win%2Fnews-story%2F0fef0a8beda3193cba1425154071a81f&memtype=anonymous&mode=premium&v21=HIGH-Segment-2-SCORE&V21spcbehaviour=appendend&ref=redflag.org.au) analysts. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people languish on the public housing waiting list, while tenants and home owners struggle with unaffordable rents and mortgages. A government that took this crisis seriously would be massively expanding public housing, not demolishing it. ### Rebellion in the AEU: officials prevent debate as vote approaches on terrible deal URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/rebellion-in-the-aeu-officials-prevent-debate-as-vote-approaches-on-terrible-deal/ Last updated: 2026-06-14T03:27:53.000Z Australian Education Union members across Victoria will meet on 15-18 June to make a crucial decision: to accept or reject an in-principle agreement our union leaders have reached with the state government. They claim it is the best we can get, but it is far from it. [Socialists in Schools](https://www.instagram.com/socialistsinschoolsvic/?ref=redflag.org.au), a campaign group within the AEU, have been organising school staff to oppose the deal and push the union leaders to resume industrial action. We want to win an agreement that addresses [our grievances](https://docs.google.com/document/d/152rokLaf9VTki2SEKC4NF6jNJLuSfl523Y7nKs94uX8/edit?tab=t.0&ref=redflag.org.au)—unpaid overtime, crushing workloads, poor pay, among other things—and gains the funding we need to turn around the crisis in Victorian public schools. Since the agreement was reached, the AEU leaders have been in overdrive trying to sell it to the wider membership. They want to wrap this all up quickly so they get back to their true passion in life: campaigning for the ALP in the next state election. While the odds are stacked against our side, reports from across the state indicate that officials are finding it harder than they expected to push this agreement through. One way they are pitching the deal is through online briefings. In these, all participants’ cameras are forcibly turned off so that we can’t see anyone, not even a list of participants’ names. Our microphones are muted. The chat function is disabled. We are permitted to ask questions, but have to direct them to moderators who no one can see and who do not answer. In the middle of one of these briefings, I recalled an excursion I once took a class on to Pentridge Prison. The wonderful tour guide explained how prisoners were made to wear masks whenever they left their cells to avoid fraternisation. It made me think that the AEU leaders might be getting inspiration for their online crowd control from the wrong places. “Briefings” turn out to be their favourite event format. AEU regional meetings, which bring together union members across schools within a particular geographic area, are also turned into “briefings”. Unlike regular meetings, where union members have the right to put motions to the floor and debate them, briefings are a top-down affair in which the union leaders present the union’s “wins” at length, motions and debate are not allowed, and the officials get the last word every time. Their decision to rejig these events is likely in response to the last round of regional meetings, where the officials were trounced and condemned by members in five regions for cancelling our strikes before we had received an adequate offer from the government. Despite their best efforts to take up all the time and bore us into passivity, these briefings are full of angry school staff who are there to hold their leaders to account. Everywhere they go, officials face hostile questions and comments from frustrated union members. What about our crushing workloads? Why aren’t we being back paid to the date on which our last agreement expired? Why can’t we resume strikes to keep pushing for more? Why is the pay rise between teachers, and between teachers and Education Support staff unequal? Why is the union confusing members with compounded figures when our pay claim was not? It goes on. At the Maribyrnong briefing, Marino D’Ortenzio, vice president of the union’s secondary school division, openly argued that strikes don’t work. It’s unclear why he chose to be head of a trade union if he believes this. The best that negotiator Erin Aulich (the union’s branch secretary) could muster is that “it’s an imperfect agreement”. Thank you for your hard work, Erin. At the inner-city briefing, AEU President Justin Mullaly was forced to admit that there are many “imperfections” in the agreement. We asked him to consider sending out a list of these imperfections so that union members can hear both sides of the debate, rather than just the propaganda the AEU leaders are currently dishing out. He failed to respond. When questioned about what the agreement will do to address all the unpaid overtime teachers perform—on average 12.4 hours per week—Briley Stokes, the union’s vice president, told the inner-west briefing that teachers should only work their contracted 38 hours. Mullaly echoed this at the inner-city meeting, patronising teachers, “You just need to work to your hours”. This is the exact level of insight and empathy we’ve come to expect from AEU leaders, but it is enraging nonetheless. Of course, teachers and school staff should try to limit the unpaid work we do. But wouldn’t it be better to fight for and win an education system that doesn’t expect and require unpaid work from us? Wouldn’t it be more effective to take action together, rather than individually, and use our leverage to shut down schools and demand the pay and dignity we’re worth? An impassioned high school teacher at the inner-city briefing argued for more industrial action and the importance of strikes for winning our claims and gaining respect. They received a standing ovation. Members aren’t being silenced or ground down into voting yes easily. Many members and sub-branches are showing a determination to fight and keep this campaign alive and kicking. In many school sub-branch meetings, AEU officials are similarly facing very hostile questioning from frustrated union members. There is an extraordinary number of documents circulating via email and social media to explain and critically analyse the deal, because no one trusts the documentation produced by the union itself. Socialists in Schools members have heard that AEU officials refer to these explainers as “misinformation” at union events where we are not present, but they have not challenged the facts of anything we have produced. The union, as a stand-in for the ALP, wants to narrow the horizons of our campaign and have us quietly accept the broken status quo. In Socialists in Schools, our vision for the union is the opposite. We want to give people the resources, confidence and politics to make ambitious demands on the government, challenge the leadership when they try to keep us down, and empower every member of the union to have a voice and actively participate in debates and the direction of the campaign. We want union members to feel their power by engaging in serious strike action, which can force the government to give us what we want. The fight for a better offer from the government thus goes hand in hand with the fight for democracy in our union. We reject the notion that our list of demands is a crazy wishlist, as union leaders have suggested. On the contrary, it’s a document outlining the changes that thousands of educators believe are worth fighting for, and want to fight for. We reject the union leaders’ claim that this is the best the government could give. We barely put up a fight. It must be said that, because of the lack of democracy in the union, it is difficult to fully gauge the members’ mood across the state. Absurd meeting procedures, the tyrannical deleting of comments and blocking of critical members on AEU social media, and, most importantly, the fact that many sub-branches are deliberately kept completely disconnected from one another, make it very hard to predict the outcome of this vote. In our short existence, members of Socialists in Schools have heard that our resources have been shared widely, but we are honest that there are many more schools with which we have no connections. Our members will spend the next week emailing, calling and producing materials to promote the “no” vote, but it will be an uphill battle given the union’s resources and platform and the energy and enthusiasm the officials have deliberately wasted through months of inaction. The union’s voting system will also not help our case. For every twenty or fewer members, each sub-branch (school) gets one vote. Theoretically, this means a school with a handful of union members, or even *one*, will have the same weight as a school with twenty. We know there is no choice but to fight, though. In the last year, Australia’s billionaires increased their ranks to 178, a record high, [according to Oxfam Australia](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-02/australia-has-most-billionaires-on-record-oxfam-analysis/106746904?ref=redflag.org.au). They also collectively increased their wealth by $25.67 billion, almost $50,000 a minute. Meanwhile, one in three households experienced food insecurity in the past twelve months, meaning they were stressed about or struggled to put food on the table. Federal Labor’s recent budget will not fix this. We need to do it ourselves by returning to a militant industrial campaign. Arguments that are convincing some members to vote yes are the threat of a hard right-wing state government that might be even more hostile to teachers, the threat of arbitration leaving us in limbo, or that the current agreement could be “ripped up” and we will have to start from scratch if we turn it down. Yet in 2024, Victorian nurses rejected an offer pushed by the government and their union, only to win a significantly bigger pay rise just a month later. The earliest the government could take the AEU to arbitration is October. The strategy of relying on the ALP is the reason we’re in this mess. If we reject this offer and resume a campaign of industrial action, like many members want to do, it is an open question as to what we win, but it is highly unlikely we would get anything less. In 2022, when the AEU leaders betrayed their members by pushing through an historically appalling offer, 40 percent rejected it. Conditions in schools have continued to deteriorate, and school staff are being pushed to the brink as they try to meet the demands of the job and the needs of each child, while we try to hold on to our sanity and dignity. Outside of schools, the housing and cost-of-living crises have made many facets of our lives harder as our purchasing power dwindles, particularly for education support staff, whose criminally low wages should be a national disgrace. We have a chance with this campaign to draw a line in the sand and collectively say “no”: - No to the lies the media peddles about our profession - No to the financial insecurity we face while the rich get richer - No to carrying the burden of Labor’s broken education system - No to being silenced and sold out again by our union leaders - No to this sub-standard agreement ### People’s Inquiry details widespread crackdown on campus free speech URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/peoples-inquiry-details-widespread-crackdown-on-campus-free-speech/ Last updated: 2026-06-14T02:13:02.000Z The recently published [final report](https://www.palestineinquiry.com/final-report?ref=redflag.org.au) of the People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine provides extensive evidence for what Palestine solidarity activists have argued for more than two years: Australian universities have systematically suppressed criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and sought to silence opposition to their own complicity in the genocide. The report documents a pattern of repression across the higher education sector. Universities have used disciplinary procedures that lack procedural fairness, introduced or revised policies that expand management’s ability to police speech and protest, deployed intimidating surveillance measures that foster self-censorship, and weaponised accusations of antisemitism against students and staff advocating for justice in Palestine. All of this has occurred while universities maintain financial, research and institutional relationships with weapons manufacturers and defence companies linked to Israel’s war machine. The People’s Inquiry was launched in February 2025 by Students for Palestine, with the support of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN), the Jewish Council of Australia, the National Union of Students and Greens federal Senator Mehreen Faruqi. The inquiry was established in response to growing concerns that students and staff were facing an increasingly hostile and repressive environment on campus as popular opposition grew to Israel’s assault on Gaza. Inspired by [the tradition of people’s tribunals and inquiries](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/peoples-tribunals-and-roots-of-civil-society-justice/?ref=redflag.org.au), it sought to investigate whether universities were upholding their obligations to free speech, academic freedom and the right to protest. The inquiry invited submissions from students and staff across the country and held public hearings in Sydney, Melbourne and online. The final report draws on 156 written submissions and testimony from students, academics and representatives from 21 universities. Many of the examples of repression would not come as a surprise to those who have been involved in the Palestine solidarity movement. What the final report reveals, however, is the breadth and severity of the attempts by universities to silence pro-Palestine activity: > “Universities have policed speech, obstructed events, censored classroom content, intervened in teaching, changed policies to restrict and police protest, surveilled staff and students, disciplined individuals engaged in peaceful protest, applied grossly unfair double standards, and weaponised antisemitism to shut down legitimate criticism and protest of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Across the sector, we’ve seen these tactics used to threaten and intimidate anyone who dares speak up for Palestinian rights and against the atrocities Israel is committing in Gaza.” Across the country, students described universities using practical measures to undermine Gaza solidarity encampments, including closing public areas, cutting access to facilities and sending security staff to pressure protesters. Many reported being threatened with disciplinary action for using common slogans. Universities including Queensland University, the University of Wollongong, Monash, Curtin and the Australian National University were reported to have restricted terms and phrases such as “intifada” (uprising) and “from the river to the sea” (the call for Palestinian liberation and equality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea). Several submissions alleged that universities attempted to suppress even the use of the word “genocide” on posters, leaflets and in political campaigning. Queensland University of Technology students reported being warned that using the word “genocide” could lead to disciplinary action, and University of Technology, Sydney students said security guards instructed them to stop distributing material because it referred to genocide in Gaza. Activists repeatedly encountered bureaucratic obstacles, from cancelled room bookings and blocked film screenings to restrictions on public meetings and fundraising activities. Taken together, the testimonies point to a sector-wide effort to marginalise support for Palestine. As the report’s executive summary notes, university administrators “have gone to extraordinary lengths” to suppress activism after “buckling under a concerted campaign from politicians, the media and pro-Israel lobby groups”. The political logic, however, runs deeper than external pressure alone. Many universities have extensive partnerships with defence companies, weapons manufacturers and institutions connected to the Israeli state. They are guided by both the profitability of these connections and by Australia’s “national interest” in maintaining close ties with Israel, as part of the broader US-led imperialist bloc of countries. Students have consistently demanded disclosure, divestment and the severing of these relationships. Rather than ending their complicity, university managers have largely chosen to protect their ties. The repression documented by the inquiry is therefore not simply about controlling protest. It’s an attempt to shield universities’ political and financial ties to Israel from scrutiny and preserve relationships that a growing number of students and staff want brought to an end. ### Why the US government is destroying Cuba URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-the-us-government-is-destroying-cuba/ Last updated: 2026-06-14T02:12:51.000Z The indictment of 94-year-old Raúl Castro by the US Justice Department last month is a prelude to “regime change” in Cuba. The US is positioning military assets for a [possible attack on the island](https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/16/americas/cubans-prepare-for-us-invasion-latam-intl?ref=redflag.org.au), following its [blockade of oil shipments to the country](https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/cuba-energy-water-crisis-escalates-112507156.html?ref=redflag.org.au) (itself an act of war)—a move that has led to massive power shortages and suffering on the island. At the time of writing, the power cuts were imperilling the country’s water system, leaving as many as 3 million of the country’s 11 million people without safe drinking water. As early as February, the [United Nations Human Rights Office](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/2026/02/concerns-over-cubas-deepening-economic-crisis?ref=redflag.org.au) (UNHRO) warned about the blockade’s effects: > “Intensive care units and emergency rooms are compromised, as are the production, delivery, and storage of vaccines, blood products, and other temperature-sensitive medications. In Cuba, more than 80 percent of water pumping equipment depends on electricity, and power cuts are undermining access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene. The fuel shortage has disrupted the rationing system and the regulated basic food basket, and has affected social protection networks—school feeding, maternity homes, and nursing homes— with the most vulnerable groups being disproportionately impacted.” Conditions are much worse now than when the UNHRO issued that warning. The charges against Raúl Castro, who in 2021 retired from public life, stem from an incident in 1996, when the Cuban air force shot down two planes operated by Brothers to the Rescue, an organisation of right-wing Cuban exiles dedicated to overthrowing the Cuban regime. Under the leadership of Jorge Basulto, a Central Intelligence Agency asset who had been part of the agency’s failed invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the “Brothers” staged [provocations to increase conflict between the US and Cuba](https://jacobin.com/2026/05/castro-indictment-cuba-us-war?ref=redflag.org.au), heading off normalisation between the two countries. The 1996 incident had the effect of scotching the Clinton administration’s tentative steps toward normalisation with Cuba years after the Cold War against the Soviet Union ended. And it produced a propaganda coup for the Cuban American right, which pushed Congress to pass, and Clinton to sign, the Helms-Burton Act. Helms-Burton reinforced the decades-old US embargo against Cuba, and even extended its reach to include sovereign countries trading with Cuba, such as Canada and the US’s European allies. A recent US Supreme Court ruling (an 8-1 decision including two of the three Democrat-appointed justices) supported its provision to allow US companies and Cuban exiles to sue the Cuban government for property expropriations that the Cuban revolutionary government conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s. If nothing else, the indictment of Castro and the Supreme Court decision show that the US holds a long grudge against Cuba. How did the US government get to the point where, under the pretext of arresting a man who will soon turn 95, it may well unleash the world’s most powerful military against a weak state that is on its way to social collapse? ### **A long history** In the late 1800s, Cuba was, along with Puerto Rico, the last of Spain’s colonies in the Americas. The US was beginning its ascent in global politics and looking to flex its imperial muscle in the Western hemisphere. Cuba, as one of the last outposts of a decaying empire, was a choice target. In fact, Cuba was one of the US’s largest trading partners by the end of the nineteenth century. And US businesses had their eye on the island as a possible US state. One US financier said: “It makes the water come to my mouth when I think of the State of Cuba as one in our family”. The US government had even offered to purchase Cuba from Spain. Spain refused to sell. In 1895, Cuban nationalistslaunched a military uprising against Spain. Three years later, the US invaded the island under the pretext of avenging the explosion of the *USS Maine* in Havana harbour. Initially, the Cuban rebels thought the US would support their demand for independence and allied with the US against Spain. But after the US dispatched Spain, it crushed the independence movement under a military occupation that lasted until 1902. The US withdrew its forces (while holding on to a military base at Guantánamo Bay) but continued its control of the island under the US Congress’s 1901 Platt Amendment. The amendment, named after the US senator who sponsored it, guaranteed US oversight of Cuban finances and the untrammelled right to intervene politically or militarily in Cuba. The domination over Cuba lasted officially until 1934, and was an important milestone for a rising US imperialism that was turning the Caribbean into what Eric Williams called “the American Mediterranean”. As Jenny Pearce wrote in *Under the Eagle*, her classic history of US imperialism in Central America and the Caribbean: > “Cuba emerged as a model for United States imperialism. American economic and political domination had been secured without the seizure of a colony. The United States could continue to boast its anti-colonial traditions and beliefs despite having transformed Cuba into a virtual dependency.” US agribusiness turned Cuba into a giant industrial sugar plantation over the succeeding decades. At the time of the 1959 revolution, more than 70 percent of Cuba’s arable land belonged to large landowners, and between [25 and 40 percent was in foreign hands](https://www.localfutures.org/the-cuban-paradox/?ref=redflag.org.au). Meanwhile, the US’s foothold in Cuba and Puerto Rico helped it project power throughout the Caribbean, including engineering Panama’s secession from Colombia as a precondition for building the shipping canal through that country. The Great Depression brought economic collapse and agitation for change, leading to a military coup and US pressure on the dictator Geraldo Machado to resign. In the developments that followed, one of the coup’s organisers, Fulgencio Batista, emerged as the main leader. The US backed Batista, who ruled as a dictator from 1940, dominating the Cuban government until the 1959 revolution overthrew him. Initial US wariness of the new government led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara gave way to open hostility when it implemented a 1959 agrarian reform that broke up the old sugar plantations. Over the next two years, Castro’s government moved to expropriate foreign-owned businesses on the island. The US then began its decades-long trade and exchange embargo. By that time, Washington had already given up on trying to influence the Cuban government and had decided to overthrow it instead. The CIA, working with a group of right-wing Cuban exiles, failed in an attempted coup. The April 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco was the most spectacular of a [number of CIA-led plots](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/rfk-operation-mongoose/?ref=redflag.org.au) (including many harebrained schemes involving exploding cigars and Mafia hitmen) to overthrow the government or to assassinate its leaders. US belligerence against the Castro government led the latter to engage more fully with the Soviet Union. Indeed, only after the Bay of Pigs did the Cuban government declare its nationalist revolution to be “socialist”—by which it meant a one-party state modelled on the USSR. The USSR had tended to defer to the US’s claimed regional dominance in Latin America. But when Washington deployed nuclear missiles to Italy and Turkey in 1961 and then engaged in an extensive terrorist campaign in Cuba following the Bay of Pigs failure, the USSR dispatched its own missiles and other military hardware to Cuba in 1962\. The world was closer to nuclear war than at any time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Subsequently, the Russians negotiated a climbdown with Washington behind the backs of the Cubans. So, until 1968, when Castro supported the USSR’s suppression of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the Cuban government’s relationship with Moscow was frosty. But to Washington, Cuba was an outpost of “communism” and a source of chaos and instability in the region, even though the Cold War masked a fundamental continuity in US-Cuba relations. “The United States acted toward Cuba the same way it had acted toward other Latin American countries long before the Cold War: leaving democratic political rhetoric aside, what really counted for Washington was the defense of US economic, political and military imperial interests in its ‘backyard’”, Cuban-born socialist Sam Farber wrote in his book *Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959*. Farber’s point should be more obvious in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc in 1989-91\. Moscow withdrew its subsidies to the Cuban economy, leading to a “special period” of economic hardship and contraction in Cuba in the early 1990s. The government’s austerity measures led to the Cuban armed forces being cut by more than 80 percent. In the 1970s, the Cuban military—hundreds of thousands strong—conducted expeditions in Africa that proved decisive in defeating apartheid South Africa’s intervention in Angola’s anti-colonial civil war. Today, [Cuba fields a force of fewer](https://www.globalmilitary.net/countries/cub/?ref=redflag.org.au) than 49,000 active personnel. The post-Cold War period created [opportunities for US normalisation with Cuba](https://socialistworker.org/2015/01/27/cold-war-against-cuba?ref=redflag.org.au), which significant sections of the US capitalist class support. But under the Trump administration (both Trump 1.0 and 2.0), these efforts have been derailed—in part, because the South Florida Cuban right remains a powerful constituency in the Republican Party. Secretary of State Marco Rubio built his career through the right-wing Cuban American political machine in Florida. Anti-socialism retains significant appeal not only among Cuban exiles. Other significant Florida groups—such as Venezuelans and Nicaraguans who fled “socialism” for Miami—have provided a new source of émigré support for Republican and conservative politics. With Trump effectively outsourcing policy-making to his coterie of aides, Rubio’s obsession with “finishing the job” of rolling back the Cuban revolution may have become US policy. But under Trump 2.0, something bigger than paying off a political constituency is at work, as the “Trump corollary” to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine in last year’s[ National Security Strategy indicated](https://internationalsocialism.net/attack-on-venezuela-trumps-corollary-to-the-1823-monroe-doctrine/?ref=redflag.org.au). The document is a throwback to the days when the US treated the Caribbean as a US lake and the Western hemisphere as its “backyard”. Whether or not the US will prosecute a full-scale war against Cuba, its show of force in the Caribbean sends a message that Washington is asserting its power in the region in more unilateral and militarist ways. It’s not clear if this amounts to a “pivot” to Latin America away from Asia or the Middle East, but it’s in line with Trumpian bluster about ejecting Chinese corporations from the Panama Canal Zone or taking over Greenland. The US’s pending defeat in its war against Iran probably won’t dissuade Trump from attacking Cuba or from attempting a “snatch and grab” of Raúl Castro akin to his military-led kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in January. Indeed, it’s quite possible that Trump would consider Cuba “low-hanging fruit” to distract from his fiasco in Iran. But any sort of military adventure in Cuba would only make the current intolerable situation worse for the Cuban people. If a US assault created mass casualties, how would the injured be treated in hospitals that barely function now? Would a US attack create a refugee crisis as thousands attempt to flee the island to Florida? And how would US naval forces respond, given that preventing “destabilising migration” is one of the National Security Strategy’s aims? Another unknown is how the Cuban people would respond to US aggression. The Cuban government claims that more than 1 million Cuban citizens are enrolled in paramilitary forces that could be mobilised to defend Cuban sovereignty. The situation may not get to that point, but a researcher at the [US Army War College](https://media.defense.gov/2023/Apr/25/2003207978/-1/-1/0/2022.PDF?ref=redflag.org.au) considered the worst-case scenario (from the US perspective) to be “volatile and dangerous”. With that possibility in mind, the [US military, the State Department and the CIA ](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/us/politics/cia-director-visits-cuba.html?searchResultPosition=1&ref=redflag.org.au)have held a series of meetings with Cuban military and government officials. Given the US record of duplicity in the Middle East, it’s hard to know if these are genuine efforts to avoid military conflict or if they are meant to bamboozle the Cubans before a US attack. For socialists, neither possibility should determine how we respond. We start with the proposition that we oppose US intervention in whatever form—from sanctions to war. We oppose any US invasion. We call for an end to the current US blockade of oil deliveries. And we call for an end to the US embargo that dates from the early 1960s. Moreover, if Cubans want to emigrate to the US, we welcome them along with all other immigrants who are targets of Trump’s xenophobia. We don’t take this position because we think that the Cuban government is socialist. Despite its leaders’ sometimes radical rhetoric, it’s based on a state-capitalist economy ruled by a repressive state. Whatever pretences the US uses to justify intervention in Cuba, it has zero commitment to Cuban self-determination and zero care for the lives and living standards of the Cuban people. The US has no right to determine—or even have a say in—the Cuban people’s future. Only Cubans have that right. ### Greens vs Socialists: a response to Jonathan Sriranganathan URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/greens-vs-socialists-a-response-to-jonathan-sriranganathan/ Last updated: 2026-06-11T11:00:51.000Z What’s the difference between the Greens and the Socialists? It’s a common question, one that was the subject of a recent [lengthy blog post ](https://www.jonathansri.com/socialistsvsgreens/?ref=redflag.org.au)by Queensland Greens member and former Brisbane City councillor Jonathan Sriranganathan, “Queensland Greens vs the new Queensland Socialists: How different are they?”, published at [jonathansri.com](http://jonathansri.com/?ref=redflag.org.au) on 4 May. Sriranganathan argues there’s little to distinguish the two parties. “Right now”, he says, “I don’t see the Queensland Socialists as being a fundamentally different kind of political project from the Queensland Greens”. The parties, he points out, ran on broadly similar platforms in the recent [Stafford by-election ](https://redflag.org.au/article/boost-for-lnp-in-stafford-byelection-despite-labor-win-and-a-solid-start-for-queensland-socialists/)(he also notes the similarities between some of the Greens and Victorian Socialists campaign materials for the 2025 federal election). In addition to their similar campaign pitches, he sees the Greens as sharing the Socialists’ focus on building movements for change outside the electoral sphere. > “Messaging-wise, the main distinction between the Queensland Greens and Queensland Socialists isn’t in the policy platforms. It’s that the Socialists are more explicit about their ideological critique and long-term vision ... While the Greens share the Socialists’ insistence that electioneering isn’t the be-all and end-all, they’ve always been vaguer about exactly what kind of system and society they’re aiming for”. On this much, we have some agreement. Where we’d disagree is on how important this kind of clarity of vision and purpose actually is. Sriranganathan prevaricates a bit on this, but the ultimate implication is that the vagueness of the Greens’ vision is a strength: > “Personally, I don’t mind the Greens being more agnostic and open-ended about the long-term destination than the Socialists are. ‘Socialism’ has multiple and competing strains and definitions; hitching your wagon to such a heavily-laden ideological label can be a turn-off for some potential supporters.” Sriranganathan thinks “Greens messaging should be more explicitly anti-capitalist, and offer supporters a clearer diagnosis of exactly why the system is failing”. He just doesn’t want it to be *too* explicit or clear, because it might turn some people away and undermine the Greens’ capacity to be, as he puts it, “a space for political education where less radical members can come on a journey towards a more robust critique of the status quo”. One of the problems with this is that the Greens have never been merely vague or not sufficiently explicit about their opposition to capitalism. The party has, quite simply, never been an anti-capitalist party, and none of its most high-profile figures in Australia have ever claimed that it is or ever will be. Sriranganathan himself cites what he calls “an eternally embarrassing” 2016 [article in the *Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/22/richard-di-natale-says-greens-group-that-wants-end-to-capitalism-does-not-represent-party?ref=redflag.org.au), reporting on the formation of the Left Renewal faction within the NSW Greens—which was an attempt to win the party to an anti-capitalist perspective. In it, Richard Di Natale, Greens leader at the time, voiced his hostility to the faction, saying “of course the Greens do not support the overthrow of capitalism or any other ridiculous notions of the sort”. He went on: “If the authors of this ill-thought \[Left Renewal\] manifesto are so unhappy with Greens policies, perhaps they should consider finding a new political home”. It wasn’t just Di Natale who thought this. The Greens’ historically most defining leader, Bob Brown, shared his hostility. He was appalled, in particular, at the section of the Left Renewal statement of principles that outlined its opposition to “state-mediated oppression in all its forms” and recognition “that violent apparatuses like the police do not share an interest with the working class”. Brown [told the *Guardian* ](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/23/bob-brown-says-left-renewal-an-anti-greens-group-that-may-be-a-hoax?ref=redflag.org.au)that the faction’s “central tenet of rejecting the state and the police is also a rejection of the Greens charter, which upholds the right of citizens to law and order”. Sriranganathan points out that “after Adam Bandt became the federal leader in 2020, he more clearly positioned the Greens as a left-wing social democratic party”. But Bandt’s break with the more conservative stance of previous party leaders like Brown and Di Natale only went so far. In an [interview published in *Jacobin* ](https://jacobin.com/2021/09/australia-greens-green-new-deal-gnd-elections?ref=redflag.org.au)in 2021, he was asked, “Do you think the party needs to shift in the direction of democratic socialism?” His response was (an albeit long-winded and diplomatically phrased) “no”. “I’ve always been of the view”, Bandt said, that “as we fight to tackle the climate crisis and the inequality crisis, we should be campaigning side by side with socialists”—the clear (and welcome) implication being that while the Greens themselves aren’t socialists, they’re happy to work alongside them. In similar terms to Sriranganathan, he went on to downplay the importance of clarifying the party’s politics, saying: “I think people can judge the merits of our platform and decide how they want to label us”. One indication that Bandt’s own political worldview may be more similar to Di Natale and Brown’s than Sriranganathan might wish to admit, is his post-parliamentary move to a highly paid position at the commanding heights of the liberal-NGO world, as chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF). The ACF is on the right wing of the climate and environment movements, with a track record of more or less outright greenwashing. It claimed in 2015, for instance, that the Paris Agreement on climate change “signals the end of the fossil fuel age and will turbo charge the clean energy revolution already underway”. (The agreement was correctly dismissed, at the time, by former NASA scientist and “father of climate change awareness” James Hansen as “a fraud ... just worthless words”.) So much for the party’s main leaders. What about Sriranganathan’s claim that the political openness of the Greens enables them to take “less radical members ... on a journey towards a more robust critique of the status quo”. If this were the case, you’d expect that in the 34 years since it was founded as a nationwide party, it would have thrown up more than a single somewhat serious and organised “anti-capitalist” challenge to the party’s dominant, mildly social democratic and small-l liberal political culture (the previously mentioned NSW Left Renewal faction, which survived only a few years before succumbing to the internal backlash it provoked). Has even a single, prominent socialist activist in Australia emerged from the Greens? Someone who doesn’t just talk about the kinds of partial demands—“tax the billionaires”, “make public transport free”, “build public housing” etc—that can admittedly be found on both Greens and Socialists election material, but who is prepared to publicly and consistently make the case for socialism? I can’t think of one. Sadly, the pipeline generally runs the other way: socialists who grow tired of being on the margins and working tirelessly for years while making little headway throw up their hands and “retire” into the Greens. The failure (or non-existence?) of Sriranganathan’s radicalisation pipeline is particularly notable given the wealth of resources the Greens *could*, if they wanted, devote to it. The Greens have more than enough money to organise socialist education programs and material the likes of which the Socialists could only dream of. And they’ve got no shortage of paid staff who, were it deemed a priority, could act as emissaries and organisers for their (hypothetical) anti-capitalist views—perhaps, as Sriranganathan himself suggests, starting with the university campuses. Instead of doing anything like this, though, it appears to be pretty uncontroversial within the Greens that the vast bulk of their financial and staffing resources should be focused on the operations of their electoral machine. This relates to the question of the similarities between the two parties’ election campaign materials. You could nitpick about how similar they actually are. I’d argue that Victorian Socialists’ materials (which, as the party’s elected communications director, I help produce) are consistently more radical than those put out by the Greens. Wherever we might land on that question, however, this much is certain: the kinds of partial demands put forward on such materials are much more central to the Greens’ identity and politics than they are for the Socialists. We have an entire Marxist worldview and hundreds of years of socialist history to draw on. The Greens? They’ve got “put dental into Medicare” and similar demands and slogans, and not much else besides. They may occasionally talk about “system change”, but they don’t have a worked-out theory of the system or the means by which it could be changed. Nor do they have anything much resembling a genuine “Greens tradition” of collective action and organising outside of the electoral sphere—particularly within the workers’ movement, which socialists regard as the primary sphere from which any genuine “system change” could arise. It’s significant in itself that the word “socialist” appears prominently on all Socialists campaign material, whereas (correct me if I’m wrong) it has very rarely, if ever, appeared on Greens material. Sriranganathan presumably sees this as a positive. The words “socialist” and/or “socialism” are both, as he points out “heavily-laden ideological label\[s\]”. But while they may legitimately be described as words with significant *baggage*, they may equally be regarded, positively, as words that provide political *ballast*. Slogans like “capitalism is killing our future, vote socialist”, which featured prominently in the Victorian Socialists’ campaign for the 2022 state election, gesture to a political horizon well beyond whatever particular set of partial demands are being put forward. The final thing I want to address is Sriranganathan’s professed “scepticism towards Socialist Alternative”, which he admits “could be colouring my analysis of the Queensland Socialists”. As the article goes on, this scepticism is foregrounded more and more. Among other complaints is his claim that the group aims “to insert a vanguard of revolutionary socialists into any emerging political force to steer it. Thus SAlt organisers frequently create or co-opt groups like Students for Palestine, Students for Climate Action \[presumably he means [Uni Students for Climate Justice](https://www.facebook.com/unistudentsforclimatejustice/)—Students for Climate Action appears to be an [American group](https://s4ca.org/?ref=redflag.org.au)\] etc. whenever there’s growing public concern about an issue”. There’s a few things to unpack here. First, it’s notable that neither of the campaign groups named by Sriranganathan were “co-opted” by Socialist Alternative—they were both created by us. There’s nothing sinister at work here. Establishing single-issue campaign groups of various kinds has been the bread and butter of the socialist movement since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The Communist Party of Australia, famously, had a whole array of them, providing an entry point into radical politics and organising for people who are primarily concerned with a particular injustice. Nor have the various groups established by Socialist Alternative over the years been fly-by-night operations opportunistically relating to momentary “public concerns”. Students for Palestine (SfP) was [established in early 2009](https://redflag.org.au/article/why-we-started-students-for-palestine-15-years-ago-and-what-we-achieved/), in response to Operation Cast Lead—an Israeli assault on Gaza that killed more than 1,500 people in the course of three weeks. This was at a time when the Greens’ policy on Palestine concerned itself more or less equally with both Palestinian and Israeli “rights and aspirations ... to live in peace and security in their own independent, sovereign states”. The Palestine solidarity movement was, at the time, almost exclusively composed of Palestinians themselves and their supporters among Arab and Muslim communities, First Nations activists like Gary Foley and, alongside them, socialists. Greens MPs were sometimes reluctant to speak at rallies for fear of being seen to associate with “extremists”. Socialists, in contrast, were (as we [long had been](https://x.com/OlleyJam/status/1870322830438797773?s=20&ref=redflag.org.au)) centrally involved in the hard work of organising and protesting for Palestine, with many of our comrades being [attacked by police and arrested](https://electronicintifada.net/content/australias-repression-bds-movement-coordinated-israel/10247?ref=redflag.org.au). The leading role played by Socialist Alternative (and Socialist Party) members like [Josh Lees](https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/socialist-activist-and-serial-propalestine-protester-josh-lees-launches-political-party/news-story/b25795acebc0099c3a1311b9f3822760?ref=redflag.org.au) in Sydney’s Palestine Action Group and [Omar Hassan](https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzDZStjr4gw/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==) and [Jasmine Duff](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUp0G8aEmfh/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==) in the Melbourne Palestine solidarity campaign, is a reflection of the group’s decades-long track record of organising in this area. In the years since 2009, SfP has continued to work tirelessly—both on and off campus—to raise awareness about Israel’s crimes and the Australian government’s complicity. One of its founders, Socialist Alternative National Executive member Vashti Fox, subsequently wrote a book, [*The Story of Palestine: Empire, Repression & Resistance*](https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/the-story-of-palestine-empire-repression-and-resistance?ref=redflag.org.au), aimed at providing an accessible general introduction to the history and politics of the Palestinian liberation struggle for an Australian audience. And in the context of the escalation of Israel’s genocide since October 2023, SfP has been an absolutely central part of the movement, organising (among other things) the bulk of the university Palestine encampments in 2024 along with [student referendums on Palestine](https://youtu.be/ozskma2Zxyc?si=NK2iROyjTAkaUgEn&ref=redflag.org.au) that involved thousands of students across Australia. The Greens’ gradual shift to a more forthright pro-Palestinian position is welcome. The stand taken by many of its leaders against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and their refusal to be cowed by the avalanche of attacks from Zionists (including, before they mostly left the party, those within the Greens) and other pro-Israeli sections of the media and political establishment, has provided a significant boost to the cause. But if we must throw around accusations of bandwagon jumping here (personally I don’t much mind what particular individuals’ or groups’ motivations for getting involved are, so long as they’re contributing in some way), it’s certainly not Socialist Alternative, or socialists more generally, that most fit the bill. Uni Students for Climate Justice wasn’t sustained for as long as SfP—the period of its most intensive activity was cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying lockdowns. But again, there was nothing sinister about what it aimed to achieve. It was conceived as providing a space for more radical politics within a broader climate movement that was led (with the [partial exception of Extinction Rebellion](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6939/)), by moderates. The group’s utility was demonstrated most clearly in January 2020, at the height of Australia’s bushfire crisis, when—in defiance of massive pressure applied by the government and more conservative forces in the movement, who were concerned about drawing police resources away from immediate “relief efforts”—it organised [tens-of-thousands-strong anti-government rallies](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-10/bushfires-australia-protests-nationwide-sack-pm-scott-morrison/11857556?ref=redflag.org.au) across the country. It’s a shame, in retrospect, that it couldn’t be a greater counterweight to organisations like School Strike 4 Climate, whose [more conservative approach](https://redflag.org.au/article/school-strike-4-climate-being-killed-conservatives/) contributed to the decline of the movement, and the capacity for Labor to put the issue to bed by passing (with the support of the Greens) its version of the more or less completely useless “safeguard mechanism” in 2023\. The climate movement is still yet to fully recover from this setback. Movement organising is messy and contested. Mistakes will be made, and animosities generated. But abstaining from active participation in these spaces, either by not being there at all or, in the case of members of political organisations, being there only “as individuals” and not as people (openly and democratically) arguing for particular perspectives on how the movement can go forward, isn’t a virtue—as Sriranganathan seems to suggest. It’s to use movements more as a political prop or a signal of personal virtue than as a genuine avenue for winning change. Greens MPs are happy to speak at rallies for Palestine and other issues, and to use those speeches to generate sound bites for their social media accounts. But how many Greens leaders have consistently participated in the actual work of organising such rallies? How many have risked making enemies of those with differing views in order to win people to a perspective they believe puts the movement in the best position actually to win change? As Victorian Socialists communications director, I sometimes envy the Greens’ “hands off” approach to movements, which allows them to avoid becoming embroiled in often heated controversies about this or that protest tactic or similar activist issue. But I recognise that for a party that genuinely aspires to root itself in “really existing” cultures of resistance, you have to be prepared to cop the flak that may sometimes arise from that. Finally, Sriranganathan expresses concern about the significant role of what he disparagingly refers to as Socialist Alternative’s “fairly small and insular vanguard” within the broader Socialists project. He worries that “this might not be a good foundation for crafting messages and campaigns that appeal to your average worker or pensioner”. This is a slightly odd thing to raise for someone who has just argued at length that the Socialists’ “messages and campaigns” are essentially the same as the Greens’. Putting that aside, though, my main counter would be, simply, that despite (or one might say, because of) the central role played by Socialist Alternative members in the party, it’s going pretty well so far. Since its foundation in 2018, Victorian Socialists have consistently won much bigger votes than anything else achieved by socialists in Australia for generations. Every election we have run in so far, our vote has grown. In some working-class electorates in Melbourne’s north, we’ve [beaten the Greens](https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results/results-by-district/thomastown-district-results?ref=redflag.org.au). And [the results achieved in South Australia ](https://redflag.org.au/article/sa-socialists-make-a-splash-in-state-election/)and other places we’ve run since our nationwide expansion indicate the potential for this to be replicated elsewhere. Could the Greens move in a more explicitly anti-capitalist direction? Possibly. But that would require a membership that was prepared to wage a serious fight. Perhaps Sriranganathan sees himself as doing that. Unfortunately, there’s little sign that a few critical blog posts will do the trick. What would be needed, as a start, is for anti-capitalists in the Greens actually to get organised—for a renewal, as it were, of Left Renewal. To the extent there are people in the Greens who want to do that, all I can say is: good luck. If you were to succeed, it would be a positive development in Australian politics, and there may then be more justification for Sriranganathan’s claim that there is no “fundamental difference” between the Greens’ and the Socialists’ respective projects. As it stands, however, there is a difference. So we have a simple argument: socialists ought to be in a socialist party. We have now established one with more than 5,000 members nationwide. There are certainly differences of opinion in our party. But those disagreements are among socialists who fundamentally agree that we need to build both the socialist and working-class movements. Those goals would be furthered if we had even more socialists organised in the party. To that end, we think that socialists in the Greens—and the Labor Party, for that matter—should [join us and fight together](https://www.socialists.org.au/?ref=redflag.org.au). ### The concerns of Gen Z women are legitimate—sexism means no-one cares URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-concerns-of-gen-z-women-are-legitimate-sexism-means-no-one-cares/ Last updated: 2026-06-11T11:00:36.000Z Conservative UK rag the *Telegraph* is worried about young women. In her [article](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/16/greta-thunberg-aoc-radicalisation-of-young-women-femospher/?ref=redflag.org.au) “Forget the manosphere. It’s angry Leftie women we need to worry about”, Rowan Pelling speaks of the concern she feels as a mother of boys and auntie to nieces: > “On both sides of the Atlantic, polling shows young women are far more likely to skew Left than their male counterparts. It’s fair to say this emerging female cohort seems to live in ceaseless dread and fury of fossil fuels, Elon Musk, toxic masculinity, TERFs and neo-Nazis.” This dread and fury are, for Pelling, not a reasonable reaction to well-documented environmental destruction, a rise in authoritarianism and high rates of sexual assault, but the result of the “sewer-tide of social media and fake news” leading credulous young women astray. Pelling is concerned that the anger and misandry are so out of control that they are affecting—horror of horror—women’s desire to procreate, in contrast to her more “baby-positive” nephews. Pelling’s solution is a *Love Island* twist, where young women are put on an island with soldiers and marines—a stomach-churning proposition given the high rates of [sexual assault in militaries](https://defenceveteransuicide.royalcommission.gov.au/publications/final-report-volume-3?ref=redflag.org.au)—in the hope that they will realise that conservative, strong men are actually suitable love interests. Inanity notwithstanding, Pelling is pointing to a real social trend; young women are more likely to be left wing than both their male and older counterparts. [In Australia](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-29/vote-compass-shows-gen-z-women-shifting-left-federal-election/105213284?ref=redflag.org.au), 67 percent of young women described themselves as left leaning, compared to 50 percent of young men (still a very large proportion). While young men (18-28) are still more likely to vote for Labor than Liberal than their older counterparts, they are lagging behind Gen Z women. Young women are four[ times more likely](https://freshwaterstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/Freshwater-Strategy-Mind-the-Gap-Gen-Z-Voters-Research.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) to view Trump negatively than boys, with a 61-point disapproval rating for the female cohort. In the US, [Gallup polling shows](https://19thnews.org/2026/05/gen-z-politics-gender-divide-in-schools/?ref=redflag.org.au) that the number of 18 to 29-year-old women describing themselves as “liberal” had increased from 28 percent to 40 percent between the late 1990s and 2023\. Young women are more likely to care about social issues such as the climate crisis, health care, feminism and anti-racism than men, according to polling in both Australia and the [UK](https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/polling/2026/04/revealed-the-new-radicalism-among-young-women?ref=redflag.org.au). The right-wing media mock young women like Greta Thunberg and Grace Tame for standing up for these positions and not fawning before the powerful, and they dismiss those who admire them as brainwashed by fake news and social media algorithms. But it is a credit to Gen Z women that, in the face of an increasingly dire, violent and irrational world, they have chosen to respond rationally and with humanity. The issues they are concerned about are pressing and real: the climate crisis is accepted and documented by the vast majority of environmental scientists and organisations like the United Nations. The gap between women and men in terms of pay and working conditions, housing, assets and violence and abuse is likewise a verifiable fact. It is the Murdoch press and right-wing ideologues who try, in the face of science, statistics and logic, to argue that climate change is not real and feminism has gone too far. It is the likes of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong who claim that genocide is actually self-defence and opposing it antisemitic bigotry. These are the real proponents of fake news aimed at misinforming young people, and they have an army of Trump-loving tech bros to help them. Far from being “female malcontents” with “apocalyptic pessimism”, young women are simply choosing decency over capitalist propaganda. And politicians, columnists and the powerful hate it. In [the article](https://www.newstatesman.com/cover-story/2026/04/meet-the-angry-young-women-why-young-women-dont-want-to-date-me?ref=redflag.org.au) ridiculed by Pelling, Emily Lawford for the UK *New Statesman* interviewed some of these young women who are at the forefront of left-wing and progressive politics. Many of these women are involved in activism, both online and in the real world, and feel despair at the state of the world. One woman, Anna, spoke of the experience of attempting to get disability support radicalising her. “There is this real sense of panic and hopelessness”, she said about politics. “We have policies that aren’t looking after us. We have a government that doesn’t seem to give a shit if genocide happens.” For many of the women interviewed, watching Israel’s genocide in Gaza, backed by the West, was a radicalising experience. Involved in the Gaza solidarity encampments, attending protests and organising fundraisers, these young women are part of a cohort globally who care about social issues, and who feel overwhelmingly negative about capitalism. Only 17 percent of young women responding to polling for the *New Statesman* had a positive view of capitalism. One interviewee, Phoebe O’Brien, described why she’s a revolutionary: “I want systemic change. I don’t want to exist within these same systems. I want to be an instrument of the revolution”. Many of these young women don’t feel negative only about the system; they also feel negative towards young men. There’s a feeling that their male counterparts understand these social issues less and care less about women and changing the world. This isn’t helped by the fact that at the same time young women are ridiculed for their political opinions, they are implored to “understand” the misogyny of young men struggling with their masculinity and who are drawn to rape-promoters like Andrew Tate. According to the [Lowy institute](https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/young-men-are-lurching-right-worldwide-australia-immune?ref=redflag.org.au), the political gender divide is due to young men “feeling scrutinised and sidelined, seeing few champions for their anxieties about status, purpose, and financial security”. The double standard is obvious: men’s ideas have legitimate roots, women’s reflect vacuous stupidity. But it is worth recognising that the shift in politics among young people is trending generally in a leftwards direction. Not just young women, but young men too are turning against the system in greater numbers. According to [research](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/10361146.2026.2628155?needAccess=true&ref=redflag.org.au) conducted by Intifar Sadiq Chowdhury into Australian young people’s political views, “The widening of the gender gap, then, is driven not by polarisation but by women moving leftward at a faster pace—or men doing so more slowly—rather than a true divergence”. Gen Z women are showing us that there is hope. We owe it to them to give organisational expression to their political ideals and to stand against the patronising right-wing press that seeks to push them down. ### One Nation breaks ground in Fremantle, but not without opposition URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/one-nation-breaks-ground-in-fremantle-but-not-without-opposition/ Last updated: 2026-06-02T04:46:21.000Z One Nation has established a new branch in Fremantle, its first in Western Australia outside a primarily rural area. The first branch meeting was held on Saturday 30 May and was protested by the WA Socialists, who wanted to send a message that migrants are welcome in Freo, racists are not. The launch of the new branch was not publicly advertised, but someone leaked the location a day before the meeting. WA Socialists then made the snap decision to protest the event at the Fremantle Bowling Club. Chants of “Pauline Hanson go to Hell, take your racists there as well!” and “Go home racists, go home!” met the small handful of well-to-do One Nation members coming through in dribs and drabs. Several locals joined the demonstration, outraged that such an event would be taking place on their own street. WA Socialists campaign director Alexis Vassiley told *Red Flag*: > “We protested to send a message that Muslims are welcome, migrants are welcome, all of the people One Nation scapegoats and demonises are welcome. Racism and bigotry are not. The Liberals ape her policies, Labor shakes hands with her and the media gives her dream coverage. So it’s up to parties like WA Socialists and grassroots activists to stand up and fight back.” If the left and working-class movement has a home in Perth, it’s Fremantle. Vassiley spoke about its legacy: > “Fremantle is a city with a rich working-class and anti-racist history. One of the malls is even named after the communist unionist Paddy Troy. And it was built by migrants. One Nation isn’t welcome here.” The docks have been the site of many militant workers’ actions, including strikes against war and in solidarity with the Indonesian struggle for independence from Dutch colonialism. The Esplanade still hosts one of Australia’s largest annual May Day marches. The fact that One Nation chose Fremantle, of all places, to establish its first urban branch in Perth is a sign of their confidence and momentum. It certainly will not be the last place either: One Nation’s website declares an intention to establish branches in every federal electorate in the country. The day was won by the WA Socialists, but unfortunately, making opposition known outside a single branch meeting won’t be enough to stop Pauline Hanson’s rise to the political mainstream. There will be more new branches, and polling consistently demonstrates that One Nation has become a major player in the electoral sphere. The [most recent DemosAU poll](https://demosau.com/news/one-nation-leads-alp-and-coalition-as-voters-sour-on-budget/?ref=redflag.org.au) suggested that if a federal election were held right now, One Nation would become the second largest force in Parliament, with up to 58 seats in the House of Representatives. The Socialist Party around the country is building an anti-racist and anti-capitalist group against Hanson and against the status quo of Australian capitalism. WA Socialists plan to protest Hanson when she visits Perth this month as well. --- *WA Socialists will be protesting Pauline Hanson at 5:30pm on 10 June, meeting outside Midland Train Station. Follow WA Socialists on Instagram* [*@wa\_socialists*](https://www.instagram.com/p/DY6ZZyvjs6N/?ref=redflag.org.au) *for updates.* ### Australian activist speaks about flotilla experience URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/australian-activist-speaks-about-flotilla-experience/ Last updated: 2026-06-04T02:57:50.000Z On 18 May, hundreds of activists sailing to Gaza as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla were abducted and imprisoned by Israel. The activists were in international waters when they were intercepted. Inside Israel’s notorious Ketziot prison, activists were beaten, forced into stress positions and shot with rubber bullets. Reports say some activists faced electric shocks and sexual abuse. This sort of brutality is standard treatment for Palestinians in Israeli prisons—and often much worse. Currently, 10,000 Palestinians are detained in Israeli jails, including thousands who face imprisonment without charge or trial. Video footage of Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir taunting the imprisoned flotilla activists brought attention to the violence and barbarity that run rife through Israeli politics. Neve O’Connor, a Melbourne student and support worker, was one of eleven Australian activists imprisoned by Israel. She spoke to *Red Flag* about the experience. ### **How did Israel intercept the flotilla?** The first time they intercepted our ships, it was at night with a lot of secrecy, whereas this one was in broad daylight. It was a flagrant violation of international and maritime law, done and conducted in the middle of the day. You could see every single one of the soldiers heavily adorned with weaponry. Guns, flashbangs, handguns, tasers, every single weapon you could imagine. It was crazy how heavily armed they were, given that we were on a nonviolent mission. The moment you set foot onto those Israeli prison boats, you are subjected to violence and deprivation of humanitarian rights. It is a language that Israel is well versed in, and it seems that violence is the only way they can communicate. I saw people being shot within five metres from where I was standing. There were beanbag pouches filled with rubber shrapnel fired directly into people’s legs; they threatened us with water cannons. They denied us access to water, food and protection from the elements. On the first kidnapping, we had mattresses but no blankets. On the second kidnapping, we had no blankets, no mattresses. We were crammed into these shipping containers so tightly that if one person rolled over, everyone had to roll over. It was a constant barrage of violence and brutality. ### **Millions of people have seen the videos of Itamar Ben-Gvir overseeing the abuse of imprisoned flotilla activists. What did you experience while being detained?** When we were processed from the prison boats to the immigration yard, we were put in stress positions for over an hour. It’s difficult to fully articulate just how painful and all-encompassingly uncomfortable this is, particularly for those of us who had our hands zip-tied behind our backs. The point of putting people in the position is to put them under stress: you respond immediately. You get nauseous, you’re on the precipice of passing out. Some people reported seeing stars because they were in so much pain. People around us were crying out for help. One of the most harrowing moments of my entire mission was when we were sitting in these stress positions in the immigration tent. They would play the Israeli national anthem on repeat on a loop. People were screaming from the amount of pain they were in, but also because Israeli immigration officers would just start descending on people and they would beat them up and brutalise them even further. You never knew which one of your friends was about to be taken out to be shot or taken out of the prison yard to be beaten in a shipping container. You could hear the screams of your friends intermingling with the national anthem, and the soldiers, laughing, were turning it up and giggling along. They were so joyful in the face of such callous cruelty that they were inflicting. Because each step of our mission was so imbued with the hope of Palestinian liberation, though, even when I was going through one of the most horrible things of my life, you just had to sit there and reflect and think of how much pain Palestinians would’ve had to endure in that moment. For them, there are no cameras, there is no protection from a government, and there is no embassy flying out to meet them in a couple of days. They have to withstand the full brunt of Israel’s violence on their own. ### **What do you think about the way the Australian government responded?** The way that Labor has responded is so typical of the government. Totally weak-willed. I was not shocked that \[Prime Minister\] Albanese didn’t speak out, and I was not surprised at his and \[Foreign Minister\] Wong’s silence because this has been their legacy. This has been the stain they have left on Australia’s history. They have actively engaged with, benefited from and supported a genocide once again. They’ve shown total apathy to the Palestinians facing genocide. It’s disgustingly disappointing. I’m so enraged by the fact that we, as ordinary civilians, are forced to sail and forced to put ourselves in the line of fire, at immense personal risk, while our government is too weak-willed to stand up and oppose a genocide. It would appear there is no act heinous enough, there is no crime brutal enough, and there is no violence dominating enough for Australia to sanction Israel. If it wasn’t enough that Israel is actively complicit in genocide, our own government doesn’t even care when its own citizens are brutalised. We know the government is perfectly capable of sanctioning apartheid regimes: we did it in South Africa, and Australia currently has more than sixteen active sanctions against different countries acting in violent ways. It shows that they are capable, but just not capable when it comes to Israel. It’s appalling and sickening, and I will continue to speak out against and hold Anthony Albanese accountable until he pays for the complicity in these crimes. ### **What motivated you to sail on the flotilla, and why do you think it matters that people keep fighting for Palestine?** The decision to join the mission was simultaneously one of the most complex I’ve made, but also the simplest. I decided to stand up, since our government is not. Our government is absolutely complicit and dismissive of those who are standing up for Palestine. So it was actually an easy decision to go. If there were a mission tomorrow, I’d go again. With immense trepidation, now knowing the violence of Israel firsthand, I would still go regardless because Palestine is still not free. Palestine is still not liberated from the tyranny of Israel’s abuse. At the very crux of this issue, anyone with a semblance of humanity and compassion should be appalled by the brutalisation of Palestinian people and of occupied people everywhere. This mission was not just for the Palestinian people; it was for people all over the globe suffering under the tyranny of imperialism. It matters to keep fighting because so many roads of abuse and tyranny lead back to Palestine. The fact is that Palestinians have shouldered the brunt of their own advocacy for generations, but the world is finally waking up and joining them in their mission for solidarity. That should be so inspiring to everyone. It was deeply inspiring for me. At the core of who we are, we should be morally affronted by the horrors of genocide. And we all have a right to stand up and say, this is not enough, this is not okay, and it will not be done in my name. ### Whingeing slobs run the country URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/whingeing-slobs-run-the-country/ Last updated: 2026-06-04T02:54:44.000Z Australia: renowned for being home to lovable, lazy, slow-moving slobs. The Japanese, in particular, can’t get enough of our koalas. But another species populating these shores is far less endearing. Most of the people in the [latest *Australian Financial Review* Rich List](https://www.afr.com/rich-list/the-rich-list-used-to-be-millionaires-now-almost-all-are-billionaires-20260507-p5zury?ref=redflag.org.au) aren’t household names. But they should be. We should encounter them on street corners in towns and cities across the country every week. They should stand there for hours, days even, shaking strangers’ hands and saying, “Thank you”: > “Thank you for doing all the work that enabled us collectively to accrue more than $700 billion. Thank you for the extra $39 billion we piled up just this year—a bit more than the amount cut from disability support over the next four years because we say we can’t afford it. Thank you for electing politicians who ensure that we get richer and richer with every passing minute.” At the very least, you’d think they’d thank their lucky stars that they’ve gotten away with pilfering and exploiting the working class; that they’d just shut up and be content with their enormous privileges. But no. It’s endless complaining that life is just too tough: too much “red tape”, too many restrictions, too much entitlement among workers, too much socialism in government. For them, Australia is like a perpetual war against capitalist sensibilities. Sarah Garnham previously detailed [the entrepreneurs’ rebellion](https://redflag.org.au/article/business-community-has-a-big-sook/) against the federal government’s very minor tax changes. But they are just the latest iteration of the whingeing capitalist brigade. Among the most galling are Australia’s richest and fifth-richest people. Has there ever existed a lazier, whinier couplet than Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer? Wealthy beyond all imagination by getting other people to dig up the country’s natural endowment so they can sell what ought to belong to everyone, taking the proceeds for themselves. Yet never missing a minute to sook about how shit the place is that allowed them to become among the most pampered slobs in human history. Not even the Liberal and National parties are right-wing and pro-business enough for them. No, they’ve either got to form their own party, like Palmer, or, in Rinehart’s case, spend squillions backing the odious cane toad Hanson. They’ve got to take out full-page ads in newspapers to cry about the very system that made them wealthy. They’ve got to put out press releases and host conferences about how the country has gone to the dogs for not letting them soak the working class even more than they already have. Rinehart gave [an Australia Day speech](https://www.ginarinehart.com.au/australia-day-is-a-time-for-celebration-2/?ref=redflag.org.au) this year in which she lamented the degradation of society, and looked back longingly for a time when: > “Even pregnant women were photographed manually tilling the soil, and cutting down huge trees with a hand-held, not electric, saw! ... Children would spend hour after hour, milking cows twice a day, turning handles to separate milk from cream, and then, turning more handles to make butter from the cream, collecting firewood, water, and helping with many other tasks.” Imagine how much money this 39-billion-dollar battler could make if only she could send children down the mines and abolish parental leave? Alas, woke has gone mad. Wake up, Australia. Presumably, the good old days included the 1980s when her father, Lang Hancock, could go on TV and [advocate for the sterilisation](https://www.facebook.com/NITVAustralia/videos/connection-to-country-lang-hancock/10154880784112005/) of the “half-caste” Aboriginal people—“who are no good to themselves and can’t accept things”—by doping their water supply. The world would have been better had Lang sterilised himself and spared us his daughter. Gina’s only “skill” was being born into a shithouse family that [fights among itself](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/20/inside-the-bitter-billion-dollar-feud-tearing-gina-rinehart-john-hancock-family-apart-ntwnfb?ref=redflag.org.au) over who should get how much of what should be the common wealth of all. She stumbled into the family business just in time for the biggest mining and resources boom in world history. It is a sob story for the ages. Perversely, though, there’s something to all the whingeing: Australian capitalism really is shit. It must be. How else could these modern-day Marie Antoinettes have gained such privilege and power if not for a totally broken system? In Australian capitalism, those who work the most end up with the least. The slobs who work the least end up with the most—but never tire of sooking. ### Reform UK is the new normal URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/reform-uk-is-the-new-normal/ Last updated: 2026-06-04T02:53:14.000Z On 16 May, 60,000 racists joined a demonstration in London led by far-right agitator Tommy Robinson. Marchers carried wooden crosses and placards [bearing](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/17/arrests-unite-the-kingdom-rally-pro-palestine-march-london?ref=redflag.org.au) the slogan, “Christ is king, fuck Islam”. An unnamed organisation [distributed](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/16/tommy-robinson-tells-tens-of-thousands-at-london-rally-to-prepare-for-battle-of-britain?ref=redflag.org.au) leaflets promising anonymity to prospective members. “In a country saturated with degenerates ... and imported political enemies”, the flyer read, “we are a brotherhood of White Europeans”. This is the muck that is shaping, and is shaped by, the political ascendancy of Nigel Farage and Reform UK. The recent electoral deluge that resulted in Reform gaining more than [1,450 seats](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgz155y9exo?ref=redflag.org.au) across Britain’s local councils was a devastating advance for the party’s momentum. But it was not unexpected. Reform has topped opinion polls in the UK since April 2025, according to PollCheck’s voting-intention [tracker](https://www.pollcheck.co.uk/polls/reform-uk/?ref=redflag.org.au). It became the third-largest party with 14.3 percent at the July 2024 general election—an ominous breakthrough that quickly catapulted Reform ahead in the polls, surging first past the crisis-ridden Conservatives and then ahead of the sitting Labour government. In an article for the *British Politics* journal, Richard Hayton suggests that Reform is also likely on track to become the largest party by membership, with 200,000 members as of February 2025. For more than two decades, Farage has painstakingly built an electoral base for his distinct brand of hard-right British nationalism. This goes beyond the “Trump effect” often cited as the motor for far-right successes around the world. There’s a decidedly home-grown political history behind the rise of Reform that stretches back to the 2016 Brexit referendum, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the mainstreaming of Islamophobia and the splits between the Eurosceptic and the pro-European wings of the Conservative Party from the 1970s. Certainly, Trump being in the White House has accelerated the pull to the right and legitimised all kinds of political filth. Farage’s own racism has become more vitriolic over time, as Joseph Choonara points out in a September 2025 [piece](https://isj.org.uk/hope%5Famid%5Fhorror?ref=redflag.org.au) for the *International Socialism Journa*l. In 2024, Farage rejected the idea of mass deportations when the far-right Alternative for Germany adopted the then-controversial stance, saying it was “a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people”. By August 2025, with Trump’s anti-migrant machine in full swing, Farage was [unveiling](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yk4r5e514o?ref=redflag.org.au) an Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill that promises ICE-style immigration raids, the construction of removal centres in “remote parts of the country” and a target of 600,000 deportations. But Farage and his entire political framework are not just a carbon copy of Trumpism adapted for a British audience. Reform UK (and similar parties around the world) developed from splits within the establishment conservative political tradition and its voter base. Farage himself drifted away from a fourteen-year stint in the Conservative Party as a young man in the 1980s and gravitated towards a circle of Eurosceptic reactionaries, as political scientist Vernon Bogdanor explains in his 2024 book *Making the Weather: Six Politicians Who Changed Modern Britain*. While formally operating outside the Conservative Party, these anti-Europe circles included prominent Tories and overlapped with an extant Eurosceptic wing inside the party. The Eurosceptic right believed the mainstream Conservative project of incorporating the UK into the European economic bloc was a turn away from British imperial ambitions that would hinder entrepreneurial drive. When Farage helped cohere the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in the early 1990s, the unifying ideological factor was not street-level racism. It was the world view of a minority section of financiers, Thatcherites and small capitalists who viewed European integration as fundamentally bad for British business. It was only in the early 2000s that UKIP seized the initiative to launch an anti-immigration campaign for seats in the European parliament. But Farage did not create this racism. Across the Western world at that time, media and political establishments unleashed a wave of Islamophobic chauvinism to justify the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. This translated into massive spending on border “fortification”, immigration controls and increasingly brutal treatment of refugees seeking asylum from the ravages of war. UKIP’s policy of British “independence” now swam with a tide of nationalism and anti-Muslim scare campaigns driven by establishment forces. Farage could argue that separation from the European Union would allow Britain to better secure its borders against the “threat” of immigration. The rising tide of racism and this new angle on Euroscepticism helped UKIP become the second-largest party in the European Parliament at the 2009 elections. The Western ruling classes’ “war on terror” helped Farage turn a fringe, capitalist dispute over trade regulations into a weaponised political strategy. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, mainstream political forces doubled down on racist arguments to deflect anger away from their own austerity programs, wage freeze policies and hollowed-out welfare states. Shamefully, social democratic and reformist parties often led the charge. Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised “British jobs for British workers”, and Labour leader Ed Miliband’s 2015 campaign team went so far as to manufacture official Labour Party mugs emblazoned with the blunt slogan: “Controls on immigration”. Today, Keir Starmer’s Labour enforces “voluntary repatriation” [policies](https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/shabana-mahmood-asylum-seeker-immigration-reform-txpxcm0x9?gaa%5Fat=eafs&gaa%5Fn=AWEtsqd0R6BObsYaBKyLEPozGhU5wbgoG0NLA2f8KSt4-uimrYBm2P860UzYttMrurE%3D&gaa%5Fts=69a975f6&gaa%5Fsig=3axZoruUu-lKX8LGnjM2NmTMpjYOFHPnGdEjNKKqPZxvZUV9ThhrEmrBf9502d62yQan1TKGyM6vPrz0EHnMig%3D%3D&ref=redflag.org.au) that offer financial incentives for non-Britons to leave the country. Starmer warned at a May 2025 [press conference](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-remarks-at-immigration-white-paper-press-conference-12-may-2025?ref=redflag.org.au) that if the government didn’t “take back control of our borders ... we risk becoming an island of strangers”. For their part, the Conservatives have gone even further, with a party spokesperson [suggesting](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/oct/22/deporting-legally-settled-people-broadly-in-line-conservative-policy-kemi-badenoch?ref=redflag.org.au) that legally settled migrants should be deported from Britain if they earn less than £38,700 or claim welfare. The policies and racist admonitions of today’s major parties would have been entirely at home in the 2010 [manifesto](https://general-election-2010.co.uk/bnp-manifesto-2010-general-election/bnp-manifesto-2010-immigration-an-unparalleled-crisis-which-only-the-bnp-can-solve/?ref=redflag.org.au) of the British National Party, an earlier far-right electoral formation active from the 1980s to the mid-2000s. But unlike the current Labour government, the BNP held no seats in the House of Commons, was categorised by academics such as Nigel Copsey as “fascist” and was widely pilloried (even by right-wing tabloids like the *Sun*) for its beyond-the-pale racism. What was once regarded as scandalous is now accepted as regular political terrain in Westminster. With these racist narratives already set in motion by establishment forces, the 2016 Brexit referendum catapulted Farage into prominence as a political personality. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to call a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union was an ill-conceived attempt to manage the Eurosceptic faction within his own ranks. Instead, it provided an unrivalled campaigning opportunity for the anti-migrant and anti-European right inside and outside the Conservative Party. As Bogdanor outlines in *Making the Weather*, a section of the Tory base was already disgruntled with what they regarded as Cameron’s “progressive” turn in the 2010s. To appeal to young urban graduates, Cameron embraced causes such as equal marriage and green energy. Many older, socially conservative Tory voters were repulsed. They found UKIP’s unashamed British nationalism refreshing and were charmed by Farage when he promised a return to old-fashioned Conservatism. When the referendum results delivered a “yes” to leaving the European Union, the Tories ditched Cameron in favour of the recently self-styled Brexiteer Boris Johnson. With the Eurosceptic wing ascendant inside the Conservative Party, Farage receded from the political limelight. Data from political scientist Oliver Heath, released in March 2025, show a clear, oscillating pattern among a large, volatile segment of right-wing voters. Prior to Brexit, there was a defection of hard-right Tory voters to UKIP. By 2019, those voters returned to the Tories under Boris Johnson’s promise to get Brexit done. After a few years of Tory rule, they swung right back to Farage under his new vehicle Reform UK, with roughly 80 percent of Reform’s voters coming directly from the 2019 Tory base. This dynamic has become only more entrenched. YouGov’s recent voting intention [study](https://cdn.persuasionuk.org/May%5F2026%5Felections%5Fpreliminary%5Fanalysis%5F7325311b0f.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) showed one in three remaining English Tory voters planned to switch to Reform at May’s local elections. It’s this realignment of the conservative vote that allowed Labour to sweep into power in 2024—a House of Commons research briefing [shows](https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-10009/CBP-10009.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) Labour’s vote share was lower than that of any other postwar majority government, yet the party secured seats because the right-wing vote was split between the Tories and Reform. This was the darker mechanism behind the cheery narrative of a “landslide” general election victory for Labour. Another myth gaining ground after May’s local elections is that Labour voters are shifting to Reform in big numbers. Reform’s success in traditional Labour seats in the north of England seems to bear this out, but a closer look at YouGov’s statistics shows only 5 percent of Labour voters were considering voting Reform at the local elections. In contrast, 22 percent of Labour’s base was moving to the Greens, while 24 percent of Labour’s 2024 voters were so disillusioned that they were simply planning to abstain. This collapse in Labour’s already low primary vote, and the increasing dominance of Reform on the right, allowed Farage’s party to sweep traditional Labour-voting areas. But this was not due to working-class Labour voters flipping to Reform—they are abandoning Labour for the left-pitching Greens, or shifting into total disengagement from parliamentary politics. Instead, it’s cashed-up capitalists who are lending Farage their increasing support. Ashley Armstrong reported in June 2025 for the *Financial Times* that Reform was hosting a series of events for corporate leaders who wished to “influence policies with a party seen as a real contender at the next election”. This apparently involved a meal with Farage and twenty business advocates, during which they discussed slashing regulation and government spending. Harry Shukman’s [report](https://hopenothate.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/state-of-hate-2025-final-pdf.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) for anti-fascist research centre Hope not Hate outlines Reform’s billions of pounds in funding from millionaire financiers, former Tory donors and old-money English aristocrats. As mainstream parties and sections of capital pull Farage’s politics into the mainstream, they help neo-Nazis like those around Tommy Robinson to recruit in the shadow of Reform’s electoral success. The collapse of establishment conservatism in Britain and the rise of Reform have been slow-motion processes over twenty years, but the same dynamics are playing out much quicker in places like Australia. Farage has set an example for parties like One Nation that aim to carve out a base among former Liberal supporters. In fact, Farage’s machine is providing direct assistance to its Australian counterpart—in April, the *Guardian* [reported](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/apr/17/uk-tory-mp-who-defected-to-reform-advises-one-nation-in-australian-byelection-campaign?ref=redflag.org.au) that Reform UK member and former Conservative MP Tom Hunt was advising One Nation on electoral strategy in the South Australian state election and the Farrer by-election in New South Wales. What is clear is that Reform and parties like it are now solidly established in the landscape of right-wing politics. The crisis and rightward trajectory of capitalism’s major parties are not going away, and neither are the political monsters they produce. Yet Britain also offers a hopeful example for socialists in Australia. The massive mobilisations we have seen on the streets, such as the [half-million-strong anti-fascist march](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2rn03ryz8o?ref=redflag.org.au) in London on 28 March, will not stop the newly normalised far right in its tracks. But they are an indispensable first step. They cohere an opposition and give anti-racists confidence in numbers. We need to build a permanent, radical counterweight that can challenge the far right and the system that breeds it. ### Two years on from the Gaza solidarity encampments URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/two-years-on-from-the-gaza-solidarity-encampments/ Last updated: 2026-06-04T02:51:52.000Z It has been two years since university students across Australia set up Gaza solidarity encampments as part of a global student movement for Palestine. Sleeping in tents to draw attention to Australian universities’ ties to Israel’s genocidal campaign, we confronted university administrations, the corporate media and the federal government. In doing so, we inspired many others. I was an organiser of the Sydney University encampment. I had been a socialist and activist for several years, but the two-month encampment was a steep learning curve; we learned how to run a permanent organising space, how to deal with constant and often hostile media attention and how to maximise the radical potential of the movement. Our encampment would not have been possible without the example set by students in the USA, in particular at Columbia University. We watched as students and their supporters resisted the NYPD’s attempt to clear the encampment by force. Their actions dared us to think and act outside the box, opening up a new form of struggle we had not contemplated before. Socialists in Australia were crucial in spreading the movement. I was doing my weekly grocery shopping on a Sunday night when Shovan Bhattarai, another socialist at Sydney University, called to convince me that we should do what the students at Columbia were doing. I didn’t take much convincing, and the next two days were spent making phone calls and convincing activists from other groups, and sourcing tents and camping supplies. On the evening of Tuesday, 22 April 2024, we launched the camp under the guise of a rally in solidarity with the students at Columbia. Fellow members of Students for Palestine and Socialist Alternative across the country soon followed suit. At the movement’s high point, twelve universities had encampments on their lawns. The first few weeks of the camp were the most frantic and fast paced. From the beginning, we tried to make it as open, democratic and radical as possible. This meant keeping the camp’s focus outwards on those students not yet involved and trying to draw them into the movement. We held almost daily rallies to bring our message to others, and organised countless teach-ins that harked back to the tactics of the anti-Vietnam War movement. These teach-ins educated new activists on the history of Palestine and of other major student movements. Meanwhile, on weekends, we hosted events aimed at the broader community, such as family fun days (involving a harmless children’s rally that was later much maligned by the right-wing press). This approach was informed by the lessons learned from reading about previous occupations and protest camps. We believed that the tendency of these actions to obsess over the internal structures and operations of the camp was harmful. The goal would become perfecting our own slice of utopia, not on developing the collective power that could challenge the system and its institutions. We viewed involving greater numbers of students as the best strategy. We knew that the response of university management and the government would determine our tactics. Perhaps they had learned from their counterparts at Columbia University, because the university decided on a more cautious strategy. This was not out of any respect for student activism or sympathy with the Palestinian cause. It was a calculation that shutting us down might be more trouble than it would be worth. Instead, university managers tried more subtle forms of repression. They suddenly discovered a serious safety risk: gargoyles! With a straight face, they tried to convince us that the gargoyles that adorn the sandstone walls of the Quadrangle were an imminent risk of falling on top of us. Their next ploy was less absurd: exams. Under the cover of ensuring that the end of semester exams could take place, the university began to place severe restrictions on what we could do and when. Finally, they initiated disciplinary proceedings against several leading activists, using kangaroo courts to intimidate us. The university also held aloft a paltry carrot to go with the stick. In return for wrapping up the camp, the university offered to negotiate to meet our demands. These negotiations proved to be an absolute dead end. This was something other encampments came up against too. At Curtin University in Perth, the student union, the Curtin Guild, signed a memorandum of understanding with management behind the back of the encampment. This agreement was a PR win for the university, allowing managers to claim that they had consulted the encampment and reached a compromise pleasing to all sides. Missing from it was any real commitment to divestment or ending research ties with arms companies. This confirmed the argument that socialists made at the time—that negotiations by themselves can never win our side what we want. When meeting with management, other camp representatives thought that moral appeals would sway the vice-chancellor. However, management were well aware of what Israel was doing in Gaza, they simply did not care. No amount of pleading or presenting rational cases would change their attitude. The Liberal Party, pro-Israel groups and the right-wing press were unhappy with the universities’ cautious approach. From the beginning, they waged a campaign of slander and lies against the camps. The then opposition leader, Peter Dutton, went on 2GB radio to compare the encampments to the 1938 *Kristallnacht* Nazi pogrom. Liberal Party education spokesperson Jane Hume claimed, without a shred of evidence, that the camps were “hotbeds of antisemitism”. These claims ignored the presence and support of anti-Zionist Jewish students and staff, and groups such as the Jewish Council of Australia. They were also a way to deflect from the reality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the complicity of Australian universities in that genocide. Supporters of Israel were willing to back these lies with intimidation. The Australian Jewish Association, a leading pro-Israel organisation, published what was in effect an incitement to violence on X: > “It should surprise nobody that Nazi encampments on Australian universities make many people angry. We never condone anything illegal but with the Albanese Govt and university heads missing in action, nobody should be surprised if members of the public take matters into their own hands.” Members of the “public” did indeed “take matters into their own hands”. The encampment at Monash University faced repeated nightly attacks from Israel supporters trying to smash up the camp. At Adelaide University, someone launched firecrackers from a nearby rooftop at the activists in their tents. The corporate media conveniently ignored these actions. In Sydney, the Zionists tried but failed to intimidate us. On 3 May, they called a “March for a Safe Campus”, which gathered a few hundred metres away from the encampment. The rally was a dismal failure, attracting very few students and many more middle-aged men in suits. Our counter-rally was a huge success. Five hundred students, staff and community members assembled to defend the encampment. I even ran into an old primary school friend who worked nearby and had come to the rally before his shift to defend the camp. We were clearly the side with far greater support. The universities, the government and the Zionists were unable to shut down the encampments through repression. Yet they have used their power since to restrict drastically the rights of students to organise politically. Haunted by the spectre of future encampments, nearly every university now has a “campus access” policy that prohibits sleeping on campus or erecting tents. The University of Sydney’s goes even further, banning announcements before lectures, protests inside buildings or that block entrances, and requiring that activists receive approval for holding an information stall. All of this is about narrowing the space for campaigns and protests that challenge the university or our government. So what did the encampments achieve? By themselves, the camps were not able to force universities to divest or cut ties with Israel or the weapons companies that arm it. That demand strikes at the heart of what role our universities perform for the capitalist system. Helping private arms dealers and government militaries perfect the means of destruction is not an erroneous policy; it’s what universities are designed to do. Their purpose also includes defending and legitimising the status quo, so it’s no accident that they so strictly police criticism of our government’s support for Israel and Western imperialism. Nevertheless, the encampments had a momentous impact. At the time, they re-energised the Palestine solidarity movement, creating a focal point for the broader movement. People donated whatever they could: tents, sleeping bags, blankets, spare socks and underwear. We were so overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted to volunteer their time to cook us hot meals that we needed to set up a WhatsApp chat so we could coordinate them all. Workers, high schoolers, or veteran activists from the ’60s and ’70s came and paid the camp a visit and implored us to keep up the fight. The movement created a new layer of Palestine activists. The exhilarating experience of round-the-clock collective action convinced these people to become ongoing activists in the movement. Tobias Hansson, a PhD student and tutor at the time, related how he first found out about the camp because he saw it on the news. “I saw activists from the encampment responding to hostile questions to the media ... and I thought it was the coolest thing ever”, he tells *Red Flag*. “I had felt pretty powerless around everything.” He describes feeling powerless before the encampment, following the genocide in Gaza on social media, but that the camp “really gave me a sense of I’m not just an individual doing my own kind of thing, I’m someone who’s part of a mass movement for Palestine”. After spending nearly every night at the encampment, Tobias had become convinced of the need to be an activist in a more ongoing sense. The way he describes it, the camp was clearly a formative political moment. “I think it changed me fundamentally”, he says, “the way I saw the world, the way I saw my role in the world”. The encampments also convinced some of these activists to become socialists. The fact that Socialist Alternative played such a central practical role in the movement mattered. Yoshi Leung is one of those who became convinced of socialist politics by the encampment. “I had never been to a protest before”, she says, “but I thought, if not now, when?” After meeting some members of Socialist Alternative, who “patiently introduced me to Marxism”, she began to find solutions to the problems in the world. The debates at the camp further convinced her, because, she says, “it was socialist activists who fought the hardest and had the clearest strategy”. This impact extended beyond the confines of Australia. I will never forget the day when we received a photo from Gaza of two Palestinian children who had written on their own tents: “To Australia, we see you and hear you from Gaza”. Movements of international solidarity have always played this role of conveying to an oppressed people that they are not alone. This is doubly important in the case of Palestine when it seems as though every government has forgotten or ignored the people of Gaza. Since the encampments, the student movement for Palestine has continued. Last year, Students for Palestine organised a nationwide student referendum. Five thousand students around the country voted overwhelmingly in favour of cutting ties between our universities and weapons companies and Israeli universities. At Sydney University, the local Students for Palestine chapter has hosted a series of events from rallies to movie nights to forums. A Students for Palestine member and participant of the camp, Ethan Floyd, was on board the recent Global Sumud Flotilla as it tried to break Israel’s maritime siege of Gaza. The fight for a free Palestine, and against all the horrors of the capitalist system, will require more than a few dozen tents on the lawns of Australia’s universities. But our side can only build our strength one campaign at a time. Each one brings new people into the movement and teaches existing activists new skills and lessons. And the struggles of the past can serve as inspiration for those of the future, acting as a beacon of hope in an increasingly despairing world. ### The rich chuck a sook about CGT (+ understanding the middle classes) URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/the-rich-chuck-a-sook-about-cgt-understanding-the-middle-classes/ Last updated: 2026-06-09T05:56:58.000Z Our latest episode is a fun one, responding to the chorus of whingers and sooks from the business class (though they call themselves ‘founders’ and ‘entrepreneurs’), crying about having a few of their tax dodges taken away. We explain why they’re full of shit, why Labor can barely defend their own measures, and how much further socialists want to go in taxing the rich (and expropriating them). In our second segment we explain the Marxist theory of the middle classes. We thought it’d be pertinent given all this petty bourgeois whining! We get into the weeds with this segment, answering important questions like who counts as middle class, why is the petty bourgeoisie the social base of fascism, and how useful is the theory of the “professional managerial class”? ### Want to read more? **Labor’s budget and the ruling class backlash:** - [“Business community has a big sook” by Sarah Garnham in Red Flag](https://redflag.org.au/article/business-community-has-a-big-sook/) - [“So much budget bluster” by Tom Bramble in Red Flag](https://redflag.org.au/article/so-much-budget-bluster/) **The middle classes:** - [“Who’s middle class” by Diane Fieldes in Red Flag](https://redflag.org.au/article/whos-middle-class/) - [Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, volume 2: The politics of Social Classes by Hal Draper](https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/karl-marxs-theory-of-revolution-vol-2-the-politics-of-social-classes?ref=redflag.org.au) (Read this classic ff you really want to nerd out about the Marxist theory of social classes, including the middle classes) ### Get in touch We’d love to hear from you. You can reach Emma and Chloe at [redflagradiopodcast@gmail.com](mailto:redflagradiopodcast@gmail.com) and we welcome feedback! Let us know if you have suggested topics, debates or guests you’d like us to feature. ### Help us out If you like what we do and want to help us get more socialist podcasting in your ears, please become a [Patreon](https://patreon.com/redflagradiopodcast?ref=redflag.org.au)! ### The Left Front in Argentina grows in popularity URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-left-front-in-argentina-grows-in-popularity/ Last updated: 2026-06-02T05:02:11.000Z BUENOS AIRES—In recent weeks, several polls have indicated a sharp rise in support for the Frente de Izquierda y de Trabajadores Unidad (Workers Left Front­ Unity or FITU), a coalition of socialist parties in Argentina. Support has risen from 2.7 percent in the last presidential election to anywhere between 10 and 15 percent in current national polls. In the working-class suburbs of Buenos Aires and among young people, support is likely to be more than 25 percent. Myriam Bregman, the FITU presidential candidate in the 2023 general election, is the most popular politician in the country. Brazilian polling firm Atlas Intel, which was the first to predict recent far-right victories across Latin America, found that Bregman had a 47 percent approval rating among 4,800 surveyed voters. She was the only prominent politician with a net positive rating. The result was confirmed in two additional polls conducted by consulting firms Tendencias and Zentrix. Tendencias also found that more than 23 percent of voters view Bergman and the FITU as the “official opposition” to the government, second only to the main Peronist figure and Buenos Aires provincial Governor Axel Kicillof at 32 percent. This is a huge breakthrough and is creating significant reverberations through Argentinian politics. While the socialist left is stronger in Argentina than anywhere else in the world, it is still relatively marginal. Now, Bregman is on all the mainstream news channels, being interviewed about the FITU program. For the first time in the country’s history, millions of workers are open to supporting a candidate from the socialist left rather than the Peronists, the traditional centre-left party in Argentina. The FITU is no ordinary coalition of socialist parties. The four groups in the alliance are all explicitly revolutionary organisations from the Trotskyist tradition. The program of the FITU calls for the nationalisation, under workers’ control, of the key sectors of the economy and for a “government of workers and the people achieved by the mobilisation of the exploited and oppressed”. “Without a doubt: we are facing an extraordinary opportunity and challenge”, four Argentine socialist intellectuals wrote in an open letter in response to the polls. “In Argentina today, there is the possibility that a revolutionary option will be seen with sympathy by a sector of society that is no longer small.” To understand why this is happening, we have to go back to the current far-right President Javier Milei’s shock election victory. Milei, a media personality with no party machine, rode to power two-and-a-half years ago on a wave of bitter disillusionment with the Peronist government of Alberto Fernandez. Once in government, Milei unleashed a wave of attacks on every front. A savage devaluation of the peso destroyed the living standards of the poor and transferred wealth to the rich. Proposals to attack workers’ rights, education and health were put forward. And like far-right governments around the world, Milei combined all this with a culture war offensive targeting LGBTI people, feminists and the left. He even tried to revive the image of the disgraced military dictatorship (1976-83). Since the election, the struggle against Milei has ebbed and flowed. There have been impressive mobilisations and important campaigns. However, the president has succeeded in many of his attacks. A key reason is the complicity of the Peronists in the National Congress. Several of their politicians provided Milei with the votes needed to get his attacks through the Senate. The Peronists are also the main force in the leadership of the trade unions. They have used that influence to hold back the struggle against Milei, stifling militant activity and calling mostly ineffective actions of their own. When Milei pushed anti-worker labour laws through the Congress, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), the main trade union federation, called a strike without seriously mobilising for it. When the laws went to the Senate, CGT leaders refused to call anything at all. More broadly, the Peronists have promoted the idea that the only way to defeat Milei is to wait until the next election—an approach that repeatedly runs up against the reality that many people remain disgusted by the corruption of previous Peronist administrations. This orientation has been in stark contrast to the FITU, which, on the streets and in the Congress, has stridently opposed Milei in the way many workers believed the Peronist should have done. The situation came to a head a few months ago. Milei’s standing has been undermined by a corruption scandal involving Manuel Adorni, the chief of the cabinet of ministers and a close ally of the president. Milei has refused to withdraw support from Adorni, undercutting his image as an outsider taking on the corrupt elite. Meanwhile, working-class living standards have continued to go backwards because of the high inflation Milei promised to tame. The Peronist leaders, who have moved sharply to the right in recent years, are struggling to hold their disillusioned working-class base. This has created more space for the FITU to grow. In contrast to the Peronists, the FITU has supported every struggle against Milei while also arguing for independence from the Peronist parties. Left-wing electoral breakthroughs are hardly unknown in contemporary politics. In recent years, we have seen Mamdani elected the mayor of New York, the solidification of France Unbowed, the revival of The Left in Germany, and the rise of the UK Greens. In the 2010s, the rapid growth in support for the radical left parties SYRIZA in Greece and Podemos in Spain stemmed from the anti-austerity movements in those countries. And Argentina has long been a country with a sizeable left and higher levels of struggle. What makes the Argentinian situation so different, though, is that the left space is not being filled by moderate bureaucratic forces that just want to manage a reformed capitalist system. Or vague left populists who dismiss revolutionary politics and downplay the class struggle. This time, revolutionary socialists are the ones channelling the discontent of millions of workers into support for their political project. This is a huge opportunity, but it also places a staggering responsibility on the FITU. It is one thing to correctly see the failures of SYRIZA, Podemos and other neo-reformist parties. It is another to show that at least the beginnings of an alternative strategy against capitalism are possible. It is unsurprising, then, that the situation has also intensified significant debates and discussions about the way forward for the FITU. The four parties that make up the FITU are the Socialist Workers’ Party (PTS) of which Bregman is a member, the Workers’ Socialist Movement (MST), the Workers’ Party (PO) and the Socialist Left (IS). Anyone not a member of one of these parties cannot be a part of the FITU, which has no existence outside of the electoral united front. So the hundreds of thousands of people who voted for the FITU even before the recent surge in polling are unable to be members of the organisation—unless of course they join one of its constituent groups. Before the recent polling breakthroughs, the MST had proposed that the FITU be transformed into a united socialist party, open to everyone who agreed with the FITU program, in which each of the four groups, and potentially others, would have the freedom to organise as internal tendencies. The MST considers this task to be all the more urgent now. Sergio Garcia from the MST leadership recently noted in *Periodismo de Izquierda*, a prominent left-wing outlet: > “Already in the previous situation, the need for change was posed, as the Front could not continue in a limited electoral format, stuck in routine and distant from a basic strategy to intervene into the class struggle. Now, in the new situation of a left turn, the urgency of a change is massive.” The MST proposal was not accepted by the other parties of the FITU, and in particular by the PTS. It argued that such a move would dilute the alliance’s revolutionary politics and turn it into something akin to the broad left-reformist parties of Europe. It also points to the not-insignificant political differences among the four parties. The changing situation, though, seems to have generated a greater willingness to explore new ways to transform the revolutionary left into a mass force. “Our position is that the FITU, as a coalition of organisations that agitates and propagates a classist and socialist program, was and remains very positive, but not enough”, explained Emilio Albamonte, one of the founders of the PTS, in an interview for *Ideas De Izquierda*. > “We cannot settle for a coalition of four groups, relatively small, in which we often have no agreement in the class struggle, and which once every two years make electoral political agitation. Our whole discussion is that the new location of the left raises the need both to move towards a revolutionary party of the forefront, making qualitative leaps in that field, as well as in the promotion of the class struggle.” The PTS has proposed forming a new independent workers’ party as the way forward. As a more immediate measure, it supports the creation of popular committees to elect Bregman as president, a proposal also backed by the MST, and a broader layer of non-party intellectuals, cultural figures and social activists. Revolutionaries in Argentina hope that establishing a large revolutionary socialist party is now possible. If such a party could be formed, it could have a significant impact on the class struggle in the country. The Trotskyist parties here have some influence in the workers’ movement, more so than Trotskyists in any other country. However they are still an embattled minority facing a powerful and corrupt Peronist trade union machine. They also often have sharp disagreements among themselves over trade union work—the parties of the FITU even run against each other in some union elections. A united party could find a way to resolve such disputes and create unified left interventions in the unions. A significant breakthrough for the FITU electorally could then feed back into the workers’ movement, bolstering the anti-bureaucratic socialist forces. Having a party with 10,15 or more percent of the vote supporting militant activity in the unions could make a real difference. This is particularly important, as the strength of the trade union bureaucracy makes it essential that there be political intervention to promote workers’ self-activity. Where the debates in the FITU will end up, and whether the FITU will consolidate and build on its success, is anyone’s guess. The country’s volatility also makes it hard to know what will happen next. It is possible that support for the FITU could rise and fall sharply depending on what the other parties do and the broader economic and social situation. The election is likely to be more than a year away—and a lot could happen between now and then. Everyone serious on the Argentinian left knows that the opportunity won’t last forever, and what the FITU does in the coming weeks and months could be decisive. For now, though, an opportunity has arisen to advance the socialist left in a serious way. If that continues, the various positions within the FITU will be put to the test in the real world. Argentina also holds lessons for socialists across the globe. The FITU shows that socialism can become a popular force without abandoning or watering down its revolutionary principles. While Argentina is a particular case, many of the challenges are similar to those the revolutionary left faces everywhere. The Argentinian working class remains highly fragmented and disorganised, with large sections engaged in contract work and precarious labour. Most of those voting for the FITU are not worked-out socialists, let alone revolutionaries. The neoliberal hollowing out of politics and the undermining of class identification have scared the country and played a big role in the rise of the far right here as well. Despite this, it has been possible to carve out a space for revolutionary politics. In the 21st century, there have been social rebellions and political breakthroughs for the left around the world. But the revolutionary left can put itself in a position to seriously intervene in these developments only if it has a base of organised Marxist activists who fight for genuine socialist politics. In Argentina, there are thousands of Trotskyist activists in the various far-left parties. Whatever the weaknesses and debates among these parties, the existence of such forces has made the FITU possible. ### Boost for LNP in Stafford byelection despite Labor win, and a solid start for Queensland Socialists URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/boost-for-lnp-in-stafford-byelection-despite-labor-win-and-a-solid-start-for-queensland-socialists/ Last updated: 2026-05-25T01:08:19.000Z Labor has crawled to victory in the Stafford byelection in Brisbane’s inner north. Labor came a distant second to the LNP on primary votes, but narrowly won the seat thanks to Greens preferences. Despite the victory, this result is a harsh reality check for Labor and an encouraging result for the LNP government. Since the seat was reestablished in 2001, Labor has held Stafford for all but two years. Labor ran on a confected scare campaign about the LNP potentially cutting 93 beds from the Prince Charles Hospital. But with the federal Labor government moving to kick 300,000 people off the NDIS to pay for increased military spending, this campaign rang hollow to many. The LNP experienced a swing towards it, despite being in government at a state level and Stafford being a solid Labor seat. Despite not having the votes to win, the LNP secured more than 40 percent of the vote. This is a significant result given the party’s poor results in urban areas at the 2024 state election and the Liberal Party’s crisis nationally. One Nation chose not to stand a candidate, so there was no test of their support which is surging nationally. This result will put wind in the government’s sails. Premier David Crisafulli has high approval ratings, and is no hate figure like his predecessor Campbell Newman. This is despite the fact that his government is cracking down on the Palestine movement, [expanding racist police powers to harass and jail Indigenous children](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-23/adult-crime-adult-time-passes-qld-parliament/106595642?ref=redflag.org.au), [winding up many of the meagre environmental protections that exist](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/15/lnp-cuts-funding-queensland-environmental-defenders-office-breaking-election-promise-ntwnfb?ref=redflag.org.au) and blocking access to vital healthcare for trans young people. If the LNP gets its way, billions of dollars will go straight into the pockets of developers and tourism companies in the lead up to the 2032 Olympics, rather than hospitals and schools. In a silver lining, the Queensland Socialists have made a splash in their first election campaign, coming fourth in a field of nine candidates with 3.84 percent of the vote. The party’s Stafford candidate was Liam Parry, the first person arrested under the state government’s new laws that criminalise pro-Palestine speech. The Queensland Socialists were starting from behind: due to registration timing issues, the party’s name did not appear on the ballot, instead Parry was listed as an independent. The short turn-around also meant there was limited time to campaign and raise much-needed funds. Nevertheless, the party mobilised more than 100 volunteers for doorknocks and pre-poll campaigning, knocking on more than 8600 doors, or about a third of the electorate in the lead up to polling day. Every one of the twelve polling booths were staffed by Queensland Socialists volunteers on election day, with votes above 6 percent being recorded at three booths, as well as more than 4 percent of the pre-poll vote. The party’s policies of cancelling the Olympics, standing up for Palestine and putting politicians on a workers’ wage were popular with voters. This result is a good start for Queensland Socialists, and a solid basis from which to continue building the sort of socialist movement we desperately need: one that will stand up for civil liberties, against racist law and order campaigns, and for workers’ rights. ### Business community has a big sook URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/business-community-has-a-big-sook/ Last updated: 2026-05-30T06:24:37.000Z “No fair!” the rich brats of Australian capitalism cry. They screech, flail and kick because they believe, like the odious children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that they deserve more treats. Veruca Salt ended up in a garbage chute. Under this Labor government, that kind of justice seems unlikely. The screaming about “tax grabs”, “death taxes”, “class war” and “communism” from the sorry brigade of start-up shysters, investors, small businesses, big capitalists, right-wing journos and politicians is an absolute festival of reaction. You would think from their levels of hysteria that Jim Chalmers had nationalised the banks and repossessed all investment properties and shares. Yet all Labor has done is introduce a [few mild changes](https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2026/may/21/labor-budget-changes-death-taxes-scare-campaigns-truth?ref=redflag.org.au) to reduce some grossly unfair tax concessions designed for the wealthy middle classes. The government is changing the capital gains tax discount from a flat 50 percent to a system indexed to inflation. It is slightly limiting negative gearing—the accounting trick that allows property investors to have operating losses subsidised by the rest of us at tax time. The changes affect only a small layer of the population—and by “affect”, we mean “slightly reduce some of their discounts”. Labor has also imposed a 30 percent minimum tax rate on trust funds. According to the Master Builders Association, [tradies everywhere](https://masterbuilders.com.au/statement-on-the-oppositions-budget-reply-speech-from-master-builders-australia-ceo-denita-wawn/?ref=redflag.org.au) depend on these trusts. Yeah right. Given the [number](https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2026/may/21/labor-budget-changes-death-taxes-scare-campaigns-truth?ref=redflag.org.au) of such trusts, it’s a wonder any capitalists get a look in. Combined, the measures will raise about $8 billion over the next four years. For comparison, Labor is stripping $38 billion from the NDIS while pouring another $14 billion into the military machine over the same period. The [real story](https://redflag.org.au/article/so-much-budget-bluster/) of the budget is what Labor did not do. The government did not raise corporate taxes. It did not tax gas exports or mining super profits. Giant corporations will continue siphoning billions out of the country while paying basically no tax. There is still no inheritance tax, despite Tim Wilson and other conservatives spending the last week foaming at the mouth about “death taxes”. Such taxes *actually* exist in many countries, including well-known communist regimes like [the United States](https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/estate-tax?ref=redflag.org.au). Australia’s rich will continue to live under one of the softest tax regimes in the OECD. And they know it. That’s why the stock market barely blinked. Bond traders did not leap from office windows. There was no capitalist apocalypse on budget night. The ruling class understands perfectly well that Labor remains a safe pair of hands. In fact, the budget contains plenty of goodies for business. The main demand from business owners was a 25 percent reduction in “red tape”; [they are happy](https://www.bca.com.au/our-insights/transcripts/press-conference-with-alliance-business-leaders-parliament-house/?ref=redflag.org.au) with Chalmers’ steps towards this. No Labor government is complete without promising to make life easier for corporations while explaining to nurses and teachers why there is apparently no money for pay rises. So why the meltdown? Because Australia’s wealthy middle classes regard every tax concession as some sort of inalienable human right. This is right-wing campaign. It is a classic example of the alignment of middle-class and capitalist interests in the class war. These people genuinely believe society rests upon the heroic shoulders of landlords with four investment properties in the city and a holiday house on the Mornington Peninsula. They view themselves as persecuted wealth creators bravely resisting the tyranny of contributing slightly more to the society that made them rich in the first place. In the right-wing imagination, the true builders of society are middle-class shopkeepers selling imported rubbish at a markup, landlords watching their assets appreciate while they sleep, and “entrepreneurs” who invent apps that enable low-wage drivers to deliver pizzas faster than ever before. Meanwhile, teachers, nurses and aged care workers are considered expensive burdens. People who build or assemble things are expendable. But someone who owns seven Airbnbs and spends weekends listening to podcasts about “passive income”? Apparently, they are the backbone of civilisation. Forget climate protesters or students who stand with Palestine, the aspirations and virtues of youth are represented by the “40 under 40”—nepo babies and social climbers—who penned a [courageous open letter](https://businessbuildersopenletter.good.do/sign/BusinessBuilders/?ref=redflag.org.au) to the government. Self-described “female founders” have [done the same](https://bit.ly/4urhRlC?ref=redflag.org.au). Underpaid women workers, single mums and pensioners are irrelevant; it is these girl bosses who hold the torch for women’s rights, apparently. Those who use their families and trusts to avoid tax and ensure their offspring never work a day in their lives are hailed as paragons of family values. In the moral universe of Australian capitalism, these are the people treated as the embodiment of the ANZAC spirit. The bedrock of the nation. And let’s not forget, the same people screeching about their *right* to be parasites are often the same ones bleating about migrants having the audacity to access public health services, the same ones saying migrants should be deported, the same ones who defend wars and military spending and demand that working-class people sacrifice for the nation. This tantrum by the entitled is yet another demonstration of the growing confidence and mobilisation of the Australian right. Like all serious right-wing campaigns, it's not led by the average small business owners but by their capitalist backers: conservative media commentators, right-wing parties and sections of capital tied to property and agriculture. Nationals leader Matt Canavan and the agribusiness lobby have been out in force. The outrage machine is whipping up the bases of One Nation, the Liberals and the Nationals alike. The Liberals in particular are having a wonderful time. As a distraction from their humiliating internal and existential crisis, they are able to play one of their favourite sports with gusto: defending rich people from the horror of mild taxation. It allows them to hark back nostalgically to the Howard years—the golden age of property speculation, tax concessions and effortless wealth accumulation for their social base. The Coalition can once again present itself as the party of “good economic management”, meaning excellent conditions for bosses, speculators and parasites. The Liberals initially seemed somewhat surprised by the force of the reaction against the ALP. Opposition leader Angus Taylor dedicated his budget reply speech to outlining more fascistic policies towards refugees and migrants, only to realise a few days later that he could jump on the anti-working-class economics bandwagon as well. It’s been a great week for conservative politics—filled with all their favourite activities. Taylor even found the time to get in a good bout of trans bashing. Labor, too, appears taken aback by the ferocity of the backlash. The government did its homework before the budget, leaking changes in advance and reassuring its capitalist friends that nothing dramatic was happening.But Labor underestimated how fiercely Australia’s privileged layers defend their unearned entitlements. And while the outrage campaign is being driven by the ideological right and its media apparatus, the broader ruling class is perfectly happy to join in. Not because profits are under threat, but because it enjoys reminding Labor who is really in charge. The message is simple: “We’ll tolerate you while the right sorts out its crises and because we cannot yet countenance a One Nation led coalition government. But don’t step out of line.” The irony is that many ordinary people actually support the reforms. Polling shows more support for changes to the capital gains tax and negative gearing than opposition. But workers don’t own the newspapers. They don’t have millionaire columnists screaming on breakfast television every morning. And Labor has given them very little reason to passionately defend either the government or the budget. Why would they? Labor is at pains to display its loyalty to the “aspirational” in our society, to defend its budget on the grounds that it is a) not an attack on the wealthy and b) an attempt to get more people onto the housing market ladder rather than delivering housing justice. Workers will not directly gain anything substantial from these tax reforms. And they are going to continue to be punished by the full tilt ruling-class offensive underway (benignly labelled the “cost-of-living crisis”) that the Labor government will continue presiding over. Let’s be clear: workers are the ones being stolen from. Every day, they are exploited by bosses—every cent in profit is gained through the exploitation of workers. In addition, workers are paying more taxes overall and will continue to do so. They pay income taxes, then a 10 percent tax (the GST) on pretty much everything consumed, plus a range of charges like copayments at the doctors, water and council rates for those who own their house—and skyrocketing rents to landlords for those who don’t—road tolls, public transport charges to private operators, the list goes on. Moreover, real wages are going backwards, and public services are crumbling. Labor refuses to confront the supermarkets, developers, energy corporations or banks engaged in a mass looting operation of the population. The government treats cost-of-living relief as if it were distributing wartime rations. They say, time and again, that inflation and its effects are beyond their control. So most people are understandably cynical and disengaged. The broader political picture matters here. Australia is moving further to the right. Racism is intensifying. The far right is growing. One Nation continues consolidating support. Economic insecurity is growing and society is fragmenting. Meanwhile Labor’s governing strategy has been breathtakingly uninspiring: do as little as possible while faithfully serving empire and business. The government has boosted military spending, backed the US alliance at every turn, supported Israel politically, protected fossil fuel profits and ensured the unions remain firmly sedated. At the same time, Labor attempts to maintain a thin progressive veneer through symbolic gestures and tinkering: the Voice referendum, recognising Palestine statehood while backing Israel’s genocide, criticising One Nation’s racism while preserving the policies that fuel racism in the first place. And whenever the right really starts screaming, Labor crumples. It is already laying the groundwork for backtracking on these tax reforms. We see this over and over. The antisemitism royal commission is a perfect example. The government never wanted it, but capitulated after the right whipped itself into a frenzy. Now, Labor politically owns a grotesque witch hunt aimed largely at smearing Palestine supporters and the political left. This is the essential truth about Labor governments: they occasionally nibble around the edges of inequality while administering capitalism in the interests of the rich. They are not going to stop the rise of the right because they defend the very system producing the anger, alienation and despair that the right feeds upon. And yet the unions, the liberal papers, many NGOs have folded in behind Labor—defending them because they are under heat. The Australian Council of Trade Unions’ [budget response statement](https://www.actu.org.au/media-release/unions-welcome-budget-changes-as-fairer-for-workers-and-young-people/?ref=redflag.org.au) is a disgrace to anyone who considers themselves a fighter for our class. What they should be doing is applying a blow torch from the left: demanding wage rises, public spending and welfare increases. The task of fighting the right falls to the socialist left, to workers and to social movements willing to confront the wealthy parasites currently throwing tantrums over losing the tiniest sliver of their tax privileges. No reorganisation of the tax system will shift the balance back. We need to see a revival of genuine class struggle. We need to match, and better, the class war being waged by the right. The terrible decline of strikes, made worse under Labor state and federal governments, is why the rich have gotten away with [almost unprecedented levels](https://redflag.org.au/charting-the-rise-in-australian-inequality/) of daylight robbery for so long. Because if this budget proves anything, it is that Australia’s rich are just incredibly spoiled. It would be great if the end of this story could be written by Roald Dahl. Unfortunately, we are just going to have to do it ourselves by having a revolution to overthrow the lot of them. ### Itamar Ben-Gvir is Israel URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/itamar-ben-gvir-is-israel/ Last updated: 2026-05-30T06:24:24.000Z > “We have been beaten, every single one of us has been beaten with electric shocks all over our bodies. We have bruises. Many people have broken ribs. Many people cannot walk.” —Paneli Greek activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla Israel’s [assault on the Global Sumud Flotilla participants](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjRwBcbuubU&ref=redflag.org.au) is an international outrage. The Flotilla, designed to break the siege on Gaza and bring much-needed aid to the Strip, was intercepted miles from its destination. The father of one of the Australian activists said he had been in touch with [his daughter Neve](https://redflag.org.au/article/setting-sail-for-gaza-australian-student-speaks-from-the-global-sumud-flotilla/). He related in a message to an Australian Palestine solidarity campaigner: > “She has been beaten regularly and might have concussion. She said she was lucky to be on the boat she was, as on the other boat, the IDF \[Israel’s military\] were brutal. Other participants had broken ribs, jaws and savage beatings. Shooting with rubber bullets \[was\] common. She was shot at, as a group tried to protect people from the Global South who were receiving brutal treatment. She was lucky not to one of the people that was sexually assaulted.” Activists were arrested by the Israeli military in international waters. They were hog-tied and then humiliated by Israel’s fascist security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Surrounded by masked and uniformed officials, Ben-Gvir taunted activists, telling them: “We are the landlords of this land”. In response, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands and Poland summoned Israeli ambassadors and top diplomats to formally protest and demand explanations for the conditions their citizens faced while in Israeli custody. The Australian foreign minister, Penny Wong, said: > “The images we have seen are shocking and unacceptable. We condemn the actions of Israeli minister Ben-Gvir—who Australia has sanctioned—and the degrading actions of Israeli authorities towards those detained.” In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that although Israel has every right to stop “provocative flotillas of Hamas terrorist supporters”, the way Ben-Gvir dealt with the activists was “not in line with Israel’s values and norms”. American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, called Ben-Gvir’s actions a “betrayal of Israel’s dignity”. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar declared that Ben-Gvir “knowingly caused harm to our state in this disgraceful display”. “No, you are not the face of Israel”, Saar wrote. What cant. What hypocrisy. Israel’s norms are genocide. Israel’s values are the industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. There is no dignity in a state whose soldiers shot children in the head. The face of Israel isthe calculated starvation of millions of people. It is the offering of aid and then the shooting of people who try to access that aid. It is the rape of Palestinians prisoners with bottles. Israel is the turning into dust, debris and rubble, kilometres of trees, buildings and homes. Israel is destruction. Israel is imperial warfare at its most naked and brutal. Ben-Gvir might be the most brazen and the most openly fascistic representative of the Israeli state. But he is no aberration from Israel. He is its logical product. A society built on occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing was always going to produce men like him—politicians who delight in humiliation, torture and racist terror. The only difference between Ben-Gvir and other politicians in the Israeli cabinet is that he says out loud what the others attempt to cloak in the language of “security” and “self-defence”. The Australian government’s condemnations are not worth the paper they are written on. The Australian government, and Wong in particular, have spent the last two-and-a-half years either defending Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians or deflecting attention away from their own utter inaction. They have wrung their hands over individual outrages while continuing military ties, intelligence cooperation and diplomatic support for the Israeli state. Wong can denounce Ben-Gvir’s theatrics all she likes, but the Australian government continues to back the machinery that makes such barbarism possible. When Israel flattened hospitals, Australia called for “restraint”. When Israel starved Gaza, Australia issued statements filled with “concern”. When aid workers, journalists and children were massacred, Labor responded with carefully managed condemnations while refusing to impose meaningful sanctions. Now that Western activists have been brutalised and humiliated on camera, suddenly there is outrage in Canberra. Palestinians, of course, have endured far worse every single day for decades. The flotilla activists exposed something important. Not simply the cruelty of Ben-Gvir, but the face of the Israeli state and the cowardice of governments like Australia’s that continue to shield it. The beatings, the torture, the racist taunts and the sexual violence are not unfortunate excesses. They are the methods of a state carrying out genocide. And every government that continues to arm, defend or legitimise Israel shares responsibility for those crimes. ### Japan’s hidden history of anti-imperialist protest URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/japans-hidden-history-of-anti-imperialist-protest/ Last updated: 2026-05-22T08:20:48.000Z Young people singing and dancing, chants of “No war!” and posters reading “Don’t change Article 9” have accompanied tens of thousands of protesters mobilising around Japan since February. The most recent protest was on 3 May, the country’s Constitution Day public holiday. The protests include people of all ages, but what’s notable is that more young people are getting involved. Demands focus on retaining the constitution’s anti-militarist provision amid the reality of growing militarism and imperialist war in the Middle East. The protests began soon after the election of conservative Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, and were motivated by anger at her push to remilitarise Japan. Article 9 of the 1945 constitution renounces war and prohibits Japan from maintaining a military except for self-defence. Conservatives have long wanted to repeal the provision. Japan has a largely unreported history of anti-imperialist protests. With memories of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still fresh, anti-war and anti-imperialist protests peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. These were popular struggles by workers and students in which the revolutionary left played an important role. The protests pushed back against US imperialism and forced concessions from both the US and Japanese governments. At their peak, hundreds of thousands of people marched on the streets and occupied parliament and Tokyo airport, workers went on strike and students occupied their campuses. All the while, protesters faced down violence from police and right-wing thugs. ### **Early postwar protests** Following its World War Two surrender in 1945, Japan was occupied by US-led allied forces. The country soon became integral to US imperialism and its fight against communism in the region. Although its new postwar constitution renounced both war and the creation of a military, Japan, under the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has ruled almost continuously from 1955 to the present, has been tied to US war planning. Protests against the US-led occupation began soon after the arrival of US forces. Initially, people protested for access to food as well as housing, which in major cities had been destroyed in the war and some of which the occupation forces had grabbed for themselves. Within a few years, the US bases and conservative Japanese governments’ collaboration with aggressive US militarism in Asia became the focus of opposition. In 1951, the US-led occupation officially ended, but the US-Japan Security Treaty became active the following year. The treaty granted the US the right to retain more than 2,800 military facilities in Japan (excluding Okinawa, an island chain in the south), some of which were bases housing tens of thousands of US servicemen and women. The US maintained Okinawa as US territory and fortified the islands, using them as a launching pad for B-52 bombers and to store chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. These bases were a crucial US asset in its invasions of Korea and Vietnam, while Japanese industry provided US forces with vital military supplies, transportation, equipment and food. The left played a significant role in mobilising the anti-US bases protests. The Communist Party and its affiliated unions and student organisation kicked off the movement in the early 1950s in opposition to the signing of the security treaty. On May Day 1952, three days after the treaty came into effect, more than a million people demonstrated throughout Japan to oppose it. Four hundred thousand marched in Tokyo. The day is known as Bloody May Day because of the police violence unleashed on the crowd. The protest movement continued, but the struggle against the expansion of a US base near Tokyo in 1955 was the most significant. The planned extension of the base’s runway would demolish Sunagawa, a nearby village, evicting more than 100 farming families, many of which took part in the protest. The Bloody Sunagawa battle and sit-in was popularly supported and was the largest and bloodiest anti-US base struggle of the 1950s. The protest sent a powerful message to the US and the government of the recently formed LDP, a merger of two conservative parties to counter the influence of the left and the union movement. The Eisenhower administration cancelled the base’s expansion and, in 1957, announced US troop numbers in Japan would be reduced by 40 percent. In 1959, the arrested protest leaders were acquitted by the Tokyo District Court on the grounds that the law, the stationing of US troops in Japan and the security treaty were unconstitutional. ### **A rising tide of opposition to the security treaty** The Sunagawa struggle focused public attention on the security treaty, which was due for renewal in 1960\. In response, left groups started to organise opposition. They called protests opposing US imperialist aggression and its increasing militarism in Asia, and against the growing nuclear threat at a time of increasing Cold War tensions. Protesters also opposed the LDP’s unwavering support for the US, which stemmed from its fear of the growing influence of the left and the union movement in Japan. The early protests were mostly organised by left groups, but as the deadline for renewal approached, anger spread to a broader layer of the population. In the lead-up to the June renewal, protests occurred almost daily. Although the government pushed the renewal bill through parliament’s lower house on 20 May 1960, protesters were not deterred. On 10 June, a crowd of more than 10,000, mostly students and young workers, trapped Eisenhower’s press secretary in his car. The protesters were brutally attacked as riot police unsuccessfully tried to release the aide, who had to be rescued by helicopter. The protesters scored a victory when the president cancelled his visit. The movement against the treaty’s renewal continued to grow and draw in wider layers of support. It also attracted increased violence from police and right-wing thugs. Injuries from these clashes and the death of a young student angered people further. On 18 June 1960, the treaty was due to be voted on in the upper house. Crowds, which numbered more than 300,000, gathered early and occupied the area in front of the parliament. At midnight, they got word that Kishi had forced the bill through without a vote. Angry protesters flooded the streets for days and, for the first time in Japan’s postwar history, 5 million workers went on strike over a political issue. The prime minister was forced to resign. From the mid 1960s until the security treaty’s second renewal in 1970, Japan was in constant political ferment. Protests opposing the war in Vietnam and student struggles on campuses over the authoritarianism of university managers blended into protests against the treaty. In 1964, students and workers protested the arrival of US nuclear-powered submarines. In 1965, the Peace in Vietnam Committee was formed by well-known intellectuals with the support of the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and its aligned union federation. The committee opposed the war and the renewal of the security treaty and demanded the return of Okinawa to Japanese control. The anti-war rallies drew in hundreds of thousands nationally from a cross-section of the population. Anti-war and far-left student groups also participated. Students and young workers continued their tactic of blocking Haneda airport in central Tokyo to prevent prime ministers from travelling. And in January 1968, tens of thousands of students, workers and locals protested the arrival of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise at a US naval base in Sasebo, Nagasaki prefecture. Heavily armed police attacked the protest, the images of police violence attracting public attention and support for the demonstrators. The protesters didn’t prevent the arrival of the Enterprise but did force the government to ban subsequent visits by US nuclear-powered aircraft carriers until 1983. In October 1968, hundreds of thousands rallied on International Anti-war Day, and in the following April, 200,000 protested on Okinawa Day. Protests and occupations continued at train stations, US military trains were blocked, and workers in Okinawa went on strike against the island chain being used as a US base. A general strike against the Vietnam War and the treaty’s upcoming renewal on 13 November 1969is estimated to have involved 67 unions and more than 4 million workers. Despite these massive mobilisations, the LDP government pushed through the security treaty’s second renewal on 23 June 1970, but Okinawa was returned to Japan. ### **The legacy of the protests** By the late 1970s, the peak of the movement against US imperialism had passed. For more than three decades, it had been energetic, vibrant and militant and had radicalised hundreds of thousands, especially students and young workers. Hostility towards the US and Japanese governments had created a radical and politicised atmosphere. Although the government renewed the US-Japan Security Treaty, the anti-imperialist and anti-militarist movement had sent a powerful message to the US and Japanese governments. It had forced the cancellation of a proposed expansion of a military base and a reduction in US troop numbers in Japan. It drove one prime minister out of office and forced a US president to cancel his visit. And it halted the arrival of American nuclear-powered submarines in Japan for sixteen years. The various anti-Stalinist left groups had organised, participated and led the protests, but the deep and irreconcilable divisions among them meant they couldn’t unite into a single organisation. These actions created opportunities to build and organise a movement, but many of the revolutionary groups instead focused on confronting the riot police and fighting one another. Only the Revolutionary Marxist faction prioritised building an independent anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist revolutionary party. But it was too small to have a significant impact. Cohering and developing a serious revolutionary left aimed at winning workers and students away from the reformist Communist and Socialist parties might have allowed them to grow and influence the movement. The result was that by the 1980s, no sizeable organisation had been built. Today, the fortunes of the socialist left in Japan are at a low ebb, but there remains a pressing need for resistance to war, US military bases and Japan’s growing defence budget, as well as the attacks on workers’ rights, the expansion of nuclear power and environmental destruction. Japan’s anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-militarist movement of the postwar decades is inspirational and provides valuable lessons in the fight against imperialism. The ongoing and gathering momentum of the current protests is hopeful and could fan the flames of a broader resistance movement. ### WA Labor gives up on emissions targets URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/wa-labor-gives-up-on-emissions-targets/ Last updated: 2026-05-22T08:18:55.000Z The Western Australian Labor government has ditched plans to reduce carbon emissions, according to a [report by the ABC](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-05/wa-government-abandon-interim-zero-emissions-reduction-targets/106632260?ref=redflag.org.au). In 2023, Roger Cook’s government was supposed to legislate interim targets to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions on the way to 2050\. This was going to happen in the Climate Change Bill 2023, which never made it through the state parliament. Now, according to the ABC, that bill will be replaced by the Clean Energy Powerhouse Bill, which has no interim emissions reduction targets at all. Instead of reducing carbon emissions, the new bill would shift the goalposts by setting targets for expanding carbon capture and storage, “green exports” and renewable energy generation. Speaking in response to the ABC report, Cook tried to spin it as a step forward: “The globe’s the winner, but it may mean that Western Australia’s emissions increase relative to the rest of Australia, because of the important role that we’ll play in the global push to decarbonisation”. In reality, the winner is the state’s massive fossil fuel industry, dominated by climate criminals Chevron, Woodside and Shell, which had $35.8 billion in sales of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the 2024-25 financial year, equivalent to almost 8 percent of WA’s annual economic output. The new targets let these companies dodge the heat. The “green exports” target is about setting goals for commodities exported from WA to be produced with renewable energy. Together with the target for renewable generation in the general power grid, this dodges the elephant in the room: that the vast majority of WA’s contributions to greenhouse gas emissions aren’t recorded here. A 2024 report by the Australia Institute found that almost 90 percent of the LNG produced in WA is exported or consumed in the process of enabling exports. When the LNG is shipped offshore, it’s no longer counted in domestic emissions or energy statistics. Carbon capture and storage encompasses technologies that aim to remove carbon from the atmosphere and either use it in other industrial applications or store it underground. One problem, though, is that it is not yet anywhere near effective enough to be a reliable bet in the long term. Last year, the Global CCS Institute estimated that the entire planet’s maximum capacity for carbon capture and storage would remove 64 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per annum. The most recent government figure for Western Australia’s annual emissions (in 2020-2021) was just above 80 million tonnes. The other problem with carbon capture and storage is that it encourages the extraction of more fossil fuels. The carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere is often used to extract more oil from depleted reserves through a technique called enhanced oil recovery. This is the main reason fossil fuel companies invest in carbon capture research—that it can be spun as a way to address climate change is a nice bonus. At the end of the day, carbon capture and storage is a nice-sounding cover-up for the fossil fuel industry to do more of what it’s already doing: making mega profits by condemning the planet to a climate apocalypse. The state government has preserved its nominal goal of net zero emissions (presumably not counting exports) by the distant 2050\. But a report commissioned by fossil fuel giant Woodside predicts that Western Australia wouldn’t reach net zero even if the pace of new renewable energy production was ramped up to ten times historical rates. Dropping the interim emissions targets is the latest in a series of backwards steps by Roger Cook. Last year, his government [lied about the impact of Woodside’s operations](https://redflag.org.au/article/labor-sacrifices-indigenous-cultural-sites-and-the-climate-for-fossil-fuel-profits-again/) on ancient Indigenous rock art in Murujuga, around the Burrup Peninsula, so that an extension to the notorious North West Shelf Project would be approved. In 2024, he personally intervened to remove climate impacts from consideration in the approval of industrial developments. In 2023, his government [backed down on the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act](https://redflag.org.au/article/wa-labor-capitulates-racist-campaign-against-aboriginal-heritage-law/) after an intense, racist campaign by the state’s mining and farming capitalist class, who wanted to reserve the right to exploit Aboriginal land, even if it meant destroying sacred cultural sites. The only ambition that would be meaningful in averting climate catastrophe would be to shut down the fossil fuel industry. But those running the country are making too much money from it to even consider the question, especially in the great petrostate of Western Australia. ### Chancellor Bishop is out of ANU, but the fight must continue URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/chancellor-bishop-is-out-of-anu-but-the-fight-must-continue/ Last updated: 2026-05-22T08:16:10.000Z Australian National University chancellor Julie Bishop recently announced that she would step down. She had become so unpopular that she could no longer remain the university’s ceremonial head. While this development is welcome, the emphasis from the mainstream media, the student union and the staff union is that Bishop has been the main problem at the university. Yet the issues at ANU run much deeper. Universities have been turned into profit-making institutions, rather than sites of genuine education. This has resulted in course cuts and mass sackings. As well, there has been “mismanagement” leading to financial shortfalls—ANU spent tens of millions of dollars on consultants over the last three years and made risky financial gambles. That was why the No Cuts at ANU campaign, led by students and staff at the Australian National University, forced vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell to step down at the end of 2025\. We helped stop the continued job slashing, the proposed merger of colleges and the discontinuation of courses. And in 2022, there was a similar anti-cuts campaign against vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt, who slashed hundreds of jobs and cut the [physics department by 25 percent](https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/education/anu-cuts-10-per-cent-of-its-workforce-in-pandemic-hit-20200916-p55w7i?ref=redflag.org.au). Bishop served as chancellor during these campaigns, but she didn’t play a leading role in the university’s drive to prioritise profits above all else. Indeed, the fact that there were drastic cuts under previous managers shows that the issue isn’t simply about personnel. The main issue is the university being run like a business. This is not unique to the ANU. Higher education no longer receives the public funds it once did and is more and more treated like any other commodity. University management teams often include politicians, former CEOs and administrators from large businesses. Their worldviews are aligned not to furthering education, but to competing financially and focusing on the bottom line. From the beginning of last year, the No Cuts at ANU campaign exposed the realities of the latest round of cuts. We had protests, speakouts and forums where we hosted the media, National Tertiary Education Union activists and supportive politicians to discuss how drastic the cuts were. We spoke with students and staff, publicising their experiences of the cuts to the broader community. It culminated in a 400-strong protest and media storm. The staff and students came out time and time again. That’s what ultimately led to the administration buckling. This was an activist campaign, not a lobbying or consultation campaign. While it didn’t resolve the structural problems, it did show that students and staff can win if we fight back. The end of Bishop’s tenure is welcome. But we have to keep fighting and campaigning. The new acting chancellor, Larry Marshell, [formerly the chief executive of the CSIRO](https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/julie-bishop-steps-down-as-anu-chancellor-20260508-p5zv0h?ref=redflag.org.au), oversaw the sacking of hundreds of climate scientists and staff. People like him are chosen to run universities precisely because of such records. That will continue to be the case until we transform the entire sector into one that prioritises education over profits. ### What's wrong with identity politics? URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/whats-wrong-with-identity-politics/ Last updated: 2026-05-19T00:08:17.000Z Chloe and Emma discuss identity politics, the dominant framework on the left for opposing oppression. They debunk ideas like privilege theory, autonomous organising and centreing "lived experience", ### Edition #301 | Build the left to fight the right URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/edition-301-build-the-left-to-fight-the-right/ Last updated: 2026-05-17T21:34:58.000Z So much budget bluster | Australia’s royal commission is a show trial | Victorian teachers and school staff deserve better and must fight for more _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Victorian teachers betrayed by union agreement with government URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-teachers-betrayed-by-union-agreement-with-government/ Last updated: 2026-05-18T22:38:40.000Z An in-principle agreement reached between the Australian Education Union (AEU) and the Victorian state government is a betrayal of Victorian teachers and their legitimate demands for above-inflation pay rises and improved conditions. The agreement must be rejected and further strikes called to force the government to pay school staff what they deserve and provide public school students with the quality education they are entitled to. Last year, teachers and education support members spent months putting together a detailed list of the urgent demands we need to make this job, and the education system itself, viable. Among these was the demand for less face-to-face teaching and meeting time so that teachers can plan high-quality and effective lessons, higher wages to catch up and pull ahead of inflation, smaller class sizes, more ES to support vulnerable and high-needs students, and the necessary government funding to each school to make it all happen. The proposed agreement fails to meet any of these demands. It offers nothing of substance to address our crushing workloads. It has nothing at all on school-level funding guarantees. And the wages offer most likely won’t even keep up with inflation for most staff, let alone deliver real wage rises. On pay, for example, the proposed agreement would give most teachers a pay rise of 28.2 percent over four years, well short of the 35 percent over three years teachers are demanding. It is also unlikely to keep up with inflation and therefore not be a real wage rise. This is important, because the 2022 teachers’ agreement [cut the real wages of teachers by 11 percent](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1va-Dio-nGmi0WNWVtSGJ8Myo46u096VtolvXPMh-gsM/edit?ref=redflag.org.au&tab=t.0), relative to inflation. So, given inflation is currently around 5 percent, teachers need 16 percent this year, just to get back to where they were before the disastrous 2022 agreement. But if the union has its way, they are likely to fall further behind. The pay rise on offer to other school staff is not much different. So all the fanfare about teachers earning $150,000 hides the reality of most teachers continuing to go backwards on pay. Many of the teachers’ other demands are not being addressed at all. These include the demand for increased support staff, which would make a very significant difference in many classes, and to many students. With one in seven children aged between 4 and 17 having a mental health disorder and approximately 12.1 percent having a disability, having extra classroom assistants and allied health staff would make a profound difference to children’s wellbeing and learning. But the current proposed agreement offers nothing on this front. Nor does it address the issue of funding to ensure that whatever agreement is reached is actually adhered to. Currently, local leadership at many schools tell staff that they don’t have the money to meet key obligations under the agreement, such as enough relief teachers to cover all vacancies, or enough teachers to comply with class size limits, or for educational support to actually have a lunch break. This means existing teachers have to pick up the slack, exacerbating already heavy workloads, and it means students in public schools aren’t getting the quality of teaching they should. Crushing workloads are driving teachers out of the profession—research conducted by Monash University in partnership with the AEU in 2024 confirmed that just three in ten teachers intend to stay in the profession until retirement, with excessive workloads (83 percent) and poor salary (60 percent) the primary reasons for wanting to leave. This proposed agreement fails to address this disastrous situation. The union’s sellout comes as no surprise. School staff saw it coming when the union cancelled the planned regional half-day strikes a few days before the in-principle agreement was announced. But they didn’t take it lying down: at least 25 schools and six regions, representing hundreds of primary and secondary schools across inner and outer Melbourne, [voted](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gAh1S9EmSC7Mr-le9MFL0KQt2rvm%5FQkP6RRv5O-EzT0/edit?gid=0&ref=redflag.org.au#gid=0) to condemn the leaders’ decision to cancel the strike action. Many more schools [voted](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gAh1S9EmSC7Mr-le9MFL0KQt2rvm%5FQkP6RRv5O-EzT0/edit?gid=0&ref=redflag.org.au#gid=0) to demand further 24-hour statewide strikes. One teacher at the recent [LaTrobe/Plenty regional meeting](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYB9fWkpScA/?hl=en&ref=redflag.org.au) reported that her workmates, who usually don’t attend these events, decided to attend this time. Seeing union officials “talking down to teachers for having opinions on industrial strategy”, she recalled, “my workmates just started scoffing every time they spoke”. Another teacher at the [Werribee regional meeting ](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYCOtsSOyY6/?hl=en&ref=redflag.org.au)similarly described how refreshing it was to see an alternative proposal to the conciliatory strategy advocated by the AEU leaders, one based on solidarity between all school staff. “An education support worker was crying afterwards, telling me they had never felt so supported by members who don’t want anyone to be left behind”, she recalled. It’s this spirit that can help defeat the proposed agreement. Teachers and school staff have had a sense of their power—they know it was only *after* 40,000 teachers and school staff [took to the streets](https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-teachers-fight-must-continue/) and shut down many schools across the state on 24 March that the government saw fit to offer them more than the disgraceful 17 and 13 percent pay increases it had originally slated for teachers and support staff. More strikes, not capitulation, are the way to win. A Vote No campaign is possible: in 2024, Victorian nurses voted down an agreement and won a much better deal a month later. In 2022, there was the highest vote against a proposed agreement in AEU history, with 39 percent voting to reject the deal. This was achieved with a limited campaign from a small number of members. Today, Socialists in Schools, one of the many [industry networks ](https://www.instagram.com/vs%5Fsocialist%5Fworkers%5Fcaucus/?ref=redflag.org.au)within Victorian Socialists, is going all out to make sure Vote No is far more organised and even more widespread. The Labor government is under enormous pressure to deliver a deal in the lead-up to the state election in November—if we vote against the proposal and keep striking there is the potential to win the breakthrough agreement school staff need. Teachers and school staff have demonstrated they want to keep fighting. It’s time to organise together against a Labor government and union leadership intent on denying workers the wages, conditions and quality public schools we all deserve. --- *A comprehensive breakdown of the main clauses of* [*the proposed new agreement is available here*](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A9DhI6ldHSBLTBJk0gwwJmgIIQOTnbzeG4hdQFmBzx4/edit?tab=t.0&ref=redflag.org.au)*.* *Socialists in Schools is holding an in-person campaign meeting at 1pm on Sunday 24 May at the Victorian Socialists volunteer centre at 83 Sydney Road, Brunswick.* ### Starmer’s Labour punished in UK local elections URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/starmers-labour-punished-in-uk-local-elections/ Last updated: 2026-05-17T01:50:58.000Z The collapse of the UK Labour Party’s vote in a series of local elections this month has amplified the existing crisis for the government and provides further evidence of the polarisation gripping British politics. The results confirm what the polls have been signalling: that the century-long dominance of Labour and the Conservatives is breaking apart. Reform, Nigel Farage's hard-right party, won the most ground—but the Green surge is evidence that there is also movement towards the left. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is yet to walk the plank, but the sharks are circling ever closer. ### **The results** Labour suffered major losses across England, Scotland and Wales. For the first time since the establishment of a national parliament (Senedd) in Wales in 1999, Labour lost its majority there. To rub salt in the wound, Labour First Minister Eluned Morgan was beaten in her own seat. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party will remain the largest party in Holyrood, while the Conservative vote collapsed, the party holding on to just 12 seats, down from 31 at the previous election. In the English council elections, Labour lost 1,496 councillors and control of 38 councils. In the north-east, traditionally the industrial heartland of Labour, the party was reduced to just one seat in South Tyneside (down from 28), two in Newcastle (down from 46), five in Sunderland (down from 54), and twelve in Gateshead (down from 48). In England, Reform made major gains, taking control of fourteen councils and winning 1,453 seats. The Greens also made significant advances, particularly in London, winning their first mayoral positions in Hackney and Lewisham and gaining control of Waltham Forest council. Overall, the Greens tripled their number of local councillors to win a total of 587 seats in England as well as 15 seats in Scotland (up from 8). ### **Lab*o*ur’s record** Labour have brought this electoral failure on themselves. Since winning the general election in July 2024, Starmer has used his large majority of MPs (elected on a record low vote share) to make a series of unpopular cuts to welfare and benefits in the face of a grinding cost-of-living crisis. Labour came to office promising change and almost immediately kicked 10 million pensioners off winter fuel benefits. It was only after sustained pressure from within the party that the government lifted the two-child benefit cap, a Tory policy that punished low-income parents for having more than two children. Starmer has also presided over major increases in defence spending and pandered to Trump. His support for Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador given the Labour grandee’s ties to Epstein have made Starmer’s position increasingly untenable. Before his departure in February, Starmer’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney purged supporters of left-wing former party leader Jeremy Corbyn and promoted right-wing candidates before the 2024 election. Within Number 10, McSweeney drove what Labour insiders described as a “squeeze strategy” that focused on appealing to Reform voters. Continuing that strategy in September last year, Labour appointed a more “hardline” Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, whose job was to introduce more restrictive and punitive immigration policies. Mahmood has already celebrated the deportation of 60,000 people since the party came to office and introduced new powers to physically restrain children during deportations. ### **Rise of Reform** Reform has risen from the ashes of the Conservative Party since its Brexit-induced self-immolation. Polling data show half of those who voted for the UK to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum now support Reform. The party has used the post-Brexit era to deepen anti-immigration sentiment and built a base through the amplification of grievances and the idea of “broken Britain”. From pot holes to “ending woke”, Reform attempts to focus blame for any and all grievances on the vulnerable, particularly immigrants, deflecting anger away from the rich and powerful. As party leader, Nigel Farage has managed to build his popularity and anti-establishment image despite being bankrolled by billionaires, receiving millions in personal gifts, and being accused of holding pro-Nazi views in his youth. Reform has taken hold of a significant section of right-wing voters who want to believe that hanging a St Georges flag will restore the “glory” of the British Empire. ### **The Greens** After Zack Polanski's emphatic election as leader of the Green Party in September 2025, the party has grown rapidly in size and support. Membership has tripled from around 70,000 to more than 220,000 today. By contrast, Labour membership figures sank below 250,000 in December 2025\. The Gorton and Denton by-election in February was won convincingly by Green candidate Hannah Spencer, a local plumber who campaigned under the slogan of “hope not hate” and explicitly appealed to progressive voters to vote Green not Labour to keep Reform out. The Greens’ vote share in the most recent English elections was almost level with Labour (14 percent vs 15 percent) and demonstrates that the appetite for a left alternative is real. Your Party, a more left-wing alternative formed by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and MP Zarah Sultana in 2025, did not contest the elections and has been plagued by in-fighting. Starmer’s desperate lurch back towards traditional Labourism, evident in his Hail Mary pledge to nationalise British Steel, indicates the extent to which Labour is conscious of how much ground it is losing to the left. ### **What now?** These election results have not only exposed the bankruptcy of Starmerism, but have also accelerated the splintering of the status quo of British politics. Reform is now established as the most popular party in British politics. The Greens are making significant gains, but Polanski already faces intense pressure to moderate, with rumours of internal party reviews set to tone down some of their more “radical” policies, including support for Palestine. For the socialist left in the UK, the challenge of building a genuine working-class alternative to Labour and the Greens remains. There is certainly no end in sight to the economic immiseration of the majority; the challenge is to build a political alternative capable of ending it. ### ‘ISIS Brides’ is an Islamophobic slur: Where’s the outrage? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/isis-brides-is-an-islamophobic-slur-wheres-the-outrage/ Last updated: 2026-05-17T01:48:58.000Z The Murdoch press is directing a straight-to-video thriller about Australian citizens returning from Syrian displaced person camps, where they have been languishing since 2019\. Dozens of media outlets were waiting at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport to film the arrival of the handful of women and children in early May, while tabloids published photographs of their plane landing side by side with those of women wearing hijabs, in imagery intended to evoke 9/11\. Publications from the *Herald Sun* and *Sydney Morning Herald* to the ABC and *New York Times* refer to these women as “ISIS Brides”, demonstrating how acceptable racism towards Muslims is among the establishment media. Those outlets would not countenance labelling the families of Australian citizens who fight with the Israeli army, for example, “IDF Wives”. The same people who lecture us about supporting Israel in the name of “social cohesion” are publicly crucifying Australian citizens for little more than being Muslim. Compare the treatment of these women today with 2019, when then Prime Minister Scott Morrison, an architect of Australia’s policy of turning back boats carrying refugees, facilitated the return of families from Syria on the reasonable basis that doing so was their legal right as citizens, and it was not fair for their children to grow up in camps. This generated very little uproar. But today, after years of Israeli genocide in Gaza, violence against Muslims and people from the Middle East is back in vogue. Pauline Hanson is able to declare there are “no good Muslims” without significant pushback or electoral consequence. Meanwhile, One Nation, the Liberals and the Nationals are in full swing denouncing immigration, and especially immigrants who “don’t share our values” (i.e. Muslims), as an existential threat. The irony is that the women who have been trapped in Syria aren’t even immigrants. They are Australian citizens. In his response to the 2026 budget, Angus Taylor told the Australian parliament that welfare should be withheld from new migrants (which it already is) because “citizenship has got to mean something. We want people to aspire to be citizens of Australia”. But citizenship has not assisted any of the women or children currently returning or still trapped abroad, or saved them from savage vilification. Taylor has even denounced the children—also citizens—raised in Syrian camps, saying on 3 March they “pose a risk to Australia because of the hate which has undoubtedly filled their minds”. It is unimaginable that such statements would be made about the children of Christian fundamentalists from the United States, or the children of Israeli settlers, who likewise grow up in hate-filled environments but are welcome here. And while there is yet to be any evidence presented that these women were responsible for crimes against humanity in Syria, there is plenty of evidence of such crimes being supported and aided by the Australian government, along with most of the rest of the political class. In addition to the unspeakable genocide in Gaza over the last more than two years, the Australian government has enthusiastically supported the United States’ [barbarous war on Iran and Lebanon](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-savagery-of-trump-and-netanyahu/), and many more [murderous Middle East wars](https://redflag.org.au/article/western-terror-middle-east/) before that which have claimed millions of lives. Every accusation made against the “ISIS Brides”—that they support a bloody, barbaric, terrorist organisation—could equally be made against supporters of Israel. Paul Gregoire, writing for *Sydney Criminal Lawyers* on 13 May, aptly compares the media circus about “ISIS Brides” to the silence regarding Australians fighting for the IDF who have volunteered to take part in a genocide. And what mainstream politician has denounced Ben Roberts-Smith’s attendance at ANZAC Day ceremonies, despite his war crimes that he is currently facing charges for? Instead some, like former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, have expressed sympathy for him. Apparently it is not barbarism to murder a man and then drink beer from his prosthetic leg so long as you’re draped in the Australian flag. And what of the Australian state’s claim to defend women, a core pretext of various episodes of Western meddling in the Middle East over the last few decades? The misogyny of ISIS is well known, which means women being able to act with agency and independently of the wishes of their husbands cannot be assumed. Indeed, according to ABC journalist Sara Tomevska, of the women who returned to Australia from Syrian camps prior to 2026, only one was arrested for knowingly entering an area controlled by ISIS, and that woman was found to have been coerced by her husband. The imperial ideology of “defending women” applies only when it comes to fighting wars against economic and military rivals, not when it comes to preventing Australian citizens from living in squalid camps. Albanese has shown no sympathy to these women, repeatedly saying that the “ISIS brides” (and their children) deserve it, for having “made the decision” to travel to the Middle East more than a decade ago. These women are being cast as the sinister criminals and violators of human rights by the very people who should be being charged for crimes against humanity. Instead, supporters of industrial-scale genocide and violence in the Middle East are whingeing about how they are victims, at a Royal Commission established by a Labor government that agrees with them and wants to legitimise the same crimes. The absurd hypocrisy of capitalism knows no limits. ### Australia’s royal commission is a show trial URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/australias-royal-commission-is-a-show-trial/ Last updated: 2026-05-30T06:24:13.000Z > “I mean, just walking around the CBD, it’s hard to avoid the Palestinian flag or, for example, my friend told me she recently went to a concert. She had a great time and at the end, the performer just said, ‘Thank you and free Palestine’ and I think that happens almost every single day, and, yes, it’s very tiring, yes.” —Léa Levy testifying before the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion For seven days this month, supporters of Israel were given a national platform to denounce the mass movement against genocide in Gaza. The first block of hearings for Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion finished on 12 May. Three days later was the anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, Israel’s foundational ethnic cleansing of much of Palestine. The above quote is typical of the testimonies, all of which are formally labelled “lived experience”. Analysis by [Deepcut News](https://www.deepcutnews.com/p/what-weve-actually-heard-at-the-antisemitism?ref=redflag.org.au) found that, of the 36 witnesses called in the first three days, “23 explicitly characterised criticism of Israel and Zionism or Palestinian advocacy as antisemitic”. On the second day, Jeremy Stowe-Lindner slandered a parent attending a school sporting event as an antisemitic provocateur because he was wearing “full Palestinian regalia”. When university Professor Tali Pinsky told the commission that she believed campus pro-Palestine activism was largely motivated by antisemitism, the assisting counsel simply invited her to elaborate rather than interrogating the claim. The commission’s set-up means that assisting counsel are there primarily to encourage those testifying to expound their views, rather than to cross-examine them. So defamatory statements are almost never challenged. As well, groups such as the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network were refused leave to give evidence. Unlike in a court, the Palestine movement had no right of reply, no right to defend itself in the hearings. The pro-Palestine Jewish Council of Australia was given only limited leave to participate. The commission is in effect an extension of the long-term campaign by pro-Israel groups for a crackdown on freedom of expression of those who stand for Palestinian justice. The vast majority of testimonies were coordinated by a right-wing bloc of pro-Israel Jewish groups, led by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ). The group [advertised](https://www.instagram.com/p/DTehDUUEf12/?ref=redflag.org.au) two full-time positions to coordinate this earlier in the year. ECAJ is not simply a Jewish community group that happens to support Israel; it is a politically motivated campaigning body with a stated aim of pushing the Australian government to vote against Palestinian statehood in the United Nations. In February last year, the group [called for a nationwide ban](https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/jillian-segals-plan-to-combat-antisemitism-straight-from-lobby-group-wish-list,19945?ref=redflag.org.au) on “encampments; the disruption of lectures by student protesters; and external organisations or individuals orchestrating campus protest activities”. It is notable that these demands don’t specify protests or activities related to Palestine solidarity or Israel. This is an authoritarian call to curtail left-wing activism and civil liberties in general. The federal budget, announced just as the first hearings closed, awarded ECAJ $102 million in government funding. The co-CEOs of ECAJ, Alex Ryvchin and Peter Wertheim, spoke on the first and second days. Predictably, Ryvchin launched into a vitriolic attack on Sydney’s Palestine Action Group, claiming that the group’s protests are motivated not by opposition to genocide but by “the humiliation of Israel” on 7 October 2023\. “When you deal with extremists motivated by hatred, there’s no sense that that extremism and those activities will naturally reach the end of their course, they will blow off a little steam”, he said. “That’s not how they operate. They go exactly as far as they are permitted to go.” Ryvchin’s testimony was a slanderous accusation: peaceful protests against Israel’s genocide inevitably lead to antisemitic violence. Independent news outlet Michael West Media pointed out that ECAJ and other pro-Israel representative groups are all being assisted by the same legal firm, Arnold Bloch Leibler, during the commission’s hearings. These include the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, Jewish Community Council of Victoria, Zionist Federation of Australia, National Council of Jewish Women of Australia, Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council and the Dor Foundation. Jeremy Leibler, a partner of the firm, is also head of the Zionist Federation of Australia. Leibler is a culture warrior of the right. In a January [opinion](https://www.zfa.com.au/zfa-president-jeremy-leibler-opinion-piece-the-australian-24-january-2026/?ref=redflag.org.au) piece in the *Australian*, for example, he railed against New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “collectivism” and linked it to a logic that he claims drives activist circles to rationalise rape and murder. He has [retweeted](https://medium.com/@abrahamedwards/australias-leading-zionists-express-hateful-views-about-palestinians-again-b13497a2a294?ref=redflag.org.au) posts stating that Palestine has no right to exist. Many testimonials at the commission referred to the Palestine solidarity movement and the Bondi massacre in the same breath, not explicitly stating that anti-racist protesters carried out the massacre, but trying to establish guilt by testimonial link. A speaker on day two recounted going into lockdown at a community event during the attack—and then launched a tirade about the Palestine solidarity movement, lamenting “the chants and the protests and the words and the online rhetoric”. In fact, the father and son who carried out the massacre were found by police to have been influenced by Islamic State (IS) ideology, and two IS flags were found in their car. IS opposes the Palestinian national struggle, has carried out massacres of Palestinians, and its own militants are suppressed by Hamas in Gaza. Some of those testifying linked supporters of Palestine to crimes that are now well known to have been carried out by organised criminal gangs. Others described Nazi propaganda and pro-Palestine materials interchangeably, as if both are similarly motivated. In her testimony, Australian antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal identified “far-left ... issue motivated activist groups” as one of four categories of antisemitic actors, alongside “Islamist extremism” linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, and naive people who conflate the state of Israel with the Jewish people. Yet the biggest proponents of conflating the state of Israel and the Jewish people in general are the Israeli government and its supporters. Since 1948, Zionist institutions and Israeli political figures have claimed that the state represents all Jewish people and is their homeland. It is highly hypocritical to complain that some others now might conflate Judaism and Zionism. At any rate, Jewish supporters of Palestine and Palestine solidarity activists have been the loudest in arguing that the state of Israel does not represent Jews in general. In Australia and elsewhere, far-left activists have been the most committed fighters against the rise of neo-Nazi and fascist movements. In Melbourne, for example, many of the individuals and groups that protest for Palestine also participate in anti-Nazi demonstrations led by the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism. This is connected to a proud history of leftist resistance to fascism. I have organised several marches against the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network. In 2022, I was contacted by a young Jewish woman seeking help convincing the Zionist community groups she was involved with to support the demonstrations. She lamented that the groups refused to support the campaign against actual Nazis because it was led by the pro-Palestine left. For the left, opposition to racism and fascism, and opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine go hand in hand. It’s a different story on the right. On one hand, sections of the global far right often promote antisemitic conspiracy theories. In the US, for example, MAGA movement figures such as Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Marjorie Taylor Greene have popularised antisemitism online as part of pushing a broader reactionary agenda. On the other hand, many far-right groups also support Israel. They recognise it as an exclusionary ethnostate that practices apartheid and oppresses Arabs and Muslims. So they view Israel as a model to emulate. Richard Spencer, one of the world’s most prominent fascists, once said that Israel is “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state ... the one that I turn to for guidance”. Israel’s government is run by a far-right coalition headed by the ethno-nationalist Likud party. It is part of a global movement of fascist and far-right political projects including Trump’s Republican Party, the National Rally in France, Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, Reform UK and Narendra Modi’s Indian People’s Party. All of these parties have political ties and sympathies with Netanyahu’s government, and the European parties mostly trace their origins to inter-war fascism. During the seven days of hearings, Israel [killed thirteen Palestinians in Gaza](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/12/palestine-weekly-wrap-israeli-settlers-rampage-through-west-bank-villages?ref=redflag.org.au). Armed settlers occupied the Ein Sala spring in the West Bank to prevent local Palestinians from accessing water. In Jalud, settlers bulldozed hundreds of olive trees. South of Jenin, in the town of al-Asa’asa, settlers forced a family to exhume their 80-year-old father and rebury him elsewhere. Every day, the Israeli state humiliates, imprisons and kills Palestinians. The royal commission will likely result in recommendations for a further crackdown on Palestine solidarity and left-wing activism. But every day, our world becomes darker. Fascism is implanting itself into mainstream politics across the world. Israel is getting away with a new Nakba in southern Lebanon. Now, more than ever, we need a fighting left and a strident movement for Palestinian justice. The commission is an attempt to intimidate the left and to make resistance to war, fascism and racism more difficult. ### ‘May in the minds of men’: 100 years since the British general strike URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/may-in-the-minds-of-men-100-years-since-the-british-general-strike/ Last updated: 2026-05-26T05:51:50.000Z > *Now it is May among the mountains,* > *Days for speeches in the valley towns,* > *Days of dream and days of struggle,* > *Days of bitter denunciation ...* > *Now it is May in the minds of men* > *Days for vision and for marching,* > *Days for banners and for music,* > *And beauty born of sacrifice.* —From *The Angry Summer: A Poem of 1926* by Idris Davies (1943) The 1926 British general strike is best known as one of history’s most excruciating betrayals. This class-wide mobilisation—which involved 3 million workers under a hostile Conservative government—was strangled by its own leadership after just nine days. Without securing even a gesture of compromise on the part of employers, trade union leaders imposed a crushing defeat on their own members. For those seeking to understand the frequently treacherous actions of modern union officials, the story remains an important one to study and remember. In the five years before 1926 there had been an explosive rise and gradual decline of strikes across Europe. Britain was no exception: a powerful shop stewards movement had gripped the centres of British industry in engineering, transport, mining and textiles in the years after the war. Union membership had surged beyond 8 million in 1920, but militancy receded as the Trades Union Congress (TUC) manoeuvred to take greater control of disputes and wrest control from rank-and-file committees after 1921\. By the mid-1920s, workplace organisation was almost completely eroded and unions were in retreat as employers moved to claw back gains. Union membership sank to 5.5 million in 1924. The British bourgeoisie understood that, despite winning the war, they were losing ground to the United States and a rapidly modernising Germany. Restructuring of the British economy was needed to maintain global power, and, to achieve this, a decisive defeat needed to be inflicted on the waning union movement. Because coal made up 95 percent of all energy use and was crucial to British industrial recovery, the ruling class began their assault by targeting the relatively powerful Miners’ Federation. Following the November 1924 election of Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government, the state and coal mine owners—under renewed pressure from German competition—moved aggressively to drive down labour costs. This culminated on 30 June 1925, when mine owners announced the termination of their agreement with the Miners’ Federation, reducing miners’ wages by 10 to 15 percent, and the scrapping of the minimum wage, clearing the path for sweeping wage cuts and longer working hours across the board. In response, engineers and rail workers took solidarity action with the miners, including imposing bans on handling coal. Baldwin’s government bailed out the mining bosses to avoid a premature confrontation, granting a nine-month subsidy to the coal industry to underwrite wages. Unions celebrated, but the ruling class was biding its time. A government commission was asked to deliver a plan for raising the profitability of British coal once the subsidy ended—wage cuts and longer hours would be imposed under official government sanction. Meanwhile, Baldwin focused on stockpiling coal, arresting Communist leaders and organising strike-breakers ahead of the coming battle. Conditions in Britain’s mines were already horrific. In a 1970s interview with historian Margaret Morris, one participant in the general strike described the beginnings of his working life as a 14-year-old boy in the coal pits of Fife. “As a matter of fact”, Abe Moffat told Morris, “I’m one of fourteen: seven brothers and seven sisters, all of us went in the mine. And my father. And my mother worked on the pithead, and my grandmother worked on the pithead”. Moffat recalled so many children working the mines that parents would sign them up to the union as a matter of course: “At that time it was the custom for your parents to join the union the first day you went down the pit”. This was tough, dangerous work. “I wasn’t long in the pit when I got an accident”, Moffat recalled, “It was almost six weeks working in the pit, and a big stone came down from the roof, and fortunately for me it didn’t strike my body, it only struck my foot. At that time there’s no first aid at the pit, and my older brother had to carry me home on his back ... you can imagine the face of my mother, when she seen her young son, going on six weeks working in the mine, being carried home on her other son’s back.” Working-class people had little choice, though—living costs in 1925 Britain were 80 percent higher than before the war. Yet the centrality of coal to British capitalism necessitated that even more vicious and exploitative standards be set in the mines, and that a symbolic humiliation be forced upon the Miners’ Federation. “Whatever it may cost in blood and treasure”, declared coal baron and Nazi sympathiser Lord Londonderry in 1925, “the unions will be smashed from top to bottom”. As soon as Baldwin had granted the subsidy to mine owners, he began perfecting his strikebreaking machinery. Ten “district headquarters” were established across the UK, staffed by appointed commissioners who recruited scab labour, organised road transport and coordinated food supply channels to circumvent the impact of any future strike action when the subsidy ended. Historian W.H. Crook wrote that “the government had prepared its weapons against possible industrial warfare; the railroads and the large industrial firms had laid in vast stocks of coal; and the output at the mines had been immense”. In most major cities, members of the aristocracy and middle classes established branches of the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (OMS). The stated purpose of the OMS, as reported by Communist journalist Robert Page Arnot, was to organise “loyal citizens” to “assist in maintaining essential public services ... food, water, light, power and transport”. That is, once the government and bosses had provoked unions into a strike, the legions of respectable society would step in to ensure minimal impact on the circulation of profits. According to the digital centenary project [General Strike 100](https://generalstrike100.com/?event=13669&ref=redflag.org.au#map=5.9/51.914/-3.501), the types of organisations involved in organising scabs were universities, the Citizens’ Committees for Essential Public Services (linked to local Conservative party branches) and the proto-fascist Middle Class Union. By the time the strike began in May 1926, 100,000 volunteers had registered with the OMS. While the ruling class prepared for open confrontation, the peak body of the trade unions was focused entirely on lobbying the government for an extension of the wages subsidy. In his biography of union secretary Ernest Bevin, Allan Bullock notes that in the seven months leading up to the general strike, “the full General Council \[of the TUC\] did not once discuss what was to happen when the government subsidy came to an end on 30 April nor concern itself with preparations for the support of the miners”. This seemingly confounding posture was consistent with the union bureaucracy’s entrenched practice. The official institutions of the British labour movement had much earlier turned to a permanent policy of class collaboration. Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, the TUC had issued a joint statement with the Labour Party calling for an immediate end to all strikes and “amicable settlements” to disputes for the sake of the “national interest”. More no-strike pledges were signed in 1919, as union leaders attempted to quell postwar eruptions of rank-and-file militancy. By 1924, the officials had gained experience in helping a Labour government break strikes on the docks, and basic arbitration mechanisms entrenching union leaders’ legal accountability for industrial action were firmly in place. For many union leaders, strikes were a last resort—the bureaucrats would prefer to kneel and beg on the moral high ground of industrial peace, rather than to risk being framed as the “offending” party responsible for class war. Some more “left-wing” leaders in the TUC were prepared to call for strike action, but they were not prepared actually to carry it through. Indeed, they hoped the mere *threat* of a strike would compel the government to simply extend the subsidy to the mining industry. But the government was not only interested in keeping the mines afloat—it was determined to provoke a generalised dispute to discipline the unions. Once this became clear to the officials, they had little choice but to follow through on their threat. Although they first attempted various gestures of submission, including a promise to force the miners to accept a wage cut, the TUC eventually was forced to call a general strike. The truly remarkable aspect of this story is that, despite all the union leaders’ best efforts to avoid the strike, workers still mobilised in their millions once the call went out. By all accounts, the numbers stopping work increased day by day, and workers came out from industries beyond those initially authorised by the TUC. According to the General Council’s plans, engineers and shipbuilders were not supposed to join the strike until the TUC deemed it necessary to raise the pressure on the government. But as the York and District Trades and Labour Council reported to the TUC in the first days of May: “Our greatest difficulty is to keep the men at work who should remain there, they all feel that they should be out helping the struggle”. For their part, the union leaders maintained their commitment to passivity. The editorial of the TUC’s publication, the *British Worker*, asserted: “Our task is to keep the strikers steady and quiet. We must not be provocative ... The Council asks pickets especially to avoid obstruction and to confine themselves strictly to their legitimate duties”. The editorial failed to define what other sorts of duties should fall to picketers during a strike, other than obstruction! Even once action had been initiated, union officials viewed the strike as a demonstration of pressure to force the government back to the negotiating table as soon as possible. Because they viewed it as a temporary protest, they saw no need to build the machinery for a serious and potentially protracted class confrontation. In fact, the bureaucracy was unnerved by the initiative and enthusiasm of rank-and-file unionists, who were setting up self-defence organisations in some places and hundreds of local strike committees in others. In Fife, the area of east Scotland where Abe Moffat worked, only a single train was in operation for the duration of the strike and a defence committee formed following an attack by police was 700 strong. Marxist historian Neil Davidson [quotes](https://socialistworker.co.uk/in-depth/the-1926-general-strike-nine-days-of-hope/?ref=redflag.org.au) one leader of an amalgamated union as lamenting, “\[E\]very day that the strike proceeded the control and the authority of that dispute \[were\] passing out of the hands of responsible executives into the hands of men who had no authority, no control, and wrecking the movement from one end to the other”. When a high-court judge declared the strike illegal on 11 May, it was the out the TUC was looking for. Nine days of passive and begrudging official action was the limit of the resistance they were willing to put up to a full-frontal assault from the ruling class. The strike was called off the following day. When the TUC General Council marched into Downing Street to notify the government, they did so not because the coverage or effectiveness of the strike was waning, but to demonstrate to the state and employers that they were trustworthy negotiators and guardians of the national interest. Left to fight entirely alone, the heroic miners resisted for another seven gruelling months before being starved back into the pits under the very terms of humiliation the coal bosses had set out to impose: slashed wages and longer hours. Following this decisive victory, the ruling class moved swiftly to codify their triumph, passing the draconian Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act of 1927, which criminalised solidarity strikes and effectively crippled British union power for a generation. Because the bureaucracy views industrial action as a lever to better negotiate the terms of exploitation, rather than a weapon to end it, union leaders usually prefer to sacrifice the interests of workers than to lose their seat at the negotiating table. As the 1926 strike shows, this is not a reflection of workers’ capacity or willingness to fight, but of the union leaders’ loyalty when the pressure is on. One hundred years ago, the green shoots of proletarian self-liberation emerged even on the most hostile terrain. They can again. As Davies ended his epic poem: > *But the battle’s end is not defeat* > *To that dream that guided the broken feet* > *And roused to beauty and to pride* > *Toiler and toiler, side by side,* > *Whose faith and courage shall be told* > *In blaze of scarlet and of gold.* ### Teachers and school staff fight back against imminent union sellout URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/teachers-and-school-staff-fight-back-against-imminent-union-sellout/ Last updated: 2026-05-14T23:15:53.000Z When the leaders of the Australian Education Union (AEU) emailed members to announce that they were cancelling two weeks of planned half-day regional strikes—without the government having met our demands—they presumably thought school staff would passively accept this retreat. But the AEU leaders are instead facing a rank-and-file rebellion by teachers and school staff, prepared to fight for the teaching and learning conditions that they and students deserve. To date, at least 25 schools and six regions, representing hundreds of primary and secondary schools across inner and outer Melbourne, have [voted](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gAh1S9EmSC7Mr-le9MFL0KQt2rvm%5FQkP6RRv5O-EzT0/edit?gid=0&ref=redflag.org.au#gid=0) to condemn the leaders’ decision to cancel our strike action. Many more schools have also [voted](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gAh1S9EmSC7Mr-le9MFL0KQt2rvm%5FQkP6RRv5O-EzT0/edit?gid=0&ref=redflag.org.au#gid=0) to demand further 24-hour statewide strikes, which would be an escalation from the regional half-day stopworks that the union has suspended. In many of these schools and regions, activists from [Socialists in Schools](https://linktr.ee/socialistsinschoolsvic?utm%5Fsource=ig&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcontent=link%5Fin%5Fbio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMjU2MjgxMDQwNTU4AAGnBVvrInhHZo7xdbQy60c36amubchxWOErdQJrkqKlfFG4%5FBWs6%5FGzu0CRNgA%5Faem%5FUZWOJ83mJnL3gowcDiuBww), one of the many [industry networks ](https://www.instagram.com/vs%5Fsocialist%5Fworkers%5Fcaucus/?ref=redflag.org.au)within Victorian Socialists, have played an important role arguing against the cancellations and for more industrial action. For many teachers and school staff, the strike cancellations have transformed pent-up anger and frustration into outright rage—both at the Labor government’s contempt for public school students and staff, and at our own union leaders’ tendency to sell us short. AEU leaders love to remind us that we are the worst-paid educators in Australia in the lowest- funded schools. Yet their conciliatory approach to the Labor government means we are likely to stay this way. At a 76-person emergency meeting organised by Socialists in Schools the day after the strike cancellations were communicated, rank-and-file union members met to coordinate a collective response. Longer-term members pointed out that the officials have form when it comes to selling members short—in 2022, they recommended members vote for a [deal](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1va-Dio-nGmi0WNWVtSGJ8Myo46u096VtolvXPMh-gsM/edit?ref=redflag.org.au&tab=t.0) that drove real wages down by 11 percent. The meeting drew two conclusions. First, the current AEU leaders cannot be trusted. They have a track record of selling subpar agreements. They have provided scant information about the supposed progress of current negotiations. And they call off strike action without any formal offer indicating that the government is willing to meet our demands—which include a 35 percent pay rise over three years for all staff, paid lunch breaks, clear role descriptions for education support staff, and an aide in every class. Second, we need stronger rank-and-file organisations to challenge officials’ influence and push for a more combative strategy. The officials perhaps hoped that the rumour of a 28 percent pay rise, [leaked](https://redflag.org.au/article/28-is-a-joke-victorian-school-staff-must-keep-fighting/) recently by the government, would be enough to reassure members about the negotiations’ progress. They were wrong. The only thing we’ve learned from the rumour is that strikes work. Only *after* 40,000 teachers and school staff [took to the streets](https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-teachers-fight-must-continue/) and shut down many schools across the state on 24 March did the government offer us more than the disgraceful 17 and 13 percent pay increases they had originally slated for teachers and support staff. That’s why the union’s backdown from regional half-day strikes—though already a de-escalation from the powerful, statewide shutdown in March—is a particularly shameful demonstration of just how unserious the union leaders are about fighting to achieve what members need and deserve. Teachers’ desire to keep fighting has driven the rebellion in schools and regional meetings, in office chats and in rank-and-file organising meetings over the last two weeks. Regional meetings, which are usually staid affairs attended mostly by union officials and those closest to them, have swelled in numbers and become sites of riotous debate, with Socialists in Schools activists mobilising rank-and-file union members to attend and put the case for intensifying the campaign. When union leaders have tried to lower members’ expectations and sneer at us for being “unrealistic” or “unreasonable” in pushing for serious improvements to our salaries and conditions in line with our log of claims, they have been challenged at every turn—and frequently derided—by rank-and-file activists. One Socialists in Schools teacher at the recent [LaTrobe/Plenty regional meeting](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYB9fWkpScA/?hl=en&ref=redflag.org.au) reported that her workmates, who usually don’t attend these events, decided to attend this time. Seeing union officials “talking down to teachers for having opinions on industrial strategy”, she recalled, “my workmates just started scoffing every time they spoke”. Another teacher at the [Werribee regional meeting ](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYCOtsSOyY6/?hl=en&ref=redflag.org.au)similarly described how refreshing it was to see an alternative proposal to the conciliatory strategy advocated by the AEU leaders, one based on solidarity between all school staff. “An education support worker was crying afterwards, telling me they had never felt so supported by members who don’t want anyone to be left behind”, she recalled. Making the proceedings of these regional meetings public, as Socialists in Schools has done, is an important intervention into an industrial campaign in which union members have often been left in the dark. Comments on AEU social media—an accessible forum for members to ask questions, voice concerns and express disagreement—have been restricted or deleted. Members have also [reported](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYQnMqaRIlI/?hl=en&ref=redflag.org.au) being blocked by the AEU on social media for posting dissenting remarks. With the AEU branch council likely to put a subpar agreement to members, the rebellion of school staff can’t and won’t stop. Teachers and school staff want to keep fighting. So it’s time to organise together against a Labor government and union leadership intent on denying us the wages, conditions and quality public schools we all deserve. --- *Socialists in Schools will be at the Victorian Socialists* [*forum*](https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/events/1990?ref=redflag.org.au) *against One Nation and the far right this Saturday, 16 May, 3pm at Coburg Town Hall. Get your ticket and meet us there.* ### Nakba: understanding the Palestinian catastrophe URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/nakba-understanding-palestinian-catastrophe/ Last updated: 2026-05-22T08:21:42.000Z *Al-Nakba* (“the catastrophe”) refers to the destruction of Palestinian society that took place in 1948, when more than 500 villages were destroyed by Zionist militia and more than 1 million Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes—750,000 fleeing to neighbouring Arab states and the other 250,000 becoming internal refugees in the newly formed Israeli state. Ever since, Israel has been an apartheid state that has used both military force and legally sanctioned discrimination to oppress the Palestinian people. Like other settler colonial states, Israel is primarily concerned with controlling territory and replacing the indigenous population with a settler population. As the late Australian theorist Patrick Wolfe noted, “settler colonialism destroys to replace”. Zionism, the ideological foundation on which the Israeli state is built, emerged in the late 1800s in reaction to anti-Semitism and waves of anti-Jewish pogroms taking place in Europe. At the time, a section of the Jewish middle class concluded that anti-Semitism was an eternal and inescapable phenomenon as long as Jews lived among non-Jews. They believed that the only way to avoid it was to establish an independent state for the Jewish people. While the Zionist movement eventually settled on Palestine as the location for the new Jewish state, its leaders also considered a range of other countries, including Argentina, Turkey, Kenya, Angola and Uganda. Regardless of the area chosen, Zionism’s founding father, Theodore Herzl, understood that it would be impossible to establish without the backing of the one of the major imperial powers. The Zionist movement, however, didn’t gain an imperial sponsor until in 1917, thirteen years after Herzl’s death, when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, which affirmed that it would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Herzl also understood that, regardless of where the Jewish state was eventually established, it would be necessary to expel the existing indigenous population to make way for Jewish settler colonists. “When we occupy the land ... we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country”, Herzl wrote in an 1895 diary entry. “Both the \[expropriation of property\] and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” Herzl here articulated two of Zionism’s central doctrines: exclusivist Jewish labour and “transfer”. As Palestinian historian Nur Masalha explains in *Expulsion of the Palestinians*,the concept of “transfer” within Zionist ideology came to be “a euphemism denoting the organised removal of the indigenous population of Palestine to neighbouring countries”. Moreover, he notes, it “occupied a central position in the strategic thinking of the leadership of the Zionist movement and the Yishuv \[the Jewish population in Palestine prior to the founding of Israel\] as a solution to the ‘Arab question’ in Palestine ... Virtually every member of the Zionist pantheon of founding fathers and important leaders supported it and advocated it in one form or another”. Prior to the 1890s, Jewish people made up less than 4 percent of the population of Palestine, while Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians made up the overwhelming majority. It was therefore essential, if the Zionist project were to succeed, to change the demographic balance. Over the next 50 years, mass Zionist immigration to Palestine increased the Jewish settler population to approximately one-third of the overall population. The Zionist movement also bought land from Palestinian and Arab landowners, establishing dozens of colonies and expelling the Palestinian tenant farmers and their families who had worked the land for centuries. It soon became clear that very few Palestinians had any interest in selling their land to the colonists. By 1947, Jewish settlers had succeeded in purchasing just 7 percent of privately owned land in the territory. However, as Patrick Wolfe notes in his 2016 book *Traces of History*, even this limited acquisition of territory allowed the Zionist movement “to establish a colonial beachhead” in Palestine from which it could carry out the mass, violent expulsion of most of the Palestinian Arab population, expropriate the lands which they once occupied and establish the state of Israel. As Zionist settler colonialism intensified, political violence in 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1933 erupted as tensions between the Jewish Zionist settlers and the Palestinian Arab population boiled over. In 1936, Palestinians began a three-year anti-colonial revolt. Combining non-violent civil disobedience, general strikes and armed struggle, tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from all classes mobilised to throw off the shackles of British imperialism and Zionist settler colonialism. During the revolt, British mandate police stations and government buildings were targeted; British convoys were attacked; roads, railroads and telegraph lines were cut; and trains and oil pipelines were blown up. More than 5,000 Palestinians were killed by British troops. The British authorities also carried out collective punishment against whole Palestinian villages. This included bombing several villages out of existence, demolishing houses, enacting curfews, outlawing Palestinian political parties and associations, deporting or exiling their leaders and banning public protests. Hundreds of Palestinians were also convicted by British military courts; more than 50 were hanged and 2,500 detained in internment camps. By late 1938, Palestine was under a state of siege. It took more than 20,000 British and 15,000 Zionist troops to finally put the revolt down in 1939. By the end of the uprising, the Zionist movement was stronger than it had been in 1936, having increased its military capacity due to its collaboration with Britain to suppress the revolt. Between 1940 and 1945, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion continued to strengthen and expand the military capabilities of the Zionist movement in Palestine, while supporting Britain’s war efforts in Europe. With the Palestinian national movement crushed, the leaders of the Zionist movement also began final preparations for the creation of the Zionist state, including creating a detailed registry of every Arab village in Palestine. This registry, known as the Village Files, was compiled by the Jewish National Fund, which was responsible for settling Jewish colonists in historic Palestine. Today, the fund remains one of the key tools used by the Zionist movement to enable the colonisation of Palestine. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, although the Village Files recorded the location of the villages, access roads, land quality and other socio-cultural information such as the names of village leaders, religious affiliations of the inhabitants and their main sources of income, they were not simply an “academic exercise in geography”. Pappe explains in his 2006 book *The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine* that the files also included “an index of hostility” towards the Zionist project based on whether the villages had participated in the 1936-39 revolt. Accompanying the index was a series of lists, which identified individuals and families who had fought against the British and the Zionists during the revolt or had been involved in the Palestinian national movement in any capacity. According to Pappe, these lists, along with lists added in 1947 detailing “wanted” persons, were used in 1948 by Zionist militias as they seized control of and occupied Palestinian villages. Any Palestinians on the lists were immediately identified and “shot on the spot”. As the war in Europe drew to a close in 1945, the Zionists under the leadership of Ben-Gurion enacted a new strategy, believing they were now militarily and demographically strong enough to need no longer the imperial backing of Britain. Over the next three years, Zionist militias attacked not only Palestinian Arabs but also British troops and infrastructure, including the terrorist bombing of Britain’s administrative headquarters in the King David Hotel in 1946, resulting in the death of 91 government officials, soldiers, police and office workers. Zionist terrorist attacks on both British infrastructure and Palestinian villages escalated further after 29 November 1947, when the United Nations announced its plan to partition Palestine. The UN plan allocated 55 percent of Palestine to the Zionist movement, despite Palestinian Arabs making up two-thirds of the population. Between December 1947 and March 1948, Zionist militias stepped up their terrorist bombings of Palestinian neighbourhoods and villages. Among the attacks ordered by Ben-Gurion at the end of January 1948 was the destruction of the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in Jerusalem. On 7 February, a week after the attack, Ben-Gurion also visited the Palestinian village of Lifta on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which had been destroyed in early January. According to Pappe, after the visit, Ben-Gurion “jubilantly recounted” to other leaders of his political party: “In many Arab neighbourhoods in the west \[of Jerusalem\] you do not see even one Arab ... what happened in Jerusalem and in Haifa—can happen in large parts of the country ... If we persist it is quite possible that in the next six or eight months there will be considerable changes in the country, very considerable, and to our advantage. There will certainly be considerable changes in the demographic composition of the country.” Throughout February 1948, the Zionist militia under Ben-Gurion’s command continued to terrorise Palestinian villages, expelling their residents. In March, Ben-Gurion finalised Plan Dalet, the Zionist movement’s blueprint for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Pappe notes in his book that, at the beginning of April, “each brigade commander received a list of the villages or neighbourhoods that had to be occupied, destroyed, and their inhabitants expelled”. Following Ben-Gurion’s formal declaration of the establishment of Israel on 14 May, his new government set up an unofficial “Transfer Committee” to oversee the continued ethnic cleansing. In *The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited*, Israeli Zionist historian Benny Morris notes that a 5 June memorandum issued by the Transfer Committee argued that “the uprooting of the Arabs should be seen as a solution to the Arab question” and proposed “preventing Arabs from returning to their places” by carrying out the “destruction of villages as much as possible during military operations” and the “settlement of Jews in a number of villages and towns”. By the time Zionist forces finished implementing Plan Dalet in January 1949, the Zionist movement had taken control of 78 percent of historic Palestine and expelled 1 million Palestinians from their homes. Since 1948, Israel has continued to expand, annexing more and more Palestinian land. In 1967, it took East Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, ethnically cleansing a further 350,000-400,000 Palestinians from their land and homes. Since then, Israel has established more than 130 colonies in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, while another 100 wildcat (unofficial) colonies have been established independently. More than 600,000 Israeli colonists are living in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in contravention of international law. For Palestinians, the *Nakba* of 1948 never ended. ### German high schoolers strike against conscription URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/german-high-schoolers-strike-against-conscription/ Last updated: 2026-05-14T01:04:23.000Z BERLIN—Tens of thousands of German high school students skipped class on 8 May to protest against conscription and militarism. In total, 45,000 took part in demonstrations in 150 towns and cities across the country. “In my class, there’s barely anyone left”, a year 9 student at the Berlin rally told *Red Flag*. The nationwide day of action was coordinated by School Strike Against Conscription ([Schulstreik gegen Wehrpflicht](https://schulstreikgegenwehrpflicht.com/?ref=redflag.org.au)), a coalition of activists that has organised two other school strikes since December, when the German parliament passed the Military Service Modernisation Law. Under the new rules, every 18-year-old German receives a questionnaire asking them if they are interested in military service. The young men are required to undergo physical, medical and cognitive testing, as well as a face-to-face consultation assessing their suitability for enlistment. For now, enlistment remains voluntary. However, last month, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius of the Social Democrats (SPD) [announced a target](https://www.bmvg.de/resource/blob/6093766/01b1718498c25db9010ea13724d7a37a/dl-gesamtkonzeption-der-militaerischen-download-deu-data.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) of 260,000 active soldiers and 200,000 reservists by 2035—almost double Germany’s current troop numbers. If enough volunteers can’t be found, or “if the strategic situation worsens”, the military service law outlines a path to conscription. For millions of young Germans, this has cast another shadow over a future already marred by cost-of-living pressures and impending climate disaster. “Dying? That’s not in the timetable”, read one placard at the Berlin demonstration. One high schooler told *Red Flag* that they would “rather be on the streets than at the front”. One new regulation requires men between the ages of 17 and 45 to notify the German military (Bundeswehr) if they plan to leave the country for more than three months. Widespread indignation forced the government to back down, stating that the clause was [currently suspended](https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/bundeswehr-meldepflicht-auslandsreisen-100.html?ref=redflag.org.au). Organisers chose 8 May, the anniversary of the end of the Second World War, to connect the remembrance of the horrors of that conflict with anti-war resistance today. Chants of “Siamo tutti antifascisti!” (Italian for “We are all anti-fascists”) combined with Palestinian flags and keffiyehs (traditional Palestinian scarves) throughout the demonstrations, highlighting the importance of standing against the far right and the Gaza genocide for tens of thousands marching. Despite its best marketing efforts and the presence of recruiters at schools, the Bundeswehr has not been successful in recruiting young Germans. [Recent reporting](https://taz.de/18-Jaehrige-beantworten-Briefe-nicht/!6177053/?ref=redflag.org.au) revealed that 28 percent of those receiving the enlistment questionnaire ignored it, despite the threat of a €250 euro fine. Of those who completed it, half rated their interest in military service at 0 on a 0-10 scale. The modernisation law is part of a militarisation drive that began with a €100 billion “special fund” for the military, introduced in 2022 by Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The current government, led by the conservatives in coalition with the SPD, changed the constitution to exempt military spending from budgetary debt restrictions. Headed by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, it combines remilitarisation with a class war at home. Merz [promised a conference of bankers last month](https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/merz-rente-basisabsicherung-spd-kritik-100.html?ref=redflag.org.au) that the state age pension should be only a “basic cover”. Health Minister Nina Warken [has said](https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/kontext/krankenkassen-reform-warken-100.html?ref=redflag.org.au) she wants to slash €20 billion from the sector. A Year 10 student at the Berlin demonstration told *Red Flag* that young people’s futures are “going down the drain” and demanded that the government “put some money into education”. A big part of the government’s program aims to make German industry more internationally competitive. Alongside handouts to the bosses, this means attacking workers’ pay and conditions. Last week, Labour Minister Bärbel Bas [announced plans](https://www.fr.de/verbraucher/73-stunden-woche-merz-regierung-kippt-acht-stunden-tag-experten-warnen-vor-drohender-zr-94296786.html?ref=redflag.org.au) to scrap the eight-hour day. Across the country, crowds included contingents from the teachers’ union. A Berlin teacher told *Red Flag* they thought it was important to attend because “instead of burning money, we demand money for schools and universities, social services and the health system”. A central motivation for Germany’s remilitarisation is competition with Russia. In 2023, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said: “We need to become ready for war.” And last month, Germany released the first official military strategy in its post-war history. Pistorius’ foreword declares that a changing “international security situation” means that Germany must have “the most powerful conventional army in Europe”. This aggressive military build-up is a disaster for workers and young people. Billions for war come at the expense of hospitals and schools. History shows that when imperialist rivalry turns into military conflict, millions of working-class lives are sacrificed at home and at the front. “It’s about our life, and it’s not their \[the politicians’\] children that will go to war; they won’t suffer. It’s always the civilian population and above all the poor who will”, a Year 9 student told *Red Flag*. The successful school strike demonstrates the potential to build anti-war resistance. School Strike Against Conscription activists are now planning a week of action in June and a conference in July, followed by another nationwide strike after the northern summer break. ### Melbourne council workers strike for better pay and a collective contract URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/melbourne-council-workers-strike-for-better-pay-and-a-collective-contract/ Last updated: 2026-05-14T00:30:00.000Z Workers across eight Melbourne local councils went on strike for 24 hours on 5 May to demand higher pay and a multi-enterprise bargaining agreement. That’s a contract covering workers at all eight councils, rather than each council having its own agreement with different conditions and rates of pay. Local council workers provide a variety of essential services, including childcare, garbage collection, library services and parks and road maintenance, many of which were partially or fully shut down on the day of the strike. In the inner-north council of Merri-bek, the strongly unionised librarians shut down all five libraries for the day. It’s not surprising that council workers were ready to walk off the job. The average salary is $70,000, according to the Australian Services Union (ASU), the main union covering council workers. Under each council’s existing agreements, real wages have declined by between 8 and 13 percent. The ASU wants a wage rise of 10 percent in the first year, followed by 4 percent for each of the next three years. This is not an extravagant demand. Even assuming inflation returns to the Reserve Bank’s 2.5 percent target over the next three years, those increases would still leave half of the councils’ workers behind in real terms. That is particularly insulting, given the exorbitant salaries of council CEOs, like the City of Melbourne CEO who “earns” more than $500,000 per year. A whopping 97 percent of union members, averaged across all eight councils, voted in favour of industrial action in late March. The campaign kicked off with a 24-hour strike of garbage collectors at three councils on 7 April, followed by bans at various councils involving library workers, street cleaners and garbos. Bans can impose a cost on management while limiting the impact on workers’ incomes, but they also leave management with the option to dock workers’ pay or formally discipline them. As the pressure on workers increased in mid-April, union members at the Merri-bek and Melbourne City councils voted for a 24-hour strike across all eight councils. On 17 April, an online meeting of hundreds of ASU council workers voted unanimously for a strike. More than 80 percent voted for a 24-hour stoppage, but there was also some support for a 48-hour strike, especially from depot workers, who were under threat from scab labour. A few days later, a delegates’ meeting voted to pause the work bans and begin preparations for a 24-hour strike on 5 May. On the day of the strike, around 1,200 council workers converged on Trades Hall for a rally before marching to state parliament. Spirits were high. Eugene, a worker at Maribyrnong council, told *Red Flag*: “Strength in numbers is the number one thing. Having workers out there talking to each other is what builds workers’ class consciousness. We’re all fighting the same cause, no matter what council, no matter what area”. Another worker, Jason, a delegate at Hume City Council, said that the councils have “dragged out the process ... Our demands are simple, but the councils have made it anything but that, so now we need to give them some consequences”. Groups of workers from councils not included in the multi-enterprise bargaining also attended in solidarity. Some are pushing for their councils to join the fight for the combined agreement, while others narrowly lost the vote to join due to scare campaigns and dirty tactics by management. In addition to securing much-needed pay rises, the fight for a multi-enterprise agreement has broader significance. Negotiations for the council agreement are one of the first major tests of the federal Labor government’s 2022 industrial relations changes that expanded multi-enterprise bargaining rights for unions. The idea is that a single agreement covering workers at multiple workplaces gives them greater clout in negotiations. If the ASU succeeds in this attempt to establish a collective contract, and one that is better than what would have been negotiated individually, it will unite thousands of workers and open a path for others to follow suit. A clear win for the council workers would also show workers everywhere that we don’t have to put up with yet another round of nominal wage rises that fail to keep pace with inflation. The next steps remain to be determined. We will need plenty of organising, discussion and industrial action before the state government feels any pressure to increase council funding—either through direct grants or by easing restrictions on rate rises. In the past, council workers have waged epic industrial disputes to win and keep wages and conditions and to restrict outsourcing. Returning to that level of militancy has to be the aim. It is ambitious, but necessary. The strike has lifted workers’ confidence and sent a message to councils that workers are prepared to fight for their wages and conditions. With inflation on the rise again, a strike of thousands of workers who provide essential services is a solid step in the right direction. ### So much budget bluster URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/so-much-budget-bluster/ Last updated: 2026-05-22T08:21:31.000Z If you were to believe the Sydney *Daily Telegraph*, the Albanese government’s latest budget is a “big taxing communist manifesto” and “the most radical redistribution of wealth since the Whitlam era”. Other Murdoch outlets followed suit. It was class war on the backbone of the nation, the boomers, the “mum and dad investors” and the entrepreneurs. Socialism reborn. As far as the government is concerned, though, this is a budget that finally tackles “intergenerational inequality”, specifically by winding back regressive tax lurks that have enabled landlords to get away with billions in tax avoidance since the Howard government introduced them a quarter of a century ago. ABC and Nine masthead newspaper columnists joined in, praising Treasurer Jim Chalmers for giving the younger generations hope that they may one day buy their own home. Finally, a government standing for fairness. If only. The budget incorporated a series of tepid tax reforms whose impact on housing affordability and availability will be marginal at best. It was so radical that plenty of mainstream economists lined up on budget night to welcome them as long overdue change. So radical that the stock market barely blinked. Far from being “communist”, an assault on Australia’s capitalists, the budget leaves the capitalist class almost unscathed. Some may have to pay a little tax on the trusts they have used for decades to squirrel away their wealth, safe from the taxman. But this modest tweak is far outweighed by what the government didn’t do. It didn’t introduce a 25 percent tax on gas exports, a popular measure that would have generated tens of billions of dollars in funds in the coming years. It didn’t increase corporate tax rates. It didn’t introduce a wealth tax, the only thing that can make a dent in the fortunes of the richest families. It didn’t introduce higher marginal tax rates on the country’s top “earners”. The government may talk about “intergenerational inequality”, but it leaves class inequality untouched. The government is doing nothing to rein in some of the biggest capitalist boondoggles out there: the tens of billions of dollars handed out to private operators in aged care, childcare, “affordable housing”. Since the neoliberal revolution ushered in by the Hawke and Keating governments in the 1980s, public provision of services by government agencies and departments, already feeble by international comparison even in its heyday, has been replaced by contracting out to private operators who will only operate services and build homes if their pockets are filled with taxpayer funds. It is this model of “responsible government” that leads to the shocking standards in aged care homes and childcare, and a constant turnover of staff sick of the overwork and poor pay. This entire model remains. A crash program of public-sector homebuilding that takes access to a secure home out of the clutches of the landlords, the property developers and the banks? Not a chance. Instead, first home buyer schemes that drive house prices higher. The attacks on the National Disability Insurance Scheme encapsulate the government’s right-wing approach. There is a crying need for serious government funding for services for people with disabilities. But the NDIS was never that. As with aged care and childcare, the NDIS outsources service provision to the private sector. By design, it has become a honeypot for thousands of shonks who have driven up the cost of the NDIS year after year. The government’s reaction? Not to scrap the system and start again with a publicly operated one, affording care for those who need it and decent working conditions for those who staff it. Instead, it is cutting planned spending by $15 billion and booting off an estimated 160,000 clients over the next four years while promising to tackle the shonks in an industry where shonks are a design feature, not an error. Almost unmentioned in the cries of doom from the Murdoch journalists or the paeans of praise from the liberal and centrist media was the budget’s obscene expansion of military spending—up by another $15 billion in the next four years and $53 billion over the next decade. Twelve billion dollars to expand the Henderson shipyards in Perth to service the nuclear submarines on their way and to build the new Japanese-designed frigates. Billions more to expand the military footprint in the Northern Territory. That the media made next to nothing about the ever-growing outlay of funds on the military at a time when all agree that reining in the budget deficit is a priority tells you everything about how normalised Australia’s growing militarism has now become. With the bipartisan commitment to spend $368 billion on the AUKUS nuclear submarines, the political establishment, right-wing and centrist alike, is happy to sign blank cheques to the warmongers, no questions asked. At a time inflation is running at 5 percent and likely to rise still higher in the coming months, wages are growing by barely 3 percent. After a brief reprieve, we’re back to another round of real wage cuts. What is the government doing about this? Are we supposed to be grateful for the pitiful $5 a week tax offset, or the 1 percent cut in tax on the lowest incomes? These will quickly be eaten up by bracket creep as rising nominal wages push workers into higher tax brackets. Or the cuts to public service jobs? There are billions of dollars for construction companies to build infrastructure and housing, their way cleared by reduced environmental and workplace health and safety protections, but precious little for public schools and hospitals. The government’s talk of fairness and tackling inequality is empty noise. Yet in some ways, the budget is ambitious: it is characterised by an ambition to keep Australian capitalism’s winners rich and its losers poor. ### We have to fight, not accommodate, One Nation and the far right URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/we-have-to-fight-not-accommodate-one-nation-and-the-far-right/ Last updated: 2026-05-17T01:51:21.000Z One Nation must be fought relentlessly. That has to be the lesson the left and the working-class movement takes from the victory of Hanson’s far-right racist party in the Farrer by-election, where One Nation won close to 40 percent of the primary vote—and around 57 percent on two-party preferred terms. We can’t bury our heads in the sand. One Nation can’t be wished away or ignored. If there was any doubt about the threat posed by Hanson’s politics, you just had to listen to her reactionary victory rant on election night. Racism, of course, was central, with attacks on “mass immigration” and Muslims and the demand for “Australian values at the heart of our immigration”­—to which her mob of supporters responded with chants of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Oi, Oi, Oi!” Alongside the racist bile, she denounced “net zero ideology”, demanded “energy abundance” (i.e. burning more coal to make the climate disaster worse) and called to “unlock the water” to unleash more environmental destruction on the Murray/Darling basin. As for the idea that One Nation is an “economic populist” party standing up for the so-called battlers, Hanson demanded increased government austerity measures, attacking “big spending” and “big government”. Barnaby Joyce chimed in with attacks on out-of-control “socialism”. All of this is occurring in a context where the world capitalist system is becoming meaner and nastier, with more and more attacks on basic rights and working-class living standards. The far right is entrenching itself in country after country. Just days before One Nation’s success in Farrer, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK surged to victory in numerous council elections in Britain, and Narendra Modi’s ultra-reactionary Indian People’s Party won big in a string of regional elections in India. One Nation’s thrashing of the Liberals will substantially add to the momentum it gained from its 23 percent vote in South Australia. Big money had already been flowing into One Nation’s coffers from the top end of town, and that is sure to increase as more of the rich and powerful follow Gina Rinehart’s lead. So a line has to be drawn. One Nation is not going to be stopped by backing conservative independent candidates like Michelle Milthorpe, who Get Up! spent over half a million dollars campaigning for in Farrer. Nor will it be stopped by rallying behind the right-wing Labor governments of Albanese in Canberra, Minns in NSW and Allan in Victoria, as the lesser evil. And One Nation is definitely not going to be stopped by accommodating its reactionary, racist and anti-working-class politics. Decades of racist attacks by the mainstream parties on refugees, Muslims and Aboriginal people, combined with their undermining of workers’ rights, living standards and union organisation, have prepared the ground for Hanson. The far right is not unstoppable, but it will not be defeated by confining ourselves to the framework of parliamentary politics. We have to rebuild our unions as fighting forces that stand up for workers. We need mass mobilisations on the streets to break the momentum of the far right and to stand up to racism. None of that is going to happen overnight. It will take determined effort by committed activists to begin to turn the tide. It is going to be a long fight. A vital element of any successful resistance to the far right is building a militant socialist movement prepared to consistently mobilise to defend the interests of the working class and the oppressed. We need a party that will challenge not just One Nation but the whole capitalist system, whose interests the far right serves. The reformist politics of the ALP and the union leaders, and the small-l liberal politics of the Greens, are incapable of offering the concerted resistance to the far right that is necessary. They are too tied to capitalism. They are not prepared for the scale of working-class mobilisation needed to crush Hanson because that would threaten the interests of the entire Australian ruling class, to which they are tied. We are in dangerous times. Mainstream politics is being decisively shaken up. The Liberal Party, the dominant party of capitalist rule in Australia for nearly 80 years, is in disarray. The Liberals’ very survival is in question. At the close of counting on Saturday night, they had been reduced to just 12.4 percent of the vote in Farrer, long a conservative stronghold. The Nationals were on 9.8 percent. A swathe of their regional seats is now under threat. It is difficult to see the Liberals being able to form government federally without a coalition arrangement with One Nation. What was the response of Liberal leader Angus Taylor to their debacle? He defended preferencing One Nation and joined Hanson in calling for “reducing government spending” and “abundant energy”, and declared that “mass migration has not worked for this country”. This increasing shift to the right by the Liberals simply inflames the reactionary political mood in society and is unlikely to break One Nation’s momentum. Nonetheless, challenges remain for One Nation. It has yet to establish a solid party machine and has yet to be seriously tested in the major cities. Whether it can break through in the main urban areas will be decisive. In Farrer, One Nation consistently polled over 50 percent in the more rural booths and in some 60 or 70 percent. But in most Albury booths, the party polled considerably less—a bit over 20 percent. That should, of course, be no grounds for complacency. But it does indicate that not everyone is going over to Hanson. The task now is to galvanise those appalled and shaken up by the One Nation surge and cohere them into a fighting force. The myth of easy-going Australia is being shattered. We have to build a militant socialist movement that can stiffen the resistance to the far right and lay the basis for a genuine alternative to all the horrors of capitalist society. ### Strike wave in India shows workers’ power URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/strike-wave-in-india-shows-workers-power/ Last updated: 2026-05-15T07:56:59.000Z Wildcat strikes and militant protests have spread across several industrial belts in India in the last few months. Workers in various industries are demanding eight-hour workdays, wage increases, overtime pay, better workplace safety and basic amenities such as drinking water and toilets. In April, news presenters tut-tutted over [footage](https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/noida-protests-factory-workers-wage-hike-demands-phase-2-sector-60-vandalised-cars-vehicles-set-on-fire-video-news-101776058452452.html?ref=redflag.org.au) of burning cars and stone-pelting workers in the national capital region, which includes several industrial cities surrounding the capital, New Delhi, in the country’s north. Police have attacked workers with batons and tear gas and made hundreds of arrests. Hundreds more are [missing](https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/04/15/at-least-tell-us-you-have-him-families-search-for-missing-workers-after-noida-crackdown?ref=redflag.org.au)—possibly abducted by police or company goons. Authorities have [denounced the strikes](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/noida/was-noida-workers-protest-hijacked-40000-protesters-arson-bot-networks-pakistan-link-under-probe/articleshow/130249530.cms?ref=redflag.org.au) as the work of communist “outside agitators” or as a subversive plot by Pakistan. They have even pressed terrorism charges. Workers from oil refining and petrochemicals, auto parts, textiles and garments, steel and domestic services have come out. The actions have spread by example—workers’ militancy or partial wins in one struggle have given workers elsewhere the confidence to act. The wildcat strikes, involving many tens of thousands, have shaken the country’s labour movement and industrial relations far more than the annual one-day set-piece [general strikes](https://peoplesdispatch.org/2026/02/12/300-million-on-the-streets-in-a-historic-national-strike-in-india/?ref=redflag.org.au) called by the national trade union federations, which involve 100 million workers or more. Indeed, one such set-piece general strike occurred on 12 February. Leftists reported that, as in past years, union officials in many workplaces tried to [undermine the day of action’s](https://mazdoorbigul.net/archives/18082?ref=redflag.org.au) disruptive potential by counselling workers to organise a protest rather than a strike, or even a mere meeting outside work hours. The passive and tokenistic nature of the annual general strike elicits little interest from big business. That is a contrast to the alarm provoked by the militancy of this strike wave from below. Most strikers are contract workers employed by subcontractors rather than directly by the workplace where they work. They are paid lower wages and are denied the social security provisions that permanent workers doing the same work at the same plant receive. The national trade union federations tend to cover permanent workers much more than contract workers. In India’s organised manufacturing sector, [40 percent of workers](https://www.businessworld.in/article/every-2-in-5-workers-in-formal-manufacturing-sector-on-contract-in-fy23-data-538015?ref=redflag.org.au) are now contract workers. It is a substantial increase compared to the early 2010s. The spontaneous spread of these actions makes sense given the working conditions. It is common to work twelve-hour days with no overtime pay and only two days off a month. Labour economists say that to maintain a household in a small city, the minimum wage should be about 30,000 rupees a month (about A$440). Most of the striking factory workers earn closer to 10,000 rupees, the minimum wage in many states. In practice, however, nearly two-thirds of Indian workers earn less than the minimum wage, according to the most recent labour force survey, conducted by the Ministry of Statistics. Domestic workers involved in the strike wave, for instance, receive around 8,000 rupees. On top of that, there is the impact of the war on Iran. The price of cooking gas in India has risen fourfold or even eightfold in some places. Gas cylinders are the primary cooking fuel in cities and account for a significant share of monthly household spending for most workers. Many [migrant workers are leaving cities](https://www.businesstoday.in/india/story/no-way-to-cook-lpg-shortage-forces-out-migrant-workers-from-cities-amid-west-asia-war-524091-2026-04-05?ref=redflag.org.au) to return to the countryside because they cannot afford to eat. A 2026 report on [heat stress in the garment industry](https://www.heatwatch.in/blogs/new-report-breaking-point-heat-and-the-garment-floor?ref=redflag.org.au) by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai provides a broader sense of factory conditions. Of the surveyed workers, most work in buildings with metal or asbestos roofs that lack adequate airflow, let alone air conditioning, alongside machines such as dyers that operate at over 120 degrees Celsius. Most report difficulty obtaining permission to go to the toilet. Over a third report no reliable source of drinking water on the factory floor. A large majority of the workers (who are mostly women) report clinical symptoms of dehydration, urinary infection and disruptions to menstruation. To top it off, India experienced a [severe heatwave](https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2026/Apr/26/india-reels-under-severe-heatwave-98-of-worlds-hottest-cities-recorded-in-country?ref=redflag.org.au) in late April. The [timeline](https://www.groundxero.in/2026/04/23/demanding-workers-rights-not-a-pakistan-linked-conspiracy-labour-organisations-slam-state-repression-and-criminalisation-of-workers-revolts/?ref=redflag.org.au) of spreading protests and strikes gives a sense of the dynamics. On 2 February, protests and strikes broke out at an Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) refinery in Barauni, Bihar, sparked by a workplace death. On 23 February, 30,000 workers struck at another IOCL refinery, in [Panipat](https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/haryana/violence-erupts-again-at-panipats-iocl-refinery-as-labourers-clash-with-police/?ref=redflag.org.au), Haryana. A workplace accident had left two dead and a third requiring an amputation, after management refused to allow the timely entry of an ambulance. As videos of police repression of Panipat workers went viral, other workers took inspiration: steel workers in Surat, Gujarat, at ArcelorMittal Nippon (but employed by a contracting company that also subcontracts to IOCL); paint/petrochemical workers in Bharuch, Gujarat; IOCL workers in Salem, Tamil Nadu, and in Vadodara, Gujarat. In early April, strikes broke out in the town of Manesar, Haryana—first among thousands of auto-parts workers, then textile and garment workers. The chief minister of Haryana responded with both a carrot and a stick: the stick of arrests and “public disturbance” laws to prevent workers from organising in public, and the carrot of raising the state’s minimum wage by 35 percent. This still left wage rates well below the demands of the protesting workers—the minimum wage had not been raised since 2015. Nevertheless, the partial concession gave workers in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh confidence to make similar demands. The industrial city of Noida erupted from the second week of April. As well as factory workers in textiles and garments, women domestic workers and gig workers joined protests. The state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, is a notorious spewer of anti-Muslim hate. He is touted as a potential successor to Narendra Modi as a prime ministerial candidate because of his popularity among the core voter base of the ruling far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party). The police in Uttar Pradesh are among the most brazen in their anti-Muslim harassment. They also routinely turn a blind eye to Hindu fundamentalist vigilante groups who beat and lynch Muslims. It is the Noida protests above all that have provoked government accusations of Pakistani plots and that have received the harshest police repression. Prominent trade unionists in the state were placed under house arrest to stop them from consorting with the strikers. Yet here too the authorities made a concession by raising the minimum wage by 21 percent. It is important to situate the strike wave in a larger context—three issues in particular. First, new [Labour Codes](https://medium.com/tech-people/new-labour-codes-explained-48a4679d4a29?ref=redflag.org.au) came into force last November (after being enacted in 2020), strengthening the position of business owners and weakening the position of workers. They are the biggest attack on workers’ conditions in decades and are a significant plank of the Modi government’s ambition to make India a global manufacturing hub. The codes make it easier to stretch the workday to twelve hours (which was already the norm in many factories), make it harder to strike legally, make it easier to fire workers, weaken factory inspections for health and safety, and decriminalise and lower penalties for industrial offences by employers. The national trade union federations view the Labour Codes as a major threat and have called for their repeal in their annual one-day general strikes in recent years. While the token annual strikes have been toothless, perhaps the strike wave can finally provide some industrial muscle to oppose them. Second, rural living standards are dire. Many urban workers are migrants from the countryside. The flow of rural-to-urban migrant workers exerts a continual downward pressure on wages in cities, and remittances from migrant workers to their families in villages are an important source of support for households of small farmers and farm labourers. There is chronic [underemployment](https://www.ilo.org/publications/india-employment-report-2024-youth-employment-education-and-skills?ref=redflag.org.au) and “disguised unemployment” (an extra pair of hands on the family farm even though they are not needed) in the countryside. This was made worse during the pandemic as millions of migrant workers fled cities when workplaces closed—many have never returned. Modi’s ongoing [trade negotiations with the US](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/indiaus-trade-deal-big-promises-quiet-protections-what-really-happens-to-agriculture/articleshow/128019118.cms?ref=redflag.org.au) will likely lower India’s agricultural protectionism and may affect not only farmers but also farm labour, as farmers lower wages to remain competitive. Modi’s attempt to pass farm laws that benefit agribusiness at the expense of farmers was stopped in 2021 by a farmers’ movement, and today’s trade deals with the USA could provoke a similar campaign. Third, India has a high level of [unemployment among university graduates](https://indianexpress.com/article/business/azim-premji-university-state-of-working-india-2026-report-graduate-unemployment-white-collar-jobs-10587275/?ref=redflag.org.au)—people trying to enter professional or white-collar work. Nearly 40 percent of graduates under the age of 25 are unemployed. Meanwhile, the gap between non-graduate incomes and graduate incomes for youth has narrowed over the past decade. So this strike wave among blue-collar workers comes as other sections of society also face pressure—farm workers, small farmers, graduates and others. Trade negotiations with the USA have raised fears that increased competition from international firms will wipe out a layer of small farmers and small enterprises, who would be cast into the job market when unemployment is already high. It remains to be seen whether the combination of repression and small concessions will end the strike wave, or whether the desperation of wide layers of society will bring fresh reinforcements into the struggle. It also remains to be seen whether these fiery strikes from below will push the staid trade union bureaucracy beyond token actions. But one thing is clear: the industrial workers of India, so often written off by academics and paternalistic union bureaucrats alike, are once more proving themselves to be a fighting force. ### Greens’ unprincipled stance at Queensland by-election shows party’s true colours URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/greens-unprincipled-stance-at-queensland-by-election-shows-partys-true-colours/ Last updated: 2026-05-07T06:02:27.000Z Prominent member of the Australian Greens, Jonathan Sriranganathan, a twice-elected councillor in South Brisbane, recently published a long piece on his website, “Queensland Greens vs the new Queensland Socialists: How different are they?” While welcoming the emergence of a new left-wing force, Sriranganathan concluded that there wasn’t much difference between the two. Yes, there are conservative tendencies among the Greens’ elected representatives, reflecting powerful establishment pressures on them. Yes, the Queensland Socialists (QS) come out against capitalism and for socialism while the Greens don’t. But “currently, both parties are essentially pushing in the same direction”. It is unfair, then, for QS to criticise the Greens for being “more interested in maintaining the capitalist system than transforming it”. That, Sriranganathan argued, is “a superficial and unsophisticated misdiagnosis of what’s really going on”. Yet it turns out that the socialists’ supposedly “superficial and unsophisticated misdiagnosis” hits the nail squarely on the head. Barely 24 hours after publication, the idea that the Greens represent as much of a challenge to the status quo as QS was blown out of the water by the party’s decision to issue an open ticket for the Stafford by-election in Brisbane. The party’s how-to-vote card nominates the Greens candidate at number one and then urges voters to fill in the remaining eight boxes however they like. By publishing an open ticket, the Greens are indicating that they see no in-principle difference between the Liberal National Party (LNP) and the Queensland Socialists, nor between the far-right Independent and the ALP. An open ticket indicates to the party’s supporters and voters that the Greens are not concerned by the prospect of their preferences being used to boost the LNP’s chances of winning or gaining from the election, which would embolden the Crisafulli government to press ahead with its right-wing agenda attacking Indigenous people, cutting public-sector wages, banning free speech and locking up supporters of Palestine. Quite rightly, the Queensland Council of Unions has condemned the Greens’ refusal to campaign against the LNP, stating that it gives “the LNP a free pass for their attacks on workers’ rights and safety”. Even the Murdoch-owned *Courier Mail* can see what is at stake: “It is unclear why the party would ditch Labor at the upcoming Stafford election when LNP policies put forward under the Crisafulli government, including ‘adult crime, adult time’, pill testing, drug diversion, hate speech and e-safety laws, have been at odds with Greens values”. Some Greens members are angry about the decision by the state campaign committee and Brisbane North branch to issue an open ticket for Stafford. They are certainly grumbling about it at pre-polling. But the most Sriranganathan can come up with in a Facebook post responding to the dispute is to declare, “on balance ... it’s probably the wrong call”. In coming down weakly against the decision, he gives as much credence to the other side in his argumentation, most of which centres on electoral expediency rather than what helps advance the struggle against the reactionary state government. Yes, the LNP might take the seat, he argues, but don’t blame it on the Greens, as an open ticket will only swing at most a few hundred votes to the LNP. Yes, it’d be bad if the LNP wins Stafford, but the ALP are dreadful too. Yes, an LNP win will give the party a morale boost, but there are also “some very obvious benefits”, as Labor losing the seat “will make federal Labor more responsive to pressure from the Greens and left-wing social movements”. Yes, he disagrees with the decision, but “doesn’t feel particularly strongly about it” and certainly can’t find it in himself to criticise the party bodies that made the decision because they are only exercising “local branch autonomy”. These thin rationales for the open ticket are all cop-outs, a way to fudge the important question. Lost in all this tactical Tetris is the fundamental point of principle: do the Greens want to contribute to building a left that can fight the right? Do they even see politics as a battle of left versus right? Electoral politics isn’t everything, but it does matter insofar as it affects mass consciousness and the potential direction of struggles on the ground. The fact that the Greens have been missing in action on this front—the party has had little to no presence at demonstrations for many years and could only muster up a couple of dozen people for its contingent at the thousands-strong Labour Day march in Brisbane this year—perhaps hints at why the party could be so unconcerned about potentially giving a boost to the class enemy LNP. And the idea that the Greens’ refusal to preference Labor, potentially causing the ALP to lose Stafford, will force Labor leftwards flies in the face of history. All it will do is shift the political climate to the right and demoralise those who do want to fight. And even if the Greens felt they couldn’t preference Labor because they’re so dreadful and right wing (even though the Greens’ entire rationale for the past decade has been to form working coalitions with Labor governments and to pass Labor legislation barely amended), why not preference Queensland Socialists with whom Sriranganathan claims such close kinship? QS candidate Liam Parry is the first person charged with challenging the Crisafulli government’s legal attacks on the Palestine movement and potentially faces a two-year jail sentence. But the Greens, who regularly send representatives to speak at Palestine rallies, can’t even stir themselves to tell their supporters to preference Liam as an act of basic solidarity. As far as they’re concerned, there’s nothing to choose between the LNP prosecutor and the socialist defendant. Needless to say, QS is preferencing the Greens above every other party, and Labor before the LNP. Sriranganathan concluded his lengthy treatment of the relationship between the Greens and QS with the challenge: “For Socialists who think the Greens are too centrist or reformist, the key question remains: what in practice are you actually doing differently to ensure you don’t go down the same path?” That’s pretty simple: standing up for principled left-wing positions and class solidarity. A vote for Queensland Socialists at this by-election is a vote in that spirit. The same can’t be said of a vote for the Greens. ### Gordon Crane: a Marxist intellectual in Australia URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/gordon-crane-a-marxist-intellectual-in-australia/ Last updated: 2026-05-07T02:09:56.000Z A bright, working-class boy, then Christian patriot during World War I, Gordon Crane became a star university scholar concerned about the condition of the working class. As a 1922 graduate of the University of Queensland with first class honours in history, he could have had a lucrative and successful career, at least as a middle-class professional. Instead, he devoted his life to the socialist workers’ movement, to which he brought profound Marxist insights into the nature of capitalism, in the late 1930s. Figures like Crane, who are not academics, authors of articles in respectable journals or books, don’t feature in mainstream histories. There are brief mentions of Crane in an online labour movement [database](https://peopleaustralia.anu.edu.au/biography/crane-frederic-gordon-33166?ref=redflag.org.au) and a very few books, theses and articles. But people like him matter to us because they made important contributions to workers’ struggles and expanding our understanding of how capitalism works. Born in 1897 to a skilled metalworker father, Gordon Crane was the oldest of seven children. He won a scholarship to Ipswich Grammar School, where he won a Thallon Memorial Medal in 1914\. His dad worked in the Ipswich Railway Workshops, and the solid gold medal, with a locomotive on one side, was awarded to the children of railway workers who did best in the state’s intermediate high school exam. For decades, Thallon had been a senior Queensland Railways employee, eventually commissioner. Having won further support to go on to senior high school, then a teacher’s scholarship and enrolling in Queensland University, Crane volunteered to fight in the First World War in March 1916, apparently without his father’s approval. Suffering from health problems throughout his life, he was hospitalised while in military training and medically discharged after six months’ army service. Crane returned to study only in 1918, part time. From 1920 at the latest, he worked as a teacher. When the University Senate decided to up the fee for students sitting exams in 1919, Crane and Fred Paterson organised collective protest. The Senate backed down after a student mass meeting. While at university, Crane’s social ties shifted from the Church of England Men’s Society to the Workers Education Association. Although it was organised through the university and its full-time tutors were paid by the State Education Department, the association in Queensland was a radical adult-education organisation, whose program included classes in Marxist economics. Crane conducted some of its classes as a volunteer and, in 1921, was elected its treasurer. The prize-winning essay in economics that won him the lucrative Archibald scholarship for honours study demonstrated his concern for workers’ wellbeing and implied that he had reformist socialist politics. The WEA Students’ Society gave him the three volumes of Marx’s *Capital* in gratitude shortly before he left Brisbane. After graduating with a BA in history and economics, Crane taught at Mt Morgan’s high school. But he was soon employed full time, by the Education Department, as the Workers’ Education Association tutor in nearby Rockhampton. The WEA in Rockhampton was dominated by union militants and socialists, especially rail workers. The railway was the city’s largest employer. Crane was not only active in the Teachers’ Union, arguing for its affiliation to the Labor Party. He was also an advocate of what is today called progressive, “child-centred education”. In August 1925, Crane resumed his very close connection with Queensland Railways, though in a quite different spirit from his gold-medal award a decade earlier. He was very active in a week-long strike by railway workers that started in Rockhampton on 27 August (a day before the rest of the state). Queensland’s Labor government had cut the basic wage from the equivalent of $8.50 a week to $8 in 1922\. Now members of the rail unions, led by the very militant Queensland branch Australian Railways Union, insisted that the cut should be restored and that unionists had the right to hold stop-work meetings. Workers of the Railways Central Division, which included Rockhampton, added restoration of a 36¾ hour week for clerical workers. The Northern Division also demanded time and a half for night work. Both Crane and Fred Paterson spoke at many, if not all, of the rail workers’ mass meetings in favour of the industrial action. Paterson—by then a member of the minuscule CPA and between 1944 and 1950 the party’s only ever representative in an Australian parliament—was even coopted onto the strike committee. The government conceded the demands common to all three divisions. At the 1,500-strong Rockhampton meeting, which accepted this, according to the *Capricornian*, “Three cheers were given for the ‘Great Labour Movement’, the Disputes Committee, and Messrs. Paterson and Crane”. By December 1925 at the latest, Crane had Communist politics even if he was not, like Fred Paterson, a member of the Communist Party of Australia. When questioned about the difference between socialists and Communists at a meeting, the *Observer and Evening Brisbane Courier* quoted him as saying: > “that the Communists were prepared to carry their fight against capitalism to the bitter end, whenever it might be necessary, the Socialists were prepared to draw the teeth of the working class, and would take no course except constitutional action. Consequently, the Communists were the enemies of capitalism and the Socialist party was capitalism’s last defence.” At that stage the Queensland Labor Party still tolerated members who were also members of the Communist Party. Not for much longer. While Premier Bill Gillies had conceded the main demands of the 1925 railways strike, his successor, Bill McCormack, headkicker and former Australian Workers’ Union official, manoeuvred to isolate and weaken the ARU. Using a requirement that ALP members had to pledge that they weren’t members of the CPA, he pushed the militant union out of the Labor Party in 1926. At a pettier level, the Education Department tried to exiled Crane to a one-teacher school in the bush, first to Jundah, more than 200 kilometres south-west of the railhead at Longreach. There were protests. Gordon then accepted the position at Djuan, another one-teacher school, *only* 50 kilometres north of Toowoomba, in the parliamentary constituency of the conservative Queensland opposition leader. A year later, in February 1926, the ARU put him on as state organiser. The union became involved in the South Johnstone sugar mill dispute. Railway workers refused to transport scab sugar from the mill, in solidarity with AWU members striking over job security at the mill. McCormack responded by locking out the entire railway workforce of almost 19,000 until workers signed a pledge to obey management’s instructions. The dispute ended without any concessions by mill management. AWU members returned to work; the ARU accepted the pledge and a guarantee that there would be no victimisations. From 1927, if not earlier, Crane was following the CPA’s line and helping to build its front organisations, whether or not he was formally a party member. His acceptance of the party’s line continued when it became thoroughly subservient to the interests of the bureaucratic, capitalist ruling class in Russia, whose counter-revolution was complete by 1929. Facing financial problems in 1929, the ARU ended Crane’s employment, on the basis of last on, first off. But the Rockhampton Trades Hall Board soon appointed him its secretary. He made a living during the Depression by doing coaching work for school students and people studying for professional exams, paid lectures and classes, and pay as part-time secretary of the Rockhampton Trades Hall Board, to which he was an ARU delegate. He also featured at political street meetings, actively supported workers and the unemployed in struggle, and appeared in court on behalf of two workers’ families faced with eviction. In mid-1932, after the birth of his son, Crane gave up his Trades Hall position and set up a coaching business to improve his family’s income. He was politically inactive for the next four years. The only partial exception were formal, paid debates, the first attended by 700 people. He argued that the Douglas Credit recipe for prosperity, popular during the 1930s, was flawed economics, without apparently making a case for socialism. The following year, the ARU’s Queensland secretary, Tim Moroney, recalled Crane to political duty, employing him as the union’s part-time education officer in Brisbane. Later, he worked full time for the national union, initially in Brisbane, then Sydney. Unions have often used their journals as instruments for the education of their members. Crane’s new ARU education scheme was far more systematic than most. He organised discussion groups around a course of reading on Marxist economics, and imperialism, across the state and then nationally; an educational supplement in the Queensland branch’s monthly newspaper; and the publication of pamphlets. Crane made pioneering contributions in Australia to the understanding of capitalism, in his ARU pamphlet [*The Workers’ Struggle against Capitalist Depression and the Way out*](https://archive.org/details/crane-gordon-the-workers-struggle-against-capitalism-and-the-way-out-1937-ocred), and articles in the Queensland ARU’s *Advocate* and the CPA’s journal *Communist Review*. He produced the first serious Marxist examination of cycles in the Australian economy. And he was also the first to explain systematically the relationship between economic crises and the long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall. His publications drew on *The Nature of Capitalist Crisis*, by John Strachey, English publicist and then fellow traveller of the Communist Party. This became the main textbook for the ARU’s education course. The CPA was prepared to tolerate Crane’s deviation from the Stalinist orthodoxy in economics—that crises were due to “underconsumption”, that is, the working class’s insufficient purchasing power. After all, Crane was expounding arguments made by an important ally in Britain. That Crane and Strachey were both drawing on Marx’s arguments in the third volume of *Capital* was much less significant. Obscure economic theory was one thing, Russian foreign policy another. While believing that Russia was a workers’ paradise, Crane had the temerity in 1937 to criticise intensifying Communist efforts to woo western “democracies” into an anti-fascist alliance with the Soviet Union. Senior Party official Richard Dixon put him in his place. But the CPA’s *Communist Review*, edited by Dixon, continued to publish articles by him. And, in late 1939, the Labour Council of NSW, in which the CPA was very influential, employed Crane to head its Research Bureau. Then, shortly after Nazi Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, like a good Stalinist, he joined the Australian Army. In late 1945, Crane (at this stage certainly *not* a CPA member) toured the state campaigning on behalf of the Queensland Trades and Labour Council campaigns for the 40-hour week and a rise in the basic wage. He then settled in Brisbane and resumed his coaching activities. In 1946, *Railroad*, the newspaper of the NSW ARU, now under vehemently anti-communist leadership, published three articles by him. In them, he followed John Strachey in embracing Keynesian economics as a means to avoid crises under capitalism. By the time he died on 8 February 1949, Gordon Crane had rejoined the Labor Party, well before the Queensland ARU reaffiliated. He was very fondly remembered by former comrades in the ARU. In his autobiography, Frank Nolan, a comrade of Crane’s in Rockhampton in the 1920s and later Queensland state secretary of the ARU, recalled: > “Gordon Crane as an adult educationalist had no superior in Australia. His death at an early age ... was a grievous loss to the Labor Movement. Gordon Crane had a wonderful analytical brain. He was a splendid writer and devastating debater. He could almost make you believe ‘black’ was ‘white’.” --- Rick Kuhn is the author of *Paradise on the Instalment Plan: The Economic Thought of the Australian Labour Movement between the Depression and the Long Boom*, just published; and, with Tom Bramble, of *Labor’s Conflict: Big Business, Workers and the Politics of Class*. ### The long fight for civil rights in Queensland URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-long-fight-for-civil-rights-in-queensland/ Last updated: 2026-05-07T02:07:39.000Z The arrest of more than [20 activists in Brisbane on 18 April](https://redflag.org.au/article/twenty-arrested-at-brisbane-palestine-rally/) for saying six words calling for Palestinian liberation was shocking, but it was not unusual in Queensland’s history. The pretext for repressing social movements has shifted—whether public order, patriotism or, more recently, [“social cohesion”](https://redflag.org.au/article/social-cohesion-a-weapon-to-defend-the-status-quo/)—but repression remains a recurring theme in Queensland politics. Under capitalism, free speech and civil liberties are never secure: governments can strip them away, but movements can also win them back through defiance and mobilisation. One of the earliest free speech fights took place in Brisbane in 1913, when socialists, Russian revolutionary exiles and members of the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the Wobblies, waged a prolonged 12-month struggle for free speech. Since federation, formal political rights had advanced, but civil liberties had not. The Brisbane Traffic Act 1905 restricted the holding of meetings and processions. To hold a meeting or a procession, organisers needed a permit, which cost 20 shillings—around half the weekly basic wage—and took three days to obtain. Permits could be denied for any reason and were almost always denied for Sundays. Seeing the injustice in this, radicals would begin public speeches, denouncing the evils of capitalism. Due to Sunday observance restrictions, which banned almost everything in public apart from church, there was not much else to do, and crowds would start to gather. Police would then arrest the speaker, only for another speaker to step forward and replace them. And then another, and then another. The speakers were hauled off to jail and brought before the magistrate. More than 30 activists were arrested in total, and collectively they spent more than five and a half years in prison. As the campaign escalated, the radicals became cheekier in their actions. Some locked themselves to posts so they could speak for longer and denounce the police, while the police rushed around trying to find saws to cut them out of the railings. Bob Besant, a 23-year-old labourer, captured the cheekiness of this defiance. He rode a horse up and down Queen Street, followed by 2,000 to 3,000 people, with placards hanging on either side of the horse that read: “Sorry to say I must be quiet—for if I speak I will cause a riot.” Eventually police arrested him, but the stunt exposed the absurdity of the law: he was neither holding a public forum nor conducting a meeting. In the end, he was fined and jailed for a week. One of the sentencing magistrates later exclaimed in irritation that a special plot of land should be set aside for the radicals to speak, because he considered it a waste of time having to sentence these agitators Monday after Monday. However, while radicals of all kinds were involved, the wider trade union movement did not take up the issue. After the defeat of the 1912 Brisbane general strike, leaders of the trade union movement thought it better to focus on getting the Labor Party elected than to put time and energy into a street campaign for free speech. The campaign therefore petered out without the backing of the wider trade union movement, showing that civil liberties campaigns cannot win through the actions of a radical minority alone. However, the First World War soon thrust new battles over civil liberties on to the working class in Queensland. In the early months of the war, there was a wave of patriotism and support for the British Empire. But as casualties mounted, living standards fell and wages were frozen, support for the war declined. At the same time, the need for more workers to go and die for the ruling class increased, and so the Australian government, led by Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes, tried to introduce conscription not once but twice. Both attempts were defeated by working-class defiance, despite repression, censorship and the curtailment of civil liberties. The second referendum campaign of November–December 1917 became a fight over free speech as well as over conscription. Hughes had expanded censorship and repression through the War Precautions Act, which was used in a pervasive and ad hoc manner to suppress views critical of the war effort and conscription. Anti-conscription publications were censored, mail was opened, meetings were monitored, and migrants were threatened with arrest, deportation or imprisonment. But repression did not stop the anti-conscription movement. Across Australia, massive demonstrations drew in thousands of workers, and violent strikes erupted outside the control of union officialdom. Under intense pressure from their radicalised rank and file, the union leaders who controlled the party machine were forced to take a stand. They expelled Hughes from the ALP, the only time a Labor prime minister has been booted from the party. The Ryan Labor government in Queensland also felt this pressure intensely and became the only state government opposed to conscription (even if it still supported the war). This was not because Ryan was concerned for the sanctity of human life. Rather, his government feared the radicals and the possibility that they could disrupt the whole social and industrial life of Australia. As the campaign unfolded, both the trade union movement and the Ryan government became increasingly frustrated by Hughes’ censorship. The Ryan government tried to circumvent the censor by having suppressed anti-conscription material read into parliament under privilege. The Brisbane Industrial Council, which linked militant unions (waterside workers, railway workers and the building trades) then moved to distribute it across the state, accompanied by denunciations of the government’s tyranny. Hughes responded by ordering the seizure of the material and sending troops to raid the Government Printing Office in Brisbane. Ryan instructed the Queensland police not to comply. For a moment, the issue of free speech escalated into a political crisis, with the possibility of open confrontation between the commonwealth and the Queensland government and the organised labour movement. The Brisbane Industrial Council even discussed plans to arm trade unionists if the army were used against the labour movement. In the end, both sides backed down. But the episode revealed how quickly the suppression of dissent could push Queensland toward a much wider political rupture. Hughes and the ruling class were defeated in their attempt to introduce conscription, which was rejected in two successive referendums in 1916 and 1917\. The anti-conscription movement was too broad and too deeply rooted in the working class to be silenced. Unlike the 1913 free speech campaign, which remained relatively isolated, the anti-conscription struggle drew in far wider layers of the labour movement and was able to win. By the 1960s, a new generation of students and young workers, having grown up during sustained economic growth without sharing much in its benefits, began to mobilise against the White Australia policy and then quickly moved into full-scale opposition to the Vietnam War. In Queensland, these anti-war protests soon became entangled with a broader fight for civil liberties. Marches, sit-down protests and draft-card burnings brought activists into direct conflict with the Traffic Act regulations that required police permission for political processions and street meetings. In October 1966, in a Brisbane demonstration against the war and conscription—in what would become the beginning of the “Right to March” campaign—police arrested 26 activists. This fused the issue of the war with the right to protest. The following year, four students went to prison for refusing to pay fines arising from earlier protests, which in turn led to more agitation at the University of Queensland. Forums, meetings and marches drew thousands into debate not only about Vietnam, but also about state power, civil liberties, censorship and capitalism. In September 1967, thousands of students and staff defied the authorities by marching beyond the points authorised by police. After marching eight kilometres into town, the protesters were ordered by police to disperse. Around 1,500 students then sat down in the street and linked arms. Police moved in with 250 officers to remove them, and in the subsequent melee, more than 100 people were arrested. However, with the National Party’s Joh Bjelke-Petersen becoming premier in 1968, the street march issue was to become one of Queensland’s [major ongoing civil liberties fights](https://redflag.org.au/article/activists-life-johs-queensland/). In 1977, Joh declared that “the day of the street march is over” and banned political processions by removing the practical right of appeal against police refusals of permits. The ban was aimed above all at the growing anti-uranium movement. The uranium industry was a potential bonanza for local capitalists, and the government was determined to stop the movement from gathering momentum. But once the ban was imposed, the issue rapidly expanded beyond uranium. It became a general fight over civil liberties and state power. Students, unionists, church people, environmentalists, liberals, socialists, communists and many previously uncommitted people were drawn into a broad campaign of defiance. What followed was the biggest and most sustained civil liberties struggle in Queensland’s history. Over the next two years, there were hundreds of protests, thousands of arrests and thousands more charges laid. Demonstrators were beaten, harassed and repeatedly dragged through the courts. Permits were refused, marches were declared illegal, and the police force was used as a weapon to enforce Joh’s rule. Yet this is also one of the clearest examples in Queensland history of repression being beaten back. The campaign was not won through appeals to the government’s conscience. It was won because people kept marching, kept defying bans, and made the cost of enforcement too high. Large demonstrations, small stunts, repeated arrests, jailings and organised persistence gradually undermined the government’s position. By 1979, permits were again being granted more readily. The permit system remained, but the attempt to crush protest outright had been pushed back. This history matters because it shows that the Crisafulli government’s attack on the Palestine campaign is not some shocking break with Queensland’s past. It fits an old and familiar pattern. Protest is tolerated only while it remains manageable, containable and politically harmless. When it does not, it must be crushed. For months, the authorities have slandered the movement as extremist, disorderly or antisemitic. Now slogans are being criminalised, arrests are being made, and the government is trying to send a message: dissent will carry a cost. The aim is not simply to punish a few activists. It is to frighten a broader movement, to make people hesitate before attending a rally, picking up a placard or speaking publicly in solidarity with Palestine. Democratic rights under capitalism are always contested. Free speech and freedom of assembly are not gifts from above. They are the products of past struggle, and they survive only so long as people are willing to defend them. Rights that exist on paper can still be undermined in practice. Rights that have been won can be narrowed, suspended or stripped away when the ruling class feels threatened. Repression is defeated through collective struggle. Queensland’s history does not show that governments are persuaded by eloquent pleas for tolerance. It shows that rights are defended through collective resistance, mass defiance and the building of movements strong enough to make repression difficult to sustain. The right to march was not defended because Joh was reasoned out of his authoritarianism. It was defended because thousands of people refused to back down. The activists arrested in Brisbane last month belong to a long tradition. From the 1913 free speech fighters to anti-conscription militants, to civil liberties marchers, to anti-uranium protesters, Queensland governments have repeatedly faced opposition to their attempts to criminalise dissent. The way our side has won is when we have defied en masse. ### The savagery of Trump and Netanyahu URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-savagery-of-trump-and-netanyahu/ Last updated: 2026-05-15T07:56:46.000Z Three months in, the numbers emerging from the latest war waged by Israel and the US are harrowing. More than 1,600 civilians have been killed in Iran since 28 February, and 3.2 million people are internally [displaced](https://www.unhcr.org/news/press-releases/unhcr-3-2-million-iranians-temporarily-displaced-iran-conflict-intensifies?ref=redflag.org.au). US strikes have obliterated apartment blocks and residential areas all over the country. Schools, hospitals and sport centres have been hit. Behind every number is a family like that of Mohammadreza and Marzieh Ahmadi. Their children were killed in the US airstrikes on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, which killed 156 people just one hour after the war began. When Mohammadreza dropped his son and daughter off that morning, 10-year-old Sobhan tumbled out of the car and grabbed his younger sister Hanieh in a bear hug. Mohammadreza told the [*Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/mar/28/parents-victims-iran-minab-shajareh-tayyebeh-school-bombing-describe-day?ref=redflag.org.au) that at the time he thought, “I am lucky to have a son who cares so much for his sister”. Marzieh went through years of miscarriages before Sobhan was born. He was developmentally delayed, and the family devoted themselves to helping him learn to speak. Just hours after Mohammadreza dropped his children off, the first US missile slammed into the school. Sobhan survived the first strike. He escaped to the playground, but his sister was missing. He ran back inside to find her. When Mohammadreza arrived at the morgue later to identify his children, the *Guardian* [reported](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/mar/28/parents-victims-iran-minab-shajareh-tayyebeh-school-bombing-describe-day?ref=redflag.org.au), “Hanieh’s skull was fractured, but her face was intact. And he recognised Sobhan immediately, at first glance, even though he was severely injured. Both his legs were broken. He was missing an eye. Half his face was gone.” Oil infrastructure has also been attacked, with far-reaching human and environmental consequences. On 7 March, Israel attacked four major oil depots around Tehran, leading to oil fires that caused an enormous plume of heavy black smoke to engulf much of the city. “The city looked apocalyptic”, a woman in north-west Tehran told Human Rights Watch. Days later, Iran’s deputy health minister told *Al Jazeera* that the plume had created acid rain, which “is already contaminating the soil and water supply”, the Iranian Red Crescent warning it can also cause skin burns and severe lung damage. In Lebanon, Israel is using scorched earth tactics. The Israel Defence Force has posted public videos showing the controlled detonation of entire villages along the Lebanon-Israel border, rigging houses with explosives and turning them into rubble with the press of a button. In early February, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun accused Israel of spraying farms in the south with cancer-causing herbicides to destroy agriculture. And late last year, Israel used white phosphorus to scorch Harj al-Raheb, an important forest on the border. Roughly 1.2 million people, one-fifth of the population, have been displaced. Six hundred thousand of them will never return if Israel [has its way](https://www.cfr.org/articles/israel-announces-plan-to-occupy-southern-lebanon?ref=redflag.org.au). A further 1,200 have been killed. In March, Israel issued expulsion orders for Beirut’s southern suburbs, the Bekaa Valley and Baalbek in the east, and much of southern Lebanon. The IDF invaded and gained control of roughly 14 percent of Lebanon’s territory, initially taking land south of the Litani River and systematically destroying the bridges that cross it. In early April, the IDF indicated the area it planned to occupy long term, which included 10 percent of Lebanon. Israel seeks to expand its territorial control and force Hezbollah northward. Hezbollah is a political party with a mass base among the Shi’ite community which operates like a state within a state. Its military wing has been the only bulwark against Israel in the south of the country since the later years of the Lebanese civil war. Israel has consistently refused to define its own borders, and has repeatedly invaded Lebanon since 1978\. In early April, 18 Israeli lawmakers from far-right parties including Likud wrote an open letter pushing for a full occupation up to the Litani River. The river is an important source of fresh water in an arid region. In 1919, Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization, wrote a letter to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George to push for the river to be a [key water source](https://www.thebeiruter.com/article/israel%E2%80%99s-historic-ambitions-with-the-litani-river/1026?ref=redflag.org.au) of the future Israeli state. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, argued at that time for the river to form Israel’s northern border, and revived the idea in the late 1940s. The claim to the river is also associated with Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of revisionist Zionism and a spiritual forefather of Israel’s far right. For years, many of the terrible fantasies of Israel’s most extreme political figures were not posed as realistic options. The current Gaza genocide changed that. Trump and Netanyahu are burning and blasting their way through the region. The capitalists and the political establishment the world over are letting it happen. ### The best decision you could make at university, or anywhere else, is to become an activist URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-best-decision-you-could-make-at-university-or-anywhere-else-is-to-become-an-activist/ Last updated: 2026-05-15T07:56:32.000Z The world is getting increasingly violent and irrational. The horror in Gaza has been followed by yet more death and destruction in Iran and Lebanon. The right is ascendant almost everywhere, with the surge in support for One Nation here just the latest example. If you think something needs to be done about the state of the world, you’re absolutely right. But what exactly should we do? First, we have to address the elephant in the room: change these days feels hard to achieve. The people who run the world seem to act with impunity and without regard for whether or not anyone approves of their actions. Terrible US and Israeli war crimes attract sycophantic support, most enthusiastically from the Albanese government, while protests against them are either ignored or criminalised. We could conclude from this there is no alternative but to accept the status quo—which is exactly the conclusion those in power hope we will come to. Or, we can refuse to give in, figure out what has worked to change things in the past and, from there, work out what can be done to get us a bit closer to that goal today. One of capitalism’s best-kept secrets is that when large enough numbers join movements to fight back together, change can happen relatively easily and unexpectedly. Just think of the Gen Z-led uprisings that have brought down governments in Bangladesh and Nepal in the last couple of years. The movement against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s is another example. Millions across the world engaged in resistance to the war, finally forcing the US to withdraw in what was a disastrous defeat for US imperialism and a win for our side. The heroism of the Vietnamese resistance, combined with revolt among US soldiers and a mass movement at home, made it impossible for the war to continue. Mass movements are most successful when they involve organised workers. It was the revolutionary actions of masses of Russian and German workers that ended the slaughter of World War One, for example. Action by workers doesn’t just disrupt society in a way the powerful can’t ignore; it also raises the possibility of a democratic alternative, run collectively by the people who produce the wealth. We are living in a different time to the heyday of the Vietnam War movement or the Russian Revolution. We haven’t been able to stop the genocide in Palestine, or force major changes in Australia’s stance. So we need to be willing to face up to the size of the mountain we have to climb in order to know what steps to take now. What we do know is that capitalism reliably breeds discontent, which can be turned into action if there are people arguing for it. Action is important because it brings people together and starts to impact wider layers. Take for example the 300,000-strong March for Humanity in Sydney, and the thousands who marched against the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog. These marches provided thousands the opportunity publicly to oppose the government and to see that others shared their disgust. And they made it impossible for the government to maintain the fiction that there is consensus support for Israel. Through mass action, we can get a sense of the power of our side, experiment with how to organise it most effectively, and get a better idea of what we’re up against. It brings people together and gives them a reason and opportunity to strategise about the way forward. Individuals can have an impact, but individuals organised together around shared aims and strategies have much more. Which is the reason that, at the centre of most sustained movements, there is a minority of activists thinking about the next steps, how to widen support and win. These activists are usually organised in groups, formal or informal. In the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, black students in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee spent their time between classes going to political meetings, organising sit-ins and regularly risking their lives to stand up against racism. They forged a new political tradition of resistance, which contributed to the movement’s success. It’s still true today that organised groups of people can make things happen, even when they are relatively small. For example, when the Herzog visit was announced, activists across the country in various pro-Palestine groupings made a conscious choice to turn it into a political scandal for the Australian government. Instead of allowing Albanese, Herzog and Minns to dominate the narrative, activists flipped the script by organising mass demonstrations across the country. But organisations need to be about more than just the immediate strategies for movements or campaigns, most of which are short lived. They need to offer a wider world view and vision for social change. This is why building socialist organisation is crucial. Socialists are for the complete destruction of capitalism and its replacement with a society run by the working class. We’re fighting for a world in which we don’t have to keep organising episodically against atrocities and injustice, and instead society’s resources are organised democratically and used to meet people’s needs, not entrench the privilege of a few. To get there, socialists want to use every opportunity for collective resistance to build and strengthen the sorts of organisations we need to fight for this goal now and into the future. We will need many more people to make the choice to join socialist groups to win fights in the long term, including pushing back the far right. That’s why it’s important to be an organised socialist today. This means improving your understanding of the system so that you can fight it most effectively together with other socialists. Being a socialist also involves throwing yourself into campaigns, fighting for radical perspectives within them and arguing to others to become socialists too. If we want to destroy capitalism, the system responsible for so much horror, it will take nothing short of hundreds of thousands choosing to do the same. --- *Madi Curkovic is the Monash Student Association education officer.* ### The emancipation of labour is still the hope of the world URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-emancipation-of-labour-is-still-the-hope-of-the-world/ Last updated: 2026-05-11T00:29:03.000Z To the superficial observer, hope can seem hard to come by. The working class has been on the receiving end of a decades-long offensive by our rulers. Unions, the most basic and powerful expression of working-class power under capitalism, are a shadow of their former selves in many countries, including Australia. The socialist parties, which once mobilised thousands or tens of thousands for May Day marches, have withered. The idea of united working-class action across borders, demonstrated in the international strikes for the eight-hour day on May Day in 1890, can seem remote. The prospect of the working class winning liberation, perhaps, even more so. The horrors of the system are unrelenting. And yet ... As we take stock of our forces on May Day, the elements that were so essential to those original international strikes on 1 May 1890—working-class power, international solidarity and socialist politics—are still forces that can move the whole world. In fact, they are the only true sources of realistic hope. Take international solidarity. Internationally coordinated or sympathetic action to challenge a world system of exploitation might sound like a tall order. But it’s been a regular feature of world politics in recent decades. Enormous protests tipped the crisis-ridden Stalinist tyrannies of Eastern Europe into collapse in 1989\. The largest coordinated protests in world history were not a hundred years ago, but in 2003—protesting against the murderous invasion of Iraq by the US, the UK and Australia. And in January 2011, mass protests in Tunisia, sparked by soaring food prices and an economic slump following the global financial crisis of 2008, toppled the US-backed dictator Ben Ali. This eruption of hope and protest spread rapidly across the Arab world—and far beyond. Protests and some strikes brought down the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt in February that year. Activists in Greece, also hard-hit by the aftermath of the GFC, took heart from this and launched the “movement of the squares”, inspired by the mass occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo. Mass protests moved to the other end of the Mediterranean in the form of the Indignados movement in Spain. And from there, activists who worked between Spain and New York started a small encampment in an obscure park near the southern end of Manhattan. Occupy Wall Street was born, its slogan “we are the 99%” highlighting how the ruling 1 percent of society was living in luxury while the rest of us went backwards. By the later months of 2011, what started as a protest against poverty and repression in Tunisia had bloomed into the global Occupy movement, with protest camps in 154 cities from London to Oakland to Tokyo to Melbourne. The Occupy protests were dispersed. But as left-wing author Vincent Bevans records, in the decade that followed, there were more mass protests and uprisings in more countries than any other decade in the history of capitalism. There were eruptions in Chile, Iraq, Sudan, France, Hong Kong, and a swathe of other countries in 2019\. And in 2020, somewhere between 19 million and 26 million people across the US were part of the riots and protests following the brutal police murder of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis. Black Lives Matter was the largest protest movement in US history, and sparked protests against racism and murderous policing across the world. It’s not surprising that this international spread of protests and uprisings is a feature of the modern world. We live in a globally integrated economy and society, where the impact of wars and economic crises can spread across the planet at lightning speed—as can discontent, protest and resistance. However, two weaknesses are clear from this brief survey of recent global waves of mass protest. And they represent the other two essential features of the whole concept and history of May Day—working-class power and socialist political forces. Though many millions of workers were part of the historic protests from 2011, overwhelmingly they participated as individuals rather than as an organised body of workers who, through actions in their workplaces, could disrupt or even entirely halt capitalism’s “business as usual” and thus its toxic lifeblood of profits. This is not because the working class has somehow disappeared or lost its power. The global working class is bigger than it has ever been. And by definition, we have as much potential power as we ever had: we still do pretty much all of the goddam work around here, after all. But the history of capitalism is, in large part, a history of how the means of production have been constantly transformed, and the working class along with it. In any one city, the main employer might have shifted from textiles to auto manufacturing to education, health and tech. But whatever the industry, or combination of industries, nothing can function without workers. Each phase in capitalism’s history produces new challenges for working-class activists. It’s not hard to find working-class militants who were veterans of the epic struggles of the English working class in the 1840s, bemoaning the depoliticised state of their fellow workers in the 1860s. The US labour movement of the 1920s was awash with gloomy prognostications about the new industries of cars and electricity being unorganisable. In both cases, it was a new generation of activists, drawing fuel from a renewed radical politics, who sparked the mass organising of the new industries. Similarly, in the 1970s, it was a generation of radicalised young people, many of them former students, who shook up staid industries and their unions as they entered the workforce. Today, a new generation of radicals face the enormous task of reviving working-class struggle and recreating unions as fighting organisations, rather than the pathetic NGOs or lobbying organisations which so many have become. This points to the third crucial ingredient of the historical tradition that created May Day: radical working-class politics. Waves of struggle come and go. Capitalist logic dictates the ever-evolving shape of capitalism and its productive forces. None of us has much control over any of this. But political radicalism, and specifically radical organisation, can be shaped by the actions of you and me. Allow me a couple of personal anecdotes to illustrate. The first May Day march I got to in Melbourne, in 1986, was an impressive affair at one level. Many thousands of working-class people with left-wing political traditions marched behind their banners. Migrants from Turkey, Greece and Chile were prominent. So were members and supporters of the Builders Labourers’ Federation, which was under daily assault from the state and federal Labor governments and their police forces. To my nineteen-year-old eyes, the whole thing was inspiring proof that some version of socialist politics could take hold among working-class people. But the whole thing was built on rotten foundations. And within a few short years, the structure built upon that foundation would come crashing down. The march was led by an enormous banner featuring a picture, among others, of Stalin—the murderer of the Russian Revolution and of the revolutionary socialist tradition along with it. For decades, the politics of working-class revolution had been utterly marginal in the workers’ movement throughout most of the world. Another part of the problem was the trade union bureaucracy. Surviving as a union secretary for years or decades necessarily involves compromises with the capitalist system. This fosters a politics of class compromise, expressed in Labor-style reformist politics. Many of these types were all too happy to paint themselves red—or at least pink—on May Day in the 1980s. But every other day was dedicated to helping Labor impose neoliberalism, or at best doing little to organise and politically arm workers to wreck Labor’s plans. The Stalinist and soft-Stalinist wing of this left went into crisis and collapsed, gradually or not so gradually, in the years that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989\. The reformist wing of the left is not in crisis in the same way, but has decayed as its failure to mobilise workers to fight has come home to roost. All of this has created a political space in which a new left can be built. And for the first time in many years, many socialist organisations are growing around the world. So a new left is being born. The crucial question is, what sort of left? Some are building on the same rotten foundations of Stalinism and reformism that, in their different ways, seek to manage some slice of capitalism rather than overthrow it. This is a dead end, at best. Governing a system which demands that the working class pay for wars, economic crises and climate destruction will turn you into someone who presides over and enables all that and more. Building a revolutionary socialist alternative to all this is no easy thing, as any member of Socialist Alternative can tell you. But we’ve demonstrated in practice that it’s possible to build a serious revolutionary socialist group that can help organise our fellow workers to fight, make an impact on politics at the state and national levels, and create the basis for a bigger and even more serious organisation in the future. So where does all this leave us? The last year has shown us some wonderful examples of how quickly things can move, and how seemingly dormant traditions of working-class organisation, action and solidarity can be revived. In August last year, it was easy to find scathing critiques of the timidity of Italy’s union movement. Yet in September and October, two one-day general strikes against Israel’s genocide in Gaza gave the whole world a glimpse of what working-class power and solidarity look like. Unsurprisingly, politicised militants in a key workforce on the docks played a crucial role. And in February, dock workers in 21 ports around Europe and the Mediterranean disrupted shipping in protest at the ongoing genocide. Meanwhile, in the US city of Minneapolis, workers shut down whole sections of the city and the economy on 23 January. Their day of “no work, no school, no shopping” was an extraordinary display of power, in protest against the murderous terror of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. It’s worth saying that again, slowly. The first city-wide strike in the US in decades was an act of defiance against a government crackdown on migrants. And not just any migrants: undocumented migrants. Migration was the issue that Democratic Party opinion-makers had decided was not a winner, and so shouldn’t be mentioned. Yet it was exactly this issue, and revulsion against the brutal police-state means used to terrorise migrants and solidarity activists, which sparked the Minneapolis uprising. If any proof were needed that the working class is still able and willing to fight for ourselves and our whole class, alongside all those done over by capitalism, this is it. Despite decades of being right-sized, restructured, outsourced, algorithmically managed and variously fucked over—these stories show us that the working class, given half a chance, is still in the fight. Some unions in the US are building on this with stoppages and protests on 1 May this year. Not all of us will be shutting down cities on that day, or even marching in the street. But anyone who is building working-class power, demonstrating working-class solidarity across the borders that are meant to divide us, and—crucially—building the organised politics of human liberation that can power our class to victory, is continuing the finest traditions of May Day. ### May Day, a celebration of workers’ struggle URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/may-day-a-celebration-of-workers-struggle/ Last updated: 2026-05-11T00:28:52.000Z May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, commemorates the commitment and sacrifice that millions of people have made in the name of the workers’ movement. It is also a time to raise the demands of today. On no other day are the proud traditions of the working class celebrated by so many people from so many countries. Since the first demonstration in 1886, the first of May has been celebrated across the world, in times of retreat and of upsurge. The day has played an important role in revolutions from Russia 1917 to Iran 1979. Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish revolutionary murdered during the German revolution in 1918, [wrote](http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1894/02/may-day.htm?ref=redflag.org.au) of the importance of May Day in 1894: > “As long as the struggle of the workers against the capitalists and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands. And, when better days dawn, when the working class of the world has won its deliverance, then too humanity will probably celebrate May Day in honour of the bitter struggles and the many sufferings of the past.” May Day has been a time of celebration in pagan rituals for centuries. But the origins of the workers’ day lie in the bitter campaigns for the eight-hour day. In 1856, stonemasons and other sections of the working class in Melbourne were the first workers in the world to win recognition of the eight-hour day. Bitter struggles were being waged elsewhere for the same demand. In America, that beacon of prosperity, twelve-, fourteen- and even eighteen-hour days were common. The words of the “Eight Hours” song sum up the basic humanity of the demand: > *We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers;* > *We’re sure that God has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours.* > *We’re summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill:* > *Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will.* It was a humanity that the bosses were not going to recognise lightly. In 1884, the fourth convention of the American Federation of Labor (as it was later known) resolved to organise for the limiting of the working day to eight hours from 1 May 1886\. They were joined by the Knights of Labor and smaller radical groups, and more than 300,000 workers participated in the national strike that was called for that day. In Chicago, the centre of the emergent working-class movement, 40,000 workers struck. Two days later, two strikers were killed at the McCormick Reaper works. A number of anarchist leaders called a meeting in Haymarket Square for the following day and 3,000 attended. As the meeting was wound up, a bomb exploded near the police lines, possibly thrown by an agent provocateur. Five anarchists, including Albert Parsons and August Spies, were executed after a trial that was more about their political beliefs than what had happened on the day. Before his assassination, Spies warned: > “If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labour movement ... then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but there and there, behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.” The ongoing commemoration of May Day is vindication enough of his words. In July 1889, at the 100th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille during the French Revolution, the foundation meeting of the Second International was held. At that meeting, a call for demonstrations on 1 May 1890 was made and heeded. The *Sydney Morning Herald* [reported](http://www.tlcwa.org.au/index.php?option=com%5Fcontent&view=article&id=21:a-brief-history&catid=151:may-day&Itemid=646&ref=redflag.org.au) that the wealthy of Vienna were so worried about the demonstrations that they were “placing their valuables in the custody of banks”. May Day was established in the minds of both those for whom it was a celebration and for those to whom it was a warning. In Australia, [according](http://www.newtradeshall.com/default.aspx?id=72:&ref=redflag.org.au) to historian Len Fox, the first May Day march was conducted by striking shearers in Barcaldine in 1891 (the year before the Melbourne Social Democratic Club had held a May Day meeting). It was reported that 1,340 men took part. Henry Lawson composed a poem, “[Freedom on the wallaby](http://unionsong.com/u021.html?ref=redflag.org.au)”, in protest of the use of armed troopers to crush the shearers’ strike: > *So we must fly a rebel flag* > *As others did before us,* > *And we must sing a rebel song* > *And join in rebel chorus.* > *We’ll make the tyrants feel the sting* > *O’those that they would throttle;* > *They needn’t say the fault is ours* > *If blood should stain the wattle.* The official Labour Day demonstration, which commemorated the establishment of the eight-hour day, was traditionally held by trade union councils in April. It was the stronghold of the more established unions —often only those unions that had already established the eight-hour day were allowed to take part. May Day, by contrast, was seen as more radical, a challenge to the Labour Day celebrations that seemed content to proclaim their respectability and self-reliance. May Day became the day for the radical section of the working class and the radical organisations to raise the broader political and economic demands of the working class. By 1898, some 35,000 people attended the Melbourne event to hear the English socialist Ben Tillett speak. May Day demonstrations were banned by the Liberal Menzies government in 1941 and 1942, but have occurred every year since, through the highs and lows of the Australian workers’ movement. In times of little struggle, it can be just the old-timers, some union officials and a handful of the left who mark the occasion. But the meaning of May Day is not one that can be “stamped out”. Because it is a day to honour past struggles and engage in current ones, it will always remain a day to mark on the calendar. In Australia, May Day has been a time for demonstrations on a wide range of progressive causes, from the anti-conscription battles of the First World War to anti-fascist mobilisations in the 1930s to the anti-Vietnam War campaign and the equal pay disputes of the 1960s. During the anti-globalisation protests of 2000, the May Day march was attended not just by the left, but tens of thousands of trade unionists, who marched on the Melbourne Stock Exchange, venting their indignation at the inequalities and poverty caused by capitalist greed—a familiar refrain for May Day. In the US, May Day became a central focus of the movement for immigrants’ rights, sparked in 2006 when millions of undocumented workers struck and demonstrated alongside their supporters. Whether there is a million or a hundred on the street, May Day is a celebration of the rights, like the eight-hour day, that we have won in the past, and a reminder of the rights we still have to win. Above all, it is a celebration that the vision of a fundamentally better society is one that is shared with others throughout the world, and has motivated so many throughout the years. For those who celebrate May Day, the words of Bernard O’Dowd, a founder of the paper the *Tocsin* and of the Victorian Socialist Party, from his poem “[May Day](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/may-day-3/?ref=redflag.org.au)” are fitting: > *Come Jack, our place is with the ruck* > *On the open road today,* > *Not with the tepid “footpath sneak”* > *Or with the wise who stop away.* > *A straggling, tame procession, perhaps,* > *A butt for burgess scorn;* > *Its flags are ragged sentiments,* > *And its music’s still unborn.* > *Though none respectable are here,* > *And trim officials ban,* > *Our duty, Jack, is not with them,* > *But here with Hope and Man?* > *And how the gales of Freedom move,* > *Like wildfire’s leap and fall,* > *Or north wind’s through autumnal grass,* > *The red flags over all.* > *Yes! There’s our place, whatever flames* > *Those nearing clouds display,* > *Tho’ much they mean to footpath sneaks* > *And the wise who stop away.* ### Rosa Luxemburg on the origins of May Day URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/rosa-luxemburg-on-the-origins-of-may-day/ Last updated: 2026-05-07T02:11:08.000Z Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) grew up in Russian-ruled Poland and was involved in underground activism while still in high school. She became one of the most formidable theorists and organisers of her generation, penning a major critique of Marx’s *Capital*, sparring with Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin and, most importantly, polemicising against the growing reformist current in the German Social Democratic Party from about 1903 (in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, socialists/ Marxists called themselves “social democrats”). The SPD was founded in 1875\. Its first political program was criticised by Marx and, by the end of his life, Engels was beginning to grapple with the party leaders’ attempts to transform revolutionary socialism into evolutionary socialism—the idea that socialism could be brought about by parliamentary legislation backed by a mass movement of workers. Luxemburg became a strident critic of this new reformism, eventually leading a breakaway revolutionary group when SPD parliamentarians voted to fund Germany’s participation in the First World War, which left tens of millions of workers across Europe dead or maimed. During the war, Luxemburg was imprisoned for several years but continued her polemics from jail before being released on 8 November 1918 as the German revolution entered its opening phase. Two months later, the SPD government ordered a crackdown. Luxemburg was assassinated on 15 January 1919 in Berlin. “What Are the Origins of May Day?” was written in 1894 and published in *Sprawa Robotnicza* (Workers’ Cause), a paper co-founded by Luxemburg the previous year. ### **What are the origins of May Day?** The happy idea of using a working-class holiday celebration as a means to attain the eight-hour day was first born in Australia. The workers there decided in 1856 to organise a day of complete stoppage together with meetings and entertainment as a demonstration in favour of the eight-hour day. The day of this celebration was to be 21 April. At first, the Australian workers intended this only for the year 1856\. But this first celebration had such a strong effect on the working masses of Australia, enlivening them and leading to new agitation, that it was decided to repeat the celebration every year. In fact, what could give the workers greater courage and faith in their own strength than a mass work stoppage that they had decided themselves? What could give more courage to the eternal slaves of the factories and the workshops than the mustering of their own troops? Thus, the idea of a working-class celebration was quickly accepted and, from Australia, began to spread to other countries until finally it had conquered the whole working-class world. The first to follow the example of the Australian workers were the Americans. In 1886, they decided that 1 May should be the day of universal work stoppage. On this day, 200,000 of them left their work and demanded the eight-hour day. Later, police and legal harassment prevented the workers from repeating this demonstration for many years. However, in 1888, they renewed their decision and decided that the next celebration would be on 1 May 1890. In the meantime, the workers’ movement in Europe had grown strong and animated. The most powerful expression of this movement occurred at the International Workers’ Congress in 1889\. At this congress, attended by 400 delegates, it was decided that the eight-hour day must be the first demand. Whereupon the delegate of the French unions, the worker Lavigne from Bordeaux, moved that this demand be expressed in all countries through a universal work stoppage. The delegate of the American workers called attention to the decision of his comrades to strike on 1 May 1890, and the congress decided on this date for the universal working-class celebration. In this case, as 30 years before in Australia, the workers really thought only of a one-time demonstration. The congress decided that the workers of all lands would demonstrate together for the eight-hour day on 1 May 1890\. No one spoke of a repetition of the holiday for the next years. Naturally, no one could predict the lightning-like way in which this idea would succeed and how quickly it would be adopted by the working classes. However, it was enough to celebrate May Day simply one time in order that everyone understand and feel that May Day must be a yearly and continuing institution ... The first of May demanded the introduction of the eight-hour day. But even after this goal was reached, May Day was not given up. As long as the struggle of the workers against the capitalists and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands. And, when better days dawn, when the working class of the world has won its deliverance, then too humanity will probably celebrate May Day in honour of the bitter struggles and the many sufferings of the past. ### Why we carry the red flag URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-we-carry-the-red-flag/ Last updated: 2026-05-07T02:10:55.000Z In 1913, two years before he was executed by the US state of Utah in a frame-up, Joe Hill wrote the song “Should I ever be a soldier”. The chorus goes: > *Should I ever be a soldier,* > *‘Neath the Red Flag I would fight,* > *Should the gun I ever shoulder,* > *It is to crush the tyrant’s might.* Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World, of which he was a member, identified the red flag with the cause of international socialism, symbolising that the same blood flows through the veins of the entire human race. The time in which Hill’s song went around the world was very similar to our own: a time of increasing imperialist tensions. In a few short years, millions of working-class people would be gunned down in hellish trench warfare. The vaunted national “freedoms” for which the warring states of the First World War urged working-class people to sacrifice were buried under concentration camps, censorship and conscription. In that period of universal horror, the red flag became the symbol of hope for the world’s workers. Unlike the various national flags, which divide humanity and under which imperialist wars are waged, the red flag was the symbol that workers all over Europe raised to signify their rejection of nationalism and embrace of international solidarity. In Petrograd, in Riga, in Helsinki, in Vienna, in Prague, in Budapest and in Kiel and Berlin, it was the symbol of working-class revolt against the human slaughterhouse. The red flag was also raised in Australia, where working-class newspapers from coast to coast republished the story of how German sailors had raised the red flag in November 1918, motivated by “working-class sentiment, the sentiment of justice”, and saved thousands of lives on both sides by refusing to follow military orders any longer. It was this revolt which finally ended World War One. While Australian workers were inspired by the Russian Revolution to hoist the red flag on trades halls across the country, the Australian government made flying it a crime punishable by up to six months’ imprisonment. Dozens of socialists were imprisoned for flying the flag and Russian-born activists were deported, while vigilante mobs whipped up by right-wing worthies and a fearmongering media bashed unionists and anti-war socialists. Precisely because the red flag signifies the rejection of national divisions, its displays have always evoked frothing, maddened denunciations from the ruling class. As the US socialist Eugene Debs remarked, the red flag “produces the same effect upon a tyrant as it does upon a bull”. While some historians have discussed an ancient origin to the red flag, in modern political history it dates to the French Revolution of 1789\. According to the French socialist Jean Jaures, a red flag was originally raised by the first, moderate and pro-monarchist government in 1791 to signify the implementation of martial law. A year later, the red flag was flown by the insurrectionary workers and sans-culottes of Paris to signify the “martial law of the sovereign people against the rebellion of the executive power”. i.e., the French king’s conspiracy with foreign powers to crush the revolution. From that time onwards, the red flag became “the people’s flag”. In 1831, coal miners in the Welsh town of Merthyr marched behind the red flag in a revolt against cuts to their wages. Twenty-four workers were killed by soldiers, and a number were executed or sentenced to transportation to Australia. The British home secretary who crushed the uprising and carried out the subsequent repression was Lord Melbourne, after whom an Australian city was later named. The red flag appeared again at the head of struggles for peace, liberty and justice in 1871 during the Paris Commune, in 1927 in China and in 1968 all over the world. During the recent general strikes in Italy, Spain and Greece, the red flag was flown to call for an end to the Israeli genocide and in revolt against the far right. All over the world, socialists fly the red flag to carry on the tradition of working-class self-emancipation. When we fight for Palestine, against the drive to war, for better wages and for public housing, the red flag signifies that our struggles form part of the global fight to realise our common humanity and to put an end to the class system that rules by hatred, greed and fear. ### ‘28% is a joke’: Victorian school staff must keep fighting URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/28-is-a-joke-victorian-school-staff-must-keep-fighting/ Last updated: 2026-05-07T02:10:43.000Z The 28 April leak from the Victorian state government about an [alleged pay offer](https://www.afr.com/politics/vic-labor-to-bump-teachers-pay-offer-to-avert-strikes-during-election-20260428-p5zro7?ref=redflag.org.au) for teachers is a transparent attempt to undermine the school staff’s industrial campaign. It claims the government is preparing to offer teachers a 28 percent pay rise over four years, but provides no details about who will be covered or how conditions will be affected. The right-wing press broke and amplified the story, with the *Australian Financial Review* (AFR) leading with the headline “28pc pay rise: Victorian Labor’s massive offer for teachers”, while the *Herald Sun* sensationalised it as a “whopping 28 percent pay rise”. The AFR’s anonymous government source delivered Labor’s typical threat: “Teachers will not get a better deal under a Liberal government if Jess Wilson were elected in November”. The use of this tactic on the one hand shows that the government is feeling the pressure from the teachers’ campaign. But we also need to recognise this leak for what it is: an attempt to weaken teachers’ resolve, undermine public support for the campaign and take momentum away from the upcoming industrial actions, in particular the regional stop-works planned for term two. The government is banking on the idea that a 28 percent pay rise over four years will be perceived as generous. But it is woefully inadequate and miles from what teachers deserve and are demanding. Prices are currently rising by 4.6 percent each year, and are predicted to continue to rise. Added to that, the sub-par 2022 agreement has seen teachers’ pay go backwards by 11 percent. This means a 28 percent increase over four years is not a real pay rise—it will merely return teachers to our 2021 wage levels ... by 2029. The silence on conditions and coverage is also telling. The last government offer, just days before the statewide strike in March, contained serious attacks on conditions. It proposed replacing time in lieu arrangements with an uncapped overtime index and replacing caps on face-to-face teaching time with an opaque index that would likely mean more teaching hours for many. It also included an additional hour of mandatory meetings for teachers each week. And while teachers were offered a paltry 17 percent wage rise over four years, low-paid education support staff were offered just 13 percent—a disgraceful attempt to pit teachers and education support staff against each other. With a workforce of 100,000 people spread across 1,500 workplaces, it is hard to tell what teachers are making of this leak tactic. But so far, the evidence points to indignation and anger. Online teacher forums have been [flooded with comments](https://educationhq.com/news/this-aint-it-chief-vic-teachers-blast-govt-over-incoming-28-per-cent-pay-offer-209007/?utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fcampaign=EducationWeek+Australia+29042026&utm%5Fcontent=EducationWeek+Australia+29042026+CID%5Fbdd23380e050cada70ec33f821ffd5b5&utm%5Fsource=EducationHQ+Campaigns&utm%5Fterm=This+aint+it+chief+Vic+teachers+blast+Govt+over+incoming+28+per+cent+pay+offer&fbclid=IwY2xjawRemZdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAEwAAEekq4F8bwbVPWRlUgDESycYI4SoG0le5oDrw9WquVzJPaW7%5F%5FCM72P5E94xNw%5Faem%5FnicRCpA%5FU0C8PzLxtF8UDQ) like, “28% is a joke, and a VERY calculated maneuver\[sic\] by the gov. I’d vote no on this instantly”, and, “Garbage. Don’t fall for it. 28% over four years would STILL leave us chasing our tails”. Angry teachers [chimed in](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXtHtmIk01d/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D) on talk back radio the next day, saying, “Hard no from me \[on a 28 percent pay rise\]. We’re asking for a pay raise that would be 35 percent over three years. The government is \[only\] offering 28 percent over four”. Despite the inadequacy of the mooted 28 percent pay rise, the improvement from the first offer shows that there is significant pressure on the government. And that means if we can increase the pressure, they are likely to offer more. This will require escalating our campaign with more statewide strikes, not delaying and de-escalating by limiting our actions to rolling, regional strikes and partial work bans. Tasmania is a cautionary tale. The teachers’ industrial campaign there featured a wave of rolling, half-day regional strikes in October 2025 followed by a statewide half-day strike in December. The Tasmanian government responded with a pathetic offer in February, which included a measly 8.75 percent pay rise over three years and very little progress on conditions. Teachers responded with a wave of regional strikes in late March. But these rolling regional strikes were never enough to win a good deal from the government. The next offer included some dubious improvements to conditions, but no improvement to the below-inflation pay rise. Presenting this as a victory, the union leadership pushed for members to accept the offer. On 10 April, support staff voted up their portion of the deal and last week teachers followed suit. Now they are locked in to a 3 percent pay rise this year and next, followed by a 2.75 percent pay rise in 2028, well below current and predicted [inflation](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-29/monthly-inflation-surges-in-march-australia/106619740?ref=redflag.org.au). The terrain is different in Victoria, where both the government and union leadership know they can’t get away with another below-inflation sellout. But there is still a risk that drawing out our campaign with rolling, regional strikes and partial bans will wear members down while failing to adequately pressure the government into making the necessary concessions. And while Labor are trying to hold the November state election over teachers’ heads, that logic can work in reverse—the government is under significant pressure and can hardly afford to alienate such a significant section of the workforce. This strengthens the argument for decisive action, including multiple full-day statewide strikes both this term and next. Some argue that cost-of-living pressures make statewide strikes too expensive for teachers to undertake. But if we fail to take the decisive action needed to win serious pay rises, cost-of-living pressures will only intensify and we will have no recourse to address them. A 35 percent pay rise would add between $27,856-$41,322 to our annual wages—well worth missing several one-off days of pay. Then there is the pressing issue of our unsustainable workloads, which are driving so many staff to misery or causing them to leave the profession they love. We can’t afford *not* to strike. The statewide strike on 24 March was incredibly popular and powerful, and inspired many thousands of school staff to join or re-join the union. Clearly, teachers want a union that takes effective action and doesn’t settle for crumbs—witness the 98 percent of union members who voted in favour of strike action in the mandatory ballot. We should maximise attendance at our rolling, [regional strikes](https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/term-2-teachers-strikes-to-close-victorian-schools-through-may-and-june-20260420-p5zpf0.html?ref=redflag.org.au) and organise solidarity actions when other regions are striking. But we also need to fight for our union to adopt a strategy that can win. Socialists in Schools have written a [model motion](https://docs.google.com/document/d/14bloGwu43csGAAih-tMyIrZQHFL6cw7Fc8zmDIWWD64/edit?tab=t.0&ref=redflag.org.au) to reaffirm our key demands and for multiple statewide strikes in term two, which has so far been passed in more than twenty schools and at two regional meetings. We are encouraging union members to pass motions like these at their schools and regional meetings in order to build the pressure on the union leadership to call more statewide strikes and continue rejecting sub-par offers. There is also an [open letter](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScuiSDV9OvpU5F6i6EgFtzZ219RosgZEipIO45PmgnQc0VQ5g/viewform?usp=send%5Fform&ref=redflag.org.au) in support of more statewide strikes for staff to sign. Finally, while our fight for better wages and conditions is essential, the problems school staff face are even bigger than this. Public education is treated as a cost to be minimised by those in power, whatever party they hail from. The rich and powerful would rather prioritise tax cuts for the wealthy, military spending and handouts for businesses, including fossil fuel companies. Only workers have an interest in, and the ability to, stand up to this agenda and fight for a society that puts people’s needs first. And we are better off when more of us fight for this goal. Socialists in Schools sees the fight to improve and defend public education as part of a larger struggle for the kind of society we deserve. If you agree, please join us. *The next organising meeting of Socialists in Schools is at 1pm Sunday 24 May at the Victorian Socialists Volunteer Centre, 83 Sydney Road, Brunswick.* --- *Brendan Stanton is a secondary school teacher, Australian Education Union member and activist with Socialists in Schools in Melbourne* ### The NDIS shouldn’t be gutted to pay for war, but people with disabilities deserve better URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-ndis-shouldnt-be-gutted-to-pay-for-war-but-people-with-disabilities-deserve-better/ Last updated: 2026-04-30T04:35:07.000Z At a National Press Club address on 22 April, Health Minister Mark Butler announced [major cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/ndis-announcement-live-updates-mark-butler-reveals-long-anticipated-reforms-to-50b-scheme-in-national-press-club-speech-20260422-p5zpya.html?ref=redflag.org.au). They included a plan to reduce the number of participants to 600,00 by the end of the decade, an overhaul to the eligibility criteria from a diagnosis-based model to a functional capacity assessment model, and a slashing of budgets for support workers in community engagement. The intention is to reduce annual spending on the NDIS from its current projection of $75 billion by the end of the decade to under $55 billion, which is just a bit more than what will be spent this financial year. Given there are currently 760,000 people accessing the scheme, with that number predicted to reach 900,000 by 2030, these cuts will potentially leave up to 300,000 people without the support they need, and reduce the services available to the remaining participants. The NDIS was always going to be a disaster—it was established in 2013 as a for-profit based scheme with negligible oversight, prime for profiteering and exploitation. But given that people with disabilities now have little else to fall back on, it must be defended. The proposed changes will only make things worse for those with disabilities, and they are being driven by the government’s desire to invest more in the military and future wars, not to improve the living conditions of NDIS participants. What is needed, and still needs to be fought for, is disability support organised around meeting people’s needs on a rational, planned basis, not a for-profit model that turns disability into a business opportunity. For all the inadequacies of the NDIS, participants who are kicked off the scheme have limited options, since most [state-based services were privatised](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-5964/) or defunded following its establishment. Accessing existing services outside of the NDIS is extremely expensive, the price caps imposed on service providers through the scheme in effect having become baseline prices. Occupational therapy, an essential support, is an example—it currently costs [around $190 per hour](https://www.ndis.gov.au/providers/pricing-arrangements?ref=redflag.org.au), meaning many families will need to decide if they can afford to access these supports or simply go without. People with disabilities locked out of the NDIS will be forced to rely on [foundational supports](https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/foundational-supports-for-people-with-disability?ref=redflag.org.au) announced by the government, which do not yet exist. Nearly one-half of the $10 billion that is expected to be spent on these services will go to the Thriving Kids program, aimed at getting kids with autism and mild developmental delays who don’t require much support off the NDIS. This leaves many other people in an extremely precarious position, with the states refusing to commit to filling the service gap. For those who will be kicked off the NDIS and want to appeal the decision, options will be limited. With the number of people being removed from the NDIS, it is likely there will be a significant backlog and long waits for decisions, leaving participants in the lurch in the meantime. [According to ](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-23/ndis-eligibility-assessment-tool-could-backfire-say-experts/106597018?ref=redflag.org.au)Disability Advocacy Network Australia chief Emma Beninson, if people are removed from the NDIS without access to adequate replacement support, “we \[will\] see people going off the scheme and into an abyss” and “probably see people taking their own lives if they are forced off the scheme without a safety net”. The funding Labor is targeting for cuts, in the area of social, community and economic participation, has been derided in the media as money for haircuts and sex workers (which is not true). In justifying the 30 percent reduction in funding, Butler attacked the workers involved, stating he had heard stories of “support workers being on their phone while on the job”. As if it is the workers and the participants, not the rort-enabling, for-profit scheme that Labor set up, that is responsible for the NDIS’s dysfunction. In fact, the community support slated for cuts typically involves one-on-one support worker hours that enable participants to attend appointments and complete tasks like grocery shopping, therapy sessions or group activities that they would be unable to access without this help. Depriving people of these services is depriving them of access to community connection and will leave them increasingly confined to their homes. With these services cut, the slack will ultimately fall back on family members—and disproportionately on women. This will not only increase the load carers already carry, but will also potentially force them to reduce their paid working hours to care for loved ones, meaning greater poverty for families with disabled members. Those without family support will have either to do without—and deal with the risks and deprivation that creates—or use whatever private funds they have to make up for the gap in support, leaving them in a financially more precarious position. To add further insult to injury, Butler has used the longstanding slogan of the disability rights movement of “Nothing about us without us” to give political cover to these cuts, promising that people with disabilities and their advocacy organisations will be consulted on how best to proceed with the butchering of their rights. What neither Labor nor the right-wing media will admit is that it is the private, for-profit nature of the NDIS that is the real problem. Providers have been given a blank cheque to extort, exploit and hold disability services to ransom in the most unregulated market in Australia, with fewer than 10 percent of service providers registered with the NDIS and the rest outside the purview of the NDIS regulator. [Shonky providers](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/apr/20/ndis-infiltrated-organised-crime-gangs-australia?ref=redflag.org.au) have forged documents, given cash kickbacks, extorted and intimidated people on the scheme. False and inflated payment claims are prevalent and almost impossible to trace in the tangled payment systems that are often overseen by financial intermediaries who approve these payments. Where regulation does exist, such as the price caps imposed on certain services, this has become the standard price, as providers maximise profits regardless of the quality of the service being provided. People with large NDIS plans are often targeted. [In 2024](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-18/ndis-participant-family-fears-unscrupulous-providers/104731060?ref=redflag.org.au), a 27-year-old Melbourne man was separated from his family and had his $670,000 plan taken control of by NDIS providers who were not his authorised carers. Predatory providers can funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars into their dodgy services by various intimidatory means. The man’s parents described the experience as like a “consensual kidnapping”, because they were deprived of contact with their son and he was plied with drugs and vapes to keep him in the rogue providers’ group home. While more providers will likely be required to be registered and subject to oversight under the government’s proposed changes, even this limited measure does little to guarantee that the service is of a standard that people deserve. In [2020](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-14/integrity-care-directors-to-stand-trial-ann-marie-smith-death/103230252?ref=redflag.org.au) Anne-Marie Smith, a woman with cerebral palsy, died in hospital. She had spent a year without moving from her chair, even to go to the toilet. She had severe pressure sores, which led to septic shock, finally resulting in multiple organ failure. Her carer was sentenced to six years’ jail for manslaughter, and the company responsible, Integrity Care, was fined just $12,600 for failing to report her death within 24 hours. The company had previously failed four performance audits, had not completed any mandatory NDIS worker screenings until after Anne-Marie’s death and had been banned from working with Disability SA. Despite this, it was still a registered NDIS provider at the time of Smith’s death. This death could have been prevented, but the logic of a for-profit system means making money comes before people’s wellbeing. The market-based system implemented and overseen by the Labor Party has totally failed on every metric. Scheme architect Bruce Bonyhady stated in the [NDIS ](chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https:/www.ndisreview.gov.au/sites/default/files/resource/download/working-together-ndis-review-final-report.pdf)Review: > “Markets in the NDIS have not worked as originally imagined. Competition has not encouraged innovation or increased the diversity of services for all participants in all locations. In some cases, it has led to poor, or even no services. Of greatest concern is that a failure of competition and regulation has opened the door to exploitation and abuse. > “As the Disability Royal Commission has rightly identified, this cannot be allowed to continue. Critically, the focus on market competition has neither driven inclusion nor helped to nurture connections with family, friends and community. In fact, sometimes the exact opposite has occurred.” The groundwork for these cuts has been laid for some time, on the back of a brutal campaign against the NDIS from the ruling class, the press, Labor and the Liberals to strip back support to the most vulnerable people in society. But it has been the tension with military spending that has really tipped the balance and exposed the rotten priorities of Australian capitalism. It is no coincidence that Butler’s speech followed the announcement by the defence minister that there would be an increase of $[55 billion to the defence budget, to bring Australia closer to the 3 percent GDP NATO targets](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-17/australia-defence-spending-in-charts-military-investment-adf/106572172?ref=redflag.org.au), projecting a total increase to $425 billion on defence spending over the next decade. Killing people, dominating the Asia-Pacific region and assisting US military adventures come ahead of caring for people with disabilities, as well as health, education and every other measure meant to improve people’s lives. The cuts to the NDIS should be opposed; they are cruel, brutal and callous. Five years ago, it would have been unthinkable to cut the NDIS in this way. But with global powers lining up for war, the Australian state’s priorities are clear. The NDIS is a deeply unfair system that is taken advantage of by grubby, money-hungry capitalists who see it as an easy payday, but cutting the funding does not fix the problem; it only deepens them. Cutting funding will only isolate the disability community further and put their families under greater pressure. People with disabilities deserve a fully funded, public system that is able to give people a genuine say in the support that they are provided: a system that places people before profit and gives genuine dignity and respect to those who need it. The destruction of the only oasis for the disabled is nothing to be supported, and we should all fight to tear down the brutal capitalist system it spawned from. ### Cold front forecast for Newcastle’s left as right-wing weatherman wins mayoral election URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/cold-front-forecast-for-newcastles-left-as-right-wing-weatherman-wins-mayoral-election/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T05:12:05.000Z Did you know that on a hot day, scattered cumulus clouds in the morning will probably mean rain in the evening? Similarly, the election of a right-wing former weatherman as Newcastle’s mayor will probably spell gloomy weather for the city’s left. Gavin Morris, a self-described independent, received 51 percent of the first-preference vote in a six-way race, more than double that of the second-place candidate. At a community forum, Morris was asked about his position on using public land to host the festival component of Rising Tides’ People’s Blockade, which, in 2025, attracted up to 10,000 people to protest the city’s fossil fuel exports. He ranted about how the organisers had betrayed the city’s trust by breaking the law “not once but twice”, and how businesses lost potential revenue from a cruise ship that cancelled its visit. When Morris talked about his vision for Newcastle, he referenced his time in New York in the 1990s, saying he felt safer walking the streets of America’s biggest city than walking along King Street in Newcastle. He praised former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for heavy-handed policing policies that targeted the poorest sections of the city and disproportionately affected Black and migrant communities. Morris wants to replicate this in Newcastle, which shows his priorities are protecting business owners over the hardest done by Novocastrians. Despite Newcastle being a Labor stronghold, the ALP was no opposition. Labor candidate Declan Clausen’s pitch to voters at the community forum was about how well he could compromise. He bragged about how well he worked with the Liberal Party to secure support for hundreds of decisions in the council chamber. This uninspiring vision resulted in Clausen winning just 16 percent of the vote. On paper, the Greens had significantly more left-wing policies and presented a vision for a fairer Newcastle council. However, they also continued with the logic of consensus-building taken up by the Labor Party and have not been particularly left wing on council. Green’s candidate Charlotte McCabe led a campaign against Astra Aerolab, a proposed missile production facility at Newcastle airport. However, she did this not by taking an explicitly anti-war stance, but by raising concerns about the lack of community consultation. The rest of the council framed the consultation to highlight “job creation” while avoiding any mention of missile production. Council then supported the proposal, and it was a victory for the right. If there is any hope, it’s that NSW Socialist Party members are building a Newcastle branch. ### Don’t believe the hype: NSW nurses and midwives’ pay deal is a disaster URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/dont-believe-the-hype-nsw-nurses-and-midwives-pay-deal-is-a-disaster/ Last updated: 2026-04-24T06:46:37.000Z The pay deal given to public sector nurses and midwives in NSW on 16 April is an historic defeat and proof of the failure of the arbitration strategy. It is a wake-up call for all trade unionists that this strategy, favoured by the leaders of most unions around the country, is not enough to win the gains workers need to keep up with inflation and stay afloat in the cost-of-living crisis. Breathless reporting of a “historic” pay rise for NSW nurses and midwives of up to 28 percent obscures a much less impressive reality for most of the workers covered by the Fair Work Commission’s decision. Registered nurses and midwives, who make up the overwhelming majority of this workforce, have in fact only been awarded 16 percent over three years—the lowest pay rise in this decision. And 10 percent of that is a “one-off reset” intended to address not only the increased cost of living but also work values and the historic and significant underpayment of the majority-female workforce. In practice, registered nurses and midwives will receive a pay rise of 7 percent in the first year, as the 3 percent pre-existing increase will be subtracted from the 10 percent one-off increase. The inflation rate currently stands at 3.7 percent and is expected to reach more than 5 percent in the coming months. So we are looking at possibly less than 2 percent in real terms this year. The remaining 6 percent, to be given in two 3 percent increments over the following two years, could very well mean we will be locked into two more below-inflation pay rises. Sixteen percent is a fraction of the claim brought to the commission by the union, which was 35 percent over three years. The commission did grant a cribbing allowance for nurses working in patient transport services, but rejected a claim to double the existing sick leave allowance. The much-quoted 28 percent pay rise over three years applies only to assistants in nursing. These workers currently earn just a shade over the minimum wage, so they are starting from a much lower base than most of the workforce. They are also a much smaller and more transient section, with a significant proportion being nursing students, usually employed for just two or three years while they are studying. The story is similar for enrolled nurses, who have been awarded an 18 percent increase—they are a very small section of the workforce and are already drastically underpaid. Previous offers had not split increases by categorisation. These higher raises are by no means unwelcome, but it is hard not to speculate that they are a cheap way to get a higher increase into the headlines, while the majority of nurses get a pay rise they will barely notice. For registered nurses and midwives, this pay deal won’t even restore real wages to the level they were at in 2020, before the state government froze wages in the public sector. If the inflation rate continues to rise this year to 5 percent, as forecast by the Reserve Bank, that will put us a full 6.4 percent behind CPI by 30 June 2026\. The following chart breaks this down: | | Wage increases for NSW public sector Registered Nurses | Inflation (Consumer Price Index) | Wages v CPI, compared to 30 June 2021 | | --------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------- | | 1 July 2020 to 30 June 2021 | 0.3% (1 July 2021) (index = 100.3) | 3.8% (index = 103.8) | Wages behind CPI by 3.5% at 30 June 2021 | | 2021-22 | 2.04% (1 July 2022) (index = 102.3) | 6.2% (index = 110.2) | Wages behind CPI by 7.9% at 30 June 2022 | | 2022-23 | 2.53% (1 July 2022) (index = 104.9) | 6% (index = 116.8) | Wages behind CPI by 11.9% at 30 June 2023 | | 2023-24 | 4% (1 July 2023) (index = 109.1) | 3.8% (index = 121.3) | Wages behind CPI by 12.2% at 30 June 2024 | | 2024-25 | 3% (1 July 2024) (index = 112.4) | 2.1% (index = 123.8) | Wages behind CPI by 11.4% at 30 June 2025 | | 2025-26 | 3% (1 July 2025) (index = 115.8) Plus 7% awarded April 2026, back paid to 1 July2025 (index = 123.6) | 5% (forecast\*) (index = 130) | Wages behind CPI by 6.4% at 30 June 2026 | | 2026-27 | 3% (1 July 2026) (index = 127.4) | 2.9%\* (index = 133.8) | Wages behind CPI by 6.4% at 30 June 2027 | | 2027-28 | 3% (1 July 2027) (index = 131.2) | 2.6%\* (index = 137.3) | Wages behind CPI by 6.1% at 30 June 2028 | The decision was handed down by commission president Igmar Taylor, who, according to the *Australian Financial Review*, is paid a base salary of $497,000 per year. He was at great pains to explain that the commission does, in fact, accept the validity of the substantial body of evidence presented by the union outlining the changing value of work in the profession and the gendered nature of the underpayment. As he announced the numbers, however, it became clear that the commission’s main priority was the “fiscal position and outlook of the New South Wales government”, as required under changes introduced by Labor in 2023\. Compensating the state’s largest workforce for gendered underpayment comes second to helping the government save money. Taylor also was at pains to make clear that the eight-month delay with this decision, plus the decision to restrict backpay to just mid-2025, was a consequence of the union “not comply\[ing\] with the commission’s orders” and taking three days of strike action in September and November 2024, in effect punishing workers for using their industrial power to push for a legitimate and long-overdue pay rise. This highlights well the role of the commission and bodies like it: to placate workers and give union leaderships the occasional win, while also ensuring that militancy and mass worker involvement in winning gains are minimised. But mass participation in industrial action under members’ control is exactly what has the potential to win the sort of pay rises we deserve. Far from having too much, this campaign didn’t have enough of that. It was initially fought with large, stage-managed single-day actions, at most twice a month. These were no doubt impressive and, for many participants, myself included, were an inspiring (but brief) display of workers’ power. They were disruptive, but not dramatically more disruptive than a standard Sunday or public holiday. But even these were quickly wound up, the union agreeing to enter the arbitration process on the condition that no further industrial action would be undertaken. The industrial power of the state’s largest workforce was traded for the expertise of lawyers in a bosses’ court that, not surprisingly, delivered us an inadequate outcome. It will take serious, rather than set-piece, industrial action to win the pay rises workers need—like that taken by nurses in New York earlier this year, which involved 15,000 union members on an indefinite strike that, in some areas, lasted up to six weeks. That strike was primarily defensive, but after committing to the strategy and even voting down a worse compromise proposed by the union leadership, they ended up winning some of their demands regarding enforceable safe staffing. Single-day actions, or even multi-day actions, will not cut it against the Minns government. If we don’t want to suffer another defeat, we need to start building the networks and infrastructure now for an indefinite strike next time. ### Liberal Party copies One Nation’s homework URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/liberal-party-copies-one-nations-homework/ Last updated: 2026-04-23T02:16:06.000Z The Liberal Party’s “Australian values migration plan”, [announced last week](https://www.liberal.org.au/2026/04/14/leader-of-the-oppositions-address-to-the-menzies-research-centre?ref=redflag.org.au), is a far-right wish list of racist anti-migrant politics. Greens Senator David Shoebridge is right to compare it to the White Australia Policy. But it’s not just some throwback to the past. It’s a sign of the future: far-right politics is entering the mainstream in Australia. The plan, unveiled by party leader Angus Taylor, proposes a new task force to deport 65,000 “overstayers” living in the country on expired visas. Whatever the details, the inspiration was crystal clear. Taylor wants an Australian-style ICE agency to oversee mass deportations. While that’s happening, people entering the country will have their social media accounts screened by the government, as under President Donald Trump’s border regime in the United States. Taylor’s speech hit just about every possible far-right talking point on immigration. Migrants in Europe have, he said, brought about the “erosion of national culture” and the “Balkanisation of communities”. The only thing missing was a vision of the Murray-Darling [foaming with blood](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/14/enoch-powell-rivers-blood-legacy-wolverhampton?ref=redflag.org.au). He spoke about migrants coming to Australia “with subversive intent” and blamed their malign influence for the explosion of Palestine solidarity protests (“genocidal marches”) across the country. Sickeningly, he singled out 1,700 refugees from Gaza as a “high risk to our nation”; the Liberals are calling for all of them to have their visas re-evaluated “with far greater scrutiny”. It is typical of the far right to portray any challenge to the powerful in society as the work of sinister foreign forces—usually in cahoots with the left—out to weaken the nation. For years, Muslims have been the favoured scapegoats. A century ago, the Nazis in Germany railed against Judeo-Bolshevism. Today, the far right decries “[Islamo-leftism](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01419870.2025.2465503?ref=redflag.org.au)“. The Liberals want to restrict migration from countries “ruled by fundamentalists, extremists and dictators” in favour of countries more aligned with “Australian values”. And in the Liberal Party’s universe, the Australian value of paramount importance is the ability to speak English, which the party wants to make mandatory for any permanent visa holder. For the record, five years ago, more than 800,000 people in the country didn’t speak English well or at all, [according to the 2021 Census](https://profile.id.com.au/australia/speaks-english?ref=redflag.org.au). Plus, more than one in five speak a language other than English at home. You wonder how Angus Taylor gets any sleep at night with such an enormous potential fifth column in the country who don’t talk proper Australian! In spite of all this, Taylor maintains that his migration policy doesn’t “discriminate based on nationality, race, gender, or faith” but rather on “values”. It’s a simple trick the far right worked out decades ago: swap out the pseudoscientific racial hierarchy mumbo-jumbo of old for a more palatable racism based on differences between incompatible cultures or values. It’s racism with a facelift. The context of Taylor’s announcement is important to keep in mind. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is surging ahead in opinion polls. The party won 23 percent of the vote in the South Australian state election, and a majority of those votes [came from the Coalition](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/23/south-australian-election-voters-frustrated-angry-one-nation?ref=redflag.org.au). The Liberals’ new migration policy is squarely aimed at winning those voters back. But politics is about more than just elections. Some want to downplay the threat Hanson poses, insisting she can’t win enough seats to take power. That misses the point. Even in countries where they aren’t in power, far-right parties are setting the tone in politics. Mainstream political parties, desperate to prop up their rule and with nothing else to offer, feed into the racist reaction. One Nation may not be in government, but the Liberals are taking One Nation policies to the next election. Of course, the line between “traditional” conservatism and far-right politics has always been blurry at best. Hanson herself was a Liberal Party member and candidate. In the 1990s, then-Liberal PM John Howard—who was sitting in the audience at Angus Taylor’s speech last week—responded to Hanson’s rise by adopting her policies. It might have set One Nation back electorally for a while, but it only legitimised the politics. Today, Hanson knows full well that the Liberals’ far-right tack can only help her, saying: > “I’m pleased to hear that Angus Taylor has listened to my policies. But do I trust them to deliver like One Nation does? No, because the Liberal Party is full of moderates ... It’s the same rhetoric, but they won’t carry it through.” As the French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen famously said, people prefer the original to the copy. The Labor Party has played its part in creating a climate in which more extreme anti-migrant racism festers. Former Labor PM Paul Keating introduced [indefinite mandatory detention](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-11/obrien-the-founding-father-of-australias-indefinite-mandat/3658804?ref=redflag.org.au) of asylum seekers in the 1990s. In 2012, PM Julia Gillard reopened refugee prisons on Manus Island and Nauru, and a year later, her successor, Kevin Rudd, declared that refugees arriving by boat would never settle in Australia. The current Labor government has backed Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and [turned away Palestinians trying to flee](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/16/palestinians-australian-visas-cancelled-mid-flight-collateral-damage?ref=redflag.org.au). Current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has spent the last four years sucking up to the one man who embodies the far-right resurgence more than any other—Donald Trump. The Liberals’ migration plan is a sign of how embedded far-right politics are becoming in capitalism today, including in Australia. To respond, we need socialist politics that can take the racist reaction head-on and fight the system that spawns it. ### Arrested for standing with Palestine, now running for parliament URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/arrested-for-standing-with-palestine-now-running-for-parliament/ Last updated: 2026-04-30T22:05:42.000Z Liam Parry was arrested last month for using a Palestinian liberation slogan at a student protest, just an hour after the Liberal National Party state government banned the phrase. Now, he is standing in Brisbane’s Stafford byelection for the newly established Queensland Socialists. He spoke to *Red Flag* about the ominous restrictions on free speech now being imposed and why activists are determined to challenge the government’s censorship. --- ### **You were arrested for using a banned phrase calling for freedom for the Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. You uttered the phrase knowing that doing so now carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison. Why did you think it was important to challenge the ban?** I was arrested about an hour after a series of new laws introduced by the Liberal National Party government in Queensland came into effect. The laws ban people from saying two phrases relating to Palestinian freedom “in a menacing or intimidating way” in public. The laws came into effect about 20 minutes before a scheduled demonstration organised by Students for Palestine. I was chairing the protest, and I decided to explain why the slogan about the river and the sea is worth defending. It has a long history in the Palestinian solidarity movement. I have spent my whole adult life chanting it at Palestine rallies, something tens of thousands of people across Queensland have done in recent years. It is a call for justice and liberation for the Palestinian people, not a terrorist or violent slogan as the Queensland government alleges. As part of my explanation, I said the phrase. About a minute after I finished my speech, I was arrested by Queensland police. I was charged with “reciting a prohibited expression”. The idea that there are prohibited expressions in Queensland is frankly ridiculous and frightening. I was held in a watch house for four or five hours. An ironic detail is that while I was in custody, the police went through my bag and confiscated some papers. One set contained the notes for my speech. The other was a printout of an article about fascism by Ernest Mandel, a Jewish Marxist and Holocaust survivor. In the context of these extreme authoritarian laws, the police chose to confiscate a pamphlet critiquing fascism written by a Holocaust survivor. My arrest shows what these laws are really about. They are not designed to stop harassment or intimidation. They are designed to target the Palestinian solidarity movement. Nothing I said harassed or intimidated anyone. All I did was call for freedom for the Palestinians. ### **Over the weekend, thousands of people participated in protests and other events to challenge the ban. What was the result of those actions?** I was the first person arrested under these new laws, but I am far from alone now. More than twenty people have since been arrested and charged. Over the last weekend, there was a wave of creative collective defiance. One standout moment was a 100-strong flash mob during which everyone sang the lyrics to “Two strong hearts”—a John Farnham song that includes a lyric referencing “a river to the sea”. It was a brilliant way to expose the absurdity of laws that criminalise a phrase also found in an iconic Australian pop song. On Saturday, twenty people defied the laws and were arrested together. It was inspiring to see so many people willing to put themselves on the line. On Sunday, we held a mass protest, marching to parliament to call out the government for these laws. It was a whole weekend of action and resistance. It was powerful to be part of, and I don’t think it will be the last. Five of my comrades from Students for Palestine have been arrested, young people who’ve been organising Palestine activism on university campuses. They have done a remarkable job standing up for freedom of speech and the right to speak out in solidarity with Palestine. ### **You’re about to run as the candidate for Queensland Socialists in the Stafford byelection. Why did you decide to run?** Because I believe it is vital to shine a light on these appalling new laws, which are a major attack on freedom of speech by a right-wing authoritarian government. My campaign will speak directly to these restrictions and to the situation in Palestine. We plan to take the fight to the government over free speech and solidarity with Palestine. But there is no shortage of things to fight for in Queensland. The housing crisis is completely out of control. Rents are through the roof. Brisbane is now, on average, more expensive than Melbourne in many parts of the city. Landlords and property developers are raking in millions while workers struggle to pay rent and make their mortgage payments. The government is ruling for the rich, and workers are suffering. The LNP has also introduced a range of laws targeting young people, promoted under the slogan “adult crime, adult time”. Children as young as 10 can be locked up like adults. This disproportionately affects Indigenous children, who face a lot of police harassment and poverty. Even more extreme, the government is attempting to expand these provisions so that young people could be sentenced to life in prison for “rioting”. In Queensland, One Nation has a strong base and is growing. Funded by billionaires, they push anti-migrant racism to divide working people. We need a socialist voice that stands up to that racism and calls out both the Liberal and Labor parties for getting us into this situation. ### Setting sail for Gaza: Australian student speaks from the Global Sumud Flotilla URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/setting-sail-for-gaza-australian-student-speaks-from-the-global-sumud-flotilla/ Last updated: 2026-04-30T22:05:34.000Z Roughly 40 boats have set sail from Barcelona to participate in the flotilla to Gaza. **Neve O’Connor**, a Melbourne student and support worker, spoke to *Red Flag* from on board one of the vessels, which left port a week ago. Her fleet will soon be joined by dozens of other boats departing from Sicily. Together, they will cross the Mediterranean Sea and attempt to bring life-saving humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip Israel has controlled Gaza’s borders since 2007 and has imposed collective punishment on the population through a crippling siege. Today, Palestinians languish in flimsy tents as storms and disease ravage the territory. Israel’s genocide has killed at least 72,000 people since October 2023\. While a ceasefire was declared late last year, the military has continued to kill Palestinians with airstrikes, shelling, machinegun fire and through unpredictable border closures to prevent vital aid from entering. Activists have attempted to sail to Gaza repeatedly since 2008\. In that time, five boats have broken through. Last year, more than 40 boats attempted the voyage. They were illegally intercepted in international waters by the Israeli military and towed to the Israeli port of Ashdod. Those on board were held in Israeli prisons before being deported. The Australians on board were forced to each pay $4,000 to the Australian government for their repatriation. Now, Neve and other activists are sailing again. --- ### **Why did you decide to join the flotilla?** I was inspired to join the flotilla by a few things. One is the absolute decay of any faith I have in our government to make the right choices, to be compassionate and care about those who are occupied. Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong are complicit in the genocide, but so are other politicians in Australia. Wong and her “nonlethal” fighter jets comment angered me like I’ve never been angered before—she was so casual about Australia being involved in equipping these planes that bomb people, kill families and displace people from their land they’ve been living on for generations. There’s the casual derision of Palestine protesters; this thinly veiled disgust the government has for those protesting a genocide. It’s like our leaders are fed up with the fact that we’re not going to turn a blind eye towards genocide, apartheid and brutality. And so that was really driving me to feel so much anger—and so useless. My government was directly supporting this and involved; it was up to normal people to do something. I think that’s a common thread through the Global Sumud Flotilla—that this is a people-powered movement of nonviolent direct action, led by people from all corners of the globe wishing for Palestinian liberation. That was really inspiring to me when I saw it last year. So I thought about it a lot, but it was a no-brainer for me to sign up. Of course, the main reason was the absolute heartbreaking horror. Words don’t come close to the immense amount of pain and grief I have felt watching Palestinians be brutalised, be slaughtered, be raped and killed in prisons. And then seeing such a dystopian reaction from the world, I wanted to be part of a movement which would create change. I’d been protesting, boycotting and writing letters, and I think those are so important. But I was privileged to join this. I can take time off work. I’m able-bodied. I was reading a book by Mohammed El-Kurd, called *Perfect Victims*. It was talking about a journalist, a Palestinian-American, and the world was furious that an American had been killed. I was thinking about how the Australian passport is a protective factor. I believe in compassion and empathy and integrity, and to me, fighting for oppressed people is about all of those things. I used to always sit in the classroom and learn about World War Two or other atrocities, and I’d think, “God, how could people sit by and let that happen?” And now we’re in another fascist, imperialist, brutal chapter of history. And our government is participating in it. Our country was built on the bones of First Nations people who suffered from imperialism. It makes me sick. So that drove me to action. ### **What are you trying to achieve?** The main thing is breaking the siege. Since the early 2000s, there have been flotillas and boats trying to break the siege. Some have done it. But not since 2009\. Despite what the media would like people to believe, there is aid on every ship. I put it there, and I’m looking at it right now. There’s a box labelled “humanitarian aid”, and it has nappies inside. These boats are filled to the brim with clean water, food, medication, nappies and baby formula. Everything you would need to immediately comfort and provide solace to people who are suffering. And the people here are also a form of aid. We have doctors, we have educators, those who are specifically trained in trauma-informed recovery and PTSD. There are people who are dedicated to arriving in Gaza and spending whole chapters of their lives to help rebuild it and free people from the tyranny of Israel’s oppression. That’s one thing that’s important. Another is global recognition of Palestinian sovereignty. We want to force people to look, force people to see. We want global recognition that Israel’s chokehold on Palestine needs to end. This mission is for Palestinians. It’s for those in the West Bank and in Gaza, but also for all occupied people. We know that our own First Nations people are still oppressed and targeted. The beauty of this mission is that it’s so multifaceted. We are sailing to Gaza, but we are sailing for all humanity. ### **Can you say something about the interconnection of the flotilla with global solidarity for Palestine?** To me, the flotilla is just one branch on the tree of Palestinian resistance. This mission is an international one. But there are so many things to do. People should protest, they should boycott and write letters. And \[student activism\] like yours is so important. Because it commands such international attention, it opens a space for people to shut down their own streets and to hassle their MPs into condemning Israel. I’m honoured to be here, but I was also honoured to be at the protests. We’ve been learning about sumud in our training—it’s a word which means perseverance, but it’s so much more encompassing than that. It’s the lifeforce of Palestinian resistance and liberation, and it represents joy and passion, and moments of creativity and intimacy. I think when we’re talking about people being oppressed, they can become this singular entity that is “people we are fighting for”. But these are people with their own lives, their own goals, their own aspirations. Sumud is about saying that people will be free, because they’re free inside their souls. We are not overriding the voices of Palestinians. We’re fighting alongside them. We are with them. Should Israel illegally detain us and abuse protesters as horrifically as they did last time, the world won’t be able to ignore it. They won’t be able to ignore the brutality and the horror of Israel’s apartheid regime. So I’m putting myself on the line, yes, but I’m doing it because I must. Israel is a rogue state that wields violence to its advantage. But we hope that if we go through the court of public opinion, our governments will face pressure. ### **What was it like going from Australia to Barcelona, to then launching the boat and finally setting sail?** My application took a few months, but my experience was pretty quick. I was in Barcelona three days after getting the acceptance email. The process of packing and saying goodbye to so many family members in very heartfelt ways was quick. They were concerned about me, proud of me, perhaps angry about my decision to go. It’s easy to admire activists from afar, but having a loved one go is so much harder. It was sometimes tough to sit with them and have those emotional chats, but it was something I’ll treasure and carry with me for the rest of my life. The second I got into port, it was just action. I got in around 7am, and by 11am, I was cutting mattresses and painting. There’s so much work to do because there are so many boats to fix. And so I just threw myself into it. I don’t have super technical trades experience compared to other people, so I just said, “I’m here to work”. We were working until 9pm or 10pm, and in the last days until 1am or 2am. And you’re so invigorated by being there because you’re just surrounded by the best of humanity. I was there for around two-and-a-half weeks, and it was such a family so quickly. Everyone was busy, but we’d make time for each other. I’ll never forget getting those boats ready. ### **Where are you now, and what’s around you?** Just now, we lit flares for all those who are imprisoned in Tunisia—we are sailing past. I watched fuckloads of flares, like forty plus flares, light up the horizon. I have some ash in my eye! It was beautiful. It’s about to be a beautiful sunset. The sunset is always behind us, so as we look forward, we’re always enveloped in this stunning dusky pink. I can pretty much always hear the hum of the engine and the crash of the wake. It’s oddly calming. It reminds me of when I was a kid, and I used to go to sleep in my grandmother’s laundry to the hum of the washing machine. I’ve been thinking a lot about home. I’ve been doing a lot of repairs, so we’re at the back. We’re looking at the rest of the flotilla in the distance. The formation is beautiful; it stretches so far across the horizon. I saw dolphins this morning guiding our boat to freedom. Every time we see ocean life, it feels so magnetic, like we’re on the right side of history. Our boat left port in Barcelona a couple of hours after everyone else. Not even half an hour later, this huge mink whale came up five meters just below the stern and surfaced—we were all losing our minds. It started shooting water up into the air. We’ve been incredibly blessed with so many signs from the universe that we’re doing the right thing. There is such hope in the air, even compared, I’ve heard, to the last mission. This is so well organised. Its architecture is so formidable. When we meet up with the crew from Sicily, we are going to be massive. There are going to be boats that make it, I’m confident of that. There’s a genuine feeling that we will do it this year. We will break the siege. ### Socialist Party activists build an anti-Hanson fightback URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/untitled-2/ Last updated: 2026-04-20T23:13:26.000Z Ellie noticed something striking during a recent doorknock she helped organise in Melbourne’s west to build local opposition to the rise of the far right. “On one street in West Footscray, every person I spoke to said they were angry or concerned about One Nation”, she recounts. But they were also worried they might be the only ones feeling that way. So, as she moved from door to door, she relayed that everyone else in the street felt the same. “You could just see their relief and confidence.” Ellie is among hundreds of Socialist Party activists and members in Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and Canberra fighting back against the anti-migrant, anti-Muslim and pro-capitalist politics of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. It’s a campaign that, through doorknocks, leafleting and information stalls across suburban areas, is striking a chord. “So many ordinary people—migrants, Muslims, women, the LGBTQ community and workers—rightly see One Nation as a threat”, says Victorian Socialists’ Western Metro candidate Anneke Demanuele. Mainstream media outlets and parties are normalising far-right talking points by agonising over the supposedly “legitimate concerns” Hanson claims to be addressing with her racist scapegoating. The Liberal Party is lurching further to the right, trying to outflank One Nation. And the Labor Party, too, is capitulating to the bigotry Hanson is spewing. The Socialist Party’s campaign is an anti-racist and anti-capitalist antidote to these developments. “At the last doorknock in Epping”, Victorian Socialists’ Northern Metro candidate Omar Hassan says, “it was heartwarming to see people’s faces turn from scepticism to relief as they understood we were there to explicitly attack Hanson’s bigotry and build solidarity with them and their families”. It’s important to draw a line in the sand and not give an inch to the racism promoted by One Nation. It’s also important to expose the corporate interests behind Hanson and explain that they want to ratchet up nationalism and cohere the population around a supposedly shared national interest, rather than distinct class interests. This argument isn’t rocket science. Hanson is backed by billionaires like Gina Rinehart, and she consistently votes with the Liberal Party—so her claims to be some sort of “anti-establishment” outsider are just more bullshit from another professional politician. Highlighting One Nation’s pro-capitalist agenda is important for clarifying what the far right actually represents and what kind of politics is needed to challenge it. As Hassan explains: > “The far right are now an extended part of mainstream capitalist politics. This is a product of the Murdoch press, billionaire funding and support, and the general breakdown of traditional parties and politics over the last few decades. The US shows us what it looks like when the extreme racism and militarism of parties like One Nation are in power.” Demanuele puts it bluntly: > “The far right want to impose the most stripped-back, brutal version of capitalism. More attacks on workers’ rights, more tax cuts for businesses. A dog-eat-dog society more like the USA, with extreme poverty, social decay and pittance minimum wages.” The point of the Socialist Party’s anti-Hanson campaign is not simply to encourage the many people horrified by One Nation’s rise to get involved in anti-Hanson activism. It is to turn passive opposition to Hanson into general opposition to the far right and the system that enables her. “Nobody is coming to save us from these monsters”, Demanuele says. “The time to organise and fight is now.” *Victorian Socialists are hosting a* [*public forum*](https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/events/1990?ref=redflag.org.au)*, “Melbourne says no to Hanson”, at Coburg Town Hall, 3pm Saturday 16 May.* ### RMIT University backs down on suspension of Palestine activist URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/rmit-university-backs-down-on-suspension-of-palestine-activist/ Last updated: 2026-04-20T23:07:26.000Z In an important victory for Palestine activism, Melbourne’s RMIT University has been forced to drop a discipline case it brought against me because of my pro-Palestine political activity. Last year, I filmed a video standing outside RMIT’s Sir Lawrence Wackett Defence Centre in which I explained the connections the university has to the weapons industry. The video was part of a campaign run by Students for Palestine, of which I am a member, and was intended to encourage students to attend the National Student Referendum on Palestine. The video made use of publicly available information about RMIT’s research partnerships and ties to companies like Boeing and BAE Systems, both of which contribute military technology to the Israel Defence Force and US Department of War. A few weeks ago, I received an email from the head of my department informing me that they had received an anonymous external complaint about this video, and as a result I would have to attend a disciplinary hearing. Only after repeated requests from my student rights officer did the disciplinary board allow me to see the substance of the charge against me. It turned out I was being threatened with suspension for three reasons. The first was naming the location of the Sir Lawrence Wackett Defence Centre, even though it is publicly listed on LinkedIn and in the [Australian and New Zealand Defence Directory](https://www.austandnzdefence.com/listings/listing%5Fdetails/rmit-sir-lawrence-wackett-defence-aerospace-centre?ref=redflag.org.au), and there is prominent signage to it on campus, which is visible in the video. The second was for sticking my middle finger up at a building—a gesture that was apparently too “vulgar” and “disrespectful” for RMIT management to bear. The third reason for my threatened suspension was for saying the centre should be shut down—a position I maintain and which is consistent with upholding human rights and anti-militarism. As far as the university is concerned, students challenging genocide and militarism is more of a problem than the university having partnerships with weapons companies and militaries. This is why, over the past few years, RMIT, along with other university administrations around the country, has repeatedly tried to punish student activists who have called their activities into question. On hearing news of my threatened suspension, the RMIT Students for Palestine collective sprang into action, launching an [open letter](https://overland.org.au/2026/04/open-letter-rmit-staff-and-students-oppose-disciplinary-action-against-gemma-seymour-over-video-opposing-links-to-weapons-ties/?ref=redflag.org.au) that was signed by hundreds of staff and students, and getting support from pro-Palestine journalists and lawyers. The staff union on campus contacted me to express its support, and the student union sent a protest letter to the vice-chancellor. Importantly, we got the story out into the media. Universities can get away with all sorts of violations of students’ rights behind closed doors because, in most cases, no-one much is paying attention and they are intimidating institutions. But when exposed to public scrutiny, they worry about their brand and can be shamed into backing down. The very same day we got the story into a mainstream publication, I was emailed a notice that the case had been dropped in its entirety, with no explanation offered. It’s vital that we fought this case and an important victory. It should not be an offence for students and staff to criticise the university for the research it does, or to call on it to divest from the defence industry. We cannot accept their attempts to outlaw freedom of speech on campus, especially in a context where universities are increasingly moving towards a closer relationship with governments and arms companies intent on war. And we cannot be intimidated into forgetting or ignoring what is happening in Palestine and the broader Middle East. Mandatory death penalties for Palestinians in Israel have just been introduced, and the treatment of people in southern Lebanon is starting to look more and more like that meted out to people in Gaza over the last nearly three years. The campaign also demonstrated that, when you make a stand for democratic rights, you can win support. Rather than intimidating us, this affair has only strengthened the resolve of the Palestine campaign on campus. We will continue to organise until every last link with war and genocide is broken. ### War on Iran shows continuing fossil fuel dependency URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/war-on-iran-shows-continuing-fossil-fuel-dependency/ Last updated: 2026-04-30T04:44:51.000Z The oil shock caused by the US and Israel’s war on Iran has provided another depressing reminder of the continuing failure of the global “green transition”. Politicians, NGOs and leaders of the mainstream climate movement have been spruiking the idea of a cleaner, greener capitalism for decades. Back in 2015, when the UN-sponsored Paris Agreement was negotiated, the response of major environment organisations was almost giddy. [350.org](http://350.org/?ref=redflag.org.au), one of the more “radical” NGOs, described it as “landmark” and “a signal ... that the age of fossil fuels is over”. The Australian Conservation Foundation (now [headed by Greens ](https://www.acf.org.au/news/acf-appoints-adam-bandt-as-its-next-ceo?ref=redflag.org.au)ex-leader Adam Bandt), claimed similarly that it “signals the end of the fossil fuel age and will turbo charge the clean energy revolution already underway”. It was clear enough at the time that this was utter bullshit. Former NASA scientist and “father of climate change awareness” James Hanson described it, accurately, as “a fraud ... just worthless words”. Ten years down the track, it’s clear just how much of a fraud it really was. Not only have global greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise. The rate of growth has accelerated. The most accurate measure of this is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. National and global reporting on greenhouse gas emissions can’t be trusted—it’s very easy, and very common, for corporations and governments to cook the books. Total reported carbon dioxide emissions hit a new record high in 2025, but growth has slowed somewhat in recent years. The growth in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, however, has not. The sad reality, brought to light so starkly by the disruption caused by the war, is that capitalism’s fossil fuel addiction is stronger than ever. Around 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil and liquefied natural gas is exported in tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz. And such is the ongoing centrality of these products to the economy that even a few weeks of disruption to this supply were enough to send inflationary shock waves around the world. It’s true that a lot of new green energy infrastructure is being built, and green energy investment is growing. The impact of this growth, however, is counteracted by the simultaneous growth in energy consumption and the ongoing use of fossil fuels for things like fertilisers and plastics. As the *Australian Financial Review*’s foreign affairs and defence correspondent Michael Read put it in an article published on 28 March, “The cascading disruptions are a reminder that the Strait of Hormuz is a choke point not just for oil, but for a vast web of industrial inputs that sit at the core of modern industry. “That includes urea-based fertilisers, helium for MRI machines, sulphur for copper extraction, chlorine for water treatment and petrochemical feedstocks such as ethylene, propylene and ammonia—inputs that flow directly into plastics, resins and industrial chemicals.” An industry like transport should classify as low-hanging fruit when it comes to reducing emissions. Battery technology has advanced to the point where the bulk of land and a decent portion of sea transport (lighter vessels travelling shorter distances) could be electrified. Combined with an accelerated transition to renewable electricity production, this could be a significant brake on any further growth in global fossil fuel consumption. Yet the “green transition” in transport has been virtually non-existent. According to [data from the International Energy Agency](https://www.iea.org/energy-system/transport?ref=redflag.org.au), transport is dependent on oil products for around 91 percent of its energy—down just 3.5 percent since the early 1970s. Immediately below transport on [the list ](https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector?ref=redflag.org.au)of biggest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions are agriculture and manufacturing and construction. These are much more difficult problems to solve. Producing a truck that runs on electricity is easy. Producing a cow that doesn’t burp and fart isn’t—not to mention the synthetic nitrogen fertilisers that the productivity of industrial agriculture depends on. To avert runaway warming, we need to build a world economy in which the use of fossil fuels is reduced to what is absolutely necessary for human wellbeing. In recent weeks we’ve seen how distant that goal remains. Getting there requires a massive scale of change—involving every major industry and all aspects of our lives (our housing, transport, what we eat and so on). No government today is considering anything like this. The momentum, in fact, is in the opposite direction. The disruptions to fossil fuels supplies and accompanying spikes in energy prices caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine and now the US and Israel’s war on Iran have been used by the global far right to push back against efforts to tackle climate change—epitomised by US President Donald Trump making his pledge to “drill, baby, drill” a central part of his 2024 election campaign. Here in Australia, Queensland’s Liberal government under David Crisafulli [recently announced](https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/104861?ref=redflag.org.au) it was “unlocking Australia’s first oil field in 50 years, at the Taroom Trough, for future fuel security”. And Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, which has experienced a big surge in support in recent months, has promised to pull Australia out of the Paris Agreement, ditch the “net zero by 2050” target and boost production of oil, coal and gas. The main criminals in all of this are, of course, the fossil fuel companies and their political servants. However much lip service may have been paid over the past few decades to the need to tackle the danger of climate change, these people have always been committed to maintaining the status quo of global fossil fuel dependency. There’s a special place reserved in hell, though, for the unfortunately very numerous category of people and institutions that have continued to promote the possibility of a genuine “green transition” occurring under capitalism, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It’s not difficult to understand why they would do this. Climate NGOs and Green politicians alike need periodically to justify their existence by claiming some “win” or other on issues they’ve pledged to address. If we’re going to get anywhere, though, we have to look reality in the face. The climate movement isn’t winning. It has been losing badly for decades. And the starting point for turning this around is the recognition that there is no “green transition”, and nor can there be while the monstrous, fossil-fuelled system of global capitalism rolls on. ### Imperialist war is class war URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/imperialist-war-is-class-war/ Last updated: 2026-04-30T04:44:35.000Z Imperialist war is an extension of the class war waged by capitalists against workers in the world’s industrial heartlands. Revolutionary socialists have said something like this since at least the 1880s and 1890s. In those decades, Wilhelm Liebknecht in Germany and Ernest Belfort Bax in Britain argued that colonial annexations were about “exporting” capitalism’s domestic problems—unemployment and overproduction—to other parts of the world. The next generation of Marxists argued that, once the great powers had annexed the whole world, capitalism had to turn on itself, transforming the means of production into means of destruction and workers into enemy soldiers fighting and dying for their respective country’s capitalist class. The argument by no means downplays the horrific slaughters carried out in other areas of the world, such as by the Belgians in the Congo or, more recently, the genocide in Gaza. On the contrary, it is an attempt to show that world capitalism is not simply a system of markets, but of violence and coercion, and to explain the connections between domestic and foreign policy. Some of the connections have become more evident through the US-Israeli attack on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. There’s the talk of fuel rationing (for workers, but not capitalists) and the Reserve Bank governor is openly threatening to engineer a recession—put hundreds of thousands of people out of work and into poverty—to preserve “price stability” for the capitalists and financiers. But this is only a small taste of how imperialist war is linked to class war. The connection was much clearer a century ago, when capitalists across Europe forced workers to kill each other during the First World War. Casualties totalled more than 37 million, including at least 8.5 million killed. To prosecute the war, governments imposed martial law, domestic rationing, conscription (military slavery), and bans on political and industrial organising. The link between class war and imperialist war became so obvious that the conflict ended only when workers’ revolutions against the capitalists erupted in 1917-18. Yet, since the end of the Second World War, the connections have been less evident. There are two main reasons for this. First, most imperialist hot wars in the last 80 years involved powerful states invading much weaker states. So the number of casualties among soldiers from the imperialist countries has been much lower than in the generalised conflicts of WWI and WWII. The dead have piled up primarily in capitalism’s periphery: Korea, Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on. Second, the more limited military mobilisations, combined with a period of relative prosperity—economic expansion and rising living standards—have allowed wars to be waged with less domestic “sacrifice”. By and large, there have been few “emergency measures” such as rationing, wage freezes or cuts, the banning of political opposition or the suspension of elections. (Not always, of course: in the US, there was military conscription/slavery during the Korean and Vietnam wars.) Times, however, are changing. On the one hand, the rise of China as a challenge to US global domination raises the prospect of more serious inter-imperialist conflict. That is spurring a return to the “total mobilisation” mentality of previous times, which involved marshalling ever greater social and economic resources to military ends. On the other hand, the period of relative prosperity has also come to an end in many countries, and states have less capacity to fund their war machines without making workers’ lives much more miserable. Russia today is an obvious case. But pretty much all the major Western powers are significantly indebted and are either foreshadowing or implementing major cuts to social spending to fund military expansions. So the link between imperialist war and class war is becoming clearer again, even in the absence of a major inter-imperialist conflict. In Europe, ruling-class figures have been saying for several years that social welfare is a relic of the twentieth century and that governments must prioritise rearmament spending. In Australia, there is an ongoing campaign bemoaning how terrible it is that spending on the national disability scheme is approaching the level of military spending—the implication being that it’s preposterous to waste all this money trying to look after people when the country needs to prepare for war. The upcoming federal budget will reflect these priorities, with the Department of Defence getting more handouts while the scramble continues to rein in NDIS spending. But the link is most evident in the United States, where the latest White House budget asks Congress to increase military spending by more than 40 percent, to US$1.5 trillion, while gutting social spending. President Trump is explicit about the link, reportedly telling a private White House luncheon this month: “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things ... We have to take care of one thing: military protection”. These two things—expanding military might and deteriorating conditions of the working class; imperialist war and class war—are becoming increasingly linked everywhere. And ruling-class demands for working-class sacrifice are key to understanding why far-right and fascist parties are being embraced by sections of the capitalist class in all the major Western powers: the US, Britain, Germany, France and Italy. Imperialist war and class war are one war—a war waged by capitalists against workers everywhere. In the coming years, it will be impossible to defend working-class living standards without also opposing militarism. Likewise, it will be next to impossible to build a solid and sustainable political opposition to imperialism and militarism without linking them to the increasing attacks on workers and the oppressed at home. #/share ### Twenty arrested at Brisbane Palestine rally URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/twenty-arrested-at-brisbane-palestine-rally/ Last updated: 2026-04-19T00:33:48.000Z Cries of “Shame!” rang out in Brisbane CBD on 18 April as Premier David Crisafulli’s police stormed the stage to arrest activists at a Palestine solidarity rally. Their crime? Calling for liberation for Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Edward Carrol, a Jewish anti-Zionist activist, was the first to be arrested, for defying laws that purport to be about “fighting antisemitism”. Dozens of riot police, backed up by a line of horses, repeatedly charged through the hundreds-strong crowd, arresting activists who were chanting or displaying the banned slogan. Meanwhile, a speaker recalled her days fighting against the Bjelke-Petersen government, which banned street marches in 1977, before being arrested. Another Jewish anti-Zionist activist spoke about having fought against apartheid in South Africa, and how important it is to stand with Palestinians on the right side of history. He was treated to the full force of Crisafulli’s riot squad, which moved in immediately to arrest him. Students for Palestine Queensland convener Ella Gutteridge told the crowd: “Israel is carrying out terror, all across the Middle East, with the help and support of our government. And that is why I will never stop proudly saying Palestine should be free”, followed by the banned slogan. She was promptly arrested along with four other Students for Palestine activists. After about 15 arrests, the police tore down the sound system and began snatching megaphones from activists’ hands. Undeterred, the chanting continued unamplified as the rally marched down Roma Street to the watch house where arrestees were being held. Hundreds sat on the road and occupied the rear entrance of the watch house to ensure the activists inside could hear their supporters outside. The police kettled the crowd in the narrow side street, arresting a further handful of activists and generally trying to intimidate the crowd. Protesters then marched back to the rally starting point. A total of 20 people were arrested. If found guilty of “reciting or displaying a prohibited expression”, they face up to two years in prison. Meanwhile, supporters of war and genocide walk free through the halls of parliament, backing Israel and the US’s barbaric actions down the line. Crisafulli’s government allows weapons companies that make parts for Israeli fighter jets to operate in Brisbane suburbs. It locks up Indigenous children as young as 10 for minor crimes. And yet it dares to lecture anti-genocide activists about “hate”. The campaign to overturn these new laws is just getting started. At the same time, Queensland Socialists have just announced they will be contesting a by-election in inner city Brisbane next month, in the seat of Stafford. The party has chosen Liam Parry, the first person arrested under the new laws, as its candidate. Opposing the government’s efforts to outlaw Palestine solidarity will be a major part of the campaign. ### Queensland: beautiful one day, police state the next URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/queensland-beautiful-one-day-police-state-the-next/ Last updated: 2026-04-19T00:32:23.000Z Queensland once again feels like a police state. Laws outlawing pro-Palestine slogans introduced by Liberal National Party Premier David Crisafulli are being aggressively enforced by the Queensland police. Just 20 minutes after the laws came into effect on 11 March, dozens of riot cops massed outside state parliament, waiting to arrest activists. Students for Palestine member Liam Parry was the first to go after a speech explaining why the banned pro-Palestine slogan is an important call for equality. Eighteen-year-old Bonnie Carter was arrested 30 minutes later for wearing a T-shirt bearing the banned slogan. Since then, four more people have been arrested and two have been charged for the crime of calling for Palestinian liberation. This includes 70-year-old Jim Dowling, who was charged for holding a sign at a protest outside Boeing’s Brisbane headquarters. Another person was arrested following a police raid of a Catholic homelessness charity, Dorothy Day House. Well-known street artists James Hillier, better known as Nordacious, and Scott Marsh have also been threatened by the police for featuring the banned slogan in their artworks. Nordacious has reported that he was told to remove the artworks from his Instagram page or potentially face charges under the act. At two subsequent rallies, police have falsely claimed that similar expressions also fall foul of the laws, despite that provision being explicitly removed from the final draft. Action Ready Queensland reported that police [threatened to arrest a protester](https://www.instagram.com/p/DW2YuTMmLlX/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==) outside Parry’s court appearance for holding a sign that said “from the sea to the river”, and another for holding a sign that said “[from the fresh to the salty” at the annual Palm Sunday rally](https://www.instagram.com/p/DWh7dTKE-Ik/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==). Neither of these slogans are restricted in the new legislation. This is intended by the police and government to create an atmosphere of intimidation and fear. It is not about “community safety” or protecting people from hate or antisemitism. None of the protesters who have been arrested or charged were a danger to the community, and there’s nothing hateful or antisemitic about standing up against genocide or calling for Palestinian liberation. Queenslanders have fought and defeated repressive anti-protest laws like these before. It’s time to do it again. ### Chris Minns’ anti-protest laws struck down. Again! URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/chris-minns-anti-protest-laws-struck-down-again/ Last updated: 2026-04-30T04:44:22.000Z The campaign to criminalise the Palestinian solidarity movement has suffered a serious blow, with the latest of the NSW government’s anti-protest laws being struck down in a constitutional challenge brought by the Blak Caucus and the Palestine Action Group. For two and a half years, hundreds of thousands of people have mobilised around Australia to oppose the endless genocide and war, in Gaza and beyond, being waged by Israel and the US. For that entire time, Australian governments, both federal and state, have stood with the war criminals, continued supplies of Australian-made weapons components to keep the slaughter going and tried to crush and criminalise anti-war opposition at home. Chris Minns’ NSW Labor government has often led this charge, ramming through a series of anti-protest laws targeting the Palestine movement. This agenda did not begin with the Bondi massacre, but escalated in its wake, as the ruling establishment sought to exploit this tragedy to blame the Palestine movement, without a shred of evidence or logic, and to create a more authoritarian society. On Christmas eve, Minns rammed through laws that gave the police commissioner the power to ban street marches, and even many static rallies or assemblies, about any cause whatsoever, in the entire state, for up to three months at a time, following a terrorist attack anywhere in the world. Minns said he wanted a “summer of calm”, and that these laws were about promoting what has become that favourite slogan of dictators: “social cohesion”. Then it was announced that genocide-inciting Israeli President Isaac Herzog would soon be touring the country, and it became crystal clear what these laws were really about. “Calm” and “cohesion” mean to the pro-war establishment something akin to what “peace” means to Israel—the “calm” of a silenced, defeated population, the “peace” of a graveyard. But tens of thousands of people had a different idea. They thought they should have the right to protest against the president of a country committing genocide, and against their own government rolling out the red carpet for him. And on 9 February, they turned up in droves to Sydney Town Hall, in the face of all the threats and the lies. Not to take anything away from the absolutely brilliant and tireless legal team that won this case, but that was surely the day these laws were really defeated, even if we didn’t know it yet. A few things are noteworthy about the judgement. First is how emphatic it is. This was a unanimous verdict by a three-judge panel of the NSW Court of Appeal, including the chief justice. An appeal to the High Court would only be inviting further defeat and embarrassment for the government. Second, the government lost its case on more than one ground. The court found that the laws were both “not reasonably appropriate and adapted to achieving” their stated purpose, being a “blunt tool”. More fundamentally, and in a blow to the “social cohesion” justification for a police state, the court said: > “It is not a constitutionally legitimate purpose to seek to discourage all forms of public assembly across a nominated geographical area to preserve social cohesion, on the grounds that the very act of holding public assemblies is apt to cause tension and division in the community. The system of representative and responsible government entrenched by the Constitution, involving a free and true choice by the electors, entails acceptance of the potential for disharmony, incivility and disruption that is part and parcel of democratic intercourse.” This victory has several important ramifications. First is for all those arrested at the protest against Herzog. The police have outrageously made dozens more arrests since that night, as they trawl through video footage and try to maximise the number of charges laid. These arrests have included shocking dawn raids, with protesters’ doors busted down by heavily armed special operations police units. This is the police desperately trying to find some charges that will actually stick, to create a narrative of violent protesters and to undermine the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission investigation into police brutality. In the wake of this court’s verdict, we must demand that all those charges be dropped immediately. Given that the powers used to block the rally were invalid, our protest and planned march from Sydney Town Hall to NSW parliament was in fact an authorised protest. This verdict also strengthens the case to overturn the government’s ludicrous invocation of the Major Event Act, which is the other legal fig leaf the police are clinging to to justify their actions. Second, the verdict strengthens the ability of everyone assaulted, injured, wrongfully arrested and whose democratic rights were violated by NSW Police on 9 February to make civil claims for potentially large amounts of compensation, which they absolutely deserve. Third, the decision is a blow to any further steps Minns was planning to stifle democratic rights. In particular, his plans to pass laws to criminalise phrases like “globalise the intifada” must surely now be shelved. And this emphatic judgement must help a looming challenge to the appalling “banned phrases” laws in Queensland, which potentially outlaw people singing the John Farnham lyrics, “From the river to the sea”. The next major battle will be to stop the royal commission from establishing more lies and legal restrictions against the Palestine movement. Something must be said about the Labor Party. Given Chris Minns’ record of lying to the public and eroding our democratic rights, we are calling for his resignation. Of course, Minns is well beyond shame, and probably already has future lucrative career options lined up in the weapons or real estate industries. But this isn’t about Minns alone. It was revealed in Senate estimates that every single member of Minns’ cabinet backed these undemocratic and unconstitutional laws. Not a single Labor MP voted against them. The Labor Party is a stinking, unsalvageable and nasty machine, where principles go to die. Minns’ approach of doing a Keir Starmer, pandering to the right and the ruling class and chest-beating about law and order may win him another election, but he is only paving the way for a seismic shift to the right and One Nation. In that context, as good as this court victory is, it is no substitute for the political struggle that is needed: the ongoing struggle for a free Palestine, for the right to resist militarism and war and for a socialist alternative to the rotten status quo. --- *Josh Lees is a spokesperson for the Palestine Action Group.* ### ‘Never say that there is only death for you’: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/never-say-that-there-is-only-death-for-you-the-warsaw-ghetto-uprising/ Last updated: 2026-04-30T04:44:14.000Z The story as we hear it every year on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising goes something like this: the uprising was carried out by a small group of mostly young and strong men. One day, despair at the constant deportations and murders gave way to resistance, and they slowly took control of the ghetto. On 19 April 1943, they rose up, but, sadly, the heroes were vanquished. Today, we commemorate this glorious episode. The real history shows a very different story, one that’s way more thrilling and inspiring than these conventionalities. Jews have lived in Poland for more than 1,000 years and by the early 20th century were a significant proportion of the population. After Poland achieved independence in the years following World War One, however, a series of right-wing governments gradually excluded Jews and other ethnic minorities. Right-wing general Józef Pilsudksi took over in a coup in 1926 and became increasingly authoritarian after 1930\. After his death in 1936, antisemitism increased, with street thugs carrying out pogroms and government-sponsored discrimination. Polish fascists called for boycotts of Jewish businesses and attacked students at universities. In response, Jews formed self-defence groups, and there were mass strikes and demonstrations in collaboration with the Polish Socialist Party. So by the start of World War Two, there was a seasoned movement already in existence. The Nazis weren’t the first fascists that Polish Jews encountered. There is a myth that the Jews in Nazi-occupied countries went like lambs to the slaughter. But in fact, there were underground resistance movements in approximately 100 ghettos in Eastern Europe, and uprisings in 50\. There were also uprisings in three extermination camps and eighteen forced labour camps. Up to 30,000 Jewish partisans fought in approximately 50 partisan groups, and about 10,000 people survived in family camps in the forest. The underground organisations scattered throughout Poland kept in touch via a network of couriers, most of whom were women. When the Nazis invaded in 1939, there were about 375,000 Jews living in Warsaw, almost a third of the population. At the end of 1941, the Nazis forced them into a ghetto only 2.5 percent of the area of the city. Why did the Nazis establish such ghettos? A core component of genocide is the dehumanisation of the population to be destroyed, and a core component of that is the separation of the people into enclaves away from mainstream society, where they can be more easily controlled, manipulated and degraded. Genocide isn’t a single or short-lived act but a process, and this initial segregation and dehumanisation are a critical part of that. The diary Chaim Kaplan wrote about life in the ghetto, *Scroll of agony: the Warsaw diary of Chaim A. Kaplan*, recognised the process. “We are segregated and separated from the world”, he wrote, “driven out of the society of the human race”. The dehumanisation in the ghetto was relentless: the massive overcrowding, the disease, the humiliations of entry and exit, the killings, the round-ups and transports. Perhaps the most telling example is food. Many photos show children dying of starvation in the streets. In fact, so little food was allowed in legally that 80 percent of the food consumed came in from smuggling. Jan Karski, a Polish underground activist, visited the ghetto secretly. He said, “Everything there seemed polluted by death, the stench of rotting corpses, filth and decay”. And Marek Edelman, in his famous book *The Ghetto Fights*, emphasised the psychological torture: > “The Jews, beaten, stepped upon, slaughtered without the slightest cause, lived in constant fear. There was only one punishment for failure to obey regulations—death—while careful obedience ... did not protect against a thousand and one fantastic degradations.” ### **Formation of the Jewish Fighting Organisation** The Nazis finally decided on what came to be called the Final Solution at the Wannsee conference in January 1942\. But this was only the last step: actions had been going on for at least two years and had roots much further back. There were enormous problems for the Jews in organising resistance to the Nazis. The fact that the ghettos were filled with all sorts of non-combatants like children, ill people and elderly people made things very difficult. But there was also the political problem—that the traditional leadership of the communities, and the Jewish Councils, which were set up by the Nazis, were very conservative. They refused to recognise the process of genocide. They preferred to believe that if only Jews cooperated and were useful, the Nazis would allow them to live. Nor did the leaders of most of the leftist parties recognise what was happening. It was the youth groups that first saw the reality and called for armed resistance. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to achieve agreement. By July 1942, maybe 100,000 Jews in Warsaw had already died. Then the Germans rounded up and deported another quarter of a million in a mass deportation known as the Grosse Aktion (Great Action). By October, with only about 60,000 people left in the ghetto, there was no more denying what was happening. A coalition of several socialist-Zionist groups, the Jewish Labor Bund and the communists formed the Jewish Fighting Organisation (JFO) under the leadership of Mordechai Anielewicz. Others in the leadership included Yitzhak Zuckerman (second in command), Zivia Lubetkin and Marek Edelman. Armed resistance required arms, which proved extremely difficult to obtain. Everything had to be smuggled in or manufactured illegally on the spot. The JFO also carried out military training. ### **Little uprising** When 1,000 Germans marched into the ghetto on 18 January 1943, intending to round up more people for deportation, a company of 40 men and women fought back. These 40 people had only four pistols and four hand grenades plus iron pipes, sticks and light globes filled with sulphuric acid. This was a real David and Goliath situation. Amazingly, the Germans were forced to retreat after four days, with fewer Jewish deaths and far fewer deportations than expected. This encounter was the first street fighting in occupied Poland. Marek Edelman recounted: > “For the first time German plans were frustrated. For the first time the halo of omnipotence and invincibility was torn from the Germans’ heads. For the first time the Jew in the street realised that it was possible to do something against the Germans’ will and power ... \[It was\] a psychological turning point.” This event is known as “the little uprising”. What happened next is in some ways at least as important as the events in April but is less well known. Warsaw wasn’t the only city where there was resistance, but most other underground organisations didn’t have enough popular support for an uprising. Warsaw was different. The JFO took effective control of the ghetto, which enabled them to organise and lead the uprising of the entire remaining ghetto population. According to Lubetkin, “We became the undisputed authority ... The Jews no longer sought the advice of the \[Jewish Council\] nor did they heed its orders”. And, according to Marek Edelman, the JFO “was the only force and the only authority recognized by public opinion”. First, they executed the Jewish police and Nazi spies. Then they took over all aspects of ghetto life. One great necessity was raising money to smuggle supplies. The JFO took all the money from the Jewish Council and imposed taxes on rich people. They even set up jails for people who didn’t comply. As Edelman says, “everybody had to pay either voluntarily or forcibly”. They also robbed banks. The most urgent need was weapons. They obtained some firearms from the Polish underground army and set up workshops to make bombs and Molotov cocktails. The rest of the population also prepared by building defensive bunkers. This is critical—almost the entire remaining population planned resistance. This city-wide revolt shows up the lie in mainstream accounts about a “small band of rebels”. ### **The uprising** The Germans attacked on 19 April 1943\. The JFO had 500 fighters organised in 22 fighting groups, approximately a third women. Most were under 25, with ages ranging from 13 to 40\. They had one pistol each, and a total of 200 Molotov cocktails, ten rifles and a couple of submachine guns. The German side consisted of more than 2,000 soldiers with heavy weapons, including artillery, mine throwers and machine guns. With their overwhelming military superiority, they anticipated an action of only three days. But the Nazi commander, General Stroop, reported after a week: “The resistance put up by the Jews and bandits could be broken only by relentlessly using all our force and energy by day and night”. None were more surprised than the defenders themselves. They also expected to last no more than a few days. But almost everyone was still alive! Expecting to die, they hadn’t planned any escape routes or survival plans. On 23 April, the JFO published an appeal to the Poles. This little-known but amazing and moving statement stands with any resistance struggle proclamation in the world: > “Poles, citizens, soldiers of freedom! Through the din of German cannons, destroying the homes of our mothers, wives and children; through the noise of their machine-guns, seized by us in the fight against the cowardly German police and SS men; through the smoke of the Ghetto, that was set on fire, and the blood of its mercilessly killed defenders, we, the slaves of the Ghetto, convey heartfelt greetings to you ... > “Every doorstep in the Ghetto has become a stronghold and shall remain a fortress until the end! All of us will probably perish in the fight, but we shall never surrender! We, as well as you, are burning with the desire to punish the enemy for all his crimes, with a desire for vengeance. It is a fight for our freedom, as well as yours; for our human dignity and national honour, as well as yours! We shall avenge the gory deeds of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec and Majdanek! > “Long live the fraternity of blood and weapons in a fighting Poland! > Long live freedom!” There are many stories of heroism and bravery. Stroop gives an amazing account of the women fighters: > “Agile as acrobats, shooting with a pistol in each hand ... dangerous in hand-to-hand contact ... when a woman like this was caught, she appeared scared as a rabbit, thoroughly despairing, and suddenly, when a group of our men was nearby, she pulled out a grenade hidden in her skirt or in her pants and threw it at them with a string of curses on her lips.” Defeating the uprising took six weeks and, even then, as Edelman writes, the insurgents “were beaten by the flames, not the Germans”. Organised resistance was over by the end of April, but localised resistance continued until June and possibly even later. The ghetto uprising was a military failure. But as Anielewicz noted in his last letter, “what took place exceeded all expectations. In our opposition to the Germans we did more than our strength allowed”. Looking back on these events, second in command Yitzhak Zuckerman commented: > “I don’t think there is any need to analyse the uprising in military terms ... \[N\]o one doubted how it was likely to turn out ... The really important things were ... in the force shown by Jewish youths ... to rise up against their destroyers and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising.” At least 7,000 Jews died in the conflict. Only a few managed to escape through the sewers, including Edelman. The Germans captured approximately 42,000 people. The ghetto itself was reduced to rubble. ### **Who is the true inheritor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?** The uprising had an enormous impact throughout Poland and around the world, and it continues to be commemorated today. Everyone wants to own this history—from right-wing world leaders to Zionists to mainstream politicians. But what the insurgents in the Warsaw Ghetto represent is not something that Zionists or governments today want to promote. Those reactionaries absolutely aren’t, in any sense, the inheritors of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The fighters of the JFO were seasoned activists and members of organisations with a history of struggle. And they were *socialists*—a word that doesn’t pass the lips of the speakers at the mainstream commemorations. We can take an answer to who really are the political inheritors of the uprising from the verses of a song written by Jewish poet Hirsh Glick to commemorate it: > *Never say that there is only death for you,* > *Though leaden skies may be concealing days of blue,* > *Because the hour we have hungered for is near;* > *Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble—we are here!* > *We’ll have the morning sun to set our day aglow,* > *And all our yesterdays shall vanish with the foe;* > *And if the time is long before the sun appears,* > *Then let this song go like a signal through the years.* “Let this song go like a signal through the years”—that is what this article is doing, keeping the memory of the real event alive, to prevent it being instrumentalised by conservative and right-wing forces. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising doesn’t belong to the scum of right-wing politicians, Zionists, the ruling class and the imperialists. The uprising is Jewish history but not just that. Above all, it’s socialist history. Once again, the drums of war are beating. Amid the death and destruction, however, resistance remains. The uprising belongs to all socialists who, amid the carnage, continue organising and fighting for a better world—“Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble—We are here!” ### What’s the left’s verdict on ‘No Kings’? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/whats-the-lefts-verdict-on-no-kings/ Last updated: 2026-04-23T02:32:09.000Z CHICAGO—More than 8 million people took to the streets on 28 March, making the third “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration the largest single day of protest in US history, according to its organisers. That mobilisation elicited different reactions among segments of the left. The social democrats of [*Jacobin* chose these words to introduce a Ben Burgis](https://jacobin.com/2026/03/no-kings-protest-trump-authoritarianism?ref=redflag.org.au) analysis of the protest: > “The No Kings rallies have evolved beyond basic anti-Trump liberalism. Their messaging is sharply antiwar, anti-oligarchy, and far more substantive than the ‘resistance’ politics of Donald Trump’s first term. The Left should be proud to participate.” The leftist journalist [Arun Gupta objected](https://substack.com/home/post/p-176479787?ref=redflag.org.au). Writing on the eve of the October edition of No Kings, he didn’t mince words: > “\[No Kings is\] an astroturf campaign to rehabilitate pro-genocide Democrats while giving libs a performative outlet to feel like they are fighting fascism while they parade about in costumes waving signs about ‘Save our democracy’ before heading to brunch.” Michael Albert, the long-time publisher of ZNet, tried to split the difference between praise for its ability to mobilise throughout the country and criticism for its limited agenda in “No Kings: Internationalism, Localism or Both”, concluding: > “\[I\]t is better to support No Kings, celebrate its growth, and work to expand and diversify it, than it is to ignore or deny its growth and moan about its needing to do more and reject it.” It’s not surprising that one of the most visible manifestations of opposition to Trump would provoke different reactions on the left. But some question whether No Kings is a genuine opposition at all. The massive protest took place a month to the day after the US launched a war against Iran. The protest’s call to action included a charge against Trump for “spending billions of our tax dollars on missile strikes abroad while driving up the cost of living”. Mondoweiss quoted the media critic Adam Johnson: > “Given how much Trump’s attack on Iran is rapidly escalating and the stakes involved, it seems now would be a good time for No Kings and Indivisible to marshal their tremendous resources and hold an actual antiwar march with clear demands, not more partisan pep rallies. > “The US is not under any threat of a ‘king’, nor do I have any sense of what this even means. It is however in the midst of an imperial murder spree and the largest opposition movement in the county, such as it is, should probably center this fact at some point.” Given how unpopular the war is, it would hardly be a stretch for No Kings to have leaned into that opposition. And it was clear from many of the protests across the country that most attendees opposed the war. Pro-Palestine and anti-war contingents received support where they joined the protests, and anti-Zionist and anti-war groups like Jewish Voice for Peace endorsed the rallies. Nevertheless, the organisers of No Kings didn’t foreground the war nor Israel’s extension of its ethnic cleansing campaign from Gaza to Lebanon. More objectionable, No Kings [hosted an “online rally” including mainstream Democratic Party politicians](https://arunnews.substack.com/p/no-kings-is-aipac-approved), such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, known for their support of Israel. One doesn’t have to believe that the American Israeli Political Action Committee is pulling the strings of No Kings to know that [No Kings’ association with the Democratic Party leads to a dead end](https://internationalsocialism.net/the-grassroots-opposition-to-trump-can-and-must-grow/?ref=redflag.org.au). Indivisible was the creation in Trump 1.0 of two Democratic congressional staffers. Several other DC-based liberal Democratic Party-supporting non-governmental organisations, from MoveOn to the American Civil Liberties Union to the AFL-CIO (which functions more like a DC NGO than a grassroots labour central), form the leadership of No Kings. The liberal MSNOW network promoted No Kings and supplied live television updates from the rallies. Thus, [the formation reflects all the weaknesses and electoralist assumptions of its](https://internationalsocialism.net/the-character-and-limitations-of-the-opposition-to-trump/?ref=redflag.org.au) Democratic Party-affiliated organisers. Under the No Kings umbrella is what might be called a “[popular front](https://isreview.org/issue/108/new-deal-and-popular-front/index.html?ref=redflag.org.au)” against Trump. From this point of view, No Kings is valuable because it’s so broad. Even if a small but significant minority of the people who attend these large rallies is active in such efforts as anti-ICE rapid response networks, most of the people who attend are anxious to vote against Trump’s party in November. The Democrats gain by default. The champions of No Kings on the left, like the popular frontists of *Jacobin*, wouldn’t say that simply showing up at these mass rallies is sufficient. As Burgis argues: > “An effective solution to the three-headed demon of oligarchy, authoritarianism, and militarism would not start and stop in the electoral realm. The movement we need must be rooted in an organized working class. But if we only make these arguments in the pages of publications like *Jacobin*, we won’t reach the people we need to convince. We need to make them to the millions energized to fight authoritarianism in the here and now, and we need to make them not as hecklers from the sidelines but as co-participants in the fight.” In the abstract, this is correct. What socialist couldn’t agree that the key to rolling back MAGA is an organised working class? Yet, *Jacobin* and its co-thinkers in the Democratic Socialists of America don’t really prioritise a grassroots focus. In fact, the paragraph that precedes the one above is more indicative of what DSA’s real strategy is: > “A more effective response \[to ‘vote blue, no matter who’\] to the resurgent right necessarily must involve displacing the centrist leadership of the Democratic Party, which has failed to provide any compelling political vision, and offering a robustly egalitarian political program in its place.” Interestingly, this is essentially the same argument that Leah Greenberg, one of the aforementioned founders of Indivisible, [made in a recent interview:](https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/how-did-wine-moms-become-the-vanguard?ref=redflag.org.au) > “\[Compared to the 2018 ‘blue wave’ election in Trump 1.0\] I think people have a much clearer understanding that there is a very direct relationship between the frustrations that they have with overall Democratic Party leadership and the need to get involved in the primary and the candidate cycle.” It’s good to mobilise millions to show widespread opposition to Trump. But for many of the people at the head of this campaign, the purpose of these mobilisations is to provide an electoral army for the Democrats in the November midterm elections. Giving Democrats platforms they don’t deserve is a way to rehabilitate a party that much of its base detests for its fecklessness and unwillingness to fight Trump. And faced with that, even the organisers of No Kings know that Democratic voters are looking to turn the page on the party’s current leaders. But let’s be clear: that’s not a phenomenon of Indivisible “moving to the left” and embracing DSA’s orientation. It’s a signal that the democratic socialists, who have always campaigned for “better Democrats”, are finding in No Kings a validation of their pre-existing perspective. When all is said and done, the current amorphous liberal politics of No Kings also reflects the overall weakness of the current left in the US. What we actually need is a genuine left that campaigns against US imperial adventures and connects that to struggles against oppression and exploitation in the US. We need a left that aims to build organisations independent of the Democrats and their satellites. If some of the largest manifestations of opposition to Trump don’t clearly foreground anti-war or anti-imperial messages, it’s because the political presence of a left that raises those demands is weaker than at any time since those politics won a mass hearing during the Vietnam War. As Gupta has pointed out in his insightful essay on [US social movements in the 21st century](https://arunnews.substack.com/p/what-do-we-have-to-show-for-25-years), many short-lived movements of millions, from the 2003 opposition to the US war in Iraq to the 2020 uprising following George Floyd’s murder, have dissipated for lack of organisation and ideological diffuseness. As he notes, small formations of Marxists formed national anti-war organisations that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets in 2003\. But the largest of them, United for Peace and Justice, helped steer the movement into the “safe” channel of electoral politics and to their ultimate disappearance. The movement in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza that emerged in 2023 helped to revive an anti-imperialist vision. But the liberal establishment to which No Kings is tied helped to crush that movement. At the time of writing, No Kings is endorsing plans among labour activists to organise a “general strike” on May Day. It’s a good sign that No Kings is endorsing a labour-themed action whose key proponents are unions involved in [May Day Strong](https://maydaystrong.org/?ref=redflag.org.au)—a network of union and left-wing organisations campaigning on a range of working-class issues. But it remains to be seen whether it will draw as many people as the 28 March protest, or whether May Day’s message of working-class solidarity will be lost in popular-front electoralism. If electoralism wins out, it won’t be because No Kings hijacked May Day Strong. It will be because May Day Strong shares No Kings’ electoralist perspective. As three May Day Strong leaders [put it in an article last July:](https://convergencemag.com/articles/labors-strategy-must-lean-into-synergies/?ref=redflag.org.au) > “We can’t counterpose electoral and strike action: we need to do both and understand the synergies. We need to both work within the Democratic Party to push the Dems leftward, and build independent political organizations that work inside and outside the Democratic structure and help us build our base.” We should remember that the Trump agenda has received its biggest setback from activism in the streets against federal agents’ kidnapping of their immigrant neighbours in cities from Los Angeles to Chicago, and most importantly, in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. No Kings has certainly embraced anti-ICE activism, but the courageous actions of thousands of working people did more to derail Trump than any strategic decision taken in the offices of Washington NGOs. *First published at the* [*International Socialism Project*](https://internationalsocialism.net/?ref=redflag.org.au)*.* ### Palantir and Peter Thiel: spying for money and war URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/palantir-and-peter-thiel-spying-for-money-and-war/ Last updated: 2026-04-19T02:44:11.000Z I watched the *Lord of the Rings* for the first time at Christmas. It was great. I enjoyed that the underdogs stayed friends and good triumphed over evil. Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir Technologies, preferred the evil, naming his data storage and analytics company after a cursed orb from the series that provided the villains with endless vision across all lengths and breadths on the road to world domination. How creepy can you get? Thiel is one of the 100 richest people in history and a member of Donald Trump’s inner circle. He led the drive for Silicon Valley to become a Petri dish for far-right politics. And Thiel’s particular industry—surveillance and data analysis utilising artificial intelligence—is the repulsive progeny of capitalist profiteering, militarism and old-fashioned megalomania. Palantir has always been closely connected to US imperialism. Founded in 2003 as the United States government’s “War on Terror” was gathering steam, and with the mission of “defending the West”, the company received some of its early funding from the CIA. Palantir’s systems—the most well-known being Gotham and Foundry—take large amounts of data and use it to identify potential patterns. This has been put to use as a huge labour-saving scheme for the repressive parts of the capitalist state, which deploy it for mass surveillance and intelligence gathering. According to technology journalist Tom Knowles, the UK, Ukraine and Israeli militaries are Palantir customers, as are all six branches of the US military. In the words of the company’s chief executive Alex Karp, in a 2020 interview with *Axios*, Palantir’s technologies [“are used, on occasion, to kill people”](https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=299&q=Alex+Karp+our+technology+has+killed+people&cvid=49cc23c8b4064c4cb002226ed5c90bbb&gs%5Flcrp=EgRlZGdlKgYIABBFGDkyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQABhAMgYIAhAAGEAyBggDEAAYQDIGCAQQABhAMgYIBRAAGEAyBggGEAAYQDIGCAcQABhAMgYICBAAGEDSAQg2NzUxajBqN6gCCLACAQ&FORM=ANNTA1&PC=ACTS&ref=redflag.org.au). Palantir’s data analysis was part of the military planning underpinning Operation Epic Fury in February 2026, which launched the United States and Israel’s war on Iran. In particular, some Palanatir systems were involved in the targeted attack upon Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in southern Iran, which murdered more than 170 people. As Kevin Baker wrote for the [*Guardian* ](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying?ref=redflag.org.au)in March, human decisions, including those of Peter Thiel and Palantir’s scientists and executives, led to the carnage, and “calling it an ‘AI problem’ gives those decisions, and those people, a place to hide”. In 2025, Palantir was among the companies named by the United Nations as profiting from the genocide in Gaza. The deals are secretive, but, according to a July 2025 explainer by Federica Marsi in [Al Jazeera](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/1/un-report-lists-companies-complicit-in-israels-genocide-who-are-they?ref=redflag.org.au), the UN believes that Palantir’s artificial intelligence technology assisted in the design of Israeli military systems such as Lavender, Gospel and Where’s Daddy? that were used to target civilians and, in the last instance, Palestinian children. Palantir has also [partnered with ICE](https://novaramedia.com/2026/02/19/what-is-palantir-how-a-us-spytech-firm-penetrated-the-british-state/?ref=redflag.org.au) to help carry out its mass deportation regime. The aptly named Elite (Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement) assisted in creating deportation targets to track down immigrants, including the notorious use of tattoos to predict possible gang membership. The company has also been implicated in developing technologies that could be used for “predictive policing”, that is, intensifying the repression of working-class people, especially black people and immigrants. Some of the faces behind Palantir fancy themselves public intellectuals. Thiel and Karp met at Stanford University, one of the most expensive and exclusive in the world. Peter Thiel wrote a dull 2009 manifesto for the Cato Institute titled “The Enlightened Libertarian”. His main insight was that democracy hasn’t been any good since women won the right to vote. A biography of Alex Karp published in 2025 described him as “The Philosopher in the Valley”. It might seem ironic that men who constantly bemoan infringements on their individual freedoms run a murderous, brutal spy company. But that’s the modern capitalist class in a nutshell. Who needs integrity when there’s money to be made? Especially when it’s a lot of money. Julia Hornstein wrote for [*Business Insider*](https://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-ceo-alex-karp-calls-company-anti-woke-revenue-surge-2025-11?ref=redflag.org.au) in 2025 that Palantir reported a 63 percent bump in revenue in the previous financial year; in the same period, its US commercial revenue was up 121 percent and government revenue 52 percent. I am no Tolkien expert, but (spoiler alert) it appeared to me that when Frodo threw the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, Lord Sauron, who most used the Palantir, exploded. Something to think about. ### Marxism 2026 gives hope to a new left URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/marxism-2026-gives-hope-to-a-new-left/ Last updated: 2026-04-18T23:27:02.000Z More than 1,500 people attended the Marxism conference at the Melbourne Showgrounds over the Easter weekend. A revolutionary socialist gathering of this size is a precious contribution to building the left we so desperately need. The conference was a clarion call for a new world, and a place for serious discussions about the politics needed to win it. The opening night panel introduced the event’s theme: Marxism for a new left. It covered the rise of the far right in Australia and internationally, the escalation of war, racist nationalism and military spending, and the accelerated assault on working-class living standards. A keynote session on Saturday focused on the attacks currently being levelled at Palestine activists and the need for defiance in the ongoing struggle for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea. On Friday, legendary activist Dr Gary Foley moved young and old with his tales of resistance and solidarity and paid tribute to the radical firebrands who built the Black power movement. Foley returned for a second, packed out, session the following day at which he regaled the audience with stories of spies, hacks, troublemakers and the value of ASIO files. Some of the best-attended and liveliest discussions happened in the Marxist fundamentals sessions, with most attracting well over 200 people. Around 300 attended the electric final session of the stream, titled “Why we need socialist organisation”. The Friday evening panel was about why the working class can change the world. More than 800 people heard from an Egyptian comrade who revisited the lessons of the 2011 revolution and argued that the Arab working class can and will rise again. This was followed by Federico Moreno from the Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores in Argentina, who drew lessons from workers’ insurgency during the Argentinazo, and discussed the push and pull of the current war between the Milei government and the left and the workers. Jasmine Duff from Socialist Alternative concluded the panel, putting forward an argument that the current weak state of the Australian working-class movement can be turned around, citing the breakthroughs in Italy and Minneapolis as examples of how breakthroughs are possible, and that the perspective of working-class revolution is key to any challenge to the capitalist order. Participants also heard from rank-and-file socialist trade unionists in the education, healthcare, hospitality and construction industries and the important steps they are taking to rebuild class consciousness and argue for strikes. There was a stream of sessions about socialist union strategy, attended by many young workers new to the socialist movement. There were also sessions exploring high points of class struggle, from momentous strikes to revolutionary uprisings like Hungary 1956, the Spanish civil war, the Mexican revolution and the Russian Revolution. Post-revolutionary Russia, revolutionary theory and strategy, how Marxists tackle oppression, critiques of liberal theories and frameworks and the tactics and politics of party building were also all explored extensively throughout the weekend. Once again, the Marxism conference was a place for international comrades to meet and exchange ideas. We were lucky to be joined by comrades from France, Egypt, Argentina, Indonesia, the Spanish state, Greece, the US and China. Disgracefully, two of our international guests, Purity Machogu from the Permanent Revolutionary Congress in Kenya and Sanaa'i Muhammad from Struggle in Pakistan, were denied entry to the country, another clear indication of the uptick of racist nationalism. Shortly after the conference, we received the tragic news of the death of a comrade who spoke at the 2025 conference, Muzan Al Neel. Muzan was a Sudanese socialist with impressive analytical skill who, despite the vicious reaction in Sudan, never wavered in her conviction that revolutionary hope would return. Beyond formal session slots, campaign groups and organising workshops sprawled across the lawns. Some of this even began before the opening night of the conference: Marxism Fringe attendees learnt how to screen-print and collage their way towards activist poster design skills, and were able to join a special meet-and-greet with Marxism 2026’s international [guest speakers](https://www.marxismconference.org/speakers?ref=redflag.org.au). In the Saturday lunch break, Marxism 2026 hosted the first national meeting of [Socialist Party ](https://www.socialists.org.au/?ref=redflag.org.au)members from different states, who discussed how to strengthen and draw together opposition to One Nation’s vile racist politics. Students for Palestine held a workshop coordinating their freshly launched [Weapons Off Campus](https://www.instagram.com/p/DW8W0Cwleo6/?img%5Findex=1&ref=redflag.org.au) campaign, and the incredible young founders of [High School Anti-Capitalists](https://www.instagram.com/highschoolanticapitalistsaus/?ref=redflag.org.au) ran one of their inaugural collective meetings. Recently formed Socialist Party union groups also convened. [Socialists in Healthcare](https://www.instagram.com/socialistsinhealthcare/?ref=redflag.org.au) and the teachers’ group [Socialists in Schools](https://www.instagram.com/socialistsinschoolsvic/?ref=redflag.org.au) were alive and bustling with new supporters following recent strike actions. Every generation of fighters for a better world came together at the Marxism conference. The final session was a panel about the need for a serious socialist alternative and what that looks like concretely. Lily Campbell, organiser of Socialist Alternative’s newly formed Newcastle branch, made the case for people to resist the malaise and to be defiant rebels (with a cause). Omar Hassan, Victorian Socialists Northern Metro candidate, explained the vital role of socialists: the first to take up a fight, the last to leave the battlefield and the force that can offer the strategies and politics needed to win. The feeling at the end of the conference brought to mind Friedrich Engels’ hopeful words: “Youth has never before flocked to our colours in such numbers ... the thought which dominates us has never before unfolded itself so richly ... courage, conviction, talent have never been so much on our side as now”. The conference organisers would like to extend our sincerest thanks to everyone who attended, built, organised and participated in this wonderful festival of socialist politics. We hope it left every participant with ideas and arguments that will sustain and inspire them over the coming period. ### A window into the evil of the plastics industry URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/a-window-into-the-evil-of-the-plastics-industry/ Last updated: 2026-04-18T02:41:06.000Z Chances are right now you are sitting on, eating from, reading off, travelling in or wearing something containing plastic. And microplastics are almost definitely in your brain. “It is an inescapable, physical reminder of a frightening global mess—one we feel complicit in yet powerless to change”, is how author Beth Gardiner puts it in her new book, *Plastic Inc*. In one of the book’s most surreal passages, Gardiner attends the annual conference of the Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemicals Association in Dubai. The event was underwritten by SABIC, the Saudi Arabian state-owned petrochemical conglomerate. Gardiner describes how plastics executives used green-sounding language to discuss their industry’s future. Talk of sustainability and social responsibility abounded. But their real concern was with public relations: how to boost production in a world where the climate crisis, and the role of plastic within it, is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Saudi Arabia’s participation in this greenwashing spectacle speaks to an ominous trend. In anticipation of a global drop in fuel consumption, Saudi Arabia is leaning into plastics production. If, like me, you traded chemistry for English at school, it might take a second to see what relevance colourful dog toys and cling wrap have to oil. Turns out plastics are produced from crude oil, only with different spells and incantations cast upon it than those which make fuel. Saudi Aramco is the biggest oil company in the world; four times more valuable than its closest competitor ExxonMobil. It is also the number one corporate source of greenhouse gas emissions. The fuel refineries operated by Saudi Aramco are gigantic. If repurposed towards plastics production, their output could be vastly greater than typical petrochemical plants. Gardiner quotes a leading petrochemicals analyst who says, “It will only take a few of these projects to significantly affect global supply and demand”. Fossil fuel companies, then, are responding to the climate crisis by pumping more plastic into the world. While this destructive and self-serving behaviour is abhorrent, it is not new. *Plastic Inc* tracks how corporations have fostered deliberate lies about plastic being safe despite having known, from the very beginning, the dangers it posed to the environment and human health. In the 1940s and 1950s, the plastics industry drove a shift towards single-use disposable plastics. Individual packaging became an expression of a new culture of mass consumption in the postwar economic boom. Coke, for example, made an iconic and disastrous transition to plastic bottles and cans, effectively rendering the option of reusable glass bottles defunct. Fast forward to 2025, and Coke is selling 137 billion plastic bottles annually. Gardiner tries her best to get the scale of plastic waste to sink in. At current rates of growth, by 2050, the cumulative total of world plastic will be enough to coat the United States in an ankle-deep layer. She visits a plastic disposal facility in Serang, Indonesia, and describes the view from the top of a twelve-metre high mountain of plastic where mounds of waste “stretch over an area as big as ten football fields, at least”. This environmental vandalism is all the more nauseating because it is the conscious work of mega-corporations and their political allies. The chemists who developed the early forms of plastic knew this material cannot be easily disposed of. The durability of plastic—water resistant, flexible, able to carry many times its own weight—is the appeal, after all. When overflowing waste began to pollute cities, plastics corporations spent fortunes on anti-littering campaigns; measures that blamed pollution on waste management techniques and consumer behaviour without ever calling plastics production into question. In 1954, the Keep America Beautiful alliance was formed by nearly two dozen beverage, cigarette, candy and packaging companies. Its Australian offshoot is highly recognisable on beaches and other public places. The corporate message was that, so long as people put their rubbish in the bin, there was no damage done. As public consciousness about pollution nonetheless mounted, the plastics industry pivoted towards recycling and launched the most effective greenwashing scam in history. The explicit aim was to stop legislation that sought to halt or lower plastic production. Gardiner highlights an episode of corporate skullduggery in Minnesota in 1989\. The city councils of Minneapolis and St Paul had created a national stir by banning many kinds of plastic packaging. In response, a plastics industry association body, the Council for Solid Waste Solutions, set up local recycling programs in the Twin Cities and flooded media with advertisements promoting the green ethos of recycling. The plastic bans were never enforced, even as the recycling programs fizzled after splashy launches. But Gardiner shows that the very concept of plastics recycling is fraudulent. Only plastics of the same compound can be recycled together. Given there are tens of thousands of plastic variants, effective sorting is prohibitively labour intensive and often plain impossible. Recycled plastic also breaks down quickly such that very few items, like milk jugs, can reasonably be repurposed multiple times. Plastic could never be recycled enough to outmatch new production and curb waste—which is precisely why corporations can advocate it. In the late ’90s, many Western nations, including Australia, began shipping plastic waste to China. By 2015, China’s annual plastic scrap import was 110 million tonnes, with the US sending 1,500 shipping containers of waste daily. For a short period, China had vast reserves of labour willing to undertake the arduous task of sorting and recycling plastics for low wages and at great risk to their health. In 2018, China decided it would no longer be the world’s garbage bin. Waste once destined for China ended up in the streets of poor countries—Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. This is technically illegal, but webs of middlemen and brokers in international shipping, in rich and poor nations alike, have found ways around environmental laws and are profiting from the waste trade. While school children in Australia carefully sort their rubbish into appropriate bins, less than 9 percent of plastic produced has ever been recycled (and this based on questionable accounting). Plastic is more likely to end up on the outskirts of an Indonesian coastal town than to be reused or recycled. Contrary to the exhortations of industry executives, Gardiner points out that plastic is not sustainable at any stage of the production process, from refining to waste. She also sheds light on the hazards of plastic for workers, an issue that is often overlooked in environmental circles. Chemical conglomerates are notoriously unregulated; in the US, companies do not have to prove their products are safe before they go to market. Petrochemical workers live with the fallout from toxic spills, explosions and leaking infrastructure, all in the face of obstinate companies refusing to admit wrongdoing. Gardiner travels to a parish called St John in Louisiana, part of a stretch of the lower Mississippi River nicknamed “Cancer Alley” from the 150 petrochemical plants and refineries in the area. In 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency met with residents of St John and informed them that for decades they had been breathing over ten times the safe limit of chemicals like chloroprene—used to create synthetic rubber—from a complex established by DuPont in the 1960s. This explained a lot. Eighty-five-year-old Robert Taylor, a lifelong resident of St John, told Gardiner that his uncle, brother, sister, mother and cousin all died of cancer. His wife got cancer and moved to California for cleaner air. He stayed behind to care for his daughter, debilitated by an autoimmune disease common among women in the area. “I still haven’t been able to wrap my mind around that and understand who had the authority to decide that we were expendable”, Taylor said. Taylor’s story is repeated by workers in town after town that Gardiner visits, who also detail the intimidation they faced by factory stooges when they tried to raise the alarm about safety. She interviewed two Texas residents who fished bags of nurdles—plastic waste pellets—out of their neighbourhood lake every morning for over a decade to gather evidence against Taiwanese plastic producer Formosa. Petrochemical workers and their families living near refineries are in many ways at ground zero of a terrible experiment the whole world is subject to, looking at exactly what plastic does to the human body. It might take generations to know for sure what is happening to us as we ingest microplastics through our skin, food, drink and the air we breathe. But it’s unlikely to be good. For all the terrifying detail with which Gardiner exposes how the plastics industry and its political allies are knowingly destroying the planet, her solutions come across as somewhat utopian given the scale of the problem. While highlighting how industry circumvents government directives—when politicians even have the will to try to take on profitable businesses—Gardiner advocates primarily for increased regulation of plastic to curb its preponderance. In the final chapter, Gardiner highlights a number of stores where all products are based on reusability as the economic alternative to a world gone single-use mad. The problem is that the plastic catastrophe, and the climate crisis more broadly, persist because capitalists have the social power to direct the economy in the first place, to pressure governments to loosen regulations and flout them when necessary. The chemical executives conferencing in Dubai, boosting plastics in fear of falling fuel usage, run the world. This minority is too blinkered by the greed of short-term profit to be morally swayed by public outcry and have the resources to influence or ignore legislation. To stop the madness of climate destruction, transition to sustainable production and even begin to reverse the damage caused in two and a half centuries of capitalism, the capitalist economy needs to be overturned and the power of its overlords broken. *Plastic Inc* nevertheless provides a powerful insight into the dangerous sham of greenwashed capitalist solutions to the climate crisis. Gardiner’s interviews with profiteers and victims of the plastic trade alike are often harrowing, as are her dystopian portraits of the invasion of plastics into the natural world. Readers will have difficulty avoiding the conclusion that there is crying need for radical change, however difficult it might currently seem to achieve. ### The National Defence Strategy and the collapse of the centre URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-national-defence-strategy-and-the-collapse-of-the-centre/ Last updated: 2026-04-19T02:44:00.000Z Hours before the federal government’s latest [National Defence Strategy](https://www.defence.gov.au/about/strategic-planning/2026-national-defence-strategy-2026-integrated-investment-program?ref=redflag.org.au) was released, a morning presenter on ABC News Radio asked if the extra $53 billion in reported military spending would be enough to “satisfy the US”. Similarly, the *Financial Review*’s foreign affairs and defence reporter, Michael Read, noted that the $53 billion figure “falls well short of the demands made by US President Donald Trump”. At the *Guardian*, part of a headline read: “plan still short of Trump’s demands”. Political editor Tom McIlroy uncritically regurgitated the defence minister’s talking points before highlighting only that the Liberal Party thinks more money should be thrown at the generals. So it was clear in advance that the content of the National Defence Strategy would, by and large, be irrelevant. The ruling class and its hired propagandists were all on board Labor’s militarist train. And any suggestion that Trump and US imperialism ought to be resisted, rather than accommodated, would not have needed censoring or editing out—the thought just didn’t enter anyone’s mind. The only dissent to yet more spending on weapons of mass destruction came from the war-hawk right, who think that the ALP can’t be trusted to spend wisely. Yet anyone throwing a critical eye over the document would immediately be struck by the audacity of the propaganda. The government previously said it was spending at least $368 billion on nuclear submarines and undertaking a “whole-of-nation effort” to defend “the global rules-based order”. That order, it was not subtly insinuated, was absolutely central to Australian security and prosperity, but threatened by a belligerent China. Critics of this outrageous military buildup were dismissed as Beijing’s useful idiots, or even proxies. Now, the new National Defence Strategy casually announces that the rules-based order is “in transition”. Funnily enough, this reality also calls for increased military spending. Anyone not living in a cave for the last year will note the evasion here. Why is the order in transition? That’s the Republican elephant in the room, as Trump creates chaos worldwide while his secretary of state openly lampoons the so-called order. According to this demented Labor Party document, however, the Australia-US alliance “contributes to the peace and stability of the region”. Were the people who wrote this on drugs? It probably wouldn’t matter if they were, because no-one in the political class or the media seems the slightest bit interested in challenging the government on this laughable fairytale of Trump-led, Albanese-endorsed, peace and stability. The reality, of course, is that there is today no greater destabilising force in international relations than the United States. There is no greater threat to peace in South-East Asia than the White House belligerents, who are emboldened, rather than tempered, by their unfailing allies in Canberra. And the only military threat to the Australian mainland is the one created by the government’s all-or-nothing partnership with Washington. As we noted three years ago on [the release of the Defence Strategic Review](https://redflag.org.au/article/defence-strategic-review-and-new-imperialism/): “The single biggest contributor to the threat of an inter-imperialist conflict in East or South-East Asia is the US military’s aggressive forward positioning as it tries to maintain regional dominance over China. Any specific threat to Australia emanating from this situation will primarily be a function of Canberra partnering with Washington in a war against Beijing.” The US military views this continent as little more than an “[unsinkable US aircraft carrier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3HhPU9DGsQ&ref=redflag.org.au)”. You get the sense that this is well understood among those running the country, but that the ruling class here has made its bed with the US empire, for better or worse, as it previously did with the British Empire. If that’s the case, no sacrifice will be too great if push comes to shove with China. But the sacrifice will be on workers, not capitalists—and certainly not on the drafters of documents like this. The Coalition government’s 2020 [Defence Strategic Update](https://www.defence.gov.au/about/strategic-planning/2020-defence-strategic-update?ref=redflag.org.au) projected ten-year military spending of $575 billion. At the time, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a pro-militarist think tank, estimated that the outlay represented [an increase of 87 percent](https://www.aspi.org.au/report/cost-defence-2020-2021-part-1-aspi-2020-strategic-update-brief?ref=redflag.org.au) on the Defence Department’s previous budget. The Labor government’s [2024 National Defence Strategy](https://www.defence.gov.au/about/strategic-planning/2024-national-defence-strategy-2024-integrated-investment-program?ref=redflag.org.au) boosted spending by another 33 percent, committing $330 billion in new investment over the decade to 2034 and increasing overall funding to the Department of Defence and the Australian Signals Directorate to $765 billion over the same period. Now, there’s yet another $50+ billion. Yet the voices of mainstream Australian media and political circles can do nothing but wonder if it’s enough to satisfy the leader of global fascism. That’s how far the centre has now drifted. ### Middle East crimes show why we should oppose the US alliance URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/middle-east-crimes-show-why-we-should-oppose-the-us-alliance/ Last updated: 2026-04-18T04:41:51.000Z In the first days of the US-Israeli attack on Iran, few governments were as enthusiastic as Australia’s. Anthony Albanese’s ALP virtually cut and pasted the lies used by George W. Bush and John Howard at the start of the 2003 Iraq war: Iran was on the cusp of developing nuclear weapons; its ballistic missile program and international proxies represented a threat to international peace and security; and a war would liberate “the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression”. So, it was “bombs away” with Donald Trump and US Central Command. Not even the US killing of 175 Iranian schoolchildren and teachers on the first day of the war cooled the government’s appetite for action. The *Guardian* reports that some “left faction” Labor MPs had been “quietly alarmed” and were “confounded” by the government’s immediate readiness to back the illegal invasion. But any idea that they might fight was soon scotched: “the Labor caucus quickly fell into line behind the prime minister”. It probably helped that the PM, foreign minister and defence industry minister, all nominally from the party’s left, led the charge. Only once it became clear that the Iranian regime was not about to crumble, only when Iranian armed forces demonstrated their ability to strike back and only when Iran’s shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz blocked energy exports to the world, did the Albanese government begin to back away from its open support for the war. Starting in mid-March, the government began to emphasise “de-escalation”. Now it began to preach the need for “all parties” to observe “international humanitarian law”. Now it began to express its “concern” at the state of things. This wasn’t primarily concern about the thousands of Iranians and Lebanese murdered by US and Israeli bombs, mind you. Nor was it concern about unbridled aggression by two of its most important allies. No, what mattered to the Albanese government was the disruptions to the world economy. The government is now hoping the ceasefire holds so that, as Foreign Minister Penny Wong put it, “Australians and the world can see lower prices for fuel”. Although the messaging has changed, you will look high and low for any admission that responsibility for this disaster lies squarely at the feet of the US and Israel. The Albanese government attacked Russia for breaching the so-called international rules-based order when it invaded Ukraine, but brushes that aside when it comes to the US-Israeli illegal invasion of Iran. Here, Albanese and Wong told us, “the legal basis for the attack is a matter for the US and Israel”. No surprise coming from a government that has backed Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The government condemns Iran for closing the Strait of Hormuz as if this were simply an act of bastardry by Tehran, rather than a response to the invasion. Nor does it state the obvious: that if the US and Israel stopped attacking Iran and Lebanon, there would be little motive for Iran to use its leverage in this way. In calling for “all parties to uphold international humanitarian law and protect civilian life”, as Wong now does, the government tries to obscure the fact that Israel and the US are responsible for by far the majority of civilian deaths, nearly 4,000 in Iran and Lebanon, including more than 300 slaughtered in Lebanon just hours after a ceasefire had been declared. (Iran is responsible for 41 civilian deaths in the Gulf and 27 in Israel.) Wong admits that the Israeli military killed Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom and six of her colleagues in Gaza in 2024\. But two years later, all she can do is issue a lame press release calling for “transparency” in Israel’s “investigation” into the matter, as though the killing was an isolated criminal act, rather than an inevitable feature of a genocidal war. The foreign minister calls for action to protect the lives of humanitarian aid workers in Lebanon, but fails to mention that Israel, and Israel alone, has killed 40 and injured 100 health workers in air strikes on ambulances, civil defence centres and medical clinics. Wong says she is “gravely concerned” at “the expansion of the conflict into Lebanon” but lays the blame on Hezbollah despite Israel attacking Lebanon long before Hezbollah joined Iran in March. And when Donald Trump threatens to send the Iranian people “back to the Stone Age, where they belong” and to end civilisation in Iran “never to be brought back again”, it is only after Nationals leader Matt Canavan denounces this Hitlerian rhetoric and only after a ceasefire is announced that Albanese can bring himself to declare these barbaric statements “inappropriate”. No, prime minister, that will not do. “Inappropriate” is turning up to a wedding wearing black, not threatening civilisational extinction. The Australian government simply cannot tell the truth about this war because—despite its constant avowals that it is only playing a defensive role, its insistence that it will not send “boots on the ground” and its calls for “de-escalation”—it is complicit. Australia’s complicity is not just government statements supporting the invasion and denouncing Iran. It is the intelligence gathered by the Pine Gap spy base that Australia shares with the US Central Command and Israel. This intelligence is an essential element of US military capabilities, without which the US and Israel would fly blind. Australia’s complicity takes the form of the three Australian crew serving on board the US Navy submarine that sank the unarmed Iranian frigate, drowning 100 Iranian sailors, last month. Complicity involves dozens of other Australian submariners embedded in the US Navy as part of the AUKUS nuclear submarine project, the 100 military and intelligence personnel stationed at US bases in the Gulf and the deployment last month of 90 SAS personnel to the US Al Minhad air base in the United Arab Emirates. What else is Australia’s supply of components to Israel’s fighter jets if not involvement in this war? Complicity is the Australian government sending missiles and an E-7A Wedgetail battle management surveillance aircraft, along with 85 airmen and support crew, to the UAE to support US war aims in the Gulf. Initially, the Wedgetail deployment was for one month; that has now been extended indefinitely. There are limits to Australia’s support. Aware of the unpopularity of the war, its fear that deeper involvement might lead it into a quagmire like Iraq and Afghanistan and its focus on containing China’s rise in the Asia-Pacific, the Australian government has said from the outset that it won’t put boots on the ground in Iran. However, it is certainly considering putting a Royal Australian Navy ship in the Gulf as part of a European mission to challenge Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. But if the government were really concerned about the rising death toll and destruction resulting from the war, it would take steps to stop it by immediately pulling back every bit of Australian support for the US and Israeli war machine, whether military intelligence, basing and port facilities, personnel, hardware or critical minerals. It would condemn the US and Israeli attack and press war crimes charges against senior figures in the US and Israeli administrations. It would sanction Israel for its crimes in Gaza. It would scrap the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. There is a precedent for this. In 1985, the New Zealand government banned visits from US nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered vessels, leading the US government to effectively end military cooperation between the two countries. Nonetheless, it is almost impossible to envision any Australian government doing this. The Australian ruling class is complicit in US and Israeli wars because it remains committed to US power in the Middle East and beyond. This is not because it is merely a lackey of the US, but because it regards US domination as a guarantor of Australian power in the Asia-Pacific. As Defence Minister Richard Marles argued in 2023, the Australia-US alliance > “affords Australia capability, technology and intelligence advantages we simply could not acquire or develop on our own. This expands our strategic options, makes us less vulnerable to coercive action, and enables Australia to pursue our national security interests far beyond what we could achieve alone”. The alliance is not subservience but a force multiplier for Australian imperialism. This is why the ruling class regards support for the alliance as a prerequisite for any party with ambitions to govern and why every major party supports US imperialism. When Albanese was asked about whether his mealy mouthed “concern” for the effects of the war might open a rift with the White House, the prime minister told the ABC “Not at all. We have a very constructive relationship, personally, myself and President Trump”, while Marles said that the alliance “is enduring and as important today as it’s ever been”. The task of all those who oppose US and Israeli barbaric wars is to end Australia’s integration into the US military. That is not because an independent Australian military would be inherently better; it would not. As its record shows, Australia, with the fourth most powerful military in the Asia-Pacific, is quite capable of carrying out war crimes in its own name; there would be nothing progressive about Australian armed forces “going it alone”. But the world would be a safer place if the Australia-US alliance were broken. Detaching one of the US’s most reliable allies would weaken the US’s ability to rampage around the world. And undermining the Australian armed forces’ strike capacity would weaken Australian militarism in our own region as well. ### A new space race and the omen of war URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/a-new-space-race-and-the-omen-of-war/ Last updated: 2026-04-18T04:41:39.000Z It’s difficult to avoid a sense of awe when seeing images from the Apollo missions that took humans to the Moon for the first time. Who hasn’t gazed up at the night sky and wondered what it would be like to actually go up there? Watching Artemis II lift off on the morning of 2 April to take us back, all I felt was a sense of dread. Awe for the Moon landings is easy to feel in hindsight, when the images of Neil Armstrong descending onto the dusty lunar surface are separated from us by decades. It is easy to forget that as Apollo 11 shot into space, napalm was raining down on Vietnam. Or that the chief engineer who designed its rocket was a former Nazi officer who oversaw mass missile production by slave labour in a concentration camp. Or that life in the United States was being transformed in the wake of massive social movements against war and for civil rights. The launch of the first crewed mission back to the Moon in more than five decades seemed to come out of the blue, following a flurry of more pressing events. Artemis II launched as American and Israeli bombs rained down on Iran and Lebanon. A few days after the No Kings protests, which were the biggest demonstrations in American history. A few months after a mass rebellion in Minneapolis, culminating in a general strike against Gestapo-like goons carrying out mass deportations. Beyond the striking similarities between the historical moments, the central driving force of Space Race Two is the same as that of Space Race One: great-power rivalry. Much is written by liberal pundits about how space exploration is an internationally unifying endeavour driven by simple human curiosity. Maybe Neil Armstrong meant it when he said “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”—but space exploration has never been pursued in the interests of all humanity. It has always been about projecting state power. The US was spooked into starting the Space Race after the USSR launched the satellite Sputnik I into orbit in 1957\. It proved that Russia was not only ahead in space technology but also in developing long-range ballistic missiles. Within four months, an American satellite was also in orbit. Within three years, American surveillance satellites were capturing strategic imagery of the Earth’s surface. By 1961, then-President John F. Kennedy had stated openly the American goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him to Earth by the end of the decade. The logic was simple, but it was not altruistic. There was no better proof that the US was capable of landing a missile on Moscow than landing the payload of a missile on the Moon. The technology required to go where no one had gone before was the same technology needed to build precise intercontinental ballistic missiles, and other useful tools for industry and imperialism. The core motivation was the drive to expansion and domination intrinsic to capitalism. JFK stated plainly the beating heart of it all in his famous 1962 speech at Rice University: “This country was conquered by those who moved forward—and so will space”. Space Race Two’s goals are somewhat different, but no less imperialist. There are now many powers with extremely long-range missiles and enemies they would like to target. This time, JFK’s old allusion to “conquering” space is even more the immediate aim. US President Trump himself made a similar reference to America’s colonisation in his second inauguration speech: “We will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars”. The crew of Artemis II will only circle around the Moon, not land on it. But the launch has fired the starter’s gun for a scramble that will play out over the next decades. NASA intends, over the course of several Artemis missions, to establish a permanent base near the Moon’s south pole. By getting there first, the Americans intend to claim dominion over the potentially abundant lunar resources. The surface could be loaded with rare-earth metals, helium-3 (a rare isotope used as fuel for fusion reactors), and frozen water, which can be turned into rocket fuel, enabling the base to serve as a refuelling site for further missions to Mars. The reason this is all happening now, and not any time in the last 50 years, is that the US has a new rival rising on the horizon: China. It is no coincidence that Artemis has been kicked into gear to beat China’s plans to achieve a crewed Moon landing by 2030. If it really were all about human curiosity or attempting to unify mankind behind one ambitious, international goal, why did it take so long to go back? NASA did not forget how to build rockets. Indeed, an internal report for the president’s office, written at the height of the Apollo program, estimated that a Mars landing could have been possible in the 1980s had the space program maintained its funding level. If the Artemis program proves anything, it’s that for capitalism, there truly is no final frontier. As long as there are continents to claim, whether on Earth or in space—the Moon has a land area similar to Africa’s—the system demands they be fought over. Of course, expansion into space has not been totally on pause for half a century. Every day, new satellites are launched, forming networks for communication, surveillance, and, soon, likely also weaponry. Low Earth Orbit has already become a new domain for profiteering and warmaking; the Moon is the next. The images of the Earth and Moon beamed back from Artemis II are breathtaking. Their tragedy is that they are an omen of a possible world-engulfing war to come. ### To Lam: Vietnam’s new exploiter in chief URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/to-lam-vietnams-new-exploiter-in-chief/ Last updated: 2026-04-18T04:41:20.000Z To Lam has been unanimously elected as the president of Vietnam by the country’s National Assembly. The election comes after his ascension to the position of general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) nearly two years ago. Holding both positions gives him unprecedented power over Vietnam’s one-party state. So, what does To Lam’s ascension tell us about the state of Vietnam today? Lam owes much of his rise to power to the “blazing furnace” anti-corruption campaign led by the late former general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong. Trong and his allies vigorously pursued a campaign to ostensibly root out corruption in the CPV. Campaigns like this are golden opportunities for ambitious ladder-climbers like Lam because they allow them to remove political rivals in a way that seems virtuous rather than Machiavellian. The CPV is notoriously opaque, so it is difficult to account for precise factional manoeuvres, but Lam’s auspicious rise from cabinet minister to the most powerful politician in the country was undoubtedly aided by his role in leading anti-corruption efforts. Vietnam has had four presidents over the last three years, with Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Vo Van Thuong resigning due to corruption investigations in 2023 and 2024, respectively. It’s ironic that Lam became the main face of the anti-corruption drive. Before becoming general secretary, he was probably best known for scandalous pictures of him being fed gold-crusted steaks by the 2010s internet-meme chef Salt Bae while millions of Vietnamese barely scraped by from one meal to the next. Internal party politics weren’t the only force behind the anti-corruption campaign. Excessive corruption in the state bureaucracy, such as extortion for preferential treatment, can significantly increase the cost of doing business. This is particularly problematic for countries like Vietnam that rely on foreign direct investment. As a nation ravaged by a century of colonisation and war, Vietnam did not have the capital infrastructure to independently industrialise after it defeated the US invasion in 1975\. So, in 1986, the government launched a strategy of sweeping privatisations, land reform and opening up to foreign capitalists. To make the country more attractive to foreign companies, Trong’s anti-corruption campaign intended to reduce graft-related costs and delays. This is why it was not just top party leaders who got burnt in the furnace. A 2023 report by Singapore’s Yusof Ishak Institute found that more than 200,000 party officials had been disciplined for corruption since 2016. But Lam has come to power at a time when the blazing furnace is cooling. The campaign’s scale and intensity created two notable problems. First, it promoted its own type of inefficiencies. In a context where mistakes or risks could be construed as corrupt behaviour, state officials were encouraged to act conservatively. They either denied additional funding requests or spent more time perfecting the paperwork, both of which resulted in centrally allocated funds being held up longer or not fully invested in their intended purpose. In his time as party secretary, Lam has sought to resolve this problem. He has reduced the number of provincial administrative units from 63 to 34, eliminated five central government ministries and fired or retired tens of thousands of bureaucrats. By slashing red tape and eliminating entire layers of bureaucracy, Lam is likely hoping to counteract the inefficiencies engendered by the party-state’s culture of fear. The second problem was the limited democratic accountability it promoted. Vietnam does not have basic democratic rights like freedom of the press, independent trade unions, election campaigns or many other means for citizens to publicly express their discontent. But the anti-corruption campaign put high-profile political figures under intense public scrutiny. State media not only covered each case in great detail but also encouraged people to report instances of corruption they might have witnessed. This could create a dangerous norm for an authoritarian state: a legitimate avenue for the collective discussion of political grievances with members of the ruling party. As part of Lam’s rise to power, he has restricted the democratic space by aggressively targeting independent journalists, artists and social media activity critical of the government. For dictatorships like Vietnam, any space for political critiques to combine with broader popular frustrations is a major threat. Where there have been protests and resistance in Vietnam over the past few decades, the ruling party has sought to contain or deflect them. For example, an inflation-fuelled strike wave from 2009 to 2011 swept across the country spontaneously. Local media outlets and party officials would often sympathise with the strikers’ grievances, posing as their champions. What they would not tolerate, though, were demands for independent unions or criticisms of the Communist Party. The party could successfully contain workers’ grievances to just an economic focus until the worst of the inflation crisis abated, but working conditions and living standards in the cities continued to cause frustration. That discontent finally exploded into massive riots in 2014, when President Nguyen Tan Dung allowed street demonstrations for citizens to protest China’s aggressive moves against Vietnam in the South China Sea. Allowing the initial demonstration might have been a useful way to deflect class anger into nationalist, anti-Chinese sentiments, but Dung could not predict the scale of the riots which followed. Anti-China sentiment flared back up in 2018 with protests against proposed special economic zones legislation that was to grant Chinese firms exemptions from existing Vietnamese labour laws. When the ruling party was under scrutiny for its profit-driven dealings, anti-China sentiment could no longer be stoked as a deflection. Repression, once more, became the order of the day. So, To Lam has come to power, offering the slowdown of anti-corruption campaigns, significant cuts to the state bureaucracy and greater censorship. His success is a triumph of personal ambition. But why would workers feel any hope in his victory? What does Lam’s rise deliver for the millions of small farmers who have been forced to move from the Mekong Delta to Ho Chi Minh City, where they have little access to jobs or services? What does Lam’s rise deliver for the hundreds of thousands of textile and garment workers being paid poverty wages in slave-like conditions? What does Lam’s rise do for women still earning 10 percent less than their male counterparts and subjected to degrading sexist treatment, or for migrant workers systematically put in dangerous working conditions, or for ethnic minorities persecuted by the state? Well, Lam promises “a new historical starting point, a new era, and the rising era of the Vietnamese nation”. Lam’s “era of national rise” will supposedly herald annual growth rates of more than 10 percent, something every Vietnamese citizen should apparently be proud to aspire to. But this is a difficult promise to deliver in such an unpredictable global environment, already being squeezed by the impacts of Trump’s war on Iran. And even if it were achieved, the promise of economic growth is first and foremost a promise to the capitalist rulers of Vietnam. Let them eat gold-crusted steak. ### Palestine solidarity activist charged in QLD receives support URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/palestine-solidarity-activist-charged-in-qld-receives-support/ Last updated: 2026-04-08T22:23:25.000Z “This is not a police state—we have the right to demonstrate!” Around 60 Palestine solidarity activists, community members and journalists chanted at the entrance to the Brisbane Magistrate’s Court on Monday morning. They were there to support Liam Parry, the first person to be charged with “reciting a prohibited expression” under the Queensland Liberal government’s new “hate speech” laws. Liam is facing up to two years’ jail for saying “from the river to the sea” at a Students for Palestine rally last month. The police’s conduct at the community gathering was telling. Before the speeches, officers told the rally organiser that they had “the resources to do what happened to Liam to other people” in the crowd. They encircled a 70-year-old man holding a sign that read “From the Sea to the River”, threatening him with arrest unless he put it away. Activists have warned for months that the new laws are about intimidating and silencing the Palestine solidarity movement. The eagerness of the police to enforce the laws, even in dubious circumstances, proves their point. The crowd was undeterred. The chants of solidarity rang out across Roma Street. Addressing the crowd and a throng of cameras after his hearing, Parry said: “It’s an important moment in Queensland right now. The government is trying to criminalise pro-Palestine advocacy. We can’t accept that”. The next opportunity to protest for Palestine and against the new laws will be during Justice for Palestine Magandjin’s weekend of action on 18-19 April. --- *Ella Gutteridge is the convenor of Students for Palestine in Queensland.* ### Public housing tenants under attack in Wollongong URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/public-housing-tenants-under-attack-in-wollongong/ Last updated: 2026-04-08T22:11:40.000Z On 28 March, 100 public housing tenants and their supporters rallied to protect public housing at Bellambi Estate in Wollongong. The people were angry, and they ought to be—the NSW Labor government is planning to demolish their homes and replace them with shops and luxury apartments. Bellambi is a special place, the kind that is rare these days. Only a fifteen-minute drive from the centre of town, the estate is right on the beach and is made up of townhouses and stand-alone houses. Currently, about 95 percent of the 500 residences are public housing provided by Homes NSW (formerly the NSW Housing Commission). But in recent years, the area has caught the eye of property developers and wealthy holidaymakers. So the Labor government and Homes NSW are rezoning the estate to allow the public land to be handed over to private developers, and allow a massive increase in density, adding 2,000 dwellings. The vast majority of this will be private housing. Homes NSW is promising only 30 percent “social housing”—a term that covers both public housing and community housing provided by private charities and NGOs, which comes with fewer rights for tenants. Importantly, there is no guarantee that homes built to replace the existing public housing stock will be like-for-like replacements. We asked Paul Scully, the planning minister and MP for Wollongong, if tenants forced out of three-bedroom houses with backyards will receive those same amenities after the rebuild. He replied: “That is not what this redevelopment is”. This is why it was so important for NSW Socialists to call the rally. Our activists had spent a few weekends at Bellambi, putting up posters, getting leaflets in letterboxes and knocking on doors. Every tenant we spoke to was angry about poor people being kicked out to make a playground for the rich. But there was also a sense of despondency. One tenant had been threatened with eviction because she was one dollar short on her rent. Another had been waiting years for repairs to a sunken foundation that had opened a hole in her wall big enough to stick her arm through. The rally allowed and airing of these grievances. In an open-mic section, half a dozen tenants delivered impassioned speeches. They rejected “being moved into shoebox apartments”, denounced the government for wanting “to move the rich bastards in”, and pointed out the anxiety that the proposal was causing to their families. This is only the beginning of the fight for public housing and tenants’ rights in Bellambi and beyond. As one teenage public housing tenant said: “If they get away with this here, then they will move onto another suburb, then another, then another”. Such a spirit of solidarity will be needed to win this fight, and the fight for public housing across the state and the country. The next rally to protect Bellambi Estate will be at midday on 23 May at Paul Scully’s office in Wollongong. ### Charting the rise in Australian inequality URL: https://redflag.org.au/charting-the-rise-in-australian-inequality/ Last updated: 2026-05-21T11:27:43.000Z Since the mid-1990s, the Australian economy has expanded consistently, and the working class, at least most of it, has largely avoided the major assaults on living standards that others around the world have endured repeatedly. The one exception was the inflationary wave following the pandemic, during which, according to calculations by Australian National University associate professor Ben Phillips, household disposable incomes on average declined 11 percent between mid-2021 and mid-2023\. That was the biggest attack on working-class living standards in several generations. Taking a longer view, the 50-year trend has been rising average household incomes (they have almost doubled in real terms since 1975) and increasing life expectancy, which is up by more than 14 percent (people living ten years longer on average). Founded as an open-air prison totally dependent on British aid, Australia now ranks among the top ten economies in the world for per capita output and has become one of the wealthiest societies in human history. How, then, is it conceivable that 14 percent of the country—[nearly 4 million people](https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/poverty%5Fin%5Faustralia%5F2025%5Foverview/?ref=redflag.org.au)—live in poverty and [more than 120,000 are homeless](https://homelessnessaustralia.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Homelessness-fact-sheet-2023-1.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au), while those with homes are among the most indebted people in the world? How, amid such wealth, can it be that about 30 percent of households nationally are food insecure, and that [20 percent of people regularly have to skip meals](https://reports.foodbank.org.au/foodbank-hunger-report-2025/?ref=redflag.org.au) or whole days of eating? The reality is that, despite the broad-brush painting of increasing prosperity, the Australian working class has been ripped off, while a greater share of the tremendous wealth generated in the domestic economy has been distributed to those at the top—big business owners and wealthy households with substantial financial assets and property portfolios. The charts here tell a particular story in which growing average household incomes have masked diverging fortunes: increasing concentration of wealth and growing income inequality. In 2019-20, for example, the top fifth of households had [five times the income of the bottom fifth](https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Inequality-in-Australia-2023%5FOverview%5Fscreen.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au). And in recent years, the Governance Institute of Australia has reported average [annual salary increases of 10-15 percent](https://www.governanceinstitute.com.au/news%5Fmedia/executives-continue-to-receive-double-digit-pay-rises-despite-lower-inflation/?ref=redflag.org.au) for CEOs and top managers and directors of the largest companies, far in advance of the 3-4 percent rises for workers. Meanwhile, the corporate sector has increased its profits and power decade after decade. Soaring house prices, which have grown at twice the pace of wages in the 21st century, have resulted in Australian households having one of the highest debt-to-income burdens in the world. The situation is complicated, however. While many working-class households are financially stressed and more sensitive to rising interest rates, residential property debt, as with savings and financial assets, is concentrated in the highest-income brackets. The most recent figures show that only one in seven of the poorest 40 percent of households have a mortgage. To state the obvious: poorer people mostly can’t afford property and often don’t qualify for loans. For those without property, rents have also increased—by more than 10 percent above wages this century—and the gap continues to grow. Renters are overwhelmingly and disproportionately working class and concentrated in the bottom 50 percent of income earners and wealth holders. As the Reserve Bank noted in a recent financial stability report: “Renters tend to have lower incomes ... \[and\] substantially lower savings than mortgagors irrespective of their age. As a result, renters are much more likely to experience financial stress than other households. In 2021, renters were around twice as likely to face difficulties paying their bills and were around four to five times more likely to seek help from community services or family and friends.” Specific groups are doing it much harder: working-class single parents, for whom there is a multiplier on inflation (single income, but several consumers); and those with lower incomes and little to no savings buffers, for whom only a small drop in real wages signals, or increases, financial distress. Most discussions about what’s gone wrong revolve around government policies—tax rates, tax concessions and so on. They certainly have played a role. But the key chart in this series is surely the one showing the decline in working-class struggle (see below). As the wealthy have lined their pockets and the corporate world has increased its profits, trade union leaders have played dead, refusing to fight for their members, instead treating their member-funded positions as sinecures. That collapse in the number of workers fighting for wages, rights and respect is at the heart of why Australia has increasingly become a paradise for billionaires and a daily battle for so many workers. ### **Results** One of the most striking features of the post-pandemic economic situation is that, by almost every measure, the labour market is the tightest it has been in generations—unemployment has hovered near 50-year lows, and the employment-to-population ratio is the highest since records began in the early 1980s—yet stories of hardship abound. While the charts tell a particular story, they don’t really capture people’s quality of life and how economic changes affect their relationships and how they feel about their place in the world. Consider the respondent quotes included in the preamble to the 2023 cost-of-living report from the NSW Council of Social Service, *Barely hanging on*: “While the statistics are stark, it’s the comments from focus group participants that are most revealing. Statements like ‘there’s a lot of fighting about money’, ‘we have no time with our children’, ‘it’s diminished my pleasure in living’, ‘it’s impossible to enjoy family life’, and ‘it’s nearly torn my husband and I apart’ convey some of the anguish and distress that is being felt, particularly for those raising kids. People also spoke of their shame—at not being able to afford a haircut or decent clothes, having to borrow money from family or lining up at food pantries for the first time.” Or consider a school leaver who gets a job but can’t afford to rent a place. Financially, s/he is better off staying at home, but might consider life tied to their parents to be stifling and prefer to be poorer if it meant having more independence. Or consider a full-time worker getting a second job because of rising rents or mortgage payments. They now have a higher disposable income, all other things being equal. But they might equally say that their quality of life has deteriorated because they don’t have the time to do the things—catching up with friends and family, playing sport, going out etc.—that make life worth living. Or take the following anecdotes from media reports of the cost-of-living crisis over the last few years. Each person is now in a situation where they are, on paper, economically better off than before. But could you say that their quality of life has improved? “At 39 years old, Claire did not ever foresee herself having to share her housing with anyone other than her 18-year-old daughter. For nine years she has rented houses for the pair but increasing cost of living pressures and rent rises meant they have had to open their Brisbane space up to strangers ... filling the extra space was the only option left. She said it was something her teenager struggled with ... ‘Having other people \[in the house\] has been an adjustment, her mental health has suffered’.” “At the age of 44, Mike Coates is flipping a stereotype and moving into a granny flat in his mother’s suburban backyard. Mike believes he’ll be in the granny flat for several years to come.” “Sue Leighton lives off the pension and a small amount of superannuation accrued in the years she wasn’t looking after her children ... To keep a roof over her head, Sue turned to house-sitting, and she has been doing it ever since without paying rent in Australia and even in the United Kingdom ... However, Sue admits this lifestyle is a necessity. She thinks about having her own home and garden again, but the finances scare her. “‘I look at my bank account and go onto real estate listings, and start to have a mental breakdown. I don’t really think I have a choice at this moment’, she says. ‘For me to pay rent, water, electricity and all of my bills would far exceed my income. I read the news daily about ladies my age living in their cars. I do feel lucky that I can just keep doing this. But my health is starting to fail and this worries me.’” Most of the quotes come from people at the margins. But the number of those living on the edge is increasing. How the economic situation will evolve over the next six months is now impossible to predict, let alone over the decades to come. Two things are certain, though: if working-class struggle doesn’t return to the fore, there will be few good news stories; and the exceptionalism of Australian capitalism—its capacity to sail through relatively unscathed—is going to be tested sooner or later. ### South Australian elections: One Nation insurgent, Liberals disintegrating, Labor victorious URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/south-australian-elections-one-nation-insurgent-liberals-disintegrating-labor-victorious/ Last updated: 2026-03-29T09:05:04.000Z The 21 March South Australian election may well be remembered as the beginning of a new era in Australian politics. The Liberal Party, one side of the two-party duopoly that has characterised Australian politics since the 1940s, has been humiliated by the far-right One Nation, which has captured much of the conservative vote. While Labor secured a resounding majority of seats, its primary vote dropped slightly overall and dramatically in some areas of traditional strength. These losses were compensated for by gains in some urban areas that were, until recently, Liberal-aligned. But the main story of the election was the surge of One Nation, mostly at the expense of the Liberal Party. The Liberals were supplanted by One Nation as the main opposition party throughout the state, finishing third on overall primary votes. One Nation is currently sitting on 22.4 percent of the primary vote, behind Labor’s 37.4 percent and ahead of the Liberals’ 19.4 percent. The party has won at least one lower house seat and is in the running for three more, as well as winning three of the eleven upper house seats up for election. The One Nation surge, suggested in polling over the last several months, has been shown to be very much real. But even before One Nation’s rise, the South Australian Liberals were due to face a serious reckoning. In the 2022 state election, Labor began making serious inroads into the affluent suburban seats that were traditionally Liberal Party heartlands. Labor picked up a further two suburban seats from the Liberals in subsequent by-elections. In the 2025 federal election, the Liberals lost their final Adelaide-based federal seat to Labor, and booth results suggested they could face a similar wipe-out in the state election. A chaotic revolving door of leaders added to the Liberals’ problems. The party became the subject of ridicule when the *Advertiser* published a video of one former leader, David Speirs, snorting cocaine on his kitchen bench, which led to his arrest and conviction for supplying a controlled substance. Labor took full advantage of the turmoil to solidify its image as the only party capable of forming government. The state Labor government, by contrast, is broadly popular. Premier Peter Malinauskas enjoys the highest net approval of any political leader in Australia, with a net positive rating of 33 percent according to a [poll published by DemosAU in March](https://demosau.com/news/ranked-most-popular-to-least-popular-state-premiers/?ref=redflag.org.au). With the state economy growing, Malinauskas has been able to attract the support of business, developers and real estate groups, and has gotten away with suppressing wage growth for public sector workers. With neither a competent right-wing opposition nor any serious challenge from the unions, Labor has managed to weather what should be damaging controversies, from its handling of the algal bloom to the ongoing ambulance ramping crisis at hospitals. South Australia is a very urban and very concentrated state: more than three quarters of the population live in Adelaide, and 33 of the state lower house’s 47 seats are in the city. This has favoured the Labor Party, which since the end of a rural gerrymander at the 1970 election has been in government for 40 of the past 56 years. What is notable about this election, though, is that Labor has consolidated support in seats that were the traditional base of the Liberals. Labor had swings towards it across affluent inner-city, leafy and beach-side suburbs, including a swing of more than 20 percent in the affluent suburban seat of Waite, which was once safe Liberal: the Liberal candidate ended up conceding before the counting even began. Labor has won at least four metropolitan seats from the Liberals, and on the current count the only Adelaide-based seat the Liberals are certain of retaining is Bragg, the wealthiest electorate in the state. While the South Australian Liberals may be particularly inept, their problems are not unique. As the far right have grown globally, a section of the Liberal base around the country has radicalised to the right. In South Australia, the right-wing factional warrior Alex Antic brought fundamentalist Christians and anti-vaxxers into the party in successful takeovers of local branches, with similar pushes happening in other states. This has contributed to sections of the party’s more moderate voting base rejecting the party in favour of Teal independents, while in South Australia it has been Labor that has benefited. This trend would not be easily reversed even if there was the will to do it: affluent voters have found that they get on pretty well under Labor governments. With the rise of One Nation, the Liberal Party now faces a mortal threat on its right flank. One Nation has become the leading right-wing party across much of suburban Adelaide, leaving the Liberals trailing behind in the outer suburbs north of Gepps Cross and south of the Darlington escarpment. Except for the leafy hinterland regions of the Adelaide Hills, One Nation also ran first or second in every regional seat. One Nation largely took votes from the Liberals, although there were swings from Labor in some outer suburban seats. The level of organisation of One Nation is highly uneven across the state. While the party reported an attendance of 250 people at a pre-election event in the small town of Eudunda, across much of Adelaide they lacked a visible ground campaign, with no campaigners at several polling booths. They nonetheless were still able to get strong votes in seats where they had little visible campaign. Support for One Nation was buoyed by constant attention from the legacy media, a reactionary social media campaign from lead candidate and former Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi, and the personal brand of leader Pauline Hanson. On the campaign trail, Bernardi mocked the indigenous Kaurna language, peddled conspiracy theories about COVID-19 being a fake pandemic, doubled down on his past comments linking same-sex marriage to bestiality and defended Hanson’s claims that there were “no good Muslims”. One Nation’s chaotic track record means many are sceptical about the party’s ability to hold on to its newly elected members, but there is no room for complacency from the left. The opportunity for them to build a more serious far-right machine is there. Cory Bernardi is a right-wing factional warrior with years of political experience fighting moderates in the Liberals, and brings a level of experience that other elected One Nation MPs have lacked. The party has also been normalised by the media and other political parties. It was once Liberal Party policy to preference One Nation last. Those days are long gone, with the Liberals preferencing the party throughout the state. On election night, Malinauskas emphasised his willingness to work with One Nation MPs. With a popular but right-wing Labor government, and an insurgent far right, there is space for a left alternative. The Greens, with its strategy of orienting to affluent Liberal-held seats, is not such an alternative, despite the party increasing its statewide vote in this election. In the seats of Croydon and Enfield, there were promising results in the SA Socialists’ first election campaign. The breakthrough of One Nation is a warning for the rest of the country. While the particularly rotten state of the Liberals in South Australia was undoubtedly a bonus for One Nation, the result nevertheless shows a significant section of society are willing to get behind One Nation, even in a highly urban state. The left needs to get organised to confront this far-right menace. ### Anti-Muslim attack covered up by Monash University URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/anti-muslim-attack-covered-up-by-monash-university/ Last updated: 2026-03-29T03:36:56.000Z Muslim students at Monash found their men’s prayer space vandalised earlier in March. Slogans including “Fuck Islam”, “Death to Palestine”, “You will Never Win” and “USA, USA, USA” were scrawled on the walls of the Religious Centre, along with a drawing of the Israeli flag. Photos of the vandalism were posted on social media by the Monash University Islamic Society. Judging from Monash University’s numerous statements against racism, you’d think this attack would be at the top of their list to address. You’d be wrong. Instead, the university painted over the graffiti, hoping to move on as though nothing happened. The Monash University Islamic Society (MUIS) reported on social media that no communication was sent out to the Muslim students until almost a week later. Only when Monash was called out online by MUIS, Students for Palestine, and the Monash Student Association, did university authorities feel at all obliged to make a public statement. This is not the first of such attacks either. The men’s prayer space was previously trashed in October 2024, and a video of the damage posted by MUIS on Instagram. The video showed rubbish strewn all over the floor and what appears to be light fixtures ripped out. Several other anti-Palestinian, pro-genocide slogans across Monash’s Clayton campus have previously been painted over by the university, with no further action or investigation undertaken. Compare this to how Monash has thrown its institutional weight behind the right-wing campaign against supposed “antisemitism” on campuses. The university has adopted the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism and publicly supported the Royal Commission into Antisemitism announced earlier this year. When a student put up a sticker on campus depicting an Israeli flag with a cross through it, the student was dragged out of class by security and questioned. What was clearly a political statement against the actions of Israel was deemed “offensive” by the university, and potentially antisemitic. Many more pro-Palestine students, including Students for Palestine activists, have likewise been subject to disciplinary procedures because of their public opposition to the Gaza genocide. Nine students were threatened with discipline for their role in organising the Gaza Solidarity Encampment in 2024, on the basis that the protest was a threat to Jewish students’ “psychosocial safety”. No such concern has been shown about the psychosocial safety of Muslim students who are expected to remain quiet about attacks on their spaces by pro-Israel activists. Monash’s cover-up of the anti-Palestinian attack on the Monash Religious Centre shows how hypocritical its anti-Palestine smear campaign is. While Muslims and Palestinians are subjected to increasing violent racism, Monash University sweeps it under the rug, and joins the rest of the higher education sector’s battle to fight the students calling for an end to genocide. One form of racist hate is legitimate, while pro-Palestine activity is disingenuously labelled as racist hate, scrutinised and punished. The campaign against antisemitism on campus is not a response to an actual rise in bigotry, because for all the investigations the university has done, no evidence has been found of antisemitism on the part of those accused. Discipline has had to be dropped for this reason. The real objective is to stifle criticism of Israel and its crimes, because Israel is in the same Western imperial bloc as Australia. The message is clear: the mass murder of Palestinians is acceptable and attacks on Muslims should be quietly ignored. The real victims are those made uncomfortable by opposition to genocide. “Death to Palestine” isn’t just a slogan on a wall, it’s what’s been happening in real time. And Monash is aiding this, not just by persecuting Israel’s opponents, but also by contributing research and know-how to the Western war machine. So long as this complicity goes on, student activists will fight to end it. ### No right to protest at University of Technology Sydney URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/no-right-to-protest-at-university-of-technology-sydney/ Last updated: 2026-03-29T03:35:25.000Z Management at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in February announced that protests could be organised on campus only with approval from the university, and that only a select few could apply for permission. The protest approval form, which must be completed before a protest can be held, includes questions about the potential damage to the physical and psychosocial wellbeing of anyone who might oppose the action, with the implication being that permission might be denied if the protest was likely to make someone feel upset. It also requires any leaflets that may be distributed to be submitted for approval. What’s worse, the form can be filled in only by staff, student union representatives and student club presidents—a rule which denies about 50,000 students the right even to seek permission to hold a protest. Tellingly, when pro-Palestine activists sent management a letter objecting to the policy on the basis that it is anti-democratic and implicitly racist given that most student union protests are about Palestine, the university allowed the 11 March Student Strike for Palestine to take place without formal approval. Management has, nevertheless, indicated that it isn’t willing to back down on the implementation of the approval system. The idea that people fighting against the atrocities in Gaza should have to consider the feelings of those who support the genocide is absurd, as is the university’s shameless denial of democratic rights to the vast majority of students on campus. The fight will continue. ### Death, destruction, destitution—and profits URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/death-destruction-destitution-and-profits/ Last updated: 2026-04-12T03:30:24.000Z Since the invasion began on 28 February, the US and Israel have killed nearly 2,000, injured 25,000 and displaced 3.2 million people in Iran. US Central Command claims to have carried out more than 11,000 strikes, including on an increasing amount of civilian infrastructure. Already crippled by sanctions, this country of 92 million people is being decimated, its economic foundations eroded day after day. At least one war aim is now clear: to inflict misery and poverty on Iran for years to come. If you want a precedent, look at the state of Iraq 24 years after it was “liberated” by the Americans. Then there’s Lebanon, where the Israeli military has bombarded the capital, Beirut, and issued sweeping “evacuation orders” for all residents south of the Zahrani River—an area covering about 14 percent of the country. More than 1,100 have been killed, and one-fifth of the population has been displaced as Israeli soldiers move to occupy the south. The fascists in the Knesset are rubbing their hands with glee as village after village is set to be razed. Perhaps this will be south Lebanon’s *Nakba*. As with Gaza, Venezuela and Cuba, the so-called international community isn’t lifting a finger to stop these criminal rogue states from unleashing mass violence wherever and whenever they think it is in their interests. To the extent that unease is evident and minor tut-tutting is now emanating from European governments, it has nothing to do with opposition to mass murder. It’s just their sinking feeling as the war’s economic reverberations are now being felt across the world. Most obviously, there’s the energy shock resulting from the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The world’s natural gas supply has been significantly disrupted. And the International Energy Agency says that this is “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”. For now, South and South-East Asia are hardest hit. The Philippines has announced a state of emergency. In Laos and Cambodia, more than one-third of petrol stations have run out of fuel. Schools are closing in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Covid-style orders are proliferating to reduce consumption as rationing begins. The longer the war goes on, the more the shortages will spread, and the greater the economic knock-on effects will be. Indeed, contingency plans are being drawn up across the world. In Australia, profiteering at the bowser began well in advance of the major oil price spike, while supply contracts were still being filled from past purchases at lower prices. The petrol companies didn’t waste any time filling their pockets and precipitating a run on supplies. Hundreds of petrol stations have now run out of at least one fuel type as industries and individuals prepare for the worst. The ALP’s response has mainly been to denounce working-class people for topping up their jerry cans—a total gaslighting operation from a government that has supported the war of aggression that has caused the crisis. But it’s not just about energy prices. According to Greenpeace, almost half of global food production now depends on synthetic fertilisers—and one-third of them are exported from Gulf States through the Strait of Hormuz. So much for all the talk about economic “transitions” we’ve been sold by capitalist governments. The reality is that we continue not just burning fossil fuels, but eating them, too. The World Food Programme says that 45 million people could be pushed into acute hunger due to rising food and fuel costs and supply chain disruptions. This isn’t an immediate prospect, but every day the war drags on will create greater problems with the next round of harvests. And already, some are getting wealthier at the prospect of a famine: corn, rice and wheat contract prices have increased by more than 6 percent, 7 percent and 12 percent respectively. Jeff Currie, an analyst at the Carlyle Group, told the London *Telegraph*’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that, without a resolution in the next month or so, “We may need to ground planes, shut chemical plants and accept lower crop yields. Hydrocarbons are woven so deeply into the economy that pulling one thread unravels dozens of others”. This is evident, for example, in the input prices of piping and concrete, among other things, which are being pushed higher in the construction industry. Forget about the housing crisis being fixed by “increased supply” and “affordable” units while Trump’s rampage, backed by Anthony Albanese, continues. And don’t expect capitalists to reduce prices to pre-invasion levels when the dust finally settles. Like the petrol companies, they put profits first and people last. As the world’s workers face greater food insecurity, energy rationing and higher prices across the board, big oil and agribusiness companies’ share prices have jumped as expectations of bumper profits have grown. But there’s now also the prospect of potential economic crises. Central banks previously contemplating cuts to cash rates are holding or contemplating rises as inflation projections have jumped. Australia’s Reserve Bank governor, Michele Bullock, announced in mid-March that the bank is “going to have to” engineer a recession if it doesn’t like the inflation trajectory in the coming months. Again, workers will pay for Trump’s aggression and Albanese’s obsequiousness. Sovereign bond yields have already moved sharply higher over the last month in Europe, the United States, Australia, Japan, pretty much everywhere. The yield on ten-year government debt is considered the benchmark rate for corporate credit, so borrowing costs across the world economy have risen anyway, without central bank intervention. This is basically a move by big financiers to squeeze more profits for themselves at the expense of everyone else. They, too, will be prepared to engineer an economic downturn—a massive attack on workers everywhere—to reflate the value of their bond portfolios if the crisis in the Persian Gulf continues. Under capitalism, those at the top always find a way to profit from death, destruction and destitution. This time is no different. ### Pinning the Iran war on Israel sanitises US imperialism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/pinning-the-iran-war-on-israel-sanitises-us-imperialism/ Last updated: 2026-04-08T23:23:13.000Z Joe Kent’s resignation as a top US counterterrorism official over President Trump’s war on Iran has been a godsend for far-right antisemitic conspiracy theorists. MAGA figures like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes have used Kent’s exit to back their claims that Trump is a puppet, acting out the war on behalf of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and other Jewish officials. In pinning the blame on Israel for this new war, they are attempting to sanitise the blood-soaked reality of US imperialism. While Israel clearly has played a significant role in urging the US into this war, Trump is carrying it out to strengthen his own country’s hold over trade routes and oil reserves—not to serve Netanyahu. For decades, some US establishment figures have labelled Iran a rogue state and argued for military action against it. But successive administrations refused to carry that out. Former President Barack Obama sought to “contain” Iran through a pact that traded sanctions relief for agreements to wind back the country’s nuclear program. This was not out of humanitarian concern. The sanctions had a devastating effect, and Obama infamously killed more people globally in drone strikes during his first year than Republican George W. Bush did in his entire presidency. The immense energy crisis caused by Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates the stakes for the US establishment in outright war with Iran. But Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s allies, has urged war for three decades. Late Senator John McCain, like Graham, opposed the Iran nuclear deal. He argued instead for pre-emptive strikes, telling news outlet USA Today that “standing by ... is not a choice. It is an abdication”. Although internally divided on strategy, the political and military establishment has long agreed that Iran needs to be countered. It may seem odd that far-right figures like Fuentes, Carlson and Kent are so determined to criticise Israel, given that none of them supports the Palestinian national struggle. Kent is a conspiracy theorist who [employed](https://archive.md/FNCAQ?ref=redflag.org.au) members of the fascist gang Proud Boys in a 2022 electoral campaign. Carlson is an attack dog of the far right who has long argued that Muslim migrants are swamping white America, and that foreigners make the US dirtier. For them, obsessive opposition to Israel comes from a fanatical blood and soil nationalism. It is tied to antisemitism. When Carlson hosted the Hitler-loving, prominent white supremacist and antisemite Fuentes on his show recently, Fuentes said that neoconservatism “arises from Jewish leftists”. Carlson replied, “Yeah, that’s a lot of it for sure”. Kent’s resignation statement presented Trump as having been manipulated by “high-ranking Israeli officials”. His statement also blamed Israel for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the broader war on terror. But the US has never needed to be bullied or cajoled into carrying out mass slaughter. It cemented its place as the world’s leading superpower by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. The US emerged from the war as the architect of a new “rules-based world order” dominated by US-led economic institutions. From the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency helped to install murderous dictatorships across Latin America to ensure US domination of its own region. Since then, domination of the Middle East has been a core plank of US foreign policy. In 1953, the CIA helped to overthrow Iran’s nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, replacing him with pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The US contributed to the coup not to help Israel, but to ensure its own access to oil and trade routes. It was years later, from 1967 onwards, that the US established a serious strategic and military relationship with Israel. This did not happen because of the whims of Jewish officials, but because Israel demonstrated that it could be a key guarantor of US interests in the region, in particular through the 1967 Six-Day War. In 1986, Joe Biden told the Senate: “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region”. He did so while warning against arming Saudi Arabia, presenting Israel as a more loyal part of the Western bloc and saying that “naked self-interest of the US” should drive foreign policy. None of this is to say that Israel itself is a puppet of the US. After carrying out genocide in Gaza, Netanyahu and his cabinet have forced 1 million people from their homes in southern Lebanon and destroyed the crossings linking it to the rest of the country, beginning the annexation of the land up to the Zahrani River. Israel and the US act as extensions of each other’s power in the region while pursuing their own interests, and while this can at times mean butting heads, it broadly serves both. Those who support Palestine should reject the Israel-centric view of the world that far-right pundits are pushing. It leads in a backwards direction, feeding the outright antisemitism of the right. And it blunts criticism of US imperialism, which is one of the key purveyors of oppression and destruction across the world. ### SA Socialists make a splash in state election URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/sa-socialists-make-a-splash-in-state-election/ Last updated: 2026-03-27T03:53:36.000Z SA Socialists achieved a solid result in its first election since the party formed in May 2025 as part of the nationwide expansion of the Victorian Socialists project. The party ran two candidates—Ahmed Azhar in the seat of Croydon and Leila Clendon in Enfield, both in Adelaide’s northern suburbs. Due to electoral regulations requiring a party to be registered a minimum of eight months before an election for it to run candidates in its name, both candidates were listed on the ballot as independents. On all campaign materials, however, they were advertised as endorsed by SA Socialists. At the time of writing, the first preference vote stands at 6.5 percent for Azhar in Croydon and 5.6 percent for Clendon in Enfield. This included some stand-out booth results, including over 13 percent at Enfield Primary School and Blair Athol North in Enfield, and 12.7 percent at Brompton and 10.3 percent at Kilburn in Croydon. These results were built on a grassroots campaign that doorknocked 7,000 households, letterboxed all 42,000 homes across the two electorates and mobilised more than 150 volunteers. Both seats are Labor Party strongholds. The current two-party preferred count in Croydon is 80 percent to Labor Premier Peter Malinauskus and 20 percent to One Nation, while in Enfield it’s 71.5 percent to Labor and 28.5 to One Nation. These kinds of comfortable margins mean the seats are taken for granted by the party, which was particularly the case in this election, when Labor's focus was on pushing the Liberals out of their remaining urban seats in wealthier eastern and beachside suburbs. Croydon and Enfield are diverse, working-class districts shaped by successive waves of migration, with thriving Hazara (a Persian-speaking ethnic group primarily from Afghanistan), South Asian, Vietnamese and southern European communities alongside public and community housing tenants, and newer apartment developments drawing in younger workers and professionals. SA Socialists found a genuine audience for class politics across both electorates and among a wide range of demographics including young share houses, older lefties who haven’t had a political home in decades and people who recognised our candidates from protests and social movements. On cost of living, the argument that cut through was straightforward: whenever there's a crisis, it's always the poor and the working class who pay the cost, and SA Socialists think the super-rich should pay instead. In Kilburn and Blair Athol North—centres of the Hazara community—anger at Labor’s record on Palestine and its support for Trump’s war in Iran also won people to voting socialist. The party’s ability to make its case in these and some other areas was helped by the relative absence of volunteers for the Greens, due to that party’s decision to concentrate resources in the wealthier and historically Liberal seat of Heysen, which it believed it was in with an (outside) chance of winning. Concerns about the rise of One Nation also helped make the case for a genuine left alternative that’s prepared to make a clear stand against racism. In Brompton, where the Greens had previously polled over 20 percent and where SA Socialists volunteers were directly competing with them for votes, the argument that went furthest was strategic and structural: that capitalism is the root cause of the problems people face, and what’s needed is an openly socialist and unequivocally anti-capitalist political movement. Something that appealed to many left-wing voters was the fact that SA Socialists isn’t just an electoral project but is committed to rebuilding working-class power through the unions and social movements too. The votes are still being counted, but SA Socialists’ results in this election demonstrate the viability of the Socialist Party project outside Victoria and lay a solid foundation for the party’s future in South Australia. ### The US empire’s crucial weakness URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-us-empires-crucial-weakness/ Last updated: 2026-04-08T23:23:05.000Z Since the days of the British Empire, one enduring misconception is that the wealth of imperialist nations—gained by plundering poorer countries—also lifts the living standards of imperialist rulers’ own populations. Following this logic, the working class in an oppressor nation shares a material interest in their own ruling class’s global domination. The evidence for this conclusion can seem obvious: imperialist nations are also the wealthiest nations in the world. And since the US is the world’s largest imperial power, it is easy to conclude that the US working class gains from its imperial projects. This conclusion seemed to be recently reinforced by the significant number of working-class voters—including not only whites, but also Latino voters—who propelled Donald Trump back into office in 2024. But [Trump’s re-election](https://internationalsocialism.net/its-the-economy-stupid/?ref=redflag.org.au) was more of a rejection of the incumbent, Joe Biden, than a positive embrace of Trump—reflecting the trappings of the two-party system, when the only “choice” on offer is one of the two ruling-class parties, the Republicans or the Democrats. On election day, discontent with one party can be expressed only by voting for the other party’s candidate—or just staying home. ### **The class divide** Imperialist nations have always been divided into classes, pitting workers and their capitalist rulers into an antagonistic relationship: one class can gain only at the other’s expense. This is the objective reality, which doesn’t change over time. For example, whenever workers unionise and gain a union contract, employers usually face at least a dent in their profits, while workers are in a stronger position to gain higher wages and workplace rights. Moreover, wars abroad are normally accompanied by a “war at home” that cracks down on free speech and anti-war movements, while workers pay the taxes that fund the war and become the soldiers sent off to fight and die for imperial interests. The US has long been the wealthiest society in the world, but it also has the highest rate of inequality among developed economies. And the rate of inequality has been growing at a rapid pace in recent decades. The US working class does not now and has never shared in its rulers’ wealth. At the same time, subjective factors, such as voting behaviour and the level of class struggle, do change according to changing circumstances and the resulting shifts in class consciousness. This is why, just one year after Trump’s re-election, many of his working-class voters have turned against him: he has proven to be a class enemy despite his campaign rhetoric claiming empathy for workers. And their disgust with both parties means large numbers are simply [disengaging from the electoral process](https://jacobin.com/2026/03/trump-coalition-voters-working-class?ref=redflag.org.au). As political analyst G. Elliott Morris [commented recently](https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/workers-trump-economy-2026-03-17?ref=redflag.org.au): > “\[T\]he groups with the biggest swings toward Trump in 2024—here, low-income whites and low-income Hispanics—are precisely the voters that have swung most against him since taking office. It is not a coincidence that they are also the groups most sensitive to price increases—e.g., from things like labor shortages, tariffs, and wars involving major oil producers ... The data ... shows that low-income whites have swung 26 points against Trump. Low-income Hispanics have swung 34.” In addition, the class struggle—which is the only effective negotiating tool workers have against their employers—has been abysmally low in the US for more than five decades now. Although there are some positive signs of resurgence in the last few years, it is probably difficult for most people not already familiar with US history to imagine that the US working class have, at times, led the world in combativity against their employers. One such time was the 1930s—which won the right of workers to organise into unions against the viciously anti-union US corporate class. ### **1930s strike wave and New Deal era** The Great Depression was the most significant period of class struggle that has ever taken place in the United States. The sheer intensity of the struggle during that time led ever broader sections of the working class to become radicalised and to begin to generalise politically. The legendary Flint sit-down strike, which began at the end of 1936, turned the tide most dramatically. The attention of the entire nation was riveted on the Flint auto workers, as they took matters into their own hands and stood up to the bosses, the CIO leaders, the National Guard and even President Roosevelt—and won. When Michigan’s Governor Frank Murphy—a Roosevelt Democrat—tried to send in the National Guard to end the occupation, the workers met and voted to hold the plants at all costs. They responded defiantly to Murphy: > “We have decided to stay in the plant. We have no illusions about the sacrifices which this decision will entail. We fully expect that if a violent effort is made to oust us many of us will be killed, and we take this means of making it known to our wives, to our children, to the people of the state of Michigan and the country that if this result follows from an attempt to eject us, you \[Governor Murphy\] are the one who must be held responsible for our deaths.” The governor abruptly changed his mind about sending in the National Guard. The Flint victory had an impact nationally, raising working-class confidence. By the end of 1937, nearly half a million workers all over the US had taken part in a sit-down strike. The number of all strikes more than doubled between 1936 and 1937, from 2,172 to 4,740, involving nearly 2 million workers overall. ### **‘Bought off’? Or extremely exploited?** The Great Depression struggles shifted the balance of class forces in the US for decades that followed. The US had emerged from World War Two as the world’s largest superpower, with the Soviet Union in second place. During the postwar boom, corporate employers were willing to allow industrial workers’ wages to rise significantly because the postwar era coincided with the largest and most sustained economic boom of US capitalism in history. At that time, granting higher wages was preferable to losing profits during long-term strikes. American workers won wages and living standards that were unmatched anywhere else in the world. It would be a mistake, however, to view the 1950s as an era of labour peace. First, the number of strikes across all US industries in the 1950s was only slightly lower than during the strike wave that marked the second half of the 1940s. Secondly, the corporate class enlisted Democrats and Republicans in a ruthless decade long anti-communist witch hunt, beginning in the late 1940s and led by the paranoid Senator Joe McCarthy. Thousands of people were investigated, fined thousands of dollars, fired from their jobs, sent to prison or deported—for such “crimes” as once having been a member of the Communist Party, signing a petition against fascism or having been friendly with people who had done so. In the process, this witch-hunt drove thousands of working-class militants out of their jobs. The CIO itself expelled eleven Communist-affiliated unions by 1950, amounting to 20 percent of its membership. The New Left that emerged from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the anti-Vietnam War movement—heavily influenced by Maoism and Stalinism—considered the highly paid US working class as “bought off”, a part of the problem instead of part of the solution to fighting US imperialism in Vietnam. But this was an enormous mistake. Unionised workers in particular experienced dramatic improvements in their living standards, but they paid the price of a drastic rise in the rate of exploitation. Output per worker more than doubled between 1947 and 1972\. And while the number of manufacturing workers grew by 28.8 percent between 1950 and 1968, manufacturing output grew by 91 percent. So, the real beneficiaries sat on the boards of directors of the biggest US corporations. ### **Upsurge in class and social struggle in late 1960s and early ’70s** The New Left’s dismissal of US workers proved politically disastrous for the future of the radical movement emerging from SDS. Economic stagnation had set in by the late 1960s. This stagnation, combined with growing frustration at factory speed-ups coincided with the height of the anti-war and Black Power movements as well as the wave of Black rebellions that swept every major city at that time. The result was a massive shift in working-class sentiment against the Vietnam War, and a series of working-class revolts that began as the 1960s ended. These revolts were led initially by workers, some of them Vietnam veterans, who were influenced by the movements and by the atmosphere of radicalisation of the period. The number of wildcat strikes across all industries doubled, from 1,000 to 2,000 between 1960 and 1969\. The year 1970 witnessed a veritable strike wave. General Motors experienced a 67-day strike. Some 40,000 coal miners struck in three states to demand benefits for disabled miners. New York postal workers led postal workers on strike across the country, closing down the postal service in 200 cities. When the government brought in the National Guard, they expressed sympathy with the strikers. After two weeks, postal workers, who are legally prohibited from striking, won a 14 percent wage increase. This rank-and-file upsurge showed the potential for even the highest paid US workers to struggle as part of their class against the employers. ### **The road downhill and consequences for workers** But if the 1930s and 1960s showed how massive class struggle can advance workers’ interests, the downward spiral in strikes and other class struggles since the 1980s has shown how, without struggle, workers lose their ability to negotiate for better wages and working conditions. A lot has changed in US society since 1947, when labour’s share of GDP stood at 70 percent. At that time, more than one-third of workers belonged to unions, while taxes on the highest incomes topped 70 percent. But by 1975, the US ruling class had reached a turning point. Having just been defeated in Vietnam and humiliated by a massive anti-war movement at home, it also faced lower profits. The postwar boom was over. By the time Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the economy entered a new recession, providing the excuse for the corporate class to launch a one-sided class war aimed at dramatically lowering working-class living standards. The only way to accomplish this aim was to destroy working-class organisations—i.e. unions. Business interests set aside their differences and united as a class in order to make Reaganism work for them. The Business Roundtable, which brought together both Republicans and Democrats, including most of the top officers of the biggest US companies, was an organisation dedicated to this process. Formed in the 1970s, the Business Roundtable played an activist role in overseeing the upward transfer of wealth known as “Reaganism”. ### **PATCO turning point** Within a few months of taking office, Reagan initiated a showdown with the labour movement. When members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)—one of the few unions that had endorsed Reagan for president—went on strike in August 1981, Reagan fired them all and permanently replaced them with scabs. The PATCO strike represented a turning point from which the labour movement has yet to recover—giving a green light to big business to engage in union busting on a massive scale. But union leaders had no intention of fighting back. Years of conservatism had made them believe they could negotiate a deal with employers and rely on their “friends of labour” in Congress. They feared the prospect of rank-and-file activism more than they feared the employers’ attacks. In the meantime, labour’s “friends” from both parties in Congress rewrote tax codes and labour laws to always favour corporations, to ensure that the balance of class forces remained decisively in favour of the ruling class. Workers tried to fight back, but the decks were stacked against them, and one strike after another in the 1980s and 1990s ended in bitter defeat. Workers who went on strike were immediately fired and then replaced with non-union labor. So, the class struggle subsided not because workers were content, but because the labour movement had been crushed. As journalist Harold Myerson [observed recently](https://prospect.org/2025/12/03/79-trillion-heist-worker-pay/?ref=redflag.org.au): > “During the years of postwar prosperity, strikes were a routine part of the economic landscape, and a major reason why worker pay constituted a decent share of the national income. After PATCO, they nearly disappeared. The number of major strikes plummeted from 286 a year in the 1960s and 1970s, to 83 a year in the 1980s, to 35 a year in the 1990s, to 20 a year in the 2000s. In recent years, the strike has enjoyed a modest revival—autoworkers and teaching assistants have won higher wages by walking picket lines—but unions have shrunk to the point that the fruits of such victories have limited ripple effects ... These are among the factors that explain why the rate of American worker unionization has declined from one-third in the middle of the 20th century to just under 10 percent today, and a bare 6 percent in the private sector.” Trump’s first year back in office has only made things much, much worse. His so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” that sailed through Congress last year was the single biggest federal transfer of wealth in US history. By January of this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that US workers’ share of the national income is now lower than at any point since the government began keeping track of it in 1947\. Workers’ wages and benefits today amount to only 53.8 percent, while the rest went to corporate profits and investment income. ### **The Minneapolis general strike points the way forward** As described above, Trump’s 2024 voting base has crumbled during his first year back in office. As Myerson also [pointed out](https://prospect.org/2025/12/03/79-trillion-heist-worker-pay/?ref=redflag.org.au): > “Americans increasingly understand that our current economy isn’t meeting their interests and that it’s rigged to favor the wealthy. A sizable public will welcome candidates who \[favor progressive\] economic reforms such as those suggested here, just as there were sizable publics that backed the reforms laid out by Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani in their campaigns. Indeed, a [national YouGov poll](https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/New%5FYork%5FPolitics%5Fpoll%5Fresults%5FbIqkj03.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) taken one week after Mamdani’s election showed that every one of his platform planks commanded majority support from the American people, including 69 percent support for raising taxes on corporations and millionaires, 66 percent support for free child care for children from six months to five years, and even 57 percent support for government-owned grocery stores.” But as history shows, only a rise in class struggle can make these reforms a reality. During Trump’s first year back in office, his presidency morphed into an authoritarian regime at breakneck speed. But thanks to the courage of the Minneapolis working class, there is a genuine sliver of hope that resistance to Trump’s tyranny can succeed at least in slowing him in his tracks. As is often the case, struggles can appear to come out of the blue. Minneapolis is an example—after Trump sent thousands of heavily armed stormtroopers to round up, brutalise, detain and deport migrants in December, there was an unprecedented mobilisation of the population in opposition, culminating in a general strike on 23 January. But [the strike](https://internationalsocialism.net/uprising-in-minneapolis/?ref=redflag.org.au) didn’t actually come out of the blue. Over a period of months, and in some cases years, community and immigrants’ rights groups had already trained over 30,000 local people to use their smartphones to video the brutality of federal agents—which are then used as evidence to counter the lies of the DHS propaganda machine. Neighbourhood by neighbourhood, working-class people of all races had been organising rapid response networks to protect each other, which had given rise to an extraordinary sense of solidarity. The murder of Renée Nicole Good on 7 January by ICE agents further fuelled people’s anger, with the 23 January strike adopting the slogan “ICE Out for Good!” On the day of the strike, between 75,000 and 100,000 Minnesotans marched through Minneapolis. More than 700 local businesses shut down for the day, while the strike drew the support of all major labour unions, including the Minnesota AFL-CIO. While the massive numbers of protesters demonstrated the power of numbers in the streets, Minnesotans were also prepared to physically defend themselves from ICE—which thousands have already been doing since DHS goons began occupying their city in December. The day after the general strike, ICE agents threw Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, to the ground and shot him nine times in the back while he lay face down. One the one hand, it is true that the fact that Good and Pretti were the first white US citizens killed by ICE generated national outrage. On the other hand, their deaths showed how white Minneapolis activists were risking their own lives in solidarity with their migrant neighbours. The sense of solidarity in Minneapolis has spread across the country like wildfire since the deaths of Good and Pretti—with protests and student walkouts that number from the dozens to the thousands in cities, large and small. The execution of Good and Pretti demonstrates that the targets of Trump’s mass deportation campaign extend beyond immigrants but also to expand his authoritarian rule over the entire US population—including its citizens. Natasha Lennard called the general strike “the most extraordinary day of mass resistance to Trumpian fascism to date” in the[ Intercept](https://theintercept.com/2026/01/24/strike-minnesota-ice-renee-good-alex-pretti/?ref=redflag.org.au). She added, “It is only a future with mass social strikes, or general strikes, involving large-scale disruption on the immediate horizon that has the chance of stopping Trump’s forces”. Knowing the history of working-class struggle in the US, and elsewhere, is necessary for all those wanting to revive it today. ### From hope to dismay: what happened to Bangladesh’s Gen Z revolution? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/from-hope-to-dismay-what-happened-to-bangladeshs-gen-z-revolution/ Last updated: 2026-04-08T23:22:54.000Z “Gen Z made everything possible. They are the future of Bangladesh and they can create a better future”. This was the jubilant sentiment expressed by a Bangladeshi student to a CNN reporter in August 2024, at the height of the historic Gen Z revolution that ended the 15-year reign of Sheikh Hasina. Some 20 months later, this optimism has well and truly faded, culminating in February’s election, which returned the centre-right neoliberal Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) to power, with the far-right Jamaat-e-Islami party receiving a historic 31 percent of the vote. How did we get here? What destroyed the promise of the Bangladeshi Gen-Z Revolution? Hasina didn’t come to power for the second time in 2009 as a dictator. She was elected as a representative of the Awami League (AL) but soon began to consolidate power. There was no single, decisive blow against democracy, but rather various legal and political manoeuvres that solidified her rule. An important one was constitutional reforms in 2011, which ended the previous practice of having neutral caretaker governments over election periods, opening the way for the Awami League to rig the following three elections. Her regime oversaw many human rights abuses, including the massacre of Shapla Square protesters in 2013, and the torture of political prisoners in the horrific Aynaghar centres (House of Mirrors). Under Hasina, the Bangladeshi economy became one of the fastest growing in the world. The benefits of this growth were uneven, primarily going to the “Kotipoti”, a small group making up less than 1 percent of the population who controlled nearly half of all the money in Bangladeshi banks, and much more wealth overseas. These Bangladeshi capitalists were benefiting greatly from the neoliberal reforms, and especially from the cheap Bangladeshi labour that underpinned the profits of some of the richest corporations on the planet, including Nike, H&M and Primark (as well as Kmart, Big W and Best&Less). On the other side of this class divide, the Bangladeshi working class was growing to be one of the largest in the world. The 4-million-strong garment industry workforce, 55 percent of which is women, is of particular significance. Over the last decade, ready-made garments accounted for roughly 80 percent of Bangladeshi exports. Workers in the industry face horrendous conditions, exemplified by the 1,134 workers crushed to death in the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse, caused by employer negligence. Garment workers mobilised, most recently in 2023 with tens of thousands striking for increased wages and better work conditions, shutting down hundreds of factories. However, the regime responded with brutal attacks, killing multiple unionists and arresting thousands. Aside from the garment industry, the working class in Bangladesh is relatively weak, with around 85 percent of workers employed in the informal sector. Even in formal sectors, wages can be as low as $60 per month, and more than a million children are forced by poverty into hazardous work. Poor working conditions have led millions of desperate Bangladeshis to emigrate in search of better-paid work, including to the Gulf states, where roughly 10 million Bangladeshi workers live and labour in horrendous conditions. Since the Rana Plaza collapse, unions have been reappearing in various industries with the backing of international NGOs. These unions are overwhelmingly top-down, employer-controlled organisations, which exist mainly to control worker activity. Unionism in Bangladesh has a rich history, with leftist unions playing huge roles in struggles in the twentieth century, but left-wing unions are now denied registration from the state. Union coverage is very low, with only 5 percent coverage in the garment industry. In July 2024, protests were sparked by the government’s unpopular job quota. The quota provided a specific number of government jobs to family members of those who fought in the 1971 revolution. But while almost every worker or peasant family was involved in fighting in the war of independence, only those with ties to the Awami regime were recognised and received these special privileges. In a climate where jobs were already harder and harder to find for most young people, students soon took to the streets to protest this nepotism. These protests were violently attacked by police. More than 1,400 protesters were killed over the course of the protests. The student actions against government policy quickly grew into mass daily protests calling for the end of the dictatorship, culminating in the resignation and flight of Hasina from Dhaka on 5 August. The protests were led by university students, workers and sections of the middle class also joining the demonstrations. Tens of thousands marched onto the streets despite the violent repression from the police. On the night of 4 August, Hasina had ordered her generals to put an end to the protest movement by implementing a lockdown. However, the generals refused, because by this point it had become clear to them that their soldiers would not shoot the protesters. The generals were no allies of the revolution—they would soon help Hasina flee Bangladesh rather than face justice for her crimes. But they could recognise the reality of their situation: the mass struggle had overwhelming public support, which extended even to the military rank and file. Hasina had no choice but to resign. The post-revolution mood in Bangladesh was absolutely jubilant. The presidential palace was stormed and taken over by protesters. Celebrations were held across the nation, and the emerging student leaders hailed as heroes. In the immediate aftermath, police were forced off the streets, having lost all credibility for siding with Hasina, and in their stead ordinary people took it upon themselves to conduct patrols and protect the temples of the Hindu minority. Over the next few weeks, hated figures from the previous regime were attacked and their homes burnt. Capitalists and Awami League members took their wealth and fled, mostly to Western countries. Bangladesh had seemingly entered a new era, one in which the people controlled their destiny, and the days of corruption and exploitation were over. However, capitalism is a very malleable system. Without a real vision for what a new Bangladesh could look like, the student leaders, who had enormous authority after the revolution, sat down with the generals and agreed to form an interim government with the founder of Grameen Bank, Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Yunus. Yunus was an opponent of the Hasina regime, was seen as fairly popular amongst Bangladeshis and had ties with international figures such as Hillary Clinton. Yunus set up a cabinet of technocrats and a few of the student leaders, such as Nahid Islam. Yunus coopted the chants of the revolution and spoke about a new era for Bangladesh brought forth through the blood of revolutionary heroes—such was the atmosphere that an 84-year-old bourgeois banker could speak in such terms! But Yunus had no interest in furthering the revolution. With the cover of the heroic student leaders, many of whom joined the new government, the revolution was reduced to a push for reform. The hundreds of students who had given their lives fighting the regime were recast as fighting for the opportunity to tweak the edges of the constitution, as Yunus endeavoured to return Bangladesh to business as usual. One of his first actions was to bring the military back onto the streets. Protesters were openly rallying against any ideas of a military junta taking over. Having forced the police and military off the streets, the protesters wanted to keep it that way. With the respectable Yunus in charge, the army was called in to rein in the “anarchy”. It would not take long for the army to use its newly legitimised power against the working class. In September 2024, textile workers once again began to take action. Facing large rounds of lay-offs following the post-revolution capital flight, workers shut down 83 garment factories in a strike wave. The liberal reformist government responded by using the army to break the strikes. In the middle of all of this were the student protest leaders. In the aftermath of the revolution, these young revolutionaries were national heroes. Their rapid transformation into typical establishment politicians, and their support for Yunus, disappointed and disoriented many of their followers. Almost a year after the revolution, they formed a party, the National Citizen Party (NCP). NCP stumbled straight out of the gate, describing itself as a centrist party, and having the underwhelming aim of creating a Second Bangladeshi Republic, this time with checks and balances. It also promised to fight corruption and fascism. However, there were immediately stories of NCP politicians being corrupt, and they soon formed a political alliance with the far-right Jamaat-e-Islami party. The only student leader who had any credibility was the Islamic populist Osman Hadi. Hadi was a Bangladeshi nationalist, and called for the Awami League to be banned. He clashed with the NCP and interim government, accusing them of betraying the revolution. Hadi was shot and killed in December 2025, leading to an explosion of mass anger. Unlike the revolution a year before, there was no clarity or purpose to the anger. The nationwide riots that ensued targeted anything related to India or the establishment parties such as the Awami League or BNP. Hindus were attacked, including the lynching of Hindu man Dipu Chandra Das. By that point, it had become evident that the interim government had overstayed its welcome and could no longer control the Bangladeshi state. Elections were called for February 2026, with the main contenders being BNP and Jamaat. Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) originated as the pro-Pakistan militia that hunted and attacked independence activists prior to Bangladeshi independence. During previous periods in coalition governments, they used their position to persecute the Ahmadiyya minority. In the lead-up to the election, Jamaat moderated its image, portraying itself as the anti-establishment party of change and reform, and downplaying its traitorous history. Jamaat also spoke about women’s rights and empowerment, while refusing to run a single woman in any of their seats. Meanwhile, the BNP positioned itself as the credible party of government. The son of former President Ziaur Rahman, Tarique Rahman, had been in exile in London over the last two decades, but was now back as the head of the BNP. Described as a gangster politician, Tarique represents the latest addition to the Zia dynasty, which had pro-US backers in the Bangladeshi ruling class. The BNP positioned itself as anti-corruption and offering a return to stability. With many Bangladeshis fearing a Jamaat victory, BNP won the election with 209 out of 297 seats. Jamaat, with 31 percent of the vote, took 68 seats, while the NCP won just six. Alongside the election, there was also a constitutional referendum about government reform, which passed with 68 percent of the vote, showing that there was still appetite for change. The BNP government will not deliver that change. The Bangladeshi ruling class, previously served by Hasina, have flocked behind Tarique Rahman’s new government. Bangladeshi workers will continue to be brutally exploited by foreign capitalists. Poverty and repression will be rampant in this new regime. There is a sentiment amongst many in Bangladesh that this was inevitable: politics is nothing but a cycle of betrayal and corruption, and nothing could have prevented it. The reality is that without an alternative source of power, this pattern will continue to repeat—people will rise up, but then power will fall back to the established bourgeois institutions of the state, the police, the military and the parliament. The only alternative source of power capable of forging an new type of society is the organised working class. Only workers can form democratic organisations that can take control over not just the streets, but the enormous productive resources that we all rely on but the capitalists control. The future struggles in Bangladesh must take lessons from 2024: the existing institutions and political forces cannot be used to bring liberation, but are a barrier to it. And struggle will return. As one Dhaka University student put it after the revolution, “We’ve ousted this regime and will do so again if the new leaders fail to meet our expectations”. ### Victorian teachers’ fight must continue URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-teachers-fight-must-continue/ Last updated: 2026-03-25T01:30:19.000Z Melbourne became a sea of red yesterday, as over 40,000 Victorian teachers, school staff and their supporters took to the streets to demand a 35 percent pay rise, meaningful workload reductions and proper funding for public education. Trams and trains became makeshift meeting spots for teachers and school staff travelling into the city from all directions, all donning the Australian Education Union’s conspicuous red t-shirt. In a small gesture of solidarity, one driver reportedly redubbed the tram he was driving the “education union tram”. Meanwhile, at the State Library of Victoria, an announcement went out mid-morning warning of “extreme congestion” in the city: the special kind of congestion caused not by traffic or road incidents, but thousands of striking workers disrupting business-as-usual to demand the schools they and their students deserve. Of the many homemade placards scattered throughout the sea of red, many were simple and stern: “fund our schools, give us 35%”. In a show of the humour that school staff bring onto the sinking ship of public education, other signs hit a different note. Failed report cards for Jacinta Allan and “More pay = more slay” were highlights. This was our first strike in thirteen years—and it couldn’t have been more urgent. We copped an 11 percent real [pay cut](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1va-Dio-nGmi0WNWVtSGJ8Myo46u096VtolvXPMh-gsM/edit?ref%3Dredflag.org.au%26tab%3Dt.0&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1774401709959923&usg=AOvVaw1d%5F5Q9XMMDHPDDUnZk1gXG) over the life of our last agreement, more than a month’s pay per year. Our workloads are unbearable, with teachers on average working [twelve and a half hours](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.monash.edu/%5F%5Fdata/assets/pdf%5Ffile/0009/3757599/What-the-profession-needs-now-AEU-Paper-1.pdf?ref%3Dredflag.org.au&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1774401709960191&usg=AOvVaw0xtNJtoG22ba1m5FBEt3jz) of unpaid overtime each week, and education support staff still not receiving paid lunch breaks. It is no wonder that only three in ten teachers want to [stay](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.monash.edu/%5F%5Fdata/assets/pdf%5Ffile/0009/3757599/What-the-profession-needs-now-AEU-Paper-1.pdf?ref%3Dredflag.org.au&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1774401709960413&usg=AOvVaw12FKaT7%5FTZ1DdNtUKq2ALf) in education until retirement. Many schools are already struggling to find enough staff. John, a high school teacher in Melbourne’s outer west, is at the coal face of this crisis. “We’re already short of 35 to 40 teachers, and we have at least three senior classes without a teacher, so those students are already so far behind”, he told *Red Flag.* “We also have 500 new Year 7 students, and many of them don’t have teachers.” This results in a crushing workload. “Teachers are running out of their own classes to chase up students without a teacher”. he explained. Emmy, a student-teacher at the University of Melbourne, has already seen how the unbearable expectations imposed on teachers drive people away from the job. “Half of our teaching cohort has already dropped out of the degree”, she told *Red Flag.* “We go on placement and see what the conditions are like. We see the insane workload for the lowest pay in the country.” This is the reality of the so-called education state, as many placards took sarcastic shots at. Burnout, underpaid and overworked teachers and school staff are expected to bear the burden of a public education system wilfully left to rot. Thousands of school staff yesterday refused this status quo. The Victorian Labor government, however, is intent on making the situation worse for Victorian school staff and our students. It has already [denied](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-school-staff-to-strike-for-the-first-time-in-thirteen-years/&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1774401709961986&usg=AOvVaw2XAyw4G9c5ZWUlgXfejpsH) public schools an additional $2.4 billion in funding through 2031\. And just last week, it tried to push for an agreement that would increase our workloads by abolishing caps on maximum teaching hours. Adding insult to injury, Premier Jacinta Allan issued a special plea to teachers at the eleventh hour, asking us to reconsider the “inconvenience for families” caused by our strike—as if a day of complete or partial “inconvenient” school closures compares to the societal decay resulting from young people being unable to access public education because no one wants to work in it or are being driven out by miserable salaries and insurmountable workloads. John’s response to this plea is simple. “It was insulting, frankly”, he said. “The Labor Party is just wildly disconnected from education staff and schools.” For Liz Walsh, a high school teacher in Melbourne’s west and a member of [Socialists in Schools](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://linktr.ee/socialistsinschoolsvic?utm%5Fsource%3Dig%26utm%5Fmedium%3Dsocial%26utm%5Fcontent%3Dlink%5Fin%5Fbio%26fbclid%3DPAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMjU2MjgxMDQwNTU4AAGnj-9H8%5FH6xKhX2uJMtqHPg7hl370pMyIez4gB3aw1cQ7gZcuOh1r0fYa-F18%5Faem%5FHP1i7%5Fmx-uqquVCQl%5FG0kA&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1774401709963119&usg=AOvVaw0PAm9CEgHa6TPZyI56TYHB), the Labor government just has other priorities. “They’ve got millions for war, private schools and prisons—but not public schools”, she told *Red Flag.* Yesterday’s strike was an important step towards putting the priorities of ordinary people—like public education and dignity at work for all—at the forefront of society and building the public schools that teachers, school staff and students deserve. This fight must continue. We need more strikes to show our collective power. The union’s leaders, however, are dampening the industrial campaign rather than escalating it. A motion published last Friday [by the AEU Victorian state council](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.aeuvic.asn.au/resolution-further-escalate-action-vgsa-2026-campaign?utm%5Fsource%3DAEU%2BFinancial%2BMembers%2Bemail%2Blist%26utm%5Fcampaign%3Db3a5231a5d-EMAIL%5FCAMPAIGN%5F2026%5F02%5F11%5F11%5F49%5FCOPY%5F01%26utm%5Fmedium%3Demail%26utm%5Fterm%3D0%5F-4a4875e314-55971647&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1774401709964039&usg=AOvVaw0V-xCfpu00BUx44YrCPQoh) states that further industrial action next term will be limited to a few bans and a patchwork of half-day stopworks in specific regions. No full-day strikes or statewide strikes are planned. This will reduce the industrial and political impact that was so clear and inspiring from yesterday’s full-day, statewide strike. To win our demands for a 35 percent pay increase for all school staff and crucial improvements to our working conditions, we can’t back down now. --- *Socialists in Schools is calling on the Australian Education Union leaders to call a 48-hour statewide stopwork in early term 2, and a mass meeting for all union members to discuss how to move the industrial campaign forward.* [*Sign the open letter*](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScuiSDV9OvpU5F6i6EgFtzZ219RosgZEipIO45PmgnQc0VQ5g/viewform&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1774401709964842&usg=AOvVaw2eEmYn%5FwIgguNx4zwcDj9v) *to show your support for these demands.* ### What’s at stake in the UWU elections? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/whats-at-stake-in-the-uwu-elections/ Last updated: 2026-03-23T11:00:46.000Z Around 500 people packed Coburg Town Hall in early February to celebrate the public launch of Members First, a reform ticket running for leadership of the United Workers Union (UWU). The crowd was impressive, and there was clearly a buzz in the air as I squeezed past a mix of union organisers, blue-collar workers and activists from the left. A decade ago, I was a National Union of Workers (NUW) delegate at the Polar Fresh (now Coles) distribution centre in Truganina. We launched a [momentous four-day strike](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-5404/) of nearly 700 workers in 2016, which [won improvements](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-5933/) in wages and conditions that eventually flowed on to other warehouses as far away as Queensland. Although I’ve since moved on, several of the delegates who helped lead the strike with me still work there. I found their table, and we greeted each other with big smiles and hugs. We still share an unshakable camaraderie. After pleasantries, we talked shop. The challenges workers face at the Coles Truganina DC would be all too familiar to workers across the industry. Managers use harassment and the threat of discipline to keep up pressure on workers to increase productivity. The wage rises and permanent jobs we won in 2016 have been steadily eroded by inflation and casualisation in the years since. Our attention was brought to the front stage for the official proceedings. The speakers from the podium struck an energetic and militant tone. Members First headliners Tim Kennedy, Caterina Cinanni and Katie McGinn spoke about the need for a fighting, member-led union. We also heard from workers with some real industrial cred, including a couple of truly heroic farm workers, one of the troublemakers from [Padre’s Coffee](https://www.weareunion.org.au/from%5Fpadre%5Fto%5Fcompadre%5Fcoffee%5Froastery%5Fworkers%5Funite%5F2025?ref=redflag.org.au) in Brunswick and a veteran of the impressive [dairy strike in 2023](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-27/dairy-strike-over-united-workers-union-cheese-milk-farmers-/103029544?ref=redflag.org.au), when 1,400 workers struck for two days across thirteen sites in Victoria. This contest for the leadership of the UWU has been building since the formation of the union in 2019 from the amalgamation of the NUW, which largely covered warehouses, food manufacturing and farms, and United Voice (UV), with coverage including hospitality, security guards, child care and aged care. Officials and organisers from the two unions have coalesced into factions vying for control of the UWU. In recent years, former UV officials have steadily driven former NUW officials out of organiser roles and cemented their control over the central union apparatus. Members First is the electoral project of the former leadership of the NUW, who aim to win leadership of the UWU at the union’s national convention later this year. The outcome of this election will have real consequences for the union’s members. Unlike UV, or much of the rest of the union movement for that matter, the NUW was willing to organise workers and, at times, call strikes. Many of the most notable strikes that punctuated the otherwise dire industrial landscape of the last twenty years were NUW disputes. The most recent example was the [unprecedented seventeen-day strike](https://redflag.org.au/article/woolworths-workers-strike-a-blow-against-corporate-power/) by more than 1,500 Woolworths warehouse workers in 2024, led by former NUW officials. Perhaps most impressive were their [exemplary campaigns](https://jacobin.com/2019/11/australia-farmworkers-organizing-food-supply-chain-coles-woolworths?ref=redflag.org.au) [to organise](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6618/) [precarious migrant farm workers](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6862/) in Victoria and South Australia. UV avoided exertions like this at all costs. It was defined by extreme industrial passivity. Its flagship growth strategy in recent decades was the absolutely [pathetic Hospo Voice](https://redflag.org.au/article/hospo-voice-terrible-and-its-getting-worse/), a “digital union” that aimed to avoid actually organising anyone to do anything. Its paid subscribers were offered little more than discounted movie tickets and barista courses. The tiered subscription model meant that anyone who wanted access to “personalised support” to win back their wages had to pay substantially more for the premium membership. Members First is campaigning for [democratic reforms](https://jacobin.com/2026/03/australia-uwu-leadership-election-union-democracy?ref=redflag.org.au) that prioritise organising and building the union’s rank-and-file structures. According to [their website](https://membersfirstunion.org/?ref=redflag.org.au), the most popular three demands are more face-to-face organising, more delegate training and the creation of a $1 million strike fund. All of these are quite moderate goals, but unlike the crime against unionism known as Hospo Voice, they at least point in the direction of organising workers and taking industrial action. However, there were always limits to how far the NUW leaders were willing to go. Though at times they tried to dance around court injunctions against picketing, for example, they were rarely willing to defy them. A top-down approach could also lead to real problems. Anyone who went along to any of the Woolworths picket lines in late 2024, for example, was struck by their passivity. Unlike [our dispute at Polar Fresh](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-5410/), it seemed as though the union put little thought or effort into turning each worker into an activist, as the old socialist motto goes, or involving the strikers in reaching out to other workers and union members for solidarity. There was no serious attempt to disrupt scab warehouses, and beyond the community mobilisation to ward off a busload of scabs for one night, there was no effort to defy or even get around court injunctions against picketing. All of this limited the strike’s effectiveness, and the final outcome was not the smashing victory it could have been. This was not an outlier. If we stick to the rules that are carefully designed to make us lose, how are we ever to start winning? Members First also lacks important political dimensions. The draconian restrictions on union rights and the right to strike are enshrined in the Fair Work Act, which was created by the Rudd Labor government. The current Albanese Labor government has done almost nothing to improve workers’ rights, and even less to address the housing and cost-of-living crisis. Its obsequious devotion to the US and Israel throughout their genocide in Palestine and their war on Iran is beyond repulsive. Although Members First leaders attack the former UV officials for their lavish funding of “party politics” (they carefully avoid mentioning Labor by name), they have refused to criticise Albanese openly, let alone break with Labor. We desperately need an outspoken, left-wing challenge to the Labor Party in the union movement. Members First is not it. Nevertheless, the fact that the Members First leaders were willing to call a strike of five Woolworths warehouses that, for all its limitations, put working-class power on the front page for a couple of weeks in 2024 is to their credit. Their organising efforts, particularly in the warehouses and farms, set them apart from the passivity of most union officialdom. Unlike most factional struggles in unions these days, there is a difference between the two sides in this case, and socialists should not be indifferent to the outcome. Socialists in the UWU should vote for and support Members First. If they win and roll out even a part of their NUW organising approach across the UWU, that would be a step forward. For my old workmates at Coles, however, it won’t automatically solve all of their problems. They’ve had former NUW organisers since 2016, but that hasn’t stopped the memory of the strike from fading, or a sense of demoralisation from setting in. The reality is that we need more strikes, and we need to be prepared to defy the courts and break industrial laws. We also need to fight the ALP and a government that endorses genocide and war. For this, we need more shop floor agitators, organisers and leaders. History shows that these can’t be created from above by any union leadership, no matter how well-intentioned it might be. We can play our part in creating such a layer through independent socialist organising among the rank and file. ### Solidarity with Indonesian human rights activist Andrie Yunus URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/solidarity-with-indonesian-human-rights-activist-andrie-yunus/ Last updated: 2026-03-23T10:57:59.000Z Just before midnight on 12 March, Indonesian human rights activist Andrie Yunus was riding his motorbike down a central Jakarta street when two men threw acid on him. Yunus screamed in shock and pain as he tried desperately to remove the acid from his body. Later, doctors at the Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital assessed that it had burned through 24 percent of his skin’s surface area. This brazen [attack](https://youtu.be/qH3eTS4aBLE?ref=redflag.org.au) has sent shockwaves through the Indonesian left. Yunus is the deputy coordinator of the Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence (KontraS), an NGO established in 1998 to advocate for victims of state-sanctioned torture, disappearances and other acts of extra-judicial repression. Given the nature of its work, KontraS is no stranger to violent incidents against its members. The most well-known was the assassination of its founder, Munir Said Thalib, by arsenic poisoning in 2004. When mass protests forced the dictator Suharto out of power and won limited democracy in the early 2000s, it seemed to promise a democratic era without the kind of poisonings, acid attacks or right-wing pogroms that characterised Suharto’s dictatorship. But the attack on Yunus was just one indicator among many, illustrating that authoritarian methods of rule are once again becoming the norm for Indonesian capitalism. Yunus has spent recent years very publicly advocating against militarism. In fact, just before the attack, he was recording a podcast about the dangers of remilitarisation. The attack was a well-planned operation, scheduled to take place in a public location with lots of CCTV coverage. It was designed to instil fear in anyone organising resistance to the creeping dictatorship by publicly targeting a prominent oppositionist. The police and courts have played a similarly intimidatory role in the wake of last year’s explosive [protests](https://redflag.org.au/article/mass-protests-rock-indonesia/) against inequality and police brutality. Thousands of activists were arrested in the months after the protests. While many had their charges dropped, the Youth Movement Against Criminalisation has found that 703 political detainees were still facing prosecution and 506 had already been convicted by mid-February. This police-driven “activist hunt” is intended to intimidate activists. The acquittal of four prominent activists, who were charged with [incitement](https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1Di1GeGF9B/) for social media posts critical of the government during the protests, was an important victory against this campaign of intimidation. But it’s not enough. Explosive mass [movements](https://redflag.org.au/article/resisting-militarism-and-capitalism-in-indonesia/) have periodically challenged the military-capitalist government in Indonesia, especially over the past six years. But every time these movements recede, the government and the organised far right go on renewed and better organised counter-offensives. This latest acid attack has caused fear among Indonesian leftists and human rights organisations, but their task remains as important as ever. Without more organisers who can give anti-capitalist leadership to the grievances of workers and the oppressed, explosive struggles will continue to rise and fall, eventually overpowered by the police, military and criminal thugs who serve Indonesia’s ruling class simply because they are better organised. Solidarity to Aries Yunus in his recovery, and solidarity to all those continuing to fight for justice under increasingly dangerous conditions. ### From the West Bank to Gaza, Israel has ‘the same eliminationist goal’ URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/from-the-west-bank-to-gaza-israel-has-the-same-eliminationist-goal/ Last updated: 2026-03-29T03:33:35.000Z Since October 2023, more than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank; 11,000 more have been injured, either by the Israeli military or by “settlers”—Israeli citizens who establish settlements and drive Palestinians from surrounding areas. More than 2,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished in ongoing attempts to steal their lands. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented more than 1,800 attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank in 2025 alone. The goal is to eradicate Palestine “between the Sea and the Jordan” river, as the original charter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party reads. Around 900,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, more than 30 percent of the population, are registered refugees from 1948 and 1967\. But more are being internally displaced. **Penny Green**, a professor at Queen Mary University of London and founder of the International State Crime Initiative, a research centre, recently spent two weeks in the West Bank observing the situation in the so-called humanitarian camps. She was interviewed by **Janey Stone**, author (with Donny Gluckstein) of [*The Radical Jewish Tradition*](https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/the-radical-jewish-tradition-revolutionaries-resistance-fighters-and-firebrands?ref=redflag.org.au). --- #### **Tell us about your engagement with Palestine.** My first project, fifteen years ago, looked at forced evictions in the Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem. A process of Judaisation was taking place, and Palestinians were being forced out of their homes by settlers with the support of the Israeli state. I also visited the Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Negev Desert. The Israeli government had a policy of removing them from their lands, destroying their villages and pushing them into towns and cities where their traditional ways of life were no longer possible. #### **You’ve returned to the West Bank many times. How much has changed?** The central change relates to the way in which the settlement project links to the military project of Israel’s settler colonialism. Since October 2023, when eyes were off the West Bank, the settlements have expanded dramatically, as has the violence deployed by settlers, who were greatly emboldened by the Gaza events. But we shouldn’t just categorise the settlers as crazy, insane, deranged fanatics; they are, in effect, Israel’s frontier shock troops. The Palestinians are brutalised by the Israeli occupying forces, and they’re brutalised by an illegal settler population which has expanded now to about 800,000. Each time I go, I see new settlements throughout the West Bank, looking like European holiday towns with rows of identical houses and always pitched on top of hills. And the residents, who are recent arrivals, are massively supported by the state and given homes and subsidies. #### **What were you researching on your most recent visit?** My major research is to look at the humanitarian camp as a site of genocidal reproduction. It’s crucial to understand that genocide is not an event. It’s a process, and it always begins with strategies of dehumanisation, which are state-sponsored. Dehumanisation leads to violence, and if that violence gets a green light, then more and more violence follows. This very often leads to or runs parallel with apartheid forms of segregation, and often camps. Once people are in camps, they’re much easier to weaken physically and emotionally; it’s easier for their communities to become fractured. When people are weakened to such an extent, and fragmented and isolated from their former neighbours, then it is much easier for genocidal states to annihilate and erase them. Given that many of the elements of the genocidal process appear in the camps, the question is whether humanitarian camps are less about safety and security and more about containment and reproducing the genocidal process, irrespective of the aims of the humanitarians who manage them. #### **This makes me think of the Holocaust and the Nazis’ plans to exterminate all Jews, which began by segregating them into ghettos. So before people were sent off to concentration camps, they were separated from other people, where the process you’ve just been describing could occur.** Yes, exactly. My project is to look at the structures of the camp, how they were formed, how they are managed and the ways in which dehumanisation and systematic weakening are fostered within the segregated nature of the camp setting. The replication or persistence of these processes continues the genocide and makes target populations vulnerable to annihilation and erasure. #### **Can you provide a couple of examples that illustrate this process?** Shu’fat in Jerusalem, the only camp under direct Israeli control, is by far the most miserable Palestinian camp I visited. It’s not the poorest camp, but it’s incredibly densely overcrowded, polluted, and crime is endemic. Residents attribute these conditions directly to Israeli policy, which is to depopulate Jerusalem of its Arab citizens and move them to camps where they can be contained and controlled. Inside these camps, people remain effectively stateless, and Israel seeks to make conditions of life so unbearable that Palestinians will leave. Palestinian resistance has had its historical base in the refugee camps—another reason why Israel wants them destroyed. Until they were forcibly evicted last year and their camps destroyed, people from places like Tulkarm camp who wanted to work would have to get up at midnight or one in the morning to join queues, enter metal cages, shuffle along extremely oppressive metal corridors and through electronic turnstiles just to cross into Israel to work. They were treated worse than cattle. So when I visit the West Bank, I see that dehumanisation, the apartheid segregation, the daily and increasing violence and the persistent efforts to systematically weaken and displace Palestinians. #### **New settlements are being established all the time. This is part of the process as well—an expansion of an already very unjust system. Can you say more about that?** Israeli apartheid is fundamental to its Palestinian dehumanisation strategy. The segregation/apartheid wall is massive, unimaginably intrusive and disruptive. It’s designed to be this way—it was never about “protection”. It was designed to fragment Palestinian communities, to make life for Palestinians intolerable and to grab land. Each time a section of the wall is built, it grabs metres and metres and metres of land and very often divides and completely segregates one section of a Palestinian village from another. Then there are the roads that link the settlements to Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem. Palestinians are not allowed to travel on these because they’ll be shot at. Driving in Palestine is the most arduous experience. You never know if you’re going to make it to your destination because, at a whim, a checkpoint will be closed, at a whim, you’ll arrive at a yellow barrier or be prevented by soldiers from going any further. Palestinians are always on their phone using apps that help them work out how they can move from one place to another, which checkpoint is open or just closed, which is a safer route to travel, where they can and cannot drive. Where once it would have taken ten minutes to get somewhere, it can now take two and a half hours. #### **How do Palestinians cope in this increasingly vicious cycle of dehumanisation, segregation, systematic weakening and violence?** The Palestinians are extraordinary in the way in which they resist the systematic process to weaken them. They talk about *sumud* (“steadfastness”). It is something incredibly powerful that, despite all of this, Palestinians remain resolutely committed to staying inside Palestine, to resisting in non-violent ways. But it is exhausting. #### **You’ve talked about the disruption of daily life. But Israel is also destroying Palestinian traditions, their culture and their history. We saw in Gaza the bombing of schools and universities and historical buildings and so on. Recently, Israel has destroyed seed banks in Hebron. Why?** The seed banks represent the future for the Palestinian people, an agricultural and sustainable future. It’s yet another means of trying to ensure that there is no way forward for Palestinians. Another way is to destroy all the schools, which is why Israel has now expelled the United Nations Relief and Works Agency from the West Bank. Since 1948, UNRWA has done an extraordinary job in educating Palestinians, but no longer. The Palestinians from Gaza are the most highly educated people in the Middle East. #### **Another aspect is the settlers and the military constantly ripping up olive groves and apricot orchards, and poisoning and stealing Palestinians’ water.** It’s a cruel form of punishment for existing as a Palestinian. As Patrick Wolfe said of the settler colonial project, the goal is the elimination of the native. And genocide is the mechanism by which that erasure, that elimination, is taking place.Of course, this is not new. It didn’t begin in October 2023\. We have to start with 1917 and the Balfour Declaration. The idea that Britain would gift Palestine with its Palestinian population to European Zionists intent on building a Jewish homeland is perhaps the most grotesque act of dehumanisation. #### **And then the Zionists say, “A land without people for a people without land”. So the land has no people. As Golda Meir famously said, “They did not exist”.** The opposite was true, of course. In 1917, Arab Palestinians amounted to 92 percent of the population. They lived in thriving towns and cities and cultivated the land rich in olive groves and orchards. The settlers arriving from Eastern Europe and beyond had no idea about agriculture and animal husbandry. They destroyed Palestinian farmlands, stole livestock and ripped up ancient olive groves and orchards. In Hebron today, settlers have occupied the heart of the old city. There are huge banners in the main street perpetuating this lie: “Palestine never existed”, “There are no Palestinians”. There is also graffiti reading “Gas the Arabs”. The genocidal intentions of these settlers have been absolutely clear for decades. But crucially, the settlers can only commit their crimes because they are fully protected by the Israeli military. #### **You’ve described the camps in the north of the West Bank as looking like Gaza. How so?** Last year, Israel attacked the camps of Jenin and Tukaram and Nur Shams with no notice and forced 40,000 people to flee their homes and communities. Many had nowhere to go. In the very early hours of the morning, soldiers came with bulldozers and began destroying huge swathes of the camps, pillaging homes as they went. But looking at it politically, the whole settler colonial project is a demographic one. The Israelis need to remove the Palestinians to prevent them from challenging the Jewish supremacy of the Israeli state. From the start, the Israeli state was very clear about its need to create and maintain a Jewish majority. Now, Israel is facing what its supporters consider a “demographic crisis”: in addition to the existence of Palestinians, more Jews are now leaving than entering Israel. #### **But that raises an enormous question—the right of return for Palestinians previously expelled by Zionist militias or by the Israeli state or by settlers.** The right of return is critical. Refugee status for the Palestinians traverses generations. It has been ratified in at least five United Nations resolutions, including Article 11 of the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 194\. That’s something that Palestinians hold on to. Not everybody will want to return, but the idea and the possibility of return are central to Palestinian resistance. But Israel gives no credence to it at all—quite the opposite. Anyone with Jewish ancestry, regardless of nationality, can come there to live, but Palestinians who were or whose families were forcibly evicted from Palestine have no possibility to exercise the right of return. #### **Reflecting on your recent visit, how do you think the West Bank compares to Gaza?** Like so many others, I have watched Gazan journalists, doctors and academics convey exactly what’s been happening. I saw clearly on this visit how the West Bank is coming to resemble present-day Gaza. In the camps, I saw blue stars of David sprayed over destroyed buildings, destroyed homes where military snipers have made their bases, and thousands of Israeli flags planted by settlers every ten metres along Highway 60 between Ramallah and the camps. Israel was never concerned only with Gaza. Its destruction of the West Bank, while different in character, is driven by exactly the same eliminationist goal. ### Horrific violence is the basis of empire URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/horrific-violence-is-the-basis-of-empire/ Last updated: 2026-03-29T08:59:47.000Z To celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States, US President Donald Trump is hosting a packed card of UFC championship fights on the south lawn of the White House. Fighters will walk directly from the Oval Office to the octagon. Weigh-ins will take place at the Lincoln Memorial. Journalist Peter Hartcher has put this down to Trump’s unique “need for constant displays of violence”. Speaking on the *Morning Edition* podcast on 12 March, he complained that this grisly spectacle is an insult to American tradition. Citing JFK’s 1962 speech that called Independence Day a celebration of a “revolution in human affairs”, Hartcher wondered aloud if “this celebration marks a regression of human affairs”. Centrist critics of Trump, like Hartcher, see him as a slightly embarrassing interlude in an otherwise upstanding institution. They want to have their cake and eat it too—disavowing Trump’s brash theatrics, while maintaining that the United States is fundamentally a force for good, and urging continued connivance with a world order in which it reigns supreme. Hence Hartcher’s support for Australian involvement in the war on Iran, despite his criticisms of Trump. But if we’re being honest, a modern-day version of Rome’s gladiatorial games is the perfect way to celebrate the anniversary of the United States—the most brutal empire the world has ever seen. And worshipping violence isn’t a unique psychological quirk of Trump; it’s a beloved pastime of the entire US ruling class. On the presidential campaign trail in 2024, Kamala Harris promised the United States would always have the “strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”, to loud cheers from US liberalism’s true believers. Following the 2011 murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton channelled Julius Caesar: “We came, we saw, he died”. And in a 9 March speech, Trump said that the military officials told him that they sink Iranian ships rather than capturing them because “It’s more fun”. This worship of violence and death in ruling circles is part of what ensures the US has gotten to and remains at the top of the imperialist pecking order. But a myth still prevails today that the early US state was, unlike the great European empires, an “isolationist” and benevolent power that promoted free trade and rejected colonialism. In reality, US criticism of European colonial practices was just a cover to grab some of their territories. The United States went to war with Spain in 1898 to seize Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. When Filipinos took US rhetoric about self-determination as good coin and declared independence, the United States violently subjugated them, leading to a million deaths from war, famine and disease. Their conduct was so piratical that Mark Twain suggested the US produce a special flag for their Philippines colony “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones”. President Woodrow Wilson, architect of early 20th century American liberalism, made it clear that his vision of free trade and commerce would be backed up by gunboats, ready to “batter down the doors of closed nations”. Democratically elected governments that haven’t enthusiastically embraced the liberating force of American capital exports have been overthrown, from Guatemala to Chile to Iran. It’s possible to pinpoint the exact moment the United States asserted itself as the dominant world imperialist power. At 8.15am on 6 August 1945, the United States detonated an atomic bomb half a kilometre above the city of Hiroshima. Tens of thousands were instantly incinerated. The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing 70,000, half the city’s population. Both were civilian targets with no military value. By the end of 1945, 140,000 had died as a result of the bombing. While the official justification for this atrocity was that it was necessary to shorten the war and prevent further loss of life, in reality Japan was already thoroughly beaten. On 12 July, President Harry Truman’s diary recorded: “Telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace”. He admitted, “The bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our terms at the end of the war”. The purpose of dropping the bomb was to send a message to future rivals that the United States was not to be trifled with. War Secretary Henry Stimson said, “Let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else. We have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way”. US hegemony announced itself to the world with one of the greatest crimes in human history. During the Cold War, the United States backed military dictatorships and crushed independence movements to maintain dominance and ward off Soviet influence. While the war in Vietnam is still commemorated by mainstream historians as a tragedy of good intentions gone awry, the conduct of US officials tells a different story. Their approach at times bordered on the genocidal. Colonel George S. Patton III, a combat commander in Vietnam, sent out Christmas cards in 1968 which read, “From Colonel and Mrs. George S. Patton III–Peace on Earth”. The attached Christmas cards contained photographs of Viet Cong soldiers dismembered and stacked in a pile. For rank-and-file troops, the war was a bewildering orgy of racism and senseless violence. As one combat veteran recalled of basic training, “The only thing they told us about the Viet Cong was they were gooks. They were to be killed”. The gravity of these crimes polarised US society, sparked resistance, and created a lasting cynicism about US imperial adventures.The first two Gulf wars aimed to rehabilitate the US empire and re-assert its inalienable right to dominate wherever it pleased. Just like today, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified on the basis of absurd lies about weapons of mass destruction posing an existential threat to the West. The price paid for this attempt to rebuild US imperial credibility was around 1 million deaths, overwhelmingly civilian, across the region. Throughout all this, Republicans and Democrats have competed for the title of most enthusiastic warmongers. Dropping the A-bomb? Democrats. Incinerating half of Korea? Republicans. The napalming of Vietnam? A team effort. The US empire has committed unspeakable crimes as the dominant imperialist power over the last 80 years—but today we are in a new, dangerous phase. The US is a power in long, slow decline. It has been weakened by failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. It faces a multipolar world with different powers jostling for position, and it is losing out economically to China, its main rival. But the US still retains advantage in one area—its overwhelmingly superior ability to inflict destruction, pain and death. Trump’s UFC-style warmongering, which has dominated so much of politics in 2026, is the expression of many things—the rapid radicalisation of the Republican Party, the ascendancy of Christian nationalists in US politics and the desire to distract and deflect from internal dysfunction and turmoil. But whatever the immediate political considerations, violence and war are so often the answer for empire because they are what underpins power. Violence has to be used routinely to protect and extend the economic power of the capitalist class. It’s used both to intimidate potential rivals and to repress resistance from below. But the fatal flaw of violence is that it tends to spark resistance—as during the Vietnam War, when US soldiers revolted against their orders in large numbers and made their rulers’ war aims impossible to pursue. It’s currently unclear whether Trump’s strategy of blatant aggression will ultimately strengthen US power or weaken it. But that’s beside the point—when great powers make strategic blunders. it only begets more violence, as empire lashes out and attempts to reassert control. The only off-ramp from this situation is to build resistance to war internationally, a resistance that aims to jam up the machinery of imperialism and eventually overthrow the people that administer it. ### How does Socialist Alternative fit into the socialist tradition? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/how-does-socialist-alternative-fit-into-the-socialist-tradition/ Last updated: 2026-03-29T03:33:05.000Z Socialist Alternative stands in the tradition of Marx and Engels—who identified the need for a revolution led by the working class to establish a new society of equality—Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who opposed reformism and imperialism and led the most successful workers’ revolution, and Trotsky, who fought for Marxism against the horrors of Stalin’s counter-revolution. The world we face in 2026 is very different from that which these and other socialists contended with in the past. The revolutionary left today is relatively weak, as is the workers’ movement in most of the world. Yet the system continues to generate new horrors—including war, environmental destruction and economic crisis—and deny the mass of people access to the basic necessities of life, like healthy food and quality housing. Resistance to these horrors, in one form or another, is never far away. For this resistance to develop into a force capable of radically reshaping society in the interests of the majority, a stronger socialist movement is necessary. Socialist Alternative is trying to build an organisation of people committed to this goal—but what does that mean in practice? ### **Our history** Socialist Alternative was formed in 1995 during a disorienting period for the far left. A downturn in industrial and political militancy began in the late 1970s, a difficult adjustment for a generation of radicals who had entered politics amid the heady struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s. The working class suffered many defeats in the 1980s, including the global triumph of neoliberalism. We faced a special brand of this class war in Australia, led by the ALP under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. There was also an influx of activists and former leftists into the academy, where anti-Marxist ideas were taken up with gusto. In an immediate sense, this was more damaging for the far left than the broader ruling-class offensive. From being broadly popular in left-wing circles, revolutionary politics was maligned and ridiculed. The newly dominant postmodern politics attacked notions such as class interest, solidarity and revolution, reflecting in theory the real attacks against the working class going on outside the ivory tower. Yet the political situation improved in the 1990s, with big protests against the first Gulf War, important battles against the Kennett Liberal government in Victoria and, towards the end of the decade, a movement against far-right figure Pauline Hanson, a big strike on the docks and then a series of global protests against corporate greed, usually called the anti-capitalist movement. Stalinism was also in terminal decline after the collapse of the USSR at the beginning of the 1990s. But though this opened opportunities for the anti-Stalinist left, it was not enough to counteract the broader trend of socialist marginalisation, or sufficient to revive working-class organisations and confidence to their former strength or to generate ongoing mass movements. Indeed, for many people, including leftists, the collapse of Stalinism was viewed as the final nail in the coffin of the entire socialist project. Various socialists worldwide deluded themselves that the situation was more promising than it was. For example, Socialist Alternative was formed from a split in the International Socialist Organisation after that group failed to accept the new reality. Its leaders said that the 1990s resembled the 1930s—a decade that had begun with the global Great Depression and the triumph of Adolph Hitler in Germany and concluded with the outbreak of World War Two. In the face of the collapse of the socialist movement, the ISO leaders also claimed that there were boundless opportunities to win people to socialism. Socialist Alternative was tasked with coming up with a more realistic assessment. ### **Early student perspective** Socialist Alternative started with around 70 members, mostly in Melbourne. The group needed a hard-headed appraisal of the political situation and how we could begin to rebuild. It would have been laughable for the group to proclaim itself the working class’s leaders or make grandiose attempts to launch mass struggles. Instead we decided to direct most of our energies to building socialist clubs on university campuses. This has proved to be an essential tactic. Today, Socialist Alternative, with more than 750 members, still puts considerable effort into relating to students and organising political activity on campuses. We have sizeable clubs at all major universities in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra and Wollongong. Our clubs engage students with revolutionary Marxism and initiate activist campaigns. We launched the first Gaza solidarity student encampment in Australia and were responsible for most of the encampments across the country. For years, we have been the main organised force to the left of the Labor Party in the student unions and have led numerous campaigns against education cuts and fee increases, as well as around issues such as abortion and LGBT rights. Despite claims by some on the left that relating to students means downgrading the importance of workers, it’s clear from history that any serious organisation needs an orientation to young people and students. Not only because, as we have proved, campuses are a place to meet people and involve them in the socialist movement, but also because young people are an important social layer that has often catalysed protest movements and revolutions. It is highly advantageous for the left that students are concentrated on enormous university campuses. While most students will adopt the dominant ideas of the day, there will always be a minority who are open to radical and revolutionary ideas. This is why students have always played an important role in the socialist movement. Of course, this doesn’t mean students can replace the working class as the revolutionary agent of social change. But once convinced of a socialist perspective, students can and have played an important role in leading struggles, both on and off campuses. As proof of this, Socialist Alternative has the highest number of working-class militants of any socialist group since the Communist Party before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many of these members were trained on the campuses. As the organisation continues to grow, we are also increasingly meeting and recruiting workers out of other areas of work, including the Socialist Party. ### **Political clarity** Political clarity is crucial for building socialist organisations. We may not be in a revolutionary situation, but revolutionary politics matter for navigating every twist and turn in the political situation, making strategic arguments about the way forward and resisting the latest liberal ideological trends and fads. Having such a focus on campus work made it doubly important to be clear on this. The universities are where most anti-working-class and anti-Marxist theories are generated and propagated. Identity politics has infused all of liberal academia and beyond. It has become “common sense” to see distinctions along the lines of race, gender or sexuality as more important than class distinctions. This is extremely disorienting for fights against sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia, but also in shaping broad left political opinion. The importance of social class has been obscured, and strategies for social change based on solidarity and working-class power have been maligned. Over the years, we have fought for revolutionary Marxist theory and politics in the face of various rival approaches like patriarchy theory, identity politics, forms of anarchism and settler colonial theory. This is not about belligerently asserting that Marx was right in the nineteenth century, but about applying a living theory of social revolution to the changing dynamics of oppression in our society. At the same time, we are extremely engaged with movements against oppression and take seriously the need to build working-class politics, not separate from, but in connection with them. ### **Rejecting liquidationism and reformism** As Socialist Alternative was establishing itself, many organisations on the revolutionary left internationally were shifting towards a supposedly “broad party” model of organisation. The argument was that lots of workers were moving rapidly to the left while social democratic parties were moving rapidly to the right, and this was creating a political vacuum that revolutionaries should step in to fill. Reasonable people could debate this analysis at the time, though it’s clear now that the early 2000s were definitively not a period of advance for the left. More important than the diagnosis was the proposed cure: to create or support “broad”, “anti-capitalist” or “anti-neoliberal” organisations that were explicitly non-revolutionary. Revolutionaries dissolved themselves into the Scottish Socialist Party, which shortly afterwards collapsed. In France, the left shrank in the years following the establishment of the New Anticapitalist Party by the old Revolutionary Communist League. In Brazil and Italy, revolutionaries entered reformist parties and gave them left cover as they attacked workers and supported imperialist policies, including the invasion of Afghanistan. In Australia, the main example was the Socialist Alliance, initiated by the Democratic Socialist Party, which eventually dissolved itself and its commitment to revolutionary politics into the Alliance in 2010\. Today, far from being a big, broad organisation, the Socialist Alliance is a fraction of the size of the explicitly revolutionary Socialist Alternative. When revolutionaries remain up front and assertive about our politics, rather than diluting or apologising for them out of deference to forces to our right, people are more likely to be convinced to join the socialist movement and fight alongside us. A few years later, a new rationale emerged for revolutionaries to dilute their politics. After the global financial crisis, a spate of “new reformist” parties and figures emerged: Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US. In Europe, the failure of mass street movements and strikes to block vicious government austerity led people to look to parliamentary change instead. It was important for revolutionary socialists to relate to the hope and support that were galvanised around these parties. But the call made by sections of the left to tail them uncritically represented another, more degenerate, version of the same defensiveness in the earlier broad party debates. In the case of Bernie Sanders, the left was championing a longstanding liberal organised in an openly capitalist party. Several socialist groups in the US collapsed in part because of these pressures. These issues led to huge debates on the broad left and within Socialist Alternative. The lessons learnt from this era remain relevant: successful reformist projects will always create challenges and opportunities for revolutionaries to navigate. ### **Programs and unity** The political basis for organisational unity among revolutionary socialists is agreement on the need for a revolution led by workers and the need to build active and democratic organisations. Important principles flow from this, like opposition to imperialism and militarism, support for struggles against oppression and opposition to class collaboration. Socialist Alternative’s statement of principles reflects this. In previous periods, other questions, such as the class nature of the Soviet Union, were questions of organisational demarcation. Although debates about questions like this still matter, they are not central to taking forward the international left. In 2013, Socialist Alternative successfully unified with the Revolutionary Socialist Party, a group that had split from the Democratic Socialist Party and remained committed to revolutionary politics. Political differences remain between comrades from this tendency and the majority from the international socialist current, but we agree on the core principles and strategy. So far, we’ve found that debates around contemporary issues divide along new lines rather than historic organisational loyalties. All of this has been useful for Socialist Alternative. It clarified our hostility to the sectarian approach of some organisations, including sections of the Trotskyist tradition, which have obsessed over secondary points of analysis or demands. A mass revolutionary workers’ party will come about only through the fusion of many different currents and tendencies of revolutionary politics. ### **Recruitment and cadre** Today, the most important area of work for revolutionary socialists is recruitment. We are way too small to make the most of the mass discontent and anti-capitalist sentiment among sections of students and workers. We desperately need to grow. At certain times, active recruitment may be less necessary than it is now—for example, when masses of people feel compelled to join the party they are most aligned with to make any meaningful contribution to social change. But right now, this is far from clear to people. And many people who identify with or are open to revolutionary socialism do not have much knowledge of what it entails politically and strategically, let alone familiarity with Marxist history and theory. To rebuild the socialist movement, it has been essential to put a lot of effort into recruiting and educating members through discussion groups, public meetings and so on. This is the foundation of everything we do. As a result of our steady growth over the years, we have expanded into new cities and campuses, built our publications and conferences (with our annual Marxism conference attracting thousands each year), and initiated numerous campaigns, movements and protests. ### **Interventionism** Socialist Alternative is not a group that sits on the sidelines and offers commentary about the world. We’re always fighting to change and shape it. From early on, we were involved in important movements, such as calling mass demonstrations against Pauline Hanson and serving on the executive council of the Melbourne Iraq war protests, of which we were part of the organising committee. We have also been part of long-term campaigns such as the refugee rights movement and the marriage equality movement, the activist wings of which we spearheaded. We have a proud history of helping to lead Palestine solidarity campaigns around Australia. We mobilised against Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006\. When Israel invaded Gaza in 2008, we worked with Arab and Muslim organisations to establish major demonstrations. We set up Students for Palestine on university campuses, which remains the only national Palestine solidarity student network. These have been crucial to making the campuses a focal point of opposition to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Socialists have limited forces, so it is not always possible to address every injustice. However, given our size relative to the rest of the left, we have taken on more and more responsibility to initiate actions and coalitions where necessary. When Roe v. Wade was overturned in the US, we called demonstrations across the country, including one organised by the Victorian Socialists in Melbourne, which was at least 15,000 strong. In 2019, we threw ourselves into the environment movement, participating in networks like Extinction Rebellion and School Strike for Climate, and despite hysterical media and government denunciations for “politicising” horrendous fires and their consequences, we called mass and defiant demonstrations in the summer of 2019-20\. Anti-fascist work has also been an important area for us. This began with taking on the far-right Reclaim Australia movement and joining many important campaigns and demonstrations alongside anarchists, other socialists and anti-fascist activists, including counter-demonstrations against the anti-vax right during the pandemic. A key project in recent years has been establishing and working within the Socialist Party. The Socialist Party is a more open and broader group than Socialist Alternative, with a focus on contesting elections. However, revolutionaries have not liquidated our forces; we participate in the Socialist Party while maintaining our revolutionary organisation and perspective. Through this work, comrades have had the opportunity to put a concrete socialist program to hundreds of thousands of workers who would otherwise never have heard of it. We do this alongside hundreds of others, most of whom are not revolutionaries but nevertheless agree with our approach. It is a real advance that there is now a serious electoral alternative based on anti-capitalist, working-class politics, as opposed to the liberal progressivism of the Greens. ### **Conclusion** Building revolutionary organisations is the key task for socialists everywhere. There is no shortage of reasons to overthrow capitalism, and there is also widespread disillusionment and discontent. Over the last decade, explosive moments of resistance have frequently involved masses of people. But everywhere, there is a lack of organisations that orient to working-class power, can lead struggles that wrest serious concessions from the ruling class and can start to build the mass consciousness and confidence needed to challenge the system decisively. Mass revolutionary parties cannot be built overnight. And they will not just be enlarged versions of groups that exist today. They are likely to be the product of radicalisations, periods of exponential growth for the left, splits and regroupments. But the foundations have to be laid today. Without organisations that fight for a revolutionary perspective, train their members in revolutionary politics, history and strategy, and build credibility and experience over time, there cannot be any hope of winning mass influence in the future. Socialist Alternative is building today with that aim in mind. But we are not just investing in the future. Socialist organising is also about contributing to the politics and possibilities of the present. Revolutionary Marxism is a living, breathing tradition kept alive by socialists working together: making sense of the politics of the day, intervening in and initiating struggles and convincing more people of the need for a revolutionary alternative. ### Private schools build government-funded castles while public schools languish URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/private-schools-build-government-funded-castles-while-public-schools-languish/ Last updated: 2026-03-21T02:15:51.000Z When Scots College, an elite private boys school in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, [opened](https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/inside-this-sydney-private-school-s-60-million-castle-20250409-p5lqgw.html?ref=redflag.org.au) a $60 million replica Scottish castle to house its library last year, the stark divide between public and private schools in Australia found its most gaudy, shameless expression. Until, perhaps, that same school reportedly [purchased](https://www.smh.com.au/cbd/great-scots-the-case-of-the-60-million-castle-and-a-vanishing-camel-20251027-p5n5l0.html?ref=redflag.org.au) a $13,000 life-sized taxidermied camel to be displayed in the new castle-cum-library. For elite private schools like Scots, extravagant capital works like these are unexceptional and indeed encouraged by the inequitable funding system maintained by federal and state governments. According to a new [report](https://www.aeufederal.org.au/application/files/7417/7154/5239/v3%5FThe%5FBuilding%5FDivide%5Fin%5FAustralian%5FSchools%5Ffinal.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) by the Australian Education Union (AEU), *The building divide in Australian schools: How capital funding fuels educational inequity,* private schools have outspent public schools on capital works by $38 billion over the past decade. In 2023, just three private schools—St Kevin’s College and Caulfield Grammar in Melbourne, and Monte Sant’Angelo Mercy School in Sydney—together spent more on capital infrastructure than 56 percent of all public schools in Australia combined. Their collective $290 million capital works budget services just 6,789 students, compared to 938,470 for a comparable figure within the public school system. The full measure of this capital works inequity becomes clear when viewed in relation to the least funded and most disadvantaged public school settings. In 2021, seven private schools [spent](https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2024-02/apo-nid325696.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) more individually on capital works than what was invested in all Northern Territory public schools that year. Similarly, from 2017 to 2021, two NSW private schools [spent](https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2024-02/apo-nid325696.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) more on capital works than the entire state of Tasmania. The capital works undertaken by private schools do not just project and concretely increase their wealth; they express and enhance the opportunities and experiences afforded to students in and outside the classroom. The AEU [reports](https://www.aeufederal.org.au/application/files/7417/7154/5239/v3%5FThe%5FBuilding%5FDivide%5Fin%5FAustralian%5FSchools%5Ffinal.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au), for instance, that St Kevin’s College has expanded its junior campus to deliver new sporting facilities, state-of-the-art STEM classrooms and a very large playground. Caulfield Grammar, meanwhile, developed a five-storey [learning hub](https://www.adcoconstruct.com.au/case-study/caulfield-grammar-school-teaching-and-learning-building/?ref=redflag.org.au) for senior school students. It is the first building within Australian schools to be WELL Gold certified—an international accreditation for building projects that meet exceptional sustainability standards and are designed to maximise human wellbeing and comfort. For many public school students, by contrast, cramped, damp, poorly ventilated and asbestos-riddled demountables are the norm. These structures—which are meant to be temporary but more often than not are permanent—not only present occupational health and safety issues for staff and students, but are also more costly to run than regular classrooms. Needless to say, they win no awards for their contribution to wellbeing or comfort. They also have a negative impact on learning. As one Victorian primary school principal explains, “There is an increased need to have spaces for small group tutoring or intervention to meet the needs of students with disabilities”. Demountables simply have no space for this, which means students don’t get the help they need. The reality is that some students simply matter more than others. Capital investment in private schools per student [averaged](https://www.aeufederal.org.au/news-media/media-releases/2025/38-billion-school-infrastructure-gap-public-schools-left-behi?fbclid=IwY2xjawQV0K5leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFsWFA0RWFQc2tOcWQwRWtxc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHgmC1KizUIn2uxUnFwEvkGNoZxFa7%5FQqu7Pu85%5FAH7oeEHpX5NeUL-pcSCt6%5Faem%5FbGVWho2gaj0yYOu-2LL74A&ref=redflag.org.au) $2,746 annually between 2014 and 2023, compared to $1,237 per student annually in public schools over the same period. Compounding this is the already inequitable distribution of recurrent Commonwealth contributions to private and public schools. Private school fees alone often exceed the funding needs of students, meaning that regular government contributions function as free money, often invested in capital works on top of the specific capital works funding. This entrenches the divide between public and private schools, with the latter accumulating more and more capital at the expense of the former. Seen in this light, the capital works disparity across public and private schools is a symptom of a deeper, systemic malaise: the chronic, bipartisan underfunding of public schools. That is why it is not enough to point the finger, as the AEU has [done](https://www.aeufederal.org.au/news-media/media-releases/2025/38-billion-school-infrastructure-gap-public-schools-left-behi?fbclid=IwY2xjawQV0K5leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFsWFA0RWFQc2tOcWQwRWtxc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHgmC1KizUIn2uxUnFwEvkGNoZxFa7%5FQqu7Pu85%5FAH7oeEHpX5NeUL-pcSCt6%5Faem%5FbGVWho2gaj0yYOu-2LL74A&ref=redflag.org.au), at the Liberal Turnbull federal government, which in 2017 shamefully ceased the Commonwealth’s long-term capital funding stream for public schools. Labor state governments are also ripping funding from public schools. [Victoria](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-12/education-gonski-funding-state-commonwealth/105282322?ref=redflag.org.au)—supposedly the “education state”—is a case in point. Last year, it was accused by the *Age* of denying $2.4 billion to Victorian schools by delaying the implementation of its Gonski reforms. For all students to access education—including facilities that make learning possible, safe and even *enjoyable*—we need a complete overhaul of the school system and the politics of the major parties, which have left working-class families and young people to languish, while the elite luxuriate in world-class, feudal-themed luxury facilities. ### Teaching in Victorian public schools is becoming unbearable URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/teaching-in-victorian-public-schools-is-becoming-unbearable/ Last updated: 2026-03-18T06:46:38.000Z “Once you get used to the 50 or 55-hour work week, and adjust your life around it, it gets better”, Aran explains. “It’s about an extra two or three hours each night from Monday to Thursday, and then an extra day on the weekend.” “Extra”, here, is a euphemism for unpaid overtime. We’re sitting across from each other at a table in the 30-person staffroom of the public secondary school in Melbourne’s north where we are both teaching. Aran’s desk faces the car park, now repurposed as a construction site for new portable buildings needed to house the school’s 2,000 students. The students have gone home, and this is a rare unstructured moment in a day otherwise dictated by bells and bureaucrats. “You will only be paid for 38 hours per week for a job that is at least 50”, Aran continues. Betty, who works in another part of the sprawling school complex, suddenly appears before us. She hovers, holding a thick stack of loose-leaf paper and exhibiting the quiet mania common to workers expected to manage the unmanageable. Betty clearly needs to interrupt us. But listening to our conversation, she chimes in with her own advice. “In this job it helps”, she says, “to have insomnia. I usually do those extra hours from 11pm to 1am each night, when my kids are sleeping”. At that time, I was studying to earn a teaching qualification while teaching at the same time—except for a third less pay. The government introduced this program for one reason: there are simply not enough teachers in schools. An international [survey](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/results-from-talis-2024%5F90df6235-en/full-report.html?ref=redflag.org.au) of teaching practices commissioned by the [OECD](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/results-from-talis-2024%5F90df6235-en/full-report.html?ref=redflag.org.au) in 2024 found that 58 percent of Australian principals report teacher shortages in their schools. This is more than double the OECD average, and the shortage [compounds](https://www.aeufederal.org.au/news-media/media-releases/2025/teacher-shortages-australian-schools-among-worst-oecd?ref=redflag.org.au) in schools supporting poor and disadvantaged students. Of the teachers who are currently working in schools, most want to leave. [Research](https://www.monash.edu/%5F%5Fdata/assets/pdf%5Ffile/0009/3757599/What-the-profession-needs-now-AEU-Paper-1.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) conducted by Monash University in partnership with the Australian Education Union in 2024 confirmed that just three in ten teachers intend to stay in the profession until retirement, with excessive workloads (83 percent) and poor salary (60 percent) the primary reasons for wanting to leave. Mid-career teachers were the most likely to be considering leaving—teachers like Betty and Aran with decades of experience. The “excessive workload” driving teacher attrition rates does not reveal itself gradually. It slaps you in the face from day one, which starts long before your paid hours do. You arrive early to print materials for your classes, correct assignments, finish planning lessons and get whatever other work done you need to, all of which is impossible once the bells start ringing. From about 9am to 3pm, you teach for four to five hours. This usually means interacting with up to six different classes and as many as 150 students, each with their own unique learning needs. These have to be accommodated into your lesson designs and teaching strategies—along with the curricula for the various classes—and all this has to be done well before you arrive in the classroom. During teaching hours, you play parent, social worker, IT technician, judge, entertainer and—if you’re lucky—educator to around 25 young people at a time. You careen back and forth between lessons that “include moments of genuine fulfilment”, as one self-exiled teacher[ puts](https://blog.aare.edu.au/demoralised-i-left-teaching-because-i-love-it/?ref=redflag.org.au) it, and others that are “dreadful, even violent, leaving you anxious and wondering how you’ll go back the next day”. In your breaks, you are often expected to undertake additional supervision duties in the schoolyard or have to complete administrative work arising from the day’s classes, like documenting challenging student behaviour and how you dealt with it. Then, when students finally leave, meetings start. Within this normalised daily frenzy, the core work of your job—planning lessons to support students’ varied needs in the classroom, preparing teaching resources and providing feedback on student work—is basically unpaid and mainly done from home. It is little wonder, then, that full-time teachers on average [report](https://www.monash.edu/%5F%5Fdata/assets/pdf%5Ffile/0009/3757599/What-the-profession-needs-now-AEU-Paper-1.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) doing 12.5 hours of unpaid extra work each week. This is the equivalent of working 6.5 days a week. It is also little surprise that 90 percent of Australian teachers report experiences of moderate to severe stress, and more than 60 percent report symptoms of moderate to severe anxiety and depression, according to a recent, comprehensive [survey](https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/08/teachers-depression-anxiety-and-stress-three-times-national-norm?ref=redflag.org.au) of teacher mental health and workplace stress conducted by UNSW. These levels are more than double the population-wide average. Without a significant overhaul of working conditions, teachers feel they have little choice but to leave. “I am working on an escape plan” is how one teacher put it to Monash researchers who published a [report](https://www.monash.edu/%5F%5Fdata/assets/pdf%5Ffile/0008/3061169/Teachers-Perceptions-of-their-Work-2022.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) on the profession in 2022\. Unbearable conditions not only drive teachers out of the profession but also make it difficult to attract people, compounding the already unmanageable workload for those who remain. This vicious circle quietly annihilates an important social right: that of education for all, not just the wealthy. This situation is by design. At both a federal and state level, Labor and Liberal governments have for decades [starved ](https://saveourschools.com.au/funding/new-schools-agreements-show-public-schools-will-remain-underfunded-in-2034/?ref=redflag.org.au)public schools of resources, driven teachers to breaking point and, with this, incentivised families to enrol their kids in private schools. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released this year [shows ](https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/education/schools/2025?ref=redflag.org.au)that the overall percent of students enrolled in public schools is at a record low, with private school enrolments growing at six times the rate of government schools. Trevor Cobbold, convener of the organisation Save Our Schools, toldthe *Guardian* that the biggest factor driving the shift towards private schools is the funding gap. “Public schools”, he noted, simply “have far fewer human and material resources than over-funded private schools”. In this deteriorating situation, families with the economic means to do so are more likely to turn away from public schools, leading them to become understaffed and overworked ghettos for the most disadvantaged sections of society and most burnt-out teachers. Turning the tide on structural inequality in the education system won’t be easy. But Victorian teachers, who are set to strike on 24 March for better pay and conditions, provide some hope. Their response is not an individual “escape,” but a collective fight back that points the finger clearly at those responsible for the disastrous state of public schools today. --- *Maria Dabbas is a member of the Australian Education Union.* ### Labor’s offer to Victorian school staff is a disgrace URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-offer-to-victorian-school-staff-is-a-disgrace/ Last updated: 2026-03-28T05:13:42.000Z Victorian teachers have suffered [a real pay cut of 11 percent since 2021](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1va-Dio-nGmi0WNWVtSGJ8Myo46u096VtolvXPMh-gsM/edit?tab=t.0&ref=redflag.org.au). On Monday, Jacinta Allan’s Labor government offered a new contract that doesn’t make up for this pay cut and worsens our already intolerable working conditions. The leaders of the Australian Education Union rightly rejected the disgraceful offer, put forward shortly after 77 percent of eligible union members voted to strike on 24 March. The government’s offer is for a nominal wage increase of 17 percent—8 percent in the first year, followed by 3 percent in each subsequent year of the four-year agreement. This is far from a “generous” offer, despite the media hype. The AEU leaders forced through the previous agreement, which contained a [2 percent annual pay rise](https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-teachers-deserve-better/) (despite [a “No” vote of nearly 40 percent](https://redflag.org.au/article/big-no-vote-step-forward-school-staff/)), just as inflation took off. Now, inflation has increased again (to [3.8 percent a year](https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/consumer-price-index-australia/latest-release?ref=redflag.org.au)) and is expected to climb further as recent oil price rises are passed through the economy. So real wages are again under pressure. We need our full claim of 15 percent in the first year just to get back to the starting line. Graduate teachers are already $8,489 poorer each year under the current agreement than they would have been if our wages had risen in line with inflation. For experienced teachers, that figure rises to $13,964 every year. This is equivalent to losing a month’s pay every year. Disgracefully, the government’s pay offer to education support staff is even lower than for teachers: just 4 percent in the first year, then 3 percent increases over the following years. Education support workers, who already receive lower wages, are essential to educational equity. As well as handling all the essential maintenance and admin tasks at a school, ES staff are vital in classrooms to ensure students with varied needs and abilities can meaningfully participate in school. Refusing to recognise ES work sends a clear message about what the Labor government values: saving dollars at the expense of some of the most vulnerable students and most under-resourced school staff. [We are demanding](https://news.aeuvic.asn.au/bold-claims-for-a-better-deal/?ref=redflag.org.au) a 35 percent pay increase for all school staff over three years (15 percent in the first year, followed by 10 percent over each of the next two years). This is essential for school staff to get ahead of inflation, rather than continuing to fall behind it. The Allan government’s offer of 17 percent for teachers and 13 percent for education support staff barely brings us to the 2022 starting line, let alone accounting for the inflation expected over the next four years. Did the Labor government really think we would accept another agreement that leaves us unable to afford skyrocketing rents, and increasing mortgage repayments and basic living expenses, compelling more and more workers to abandon public schools? The real kicker, however, is not its pathetic salary offer; it’s the attempt to undermine our working conditions. In a flagrant disregard for the insurmountable workload teachers already experience, the government proposed abolishing the cap on face-to-face teaching hours for educators. In its place, teachers would be subject to a department-controlled workload index, with even less recourse to enforce limits on our workloads. Adding insult to injury, the Allan government also proposed mandating up to three hours of meetings per week for teachers (up from two hours) and removing caps on after-hours events that teachers are asked to attend, with time-in-lieu arrangements replaced by an overtime allowance. Finally, the offer shirks any mention of funding. At the moment, school councils are so strapped for cash that they can’t even fund what are meant to be their legal minimum obligations. For instance, there is often no money for when teachers are sick, meaning classes can be much larger than the limits set in the enterprise agreement. School staff deserve much more than this offer. Perhaps the government strategy is to scare us with threats and then to back off—to lull us into accepting an unacceptable status quo, and a wage result that leaves us worse off compared to where we were at the start of the decade. We shouldn’t fall for this. We should be prepared to vote down any offer that fails to meet crucial claims on wages (both on the percentage increase and paid lunch breaks for ES staff), workload (smaller class sizes and an ES in every classroom) and funding. Paying teachers and school staff properly cannot and should not come at the expense of our conditions. Improving both is crucial if public schools are to retain teachers and ensure that all students have the right to an education. Private schools literally [build castles](https://cityhub.com.au/sydney-private-schools-60-million-castle-provokes-public-outcry/?ref=redflag.org.au) with public money on their well-manicured grounds. Labor can find money for [jails](https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-teachers-demand-dignity-but-wont-get-it-without-a-fight/), but not for the schools that would give every student the start they need. The richest 200 people in this country more than tripled their wealth (to [$668 billion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial%5FReview%5FRich%5FList%5F2025?ref=redflag.org.au)) in the ten years to 2025\. All of this tells us that the money is there—but it will take serious industrial action, including multi-day strikes, to force the government to fund schools. So it’s crucial that we start our industrial campaign with a bang—with a massive strike next Tuesday, 24 March. If you’re a teacher, be at Trades Hall at 10:30am. [Socialists in Schools](https://www.instagram.com/socialistsinschoolsvic/?ref=redflag.org.au) will be meeting at the eight-hour monument across the road. If you’re a parent, don’t let your kids get an education in strike-breaking at a mainly empty school. Instead, take the day off and bring your kids, your workmates, and your friends to Trades Hall, and march with us to parliament. ### Pro-Palestine activists arrested under new ‘hate speech’ laws URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/pro-palestine-activists-arrested-under-new-hate-speech-laws/ Last updated: 2026-03-23T11:05:18.000Z A bit over a month ago, I [wrote](https://redflag.org.au/article/queensland-government-attacks-free-speech/) in *Red Flag* that the hate speech laws tabled by the Queensland LNP government were an “extreme, authoritarian attack on the Palestine movement and civil liberties”. This was proven correct mere hours after the laws went into effect, when two activists were arrested by Queensland Police at a peaceful Students for Palestine demonstration. Their alleged crime? Using a popular pro-Palestine slogan that calls for equal rights for Palestinians and an end to Israel’s genocide. Tim Nicholls, the health minister, justified the arrests by claiming that the Bondi gunmen used the slogan before their attack in December. When asked to provide evidence for this baseless claim, his spokesperson explained that he “misspoke”. Nicholls himself is yet to apologise for what appears to be a bald-faced lie. The LNP claims that the slogan is about spreading hatred and violence; this isn’t true. As Liam Parry, one of those arrested, said in his speech at the rally: “The slogan is about saying those people \[the Palestinians\] deserve freedom ... it is a slogan of liberation for the people of Palestine”. He has since been charged and will face court in April. The other activist arrested, a young woman who had the slogan hand-written on her singlet, was released with a caution. The arrests mark the beginning of a new, dark period in Queensland politics. We knew freedom of speech and expression would be threatened by the laws. That the police immediately used them to arrest peaceful protesters shows how committed this LNP government is to undermining these fundamental rights. At a press conference on Thursday, Police Minister Dan Purdie continued the government’s line, claiming that police arrested the activists to “stamp out hate”. Again, this is ludicrous. The pro-Palestine movement has been the largest anti-racist movement in this country for generations. More than that, though, for anyone who knows anything of this LNP government, Purdie’s hypocrisy is eye-watering. His government is infamous for its “adult crime, adult time” laws, which allow children convicted of certain crimes to be sentenced as adults. “Adult crime, adult time” has been described by Amnesty International as “openly racist”, as the laws disproportionately target Indigenous youth. The LNP recently updated the legislation to add “riot” as an offence punishable by life imprisonment (yes, you read that right). If Purdie wants to stamp out hate, he should start by looking in the mirror. The double standards are everywhere. Two weeks ago, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson said in an interview on Sky News that she did not think there was such a thing as a good Muslim. As far as I know, no police have come knocking at Pauline’s door. This week, a far-right activist stormed an iftar dinner at a Mosque in Ballarat, Victoria, screaming Islamophobic abuse and death threats. The *ABC* [reported](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-10/muslim-community-left-traumatised-after-attack-on-dinner/106431706?ref=redflag.org.au) that the attack traumatised many of the young children in attendance. The man was not arrested, nor have any charges been laid. Open hatred against Muslims is fine, according to politicians and the police. But if you say, or wear a T-shirt displaying a popular slogan calling for equal rights for Palestinians, and an end to a genocide? Expect to be arrested and threatened with prison. Of course, these laws were never about stamping out racial hatred. They are an attempt to silence an anti-racist, anti-imperialist movement which, in the eyes of the ruling class, has gone on for far too long. None of this means our movement will slow down. An early sign that the strategy of intimidation was failing was the large turnout at the protest on Wednesday. The willingness of hundreds of young activists to skip class and stand up for the Palestinians, despite all the slander and intimidation, should give all of us hope. We have a lot to fight for. Gaza remains under blockade, and Israel is moving to annex much of the West Bank and southern Lebanon. The US and Israel are massacring civilians in Iran, bombing schools and turning Tehran into a hellscape of rubble and toxic gas. The Albanese government has now sent Australian military personnel to assist in fighting Trump’s criminal war. If the LNP and Queensland police think that they can stop us from protesting against such crimes, they are wrong. --- *Connor is a co-convener of Students for Palestine Queensland.* ### Why does Australia appear so beholden to the US? URL: https://redflag.org.au/why-does-australia-appear-so-beholden-to-the-us/ Last updated: 2026-07-04T21:15:41.000Z When Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced that Australia was sending troops to Vietnam in April 1965, he said the commitment was in response to a South Vietnamese government request for help. We now know that Menzies was lying. He began lobbying the South Vietnamese to issue a formal request only after he had decided to send troops. The PM, who [previously had said](https://redflag.org.au/article/how-do-holocausts-happen/) that Adolf Hitler was “one of the really great men of the century”, clearly felt the need for a sellable public line for military engagement. Thinking about that lying suck for fascism, it’s hard not to be reminded of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Unlike Menzies’ open fascist sympathies, they seem uncomfortable with the global rise of the far right. But in a way, that only makes their accommodations to Trump more condemnable. The PM was one of the first to offer [unconditional support](http://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/penny-wong/media-release/statement-iran?ref=redflag.org.au) to the US war on Iran, which is little more than a mass assassination campaign accompanied by the destruction of vital infrastructure. Wong [didn’t blink](https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22media%2Fpressrel%2F10737382%22;src1=sm1?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=FOREIGN%20MINISTER%3A%20I%27ll%20leave,in%20the%20region%20for%20decades.) when questioned about the justification for or legality of the operation. Somewhat like Menzies, Albanese said that Australia sending an E-7A Wedgetail surveillance aircraft and missiles to the Middle East was in response to a request for help from the United Arab Emirates. (That the government’s announcement of the deployment came just hours after a long early-morning call between US President Trump and the PM was not suspicious at all.) Yet it would have been more surprising if Albanese and Wong had been anything other than supine in the face of the latest American atrocities. Accepting and accommodating American prerogatives are prerequisites for anyone aspiring to run Australian capitalism—this has been established over more than a century of engagement between the two countries’ states. ### **Australia’s peculiar imperialism** Australia occupies a peculiar place in the world system. On the one hand, it has always been a component of a larger empire. Most obviously, the colonies were little more than Asian outposts of the British Empire; even after federation in 1901, when the new state gained the status of a self-governing dominion within the empire, the ruling class viewed itself as British, and the government didn’t really command full sovereignty. As it became more independent of Britain, the establishment here fought to integrate the country into another empire, gradually becoming part of the more informal network of states that made up the US-led Western “order”. Yet, on the other hand, Australia has also been an imperialist state in its own right for more than a century, harbouring its own agenda and pursuing its own interests within the framework of its great power patrons. This dual character—empire-bound independence—is key to understanding first, why Australian governments, whether Labor or Liberal, have joined or supported every war launched by Britain or the US for more than a century; and second, how what appears to be sycophancy or spinelessness is often calculated self-interest, even if it doesn’t always pay off. Think of it as analogous to someone joining an exclusive golf or “gentlemen’s” club. He applies of his own free will to join. Once admitted, he abides by the club’s rules and regulations and accepts that there are a range of restrictions on his behaviour and a series of responsibilities to uphold as a member—secrecy, defending and contributing to the club, helping other members and so on. But he joins, knowing that the price of admission is more than offset by the benefits of mingling, making connections and doing deals with like-minded rich and powerful people. Allan Gyngell, a former director-general of the Office of National Assessments, described the outlook of the Australian political establishment, somewhat one-sidedly, as [the fear of abandonment](https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/fear-abandonment?ref=redflag.org.au)—the paranoia of a tiny ruling class embedded far from its perceived mother country. Australia’s state oversees a population of fewer than 30 million, in a region of nearly 5 billion people. To be an independent and aggressive power in Asia, this implanted state required close alignment with a superpower outside Asia. To obtain such a close alignment, Australian imperialism has had to prove its worth—primarily by contributing to imperialist wars and providing diplomatic support—while finding ways to keep its key ally engaged in what has for the most part been a backwater of global capitalism: the far south-east of South-East Asia. Yet by proving its worth, it has also strengthened its regional hand through its privileged position within the world order, within “the US club”. ### **The imperial connection** In the post-federation era, the calculus goes all the way back to Alfred Deakin, the prime minister who, in a sense, inaugurated the “special relationship” between Australia and the US. In 1901, Deakin described the White Australia policy as “the Monroe Doctrine of the Commonwealth of Australia”. By this time, Australia’s local capitalist rulers had well absorbed the imperial impulse to dominate, colonise and exploit the areas surrounding the continent. Generating a national consciousness based on an idea of racial superiority was a key aspect of this project. The Australian capitalists knew that their capacity to project economic and political power was tied to the emerging great-power contest for naval supremacy in the Pacific. And it was obvious which power would best enable them: the British Empire, of which Australia was a component part. Yet London in the early twentieth century wasn’t having much truck with the Australian ruling class’s expansionist plans or desire for British resources to enable them. Deakin, for example, wanted to construct a defensive “island wall” of annexed territories as a first line of defence against the purported Japanese threat, but the British weren’t for it. The signing of the second British-Japanese treaty in 1905 exposed the diverging interests of London and its newly federated southern outpost on a range of questions, not least of which was the empire’s naval drawdown in the Pacific to focus on countering Germany closer to home. Australia’s capitalists felt betrayed. With imperial Japan’s power growing, Deakin—and the entire establishment—desperately wanted London to reverse course. To the annoyance of the British, who at the time were officially in charge of Australian foreign policy, Deakin invited the US Navy’s Atlantic fleet, then on a world tour, to visit in 1908\. Washington had recently announced itself as a world power after decisively winning the Spanish–American War and acquiring former Spanish territories, including the Philippines, where it had stationed more than 100,000 soldiers and constructed a major naval base. Rear Admiral Charles Stillman Sperry, commander of the fleet, reportedly said that the US Navy was a guarantee that Australia would “never experience the horrors of invasion”. This early dalliance with the US empire was relatively short lived. But it helped Deakin convince the British that Australia should have its own navy—ostensibly to pull its own weight in the empire, but clearly directed against Britain’s ally Japan. Moreover, it foreshadowed what would later become a pattern of behaviour: the Australian establishment attracting US power to the Australian continent as a low-cost way of projecting their own power in the Asia-Pacific while selling it as a form of defensive insurance against foreign invasion. ### **The switch** The most famous of the pro-US declarations came from Labor leader John Curtin, who [opined in late 1941](https://john.curtin.edu.au/pmportal/text/00468.html?ref=redflag.org.au) that “Australia looks to America”. President Roosevelt thought Curtin’s words only highlighted the PM’s “panic” and his “disloyalty” to London. But the sun was beginning to set on the British Empire. From 1940, one after the other, the European powers were driven out of South-East Asia by the Japanese: France from Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), Britain from Burma, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya and Borneo, the Dutch from the East Indies (Indonesia) and the Portuguese from East Timor, while Australia nearly lost control of its colony in New Guinea. While the US, too, was spectacularly routed in the Philippines, it regrouped and eventually, using Australia as a launching ground, led a counteroffensive to destroy the Japanese empire. White Australia breathed a sigh of relief. We now know that Japan had no intention of taking over the continent. But this country becoming, momentarily, the only outpost of “Western civilisation” in Asia, was particularly scarring for the local ruling class. In the history of Australian foreign relations, the fall of Singapore in 1942 stands out as perhaps the most panic-inducing moment for Australia’s rulers. The Australian establishment still very much viewed itself as British and remained committed to the much diminished British colonial projects in the region after the Second World War. And the Australian economy was still integrated into the British Commonwealth through an imperial preference system of imports and exports. But the strategic shift towards the US began in earnest after the start of the Cold War as Australia’s capitalists fretted about Japanese rearmament, the Chinese Revolution and Indonesia’s communist-coloured anti-colonialism. So Menzies sent small military detachments to help the British in Malaya in 1950 and 1955, and to Borneo in 1965, during Indonesia’s confrontation with the now independent but British-aligned Malaysia. But he sent far more troops, 15,000, to help the US in the Korean War in the early 1950s, and Liberal governments sent nearly 50,000 to help the US in Vietnam from 1965 to 1971. Menzies’ external affairs minister, Percy Spender, was determined to pledge Australian troops to Korea before the British did so. His reasoning was that Washington would look more favourably on Australia making an independent contribution to the anti-communist crusade. He was also trying to persuade the Americans to formalise some sort of Pacific Monroe Doctrine, or a Pacific equivalent to the North Atlantic Treaty, in which Canberra could be an enthusiastic junior partner—something that Labor’s wartime prime ministers, Curtin and Ben Chifley, had also raised. The establishment wanted to march with America—to keep US imperialism engaged in Asia as a bulwark against Japan, China and Russia, and to have it view Australian imperialism as an ally worth arming and consulting on imperial policy. Spender is credited as the architect of the subsequent Anzus Treaty, which fell short of some of his more grandiose expectations, but nevertheless became the foundation for the next 75 years of Canberra’s defence and foreign policy. It is billed as a guarantee that the US will be the ultimate guardian of Australia, although Washington never really viewed it that way, and no credible evaluation has ever found a serious military threat to the Australian continent. It is more akin to that exclusive membership card to the club of the powerful—a signifier that the Australian ruling class, like the Americans, can get away with its own transgressions. ### **The logic** This hard-nosed approach to US engagement is why it’s difficult to find any US actions that have prompted a rebuke from Canberra. No war crime has ever been too great for Australia’s politicians not to ignore. In fact, Australia has fought with or supported the US in every major conflict since the First World War. And, since the 1960s, the Australian military has become increasingly “interoperable” and “interchangeable”—meaning that its command structures, equipment, munitions, standards and software allow it to integrate seamlessly with the US military in joint operations. The payoff for Australian imperialism is access to equipment and intelligence that it wouldn’t be able to develop on its own without dramatically expanding the military budget. In more recent decades, Labor PM Bob Hawke was among the first to offer support and to join the US-led war against Iraq in 1990\. When doing so, he consulted only a handful of his own ministers and US President George H.W. Bush. Liberal PM John Howard followed Hawke and Menzies, being one of the first to pledge troops to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq in the early twentieth century. George W. Bush, then the US president, described Australia as “a sheriff” in the Asia-Pacific region in 2003, a remark that caused furore in Indonesia and Malaysia precisely because it was consistent with how the Australian ruling class viewed itself behind closed doors. Then there was Julia Gillard’s [embarrassing address to the US Congress](https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/transcript-of-julia-gillards-speech-to-congress/uk3tsioa6?ref=redflag.org.au) in 2011, in which she gushed: “You have a true friend down under ... I believe you \[America\] can do anything”. She even one-upped John Curtin: not just Australia, not just now, but “*the world always looks to America*”, Gillard said. She probably didn’t need to be so fawning—but it fit the pattern of ingratiation through which Australia’s rulers continually try to prove their relevance and loyalty, with the aim of augmenting their own regional power. While some moments have been more cringeworthy than others, and some engagements more costly or criminal, the imperialist logic is broadly the same over the decades. Australia’s geographical location has resulted in a ruling class quite dissimilar in outlook to, say, Canada’s: like Israel’s, the establishment here viewed itself as an isolated outpost of civilisation surrounded by barbarian hordes. That racist paranoia gave it a particularly driven imperialist posture, which has stayed with it. It’s true that the racist element diminished as White Australia faded into a more distant memory, and as the country became more multiracial and multicultural. Also, as more countries to the north developed centralised states, grew and liberalised their economies, eradicated communist insurgencies and oriented to the Western powers, the region appeared more as a sea of economic opportunities than of political threats. Yet China’s relentless rise has stirred many of the old anxieties and reinvigorated the logic of inter-imperial rivalry. Once again, the Australian ruling class is preoccupied with the thought of an Asian power dominating Asia. So it continues aggressively linking with the US empire. While Australia’s rulers somewhat seamlessly shifted from a declining British Empire to a rising American empire, there is no indication that they intend to align with a rising China any more than they countenanced an alliance with Japan (a very limited exception was fighting alongside that empire, at the behest of Britain, to destroy German influence in the Pacific in the First World War). There are several reasons why that’s the case, but there’s no need to explore them here. The point is simply that the seeming inability of Albanese and Wong to do much other than toe the Washington line has a broader logic: looking like spineless lapdogs is the price Australia’s rulers pay to secure US interests in the Australian continent. It’s the price they pay for a seat at the imperial table, with all the attendant military hardware that few other states receive, and the intelligence networks they couldn’t create on their own. It is a choice they make: being rabidly empire-bound to increase the independent power of Australian imperialism. ### The hypocrisy of the Iranian women’s soccer team scandal URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-hypocrisy-of-the-iranian-womens-soccer-team-scandal/ Last updated: 2026-03-14T02:55:16.000Z The Labor government is falling over itself to celebrate the brave escape of members of the Iranian women’s soccer team. Anthony Albanese would have us believe he was “moved by the plight of these brave women”. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke did a photo op with the soccer players, promising, “They are welcome to stay in Australia, to be safe and have a home here”. As Labor joins America and Israel’s war on Iran, they want to paint themselves as allies of the women and ordinary people of Iran against the repressive Islamic regime. Bullshit doesn’t begin to capture it. The Labor Party doesn’t care about refugees fleeing war and authoritarianism. It cares even less about the women of the Middle East. It is cynically exploiting the Iranian soccer team story to whip up more propaganda justifying the war. Our government has the gall to pretend that it cares about the plight of women in Iran while it joins a war that has already killed hundreds of Iranian women, including 165 people at a girls’ school bombed by the US. The Labor Party is happy to pose for photo shoots with the Iranian team, but is willing to ignore the endless images of the women and girls who have been murdered in the Gaza genocide. Labor has backed Israel to the hilt in its ongoing war. The government’s welcome of the Iranian soccer players fleeing persecution is in stark contrast to the way it treats other refugees—and, increasingly, migrants. Just hours after meeting with the Iranian team, Tony Burke announced new laws aimed at banning temporary visa holders from the Middle East from coming to Australia, in a further move towards Trumpian immigration politics. In February, Albanese ran a Pauline Hanson-inspired campaign to stop the so-called ISIS brides—Australian women and their children languishing in Syrian refugee camps, many who were trafficked by their husbands—from returning to Australia. The Australian Federal Police carried out a secretive operation to get in contact with and help the Iranian players escape from their state minders. The Immigration Department kicked into gear, processing their visa requests in four and a half hours in the middle of the night. For most refugees fleeing war and persecution, their experience with the Australian government could not be more different. For decades, Labor and the Liberals have weaponised the repressive and bureaucratic machinery of the state against refugees trying to come to Australia. Border Force, for years, turned back boats trying to reach Australia. Those who did make it were sent to offshore detention camps where they languished indefinitely. There are still more than 100 people detained in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Many Iranian refugees have suffered at the hands of the Labor-designed immigration system. Earlier this year, the UN Committee Against Torture found that the Australian government failed to protect an Iranian man from torture while in detention, including having his throat slit by a security guard. In 2024, a queer Iranian man who has been detained for over a decade had his appeal for freedom denied, meaning he faces deportation to Iran, where he would suffer persecution. The Labor Party is trying to sell a feel-good story: that the Australian government stands with the people of Iran against the oppressive regime. The real headline is that our rulers don’t care about ordinary people. At best, you’ll be cynically supported if it helps the government sell a war, like the women of the Iranian soccer team. At worst, you’re disposable, like the thousands of women and ordinary people who will die at the hands of Western governments in their latest murderous war. ### Albanese signs up for Trump’s war without even asking what it’s about URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/albanese-signs-up-for-trumps-war-without-even-asking-what-its-about/ Last updated: 2026-03-18T06:44:09.000Z Mere hours after the first missiles struck Tehran, Australia had signed up for the new US/Israeli war. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was one of the first and most enthusiastic world leaders to declare support for the attacks, in which Israel and the US have so far carpet-bombed capital cities, killed 165 Iranian schoolgirls plus thousands more civilians, started catastrophic fires in Tehran oil facilities and expelled half a million people from Southern Lebanon. A joint statement from the PM, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles on 28 February stated: “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security”. Albanese’s response is sycophantic even compared with some of the US’s other close allies. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer initially resisted using British bases for the strikes, and France and Germany called for negotiations rather than supporting them. The speed and strength of Albanese’s support mark Australia out as the most willing to blindly follow the US into war. And blindly it was. Wong has confirmed that Australia had no advance notice of the strikes. When asked about the justification, she told a press conference, “I’ll leave it for the United States and Israel to speak of the basis, the legal basis for the attacks”. Members of Labor’s right faction anonymously voiced concern to the *Guardian* about how rapidly Albanese, Marles and Wong declared Australian support for the war, while similar concerns were raised in a meeting of the party’s left faction in early March. Labor’s enthusiasm for this war is in sharp contrast to the party’s response to the Iraq war in 2003\. When Liberal Prime Minister John Howard sent the first Australian aircraft to Iraq in 2003, Albanese attacked him during parliamentary question time, [saying](https://www.ipsnews.net/2003/03/politics-australia-not-in-our-name-protesters-say-of-iraq-war/?ref=redflag.org.au): “What the lights in the sky represent is the death of Iraqi civilians, something for which I think Australia is taking part much to our shame”. Labor leader at the time, Simon Crean, denounced the war, and Labor MPs [spoke](https://www.greenleft.org.au/2003/526/news/thousands-march-brisbane?ref=redflag.org.au) at demonstrations against it. Australian unions came out against the war and supported the marches. The difference is that, back then, Labor was in opposition. Now, the party runs the country. This means it is responsible for upholding the interests of Australian capital, and that includes its interests overseas. Being in alliance with the world’s only superpower, the United States, is key to that—the alliance provides protection for Australian businesses overseas, favourable trade agreements and security guarantees that the Australian capitalist class depends on. For the political class, their role is to demonstrate commitment to the US alliance, whatever the US decides to do politically and militarily. Labor’s support for war this time has knock-on effects—especially when it comes to unions. This illegal, illegitimate and murderous war is not being met with the same opposition from unions as in 2003, when they were an important part of the anti-war movement. Just like with the Gaza genocide, keeping Labor in power matters more to union movement leaders than principles like standing against militarism and war. What makes the situation even worse is that this time around—unbelievably—the war has even less official justification. Trump, Netanyahu and Albanese have barely bothered to pretend there is a legitimate case for bombing Iran. In the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003, real effort was put into deceiving the public to justify the invasion. Dodgy dossiers about weapons of mass destruction were concocted, fake intelligence leaks were orchestrated and there was a lot of lofty talk about bringing democracy to places the US President George W. Bush struggled to even pronounce the names of. This time, the aggressors haven’t even taken the time to make up coherent lies, relying instead on the doctrine of “might is right” and extreme arrogance. As White House advisor Stephen Miller [put](https://www.facebook.com/reel/25484445067883149) it, “We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we’re going to conduct ourselves as a superpower”. Trump’s warlords will burn and blast their way through any person, school or city they choose. Unsurprisingly, this is the [least](https://archive.md/7002a?ref=redflag.org.au) supported war in US history. Except, of course, in Canberra. Labor’s response to this depravity is simple: they’re in. Labor minister Mark Butler told the *Today Show* that “all of us are nervous about this becoming a very long, protracted war”. Butler’s statement was an admission that the government knows that it’s a huge gamble to enter a war led by an erratic far-right president in an explosive region with no clear plan or path out. They know that it could mean slaughtering tens of thousands. They know that it could make some of the oldest cities in the world uninhabitable for generations. And they know that the money they’re [pouring](https://rahu.org.au/aukus-no-budget-for-housing-billions-for-war/?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=As%20the%20rate%20of%20people,a%20bunch%20of%20scrap%20metal.) into weapons of mass murder could instead solve the housing crisis in our own country. But for them, maintaining the US alliance trumps any and all of these considerations. If ever there were a case against the idea that changing who is in power will never be enough to make society decent and fair, Labor’s response to this war is it. We need to get rid of the system in which supporting senseless death and destruction makes political and economic sense and is a requirement of being in power. ### Union members at Sydney University vote to fight for a 25 percent wage rise URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/union-members-at-sydney-university-vote-for-a-25-percent-wage-rise/ Last updated: 2026-03-12T03:21:16.000Z National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) members at Sydney University have taken an important step towards reclaiming some of our wages lost to the inflation crisis of the last few years. At a meeting to launch the next enterprise bargaining campaign on Thursday, 5 March, 61 percent of the 300 union members voted to increase our pay claim to [25 percent](https://nteufightback.org/?ref=redflag.org.au) over the life of the next agreement—10 percent in the first year, 10 percent in the second year, and 5 percent or the inflation rate (whichever is higher) in year three. The resounding vote was a rejection of the NTEU national council’s controversial wage claim cap of 20 percent over the life of the next agreement. It is an important step towards reclaiming the tens of thousands of dollars workers at Sydney University [have lost to inflation](https://nteufightback.org/2026/03/05/analysis-wages-lost-to-inflation-at-sydney-university-2021-2026/?ref=redflag.org.au) since the previous enterprise agreement expired. A higher education officer 6.4 (a classification and salary grade for non-academic staff) is down $31,241 since 1 July 2021\. A HEO 4.3 is down $24,219, and an associate lecturer on the highest pay grade (level 8) is down $34,175\. While we have received wage increases thanks to industrial action in 2022 and 2023, they have been nowhere near enough to keep pace with the rising cost of living. On average, our wages have lagged inflation by nearly 7 percent in each year of our current enterprise agreement. Rents have [increased by 44](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-08/rental-prices-surge-almost-44-per-cent-review-finds/105865000?ref=redflag.org.au) percent in five years, the cost of groceries and other consumer items continue to rise, and bills keep getting more expensive. In this context, asking for 25 percent over the life of the agreement is a very modest claim. Even if won in full, it would not make up for the lost wages of the last five years. Other unions, such as the Australian Education Union in Victoria, have pushed for wage increases of 35 percent. In 2024, the nurses’ union in Victoria won an increase of 28.4 percent over four years after members rejected a 12 percent pay offer from the government. University workers losing hundreds of dollars from their weekly pay packets ought to be a major concern for our union. So why has this situation been allowed to happen? For too many years, our union leaders have been passive at best and obstructionist at worst when it comes to fighting for wage rises. In the NTEU, we have fought the union leaders, both locally and nationally, since 2020, when they voted to endorse the controversial Jobs Protection Framework. The scheme, which ultimately failed as a national strategy, would have effectively cut our pay by up to 15 percent in exchange for empty promises of job security. This latest cap on wage claims was imposed by a meeting of the NTEU national council in October 2025, the same body that voted in favour of potential wage cuts back in 2020\. A sizable minority of 39 percent voted against the cap. Since then, an [open letter](https://forms.gle/F2uznSG5xS8AcJBN6?ref=redflag.org.au) calling for the removal of the wage-claim cap has garnered more than 200 signatures. The vote at Sydney University is an important message to a union leadership that is selling its members short. We showed that when a group of activists gives a lead, there are plenty of union members prepared to fight for a substantial pay rise to claw back some of our recent losses. Sydney University is a rich institution, registering a $1.04 billion surplus in 2021, $298.5 million in 2022, $351.8 million in 2023 and $550 million in 2024\. While the vice chancellor, senior executives and private consultants rake in huge salaries and bonuses, workers are left with increasing workloads and declining real wages. Workers everywhere need a pay rise. If we can launch a serious industrial campaign at one of the wealthiest institutions in the country, we will set a good example for others to follow. --- *Alma Torlakovic is an NTEU branch committee member at Sydney University, an NTEU national councillor and a founding member of the rank-and-file group* [NTEU Fightback](https://nteufightback.org/?ref=redflag.org.au). ### The US-Israeli war on Iran URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/the-us-israeli-war-on-iran/ Last updated: 2026-03-12T02:23:40.000Z Emma and Chloe discuss the appalling US-Israeli war on Iran. They explain why Trump has started this war, the Australian government's response, and the recent sordid history of US imperialism. ### Further reading “[Why the US is attacking Iran](https://redflag.org.au/article/why-the-us-is-attacking-iran/)” by Tom Bramble in Red Flag. ### Why the US is attacking Iran URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-the-us-is-attacking-iran/ Last updated: 2026-03-18T06:43:54.000Z More than 1,200 dead, schools blown up, entire streets flattened, vital infrastructure destroyed—this is the cost of the US and Israel’s war on Iran. Another 500 lives in Lebanon have been wiped out by Israel. The war is not being fought for democracy, nor to alleviate the suffering of the Iranian people at the hands of the Tehran regime. This, the seventh attack on a foreign country since Trump came to office, is about the US exercising military terror—the one thing in which it still leads the world—to protect its domination in the Middle East and to send a message to other big powers that it means to stay top dog. The US and Israel are unleashing barbarism in Iran. Admiral Brad Cooper, US commander in charge of Operation Epic Fury, told the press on the third day of the war: “In simple terms, we’re focused on shooting all the things that can shoot at us”. In the US military’s rules of war, that includes a primary school where 165 young girls were ripped to shreds by one of Trump’s “precision bombing” raids. As well as apartment buildings, TV broadcasting studios, emergency service units, hotels, sports stadiums, hospitals, Red Crescent offices, UNESCO-protected historic buildings and police stations, all of which have been heavily damaged if not smashed to pieces by days of aerial bombing. The US has now hit 6,000 targets in Iran, a bombardment twice as intense as George W. Bush’s “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad in 2003. For all the US stories about liberating the Iranian people and carrying out surgical strikes, London’s *Daily Telegraph*, a right-wing newspaper and no friend of Iran, told the real story: “Tehran an ‘apocalypse’ of hospitals in flames and children buried beneath rubble ... Highways choke with those fleeing as others shelter with nowhere left to run”. This is what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth means when he says: “Flying over their capital. Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be”. Hegseth couldn’t have spelled out more clearly the brutality of the US mission. Israel’s two-and-a-half-year genocide in Gaza has provided ample opportunity for it to hone its killing machine, which is now being deployed to murderous effect in Iran. Already, the war and its consequences have extended beyond the Middle East, with a US submarine sinking an Iranian naval frigate off the coast of Sri Lanka, taking the lives of more than 100 Iranian crew. Israel has invaded Lebanon, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee in terror, and threatening to turn Beirut into Gaza. Rising oil prices and disruption to exports are driving up the price of fertiliser, threatening harvests, increasing the price of food and pushing more people into hunger. Workers around the world are bearing the cost of higher petrol prices. Industries across Asia are shutting down due to fuel shortages. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a US think tank, conservatively estimates that every day of this war is costing the US public US$1 billion; others suggest a figure closer to $2 billion at a time the Trump administration is slashing welfare. The cost of the three US F15 jet fighters shot down in friendly fire, $300 million, is equivalent to the cost of supplying 125,000 Americans with food aid or 100,000 children with healthcare. Not everyone is losing out, though: defence stocks are, according to the *Financial Times*, “the real winners”. Trump hoped this would be a short, sharp war through which intense bombardment and the death of the supreme leader might prompt forces within the Iranian leadership who might pose less of a threat to US interests to come forward to take the helm, as occurred in Venezuela. When this didn’t happen, Trump turned to talking about a war lasting many weeks and with much more aggressive bombing, telling the media a few days into the war: “We’re kicking the crap out of them. The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon”. On 7 March, he threatened the country with “complete destruction and certain death”. Given that the US military and successive presidents have for decades toyed with using nuclear weapons and given the expiry of even the weak international treaties limiting nuclear weapons, there is no limit to the terror the US and Israel might unleash. Much is at stake. Trump has stated that an attack on Cuba, which the administration has called “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security, is next on the list of targets. US and Israeli terrorism in the Middle East must be resisted. ### **Why is the US attacking Iran?** Trump has given a number of often conflicting objectives for the war. That the US is coming to the rescue of the Iranian people striving for democracy against a brutal autocracy run by religious fanatics, or that the invasion is needed to stop an imminent nuclear or ballistic missile attack by the Tehran regime. That the war is to bring an end to Iran’s support for international terrorism or to install a leadership that will respect peaceful coexistence with its neighbours and which will answer to the US president. This is the same garbage that President George W. Bush told us about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the lead-up to the US invasion in 2003. As if Trump, who has unleashed ICE goons against migrants in America, who has attacked the electoral system with a view to fixing the November mid-term elections, who has tried to turn the entire US state into a means to extend his own power and wealth and who has applauded fascist terror gangs at home, gives a damn about democracy in Iran. Trump didn’t even consult Congress before attacking Iran. Trump and his family have made fortunes in business dealings with the Gulf monarchies, tiny elites sitting on top of vast oil reserves and a working class made of indentured labour who are denied even the most basic rights. And then there’s Israel, which would rather kill Palestinians than let them decide their destiny. If Trump wants to stop a country sponsoring international terrorism, he should look much closer to home. The US has left a trail of massacres and misery in its repeated wars in the Middle East, most notoriously the so-called War on Terror, which took the lives of millions of civilians and destroyed the economies of Afghanistan and Iraq. Its divide and rule tactics stoked religious and ethnic sectarianism that have plagued both countries. Partner in crime Israel has been in a constant state of war with Palestine since the 1930s, grabbing more and more land and driving millions of Palestinians from their homeland. But it has also backed others to carry out its dirty work. For more than a decade in the 1970s and 1980s, Israel created, armed and funded the so-called South Lebanon Army, which served as a proxy to attack the Palestine Liberation Organisation and, later, Hezbollah. In 1982, Israel worked closely with fascist militias to massacre 2,000 Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps. The US is trumpeting its war as a holy mission which will bring the Second Coming closer, while Israel is run by religious fundamentalists pursuing a dream of Greater Israel through terror. It’s pretty easy to see that the justifications for war that Trump and his cronies have given are nothing but lies. So, why then is the US attacking Iran? Clearly, there are domestic considerations. Trump’s support is steadily falling, and the Republicans face a serious reverse at the November mid-term elections from a people weary of inflation and squeezed living standards. Revelations in the Epstein files have hurt his administration. You can assume he hopes for a short war that allows him to claim victory, distract attention from troubles at home and boost his electoral fortunes. Even if he did promise his supporters “no more foreign wars”, the majority of Republican supporters support the attack on Iran. But US foreign policy can’t be reduced simply to the prerogatives or whims of a particular leader. Despite Trump’s efforts to convert the state apparatus into his own personal fiefdom, the US war machine has deeper considerations that stretch far beyond the two and a half years Trump has left in the White House. The US has been war-gaming an attack on Iran for decades. Trump may have pulled the trigger, but that doesn’t explain the war. Another potential explanation is that Israel is dragging the US into a war that it otherwise may not have initiated. Certainly, Israel is a hostile ethnostate that lives only by seizing land and, as such, it is impelled time and again to go to war. This explains its destruction of Gaza and its steadily growing occupation of the West Bank. And Israel’s ambitions are far greater than simply seizing historic Palestine. At its heart, Israel’s goal is to establish “Greater Israel”, stretching across the Middle East, potentially from the Mediterranean to the borders of Saudi Arabia. Israel regards Iran as its primary obstacle to this goal. Hence, it has regular wars with Iran and lobbies successive US administrations to lead a combined operation to eliminate the Islamic Republic. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now seized on what his government regards as an historic opportunity to smash Iran once and for all. Israel is also invading Lebanon, both to destroy Iran-backed Hezbollah and to grab more territory. This is not merely a wild adventure by the blood-soaked Netanyahu government; the attack on Iran and invasion of Lebanon are fully backed by Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid. Israel has no interest in “nation building” or finding leaders it can do a deal with while leaving the regime more or less intact. Chaos in the Middle East serves its purposes. As senior Israeli security adviser Dennis Citrinowicz told the *Financial Times* on 4 March, Israeli thinking is: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future or the stability of Iran”. If this means Iran collapses like Libya or Iraq, riven by bloody sectarian struggles for power, so much the better. The war undoubtedly aligns with the Israeli government’s long-term objectives, which is why when Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press on 3 March that the US had attacked Iran “preventatively” because it knew Israel was about to do so and Iran would then attack the US in retaliation, many believed this confirmed that Israel and its Washington lobbyists were bundling the US into war. Add to this decades-long US political and military support for Israel’s wars, with the genocide in Gaza only the most recent. But none of this proves that Israel drags the US into wars to the US’s detriment. The US backs Israel because it is a force multiplier for US imperialism in the Middle East. The Israeli military can be relied upon to strike America’s enemies without the US necessarily being involved or expending the resources that would be required for the US to carry out such missions on its own. That Israel does so also enables the US to avoid the kind of international diplomatic blowback that might follow from US attacks. Growing collaboration between Israel and the US in developing new weapons systems, and Israel’s testing of them on the field of battle, along with extensive intelligence sharing, only add to the benefits the US extracts from this relationship. What’s more, Israel can lash out in the Middle East without fear of a backlash at home: no other population in the region is as committed to Western interests as Israel’s. As former President Joe Biden told the US Senate in 1986: “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region”. It is this that explains the hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid the US has given Israel since it emerged as a regional power in the 1967 Six Day war with its Arab neighbours. This does not mean that Israel and the US are always perfectly aligned. Just last June, the US appeared to rein in its ally during the twelve-day war with Iran. But the two are very close allies that are united on the fundamentals. The US is not attacking Iran because Israel told it to. Blocking Iranian power in the region, if not the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, has long been a priority for Washington under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Oil, or more precisely, control over oil, is a key reason for this. The Middle East contains half of the world’s proven oil reserves and produces one-third of its oil. It also holds 40 percent of natural gas reserves and supplies one-quarter of global LNG exports. Twenty percent of the world’s oil and LNG exports travel through the Strait of Hormuz, making it the chokepoint of world energy supplies. Who controls the Middle East controls the world’s oil and gas markets. Oil remains central to the world economy, and because oil powers the world’s navies, jet fighters, bombers and tanks, it is critical also to the military machines. When it comes to controlling oil supplies, talk about a “rules-based order” is for the birds. Raw power is what matters. This is why every imperialist power has an eye on the region. The US dominates the Middle East and has done so since the former colonial overlords Britain and France were pushed out in the 1950s and 60s. It has relied on a series of client regimes and close allies that have hosted US bases housing tens of thousands of US armed forces personnel. Israel acts as an advance guard for US imperialism. The chief irritant to US imperialism in the region has been Iran, which in 1979 threw out the Western-backed Shah and expelled the US. Iran matters when it comes to US imperialist machinations. With a population of more than 90 million, the world’s third-largest oil reserves and well placed to control the oil trade through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran could not be ignored. In the late 1980s, the US threw its weight behind Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its decade-long war with Iran that cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides. As preparations were underway for an attack on Iraq in 2003, US hawks were pushing for an extension of the war to Iran, with a British official summing up the Bush team’s motto at the time to *Newsweek*: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran”. The US quagmire in Iraq put paid to such plans but did nothing to reduce US hostility to Iran, against which the US maintained deadly sanctions. Iran’s growing influence in the region following US defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq forced the US to alternate between compromise—as in Obama’s 2015 deal to wind back Iran’s nuclear enrichment program in return for lifting sanctions—and confrontation, as when Trump, in his first term, tore up the agreement and gave Israel a green light to assassinate Iranian leaders. Israel and the US have, in the last two or three years, decimated much of what was called the Iranian “axis of resistance”, which incorporated Hezbollah, Hamas, loyal militias in Iraq and the rebel movement in Yemen. The fall of al-Assad in Syria, another Iran ally, took another piece out of Iran’s regional armoury. Russia’s war in Ukraine has diverted Putin from coming to Iran’s aid. The mass protests and strikes for democracy in Iranian cities in recent years have demonstrated the unpopularity of the regime in the eyes of swathes of the Iranian public. The US believed that now was the time to strike. This explains the US marshalling the largest naval task force in decades in the Mediterranean and Arabian seas in the weeks before the attack, along with the dispatch of 100 fighter jets to bases in the Middle East and Europe to support operations. It is not that Israeli pressure on Washington and Israel’s first strike on Iran were irrelevant to the exact timing of the US attack, but the US was already set on a path to war. Just as importantly, war with Iran complements its own long-term objectives. So, the idea that the US is acting at the behest of Israel is wrong. It is important to look at who is popularising this idea and why. First, there are the liberals who believe that the US is or could be a force for good in the world, but is manipulated into going to war by Israel. Such a belief whitewashes the entire bloody history of the US. The US has invaded, bombed and killed without restraint for centuries. First, in destroying the Indigenous population and invading and occupying Mexican land. Later, starting with the 1898 war with Spain, it became a full-blown imperialist power that has waged war across every continent. It has done 99 percent of this without any Israeli lobbying. Downplaying the menace posed by the US empire in this way gets us nowhere. Even more dangerous are the outright antisemites and fascists who see Israel as calling the shots to the detriment of the US. Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens have amassed huge social media followings, and not just among those on the hard right, by peddling the idea, sometimes openly, sometimes coded, that “Jews run the world”, and hence the US is in the service of Israel. The left should have no truck with such claims. For the US empire, this war is about more than just defeating or weakening Iran. The US wants to use its war on Iran to demonstrate to friends and enemies further afield that it remains the regional and world hegemon. While the US may currently dominate the region, its rivals are never far away. Over decades, Russia has struck deals with local rulers in the region to draw them into its camp. More recently, China, the world’s largest exporter, has made inroads through its Belt and Road Initiative. With commercial prowess comes state penetration, threatening US hegemony. When China oversaw negotiations leading to a resumption of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023, alarm bells rang in Washington. If the US is able to subdue Iran, whatever form that might take, this will send a powerful message. China may have economic leverage, but when the chips are down, it is US military power that determines who rules the world. An Iran under US control would likely withdraw from the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Belt and Road Initiative. Taking down the Iranian regime would also weaken Russian influence in the Middle East, already hurt by the fall of al-Assad in Syria. A clear US victory will also be understood by its friends in the region. The Gulf monarchies are now important logistical, aviation and financial hubs in the world economy and an important factor in the regional balance of power. In return for cooperating with the US, these regimes get US backing, weapons and protection from internal dissent and foreign rivals. The Gulf monarchies did not want this war, and they are now wearing the consequences of it in the form of Iranian drones and missile attacks. But if the war indicates the dangers of US and Israeli imperialism in the region, a US victory will also tell the Gulf states that they have no option but to continue to follow Washington’s lead, and that includes financing US government debt with their huge reserves. Each imperialist power uses a combination of aid, finance, trade and violence to secure its spheres of influence. Control over energy supplies forms an important element in US considerations. The US depends very little on Middle Eastern oil; it exports as much as Saudi Arabia and imports relatively little. Its recent decapitation of the Venezuelan government gives US oil companies access to the world’s largest oil reserves, constituting one-sixth of the total. America’s allies and enemies are much more exposed to disruptions to Middle Eastern energy. On US orders, Europe and India have both substantially reduced their imports from Russia since the Ukraine invasion and switched to the Middle East. Europe now depends on the region for 20 percent of its oil and India one-half. China is even more dependent, relying on the Middle East for two-thirds of the total. Not just oil: Europe imports 10 percent of its LNG needs from Qatar, China one-third and India two-thirds. While some countries have built up big oil reserves, none have a surplus of LNG, nor is there any spare production capacity. US control of the spigot of Middle Eastern oil and gas puts the US in a strong position to twist the arms of countries that depend on it. We cannot tell how successful the US will be in achieving its goals. The whole mission may turn out to be a complete disaster, not just for the people of the region but for the US itself. George W. Bush declared “mission accomplished” six weeks into the Iraq war. The war ultimately destroyed his presidency. But as *Red Flag* has argued elsewhere of the US war drive under Trump: “Whether it can or will succeed in Iran or anywhere else is moot. The point is, Washington is not going down wondering. It has switched gears. This is a crash or crash through operation, to hell with laws, rights, decency and humanity”. The whole Trump project has been to dispense with the fig leaf of the “rules-based order” and to assert US power against both allies and enemies alike. Whether its imposition of tariffs, shutting down any domestic opposition, arresting opponents, arm-twisting allies under threat of sanctions, attacking sovereign states, backing Israel in its genocide in Gaza and expansion into the West Bank, it all comes down to the US using its unparallelled strength to bully weaker forces, not just for immediate gain, but to strengthen the position of the US empire long term. In November, the administration announced its new National Security Strategy. This proclaimed Trump’s determination to secure the Western hemisphere for the US. Hence the abduction of the president of Venezuela, the airstrikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, the threats against Colombia, Panama and Cuba, meddling in Brazil’s judicial system, the threat to take over Greenland and support for right-wing presidents in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, El Salvador and Paraguay who are all boasting of their own Trumpian programs at home. The so-called Donroe Doctrine does not mean that the US is going to withdraw to the Americas. The US is the global hegemon and is not about to cede Europe to Putin or Asia to Xi Jinping. Trump is about using the full power of the US state—financial and military—to intimidate North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners, to get them to shell out more for their own defence, to compel them to do deals with US companies, set up factories in the US and, perhaps, to shovel some money to Trump’s businesses. Trump is doing much the same in East and Southeast Asia. In response to the US openly mocking the “rules-based order”, there has been talk in recent months in Europe and Canada about creating a bloc of middle powers that might forge a path independent of the US. While this may be a long-term project, these governments face a reality that, for now, the world economy is still dominated by US finance and that they have no alternative sources for the quantity of weapons and military supplies they need. This has meant that, while some have grumbled about various aspects of the war, they have mostly fallen in behind the US. In the name of “defensive operations”, the Starmer government in Britain has opened airfields for US B1 bombers and allowed the US to use the Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has told Europeans: “Now is not the moment” to lecture the US on international law. The Albanese government, true to form, has plumbed new depths of sycophantism in its support for the war. On the day the nuclear-armed US and Israel attacked Iran, the government issued a statement that could have come from the White House, regurgitating all the lies about Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons program and its threat to global peace and international security. Citing the Iranian regime’s “brutal acts of violence and intimidation”, it threw itself into the camp of a US president undertaking murderous repression at home. Labor ministers condemn Iran for its “indiscriminate” retaliatory strikes on the Gulf states but won’t utter a peep about the US and Israel massacring hundreds of Iranian and Lebanese civilians. When challenged whether the obviously illegal US strikes on Iran breach international law, Albanese and his ministers parrot the line that “the legal basis for the attacks is a matter for the US and Israel”, giving the two warmongers a green light to press ahead. Nor could the government resist the temptation to stoke Islamophobia, condemning and threatening the Shia community in Sydney for mourning the death of spiritual leader Khamenei. Illustrating its cynicism was its snap decision to grant humanitarian visas and shelter to five Iranian soccer players on Trump’s orders when both countries have for years detained, demonised and tried to deport thousands of Iranian asylum seekers back to potential persecution. When Foreign Minister Penny Wong was forced to admit that three Australian Navy personnel were on the US submarine that torpedoed the Iranian frigate, she said that they played no operational role on board. In fact, those submariners are just one small part of Australia’s direct contribution to the war effort. According to research by Peter Cronau for Declassified Australia, Australia has 100 personnel serving with, on secondment or undergoing training in the US for the operation of Australia’s future AUKUS submarines, with 50 currently serving on US nuclear-powered submarines. One hundred more Australian military and intelligence personnel are stationed at US bases in the Gulf, undertaking naval and aerial operations. Like the British Labour government, the Albanese government is now deploying “defensive military assistance” to Gulf states, including surveillance aircraft and missiles. The Coalition, which doesn’t share Labor’s fear of plain speaking, welcomed the decision, declaring Australia to be at war with Iran. Much more significant to the US and Israel’s wars, though, than submariners and spy planes are the US-Australian spy stations at Pine Gap and the Northwest Cape in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, respectively. These are the eyes and ears of US and Israeli military intelligence and are involved in every operation carried out by US and Israeli armed forces in the Middle East, from guiding submarines to drone targeting of individuals in their homes and offices. Like Israel, Australia is joined at the hip with US imperialism. It too bears responsibility for US wars and the bloodshed they entail. The powers waging this war are motivated by their own imperialist ambitions. These are not even dressed up as lofty or humanitarian goals: they are about projecting power through industrial-scale, deadly force. They are motivated only by what is good for their interests and will trample underfoot anyone who gets in their way. This is modern capitalism: competition between blocs of countries for control of natural resources, markets, trade routes and productive assets leads to deadly and never-ending military conflict. It is a system that can always find the money and resources for waging war, but can’t feed and house people or protect the planet we all rely on. It is not fit to continue. As long as the US and its allies are allowed to roam the region, there will never be peace in the Middle East. We must demand an end to the war on Iran, that Israel get out of Lebanon and that the US get out of the Middle East. No more bombing, no more military supplies and no more support for the US empire. And in Australia, the priorities must be to shut down US bases, expel all US military personnel, scrap the AUKUS nuclear submarines and end all US-Australia military cooperation. ### Marxism and intersectionality URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/marxism-and-intersectionality/ Last updated: 2026-03-07T11:10:04.000Z Twenty-first century capitalism is a horror show. The genocide in Palestine demonstrates the degree of suffering and destruction our rulers are willing to inflict to advance the interests of the Western imperialist bloc. The climate crisis is accelerating, and those with the power to do something about it are instead green-lighting the expansion of the fossil fuel industry and tightening up national borders. Almost everywhere, states are responding to a more chaotic world situation and mounting opposition to their agenda, with more authoritarianism, more repression, more austerity and more scapegoating of vulnerable populations. Our side needs a political framework that can integrate and account for all these horrors and that can equip activists with a strategy for consistently and effectively challenging the system responsible for them. Intersectionality can appear to provide exactly this framework, but when put to the test, it offers limited insight into the logic of oppression and no explanation or critique of the system it exists within. Today, the “intersectional” label is used as shorthand for a political position or outlook that is attuned to multiple forms of oppression and that is sensitive to the ways these oppressions intersect, frequently in a way that amounts to more than the sum of their parts. The Black feminist Combahee River Collective is often credited with articulating an early form of intersectional politics. In their famous 1977 statement, they called for a new movement based around their experiences as Black women: “a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men”. Insofar as they were arguing that movements should oppose all forms of oppression and not tolerate bigotry in their ranks, their point was and continues to be valid. In the United States in particular, there were real problems in the 1960s and ’70s with sections of the New Left failing to oppose satisfactorily various forms of oppression, particularly that of women. But intersectionality today has very little to do with debates in social movements, historic or current. The term itself was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in her 1989 essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”. The essay deals with the failure of anti-discrimination law to account for the specific oppression faced by Black women, using as a case study a legal dispute involving a group of Black women workers who attempted to sue General Motors for unfair dismissal. Within the limits of the US legal system, these women could not successfully establish management had discriminated on the basis of sex, because some white women remained employed, nor on the basis of race, because Black men kept their jobs. It was the combination of the two that caused their disadvantage, but legally, multi-factor discrimination of this sort was not taken into account. Crenshaw argues that the law must make space for the specific intersection of oppressions faced by groups that do not fit into a single axis. This is reasonable, but it is fundamentally an argument about how the legal system could operate better. Her thesis does not call into question the basic right of factory owners to discard workers at will, or to exploit them in the first place. It is not a theory of liberation, and it does not offer a critique of the social system that creates oppression. Despite these relative conservative origins, the concept of intersectionality has since adopted a more subversive identity. Its current appeal is not due to its legalistic insights, but because it’s a way of disavowing conservative forms of single-issue campaigning, and signalling a commitment to a more radical and inclusive politics. But on this it can’t deliver: simply noting different forms of oppression doesn’t get us very far. Intersectionality offers no explanation for why oppression exists or what ties different forms together. It offers no strategy for liberation and nor does it particularly purport to. It is a way of signalling good intentions with pretensions to being a sophisticated political theory. But to liberate the oppressed, we need a lot more than that. An article published in June last year by Australian feminist news site Women’s Agendademonstrates exactly this point. Titled [“Antoinette Lattouf’s case is a wake-up call for workplace intersectionality](https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/antoinette-lattoufs-win-is-a-wake-up-call-for-workplace-intersectionality/?ref=redflag.org.au)”, the article analysed the ABC’s unlawful sacking of journalist Antoinette Lattouf after she shared a Human Rights Watch post on social media. Rita Nasr, author of the piece, argued that Lattouf’s sacking was a “real-world example of what happens when intersectionality is not recognised, respected, or embedded in workplace policies and practices”, and that the ABC as an institution is not sufficiently sensitive to the lived experiences of employees from marginalised backgrounds. As a Lebanese woman, Lattouf was victimised by a workplace that wouldn’t let her bring her “whole self” to work. But this approach can’t account for the fact that many women of colour, as well as people facing still other oppressions besides, remain happily employed at the ABC. Lattouf was singled out not because her “whole self” was not present at work, but because of her refusal to accept the ABC’s line on Palestine—it was a politically motivated sacking intended to prove the ABC’s loyalty to Australian imperialism and make an example of someone who questioned it. No amount of workplace diversity or institutional intersectionality will change the power to which the ABC answers and which it obeys. And analysing the various intersecting oppressions Lattouf experiences does not help understand the forces at play in her sacking. A world careening towards ever more authoritarianism and conflict demands a more rigorous assessment of the origins of oppression, how it serves the powerful and the strategies needed to end it. In her 2016 book *The Politics of Everybody*, US-based writer Holly Lewis critiques what she calls the “vector model of oppression” inherent to intersectionality, by which she means the idea that different forms of oppression are the result of distinct and separate structures, such as patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity and so on. These vectors jet out from wholly different points of origin and crash into one another in the body of the individual, producing a particular combination of privileges and oppressions unique to every person. The vector model assumes that the world is made up of fragmented power structures with divergent purposes and no real logic or unified interest linking them together. But this contention doesn’t stack up. As Lewis puts it, “race, gender, religion, and nation are not ‘things that happen to individuals’: they are social relations conditioned by capitalism *and conditioned by one another*”. Sexism, racism, homophobia and so on are interrelated structures that have developed alongside each other over hundreds of years, shifting and changing to suit the needs of a minority ruling class. They are not independent of each other, but symbiotic. For example, the oppression of Black communities in the United States developed in a society defined by the existing subjugation of women. It was (and is) perpetrated in ways conditioned by sexism. There are many examples of this dynamic, from the imposition of the nuclear family on enslaved people as a method of social control, to the use of sexual violence against Black women by the southern white ruling class. The two oppressions are not totally separate systems, only combining in an observable way through their impact on affected individuals. Rather, they are two aspects of one social system—capitalism. Marxism can illuminate the ways in which social inequalities interact because it understands what the system is fundamentally *for*—not victimising people for the sake of it, but amassing wealth. Capitalism is defined by the exploitation of the vast majority of people, the working class, to fulfil the capitalists’ unending drive to accumulate capital. It is this drive that shapes all aspects of social life. The minority class that controls capital requires workers to accept their subordinate position. Oppression is necessary to sustain this unstable regime of production, to pit sections of the working class against one another, to divert anger at the system towards scapegoated populations and to intensify exploitation. This can involve adapting existing oppressions to the needs of capital, like sexism, as well as generating new forms. Forms of racism linked to the imperialist exploits of the ruling class—such as the anti-German/Japanese racism that saturated domestic politics during the Second World War or the Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism used to drum up support for the “war on terror”—can come and go with the conflicts they help justify. Oppression can also recede when it is no longer useful to the ruling class, as was the case with the anti-Irish racism that plagued the first two centuries of capitalism in Australia. Others, like women’s oppression, which is indispensable to maintaining and reproducing workers to be exploited, are more enduring. Each one rises and falls depending on its relationship to the needs of capital. The vector model that underpins the concept of intersectionality also fails when considered from a strategic perspective. If forms of oppression operate independently, they logically need each to be challenged and overcome separately. But precisely because each oppressed group is made up of individuals subject to all sorts of other forms of oppression, the potential for them to unite against the discreet oppressive structures is dubious at best. If united action on the part of the oppressed were unlikely, a top-down strategy to combat oppression would therefore be needed, maybe using the existing power structures, terrorism or some other anti-democratic means, which would ultimately keep the system and its inequalities in place. Marxism overcomes these problems both by being able to establish the common roots of different oppressions, and by recognising that not all oppressed groups have the same power to challenge their lot. It recognises that the oppression of the working class is different from all other oppressions, not because workers are particularly marginal or suffer more, but because the working class is the only force in society with the capacity to destroy the system and win liberation. This is so because exploitation is a contradictory phenomenon. It is the basis on which the working class are denied any control over their own labour and personal lives; it is the basis on which working-class communities can expect much worse access to housing, schooling and health care than middle-class or wealthy people. But at the same time, the absolutely essential nature of workers’ labour means that when that labour is withdrawn, the capitalists are stripped of their profits and their control over society. Workers cannot liberate themselves as individuals; only by breaking down the divisions that keep the class fragmented can workers build up the kind of collective power capable of taking on the bosses, the state and all the repressive forces of the system. This means taking seriously each and every form of oppression and drawing these fights into a broader battle against the ruling class. Our struggles are bound up with one another. Lenin summed this up when he argued in *What is to Be Done?* that a revolutionary should strive to be “the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects”. Intersectionality can appear to offer a more nuanced and sensitive understanding of oppression. But its central framework is misorienting. It detaches oppression from exploitation and separates each oppression from the others. It cannot explain how and why these forms of oppression exist, offers no way to connect them into a unitary framework and provides no convincing strategy for liberation. Far from flat and reductive, as its detractors often claim, Marxism enables us to grapple with a system that is in constant motion, forever shaping and reshaping every aspect of human existence. It both accounts for the complexity of that system—and its propensity to generate forms of social inequality that appear to, and to some extent have, a life of their own—while also identifying what connects them all: the competitive accumulation of capital through the exploitation of waged labour. It impels us to demand nothing less than total human liberation. And that is the only way consistently to oppose all forms of oppression. ### Wildcat women in wartime: the secret history of the 1943 textiles strike URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/wildcat-women-in-wartime-the-secret-history-of-the-1943-textiles-strike/ Last updated: 2026-03-07T11:07:55.000Z In 1942, the Australian ruling class was reaping the rewards of total war. While young men were sent to the front, the “Manpower Directorate” was established at home. This was industrial conscription: any woman aged 18 to 45 without children could be legally compelled to work wherever the government saw fit. Once they were assigned, it was a crime to leave. While *Women’s Weekly* ran glossy propaganda encouraging women to sacrifice for the war effort, the reality on the factory floor was grim. Textile bosses were banking lucrative government contracts for uniforms and blankets, making massive profits off the backs of tens of thousands of women. Rather than leading the charge against economic conscription and hyper-exploitation of women, the officials of the Australian Textile Workers’ Union (ATWU) took on the role of an enforcement arm of the state. Committed to defending the Curtin Labor government and supporting the war effort at any cost, the union leadership did nothing to resist the Manpower laws. They told workers it was necessary to hold back from striking—“social peace” in the factories was necessary for the war abroad. The so-called leaders of the Australian labour movement demanded that workers subordinate their class interests to the “national interest”—the bosses’ interests. In March 1942, the newly created Women’s Employment Board raised the minimum female rate in some industries from 54 percent of the male wage to between 60 and 100 percent under pressure from male and female unionists in metalworks and munitions plants. But this decision covered only 85,000 women in a total female workforce of more than 800,000 across Australia. After the Women’s Employment Board’s decision, most awards set female wages at around 90 percent of the male industry rate, but in textiles women’s wages were held at the bare minimum set by a historical court ruling on wages. The 1905 Harvester Judgement had pegged female rates at a pathetic 54 percent of the male basic wage, even for single women. The court’s deliberations had categorised working-class women as “dependants” of a father or husband: a woman’s pay packet should be lower since it was “supplementary” to the main household income. By the early 1940s, many women working in the textile industry were teenagers supporting family members, single women living alone or mothers making ends meet while their husbands were at war. In February 1943, a revolt began at F.W. Hughes and Whiddon’s mills in Sydney. When the Arbitration Court dragged its feet on a new wage claim, 120 women walked out. Within weeks, the movement exploded. A *Sydney Morning Herald* piece from 25 February, quoted in Janey Stone’s contribution to the book *Rebel Women*, described strikers spreading the action from plant to plant: “At one factory the striking girls scaled wire grilles to reach the girls working inside”. By late February, 8,000 women across New South Wales defied their union’s federal secretary and walked off the job. This wasn't just a strike against the bosses; it was a “wildcat” rebellion against their own class-collaborationist union executive. An unofficial strike committee was formed, led by the workers themselves, bypassing the bureaucratic gatekeepers. Despite the extent of this action and the hostile press coverage it provoked at the time, the story of the 1943 textiles strike remains largely untold. This is likely due to the wildcat nature of the strike. Official Australian labour history tends to be dominated by the politics of the Communist Party and the Labor Party, the very forces who betrayed the women workers in this dispute. ATWU official R.H. Erskine and the federal council didn’t just disagree with the strike—they actively sought to crush it. They called on the government to prosecute their own members as “absentees” under National Security Regulations. The *Sydney Morning Herald* noted with glee that the union had “virtually invited” the government to use the law against the strikers. The peak of the struggle took place at Leichhardt Stadium on 1 March, 1943\. Prime Minister John Curtin sent personal representatives to beg the women to return to work. Even members of the Communist Party—then fully committed to the “Popular Front” and the war effort—were booed and met with catcalls when they tried to convince the women to fold. The vote at Leichhardt was a landslide: 1,660 to 860 in favour of continuing the all-out strike. The state retaliated with the full weight of the law. Nine leaders of the strike committee were hauled into court and fined for absenteeism. The union leadership publicly washed their hands of them, announcing they would not defend any worker facing charges. Eventually, under the combined weight of state prosecution, financial strain and the hostility of their own union, the women voted to return to work on 7 March. But they didn’t go back with their tails between their legs. The motion to return passed with a stinging addendum: “We return to work with no confidence in the union executive”. Working-class women today confront the same alliance of bosses, collaborationist union officials and pro-capitalist Labor governments. Victorian teachers, who are the lowest paid in the country after more than 10 years under a state Labor government, will strike in March but already face hesitation from officials about extending their industrial campaign. Rank-and-file organisation and radical political opposition to the “official” leaders of the labour movement are the only way forward. ### The radical history of International Women’s Day URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-radical-history-of-international-womens-day/ Last updated: 2026-03-18T06:43:23.000Z International Women’s Day has become mainstream in recent years. But historically it was a socialist event. Clara Zetkin, a leading member of the German Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the early 1900s, argued that the working class would never win its battles without women and raised the issue of special party work among women. Under her leadership, a working women’s movement grew rapidly in Germany, and the female membership of the SPD rose from 10,500 in 1907 to 150,000 in 1913. Zetkin proposed the establishment of an international working women’s day at the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen in August 1910, inspired by US socialists who had held women’s demonstrations and meetings the year before. The slogan for IWD was to be: “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism”. In 1911, more than a million women and men took up the idea of IWD enthusiastically in rallies and marches, described by the leading Russian Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai as “one seething, trembling sea of women”. In subsequent years and throughout First World War, IWD continued to provide a focus for activists. What happened in Russia in February 1917 is famous. In spite of all opposition, women in Petrograd chose to protest and strike for “Bread and Peace” on 23 February, and with this sparked the February revolution. ### **In Australia** The history of IWD in Australia is not so well known. The first celebrations were organised by the Militant Women’s Group (MWG), set up by the Communist Party following its establishment of a central women’s department in 1927\. The group was first established in Sydney and later spread to country NSW, Brisbane and Melbourne. It published a monthly newspaper, *Woman Worker*. The MWG organised a rally in the Sydney Domain on 25 March 1928\. The demands were an eight-hour day for female shop workers, no piece work, the basic wage for the unemployed and annual holidays on full pay. The Sydney MWG again organised a public meeting for IWD in Belmore Park in 1929—this time with a focus on support for the wives and families of striking timber workers. The first Melbourne event occurred in 1931\. With the lead banner proclaiming “Long live International Women’s Day”, 50 women led 150 men on a march to the Yarra Bank. The MWG was the beginning of an important network among women party members and others around them. Here is a quick glimpse of some of the women activists of the day, for whom International Women’s Day was an annual celebration. Jean Young was involved with the unemployed movement in the early 1930s and a member of the CPA. As a barmaid, she was active in the Liquor Trades Union in Melbourne and became its first elected female organiser. The union executive initially restricted her from organising hotels because they “weren’t suitable places for women to enter”. Jean managed to convince them to charge women a lower union membership fee because they had lower wages, and to adopt a policy of equal pay. She successfully organised many hotels and restaurants, including the Parliament House refreshment room. Anna Morgan, an Aboriginal woman, spoke at the 1934 Melbourne IWD rally, where she denounced the “black flag of the Aboriginal Protection Board” and called for legal changes and access to social welfare for Aboriginal people. Anna was born in 1874 at a mission station in north-west Victoria and became a domestic servant at the age of 11\. Her husband’s family had been allocated a farm block at Cumeroogunga on the Murray in 1888, but the Aboriginal Protection Board revoked the agreement in 1907\. When Anna and her husband refused to accept this, they were expelled from the station and charged with trespass, lost many possessions and were jailed when they tried to retrieve them. ### **Gloves and banners** In the late 1930s and the war years, IWD involved a broader range of participants, but it also became more conservative and conventional in its approach. The atmosphere of militancy and direct action waned, and the day was mainly celebrated with luncheons and afternoon teas. Photos of the events in the 1950s and early 1960s show women with gloves, hats and handbags, indistinguishable from apolitical and middle-class women of the day. Nonetheless, many of these same women, led by the Union of Australian Women (UAW), were prepared to carry banners in street demonstrations around such issues as equal pay and peace. They were also not afraid to combat racism and to support Aboriginal people. Melva Walsh, from Moe in Victoria’s Gippsland, became UAW vice-president and addressed the IWD gathering in Melbourne in 1967\. Longtime member Marj Oke recollected: “Women would say to me: if you want to risk your reputation by belonging to something with blacks in it, go ahead, but I’m not risking mine. In opposing racism you learnt something of its sting”. The UAW members responded quickly in 1963, when Aboriginal people in Traralgon were being evicted because people objected to living near them. Marj Oke and a carload of friends went to Traralgon and held a meeting in a hall in that street and were able to prevent the eviction. ### **Equal pay** By the late 1960s, things were beginning to change. 1968 brought mass action not only in France, but also in many other countries, including Australia. In 1969, major strike action defeated the penal powers that had been used against unions for decades. In this context, it is not so surprising that Zelda D’Aprano opted for direct action in response to the 1969 Arbitration Commission ruling on equal pay. Zelda was a member of the CPA and worked for the meatworkers’ union in Melbourne. She and other unionists were in the audience when four male judges decided not to grant “equal pay for work of equal value” but only “equal pay for equal work” to the few women who did exactly the same work as men in male-dominated occupations. Female-dominated industries such as nursing missed out, and only 5 percent of women got equal pay. Zelda wrote about her reaction: > “There we were, the poor women, all sitting in Court like a lot of cows in the sale yards, while all the men out front presented arguments as to how much we were worth *… I felt humiliated, belittled and degraded, not for myself but for all women.”* On 21 October 1969, Zelda chained herself to the Commonwealth Building in Spring Street, Melbourne. “We decided I would chain myself up against the Commonwealth Government Building doors, because the government should set the example. Private industry won’t do anything if the government won’t.” Ten days later she was joined by Alva Geikie and Thelma Solomon, and the three women chained themselves across the doors of the Arbitration Court. These events drew enormous attention to the Equal Pay campaign and led to Zelda and others establishing a Women’s Action Committee (WAC) in early 1970. ### **Women’s liberation** During 1971 there were more actions, and over this year, the features of the new movement became clear. In May the first trade union-sponsored community consultation on childcare was held. In August, the WAC sponsored a national conference on “Women in the Workforce and Trade Unions”. There was also a demonstration against the Miss Teenage Quest. A pro-abortion demonstration in Melbourne drew significant crowds in November, as did the first childcare demonstration in the city square in the following February. And then came the first new-wave IWD march, on 11 March 1972. Throughout Australia, women and men rallied and marched. In all cities, there was a great sense of a new movement and new possibilities. In Melbourne up to 3,000 women marched, including many young women who brought with them a new and less earnest approach. For instance, there was a group of women on bikes with tampons hanging from their hat brims, calling themselves “the menstrual cycles”. The Sydney rally was advertised with a poster inspired by the image of Angela Davis, a Black revolutionary in the US. The main demands were for equal pay, equal opportunity in work and education, free childcare, free safe contraceptives and safe legal abortion on request. So the women’s liberation movement took off. In Melbourne, the first Women’s Liberation Movement Centre opened at 16 La Trobe Street. New structures sprang up in every state. IWD became the annual central rally of a dynamic new movement. From its beginnings in Europe in 1911, IWD has been a day for socialists and activists to celebrate the struggle for women’s liberation. In the words of Alexandra Kollontai: > “Down with the world of property and the power of capital! Away with inequality, lack of rights and the oppression of women—the legacy of the bourgeois world! Forward to the international unity of working women and male workers.*”* ### Resist the US war machine URL: https://redflag.org.au/resist-the-us-war-machine/ Last updated: 2026-04-29T06:57:33.000Z The United States ruling class has chosen the road of mass violence—and there is now likely no turning back. According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, under Donald Trump, the US military has launched more military strikes against more countries than it has under any other president in the modern era. This is just the beginning of what could come. Vexed by the reality of its relative industrial decline and by China’s rise as the world’s most powerful manufacturing economy, Washington is making a desperate gambit to maintain its global domination: leveraging its military and financial power to bulldoze all opposition. We have to resist. [Read our latest editorial](https://redflag.org.au/article/stop-the-war-break-the-us-alliance-resist-capitalist-barbarism/) Bombing Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran and Venezuela, not to mention its role in the Gaza genocide. Strikes in international waters near Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico and across the Caribbean. Starving Cuba through sanctions and a trade embargo. Threatening Greenland, Canada and other governments in the Western Hemisphere. Bringing a loaded gun to every economic negotiation in an attempt to rewrite the rules on global trade. Demanding that every ally double or triple their military spending, while ditching, in the words of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “massive welfare states”. Encouraging and supporting, through proxies such as Elon Musk, every far-right and fascist political challenge in Western countries. This is all part of a singular agenda. US imperialism is lining up its ducks to take on China more forcefully. Whether it can or will succeed in Iran or anywhere else is moot. The point is, Washington is not going down wondering. It has switched gears. This is a crash or crash through operation, to hell with laws, rights, decency and humanity. Don’t take our word for it. Listen to White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller [speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper in January](https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/05/politics/video/senior-white-house-aide-stephen-miller-says-us-military-threat-to-maintain-control-of-venezuela-digvid?ref=redflag.org.au): > We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world—the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time ... The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we’re going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. And no one in official politics or the official institutions is lifting a finger to stop this descent into barbarism. Not the United Nations. Not the liberal governments of Europe. None of them. Anthony Albanese’s Labor government, by supporting to the hilt everything Trump does and by tightly integrating Australia’s military and intelligence services with the American empire, is complicit in—a partner with—far-right gangsterism and war crimes. We have to build opposition to our own government and rebuild an anti-imperialist socialist movement in this country. Please consider supporting our efforts to expand the reach of Red Flag across Australia and internationally. *The Red Flag editorial team.* [Help Red Flag build the socialist movement](https://redflag.org.au/subscribe/) --- #### Four reasons to subscribe to Red Flag: 1. **We have an agenda: socialism**. We don’t hide it; we don’t bullshit. 2. **No government or corporate interference**. We don’t want and won’t take their money. We rely on volunteers, subscribers and donors. 3. **Genuine independence**. It’s not just about money; it’s about ideas. We reject the idea that some people should rule over others, and that business owners have a right to exploit workers. This marks us out from other outlets that are critical of capitalism, but nevertheless accept it. 4. **Not just ideas—organisation and experience**. Our writers are often the people leading campaigns on the ground: against war, for workers’ rights, for public housing, against fascism, in solidarity with Palestine. They bring perspectives and arguments that armchair commentators from other publications can’t. [Subscribe to Red Flag magazine](https://redflag.org.au/subscribe/) [Can't subscribe? Donate!](https://redflag.org.au/#/portal/support) --- ###### The latest from Red Flag Radio Emma and Chloe discuss the meaning of the Epstein files and what they reveal about how the rich and powerful rule. In the main segment, they discuss One Nation’s rise in the polls, the intense Islamophobic atmosphere in Australia and the realignment of the Coalition under new Liberal leader Angus Taylor. [Support Red Flag Radio](https://www.patreon.com/redflagradiopodcast?ref=redflag.org.au) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/02/M26-logo.png) ## Marxism Conference 2026 War. Authoritarianism. Climate crisis. Capitalism is a nightmare. But resistance is rising. From Palestine solidarity to grassroots union struggles, anti-fascist mobilisations to mass youth rebellions – we are fighting back. Join us in Melbourne 2-5 April to help build the left we need. [GET YOUR TICKET](https://events.redflag.org.au/civicrm/event/register?id=18&reset=1&ref=redflag.org.au) ### The right’s war on women URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-rights-war-on-women/ Last updated: 2026-03-04T01:43:00.000Z [*Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years*](https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/report/saving-america-saving-the-family-foundation-the-next-250-years?ref=redflag.org.au) is the chilling title of the Heritage Foundation’s latest policy blueprint. The far-right organisation behind Trump’s second presidential program, *Project 2025*, is determined to reverse the “decline” and “erosion” of American marriage, the “precipitous drop in fertility” and the “collapse of church attendance”. Describing how “family breakdown and rampant abortion tears at the soul of our country and saps it of strength and moral authority”, the foundation’s [Project 2026](https://www.heritage.org/priorities?ref=redflag.org.au) policy priorities are a dangerous wish list of misogyny: eliminating access to abortion and contraception, censoring discussion of gender and sexuality in schools and gutting income support for single mothers. Against the “scourge of woke ideas like critical race theory and radical gender ideology”, the far right is determined to make traditional gender roles compulsory again—celebrating domestic servitude and women’s submissive position in the family and society. Since the overturning of Roe v Wade, many Republican-controlled states in the US have imposed sweeping abortion bans, criminalised people who help women travel interstate for care and challenged “shield laws”, designed to guard abortion providers from out-of-state extradition and prosecution. Referring to himself as “the fertilisation president”, as Trump did at a White House event celebrating Women’s History Month, the president has established a baby bonus system—children born between 31 December 2024 and 1 January 2029 are awarded US$1,000, which can be deposited in a Trump account established in their name. The US is not alone in this. In Europe, organisations targeting “gender ideology” raised US$1.18 billion between 2019 and 2023, according to the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights’ latest report. Much of this is in Hungary, where the government is currently importing Russia’s anti-gay laws, including banning LGBTI content from schools and prime-time television. Reform UK’s candidate in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, Matt Goodwin, has posted on Substack advocating a “negative child benefit tax” on people “who don’t have offspring”. In South America, Javier Milei leads the charge, vowing to eliminate femicide from Argentina’s penal code. While numerous governments and political parties promote these ideas and codify them in social policy, they are popularised online via influencers who encourage men to see women as sub-human and warn that women’s rights have “gone too far”, a sentiment now held by 40 percent of Australian men under 35, according to the UNSW Centre for Ideas. The normalisation of misogyny and sexual objectification is connected to support for violent extremism—in 2024, research by the University of Melbourne found that nearly 20 percent of Australian men believe that feminism should be violently resisted if necessary, making anti-feminist politics the most prevalent form of violent extremist attitudes in Australia. For the far right, campaigning for the nuclear family is not just about a lifestyle preference; it’s essential for strengthening capitalism and obedience to its hierarchies, norms and institutions. The less freedom women have—over their reproductive rights, sexuality and independence—the more the family is entrenched as the inescapable norm, and with the family come the stability, free labour, economic dependence and ideological control that capitalism thrives on. To capitalism, human beings are first and foremost factors in production, not people deserving of freedom. Without people to work for them, the wealthy would not be able to generate the huge profits they depend on for their wealth and power. So controlling what the mass of people think and do in capitalist society is paramount, not just in the workplace, but in every facet of society. This extends even to the supposedly most private and personal parts—our sex lives, our relationships, our reproductive choices. The choices we make here affect the current and future size and nature of the workforce that is available to be exploited—which is why the capitalist class wants to control it. And as the most brutish expression of capitalism and its priorities, the far right is open about this. Perhaps some of the most open are the pro-natalists, campaigners dedicated to raising the Western birth rate. To them, “demographic collapse has become the global warming of the New Right”. These are the words of the infamous pro-natalist Malcolm Collins, who, alongside his wife Simone Collins, proposed a city-state government plan for “incentive systems that grant more voting power to creators of economically productive agents”, run by a single “executor”. Their 15-page slide deck, entitled “The Next Empire: Leveraging a Changing World to Save Civilization”, is a playbook for a dictatorial society in which women making more babies is a strategy for strengthening the US’s industrial and military capacity. It’s this attitude of expendability and dehumanisation that means that, while Trump can proclaim he will “protect women whether they want it or not”, he can simultaneously be embroiled in one of the most revolting examples of systematic sexual abuse ever exposed. The Epstein files have uncovered what has been the disgusting open secret of ruling class circles—that the rape, abuse and domination of young women are their modus operandi. This level of sick and unrestricted entitlement is not incidental. It flows from class power itself. Those who order the murder of civilians, who keep millions in preventable poverty, who deny health care or welfare to those who need it, come to believe that because they have the physical and financial means to exert control over our lives, they also have the right to do so. Other people, especially women, are there to use, mistreat and exert power over, to dominate and humiliate. That is what power is and does. Defending women’s reproductive rights and social freedoms in this context is essential, but it is not enough if the economic system that depends on inequality remains intact. As long as wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, our freedom to decide our own futures will always threaten their rule. If we want a different world, we have to fight every manifestation of sexism, an ever powerful far right and the whole system that makes women’s oppression profitable and politically useful. ### Fair Work cutting women’s pay, in the name of gender equality URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/fair-work-cutting-womens-pay-in-the-name-of-gender-equality/ Last updated: 2026-03-14T22:56:56.000Z The Fair Work Commission’s nearly finalised [new pay scale](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-reporttoexpertpanel-fwc-161225.pdfhttps:/www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-reporttoexpertpanel-fwc-161225.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) for the community sector is a disaster for workers. Emergency housing workers, social work caseworkers and counsellors, alcohol and other drug service workers, disability advocates and many, many more face punitive wage cuts under the proposal. It’s a sickening twist that these pay cuts will be imposed on a sector with an overwhelmingly female workforce, as part of the commission’s process of addressing “gender-based undervaluation”. Yes, you read that correctly. A process that is supposed to be about rectifying the historical undervaluation of women’s work is about to result in a colossal cut to pay rates for many tens of thousands of women workers. The disastrous scale of the cuts proposed by the Fair Work Commission (FWC) is laid out in a [detailed submission](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-sub-cfecfw-060226.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) dated 6 February this year from the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare (CECFW), based in Melbourne. It’s absolutely damning. The contents deserve to be a public scandal. The submission’s authors compiled a [chart](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JcRaPm1Yb9-PP5e14lziMeGOabAZARktfrGHkWO0d%5FI/edit?usp=sharing&ref=redflag.org.au) of eleven reasonably common roles in the community sector. They found that eight of these roles face a cut to award pay rates of between $121 and $247 per week. Residential youth workers go backwards by $121 per week ($6,308 per year) under the newest draft from FWC, released in mid-December. House coordinators in residential services face a pay cut of $185 per week ($9,600 per year). Community and family engagement roles face a pay cut of $247 per week ($12,885 per year). Caseworkers in refugee settlement services roles will have their award pay cut by this same amount—$247 per week. Case managers face a pay cut of $203 per week, team leaders $174 per week and senior case managers $185 per week. Therapeutic specialists face a cut of $196 per week ($9,085 per year). Only two of the eleven roles analysed in the CECFW submission actually maintain their current pay level. Another is impossible to classify due to the lack of clarity in the proposed new classification descriptors—but would most likely face a “significant” wage cut. Thirty organisations have signed on to the CECFW submission, including major community sector employers such as Anglicare, Baptcare, Catholic Care, Uniting, Berry Street, Drummond Street, Launch and many others. Other submissions paint a similar picture. Although many note that the latest proposal is preferable to the (even more appalling) FWC interim decision from April last year, organisations that have mapped existing staff onto the revised FWC draft have nevertheless come to bleak conclusions. Ending Violence Against Women Queensland [notes](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-sub-reply-evawq-200226.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) “a significant risk of wage regression”, where many experienced practitioners “are either red-circled, resulting in a wage freeze, or placed on lower starting rates”. Long time ASU delegate Robert Handelsmann [predicts](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-sub-handelsman-060226.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) that many counsellors now classified at level 5 risk a pay cut of between $115 and $243 per week due to ambiguities in the definition of “supervision”. Hepatitis NSW [states](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-sub-hnsw-060226.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) that the rates for Certificate III/IV qualifications and diploma-level rates fall below existing rates, “creating a clear risk of financial disadvantage”. Disability Advocacy Australia [states](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-sub-dana-040226.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) the new proposal appears “to functionally propose significant pay cuts for disability advocates”, with those doing complex work facing a pay cut of $358 per week. Youthlaw [states](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-sub-yl-040226.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) that the proposed new structure “still reduces pay of certain classification levels”. Despite this, the Fair Work Commission will push this appalling attack through. This will not surprise anyone who has followed the case. Since the commission’s [interim decision](https://redflag.org.au/article/fair-work-commission-plans-giant-pay-cut-for-community-sector-workers/) in April last year, which was estimated by the Australian Services Union to involve substantial pay cuts to 73 percent of the entire sector, in [multiple rounds](https://redflag.org.au/article/sharpening-the-knife-fair-work-takes-another-step-towards-community-sector-wage-cuts/) of [submissions and hearings](https://redflag.org.au/article/community-sector-pay-cuts-four-things-we-learned-at-the-fair-work-hearings/), state and federal governments, unions and many employers have implored the FWC to scrap its disastrous proposal. The FWC has refused. ### **What the fuck?** What got into the heads of the five members of the FWC’s “expert panel”, which came up with this appalling attack? There are a few parts to this, but all of them point to one dominant factor: sexist assumptions about women’s work and women’s pay are still baked into Australian capitalism. It’s astonishing that it’s only now, in the 2020s, that the FWC is getting around to reviewing systematically the gendered assumptions behind low wages in majority-women industries like aged care, nursing and allied health. The sexist reasoning behind these low wages was expressed in a ruling from the Conciliation and Arbitration Court in 1950\. The court asserted that “the productivity, efficiency and the needs and the responsibilities etc. of females were substantially less than that of males in this community”. Accordingly, the court set the basic wage for female-dominated industries at 75 percent of the rate for male-dominated industries. These lower pay rates are *still* embedded in many awards, which set minimum wages and conditions for workers in Australia. The result is a substantial cash discount on wages for a large section of the capitalist class in this country. From 2009, a [campaign of mass protests](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/still-fighting-for-equal-pay/?ref=redflag.org.au) by social and community services workers organised by the ASU challenged the entrenched low pay of the mainly women workforce in this sector. Thousands marched at regular days of action. This was the biggest union push for equal pay since the 1970s, when a long campaign by [left-wing unions](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/australian-unions-and-the-fight-for-equal-pay-for-women/?ref=redflag.org.au) culminated in radical actions such as [Zelda D’Aprano](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6222) chaining herself to the Arbitration Commission doors and a [series of strikes](https://redflag.org.au/node/7456) among the majority-women workforce in the insurance industry. After many twists and turns, in 2012 Fair Work granted an equal remuneration order for the social and community services sector. Though the phase-in was outrageously slow (spread over nine years), the result was a pay rise of between 23 and 45 percent for each classification on the sector pay schedule in the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services award. Jump forward a decade, and we find the Health Services Union applying to the commission to boost wages in the aged care industry. The newly elected Labor government nudged this case along by guaranteeing funding for any increased wages and by adding the promotion of “gender equity” to the objects of the Fair Work Act. The limitations are obvious though. “Gender equity” is just one object of the act, along with the promotion of “national economic prosperity” and providing a legal regime that is “flexible for businesses”. In practice, this means the commission pays a lot of attention to profits and the costs to business and government of higher wages, despite these not being mentioned in the Fair Work Act. So even at best, the measure of “gender equity” doled out by the commission is limited to what won’t encroach significantly on business profits or government costs. One example is the Aged Care Case (Stage 3) decision, finalised in 2025\. Many aged care workers, especially those involved in “direct” care, received a 15 percent pay increase in 2023 and a series of smaller increases totalling around 10 percent by August 2026\. However, other essential staff in aged care didn’t fare so well. Eighty-one percent of food services assistants in aged care are women. So are 88 percent of cleaning staff and 88 percent of laundry staff. Yet workers in these three occupational groups received pay rises totalling just 6.96 percent from the FWC review of the aged care sector. Things got even worse when the commission came back around to the social and community services sector as part of their review of awards for gender undervaluation. The ASU, among other participants in the process, assumed that the commission would leave the rates established by the 2012 Equal Remuneration Order intact: after all, these pay rates had already been increased to remedy sexist low pay. This assumption proved wrong, however. Instead, the commissioners insisted on totally rewriting the classifications to make them comparable to what they had handed down in the Aged Care Decision. Various commissioners were offended by the multiple ways in which workers in the sector could be classified at a particular level. Custom and practice in the community sector have evolved so that employers commonly pay staff at a higher rate than the most miserly, rock-bottom rate that could potentially be justified under the existing award. Several members of the commission grumbled that community services workers appeared to be “over-classified” as a result. Given the commission’s inbuilt veneration of cost control, it must have seemed totally natural for these functionaries of the ruling class to strip back classification descriptors, eliminate progression paths and remove “ambiguities” by making qualification levels the key determinant in classifying community services staff. The result was the appalling wage-cutting interim decision from April last year. So in explaining the disastrous, perverse result of a process that is meant to eliminate gender-based undervaluation in fact cutting women’s wages on a massive scale, we have an obsession with cost control and a technocratic mania for stripping back “ambiguities”—even if that crashes the established pay rates in a female-dominated sector. To these we can add a third factor. The members of the FWC who make up the “expert panel” in this matter live in a different world to the rest of us. The three deputy presidents (Alexandra Grayson, Bernadette O’Neill and Tony Slevin) are on a package of $533,000 per year; vice-president Ingrid Asbury is on $659,000 per year and president Adam Hatcher is on total remuneration of $661,174, plus a judge’s pension. Being paid $10,000 per week or more as a functionary of a state institution bound to keep watch over wage rates and ensure “business flexibility” is a sure-fire recipe for favouring ruling-class priorities over working-class wages, dignity or anything else. ### **Fighting back** This is why the FWC and its predecessors have been popularly, and correctly, described as a “bosses’ court”. Historically, the only way workers have been able to guarantee a decent outcome from these bodies—whether on equal pay or anything else that matters—is by using strike action to win on the ground or by creating a political problem for the ruling class and their highly paid functionaries, or both. The ASU campaign that won the Equal Remuneration Order in 2012 was centred on regular, thousands-strong street mobilisations rather than industrial action. Nevertheless, it was strong enough that when Julia Gillard’s Labor government [announced](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-11-23/unions-fury-at-labors-pay-rise-backdown/2347740?ref=redflag.org.au) in late 2010 that her government wouldn’t back equal pay in the community sector because of the cost, the government had to backtrack in the face of union and community fury and the promise of further rallies and even strikes. The ASU in Victoria is planning a meeting on 30 April to discuss its work value case for the community sector. This case is intended to reverse the damage from the wage-cutting outcome from the gender-based undervaluation review that the commission is now finalising and to win a wage rise across the sector. However, 30 April is more than four months since the close-to-final form of the FWC’s wage-cutting pay structure was announced, on 16 December. As of the time of writing, it seems that the ASU has not publicised the disastrous wage cuts that will occur if the commission implements the current draft. This represents a missed opportunity to explain what’s at stake and prepare for sector-wide mobilisations. Relying on reasoned argument at Fair Work didn’t win a good outcome on gender-based undervaluation from the bosses’ court last year. In fact, the opposite. Significantly increasing the scale and pace of worker mobilisations is essential to eliminating, once and for all, the gross sexist underpayment of majority-women workforces that are endemic to Australian capitalism in 2026\. --- [ASU Socialists’ Instagram page](https://www.instagram.com/asusocialists/?ref=redflag.org.au) features regularly updated material on the fight against the attacks on community sector pay and an [open letter](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc-ggIYMhdg1tl2ROzsBIDWgfqaXXedM5UAuw9S8jUiXRkk4Q/viewform?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQPNTY3MDY3MzQzMzUyNDI3AAGnKu5xByaGXHHuL9plkX9hRhSFEAiz76wUscUrslp7veSJsWxYuWyFEQdXtD0%5Faem%5F0kss5-oUzIEoHdsS8cOrLg&ref=redflag.org.au) calling for a stepped-up campaign from the ASU. ### Combating the threat of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/combating-the-threat-of-pauline-hansons-one-nation/ Last updated: 2026-03-12T02:19:52.000Z Anyone who believed that “easy-going” Australia was somehow immune from the far-right tide that has swept Europe and the US has been confounded by the rapid surge in support for One Nation, which has now overtaken the combined vote of the Liberals and Nationals in various opinion polls. Over the last two decades, the tendency on the left has been to dismiss Pauline Hanson as a has-been” and a joke. We can no longer afford that attitude. The rules of the game have decisively changed. The left needs to rise to the occasion and offer a clear alternative to defend working-class interests. Hanson first rose to prominence back in 1996 with an inflammatory maiden speech to parliament condemning Aboriginal people and proclaiming that “white Australia” was being swamped by Asian immigration. For months, the middle-class fish-and-chip shop owner was the darling of the media, who published her racist diatribe in full. Any protest against Hanson was condemned as an attack on “free speech”. The Liberals and the Nationals lapped it all up and Labor leader Kim Beazley refused to call Hanson a racist. Hanson, like so many far-right and fascist figures in Australian history, emerged out of the bowels of the Liberal Party. She was the preselected Liberal candidate for the Ipswich-based seat of Oxley for the 1996 elections. However, her vile attacks on Aboriginal people were too embarrassing even for hard-nosed Liberal operatives. She was disendorsed at the last minute but, with the help of local Liberal Party members, went on to win as an independent. Hanson benefited from the economic hardship that had hit the rural middle class. John Howard, the newly elected prime minister, was determined to shift society sharply to the right. Howard saw Hanson as a useful ally in his campaign against “political correctness”—right-wing code for any opposition to racism or bigotry. Howard implemented many of Hanson’s policies: cutting immigration (particularly family reunions), locking up refugees, extinguishing native title, abolishing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and disbanding the Office of Multicultural Affairs. It was only when One Nation began to severely erode the Liberal vote and cost it seats that Howard’s sympathy for Hanson began to fade. The 1998 Queensland state election was an important turning point. The Liberals directed preferences to One Nation, but this backfired badly on them. One Nation won 22 percent of the vote, captured a swag of Liberal seats and, by splitting the conservative vote, delivered a range of other seats to Labor. Rising mass opposition to Hanson also worried Howard and sections of the ruling class. Initially, most workers in the major urban centres were shocked and intimidated by the media barrage championing Hanson. But fear quickly turned to anger and loathing as a clearer understanding of the nature of Hanson’s right-wing agenda seeped in. With her backing from top mining bosses like Hugh Morgan and the Murdoch press, class-conscious workers saw her as a serious threat to their rights. In that context, the confrontational protests that targeted and on a number of occasions actually shut down One Nation meetings had a real impact. As well as giving anti-racists confidence, the protests played a key role in breaking the momentum of her movement, demoralising her supporters and preventing Hanson from establishing strongholds outside rural areas. Support for One Nation was weakest in Victoria, where the protests against Hanson were most intense, collapsing to just 2 percent in mid-1998. In Melbourne’s Hawthorn, with just five days’ notice, Socialist Alternative initiated a 3,000-strong mobilisation that shut down Hanson’s meeting. In working-class suburbs like Dandenong, anti-Hanson protests mobilised not just the far left but many thousands of local Asian and white workers. These militant protests helped spark a much broader anti-racist movement, including large school student walkouts that spread to numerous regional centres and country towns. Hundreds of Aboriginal people clashed with police in Echuca during an anti-Hanson protest. Rockhampton had a sizeable demonstration, and 5,000 rallied in Bendigo. In response to rank-and-file pressure, trade union officials in Melbourne organised a 50,000-strong anti-racism rally. These mass mobilisations extending into 1998 broke the back of a genuinely threatening far-right movement and prevented the consolidation of a serious fascist organisation. In the 1980s there were substantial far-right mobilisations on the streets, and by 1996, far-right support was surging, more than 70,000 marching in Melbourne in opposition to the Howard government’s gun laws. An array of far-right and fascist organisations, including National Action and its skinhead gangs, briefly coalesced around Hanson, who they saw as their “great white hope”. Hanson herself was becoming more extreme, publishing a book, *The Truth*, accusing Aboriginal people of cannibalism. But in the face of the mass mobilisations and the waning of ruling class and Liberal Party support, One Nation, wracked with infighting and corruption scandals, tore itself apart. The eleven One Nation MPs elected in Queensland in 1998 deserted the party. In the 1990s, the mainstream media, innumerable liberal commentators and some on the left repeatedly claimed that Hanson’s support base was overwhelmingly working-class “racist rednecks”. Some conservative workers, especially in rural areas, did vote One Nation. However, Hanson overwhelmingly attracted former Coalition voters, not Labor voters. Opinion polls in the 1990s showed that unionised workers were the most hostile to Hanson. As in many far-right movements, her core supporters were drawn from the small-town middle class of real estate agents, pharmacists, newsagents, lawyers, accountants, dentists, bank managers and farm machinery suppliers. They, in turn, galvanised around them retirees, police, sections of the self-employed and contractors and non-unionised workers in small workplaces. One Nation’s highest votes were concentrated in small town rural areas, peaking at 43.5 per cent in former Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s old electorate of Barambah in south-east Queensland. In the capital cities, as the commentator Phillip Adams noted, BMW and Volvo owners were prominent at Hanson’s meetings, not struggling blue-collar workers. As Australia is one of the most urbanised and proletarianised societies in the world, One Nation’s failure in the 1990s to make significant inroads into the working class of the major cities marginalised her movement. Whether One Nation or another far-right force can seriously break into and consolidate a presence in the capital cities this time around will be decisive. Right up to the present day, One Nation’s leaders and candidates have overwhelmingly had a middle-class or small capitalist background. Hanson herself owned a fish-and-chip shop. One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts had been the general manager of the Gordonstone coal mine in central Queensland. Western Australian One Nation Senator Tyron Whitten owns an earthworks and construction business. Former One Nation NSW Senator Warwick Stacey had been a British SAS officer. One Nation’s lone Victorian upper house MP Rikkie-Tyrell, who moved a motion to outlaw burning the Australian flag, is a dairy farmer from northern Victoria. One Nation has, if anything, moved further to the right since the 1990s and doubled down on its anti-Asian racism. A typical example was One Nation’s Victorian state secretary, Bianca Colecchia, posting a video of people in Melbourne’s CBD on New Year’s Eve, exclaiming, “Spot the Westerner?” Vilifying Muslims is now stock in trade for Hanson. She has embraced every other fascist cause: championing Donald Trump, denouncing lifesaving vaccines and the World Health Organization, opposing abortion rights, backing “men’s rights” and nuclear power, combined with climate denialism. Despite all this, there is nothing like the popular hostility and outrage against Hanson that was so widespread in the 1990s. She has to a considerable extent been normalised by the media and the political establishment while gaining the support of some of the wealthiest Australian capitalists, including Gina Rinehart. National Party leader David Littleproud has not ruled out working with One Nation, while Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently officially met with Hanson for the first time. Part of the reason that Hanson does not seem so extreme is that both Labor and the Liberals have implemented some of her most reactionary policies on refugees and asylum seekers and hostility to workers’ rights. Both mainstream parties have repeatedly whipped up Islamophobia, implemented a law-and-order agenda that targeted Aboriginal people and African migrants and backed the genocide in Gaza, while undermining basic health services and the living standards of workers to boost the profits of big business. In this context, anti-immigration sentiment has grown over the last few years. International trends have also had an important impact, with the far right becoming an established force in country after country. Sections of the capitalist class have been enthused by the success of Trump and the UK’s Nigel Farage. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News and the *Australian* have played a key role in consolidating far-right talking points on a range of issues like climate change and support for Israel. They have helped develop a cadre of far-right and openly fascist influencers and operators. They have fuelled support for the likes of Jacinta Price and Andrew Hastie on the extreme right of the Liberal Party, as well as for Hanson. In many rural areas and regional centres, especially in NSW and Queensland, support for far-right politics has consolidated over several years. One Nation is now making inroads into some suburban areas. As well as taking votes from the Nationals and Liberals, and to a lesser extent from Labor, One Nation, which obtained 5.7 per cent at the last Senate elections, is soaking up the votes of the assorted far-right micro parties. A further worrying sign is that One Nation has gained a massive surge of followers on social media over the last six months. It will take a major political mobilisation to push back this threat. Along with Barnaby Joyce, One Nation’s recent prominence has attracted a cohort of sordid bigots and reactionary wannabees. Adam Giles, the former Country Liberal Party Northern Territory chief minister, is typical of this crew. After losing office, Giles became a Sky News host, notoriously running a favourable interview with Blair Cottrell, the head of the openly Nazi United Patriots Front. Today, Giles is employed by Gina Rinehart as chief executive officer of Hancock Agriculture and S. Kidman & Co. Heading the One Nation upper house ticket for the South Australian elections is Cory Bernardi. A former Liberal senator, Bernardi argued for tougher anti-worker industrial relations laws, denied global warming, opposed abortion rights for rape victims and declared that permitting same-sex marriage would lead to legalised bestiality. Given his hostility to multiculturalism, support for a ban on wearing the burqa and his claim that Christianity is under siege, he will fit in nicely with Hanson. Another recycled bigot rallying to the One Nation cause is former Liberal MP Bernie Finn. He was expelled from the Liberals for “a series of inflammatory social media posts”, including calling for abortion to be made illegal in all circumstances and comparing Labor Premier Dan Andrews to Adolf Hitler. There is great turmoil and reorganisation taking place in right-wing politics. The surge in support for One Nation has sharpened the crisis in the conservative parties, which shows no sign of being resolved anytime soon. Exactly how things will develop over the coming months is far from clear. Despite One Nation regularly polling more than 20 percent, Hanson has not yet demonstrated the capacity to build and maintain a far-right movement on anything like the scale of Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France or Trump in the US. In the 1990s, Hanson failed to develop a network of strong branches and a solid core of committed party activists. Her party has long been plagued by splits and defections. This time around, One Nation is attempting to build a solid branch structure. How successful it will be is too early to tell. One Nation is far from being the only threat. The Liberal and National parties have also shifted well to the right, partly inspired by Trump and Farage and in response to the pressure from One Nation. New Liberal leader Angus Taylor seems set to move the party further right, while Andrew Hastie waits in the wings, itching for full Trumpification. At the end of last year, we also saw a brief flurry of racist street protests in which the openly Nazi National Socialist Network played a leading role. However, the far-right sentiment at this stage largely remains electorally focused and has not led to anything like the scale of violent attacks on migrants and refugees that have repeatedly occurred in Europe. The far-right terrorist attack on the Perth Invasion Day rally is, however, a dangerous warning sign. And in the wake of Bondi, there have been increasing attacks on Muslims. The far right internationally has entrenched itself as a serious political force—dominating the US Republican Party, in government in Italy, India, Israel and Hungary and leading the polls in Britain and France. Reactionary Nazi-style attitudes are widespread among important sections of the US capitalist class and key operatives in the Trump administration. Australia is now rapidly going down the same road. The far right is not simply some bizarre anomaly separate from capitalism. It is integral to the capitalist system. Fascism is a force the capitalist class have repeatedly turned to when it has suited their needs of pushing politics in a harsher, more authoritarian direction. This is vital to understand. Fighting fascism can’t be separated from the broader fight against capitalism and the mainstream political parties whose racist and reactionary policies give the far right succour. Fighting the far right doesn’t just mean combating them on the streets. The left must also prioritise standing up for workers’ rights, opposing imperialist war, mobilising in support of Palestine, defending democratic rights, building strong socialist election campaigns; indeed, every fight in which our side stands up against the rich and powerful is essential to combating and offering an alternative to the far right. It also means building the sort of strong grassroots organisations in working-class communities that have been central to the fight against ICE in Minneapolis. As long as capitalism exists, there will continue to be a space for the far right to grow. As the capitalist system moves deeper into social and political crisis, that space is set to expand. We can’t rely on small-l liberals or reformists to oppose fascism consistently. At best, the liberals will equivocate. At worst, as they have repeatedly done in the past, they will go over to the fascists when they feel their class interests are threatened. We are in for a long fight, and it is vital to build up the forces of the revolutionary left so that we can play a decisive role in the battles to come. ### Victorian school staff to strike for the first time in thirteen years URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-school-staff-to-strike-for-the-first-time-in-thirteen-years/ Last updated: 2026-03-03T02:08:12.000Z The Australian Education Union (AEU), which covers more than 45,000 Victorian public school staff, is preparing for a statewide strike on 24 March in our campaign for a new agreement with the state government. It has been too long since Victorian public school staff have flooded the streets of Melbourne in our thousands, demonstrating our collective power. This is the union’s first strike in thirteen years—and it’s desperately needed. School staff in the so-called “education state” are the lowest paid in Australia, and our schools are the worst funded, according to a Productivity Commission report from February. According to a Monash University report from 2024, only three in every ten staff want to stay in the profession until retirement. This comes as no surprise when, according to the same report, staff work an average of 12.5 additional unpaid hours each week. Stressful workloads are combined with housing stress, as 43 percent of Victorian teaching positions are in a local government area where it is unaffordable for a graduate teacher to rent a one-bedroom property, according to research by the University of New South Wales. Our uncompetitive wages, which have been outpaced by inflation by around 11 percent since 2022, are also contributing to the staffing shortage. According to an AEU survey, 73 percent of principals experienced staffing shortages at their schools last year. In response to this crisis, AEU members are demanding a 35 percent pay rise over three years. Given how far our wages have fallen behind the rising cost of living, pay is a top priority for most staff. Higher wages will also help attract and retain more staff to fill shortages. While pay is a priority, fighting for better wages should not require us to accept the unbearable workloads driving staff to burnout. This is why our demands also include a series of workload-reducing measures like smaller class sizes, more support staff and more professional practice and student-free days. We are also fighting for paid lunch breaks and clear job descriptions for education support staff, who are paid poverty wages and frequently pressured by principals to perform duties outside of their roles. To implement these improvements without cuts in other areas or shifting the burden to working-class families, we are demanding that all provisions in the agreement be fully funded. It’s important that we continue to clarify and assert our priority demands in the union to avoid them being watered down or traded off against less-supported demands in any proposed deals. The strike has been called as the state government has refused to make the union an offer after nine months of bargaining. This is not surprising given the Allan Labor government’s track record on public education. According to a report from the National School Resourcing Board, Labor denied Victorian public schools $2.1 billion in funding in 2023 alone. To make matters worse, they are denying our schools an additional $2.4 billion in funding by 2031\. This is while already wealthy private schools continue to rake in public funds. According to data from the Commonwealth Department of Education, Victorian private schools were over-funded by around $95.2 million last year. Labor has gotten away with these attacks without any real resistance from our union leaders. This is demonstrated most clearly by the union’s failure to take strike action since 2013\. Despite Labor’s denigration of our schools and profession, the AEU has continued to mobilise its apparatus to campaign for the party at each election. The AEU leadership’s approach culminated in the disastrous 2022 Victorian Government Schools Agreement. The union did not take strike action while negotiating the agreement, resulting in a deal that delivered pay cuts of around [11 percent in real terms](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1%5FO83eLz-imC8uYDBNB%5FhzvXyK9Z4BB2kRMV3bBE8GQ0/edit?tab=t.0&ref=redflag.org.au), which is the equivalent of missing around 34 days of pay each year. In response to this betrayal, thousands of members left the union, eroding union density in Victorian schools. That the union has kicked off our industrial campaign by calling a strike in the first term of the school year is a step in the right direction. The announcement of the strike has brought some life back into the union, with more than 2,500 school staff joining or rejoining since the start of the school year. That the union leaders have taken a more oppositional approach to the government, at least in the initial stages of our campaign, shows that they are responding to the pressure from school staff frustrated by the last agreement and the overall neglect of our schools and profession. This demonstrates the importance of union members using every means at their disposal, such as regional meetings, branch conferences and elections to state council, to push for a more combative approach. One strike day will not be enough to win our demands. The Allan government gave us a taste of its intransigence when it challenged our Protected Action Ballot Order at the start of this year—a brazen attempt to undermine teachers’ democratic rights. Despite projecting a budget surplus of $600 million, spending $1.6 billion on tougher bail laws and $290 million on fossil fuel subsidies since 2024, Labor claims the government is too broke to increase spending on public education. We are in for a fight. That’s why Socialists in Schools, a group of members and supporters of Victorian Socialists in the AEU and other education unions, is campaigning for the AEU to call multiple strike days, including strikes, over consecutive days. This is the only way to force the state government to deliver. It took multiple strikes in 2021 and 2022 for teachers in New South Wales to briefly become the best paid in the country. While pushing for more strikes is important, we also need to expand the ranks of socialists in our unions. Being a socialist means understanding that the collective power of workers—not the clever manoeuvring of official negotiators or the good will of Labor governments—is the solution to every problem, both inside and outside of our schools. Understanding this is the best defence against the moderate, Labor-oriented approach that has disarmed our unions in the face of repeated attacks. It also means understanding that only by getting rid of capitalism can we meaningfully address the problems in our schools and in society more broadly. As long as our society is run by the rich and powerful, the needs of working-class people—including public education—will always take a back seat to the priorities of billionaires. Socialists in Schools have produced a [Strike Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PZmA-XVRW17HLP-Ty8clPMCJOY5QF7nW/view?usp=drive%5Flink&ref=redflag.org.au) to help school staff make the case for multiple strikes and fighting the government until we win. We are also hosting a “Strike School” at 4pm on Saturday, 14 March, at the Victorian Socialists Volunteer Centre, 83 Sydney Road, Brunswick. ### New wave of Islamophobia must be resisted URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/new-wave-of-islamophobia-must-be-resisted/ Last updated: 2026-03-01T07:43:37.000Z This Ramadan, Australian Muslims began their month of fasting in a climate of extreme Islamophobia. From politicians, in the press and on social media, there is a barrage of anti-Muslim racism that makes it feel like we have dialled the clock back to the post-911 era, when the “clash of civilisations” rhetoric dominated and the “war on terror” was just beginning. This time, though, it comes in the context of a growing and better organised far right, with Coalition voters flocking to One Nation’s more extreme brand of bigotry. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is now polling at 22 percent nationally, according to the latest Guardian Essential poll. In Victoria, where the party has historically struggled to gain a foothold, One Nation now ranks first in polls. In a *Sky News* interview last week, Hanson unleashed an unchecked Islamophobic tirade in which she claimed there are “no good Muslims”. She went on to argue that Australians were afraid to visit Lakemba, the multicultural western Sydney suburb. She then used her “apology” for these comments to further slander Muslims, saying she was sorry if she “offended anyone out there that doesn't believe in sharia law, or multiple marriages, or wants to bring ISIS brides in, or people from Gaza that believe in a caliphate”. In February, racists repeatedly sent anonymous death threats to Lakemba Mosque. One letter threatened to “kill the Muslim filth race” and “deport all Muslim garbage” while also proclaiming “Praise Israel”. This letter also included a pointed threat against Palestine Action Group spokesperson Josh Lees, who, the letter claimed, “needs a bullit \[sic\]”. In the comments sections of *Daily Telegraph* articles about this on social media, hundreds of commenters spew similarly extreme racism. Brenton Tarrant, the Australian who gunned down 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, was personally praised in the mosque letter. Tarrant was radicalised by the Australian far right and neo-Nazi movement that emerged during the war on terror. As the letters demonstrate, the current climate is producing more like him. But Hanson alone is not responsible for this wave of Islamophobia. The Labor government and Liberal Party opposition promote and normalise these attitudes too. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rolled out the red carpet for the president of Israel, a man who belongs in The Hague for crimes against humanity. And he’s using the misfortune of the Australian women married to ISIS adherents (and their children) who are stuck in Syria—those the Murdoch press deride as “ISIS brides”—to ostentatiously deny basic rights to Muslims. Then there were the scenes of Muslims being bashed by police in Sydney’s Town Hall Square. Labor Premier Chris Minns unleashed police violence on protesters opposing Israeli President Herzog’s visit. Minns has defended the decision by NSW police to assault Muslims praying after the demonstration, using the beginning of Ramadan to issue a new statement defending police actions. Muslim leaders in NSW have called for an independent investigation into police violence and an apology. Minns continues to resist calls for accountability while signalling his intent to further crack down on the Palestine solidarity movement, including banning the Arabic word “intifada”. Meanwhile, newly minted federal Liberal leader Angus Taylor has launched an anti-immigration campaign, with Muslims as a particular target. A leaked draft Liberal immigration policy includes the proposal for a Trump-style ban on migration from 13 countries, including Somalia and Gaza. The Liberals remain coy about the policy, but Taylor has made it clear he believes “the numbers have been too high and standards too low”. It’s not just the volume of immigration the Liberals intend to oppose but the “values” of those migrating that need to be changed. This anti-Muslim dog whistle harks back to the White Australia policy, as well as the dark days of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. During the so-called war on terror, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism reached a fever pitch, whipped up by the media and politicians to justify the killing abroad and the crackdown on civil liberties at home. According to a Brown University report released in 2023, 4.5 million to 4.6 million people were killed as a result of the war on terror. Dressed up in the neo-colonial language of a “civilising mission” to deliver democracy, freedom and human rights to the dark and backward masses, the wars were really about Western power, oil and empire. This time, the imperialist backdrop to the surge of Islamophobia is Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, Western support for the genocide and the longer-term escalation of military tensions between China and the US. Since the so-called ceasefire, 603 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Trump’s Board of Peace to oversee the killing fields of Gaza includes no Palestinians but at least three people implicated in the Epstein files, as well as Israeli representatives. Unable to defend the indefensible, our rulers rely on vilifying the victims of these crimes. And they understand that such violence is a necessary part of defending Western interests against rivals, and want people to accept this in the name of advancing the national interest. It’s no surprise then that One Nation is being bankrolled by the richest person in Australia, Gina Rinehart. Nor that Albanese capitulates to racist talking points at the same time as he bleats about “lowering the temperature”: he understands the importance of racism as an ideological prop of the system, even if he also worries about its effect on Labor’s vote in some seats. And the capitalist class recognise that pointing the finger at Muslims or immigrants undercuts hostility that might otherwise be directed at them and helps prepare the population for the sorts of sacrifices that will be necessary to defend their interests abroad. In the face of all this, we need to build resistance and a political alternative to racism and nationalism. Just as with the Voice referendum, Labor and the liberal media’s weak response—refusing even to name racism for what it is and hoping appeals to multiculturalism will be enough—is not sufficient to defeat anti-Muslim racism or defend migrants. We need a movement that will take on anti-Muslim racism and hostility to migrants head-on—one that recognises its roots in capitalism and imperialism, that sees class solidarity as the response to far-right bigotry. We need a stronger socialist movement. ### Stop the war, break the US alliance, resist capitalist barbarism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/stop-the-war-break-the-us-alliance-resist-capitalist-barbarism/ Last updated: 2026-03-12T02:19:39.000Z The Washington regime knows no limits. Another country invaded. More lies to justify it. This time, channelling former President George W. Bush’s lies about Iraq 25 years ago, it’s that Iran posed an imminent threat to American citizens and that the US wants only freedom for the Iranian people. Just a day before the US-Israeli assault began, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi told CBS News that Iran was capitulating down the line in negotiations over its nuclear program and that this was putting a peace deal within reach. But the “negotiations” clearly were little more than a ruse to give the US and Israel cover to carry out a criminal attack. Israeli military chief of staff Eyal Zamir said the assault had been planned for months. The Iranian regime is a reactionary and oppressive capitalist theocracy. The Iranian working class has been heroically fighting against it for decades. But the idea that the far-right regimes in Jerusalem and Washington are friends of Iran’s workers and oppressed, and acting in their interests, is a sick joke. The measure of their commitment to freedom and liberation is seen in the rubble of Gaza and in the number of parents mourning dead children. They have pulled off a genocide without repercussions while lecturing the world about “civilisation”. And, under Trump, the US is engaged in gangster-style thuggery everywhere it ventures—kidnapping world leaders, starving out opponents, threatening others’ sovereignty and carrying out economic warfare against almost every country on Earth. The power and position of the US and Israel rest on plunder, exploitation and savagery. Still, they claim with straight faces that the latest mass assassination and bombing campaign is some sort of a good neighbour policy. The assault on Iran must be opposed. But this is about more than just Iran, or even the Middle East. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, [addressing the Munich Security Conference](https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/02/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-at-the-munich-security-conference?ref=redflag.org.au) last month, spoke of building “a new Western century”. European diplomats gave him a standing ovation. Gaza, Iran, Venezuela and the starvation of Cuba are but a small taste of what this entails: criminal violence and intimidation; mass murder everywhere Washington doesn’t get its way. “The West”, however, is not just white Europeans or those of that heritage. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have yet again facilitated this imperialist operation, allowing the US to station its forces permanently in their territories and working hand in glove with Trump and the Israelis. They haven’t been colonised; they are not suckers or stooges. They have put their own capitalist self-interest first and aligned with the world’s pre-eminent power. Palestinians are not their fellow Arabs. Iranians are not their fellow Muslims. Like the rulers of every state, “their people” are capitalists, their language is money and power is their religion. In this, they are no different from the Japanese government, the Philippine government, the Argentine government, the Egyptian government, the Kenyan government and many others. What of Australia in all of this? “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon”, reads [a joint statement](https://www.foreignminister.gov.au/minister/penny-wong/media-release/statement-iran?ref=redflag.org.au) from the prime minister, foreign minister and defence minister. It is thoroughly predictable that this government would regurgitate Washington’s talking point. But has it aided Trump’s far-right regime here? Has the Pine Gap facility in the Northern Territory been used for this criminal assault on Iran? The Australian government won’t say, because it never does. Either way, how much longer can the Australian alliance with the US be tolerated? US imperialism is entrenching its position on this continent. According to one [Reuters report](https://www.reuters.com/world/us-military-seeking-strategic-advantages-builds-up-australias-northern-bases-2024-07-26/?ref=redflag.org.au), Australia has become “the top overseas location for US Air Force and Navy construction spending”. This is occurring just as the Washington regime is leading what is increasingly looking like a global fascist resurgence. [The key rationale](https://www.pm.gov.au/media/joint-leaders-statement-aukus?ref=redflag.org.au) for the Australian government tying itself at the hip to the US war machine through the Aukus partnership was upholding “the rules-based international order”. This rationale, cynical as it always was, now lies in tatters. The order itself is being dismantled and disparaged by the US, which the Australian government had claimed to be the indispensable partner for upholding it. Rubio put it bluntly in Munich: “We can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people”. The Labor government, by tightly integrating this continent and its military and intelligence services with the American empire is complicit in—a partner with—far-right gangsterism and war crimes. The “rules-based order” was always little more than an imperialist order favouring the United States and its allies. The new order is the same, but different. In Rubio’s words, “Western civilisation” must be “unapologetic” and unshackled by “guilt and shame”. The new order is naked capitalism, in which only power matters, and in which humanity is an afterthought. We have to resist this descent into barbarism. ### US imperialism’s quest for ‘a new Western century’ URL: https://redflag.org.au/us-imperialisms-quest-for-a-new-western-century/ Last updated: 2026-02-28T06:42:48.000Z *This instalment of the anti-empire newsletter pulls together a few different threads from past newsletters and other pieces for Red Flag. It was written for the print edition, as none of it has been published there before. But as it all seems to be settling into a general train of thought about the current situation—though far from being fully worked out—I figured to send it out here as well.* --- As Washington amassed the largest US military force in the Middle East since 2003, Marco Rubio spoke plainly at the Munich Security Conference last month. The Trump administration, he said, wants to revive “the West’s age of dominance”. Lamenting the “terminal decline” of the “great Western empires” after the Second World War, the US secretary of state condemned the often communist-inspired postwar decolonisation movements and implored his European counterparts: > Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past. But together, our predecessors recognised that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you. His speech reportedly received a standing ovation. “Rubio accurately reflected where Trump’s foreign policy stands today”, Stephen Wertheim, a historian at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told *New York Times* diplomatic correspondent Edward Wong. “\[The president\] is working to reinvigorate US military dominance across the board. It’s America First globalism. Far from exiting alliances, Trump is weaponising them as platforms for coercion.” Indeed, US imperialism’s multi-pronged approach is now in full view. ### **Shoring up the Americas** Not since before the end of the Cold War has the US so forcefully and directly intervened in the Western Hemisphere as it has under the Trump administration. Amassing an armada to blockade Venezuela before bombing the country and kidnapping its president. Threatening the president of Colombia with a similar fate. Suggesting action against Mexico—and indeed any government that doesn’t toe Washington’s line. Creating a humanitarian crisis in Cuba through a criminal embargo and trade sanctions, with the aim of toppling the government. The US government couldn’t be clearer about its intentions, which White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller outlined in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in January: > We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world—the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time ... The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we’re going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. The audacity is shocking, but this didn’t come out of nowhere. The first Trump administration made no secret of its desire to shore up what it, and almost every US government of the last 200 years, considers to be its property and primary “sphere of influence”. So in 2019, national security adviser John Bolton, [while announcing sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua](https://ni.usembassy.gov/national-security-advisor-ambassador-john-r-bolton-delivers-remarks-at-bay-of-pigs-veterans-association-brigade-2506/?ref=redflag.org.au), declared: “Today, we proudly proclaim for all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well”. That policy, outlined in 1823 and later named after its originator, James Monroe, the country’s fifth president, was a warning to the European powers that the US would not tolerate them interfering in the region. It was a bold assertion by a pre-industrial state that had only recently gained independence: we claim an exclusive right to oversee the Western Hemisphere. Eighty years later, [the so-called Roosevelt Corollary](https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/roosevelt-corollary?ref=redflag.org.au#transcript), named after Theodore Roosevelt, expanded the Monroe Doctrine. The president addressed the Congress in 1904, declaring that the United States would not only oppose European influence but also directly intervene in the affairs of regional states: > Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. This was a precedent-setting doctrine for more than a century of overt and covert interventions into the Caribbean and Central and South America. Now, the White House has asserted the “Trump Corollary”, outlined in the latest [National Security Strategy](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au), issued in November. The document lists the “restoration of American power and priorities” as one of five “*core*, *vital* national interests”: > \[T\]he United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets. The “Trump Corollary” is therefore a refinement of US imperialism’s approach. China has become South America’s main trading partner in recent years. And Beijing has invested billions of dollars in nearly two dozen seaports and the broader continental logistics network, firmly integrating several supply chains into its economic network. Plus, there are increasing financial and military links. So US strategists are initiating what they consider a rearguard action to shore up their region as an exclusive US domain. Last year, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino [alleged](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/16/panamas-president-alleges-us-threatening-to-revoke-visas-over-china-ties?ref=redflag.org.au) that the US embassy threatened to revoke visas of Panamanian officials because of China’s close ties to the country. And after the US bailed out Argentina, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that President Javier Milei was “committed to getting China out” of the country. So the “Corollary” is a full-throated strategy not only of political interference, but of economic imperialism: > We must re-secure our own independent and reliable access to the goods we need to defend ourselves and preserve our way of life. This will require expanding American access to critical minerals and materials ... \[And\] establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations ... All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts. Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed. All countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have been put on notice that a new era of US imperialist meddling has begun. It’s here that Greenland comes into focus, both as a resource-rich territory—with significant deposits of rare earth elements, other minerals and metals, and offshore oil and gas—and as an island of military value. In the interview with CNN’s Tapper, Miller, the White House aide, reiterated that the Trump administration’s position, dating back to the president’s first term, is that Greenland should become part of the US. Because the US is the only NATO signatory capable of projecting power in the Arctic, Miller concluded, “obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States”. ### **Doubling down in Asia** The posturing and interventions in the Americas aren’t about “retreating” from the rest of the world. Despite Trump’s departures from convention, the core goal of this administration is consistent with that of previous US governments: retaining US geopolitical pre-eminence. Indeed, ever since the [first formal strategy document](https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1987.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) issued by the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan in 1987, US governments have used the language of mobilising or employing “all facets of national power” to maintain US dominance of the world. This motif appeared in the grand strategy documents of presidents [Bill Clinton](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-trump-doctrine-a-new-prewar-era/history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1997.pdf) and [George W. Bush](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-trump-doctrine-a-new-prewar-era/history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss2002.pdf), Barack Obama’s [2010 national security strategy](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-trump-doctrine-a-new-prewar-era/obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss%5Fviewer/national%5Fsecurity%5Fstrategy.pdf), Trump’s [2017 national security strategy](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-trump-doctrine-a-new-prewar-era/trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf) and [2018 national defence strategy](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-trump-doctrine-a-new-prewar-era/dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf), and Joe Biden’s 2022 [national security](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-trump-doctrine-a-new-prewar-era/whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf), [national defence](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-trump-doctrine-a-new-prewar-era/media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF) and [national military](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-trump-doctrine-a-new-prewar-era/jcs.mil/Portals/36/NMS%202022%20%5F%20Signed.pdf) strategies. Key differences today are, first, that there is a belated recognition in Washington that a war against China in Asia is probably unwinnable; and, second, that the growth of Chinese industrial power and economic sophistication have been severely underestimated. Indeed, Trump’s and Biden’s attempts to use the tariff weapon have resulted only in Beijing increasing its industrial output and positive trade balance with the world, while precipitating a series of Chinese high-tech breakthroughs considered almost unthinkable just a decade ago. Despite this—indeed, because of it—both the US National Security Strategy and the unclassified version of the [National Defense Strategy](https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/23/2003864773/-1/-1/0/2026-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY.PDF?ref=redflag.org.au) (NDS), which was quietly released at the end of January, make clear that US imperialism is not letting go of Asia: > The Indo-Pacific will soon make up more than half of the global economy. The American people’s security, freedom, and prosperity are therefore directly linked to our ability to trade and engage from a position of strength in the Indo-Pacific. Were China—or anyone else, for that matter—to dominate this broad and crucial region, it would be able to effectively veto Americans’ access to the world’s economic center of gravity, with enduring implications for our nation’s economic prospects, including our ability to reindustrialize. That is why the NSS directs DoW \[Department of War\] to maintain a favorable balance of military power in the Indo-Pacific ... our goal is to ensure that neither China nor anyone else can dominate us or our allies. To this end, US military engineers are deploying across the western Pacific, revitalising World War Two-era airfields to prepare for bombing raids, expanding naval and marine bases and pre-positioning supplies. For example, there’s a new [US$9 billion marine base](https://www.stripes.com/branches/marine%5Fcorps/2026-01-07/marine-corps-camp-blaz-guam-20325967.html?ref=redflag.org.au) in Guam, the reopening of what was once one of the [largest airbases in the world](https://tinianmayor.cnmi.gov/focus-u-s-restoring-pacific-island-wartime-airfield-for-deterrence/?ref=redflag.org.au) on nearby Tinian island, along with other upgrades or new bases in Palau, Micronesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. As well, at least 85,000 US active-duty troops are stationed in East and South-East Asia and the western Pacific. Then there’s Australia. The integration of this continent into US strategic planning for a major confrontation with China continues. The federal government is spending up to $17 billion on [bases in northern Australia in 2024-34](https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/29090046/The-cost-of-Defence-2025-2026-1.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au), an area that is now [reportedly](https://www.reuters.com/world/us-military-seeking-strategic-advantages-builds-up-australias-northern-bases-2024-07-26/?ref=redflag.org.au) “the top overseas location for US Air Force and Navy construction spending”. The first British nuclear-powered attack submarine, HMS *Anson*, has arrived in Western Australia for a month-long visit, and will be followed by more regular rotations of US and British nuclear submarines from next year. Air bases in the north have been repurposed to accommodate the largest US nuclear bombers. The marines have their own dedicated and upgraded facilities in Darwin. And the pre-positioning of US munitions, vehicles and fuel has begun in Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory. ### **Global power through regional domination** According to the most recent figures from the Pentagon’s [staffing data](https://dwp.dmdc.osd.mil/dwp/app/dod-data-reports/workforce-reports?ref=redflag.org.au), the US military has more than 170,000 active-duty personnel (about 13 percent of the country’s 1.3 million active troops) stationed in some 170 countries. That is up by 3,000 from a year earlier—so there has thus far been no real change of the force posture under this president. Once reservists and civilian staff are included, the figure rises to more than 230,000 US military personnel stationed overseas (out of 2.8 million total). The NDS will be followed by the Pentagon’s Global Posture Review, which will outline where and to what extent the US military will maintain these forward-positioned assets and troops in the coming years. There may well be some troop drawdowns in Europe and the Middle East. The US military’s overall international footprint might be marginally reduced. But the US is an empire regardless of who occupies the White House. And no other country has the capacity to deploy so much destructive military force to several areas of the globe. Nothing highlights this more than the latest build-up targeting Iran, which comes on the heels of the action against Venezuela, which involved the largest US military build-up in the Caribbean since 1994\. And, as noted, all of this is occurring as the US is expanding its capacities in Asia—now arguably the most important section of the world economy. There are limits, of course. Those are illustrated both in Rubio’s speech to the Munich Security Conference and in the Trump regime’s hectoring of all Western allies to increase their military spending to 5 percent of GDP: despite its enormous power, the US can’t go it alone against an adversary as industrially and militarily powerful as China. Continued US global domination depends on several things. First, its own unchallenged and unhindered Western Hemispheric domination. Hence, the aggressive moves against Venezuela and Cuba, and the threats against other governments, including Canada and Denmark (which holds Greenland). Second, the broader Western alliance dominating its respective regions with less direct US support. So the European NATO signatories on that continent (even while Trump still pines for Russia to become some form of ally). In the Middle East, the US dream is for an Israel-Saudi alliance built on the foundations of a decimated Iran and neutered Palestinian national movement. Third is containing China, which requires US resources freed up by the first two things to be deployed in the ongoing fortification of military positions in the western Pacific, plus renewed and deepened alliances with states in Asia prepared to join a military build-up against Beijing—Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and India being key. Fourth is rebuilding the industrial capacities of Western imperialism, along with an aggressive imperial culture unconstrained by international rules. Rubio spent some time dwelling on both areas: > We do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength ... \[We don’t want an alliance\] that exists to operate a global welfare state and atone for the purported sins of past generations. \[We want\] an alliance that does not allow its power to be outsourced, constrained, or subordinated to systems beyond its control; one that does not depend on others for the critical necessities of its national life; and one that does not maintain the polite pretence that our way of life is just one among many and that asks for permission before it acts. The sum of these goals is Rubio’s exhortation to “build a new Western century”. None of it happens neatly, easily or without tremendous violence or threats of it, as the situations in Ukraine, Gaza, Venezuela and Iran have shown. Rubio’s harking back to the last age of empires, combined with Trump’s clear willingness to unleash hell for political and economic ends, portends a much more brutal world. We have become accustomed to referring to postwar periods: the post-Second World War era, the post-Vietnam era, the post-Cold War era. But we surely have entered a new and dangerous era of intense superpower jockeying, in which political, economic and social life is increasingly geared toward preparing for war. ### Responding to the rise of Hanson and One Nation URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/responding-to-the-rise-of-hanson-and-one-nation/ Last updated: 2026-03-05T05:32:24.000Z For twenty years after Pauline Hanson was first elected to the federal seat of Oxley in 1996, the major parties tried to keep her out of Australia’s parliaments. They were broadly successful: the One Nation leader was jailed in 2003 for electoral fraud and failed in all eight state and federal elections she contested between 1998 and 2015. Yet mainstream politicians courted Hanson’s far-right voting base throughout. The Coalition, often with ALP support, implemented many of her policies. In this, they were aided by the atmosphere of the so-called war on terror from 2001, which unleashed a wave of Islamophobia across the Western world. Whether it was refugees and “border protection”, civil liberties, law and order, or government authoritarianism more generally, the first decade of the 21st century was characterised by a series of attacks on workers and the poor, and a strengthening of the position of capitalists and the repressive arms of the state. Then, in 2016, Hanson was again successful, being sworn in as a senator to the federal parliament. But this time, from the outset, the old establishment hostilities seemed to melt away. Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull met with her in his office straight away. On *60 Minutes*, Liz Hayes presented [a total puff piece](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zNgM0BLSYs&ref=redflag.org.au), following months of paid appearances on the Seven network’s *Sunrise*, the country’s top-rated breakfast TV show. In *Red Flag*, [we wrote about the normalisation of Hansonism](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-5391). At the time, the left was campaigning against the rise of a significant anti-Islam street movement called [Reclaim Australia](https://redflag.org.au/article/far-right-racists-cant-be-ignored/), and the emergence of neo-Nazi groups at the core of it. As well, Donald Trump’s successes in the US were sending shockwaves around the world and inspiring renewed far-right electoral advances in many countries. Since then, the political situation has deteriorated further. Today, in all the major Western powers—the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Italy—fascist or fascist-adjacent organisations are either in government or have become the main opposition. And as far-right groups and individuals have become increasingly successful, the capitalist establishment and sections of the corporate media have increasingly embraced, sanitised and promoted them. If we thought the far right was being normalised a decade ago, it is just part of the furniture today. In Australia, in less than a year, Hanson has flipped the script on what was thought possible. One Nation has gone from polling 5 percent to overtaking the combined vote of the Liberals and Nationals—and not just in one outlier opinion poll, but in [at least half a dozen](https://www.pollbludger.net/fed2028/bludgertrack/index.htm?ref=redflag.org.au). Shockingly, a Guardian Essential poll this week found that nearly 60 percent of Australians say that they are [open to voting for One Nation](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/24/guardian-essential-poll-australia-one-nation-vote-pauline-hanson?ref=redflag.org.au) in the next federal election. Hanson, coming on the heels of the international far-right’s successes, and backed by multi-billionaire Gina Rinehart and a growing [coterie of the ultra-wealthy](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-monsters-backing-one-nation/), is being promoted like never before. It’s clear why: there is rising discontent about the state of society, and the establishment wants that discontent directed against immigrants and in a hardline nationalist direction. The capitalists are more than tolerant of Hanson’s anti-Muslim and bigoted agitation because they are not prepared to tolerate any reforms that will significantly improve the lives of workers, such as higher wages, increased social spending or taxes on the ultra-wealthy. They know that a divided working class is a conquered working class—one more easily exploited and manipulated. They also recognise that the world is becoming more militaristic and that a major war involving Australia seems increasingly probable. They want to create a nastier society that is more likely to accept economic austerity in the name of national unity and sacrifice. Fighting the far right, therefore, increasingly must mean fighting against capitalism: Hanson and her ilk internationally cannot be separated from the broader ruling-class appetite for militarism, nationalism and the gutting of social welfare and workers’ rights. Hanson’s core support comes from a reconfigured far right—sections of the Liberals and Nationals, along with those who have been voting for far-right micro-sects in recent elections. It’s people holding on to resentments about pandemic-era public health measures and a sense that not enough is being done for small business “battlers”. It’s people who are inclined to think everyone else is getting an easier ride—people with little sense of social solidarity or collective consciousness. And of course, it’s people who view migrants as the foundation of all other problems: [an ABC analysis](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-15/story-lab-one-nation-polling/106322978?ref=redflag.org.au) of recent polling found that more than half of One Nation voters rank immigration as a key motivation for favouring Hanson over the alternatives. Yet the party’s increasing support in the polls also shows that her base is broadening significantly. This situation won’t easily be turned around. But if we don’t try, it will get much worse. How then should we respond? In [2015](https://redflag.org.au/article/far-right-racists-cant-be-ignored/), [2016](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-5391/) and [2017](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-5760/), socialists argued that the key thing was to mobilise people on the streets against the far right and against Hanson. The logic was that we had to prevent fascist organisers from recruiting young people, stop them from building branches and stop them from marching in the streets to build their political profiles. Today, protests against racism and against the far-right turn in politics remain important. In Germany, for example, mobilisations against the fascist Alternative for Germany have been essential for building resistance and building the left more broadly. And in the US city of Minneapolis, tens of thousands involved in local organising against thug federal immigration agents proved that the Trump administration can be pushed back, albeit temporarily. But we have to be realistic: the forces of the left in Australia have diminished just as the forces of the right have increased. The trade union leaders, who mobilised tens of thousands against Hanson in the 1990s, are entirely absent in offering a lead to workers today—indeed, they have disgracefully been at the forefront of backing Labor governments as they have taken a chainsaw to living standards. Even if the unions did the right thing and organised against the political slide to the right, protests alone would not defeat the far-right: they are taking control of government after government and becoming entrenched in official politics. The time for preventing their rise has passed. So we need more than protests. We need a political alternative—a socialist pole of attraction for the people disgusted with both the rise of the far right and the failure of the Labor Party and respectable liberal opinion to do anything about it. A socialist organisation that will, unlike the current crop of trade union and ALP leaders, fight for living standards and fight against the bigotry used to divide the working class. The most promising organisation on these lines is the [Socialist Party](https://www.socialists.org.au/?ref=redflag.org.au). The steps it has taken so far have been modest. Yet the enthusiasm for an alternative is clear: in less than a year, the party has grown into the largest socialist organisation in Australia in more than half a century. With the rapid rise of the far right, the stakes are high. But without a socialist alternative, the right will continue to make all the running. ### The German Jews standing up for Palestine URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-german-jews-standing-up-for-palestine/ Last updated: 2026-02-23T06:55:05.000Z German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently called support for Israel “a lasting historical responsibility”. Germany is the second largest arms supplier to Israel, and the government suppresses pro-Palestinian sentiment internally in the name of protecting Jews. Prominent Palestinians are banned from entering the country, and police violently attack demonstrations and tie people up in court. Meanwhile, neo-Nazis demonstrate with impunity and even receive protection from the police. The domestic intelligence service has categorised Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East—an organisation of German Jews who support Palestinian rights—as a “foreign extremist organisation”, and the University of Jena recently banned its chairperson, Wieland Hoban, from speaking there. During a visit to Germany in November, Janey Stone, co-author (with Donny Gluckstein) of *The Radical Jewish Tradition* (Interventions*,* 2024), caught up with Hoban to talk about how Germany’s support for Israel is presented as recompense for its past, challenging antisemitism amid the resurgence of the far right and the Palestine solidarity movement in Germany today. --- ### **We often hear about the role that “memory culture” plays in Germany. This is linked to Germany’s current policy toward Israel and is embedded in the concept known as *Staatsräson*. Can you explain this?** After the Second World War, Germany needed to rehabilitate itself after its military and moral defeat, so it could be a respectable international player again. The first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, decided to present relations with Israel as some sort of reconciliation. So Germany started military cooperation in 1955 and official relations in 1965. The idea of memory culture became a central plank of German politics in the 1980s. After reunification in 1989, Germany sought a bigger role in Western imperialism and the transatlantic alliance. And so the moral justification became more urgent. In 2008, Angela Merkel, the then chancellor, introduced the word *Staatsräson* \[reason of state\], meaning national interests. For Merkel and the German ruling class, national interest included selling weapons and having geopolitical access to the West Asian/Middle Eastern region, with the moral narrative providing a convenient packaging. Merkel’s phrase, that Israel’s security is Germany’s reason of state, became part of the standard political vocabulary. Since then, we have seen the increasing Israelification of political discourse. The more brutal Israel’s crimes become, and the more Germany is implicated in them and as an ally in genocide, the more vehemently politicians have to try to justify that morally. ### **So the primary reason for *Staatsräson* is to compensate for guilt in relation to the Holocaust. Is there a larger picture in terms of Germany’s position in global imperialism?** Yes, they want to be part of the Western alliance, to have geopolitical access to the Middle Eastern region. The US discourse justifying support for Israel does mention antisemitism, but it’s not critical for them. But in Germany, the whole legitimacy of the relationship is dependent on the moral narrative. When German politicians demand acceptance of Israel’s right to exist, they’re implicitly demanding that you acknowledge Germany’s right to exist. Germany has so closely tied its post-Holocaust legitimacy to its support for Israel that without that, the whole self-conception of the German state project is under threat. ### **We hear the argument in Germany that antisemitism has been imported by immigrants and there is no native antisemitism here. Could you comment on that?** Germany has no need to import antisemitism. There is plenty of native antisemitism. In fact, supporting Zionism can be a good form of antisemitic praxis, of supporting a way to promote the departure of Jews from Germany. But it’s become mainstream for people to use antisemitism as a weapon against migrants, especially Muslims and Arabs. As a Jewish group, we see it very much as one of our roles to counter the distortion, manipulation of antisemitism. We see the need to point out that the main source of antisemitism and also the most violence, has always been the far right. The central problem is the conflation of supporting Israel with fighting antisemitism. And that is perpetuated by treating Israel as synonymous with Jews. For instance, when the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, talks about the Jewish flag, he means the Israeli flag. Or two recent articles in the magazine *Der Spiegel*, which had references to the Jewish embassy in Berlin. There is a particularly dark side to this conflation. Israel stirs up anger and hatred in the world with its crimes. You have synagogues where people are praying for Israel and its genocidal army. Some people see this as being about Jews. It’s hard to say then, “Oh this is just a house of worship, it isn’t a legitimate demonstration target”. This is a result of the Jewish mainstream choosing to align itself with genocide. In the same way that 9/11 stirred up a lot of Islamophobia among people who maybe were not particularly racist before, Israel’s actions do stir up antisemitism. ### **So what does this all mean for the pro-Palestinian movement in Germany?** It means that to support the rights of Palestinians and actually even to be Palestinian is a challenge to the German narrative and therefore German policies on the ground. Nazi Germany, because it carried out the Holocaust and because it triggered the mass flight of Jews from Europe, was actually ultimately responsible for the Nakba as well. Because if you hadn’t had these Jewish refugees, many of whom ended up in Palestine, the Jewish population would have been far smaller; they wouldn’t have been able to raise sufficient military power to expel the Palestinians and massacre them. And so, some people have referred to the Palestinians as the victims of the victims of the Germans. The whole German redemption narrative, where Germany atones for its crimes against the Jews by supporting Israel, leaves no place for the Palestinians. Because if the foundation of Israel and the continued existence of Israel were not in effect a redemptive blessing, if they were actually something that involved terrible crimes that continue to this day, this interferes with the narrative. So what do you do with the Palestinians? Their very existence is a problem for the narrative. So people use the charge of antisemitism. But now some are starting to break with this pro-Israel narrative. Of course, those who actually become active and demonstrate on the streets are a tiny proportion. But polls have shown that Israel is losing support in the population in Germany. ### **What about the German left?** One problem on the left is the so-called anti-Deutsch movement, which originally came from the radical left. They argue that, to oppose historical German fascism, you have to support American imperialism and because antisemitism was a central element of Nazism, then we have to support Israel. The largest left-wing party is The Left (Die Linke). As well as elements of anti-Deutsch, there are reformist sections that want to avoid conflict with the *staatsraison*. There are also open Zionists. On the other hand, there are real anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists, and an increasing presence of pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist elements in a younger generation of members. Die Linke saw huge growth at the last election, primarily a reaction to the growth of the far right. Many new members have a strong view on Palestine and are now in conflict with the reformist and Zionist elements in the party. ### **So that brings us to the question of the role within the Palestinian support movement of anti-Zionist Jews in general and Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East \[Jüdische Stimme, or JS\]. How was JS established and how do you see its role in Germany?** JS was founded in 2003\. Initially, it was a small group of Israeli and German Jews who argued that not all Jews support Israel, and that supporting Jews and fighting antisemitism in Germany should not mean supporting the policies of Israel. The existence of Jews critical of Israel and using the “not in our name” message caused a lot of hostility in the Jewish mainstream. And because we started off pretty small, people found it easy to dismiss us as just some cranks, fake Jews, self-haters, traitors or unrepresentative. These accusations are familiar to all of us who move in Jewish anti-Zionist circles. But in the same way that the Palestinians are a problem for the German redemption narrative, critical Jews are also a problem. Because if this supposedly self-redeeming policy is not accepted by all Jews, then they’re not going to forgive you. This makes us troublesome, the same way that the Palestinians are troublesome for not accepting their own dispossession and slaughter. The other thing, of course, that has always been important for JS is to build alliances and relationships with Palestinian groups. And also to use whatever leverage or privilege we might have, as Jews, to assist in getting more exposure for Palestinians themselves. ### **German police frequently attack Jewish participants and others in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, pretty violently. On the other hand, you see actual Nazis holding their demonstrations and being protected by the police in the name of freedom of speech. Why does this happen?** Of course, the police always have less sympathy for the left than they do for Nazis. But yes, it’s the Palestine movement that is particularly targeted. And it’s not confined to violence—the police harass us in other ways. You get accused of doing something illegal or maybe that you said some slogan or that you held some sign, you need to be taken out of the demonstration now. We need to take your details, and maybe you’re going to get a letter from the police. There’s also legal persecution and harassment. There are something like 10,000 court cases currently. I’ve had a few such letters myself, although I’ve been lucky and the accusations haven’t stuck. But the situation is, when you oppose Israel as a Jew in Germany, to the pro-Israel mainstream, you basically renounce your status as a Jew. One consequence of this is that non-Jewish Zionists are perceived as the actual Jewish representatives. The distortion of Jewish identity through Zionism has gone so far that you don’t even have to be Jewish to be Jewish. ### **There’s been significant growth of the far right in Germany. One of the most important developments has been the Alternative for Germany (Alternative fűr Deutschland, AfD), which has had significant electoral success. Why has this happened, and what threat do they represent?** The AfD has grown a lot because they bring together right-wing conservatives and neo-Nazis. This sets them apart from previous far-right parties. The AfD started out virtually as a single-issue party based on euroscepticism. When a lot of refugees came from Syria and Iraq, Merkel’s policy of welcoming them was seen as a betrayal by many on the right wing of her conservative party \[the Christian Democratic Union, CDU\], so they migrated to the AfD. Since then, the party has moved further to the right and become more overtly racist. This consistent rightward shift in the AfD has been accompanied by increasing support in the population, which has put pressure on the conservatives electorally. It is likely that the CDU will eventually have to enter a coalition with them. ### **What do you think is the way forward for the pro-Palestinian movement and the left in general in Germany?** We have to try to reach people who are not already in our activist circles, which is not easy. However, in Berlin, there was a demonstration of about 70,000 in June, and then 100,000 in September, the biggest Palestine demonstration ever in Germany. One important route would be through the trade unions. The weapons are leaving the docks in Hamburg, and we have seen how the dock workers in Italy or Greece have really intervened in arms deliveries. ### **And so do you think also, as a socialist, you would link up the struggles around Palestine with local issues of concern to so many ordinary people, like the fact that Germany’s now introducing conscription, there’s a major housing crisis, at least in Berlin, and the cuts that are planned for very soon in social welfare payments?** Absolutely. There is a whole range of other issues that affect ordinary people, and antisemitism and Islamophobia have always been used as ways of distracting people from those issues. The whole issue of Israel is being used as a way to promote racism. This is why I mention the imperialist context, including the intensification of militarisation and the insane budgets. A law limiting state debt has been dropped to fund a military budget of €500 billion, supposedly in order to defend against Russia. Israel buys arms components such as tank engine technology that only Germany manufactures. On the other hand, the German military buys drones and missile defence systems from Israel. All of this goes together with increasing austerity and reductions in social welfare spending. So we need to explain to our audience that the Palestine issue is not something far away that has nothing to do with them, but that it’s something that concerns all of us, both at the moral and the material level. ### The Epstein Files (+ One Nation and Australia's Islamophobia resurgence) URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/the-epstein-files-one-nation-and-australias-islamophobia-resurgence/ Last updated: 2026-03-05T05:55:55.000Z Emma and Chloe discuss the meaning of the Epstein files and what they reveal about how the rich and powerful rule. In the main segment, they discuss One Nation’s rise in the polls, the intense Islamophobic atmosphere in Australia and the realignment of the Coalition under new Liberal leader Angus Taylor. ### Socialists in the student movement URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/socialists-in-the-student-movement/ Last updated: 2026-02-23T02:31:36.000Z Students today are operating in a campus climate of almost unprecedented repression. What does it mean for socialist students trying to build political organisations in the universities? The last great period of radicalisation, from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, was a time of huge struggles and social change. Like Palestine today, the Vietnam War revealed the sheer barbarity of capitalism to a new generation. An economic boom following the Second World War and the massive expansion of higher education raised the expectations of young people who chafed at the restrictions of a profoundly conservative society. The social and economic conditions generated a “youth rebellion” that helped build a bridge between radical students and a working class that was far more militant than today. The workers’ revolts that challenged capitalist rule in France in 1968 and Italy in 1967-69 were sparked by student protests and displayed a high level of worker-student cooperation. These events shattered the myth of Western capitalism’s stability and prosperity, and proved that workers in advanced economies still had revolutionary potential. But the uprisings that promised so much in France and Italy were defeated—not because of any lack of fighting spirit, but because of the politics of the left organisations to which left-wing workers traditionally looked—especially the Communist parties, whose Stalinist politics had dominated the left since the late 1920s. They worked frantically to end the mass strikes and break up the alliance between workers and students. Russia’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, following its brutal suppression of a workers’ revolution in Hungary in 1956, confirmed that the USSR had nothing to offer those fighting for a better world, and indeed was part of the problem. In Australia, Labor’s crushing defeat in the 1966 election, fought on an anti-war and anti-conscription platform, led a sizeable minority to conclude that parliamentary politics was a dead end. A new generation of young activists emerged, whose militancy and deepening criticism of capitalism created space for the formation of new left-wing groups that rejected the politics of both Stalinism and reformism. But what was the alternative? Grappling with this question generated intense debate and considerable political confusion, as various currents battled it out. Some drew inspiration from the revolutions in China (1949) and Cuba (1959) and anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa. Others viewed students rather than workers as the leaders of a coming revolution. Some rejected the idea of building any kind of organisation, arguing that parties always led to authoritarianism. A minority (including Socialist Alternative’s precursors) sought to recover the revolutionary core of Marxism and advocated building a mass revolutionary party based in the working class. The Communist and Labor parties were increasingly challenged by more radical forces. A plethora of groups—Maoists, Trotskyists, anarchists, libertarians and radical liberals such as the Students for a Democratic Society—competed for influence on campuses. The ideas that dominated varied by location. There was a sense of urgency, a widespread hope that revolution was around the corner. (Socialist Alternative’s Mick Armstrong, a leading student activist at La Trobe University, recalls being asked when he thought the revolution would start. When he replied “in about five years”, he was derided as a pessimist.) The universities were a major front in the battle against imperialist war. Newly radicalised students joined left-wing clubs at militant campuses in every state. Student unions—which today view their role as “providing services” and running sausage sizzles—became activist, political bodies. Socialist students campaigned to politicise the national student union, turning it into a body that could mobilise and coordinate mass activity across the country. By 1973, a broad alliance of socialists and unaligned far-left activists had won control of the Australian Union of Students (AUS, the precursor to today’s National Union of Students) from the Labor Party. For a period, Monash University was at the centre of student radicalism. In 1967, when a majority of the population still supported the Vietnam War, the Labor Club (a left-wing club not affiliated with the Labor Party) began collecting money to aid the National Liberation Front, the military organisation fighting against the Western invasion and therefore responsible for killing Australian and American troops. This widely publicised act of “treason” caused an enormous furore, but actually resulted in a shift to the left, both in the anti-war movement and broader society. Mere opposition to the war was now a moderate position; the radicals opposed US imperialism and supported its defeat. The National Liberation Front’s Tet Offensive in 1968 confirmed that the US could not win. In September 1965, a Gallup Poll had found 56 percent in favour of continuing the war. By August 1969, 55 percent opposed it. The Maoists were highly influential in the student movement because of their militancy and strident opposition to US imperialism—such as the 4 July 1968 anti-war protest, when the US embassy in Melbourne had its windows smashed and there were running battles with police. But their support for Stalinist regimes like North Korea alienated many students, as did their appalling positions on women’s and LGBTI rights. They also argued that Australia was colonially oppressed, so Australian workers should ally with “patriotic” capitalists against US and multinational companies. At Monash, the Revolutionary Communist Club, of which I was a member, took the Maoists on politically, using our weekly broadsheet to critique their politics and, in 1973, hosting a debate on “the road to socialism”. To their Stalinist argument for a “two-stage” revolution (first win national independence, with socialism postponed to the indefinite future), we argued for a working-class revolution to overthrow capitalism. Several hundred students attended, with most favouring our position. A few days later, the Maoists distributed a leaflet titled “Icepick”, (the weapon used to assassinate Leon Trotsky), regurgitating the Stalinist lie that Trotsky was a fascist agent. But by then, we had supplanted them as the leading force on the Monash left. The following year, we led the longest occupation of a university building to that point in Australian history. Political debate in those days was not always verbal. As their influence waned, Maoists often resorted to violence against their rivals on the left, especially Trotskyists. At the 1975 AUS conference, for example, they viciously assaulted La Trobe delegates, including the aforementioned Mick Armstrong. If you were a revolutionary socialist, you had to fight for your ideas, sometimes literally. The period of radicalisation didn’t last, but it left an invaluable residue in the form of small groups of socialists who continued both to clarify their politics and to build organisations. Socialist Alternative has been the most successful of these. We’re operating in very different circumstances today. Despite some similarities, particularly regarding student activism, the Palestine movement has not led to a generalised radicalisation on the scale of the 1960s and ’70s. What was then a vibrant and combative labour movement is today weak and passive. Strikes are at historic lows, and the trade unions have been hobbled by bureaucrats whose loyalty to the Labor Party (and their own career prospects) overrides any commitment to defending the working class. In the 1960s and ’70s, left-wing trade unions took up political as well as economic issues. They played a prominent role in the anti-Vietnam War movement and in the protests against the 1971 South African rugby tour. Today, with Labor supporting Israel to the hilt, few unions offer even verbal support for Palestine. The only [strikes for Palestine](https://redflag.org.au/article/community-sector-workers-to-walk-out-for-palestine-again/) that have occurred here have been organised and led from below by Socialist Alternative members. Students play an important role in the class struggle. Often the first to move, they can act as a catalyst, drawing broader social layers into activity. They have played a distinct role in all revolutionary movements, even when universities were largely the preserve of the upper classes. For example, during the 1905 Russian revolution, Vladimir Lenin (who had been expelled from Kazan Imperial University in 1887 for his activism) praised “the radical students, who ... are the vanguard of all the democratic forces”, and insisted that the Bolsheviks, the party that went on to lead the Russian Revolution, take work among students seriously. In Australia today, approximately two-thirds of people aged 15–24 (1.6 million) are engaged in education, so students constitute a substantial social layer whose actions can have a significant impact. This alone would be sufficient reason for socialists to do serious work among students, but it is also the case that students are of immense [strategic importance](https://redflag.org.au/article/strategic-importance-students-0) for any revolutionary organisation—especially when the left is small and socialists do not have mass influence in wider society or the workers’ movement. The fact that Socialist Alternative is now the largest far-left organisation in Australia testifies to the success of this strategy. Socialist students can play a pivotal role, whether on their campuses, in social campaigns and movements or relating to groups of workers in struggle. The radicalisation around Palestine presents an opportunity to rebuild the socialist movement, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and this is most likely to occur on campuses. The immediate task of socialists in the student movement must be to expand our base among students and win broader support for revolutionary socialist ideas. With clubs on every major campus, Socialist Alternative’s student members are well placed to do this. ### How Lenin became a Marxist URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/how-lenin-became-a-marxist/ Last updated: 2026-02-21T02:23:50.000Z In December 1887, four months after beginning his studies in law at Kazan University, about 700 kilometres east of Moscow, 17-year-old Vladimir Lenin was arrested at a student demonstration protesting the Russian tsar’s (king’s) University Act, which outlawed student organisations. Lenin joined a growing student movement, made up of brave and dedicated opponents of the monarchy. In his biography, *The Young Lenin*, Leon Trotsky writes that “the government, with its all-powerful police system and its million soldiers, remained in constant fear of the students”. Maxim Gorky, a student at Kazan in the 1880s and later a novelist, gives a vivid sense of the atmosphere in the student underground in his memoir *My Universities*. He describes a late-night secret meeting in town: > “In the pitch-black darkness I could sense that many people were there. I could hear dresses rustling, feet shuffling, soft coughing and whispers. A match flared up, lighting my face, and I could make out several dark shapes sitting on the floor against the walls. A young man leaned down from the windowsill and asked me if I had any friends among the workmen, what books I had read and if I had much free time.” The young man interrogating Gorky was Nikolai Fedoseyev, one of the most serious student leaders in Kazan, whose study circle Lenin joined. Fedoseyev managed to accumulate an impressive underground library in Kazan, with the classics of the Narodnik tradition (agrarian socialism), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, German socialists and the Emancipation of Labour group—the first Russian Marxist organisation, founded in 1883 by exiles. It was here, at 18, that Lenin first read Marx’s *Capital*. He later recalled: “Fedoseyev was one of the first to proclaim his adherence to the Marxist trend”. Marx had become a well-known figure in the Russian movement. In 1870, exiled Russian students asked Marx to be their representative on the governing body of the First International, a request he enthusiastically accepted. At the urging of the Russian students, the first non-German edition of *Capital* was published in Russia in 1872\. The censors thought it posed no threat because it was too complicated for anyone to understand. In 1880, Marx proudly commented that in Russia, “*Capital* is more widely read and acclaimed than anywhere else”. Marx and Engels anticipated that a revolution in Russia could spark a revolution across Europe. Russia was the true bulwark of the old feudal society. Following the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the Polish peasant rebellion of 1863, Marx became interested in the Russian peasantry. He closely read the work of the Narodniks and was in contact with their leaders until his death in 1883\. When a group of Narodniks assassinated the tsar in 1881, Marx remarked to his daughter Jenny that they were “sterling chaps through and through”. Marx and Engels didn’t support their tactics, but in Lenin’s words, “the heroic struggle of the handful of Russian revolutionaries against the mighty tsarist government evoked a most sympathetic echo in the hearts of these old revolutionaries”. Engels, who outlived Marx by 12 years, was better able to analyse new developments in Russia. The key question was whether capitalist relations were beginning to dominate the country. By 1894, Engels was certain that Russia was on the path to capitalist development. He predicted: > “\[T\]he fall of tsarist despotism will ... give the labour movement of the West fresh impetus and create new, better conditions in which to carry on the struggle, thus hastening the victory of the modern industrial working class, without which, present-day Russia can never achieve a socialist transformation.” Lenin later stated that he became a Marxist in the rural town of Samara, south of Kazan. Trotsky’s biography contains vibrant accounts of Lenin’s activity during this period. Lenin had moved there in 1889, just before the Kazan student circles were suppressed through arrests. A year later, he translated *The Communist Manifesto* into Russian for his study circle, which included two exiled students, Lalayants and Sklyarenko, both of whom went on to be members of Lenin’s Bolshevik party. The three of them became notorious in Samara for their frequent debates with the Narodniks. In 1891-92, a terrible famine swept Russia, which Engels believed would have drastic political repercussions. Some half a million died of disease and malnutrition. The famine presented practical questions for the Samara circles. The Narodniks advocated establishing aid canteens to feed starving peasants. Lenin’s circle received considerable moral criticism when they refused to take part in the aid canteens. In Trotsky’s words: > “\[T\]he Marxists, of course, opposed not aid to the starving, but the illusion that a sea of need could be emptied with the teaspoon of philanthropy. For them, the problem was not merely to mitigate the consequences of a social calamity, but to remove its causes.” In Samara, Lenin first began applying what he had learnt from Marx and Engels to Russia. He read every new book published about the peasantry and Russia’s economy. He was focused on the very same question that occupied Marx until his death—the capitalist development of Russia. His first articles demonstrate his meticulous application of Marx’s *Capital* to understanding Russia’s development. Independently, he reached the same conclusion that Engels had: “The transformation of Russia into a capitalist industrial nation proceeds at an ever-quickening pace”. Lenin’s conclusion was accompanied by a practical shift. In August 1893, he left Samara for the capital, Saint Petersburg, with the intention of joining the student circles in contact with the workers’ movement. Lenin soon became involved in factory agitation, conversing with workers about their conditions and writing pamphlets for distribution. A footnote in Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet *What is to be done?* recalls his days as a factory agitator: > “I remember as if it were yesterday my ‘first attempt’, one which I would never repeat. I spent many weeks grilling ‘with verve’ one worker about every aspect of the set-up at the enormous factory where he worked. The worker told me with a smile, wiping the sweat away after the end of our labours, ‘working overtime is not as tough for me as answering your questions!’” Seeking to modernise industry and to access more skilled labour, the tsarist state established schools for Petersburg workers. But the teachers in these Sunday Schools were often anti-tsarist intellectuals, such as Nadezhda Krupskaya and Lenin, who used the institutions to meet workers and discuss socialism with them. Krupskaya recalls one of Lenin’s lessons in her memoirs: “\[He\] read Marx's *Capital* to the workers and explained it to them. He devoted the second half of the lesson to questioning the workers about their work and conditions of labour, showing them the bearing which their life had on the whole structure of society, and showing them in what way the existing order could be changed.” However, these teachers were about to become students themselves. The country’s first mass strike wave broke out at the end of 1895 in the Petersburg textile factories. Boris Gorev—one of the activists Lenin joined in the city—recalls in his memoirs coming home one day to find two of his fellow activists “dancing around their apartment in sheer delight”. The strikes were evidence that the dangerous and unforgiving work many activists undertook was not in vain. We don’t know if Lenin danced around his apartment, but his writings about the strikes are filled with the same excitement. Lenin came to understand that class struggle taught workers far more than Sunday School lectures ever could: > “The strikes showed the workers who was their real foe when they had the troops and police sent against them ... \[The strikes\] have taught them to understand the *political situation* and the *political needs* of the working class.” Marx and Engels didn’t live to see the Petersburg strikes. Engels died just months before they broke out. It fell to Lenin to incorporate the rising working-class movement into their analysis of Russia. His arrest and exile after the strikes enabled Lenin to finish the work he had started in Samara. *The development of capitalism in Russia* was published in 1899 and represents the culmination of the previous decade of Lenin’s work. He had completed what Marx and Engels had devoted the last years of their lives to. In many ways, he had graduated from apprentice to master. Lenin’s study of Marx and Engels began after his expulsion from university. A few years later, in Samara, he became an active Marxist. But he never stopped studying Marx and Engels. Krupskaya later recalled that “at the most difficult turning points of the revolution, Lenin turned to the study of Marx ... ‘Marx and Engels teachings are not a dogma, but a guide to action.’ These words were constantly repeated by Lenin.” He didn’t treat their works as religious texts. For Lenin, their work took on new meaning in light of concrete historical developments and served as a guide to action. In this way, Lenin’s study of Marx and Engels is a lesson in how to study Lenin. Lenin evolved alongside a whole generation of revolutionaries. What made him exceptional was not just reading Marx and Engels. From his first days as a law student, Lenin was driven by a burning outrage at the horrors and oppression that surrounded him. To his marrow, he was a revolutionary, determined to dismantle the system that caused so many unthinkable injustices. Marxism showed him that the system was not just tsarism, but capitalism, and that the working class could liberate all humanity. To live in a world free from oppression, exploitation, war, racism, sexism or nationalism. That was Lenin’s cause, the cause of Marx and Engels, the cause of socialism. To this, Lenin dedicated every waking moment of his life. That motivation can’t be learnt from books. ### Washington’s criminal war on Cuba URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/washingtons-criminal-war-on-cuba/ Last updated: 2026-03-05T05:32:15.000Z “For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding—its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe”, US Secretary of State Marcio Rubio told the Munich Security Conference on 14 February. With no hint of irony, he praised the European colonisers’ “civilising mission”. In Rubio’s world, an Italian explorer ventured “into the great unknown to discover a new world”, bringing “Christianity to the Americas”. According to Rubio, we can thank “German farmers and craftsmen” for transforming the “empty plains” of America’s Midwest “into a global agricultural powerhouse”, English settlers for their creation of the US political and legal system, and Spaniards for “the cowboy archetype that became synonymous with the American West.” But, from 1945 onwards, it all went downhill. “The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come”, Rubio told his receptive audience. In Rubio’s view, one of the countries still shackled by “godless communist” rule is Cuba, from whose shores his parents left in 1956\. For the Trump administration, the Caribbean island represents not only a throwback to the Cold War, but a nation unwilling to bow to the diktats of US imperialism. Spanish conquistadors brought not only Christianity to Cuba, but also the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When the Haitian revolution ended colonial slavery in French-ruled Saint-Domingue in 1804, Cuba took its place as a European investors’ paradise, where 600,000 African slaves were put to work in the sugar plantations. Spanish rule ended in 1898, following Cuba’s war of independence, only to be replaced by the tyranny of a series of US-backed military dictatorships. The Platt Amendment (1901) gave the United States control over Cuba’s foreign policy, economy and internal affairs, and established a naval base at Guantánamo Bay, on the island’s south-eastern coast. While most of these measures were repealed in 1934, the naval base remained. Since 2001, it has served as an American prison and torture chamber for hundreds of “enemy combatants”, nine of whom have died there. Until 1959, when the Batista dictatorship was overthrown, power and telecommunications were in the hands of US companies. In 1956, sugar exports accounted for [87 percent of the nation’s exports](https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v06/d285?ref=redflag.org.au), augmented by tourism, prostitution and gambling. Landowners, bar owners and pimps profited handsomely from the exploitation of an impoverished population. Batista’s overthrow represented a major turning point. Denied any assistance from Washington, the new Cuban government, led by Fidel Castro, set about nationalising all US-owned industrial and agrarian enterprises. The US retaliated with a comprehensive trade embargo, which has continued to this day. Determined to restore a regime beholden to its interests, the Kennedy administration backed an invasion by 1,400 US-trained and equipped Cuban mercenaries under US aircover. The mission proved a disaster, and the mercenaries were routed within three days. For Cubans, the defeat suffered by US imperialism at the Bay of Pigs remains a potent symbol of resistance. For a wealthy, right-wing Cuban diaspora in Miami, it remains seared in their collective memory as a shameful defeat not yet avenged. This constituency is an important bulwark for Trump’s MAGA movement, espousing a virulent anti-communism decades after the collapse of the USSR. After a brief thawing in US-Cuba relations during the Obama administration, Trump’s first administration took a more belligerent stance. Trade sanctions and travel bans resumed. In 2021, the US State Department re-added Cuba to its list of state sponsors of terrorism, depriving Cuba of access to humanitarian aid, business, investment and trade, [according to](https://www.wola.org/analysis/human-cost-cuba-state-sponsor-of-terrorism-list/?ref=redflag.org.au) the Washington Office on Latin America. Trump and Rubio’s determination to achieve regime change in Havana is not solely ideological. It is also bound up with US geopolitical interests in a world in which inter-imperial rivalries have deepened. In his second term, Trump outlined a [National Security Strategy](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) that seeks to revive the Monroe Doctrine, declaring all of the Western Hemisphere within the US’s sphere of influence. In the nineteenth century, US intervention in Latin America served to ward off rival European powers. In the twentieth century, it was to undermine the influence of the Soviet Union. Today, the US is engaged in a great power rivalry with China. And in the eyes of the Trump administration, Latin America is once again a key battleground. Venezuela proved an easy first target. After months of military build-up in the Caribbean, and the sinking of dozens of fishing boats, killing at least 115 fishermen, the US kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from Caracas in the middle of the night. While the pretext was a “war on drugs”, the reality soon became clear when Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodriguez, pledged to reduce oil royalties and hand control of oil exports to US companies. Venezuela has the largest crude oil reserves in the world. Under an agreement signed by former presidents Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in 2000, Cuba and Venezuela agreed to exchange doctors and medical personnel for oil. Cuba also trained Venezuelans at the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana. However, the Trump administration has now killed this agreement, imposing trade sanctions on any country that “directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides any oil to Cuba”. In a 29 January [executive order](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/addressing-threats-to-the-united-states-by-the-government-of-cuba/?ref=redflag.org.au) justifying the move, Trump declared that Cuba “has taken extraordinary actions that harm and threaten the United States” by aligning with “numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors”. Without evidence, Trump asserted that “Cuba hosts Russia’s largest overseas signals intelligence facility” and provides a haven for “transnational terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas”. With rank hypocrisy, Trump also declared that Cuba “supports terrorism and destabilises the region through migration and violence”. So far, every former Cuban trade partner has buckled, devastating Cuba’s economy. Mexico, which late last year replaced Venezuela as Cuba’s largest supplier of oil, has bowed to US pressure and ceased sending tankers, sending 800 tons of aid instead. Canadian and Russian airlines that carried tourists to Cuba have now ceased operating, due to a lack of aviation fuel, and are instead repatriating travellers. Even before the fuel embargo was imposed, Cuba’s tourism industry was in disarray due to prolonged power cuts, fuel scarcity, and a shortage of basic goods and services. [According to](https://www.onei.gob.cu/sites/default/files/publicaciones/2026-01/arribo-de-viajeros-visitantes-internacionales-diciembre-2025.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) Cuba’s National Office of Statistics and Information, the island received only 1.8 million international visitors in 2025, an 18 percent decline compared to 2024\. Excluding the pandemic years, this is the lowest tourist intake since 2003\. At its height, in 2017, tourism generated US$3.1 billion for Cuba’s economy. Deprived of tourist dollars and oil for transport, the Cuban government has drastically cut spending on health, education and other basic services, such as garbage collection and sanitation. Cuba’s health system was once the envy of developing countries. During the pandemic, Cuban life expectancy exceeded that of the United States; infant mortality rates had long been lower. Cuba was once the only Latin American country recognised by UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, as having eliminated child malnutrition. Staple foods are now in short supply. According to a recent *Economist* [article](https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/11/18/cuba-is-heading-for-disaster-unless-its-regime-changes-drastically?ref=redflag.org.au), a carton of 30 eggs costs 2,800 pesos, more than a month’s salary for low-paid workers. A kilo of rice costs 650 pesos and a kilo of beans 350 pesos, together worth about ten days’ earnings for the low-paid. A new pandemic of mosquito-borne and respiratory disease has spread rapidly due to uncollected garbage and unsanitary water, and a health system unable to cope. [According to](https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-12-14/we-are-dying-cuba-sinks-into-a-health-crisis-amid-medicine-shortages-and-misdiagnosis.html?ref=redflag.org.au) the Spanish daily *El País*, there is a 70 percent shortage of basic medicines. Doctors estimate that the physician-to-patient ratio has declined from one per 350 inhabitants in the 1980s to roughly one per 1,500 today. For 60 years, Cuba sent medical missions around the world, providing essential medical care in impoverished countries. Today, more than 24,000 Cuban doctors are working in 56 countries, mostly in Latin America and Africa. Such missions have been branded “forced labour” by the Trump administration, which is putting pressure on countries to end bilateral agreements with Cuba, further depriving the country of revenues. Cuba’s thirteen universities have been forced to close, and many primary and secondary schools have also shut because teachers and students can’t access public transport. Unless US policy is reversed, Cuba will enter a state of famine. “Cuba is a failed nation”, Trump told reporters on Air Force One on 16 February. “And they should absolutely make a deal, because it’s a—it’s really a humanitarian threat. We’ll see how it all turns out, but Cuba and us, we are talking. In the meantime, there’s an embargo. There’s no oil. There’s no money. There’s no anything.” This is gangster capitalism. Trump is starving Cuba to create “a humanitarian threat” and then demanding the Cuban government “negotiate” on Trump’s own terms. Yet the Trump administration shows no desire to talk to the Cuban government. “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall”, Trump told reporters the day after US special forces kidnapped Maduro in January. We have seen this play out before. In the 1990s, half a million Iraqi children died because of US sanctions on the country. “We think the price is worth it”, declared Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in a *60 Minutes* interview in 1996\. Today, a similar humanitarian catastrophe is playing out in Gaza, aided and abetted by Washington. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has described the situation as “unfair”. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is “extremely concerned”. But their words won’t feed Cuban children. Capitalist governments won’t come to the Cuban people’s aid, but an international solidarity movement must. Just as we have marched to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza, we must march to stop an American genocide in Cuba. ### Who’s to blame for rising rents? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/whos-to-blame-for-rising-rents/ Last updated: 2026-02-15T04:25:57.000Z Rental affordability is at an all-time low, as rents across the country have risen 44 percent over the past five years. In Sydney, the median rental price has now hit an eye-watering $760 a week, in Brisbane it’s $660 and in Perth it’s $710\. According to the [*Priced Out*](https://everybodyshome.com.au/resources/priced-out-priced-out-an-index-of-affordable-rentals-for-australian-voters/?ref=redflag.org.au) report, published by Everybody’s Home, to afford to rent in Sydney, you need a household income of more than $130,000\. New data from the research firm Cotality show that, over the past five years, rents across Australia increased 2.5 times faster than wages. In Western Australia, rents went up a staggering 66 percent, while wages rose by only 19 percent. For the first time since records began, most renters are now in rent stress, paying on average 34 percent of their income towards rent. The escalating cost of housing outstripping stagnant wages is pushing more and more people into poverty. A recent [report](https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/poverty/?ref=redflag.org.au) by the Australian Council of Social Service found that, in 2022-23, 3.7 million Australians lived in poverty. In 2026, we can expect those figures to be substantially higher, as people have experienced three years of real wage cuts and rapidly rising rents. This is shocking. In one of the world’s richest countries, whose billionaires increased their wealth by $600,000 every day over the past year, at least one in seven people live below the poverty line. Housing in Australia is emblematic of the deepening inequality of capitalism. The ultra-rich swim in unearned billions while working-class families decide whether to skip meals or an appointment at the doctor so they can pay for a roof over their heads. Labor governments at both the federal and state levels are doing nothing to turn this around. In fact, they are giving more money to investors in tax breaks alone than the entire amount they spend on housing affordability. Reporting by the [Guardian Australia](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/29/australia-tax-breaks-landlords-more-spending-than-social-housing-homelessness-rent-assistance-combined?ref=redflag.org.au) found that in 2025, the federal government gave investors a $12.3 billion tax handout while spending only $9.3 billion on social housing, homelessness and rent assistance combined. In the face of this desperate crisis, the entire political establishment, from Labor to Liberals to Pauline Hanson and the far right, wants to convince us that Australian capitalism is not to blame. It’s immigrants who are the problem; they are competing for a limited supply of properties and pushing up prices. But immigrants are not responsible for pushing up rents. As *Red Flag* has [reported previously](https://redflag.org.au/article/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-the-housing-crisis/), the number of houses relative to the population was roughly the same in 2014 as it is today, but rents are increasing four times faster. When borders were closed in 2020-21 and there was no significant immigration, rents increased by 14 percent. When international students returned, the effect was at most a 0.5 percent increase in prices. And even this marginal increase could and should have been offset by universities using the billions of dollars of profit they make from international students to provide them with affordable accommodation. Immigrants are also not benefiting from increased rents. A [Propertytology](https://www.propertyology.com.au/the-truth-about-australian-housing-and-overseas-migration/?ref=redflag.org.au) report, based on Bureau of Statistics data, found that between 2013 and 2023, migrants purchased just 7 percent of all properties, including owner-occupied homes. The people who are to blame for rising rents are not migrants; they are Australia’s capitalists, the property developers and big investors who are making billions from the crisis. They prey on people’s need for a home to squeeze every last dollar from them. They have left hundreds of thousands of houses empty across the country while people sleep on the streets and languish on public housing waiting lists. According to Prosper Australia, a think tank, in Melbourne alone there are 100,000 empty properties that could be used immediately to house people, but instead sit empty while their owners wait to cash in on higher land prices, benefiting from government tax breaks all the while. At the root of this is the capitalist economy, which treats everything required to satisfy human needs as a commodity. Properties are not built and distributed based on the right of every person to have a home; they are built, bought and sold for profit, accessible only to those who can manage to pay the price. Demands to scrap tax breaks to investors, build public housing and cap and freeze rents are an important starting point, but these measures won’t solve the fundamental problem. While housing remains a commodity and its construction and distribution are controlled by billionaire developers, banks, wealthy investors or a state that acts in their interests, profit will ultimately determine who has access to housing. To end the housing crisis, we need socialism, and to get there, we need a mass socialist movement: a movement that fights against capitalist control over housing, a movement that fights the racist scapegoating of migrants and takes aim at our common enemy, a movement that combines the fight for immediate demands with a broader struggle against the system as a whole, for a world run by workers where housing is the common right of all. ### The monsters backing One Nation URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-monsters-backing-one-nation/ Last updated: 2026-02-15T04:24:43.000Z Longstanding Coalition supporters have jumped ship to One Nation. Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce is the most high-profile defector. Sweaty, red-faced, possibly drunk, Joyce has been the mascot of agricultural capitalists since assuming office in 2005\. For One Nation, Joyce is a prized link to the establishment, a well-connected powerbroker among Australia’s right for decades, having served twice as deputy prime minister. Joyce will be at home in Pauline Hanson’s party. He is an extreme misogynist and homophobe, opposing everything from abortion rights and same-sex marriage to vaccines for cervical cancer because they would, he claimed, encourage girls to be promiscuous. During the 2023 Voice referendum, Joyce was one of the strongest proponents of voting “no”, labelling it “racist” (against white people) to amend the constitution to establish an Indigenous advisory body. A defender of farmers, miners and gun owners, Joyce is a borderline climate denier, using “net-zero” as a bogeyman to attack the left. So when Joyce, as a One Nation member, blamed immigrants for crime, the housing crisis and expensive groceries in an 8 February interview with Karl Stefanovic—saying, in a nod to Donald Trump, “If you pine for where you came from, and say ‘I really want Australia to be like the shithole I came from’, you go back there”—he was singing from a well-worn hymnbook. Former Liberal Senator Corey Bernardi is another high-profile get for One Nation, now serving as leader of the party’s South Australian branch. Bernardi was a conservative faction fighter within the Liberals throughout his membership, and a supporter of Tony Abbott-era university fee deregulation—an unpopular and ultimately defeated measure that could have led to degrees costing $100,000\. Bernardi helped lead the “no” campaign in the 2016 same-sex marriage referendum, notoriously comparing equal marriage to bestiality. Bernardi left the Liberal Party in 2016 after failing to lead what he described as a “conservative revolution”. He spent his final years as a senator in the short-lived Australian Conservative Party. Also trying their luck with One Nation is Victorian Bernie Finn. A Liberal member for 41 years, Finn was expelled from the party in 2022 for anti-abortion positions that were unpalatable even for the Liberals. In a 2022 radio interview on station 3AW*,* Finn explained why he opposed abortion in all circumstances, including for victims of rape, saying that “babies shouldn’t be killed for the crimes of their parents”. After being expelled, Finn joined Family First before announcing last month that he is now a “proud, card-carrying member of One Nation”. Alongside political defectors, important financial backers of the Liberal Party are making overtures to Pauline Hanson, adding to her existing financial base, largely from retailers’ and developers’ associations. Chiefly, Gina Rinehart, a long-term supporter of the Liberal Party and backer of Barnaby Joyce, has been publicly and lavishly courting One Nation. Rinehart has been an overt supporter of Donald Trump and encouraged the Liberals to adopt a more Trump-like posture after losing the last federal election. She has been providing private jet rides to Hanson. On 23 January, the *Australian* reported that Rinehart has been working to flip stockbrokers from the Liberals to One Nation, in exchange for taking them to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Rinehart apparently secured $100,000 donations from Doug Tynan of GCQ Fund Management, Ben Cleary of Tribeca Investment Partners and Angus Aitken of Aitken Mount Capital Partners. Financiers are usually ghostly figures in politics, wielding power behind the scenes. What is known about Rinehart’s trio is unseemly. Cleary lives in a $23 million house in Brisbane’s wealthy Ascot and boasted to the *Courier Mail* on 27 January that Tribeca’s employees “can’t be woke”. Following Trump’s military attack and kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Cleary sent a team of bankers to Caracas. In a 5 January interview with Cleary, Bloombergwrote: “For portfolio manager Ben Cleary, Venezuela in the aftermath of US President Donald Trump’s controversial attack is one of the greatest money-making opportunities ever”. Aitken is a classic dummy-spitting right-winger and a vocal supporter of Rinehart’s far-right lobby group Advance Australia. In 2024, Aitken ranted to the *Australian Business Review* about the Greens being “a huge threat to the country ... a dangerous and divisive activist machine led by Marxist radicals”. It is likely that others will join One Nation, none of them better. Some names regularly mentioned in the media are Northern Territory former National Adam Giles and South Australian independent Senator Alex Antic. These are Pauline Hanson’s grotesque new friends. ### Epstein is the sick and depraved face of capitalism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/epstein-is-the-sick-and-depraved-face-of-capitalism/ Last updated: 2026-03-05T05:31:59.000Z Under the Epstein Files Transparency Act signed into law in November last year, the Trump administration was obliged to release all unclassified files relating to Jeffrey Epstein within 30 days. Trump’s shameless flouting of that requirement turns out to be typical of someone in Epstein’s circle: laws don’t apply to them. Raping children, avoiding tax, standing over elected governments and generally living lives of moral depravity are their birthright. Predictably, Trump is mentioned 4,000 times in the released documents, and likely many times more in the 3 million yet to be released. But the Epstein scandal does much more than simply expose odious individuals. It is an indictment on the entire system of global capitalism, those who run it and those who hold positions of influence within it. The scope is astounding: powerful figures from politics, business, science, the arts, academia, the media, all connected through financial deals, mutual favours, access to money and sex and social networks. The files reveal abuse of women and children on an industrial scale, from the modelling agency that helped Epstein traffic young women from Eastern Europe to the dozens of working-class girls from a nearby middle school lured into a ring of abuse. The Department of Justice estimates that Epstein abused more than 1,000 women. This was no secret to his friends and associates. In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to solicitation of a minor to avoid federal prosecution and served only 13 months of a cushy 18-month sentence. Most of the sentence was served on work release at his Palm Beach offices, and he slept in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail, sequestered from other inmates. Then-US Attorney Alexander Acosta, who would later go on to be secretary of Labour in the first Trump administration, was there to smooth the way—including granting immunity to co-conspirators and helping Epstein avoid federal charges despite extensive evidence of mass sexual exploitation. The victims, including 36 minors identified by the investigation, weren’t even notified of the deal. Epstein’s network of powerful friends continued to grow after his conviction. At his New York town house, Florida mansion or private island, Hollywood producers could rub shoulders with billionaires, spies, cabinet ministers, princes and Harvard professors. Some of the latest friends of Epstein to be exposed in the files are among the richest capitalists in the world. Elon Musk exchanges emails asking when the “wildest party” would be thrown on Epstein’s Little St James Island. Richard Branson emails that he would love to meet up with Epstein “as long as you bring your harem!” Bill Gates, Google’s Sergey Brin and an endless list of Wall Street bankers and businessmen are implicated. We are told that Western liberal capitalism stands for equality, human rights and respect for the law. That there is a “rules-based order” which includes checks and balances on politicians, banks and businesses that ensure transparency, the smooth functioning of free markets and a justice system before which all are equal. This peek behind the curtain exposes that as a big sick joke. JPMorgan Chase and then Deutsche Bank spent years shielding Epstein from any regulatory oversight of his shell companies, charities, massive suspicious cash withdrawals and payments to modelling agencies. That kind of hands-on service is common practice for high net-worth individuals. Epstein was an asset both as a client and as a conduit to new business deals and introductions to new wealthy clients. Former CEO of JPMorgan Chase Jes Staley regularly holidayed on Epstein’s island, flew on his private plane the “Lolita Express” and even visited Epstein when he was on work release from prison. In 2008, in the midst of the global financial crisis, the head of the investment bank reached out to Epstein, saying, “I need a smart friend to help me think through this stuff”—this “stuff” being the collapse of the global financial system. One shocking aspect of the files is the bipartisan nature of Epstein’s world. Underneath the apparently furious debates of political life, elites are fundamentally the same. Republican and Democratic Party presidents like Trump and Clinton could share the same social world. Their sense of elite solidarity went beyond sexism, entitlement and impunity. Epstein’s emails reveal a porous network of unofficial politics, backroom deals and grift available only to the mega-wealthy. They expose the casual nature with which the ruling class cut diplomatic and economic deals through back channels, seamlessly mixing statecraft with personal interest. Lord Peter Mandelson, one of the architects of Blair’s New Labour in the UK, is one of the most high-profile heads to roll. Mandelson’s casual emails to Epstein included leaked plans about the bailout of the euro and the suggestion that JPMorgan should “mildly threaten” Mandelson’s own government to undermine a tax on banker bonuses. A consistent feature of Epstein’s political agenda when partying with the diplomatic, political and security corps was his support for Israel and his ties to the Israeli political establishment. It’s certainly plausible that Epstein was an intelligence asset for Israeli security. Regardless of whether the links were formalised, he consistently advocated for Israeli interests. His close relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak included working with Barak to sell and develop Israeli weapons, arranging back-channel diplomatic meetings with the Qatari prime minister and redrafting opinion pieces about the Iran nuclear deal. His close advocacy of the US-Israel alliance was consistent with Epstein’s political outlook and economic interests. But this wasn’t his only foreign policy concern. A close friendship with far-right adviser Steve Bannon included a shared hawkishness towards China. In one of the released emails with Bannon, Epstein discusses MAGA domestic ideology and US competition with China; in 2019 he wrote to Bannon, “Your deplorables need an enemy, china, china, china \[sic\]” Mention should be made of the high-profile academics willing to debase themselves (and possibly debase others) looking for patronage from Epstein. The heads of prestigious colleges and art schools, scientists and professors clamoured for attention from Epstein, attending his informal intellectual summits at his New York apartment where he would dazzle them with insightful questions like “What is gravity?” and dangle the promise of grant funding. Noam Chomsky is a particularly disgraceful example. The left academic who wrote about imperialism manufacturing consent for war was privately happy to keep up a cheerful and sympathetic correspondence with Epstein. It’s a reminder to be perennially suspicious of those who critique power from within its institutions and without actively organising against it. The sexual abuse that underpinned much of Epstein’s circle should be seen as more than just the excesses of the leisure class. Such practices are deeply rooted in the structures of capitalism. To the ruling class, ordinary people are just things—like a super-yacht or a Maserati, only much less expensive. Workers—the majority of the population—are mere factors of production from the point of view of those who control capital and their hangers-on. And using people for their own enrichment easily transfers to using them for sexual gratification. Abuse is made immeasurably easier when there is an extreme power imbalance between the abuser and abused. The drive from Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion to the poor neighbourhoods most of Epstein’s Florida victims were from has been described as going “from heaven to hell in 15 minutes”. In the richest country in the world, “the help” live in run-down neighbourhoods next door to presidents and bankers, who treat them as their personal servants in every regard. Epstein is the sick and depraved face of capitalism. He is a conduit to the accumulation of profit and power whose interests cut across political party lines and national borders and whose friends ranged from corporate executives, bankers and financiers, to princes, prime ministers and presidents, spies, Hollywood moguls and stars of academia. His victims were poor and working-class children, girls and young women. They keep their depraved dealings secret because they know that people being aware of their extreme hypocrisy and abuse would delegitimise the rich and powerful’s privileged position in society, and they know where that could lead. If anyone needed another argument for overthrowing the ruling class, the Epstein files are it. ### Palestine solidarity, socialist activism and the fight for a better world: an interview with Josh Lees URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/palestine-solidarity-socialist-activism-and-the-fight-for-a-better-world-an-interview-with-josh-lees/ Last updated: 2026-03-05T05:31:46.000Z *Josh Lees has been a socialist activist in Sydney for more than two decades and is a well-known organiser of the Palestine Action Group. Australia’s ruling establishment—from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and NSW Premier Chris Minns, to the mainstream media and high-ranking police officers—have sought to slander and discredit him, particularly following the violent police crackdown at a Palestine rally on Monday, 9 February. Red Flag recently sat down with Lees to discuss the Palestine movement, socialist activism and why we need to keep fighting for a better world.* --- ### **Most of us will have seen the shocking footage of savage police violence meted out to peaceful protesters at last week’s Palestine Action Group demonstration against Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Sydney. Could you explain what happened that night?** Well, we had 20,000 or 30,000 people come out in Sydney in defiance of a scare campaign that’s been waged in recent weeks by our politicians and the media who have argued, or at least implied, that it would be illegal to protest. Instead, we had a massive turnout of people power to say that the people of Sydney stand against genocide, we stand against Herzog’s visit, and we’re determined to keep protesting for a free Palestine. In response to that, Chris Minns sent in his police force to violently and brutally attack a mass, peaceful protest. I don't think we’ve witnessed such scenes, possibly since the 1978 Mardi Gras, in terms of the scale of police brutality against a protest. They were bashing people, pepper spraying everyone, riding horses into people and sending people to hospital. A group of Muslim men—including a number of PAG marshals—were violently thrown to the ground as they prayed, elderly men and women were hospitalised with broken and fractured bones. At one point, the riot police thugs were sprinting after protesters, hunting them down, pinning them in place while spraying chemical weapons directly in their faces and slamming them to the pavement. So that’s what we saw in Sydney this week, as a clear indication of what side our government is on—the side of genocide and police brutality against the people. ### **The government seems to have moved from trying to spin the genocide in Gaza as defensible towards simply repressing anyone who says otherwise. How do we defend the right to protest in this context?** I think the key thing is that we have to just keep mobilising in huge numbers. We have to keep talking about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. That’s what this is all about. We can’t allow ourselves to be frightened and intimidated—that’s what repression is all about; it’s an attempt to shut us up and shut us down. I think the response of most people to the police violence has been a sense of defiance and determination that we are not going to let them silence us and that this only strengthens our resolve to fight for a better world. When the system resorts to this kind of brutality, that’s because they can’t win over the mass of people to their view. On Tuesday, 10 February, the night after the Herzog rally, we organised a rally against police brutality outside the Surry Hills police station, calling on Premier Chris Minns and police commissioner Mal Lanyon to resign. A few thousand, mostly young, people showed up, refusing to be scared into submission. It’s also important to recognise that society can’t be compartmentalised into discrete, disconnected issues. If we want to speak out for Palestine, we now also must be civil rights activists. The way that the rich and powerful attack us forces us to have a broader agenda than the single issue we might initially have been motivated by. The now very serious repression against the right to protest in NSW is a reminder that our rulers only really allow protests when they’re not having a significant impact. But the whole point is to make an impact. We’re not just saying we’re sad about genocide; we’re saying that we want it to stop, immediately, and we want our government to stop supporting it, immediately. We do that by making our government’s support come at a cost, like workers began to do in Italy late last year, and like workers did in this country against South African apartheid. ### **Labor is in power at a state and federal level, so throughout the genocide has been leading Australia’s continued support for Israel, including the recent invitation to President Isaac Herzog, who personally signed Israeli bombs that were dropped on Palestinians. Why does the ALP support Israel?** This is an important question because a lot of people immediately assume that this is because of the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby for sure is a well-funded lobby, which does exercise power and influence in this country. But I think that the Labor Party’s support for Israel goes much deeper than this. It’s ultimately tied to the fact that the Labor Party wants to manage and serve Australian capitalism and its bigger goals in the world, including its geopolitical goals. The imperialist alliance between Australia and the United States is essential for our ruling class. We can see it in the $370 billion that our government is handing to the US to secure the AUKUS alliance. Israel in turn is an essential ally of the United States, as it facilitates American domination of the Middle East and its crucial oil reserves and trade routes. That’s why Israel was created in the first place by the imperialist powers. And that’s why countries like Australia and the United States continue to support Israel. To this day, they want a violent, militarised, staunch ally to police the region and do exactly what Israel has done in recent years, which is marauding around and killing a lot of people in the interests of imperialism. ### **The right-wing media are promoting the idea that your support for Palestine is about personal gain. Quoting NSW Premier Chris Minns, Murdoch’s *Daily Telegraph* described you as “a ‘professional dissident’ who has ‘hijacked’ the cause of Palestinians for his own ends”. What do you say to that?** Thankfully, this movement is a lot bigger than me. We’ve had over the last two and a half years hundreds of thousands of people mobilise consistently in a really inspiring way to keep standing up for a better world, for a world in which genocide does not become normalised and for a world where leaders who continue to arm and fund that genocide are held to account. Obviously I’ve been part of this movement, and I’m proud to have been part of it for twenty years. But it’s not about me, it’s about the hundreds of thousands of people who have continued to mobilise against genocide, and ultimately it’s about the Palestinians. It’s also pretty laughable to suggest anyone would enter this movement for the reasons the Murdoch rags state. Speaking out for Palestine—which means speaking out against the entire political establishment, opening yourself up to slander from the media and making yourself a target of pro-Israel employers and trolls—does not confer all these advantages or favours. Just look at all the people who have been victimised because of their opposition to genocide: Randa Abdel-Fattah, Antoinette Lattouf, Peter Lalor, Louise Adler, all the artists, musicians and actors sacked by their institutions. The list goes on. Yet still people take a stand, because it is the right thing to do. The right-wing press hates the idea that anyone acts out of principle rather than self-interest, because they think doing whatever it takes to get ahead at the expense of others is the highest human virtue. The safe thing to do if you want favours, power and advancement in this society is to stay silent or, worse, support what Australia’s ally Israel is doing. The effort that these gutter journalists have put into trying to assassinate my character, particularly over the last week, is shameful. Hundreds of journalists have been killed by Israel in Gaza, more than in any conflict since the American civil war, but the media here don’t care. They’re too busy hiding in bushes outside my house and whipping up people to send me death threats. The whole spectacle is just another example of the disgraceful priorities that underpin “respectable” media and politics. ### **Despite the gotcha tone of the mainstream media this week, it’s no secret that you are a socialist. What has motivated your socialist activism for the last twenty years?** It’s pretty simple really. The desire for a world based on the principles of equality and genuine democracy. That’s the positive side of it. Then there’s the horror at the billionaires and their lackeys in the political establishment and the media, who instead just serve up a world of never-ending wars and barbarism, of racism and attacks on working-class people, all around the world. The genocide in Gaza has only further revealed what a sick, disgusting system capitalism is. I believe very strongly that the world does not have to look like this. It does not have to look like starving children in Gaza, climate catastrophe, widespread poverty and fascist ICE agents. But it will look like all of those things for as long as a self-interested tiny minority of billionaire parasites are calling the shots. This is why I have been an activist and a socialist for most of my adult life. The media keep printing these lists of all the social justice campaigns I’ve been involved in, as though it’s, like you said, some “gotcha” against me. But I’m proud of this history. Socialists understand that all the ills of this world are interconnected: we can’t just be single issue activists or we’ll never get to the root of the problem, which is capitalism. So yes, I have campaigned for refugee rights, for marriage equality, against the mega-rich, against the sacrifice of our health and lives to the altar of profits during the COVID pandemic, against runaway climate change, for workers’ rights and more. This does not negate mine or anyone’s activism in the Palestine solidarity movement. Strong movements enhance and can build on one another. ### **What would you say to someone thinking about getting involved in activism today?** Everyone needs to get involved in the fight for a better world. Because the alternative is Donald Trump, the alternative is Pauline Hanson. The alternative is Chris Minns’ riot police, beating us into submission again and again and again, unless we stand up and fight back in much bigger numbers. The world is only getting nastier, but the hope for the future lies in those masses of people who refuse to be silent, whether it’s standing up against genocide, whether it’s standing up to protect immigrants in their communities or whatever else it may be. All around the world people are bravely rising up, whether it’s against Trump in Minneapolis, workers in Italy, the Gen Z youth uprisings that swept the Global South at the end of last year, or the millions who have taken part in the Palestine solidarity movement. Take inspiration from all of that, because another world is possible if we get involved and fight for it. ### Police riot in Sydney to defend war criminal Isaac Herzog URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/police-riot-in-sydney-to-defend-war-criminal-isaac-herzog/ Last updated: 2026-03-05T05:53:15.000Z Chloe and Emma talk about the police riot in Sydney orchestrated by Chris Minns. The NSW government sent 3,500 police to bash, stampede and pepperspray a peaceful pro-Palestine demonstration of 20-30,000 people, against the rolling out of the red carpet for a war criminal who should be in the Hague. We talk about what this event reveals about the police, the Australian Labor Party and the Australian ruling classes' commitment to Israel. ### US Democrats want to look like an opposition, without really opposing Trump’s agenda URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/us-democrats-want-to-look-like-an-opposition-without-really-opposing-trumps-agenda/ Last updated: 2026-02-21T03:29:06.000Z In the wake of the murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on 24 January, [some commentators](https://prospect.org/2026/01/26/ice-trump-democrats-funding-department-homeland-security-alex-pretti-minnesota/?ref=redflag.org.au) are asking if the Democratic Party has finally grown a spine. What they mean is that leading Democrats are finally taking action beyond issuing “strongly worded letters” and holding press conferences to stand in the way of the Trump administration’s rule of ruin. They appear to be using what leverage they have to exact concessions from Trump. At the time of writing, Democrats in the US Senate have refused to provide the votes necessary to pass the appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CPB). Temporary funding for DHS lapses on 13 February. Democrats [announced a list of ten demands](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/05/democrats-ice-reforms-funding-bill?ref=redflag.org.au) they say must be included in any appropriations bill for them to vote for it. These range from requiring agents to wear body cameras to limiting arrests only to those for whom ICE/CBP obtained a judicial warrant. Perhaps this shows that Democratic politicians are not complete zombies, as they try to catch up with their base voters, who have been clamouring for them to put up more of a fight against Trump. After all, it is an election year. But it’s a long way from saying the Democrats have become an opposition force against Trump. Since the outrage at the Pretti murder erupted, the Trump administration is attempting a public relations reset around what liberal pundit Josh Marshall calls ICE “wilding sprees” in Democratic-controlled cities. Trump cashiered CBP chief Gregory Bovino and replaced him with “border czar” Tom Homan in Minneapolis. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said she was ordering federal agents besieging the Twin Cities to wear body cameras. Homan announced the withdrawal of 700 of the 3,000 federal agents in Minneapolis. We owe it to the thousands of ordinary people in Minnesota who have rallied to defend their immigrant neighbours that the administration has been pushed into making even these cosmetic changes. [Opinion polls show that two-thirds of Americans](https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/what-americans-actually-want-done?ref=redflag.org.au) oppose ICE and [Trump’s mass deportation regime](https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/ice-is-a-70-30-issue-against-trump?ref=redflag.org.au). Polls are increasingly finding majority support for “abolishing ICE”, a demand that most Democrats still consider politically toxic. But there’s another way to look at the administration’s shifts. And that is to change the media narrative, [without changing the substance](https://organizingmythoughts.org/when-the-headlines-change-but-the-violence-doesnt/?ref=redflag.org.au) or level of the attacks on the people of the Twin Cities. The administration hopes to create the impression that Homan has reined in the marauders. That will provide the Democrats with the alibi they will use to vote to fund DHS. One should ask: If Noem is so quick to agree that DHS agents should wear body cameras in Minneapolis, just how effective is that demand? And let’s not be confused about what the Democrats are up to. They’ve essentially told Republicans that they are willing to vote to fund DHS if the Republicans agree to a set of modest changes to current practice: no masked agents, allow local police to investigate ICE lawbreaking, and enforce only judge-approved warrants, among others. Republicans could agree to all of these, and, at best (assuming federal agents don’t flout them ... which they will), this might produce a more professionally managed reign of terror in Minneapolis and other cities to be invaded. But it’s doubtful the GOP would even agree to these modest changes at the start. They know that if this is the way the Democrats play the hand that mass opposition to ICE predations gave them, it’s only a matter of time before the Dems cave in. The Democrats are playing the role they almost always play when masses of people go into the streets to protest intolerable conditions. With the exception of protests against genocide in Gaza, which they don’t even pretend to support, [the Democrats mouth platitudes](https://internationalsocialism.net/elections-in-a-time-of-multiple-and-deepening-crises/?ref=redflag.org.au) that make them sound like they are on the side of the movement, but they use those platitudes to cover negotiations to tamp down protests. With some notable (and rare) exceptions, most Democratic politicians—and certainly those in the leadership of the party—don’t conceive of politics outside of narrow electoral and parliamentary manoeuvring. This was why, for most of last year, as Democratic politicians concluded that Trump was too strong to challenge on immigration, 46 voted for the so-called Laken Riley Act, passed on the day Trump became president. To the extent there is any law underpinning what Trump’s immigration thugs are doing today, this law is it. Under this law, immigrants can be arrested and deported simply on the grounds of an accusation of criminal conduct, rather than a criminal conviction. A June 2025 Republican-sponsored resolution expressing “gratitude” to ICE for “protecting the homeland”—proposed when National Guard troops occupied Los Angeles—won the votes of 75 House Democrats. This vote is less egregious than the support for the Laken Riley Act, since it doesn’t allocate funds or authorise federal thuggery. Instead, it shows how many elected Democrats are either fools or cowards. And the roster of supporters conspicuously includes ambitious politicians like California Representative Eric Swalwell and Illinois Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, both of whom are seeking higher office on the back of their anti-Trump and anti-ICE bona fides. Minnesota Representative Angie Craig, [who voted for both bills](https://www.aol.com/articles/one-laken-riley-act-one-162503876.html?ref=redflag.org.au), is trying to avoid talking about them as she attempts to recast herself as someone who will stand up to Trump and ICE as she campaigns for the Democratic nomination to be US senator from Minnesota. Now, when Democrats arguably have leverage to push the Trump administration into retreat, they are recalibrating as the “adults in the room”, who simultaneously have two goals: work with the administration to lessen “chaos”, and convince activists not to go “too far” to provoke Trump’s authoritarian dreams. Minnesota Governor [Tim Walz’s 26 January op-ed](https://www.wsj.com/opinion/tim-walz-the-un-american-assault-on-minnesota?ref=redflag.org.au) in the *Wall Street Journal* is a perfect illustration of the Democrats’ approach. Walz spends the first half of the article touting Minnesota’s cooperation with ICE and the administration on “immigration enforcement”. He blasts ICE for “taking credit for arrests that state and local law enforcement made, activity that took place before this assault on our state even began”, before continuing: > “Everyone wants to see our immigration laws enforced. That isn’t what is happening in Minnesota ... That isn’t effective law enforcement. It isn’t following the rule of law. It’s chaos. I fear that \[Trump’s\] hope is for the tension between ICE agents and the communities they’re ransacking to boil over—that he wants you to see more chaos on your TV screens, protests turn into riots, more people get hurt. Minnesotans aren’t taking the bait. They are protesting—loudly and urgently, but also peacefully.” This is Walz’s message to the courageous folks who are standing up for their neighbours. It’s admirable to protest—if protest stays within certain limits. Walz deployed the Minnesota National Guard. Not to defend Minnesotans against federal goons, but to defend ICE’s processing centre from angry protesters. National Guard support freed up federal agents to continue their marauding assaults. [A similar dynamic played out in the government’s earlier assault on the Chicago area.](https://chicago.suntimes.com/public-safety/2025/10/03/are-illinois-state-police-helping-ice-in-broadview?ref=redflag.org.au) Governor JB Pritzker, who many liberals think is some sort of resistance leader against Trump, dispatched the Illinois State Police (ISP) to conduct crowd control against protesters at ICE’s Broadview processing centre. Under the guise of “protecting free speech”, the ISP moved protesters away from the centre and arrested those who insisted on exercising their rights to free speech and assembly. In other words, ISP provided support for ICE and CBP, allowing its roving bands to attack Chicago and its suburbs. Walz’s and Pritzker’s behaviour is typical because the Democrats have never been an “opposition” party. The modern Democratic Party dates to the early 1800s. Since the post-Civil War period, Democrats and Republicans have taken turns managing the US state. At most, the Democrats represent the other choice on the ballot when the Republicans are in office. In the neoliberal era that began in the 1970s, the Democrats haven’t tried to put a stop to the ruinous free-market and repressive policies associated with Republicans and conservatives. Instead, they have helped to facilitate them. Immigration policy provides a perfect case in point. As far back as the late 1990s, Democratic President Bill Clinton was bashing Republicans for weakness on “border security”. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration initiated Operation Gatekeeper, a major step in the modern-day militarisation of the US border with México, and the 287(g) program, which enlists local law enforcement agencies for immigration enforcement. The execrable Senator Joe Lieberman, the party’s nominee for vice president in 2000, championed the creation of DHS (along with ICE and CBP) and shepherded the legislation that established them. During its eight years in office, the Obama administration “removed” more than 3 million people, more than any previous administration. In 2015, Obama even gave Homan, then ICEs’ official in charge of deportations, the Presidential Rank Award. The Biden administration wasn’t to be outdone—even compared to the first Trump administration. According to the [Migration Policy Institute](https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-deportation-record?ref=redflag.org.au), writing only five months before the 2024 election, when Trump was flaying Biden and Harris for their “weak” position on “border security”: > “Combining deportations with expulsions and other actions to block migrants without permission to enter the United States, the Biden administration’s nearly 4.4 million repatriations are already more than any single presidential term since the George W. Bush administration (5 million in its second term).” Throughout, the Democrats supported legislation for something called “comprehensive immigration reform”. It envisioned spending more on militarisation of the border, regularising a “guest worker” program across the economy, and providing a “pathway to citizenship” for undocumented migrants. Yet, [at every turn](https://socialistworker.org/2013/02/25/playing-politics-on-immigration?ref=redflag.org.au), bipartisan support for “border security” increased billions for repression while the promise of citizenship was left on the side of the “pathway” there. If the Democrats have a vision of an immigration policy that they support, it’s likely to be very similar to the Clinton/Obama/Biden policy: a technocratic regime that efficiently deports people without the social media bombast and roving thugs that have become the hallmark of Trump’s. An [irritated liberal Representative, Rosa DeLauro](https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2026-02-06/delauro-to-pressing-clergy-i-will-not-vote-to-abolish-ice?ref=redflag.org.au), the Democrats’ main budget writer in the House, declared, “I will not vote to abolish ICE” when clergy member constituents of hers pressed her to do the “moral” thing. Politics is fluid, and maybe the Democrats will sell out for a higher price. But their entire trajectory—from last year’s MAGA-lite to this year’s reluctant obstructionists—should disabuse anyone of the notion that they are true allies in the fight against ICE and Trump. That lesson is not lost on thousands of people who have become radicalised over the last year. ### They wanted to silence us. They failed URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/they-wanted-to-silence-us-they-failed/ Last updated: 2026-02-21T03:28:44.000Z They wanted to silence us. They wanted us to go away. They failed. Since the Bondi terror attack, ALP state and federal governments, business groups, pro-Israel organisations, the legacy media and the political right have been ceaselessly slandering the movement against the genocide in Gaza. This unity ticket of the ruling class has spilt gallons of ink declaring our movement responsible for Bondi, for terror, for tearing apart the fabric of Australian society and for antisemitism. This slander was accompanied by bans on protests and new laws. Behind this ideological and legal onslaught stood the omnipotent threat of the leather police glove. The tour of Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, was meant to be the icing on the cake. It was meant to be the final act in the drama. The anti-genocide movement was meant to be so intimidated by the notion that Herzog was here to help victims of Bondi that we would stay home during his visit. Instead, the Palestine movement defiantly asserted itself and sent a message to Gaza: we are with you. Fifteen thousand people in Melbourne, 20,000 in Sydney and thousands more in Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide and Hobart took to the streets last night. In about twenty other towns across the country, from tiny hamlets on the south coast of Western Australia to regional hubs in NSW and Victoria, people took a stand. With homemade signs and flags aplenty, protesters raised their voices to say that those responsible for the carnage in Palestine should not be welcome here. No doubt the images of Labor politicians, wining and dining with a man found by a United Nations commission of inquiry to have incited genocide, impelled people out of their homes. The determination to demonstrate was palpable. My mother, almost 80 years old, told me she took milk in her handbag to the Melbourne protest in case she got pepper-sprayed. High school students at the rally in Perth told me it was their first-ever rally, and they came despite their parents’ disapproval. Queensland rally-goers chanted, “From the river to the sea!” with extra gusto because of the threat that it could be banned by the Crisafulli government. Stories of individual defiance were replicated thousands of times across the country. A chant, “Herzog: lock him up!” morphed into “Albanese: lock him up!” and “Minns: lock him up!” In Sydney, the ALP speaker was heckled, despite her opposing Herzog’s visit. As images of Minns' police thugs brutalising protesters have gone viral, calls for people to leave the party in disgust have multiplied on social media, as they should. Anyone with a shred of political conscience should immediately leave the ALP. This whole saga should be a watershed moment for anyone who considers themselves part of the left. A new socialist movement must be built. Protesters are now also calling for Minns and his police commissioner to step down. There are thugs in the police, but these aren’t just a few bad apples. The violence on display at the Sydney demonstration last night was facilitated and encouraged by the thugs in suits in parliament—from Minns, who clearly gave the green light to the police to run rampage, to National Party Senator Colin Boyce, who said that a Greens senator should be “ripped apart” for questioning the government, to Albanese and Wong, who promote thuggery via their diplomatic and military ties to Israel and the USA. The whole social order of violence and intimidation has been made visible by the defence of the genocide. The Palestine movement has endured two years of intimidation. Two years of slander. Two years of repression. And yet, it remains strong. It remains defiant. We must continue. ### Police riot in Sydney URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/police-riot-in-sydney/ Last updated: 2026-02-21T03:28:34.000Z Yesterday, the NSW police rioted in Sydney, savagely attacking pro-Palestine protesters. Footage shows police repeatedly punching a man with his hands in the air. Another video shows dozens of police surrounding a group of praying Muslims and then throwing them to the ground. In yet another video, a young man is restrained on the ground as two officers take turns punching him and slamming his face against the concrete. More footage shows dozens of police chasing down fleeing protesters and flinging them into cars and shop fronts. Hundreds of police surrounded 20,000 pro-Palestine protesters as they tried to march out of Town Hall Square. The rally had been called in opposition to the arrival of Israeli President Isaac Herzog, whom a United Nations commission of inquiry last year found guilty of “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”. The police trapped the protesters in the square and ordered them to disperse. But there was nowhere to disperse to. Lines of riot cops and police officers surrounded the entire rally. When protesters failed to comply with the impossible, the police doused them with pepper spray and assaulted them with batons and fists. If people stood their ground, the police smacked them down; if people retreated, the cops chased them down. One group of protesters fell back to a convenience store. The clerk behind the counter let them in and locked the doors to protect them, helping them with the pepper spray that burned their eyes. But the police started banging on the shop doors, demanding to be let in. Much of the assault was led by the Public Order and Riot Squad, a specialist unit composed solely of officers who volunteer for its ranks. Just like ICE in the US, it attracts the vilest reactionary thugs imaginable. Tens of thousands witnessed this police violence; there are hundreds of videos and personal accounts. Faced with this evidence, the response of the police and political establishment is blood-boiling. “Remarkable restraint” is how commissioner Mal Lanyon described police actions on the night. Premier Chris Minns defended the cops, saying they were put in an “impossible situation”. But the situation was orchestrated by the police and the premier. They spent months demonising pro-Palestine protesters as violent antisemites. They said that protests in solidarity with the people of Gaza had to end no matter what. They introduced the restrictions on the right to march and decided on the exclusion zone in Sydney. They whipped up the media into a frenzy. They let the police off the leash and then defended the indefensible. For all of this, the supporters of Palestine haven’t been cowed. The 20,000 who gathered at Town Hall in the face of a united political and media assault is proof enough of that. As are the tens of thousands who protested throughout the rest of the country. In the wake of the Bondi terrorist attack, the political establishment has tried to discredit and crush the Palestine solidarity movement. They have failed. Millions of Australians outraged by Israel’s atrocities and the federal government’s support for the far-right government in Jerusalem have not changed their minds. The outrage pouring out on social media after last night is red-hot. The anger at the police and the NSW government is palpable. The prime minister should hang his head in shame for inviting Herzog to this country. *The Palestine Action Group has called a rally against police brutality for 5.30pm tonight outside the Surry Hills police station.* ### Make the Israeli president’s visit a week of Palestine solidarity actions URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/make-the-israeli-presidents-visit-a-week-of-palestine-solidarity-actions/ Last updated: 2026-02-15T04:26:59.000Z Fifty Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since last Saturday. Tomorrow, Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, will step off a private jet in Sydney, and our prime minister will welcome him with open arms. Those who oppose Israel’s genocide must take to the streets every single day of his visit, holding photos of the hospitals and schools his government has razed to the ground, of the tents flapping in icy winds next to mass graves, and of the starvation conditions still ravaging Gaza. We can’t sit by while a chief representative of a genocidal apartheid state is welcomed by Australia’s political establishment. To fail to protest would rip something from each of us that we could never recover—a small piece of the precious humanity we share with the Palestinians enduring one of the worst crimes of the 21st century. Basic democratic rights are being overturned to facilitate this war criminal’s smooth passage on a propaganda tour around the country. The Queensland government [plans to ban the phrase](https://redflag.org.au/article/queensland-government-attacks-free-speech/) “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” during Herzog’s stay. The NSW government has extended a ban on marches for the duration of his visit, and plans to close roads in the centre of Sydney for the same period. This from a government that said a four-hour march over the Sydney Harbour bridge would be too disruptive. Of course, masses of people will march anyway. Josh Lees of Palestine Action Group told *Red Flag*: > “The streets of Sydney belong to the people, not to Chris Minns or the Israeli president. Minns wants to turn Sydney into a little piece of Israel to make Herzog feel at home, complete with an enormous police occupation, road closures and checkpoints. We will not be silenced or intimidated. Huge numbers will protest in Sydney to show that we stand against genocide.” A week before Christmas, Eman Abu al-Khair’s newborn baby froze to death in her arms. Mohammed was tiny, and Eman had only a tent and her own body to protect him from the winter engulfing Gaza. Israel’s political and military leaders, like President Herzog, are responsible for Mohammed’s death, alongside the estimated 71,000 Palestinians they have killed in just two years. After destroying more than 80 percent of buildings, Israel is preventing mobile homes from entering Gaza, along with tent poles, nappies, tools, equipment to rebuild water sanitisation systems and other items deemed “dual use”. Five days after Mohammed died, Albanese phoned Herzog and invited him to Australia. When Albanese picked up the phone, did he spare a single thought for Eman and Mohammed? Or for the tens of thousands of men, women and children slaughtered in Gaza by Israel? Or for families of the estimated 9,000 people buried and under the rubble of destroyed homes? Did he picture in his mind’s eye the swollen bellies of the children starved to death under Herzog’s watch, or the torture chambers that have been filled during his presidency? Herzog is infamous for his incitements to genocide. In 2024, he spoke out against the International Court of Justice for “twisting” this statement: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true ... and we will fight until we break their backbone”. His [defence of this statement](https://www.gov.il/en/pages/president-herzog-addresses-icj-ruling-28-jan-2024?ref=redflag.org.au)? “Hamas operates from the heart of the civilian population everywhere, from children’s bedrooms in homes, from schools, from mosques, and hospitals.” Even his attempt to humanise himself included a justification for bombing children’s bedrooms. It came after a year in which footage emerged nearly every day of screaming parents clutching the corpses of infants and children, of mothers being handed plastic bags with random, disjointed body parts that were supposed to match the estimated weight of their own children. Children who should, right now, be playing on the beach. Children who should be laughing in their parents’ arms, working out their own personalities, learning to express themselves. And what of our leaders? Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong will pose for photos and shake hands with the man who justified the bombing of children and the wholesale destruction of a territory. In bringing Herzog to Australia, Labor is turning a criminal into a statesman worthy of the red carpet. It is up to us—you, me, your neighbours, your friends—to show the world that we know him to be a criminal. When his plane touches down, join your local march. Hold your head high. Show the Palestinians that they do not walk alone. ### La Trobe University City: an Orwellian nightmare URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/la-trobe-university-city-an-orwellian-nightmare/ Last updated: 2026-02-08T09:14:33.000Z La Trobe University recently unveiled its University City plan, a $5 billion scheme to transform the campus over decades by building 9,300 homes and expanding businesses. La Trobe will become a fully fledged suburb, where students, staff and the public live and work. This will be no academic paradise, though. It’s a plan to remodel the university for modern capitalism, combining neoliberalism with further integration into the military-industrial complex. The centrepiece is the expansion of La Trobe’s Living Lab program across the campus. The Living Lab is operated by Cisco, a surveillance company involved in maintaining Israel’s apartheid regime in the West Bank. La Trobe plans to fit buildings with surveillance technology to collect data on everyone in University City—students, staff and even members of the public who live there, according to an article in the *Australian Financial Review*. The data will be used to train AI models. This is a terrifying prospect. We do not know what data will be collected or how it will be used, but the history of university surveillance is cause for alarm. One role of universities in capitalism is to produce research for corporations and the state. Given Cisco’s role in Israeli apartheid, it seems plausible that La Trobe’s expanded Living Lab will be used for the military. Surveillance is also likely to intensify repression of on-campus protests. The student Palestine movement has been a bright spot in the darkness of the last few years. In 2024, for instance, a mass meeting of more than 250 students demanded La Trobe cut ties with corporations complicit in genocide, including Cisco. University bosses responded with discipline. In 2025, the University of Melbourne used data from wi-fi tracking to expel two pro-Palestine student activists. The University City may help La Trobe crack down like this. La Trobe vice-chancellor Theo Farrell told the *AFR*, “The next big thing is going to be physical AI, which is essentially intelligent robots. We can develop robotic aids to people to make sure that people can feel safe in their environment”. While these robo-cops are still science fiction, suppression of student protest is very real. Even the ostensibly positive elements of the plan, such as housing, are subordinate to capitalism. According to the Universities Accord report, meeting Australia’s “skills needs” (meaning the demands of capitalists for skilled labour) requires increasing the proportion of tertiary-qualified Australians to 80 percent of the working-age population by 2050\. Some of these skills are useful, such as nursing. But many, such as nuclear science, are about preparing for war. The report states enrolments are constrained by factors such as the difficulty of living near campus. The University City is a neoliberal solution to this problem. By expanding housing, La Trobe hopes to increase enrolments from 24,000 to 40,000\. The bosses need education for skilled workers, but students are still expected to pay for it. The new buildings at La Trobe will not be rent-controlled student housing, as in the 1960s. Instead, the university is opening public land to private development. Hundreds of homes will be privately sold, according to La Trobe deputy director Jodie Harris. Instead of making student housing more affordable, this will replicate the problems of the broader rental market, where investors hoard housing and extort renters. These changes are unlikely to be limited to La Trobe. Farrell promises, “This is the opportunity for us to use our new city as a test bed for what the future will bring”. Students must reject the La Trobe University City plan in its entirety. ### ‘Justifiable homicide by gun’: police and the working class in Australian history URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/justifiable-homicide-by-gun-police-and-the-working-class-in-australian-history/ Last updated: 2026-02-21T03:28:25.000Z > “There was a chap by the name of Whittaker ... He got shot right through the back of his neck. The bullet came out through his mouth. I saw Whittaker fall and I turned round and said, ‘You dirty bastards, are you fair dinkum?’” —Jim Nagel, quoted in *Under the Hook: Melbourne Waterside Workers Remember Working Lives and Class War 1900-1980* --- Jim Nagel saw the police murder his fellow stevedore and union comrade Alan Whittaker on a Port Melbourne picket line in 1925\. An autopsy corroborated Nagel’s account of the execution, confirming that the bullet had indeed entered through the back of Whittaker’s neck. Yet a coronial inquiry, relying on police testimony, found that Whittaker had charged at officers, who discharged their weapons “in the legal execution of duty in the suppression of a riot and in self-defence”. The official manner of death? “Justifiable homicide—by gun.” Police perform many functions as enforcers of the capitalist order. But none is more central than maintaining the exploitation of workers by bosses. As long as they’ve been part of Australia’s state machinery, police have suppressed working-class resistance and protected the wealth and property of capitalists. ### **Colonial policing: keeping workers at work** The first police in Australia’s colonies imposed strict discipline on convict labourers and indentured servants, who were forced to work by—and often for—the military authorities overseeing and growing rich off the new society. As the ruling class established a permanent domestic workforce of migrants and freed convicts, they experimented with new forms of civilian policing. Wage labourers, no longer physically compelled to work, were now surveilled and intimidated into working for a boss. Governor Macquarie’s first Sydney police regulations of 1811 outlined the new “freedoms” that released convicts would enjoy: “\[A\]ll poor persons not using proper means to get employment ... or wilfully absenting themselves from their work ... \[will be\] deemed to be idle and disorderly persons and punished as such”. Those who failed to find work or took time off without permission faced punishments such as public whippings of up to 50 lashes or up to 30 days’ hard labour, imposed by newly appointed police superintendents. The superintendents were likely also to serve as magistrates, and to be drawn from the growing landed class of pastoral employers and military officers. Judge, jury, boss and executor of discipline: the new Australian ruling class did it all. The legal system and police forces pursued the interests of employers from their earliest days. According to labour historian Michael Quinlan, almost 40 percent of all cases prosecuted under “masters and servants” legislation (the precursors to modern industrial relations laws) between 1845 and 1860 were related to unapproved absences and desertion from work. Workers’ complaints against employers were far less commonly heard, and almost never successful, which is unsurprising given that pastoral bosses generally ran the courts. For most of the nineteenth century, unskilled and semi-skilled labourers in the sheep shearing, mining and maritime industries were the backbone of Australia’s export-oriented economy. The bosses wanted an ever-expanding pool of labour that could be put to work digging, fleecing, hauling and shipping. And they wanted the work done as quickly and intensively as possible so they could make as much money as possible in the international markets. This helps explain the colonial preoccupation with policing absenteeism and “idleness”; the worst-case scenario for the new capitalist class was unpredictable shortages of unskilled labour. Police were thus central to ensuring a stable and exploitable labour supply. Maritime workers became a special target because they performed the crucial tasks of loading and transporting export commodities. The New South Wales government established a special “water police” branch in the 1840s to harass seamen and dockers, which Quinlan describes as Australia’s first “industrial police force” in his contribution to the book *Foundations of Arbitration*. Maritime workers were subjected to an identity card and leave-approval scheme copied directly from the convict labour system. Police conducted regular warrantless searches of ships’ living quarters; workers caught without a card could be arrested on suspicion of desertion. Some 60 separate statutes in Australian law applied specifically to whalers and seamen, focusing heavily on expressions of collective dissent: mass insubordination, mutiny and simultaneous desertion from work. The cops’ role enforcing industrial discipline bled over into attempts to control workers’ social activities. One Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) magistrate recorded on Boxing Day 1837: “\[T\]hree workers at Jackson and Addison’s Hobart timberyard were sentenced to the treadmill for being absent and too ‘celebratory’ on Christmas day. Two assaulted a constable trying to arrest them”. The Australian working class, from its infancy, developed a deep hatred for police as enforcers of the bosses’ interests. Early rioting in working-class communities, even when triggered by shortages of food and alcohol, frequently involved storming or burning down police stations and jails. ### **Policing strikes and picket lines** By the 1860s, unions and informal workers’ societies began to challenge existing methods of policing industry. Fines incurred by individual workers under the masters and servants laws became less effective as unions established funds to pay their members’ penalties. Isolated cases of absconding were now less of a problem than collective refusals to work—laws were applied to punish those people and institutions “inducing” or “persuading” workers to abscond. As workers turned more and more to the strike weapon against employers in the second half of the nineteenth century, bosses in turn looked to the police to intervene against strikes. Again, the semi-skilled and unskilled export sectors were key. The first port of call for employers was usually to try to replace strikers with other workers. Because the work in agriculture, mining and transport was relatively unskilled, bosses didn’t need to exert special effort to source qualified labour or implement months of training. They simply had to find large numbers of people willing to work during a strike to restart production and keep their profits flowing. The problem for employers came when strikers organised to physically resist the entry of this new labour into their workplaces. The “scab” workers, as they became known by trade unionists, were the capitalists’ main tool for circumventing strikes. The classic working-class tactic of mass picketing—forming defensive blockades around a striking workplace—emerged in response to this threat. Faced with the organised might of picketing workers, bosses sought police assistance to break picket lines and, crucially, to escort scabs into workplaces. Indeed, this became the main industrial role for police in the modern era. Historian David Baker points out that random police violence against strikers is relatively rare in Australian history—overwhelmingly, cops intervene to facilitate mass scabbing operations. The earliest recorded example of such an incident was the 1873 miners’ dispute at Clunes in western Victoria’s goldfields. There, bosses at the Lothair mine tried to impose an extra sixteen hours of work per week—without pay. The miners refused to resume work under these conditions and struck indefinitely with the support of a recently formed union: the Clunes Miners’ Association. In the fourteenth week of the strike, and with their profits now severely under threat, the Lothair directors organised with the chief commissioner of Victoria Police to bring in coachloads of non-unionised workers from the surrounding region under police guard. Tipped off to the bosses’ plans, strikers rallied the entire community to barricade roads and form picket lines at the mine. Police and scab workers were repelled in spectacular fashion as they tried to enter Clunes, with around a thousand men, women and children pelting the coaches with stones and other improvised ammunition. The *Creswick Advertiser* described how the collective activity of townspeople had overwhelmed the police operation: “\[T\]he great and real barricade was the living acting mass before them ... An attempt was made by the police to break through, but the attempt was easily frustrated”. In this case, police were forced to retreat, and the mine owners agreed to the workers’ demands after their attempt to bring in scab labour was defeated. No serious injuries were recorded during this confrontation, but that is likely because police were unprepared for the sheer level of resistance they encountered. After this early embarrassment, the cops meted out unrelenting violence in later disputes, as Baker outlines in his book *Police, Picket-lines and Fatalities*. Alan Whittaker, the striking Port Melbourne stevedore, was one victim of this violence. His 1925 murder took place during an attempt to chase scab labour from the wharves. Another death occurred in 1919 at Fremantle, when Tommy Edwards was struck on the head by a police baton in a scuffle to repel scabs. At Rothbury, New South Wales, in 1929, a young miner named Norman Brown was killed when police opened fire on 5,000 workers resisting scab labour in the Hunter Valley coalfields after a ten-month dispute. In none of these cases did police officers face discipline or criminal charges. The deaths of Edwards and Brown were ruled accidental, and Whittaker’s homicide was found “justifiable” despite evidence of an execution-style shooting. The officer who bludgeoned Tommy Edwards to death in Fremantle was never identified, and an inquiry into the events at Rothbury lauded police for their “commendable restraint”. Whenever they are seriously threatened, Australia’s bosses unleash police to brutalise, even to murder, striking workers with impunity. ### **Occupying the mining centres** The police have mainly been used to escort non-union labour into workplaces during industrial disputes. One notable exception emerges in coalfields and mining towns, where the pattern is one of much more intensive, day-to-day harassment of the entire community. Local economies in these areas tend to rely heavily on employment at a single large workplace. As the families and supporters of striking Clunes miners proved in 1873, the instinctive solidarity of a mining community can easily overpower one-off police operations. Police had to develop specific tactics for suppressing dissent in mining centres. In his memoirs, syndicalist agitator Tom Mann recounts the Sydney police transferring hundreds of officers to Broken Hill during a miners’ lockout in 1908\. Police were stationed in the town to intimidate locals. It was an early example of police “occupation” during a strike. By January 1909, the *Sydney Morning Herald* was reporting that tobacconists and butchers were refusing service to the invading officers, while “Servant girls in hotels and boarding houses where the police are quartered are ... harassing constables as much as possible in the way of inattention and neglect”. The intermittent occupation of mining towns by police continued well into the twentieth century. In the long and bitter disputes of the Depression era, when entire regions of New South Wales were gripped by strikes and lockouts, police superintendent McKay ordered the deployment of “flying squads” to travel across the state, visiting terror upon working-class communities. Trade unionists knew these special armed detachments as “basher gangs”. When Norman Brown was killed at Rothbury, 290 officers had been sent to police 120-140 miners on strike—a ratio of around two officers per striker. At Mount Isa in 1964-65, the Queensland government granted special powers to police to control movement in and out of the town, to search and arrest without a warrant and to seize printing presses over the course of an eight-month miners’ strike. This model of occupation during miners’ disputes was resource-intensive and tended to generate even greater class hostility towards mining bosses over generations. The Australian ruling class has found a structural solution. In former bastions of industrial militancy such as the Pilbara region of Western Australia, bosses have given preference to “fly-in-fly-out” (FIFO) workers who never settle permanently around their place of work. A 2012 study from the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia found that FIFO labour made up around 80 percent of the Pilbara minerals and energy workforce in 2011\. Mining communities no longer need to be so heavily policed because FIFO work has broken down localised and intergenerational union traditions. ### **Federal policing: reaction to industrial unrest** If Australia’s working-class history is shaped by police repression, then the history of Australian policing institutions is also shaped by working-class struggle. The first ever federal police force was established in response to a wave of strike action and political agitation against conscription during World War One. In 1917, the conservative Nationalist government of Billy Hughes created the Commonwealth Police Force to assist or replace state-based forces in the event of rioting or industrial unrest. Hughes harboured a deep distrust of state and territory Labor governments, especially in Queensland; he viewed them as beholden to working-class interests and not ruthless enough in their deployment of state police. In 1919, the Commonwealth Police was transformed into Australia’s first political surveillance apparatus—the Special Investigations Bureau—targeting trade union leaders, suspected communists and other “provocateurs” within the labour movement. In 1925, a new federal force was created under the Peace Officers Act. Much like its 1917 predecessor, this body was designed to intervene industrially over the heads of a state Labor government, this time in New South Wales. The federal government was frustrated by the state police’s inability to end a mass seamen’s strike that was spreading to other states. Police in NSW, Victoria and South Australia had issued 1,500 arrest warrants for strikers in the space of two weeks in an attempt to intimidate the seamen back to work, but they stood fast. Commonwealth authorities wanted NSW Premier Jack Lang to deport the union’s foreign-born leaders Tom Walsh and Jacob Johansen. But Lang, sensing this would undermine his legitimacy with Labor voters, refused. The Peace Officers Act allowed the federal government to arrest Walsh, Johansen and other militants as well as to deploy special officers to protect scabs crewing ships around the country. Unions did manage to stop the deportation of the seamen’s leaders, but the strike was eventually lost due to this unprecedented federal police intervention. The police bodies set up in this period were ultimately consolidated into the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation by Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley, who used the agency to persecute the communist leaders of the 1949 coal strike. Australia’s federal police and surveillance apparatuses were designed to curtail industrial militancy and to victimise political radicals inside the trade unions. ### **Police and industrial struggle: intertwined history** Police are capitalism’s attack dogs and its frontline defence against working-class resistance. At every stage, the police have bolstered the interests of Australian employers: imposing labour discipline in key industries, ensuring the smooth running of export sectors and breaking strikes. Working-class resistance itself has shaped the development of police tactics. As workers began withdrawing their labour to win better wages and conditions, police intervened to allow scab labour to enter during disputes, often at an employer’s personal request. Trade union organisation is weaker today than in the periods surveyed here. The lack of large-scale or long-running strike action makes the police’s industrial role less obvious. We see the cops harassing street protests or racially profiling minorities much more often than we see them attacking picket lines. But repression of working-class struggle remains a central purpose for the police. Their brutality towards the Baiada Poultry picketers in 2011 and the riot-squad offensive against building workers at Melbourne’s Myer Emporium site in 2012 serve as recent reminders. Even when police don’t physically attack workers, their presence at strikes carries an implicit threat of the violence they are mandated to perform. This threat hung heavy over the Maritime Union of Australia’s 1998 picket of Webb Dock, until a massive legion of unionised construction workers showed up in solidarity and forced the police to retreat. Marxists have long maintained that the main function of the police is to enforce the rule of capital over labour. This is borne out by the historical record in Australia. ### Origins of the police in Australia URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/origins-of-the-police-in-australia/ Last updated: 2026-02-10T08:30:55.000Z The police in Australia have, since the foundation of the state, played an essential role in maintaining Australian capitalism, and in the early years of the colony, extending its reach against Indigenous resistance. The NSW Police proudly notes on its [website](https://www.police.nsw.gov.au/about%5Fus/history?ref=redflag.org.au) that its origins date to the very earliest stages of the British penal colony. In 1789, nine of the “best behaved” convicts were selected to form a Night Watch and Row Boat Guard, ten years before the first police force in Britain. Initially, in the hellish British prison camp at Sydney Cove, convicts and their jailers were largely left to their own devices to scrounge out their own survival. One of the First Fleet marines, Watkin Tench, described the situation: “I every day see wretches pale with disease and wasted with famine, struggle with the horror of their situation”. In this context, the colonial authorities maintained their rule over their unfree and bonded convict labour force with an iron fist. In the first year of the new “civilisation” on these shores, the *Historical Records of New South Wales* records that twelve men were executed, most for theft. If the symbol of tsarist oppression in Russia was the knout, in Australia it was the lash. A product of British naval discipline, which was never applied to officers, lashings involved a person being tied to a triangle of three posts and struck with a whip, usually the cat-o’-nine-tails. This was how such punishments were described by Robert Jones, chief jailer at Norfolk Island: > “The flogger was ... a very powerful man and took great pleasure in inflicting as much bodily punishment as possible, using such expressions as ‘Another half-pound, mate, off the beggar’s ribs’. His face and clothes usually presented an appearance of a mincemeat chopper, being covered in flesh from the victim’s body.” The lash was not a punishment of last resort, but typical. Convicts James Williams and William Lane, for example, were sentenced to 500 lashes and 2,000 lashes respectively for stealing biscuits. This was the social order that the early police in Australia were founded to defend and maintain. While a small minority of senior military officers and administrators used their control over convict labour and the budding machinery of state to enrich themselves, most of Sydney’s population, 20,000 by 1837, lived in slum-like conditions. Tom O’Lincoln, in his book *United We Stand*, noted of the “free” working population of Australia in the early nineteenth century: > “Special laws governed friendly societies, vagrancy, hawkers and peddlers, Sunday observance, public entertainments, party processions and the behaviour of servants, apprentices and seamen.” The primary role of the police in Australia’s cities was to maintain this social control, with police in NSW receiving a portion of fines levied for drunkenness, indecent behaviour, obscene language and similar misdemeanours until 1850\. Such was the importance of maintaining this order for Australian capitalism that by 1814, “constable” was the fourth-largest occupation in NSW. A particularly odious level of police harassment, which frequently descended into extortion and corruption, surrounded the issuing of miners’ licences during the Victorian gold rush from 1851\. Driven by outrage at the police and bound up with general democratic demands, the Eureka rebellion of 1854 was the first large-scale confrontation between nascent organised labour and the police. This marks a pattern repeated many times since. A combined police and military operation crushed the armed uprising of the miners at Ballarat at the cost of around 30 dead. While the early resistance of the Indigenous Eora and Dharuk peoples in the immediate vicinity of Sydney was crushed over a decade of intermittent conflict, it was not primarily the fledgling police but the British marines of the NSW Corps who carried out this warfare. As the colony expanded beyond a penal settlement and began to develop as an economically viable site for exporting to the broader British and imperial markets, encroachments on Indigenous land rapidly increased. This also led to a greater demand from the Australian ruling class for a dedicated armed force to protect farmers and pastoralists—who were engaged in the dispossession of Aboriginal people—from reprisals, particularly following the 1824 Bathurst war against the Wiradjuri. This dedicated force was the NSW Mounted Police, formed in 1825, which set the mould for a slew of similar police organisations that defended and expanded the colonial frontier over the next 100 years. While the Mounted Police, which operated until 1850, was recruited from British soldiers, its role was later taken on by the Native Police. A Native Police unit was first formed in 1837 in Victoria, but was most long-lasting in NSW and Queensland, where it remained a component of the police force until 1915\. The Native Police comprised Indigenous troopers variously kidnapped, cajoled or conscripted into service, led by white police officers. The Mounted Police and the Native Police functioned as paramilitaries to crush Aboriginal resistance, carrying out a state-endorsed policy of punitive expeditions and massacres to punish any Indigenous group that threatened pastoralist, mining or farming interests as the entire continent was colonised. From Melbourne to Cape York, these paramilitaries left a trail of slaughter. Historians Mark Finnane and Jonathan Richards, in a recent [article](https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/server/api/core/bitstreams/c54049b9-d00f-42a8-83a7-dd237ff5fe48/content?ref=redflag.org.au) in the *Asia-Pacific Economic History Review*, estimated the toll in Queensland to be at least 20,000 dead*.* As the centenary history of the Queensland police published in 1964 admitted, the real role of this force was to fight a “sporadic frontier war”, with no consideration for justice or humanity. As Henry Reynolds related in *The Other Side of the Frontier*, the 100-year frontier war was driven by the incompatibility of the communal Indigenous societies with the cancerous growth of Australian capitalism, based on private property, wage labour and profit. With the consolidation of capitalism across the continent, the extermination of Indigenous societies was reduced in favour of what became a policy of apartheid-like police control over Indigenous lives under the name of assimilation. While such policies, and the subsequent establishment of the mission system, date to different periods in the conquest of Australia, all of them follow the line of reasoning of Queensland Police commissioner David Seymour in 1885: > “The blacks are now deprived of their means of existence and naturally enough when in want of food will kill whatever they come across. It would be useless to direct the Police to arrest them, for to carry out such orders every Black in the Colony would have to be made a prisoner ... While settlement was sparse and large tracts of country were open to the Aborigines, it was possible for the Police to keep them back from the settlers, but now in driving them back from one occupied locality they merely are driven to another.” From the inception of capitalism on the shores of Australia, the police have acted as the armed, violent toadies of that system. Whether as paramilitaries operating outside the law to slaughter Aboriginal men, women and children, or the jailers and persecutors of the convicts and working class, the police played a vital role in constructing the new social order. ### How the Russian Revolution abolished the police URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/how-the-russian-revolution-abolished-the-police/ Last updated: 2026-02-10T01:31:00.000Z The 1917 Russian Revolution, at least for a time, abolished the police. Instead of a professional police force alienated from the people, Russian workers organised themselves on a mass scale to protect and govern their own workplaces, homes and rights.The Russian experience offers an important lesson: abolishing the police requires a social revolution that destroys capitalism. Murray Frame, in a 2016 article for *Europe-Asia Studies*, writes that prior to the 1917 Revolution, the police of the Russian Empire “had a reputation as a steadfast pillar and hated symbol of the old order”. During the initial stages of the revolution, which began with general strikes led by women workers in Petrograd, the police confronted workers’ marches for peace and bread with arms in hand. Nearly 1,500 people were killed in the first days. As Leon Trotsky described in *The History of the Russian Revolution*: > “Toward the police, the crowd showed ferocious hatred. They routed the mounted police with whistles, stones, and pieces of ice ... disarmament of the \[police\] becomes a universal slogan. The police are fierce, implacable, hated and hating foes. To win them over is out of the question.” The death rattle of the regime came with the king’s order to the 150,000-strong Petrograd garrison to shoot at the largely unarmed workers. When some of the soldiers’ regiments refused, the entire edifice of repression shattered. The police were suddenly outgunned and vanished from the streets of Russia practically overnight. In just five days, the 300-year reign of the Russian monarchy had ended. The question of what would replace the police was paramount in the first days of the revolution. Prisons were opened, and arms were distributed freely from the soldiers to the populace, leading to many cases of robbery and assault. Out of the chaos of the revolution, different social strata began to self-organise to defend themselves and assert control over their circumstances. In his 1984 book, *Red Guards and Worker’s Militias in the Russian Revolution,* Rex Wade documents the two broadest types that emerged in Petrograd: workers’ militias and the City Militia, the latter of which rapidly earned official recognition from the new provisional government as the successor of the old police. Similar militias were established in major cities all over the Russian Empire during the revolution. Both the workers’ and City Militia began as volunteer self-organised groups to defend life and security in various areas of the city. The workers’ militias, however, were organised from factories, unions or working-class city districts and quickly developed a consciousness of their significance as specifically *working-class* bodies. As Wade explains: > “It did not take long ... for this sense of the need for arms to defend one’s liberties or viewpoint to take on more concrete forms. For the workers especially a fear of counterrevolution helped create a feeling of the need not only to be armed but also to be organized for the defense of their rights against a class foe.” As events progressed in 1917, with the provisional government maintaining Russia’s involvement in the First World War and failing to address peasant demands for land or to improve food security, workers also increasingly came to understand “that they represented the true interests of the revolution in a way no other group did”. The notion of a workers’ militia was increasingly superseded by an armed workers’ force, a Red Guard, which would proactively fight for the victory of the revolution. The Red Guard, which armed working-class groups came to identify as, is a stunning testament to the capacity for working-class self-organisation and is closely linked with the other radically democratic working-class organisations that arose in 1917\. Governed internally through democratic elections, it was typical for Red Guard formations to be organised at the workplace level, with significant input from the workers’ elected factory committee. Guards were overwhelmingly younger men, with a significant number of women workers involved in auxiliary medical units, and were paid by their employer for their duties. While many bosses attempted to evade payment to the Guard, they were usually blocked by the workers’ hostility and organisation. After a failed counter-revolutionary coup in August 1917 led by General Kornilov, Red Guard units in various factories undertook intensive combat training multiple times a week, either after work or during periods specifically rostered for the purpose. Red Guard units operated under strict self-discipline. A typical series of escalating punishments for infractions (such as abusing their authority or being drunk on duty) ranged from a “comradely talk”, expulsion from the Guard, or firing from the workplace and social ostracisation. By the time of the October Revolution, according to Wade, some 200,000 Red Guards were organised across Russia, including 30-40,000 in Petrograd alone. They were well armed with rifles and ammunition, and in the largest factories in Petrograd, such as the Putilov works, they had even formed machine-gun regiments and controlled armoured cars. This was a significant expression of the desire of workers to control their own destiny. The emergence of workers’ militia was greeted with hostility by the provisional government. Alongside the reformist Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary parties, the government sought to integrate the workers’ militias into the “apolitical” City Militia, modelled on the British police force. Murray Frame summarises the reformist ideal for the police: > “The key elements were democratic accountability within the militia, alongside its decentralisation to municipal authorities in order to prevent political misuse of the policing apparatus by the state, and a narrower set of functions \[than under the tsar\].” A conference of workers’ militiamen held in the working-class Vyborg district in May 1917 condemned the provisional government and reformist attempts to mount “a full restoration, under the title of militia, of a police force of a west European type, hated by the majority of people across the world, mainly the poorest classes”. When Lenin returned to Petrograd from exile in April 1917, he remarked in an [article](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/20b.htm?ref=redflag.org.au) in the Bolshevik newspaper *Pravda* that “the organisation of a workers’ militia to be paid for by the capitalists is a measure of tremendous ... importance, both practically and in principle”, which must urgently be generalised across the entire country to defend and develop the revolution. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, which he led, made the point that the significance of the Red Guard and workers’ militias was that they presaged the development of “the universal arming of the people”, both men and women, which would break down the old instruments of oppression, including the police. The Red Guard was central to the smashing of the old, capitalist state, which would lead to a liberated and socialist society: > “*Replacement* of the old organs of oppression, the police, the bureaucracy, the standing army, by a universal arming of the people, by a really universal militia, is the only way to guarantee the country a maximum of security against the restoration of the monarchy and to *enable* it to go forward firmly, systematically and resolutely towards socialism, not by ‘introducing’ it from above, but by raising the vast mass of workers ... to the art of state administration, to the use of the *whole* state power.” Despite the efforts of the provisional government to disband the workers’ militias, by cutting their pay, banning factories from paying their salaries and giving official recognition to the City Militia, they were unable to smash Russian workers’ efforts to self-organise. Thousands of workers’ Red Guards fought on the front lines of the insurrection to ensure the transfer of power to the workers’ and peasants’ soviets (councils) in the October Revolution. A top priority of the new Bolshevik-led soviet government was to work out how the new workers’ state would incorporate the Red Guards. The militia system of the old provisional government was formally abolished on 2 December 1917, and for nearly the next year the Red Guards served both as police and, increasingly, as an expeditionary military force. As documented by Wade, around half of Petrograd’s Red Guards volunteered to fight in defence of the workers’ revolution across the territory of the old Russian Empire against counter-revolutionary White Armies, becoming the core of the Red Army formed in March 1918\. When the Bolsheviks came to power, in keeping with the aspirations of the working class, the hope was that democratic working-class institutions like the Red Guard, the factory committees, the unions and the soviets would form a new kind of state, “a state which is no longer the state proper”, as Lenin put it, that would allow a transition to socialism. However, while the Russian workers could form this new kind of radically democratic state, it was another thing for them to maintain it in the conditions of the revolution’s isolation and under siege from international imperialism. Just as with the factory committees and soviets, slowly the Red Guards were sapped of their vitality as factories were shuttered, the population of Petrograd and Moscow collapsed, and thousands of working-class militants left to fight. By October 1918, as a “temporary measure”, a full-time police force in the style proposed by the provisional government was established by the Bolshevik government and has remained in its essentials up to the present day in Russia. What the Russian Revolution and its experience of abolishing the police prove for us today is that the police cannot be seen as a discrete and separate problem under capitalism, which can be made nicer with some reforms. The police serve a fundamental role as defenders of the social order in *all* capitalist societies, from the old Russian Empire to modern Australia. Only a working-class revolution that upends capitalism and smashes the state of which the police are a central part can abolish the police and replace them with a genuinely democratic militia of all citizens. ### Queensland government attacks free speech URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/queensland-government-attacks-free-speech/ Last updated: 2026-02-08T07:49:41.000Z The Queensland LNP government has announced new hate speech laws to be introduced to parliament this week. They are an extreme, authoritarian attack on the Palestine movement and civil liberties. If passed, the laws will make public use of the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” punishable by up to two years in prison. The announcement follows the passing of the federal Labor government’s Combating Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill, which was [widely condemned](https://redflag.org.au/article/anti-democratic-hate-speech-bill-must-fail/) as anti-democratic and could lead to the outright banning of pro-Palestine organisations. Other state governments have moved to restrict the right to protest; most outrageous is NSW Premier Chris Minns’ [attempt to ban](https://redflag.org.au/article/chris-minns-exploits-bondi-to-attack-democratic-rights/) street marches for up to three months. The laws proposed by Queensland Premier David Crisafulli continue this trend. “From the river to the sea” has long been in the crosshairs of the pro-Israel establishment. Anthony Albanese condemned the slogan’s use last year, and some universities have tried to prevent students from chanting it on campus. But this is the first attempt by an Australian state government to ban it, which would set a terrible precedent. In Germany, where the slogan was banned two years ago, police have fined activists and banned protests because they suspected someone might say it. Contrary to the claims of the pro-Israel establishment, “from the river to the sea” is not hate speech or a call for the genocide of Jewish Israelis. It is a cry for equality and justice for Palestinians and for an end to the apartheid, mass murder and ethnic supremacy of the Israeli state. Conflating the slogan with Nazi slogans and symbols, as the new laws do, is a sickening distortion of the truth. Last August in Brisbane, more than 50,000 people chanted “from the river to the sea” as we marched to end Australia’s complicity in the Gaza genocide. At that time, hundreds of desperate Palestinians were being massacred at aid distribution sites, and there were almost daily reports of deaths from starvation. According to Crisafulli, those opposing such crimes should be thrown in jail as racists and fascists. As if the situation couldn’t be more obscene, these laws are being tabled in the same week that Israeli President Isaac Herzog [arrives in Australia](https://redflag.org.au/article/protest-against-war-criminal-israeli-president-isaac-herzog/). Herzog has been found guilty of inciting genocide by a [UN commission of inquiry](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds?ref=redflag.org.au). Yet Australian politicians are giving him the red carpet treatment, while preparing prison cells for anti-war activists. The Palestine movement’s message of solidarity with the oppressed, our willingness to stand up to the media and the state, and our anti-imperialism have made us a target of the ruling class. Attacks on our rights could continue as Labor’s royal commission creates more space for pro-genocide hacks to attack pro-Palestinian activism and speech. Regardless of the lies and slander, the movement for Palestine is on the right side of history. Palestinians are still being massacred, and Gaza is being annexed under the cover of a “ceasefire”. A stronger movement will make it harder for attacks on civil liberties and freedom of speech to hold. In an increasingly violent and authoritarian world, we need to defend those rights now more than ever. --- *Connor Knight is a co-convenor of Students for Palestine Queensland.* ### I watched three minutes of ‘Melania’ so you don’t have to URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/i-watched-three-minutes-of-melania-so-you-dont-have-to/ Last updated: 2026-02-11T01:39:59.000Z “Could you let me in without a ticket? You and I both don’t want to give money to the Trumps.” The worker behind the movie counter bit her lip in sympathetic hesitation. “I know, I just don’t want to lose my job.” “Of course. Maybe you just accidentally let slip which cinema it’s in.” “Yeah, it’s cinema three or five.” Very few Sydney theatres were still screening *Melania* a week after its release. The historic box-office losses for this US$40 million “documentary” about the first lady of the United States, marketed with an additional US$35 million, are the only drops of satisfaction to be wrung from its existence. Florida would freeze over before I helped mitigate those losses at even a concession price. Loitering near cinemas three and five, I followed a woman dressed in Mar-a-Lago colours—ice white, warm white, off white, pearl, cream and light beige—into number five. A dozen people sat waiting, frankly more than I expected. But the screening cancellations widened the catchment area: this must have been the convergence of every white-haired Floridian expat within a twenty-kilometre radius. I set the timer for three minutes. Like staring at a solar eclipse, watching this for any length of time might cause severe and lifelong retinal damage. Three minutes was as much as I would bear for the journalistic pretence of an informed review. As the trailers and advertisements rolled, I pondered how we got here. *Melania* is the afterbirth of American big business’s marriage to the authoritarian, even fascist, right. Like Gonerill and Regan in their father King Lear’s court, Paramount, Netflix, Disney and Amazon all vied to flatter their way into Donald Trump’s favour by purchasing production rights at extortionate prices. No Silicon Valley tech bro or Hollywood executive was willing to perform the part of truthful Cordelia. The role of Gloucester—who had his eyes gouged out despite loyalty to Lear—is played by everyone stupid enough to watch this film. Amazon’s billionaire owner Jef Bezos won royal favour in the end. His bribe sounds like a lot: US$75 million in total, of which, according to the *Wall Street Journal*, Melania pocketed US$28 million. In contrast to Qatar’s US$400 million private jet gift to Donald Trump, and the US$1 billion fee for states joining the president’s new “board of peace”, it’s a bargain. There was no need to scout for potential directors. Brett Ratner’s resume was impeccable: the *Rush Hour* trilogy, six allegations of rape and sexual harassment in 2017, a long-standing friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu and recent cameos in the Epstein files. Warehouse authoritarianism met White House authoritarianism in the making of *Melania*. According to sources who spoke with the *New York Times*, Amazon employees could not opt out of production for political reasons. The world’s second-largest company cancelled screenings at Lake Theatre & Café—a small, alternative Oregon cinema—because the owner’s promotional material read: “To defeat your enemy, you must know them: Melania”. But now the movie had begun; I started the timer. It opens on peaceful, blue ocean waves. A sophisticated metaphor for fascism’s hypnotic promises of order and stability? But twenty seconds later, a cheap jumpscare: the camera sweeps up the sandy shore to reveal Mar-a-Lago, the Trump family residence. We are treated to drone footage of the mansion’s rooftop and its bizarre phallic protrusions, before the camera swoops down to the ground, focused expectantly on the marble steps outside the back door. Having established our servile vantage point, Melania makes her bold appearance: an extreme close-up of her feet in python-skin Christian Louboutin heels. Fascism is a pair of silver stilettos advertising in your face forever. We see her billowy white dress as the camera pans up to her face. Taking off her sunglasses in an attempt at personality, she steps into a black SUV. More helicoptering over Miami’s palm trees and golf courses is accompanied by “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones: > *War, children, it’s just a shot away* > *It’s just a shot away* > *Rape, murder* > *It’s just a shot away* The security cavalcade of SUVs carrying Melania through the winding roads reinforced my deep and abiding prejudice towards big cars. I checked the timer: still 90 seconds left. A police car inexplicably blares its sirens to herald the arrival of Melania and her secret service detail on an airport tarmac. The camera lingers longingly on the Trump family private jet (maybe the greatest private jet ever) before Melania climbs the stairway into it. A trio of obsequious flight staff await her with grins pasted onto their faces. “Happy New Year”, we hear Melania say, or perhaps it’s a post-edit text-to-speech program, before she turns, scowling. She drops her handbag onto a seat and catwalks down the aisle, staring directly into the camera. By this point, 105 seconds in, I had already forgotten that this was supposed to be a documentary. She sits and stares vacantly somewhere beyond the camera. The jet takes off and the Rolling Stones finally stop singing about rape and murder. Suddenly, somehow, Melania is now wearing a black dress and walking down a wood-panelled hallway on the jet. “Everyone wants to know, so here it is: twenty days. Family. Business. Philanthropy. And becoming the First Lady of the United States. Again.” The timer went off—I’d seen enough. I knew about the family. I knew about the business. I didn’t know about the philanthropy, unless she was referring to wishing her servants a happy New Year. After returning to sunlight and reality, I wondered: was there perhaps some wisdom to be gleaned from that cinematic sludge? Because Melania Trump, more than her ideologically demented husband, the Epsteinian depravity of his circle, and the megalomania of his political class, might better reflect the mass psychological profile of the rich. Absolute boredom. A yawning abyss without value, quality or direction, staving off the haunting incursions of nothingness with drawers and drawers of designer sunglasses, handbags, watches, stilettos, necklaces, neckties, cufflinks, ball gowns and bikinis. With private jets, fleets of luxury cars and armadas of golf carts. Wanting only more things to want, and fearing only what happens if the carousel stops. This type of self-interest lacks the charge of malevolence or even the banality of bureaucracy. It is a vacuum that abhors itself. Material acquisition personified. The benefactors of capitalist production longing to become one with their world of commodities. If a shopping mall and a human being did a sci-fi brain-machine switcheroo, it would be Melania Trump. They’re Democrats, Republicans, liberals, fascists—and none of them, really. They’re in Miami, San Francisco, Abu Dhabi, London, Moscow, Mumbai and Shanghai—and nowhere in particular. The wealth of our world, the sweat, toil and torture of ordinary, everyday people, the machinery of modern society existing only to furnish them with vanity and diversion. I remain undecided if these purely idle rich are just as bad as the fascist ideologues and depraved sadists, or whether, given their vastly greater numbers, they are even worse. But I refused to endure another 105 minutes simply to better answer this question. ### Royal commissions have been political weapons before URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/royal-commissions-have-been-political-weapons-before/ Last updated: 2026-02-15T04:27:21.000Z The royal commission into antisemitism initiated by the Labor government is set to be a key element in the ongoing ruling class assault on democratic rights, Palestine solidarity, the left and the broader working-class movement. Royal commissions have previously been used for precisely this purpose, so it is worth examining in some detail two of the most notorious examples: the 1949 Victorian royal commission into the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and the 1954 Petrov royal commission into espionage. The 1949 Victorian royal commission was a decisive acceleration of the Cold War offensive against workers and the left. In 1948, the Victorian Liberal government introduced a series of repressive anti-union measures and legislation aimed at banning the Communist Party. In 1947, the Chifley federal Labor government had passed draconian laws outlawing protests and any agitation against military projects such as the Woomera rocket range. Then, in 1949, Chifley set up ASIO to spy on the left. A number of Communists, including party leader Lance Sharkey, were arrested and jailed for allegedly subversive or seditious statements. In the same year, a CPA functionary, Cecil Sharpley, sensationally ratted on the party, authoring a series of lurid front-page stories for the Melbourne *Herald* about Communist sabotage, wrecking and plotting a Russian takeover of the country. The Victorian Liberals seized on this opportunity to justify banning the CPA, setting up the royal commission headed by conservative judge Charles Lowe. The commission’s 154 sitting days focused on an avalanche of attacks on Communists as a fifth column for a Russian invasion of Australia, who manipulated front organisations, engaged in spying and industrial sabotage and rigged union elections (disgracefully, in a few cases this was actually true). The media coverage was, to put it mildly, hysterical. Day after day, they pilloried “evil godless Communists”. A lynch mob atmosphere was whipped up. Despite royal commissioner Lowe acquitting the CPA of being controlled from abroad and of espionage and sabotage, the damage had been well and truly done. A rabid Cold War atmosphere had been entrenched. This is a warning about the dangers posed by the current royal commission, chaired by Virginia Bell. Even if her final recommendations are not draconian, a year of red-baiting media coverage can create a noxious atmosphere to justify a crackdown on democratic rights and greater police powers. Robert Menzies went on to win the 1949 federal election, promising to outlaw the CPA and ban Communists from holding trade union positions. It was part of a broader class war to contain wages and working-class living standards to ensure that big business seized the benefits of the emerging postwar economic boom. As well taking advantage of the deepening Cold War atmosphere, Menzies sharply increased military spending and imposed conscription. Menzies’ legislation not only outlawed the CPA but also members of any affiliated organisations and anyone supporting supposed communist principles. No jury trials were allowed. The burden of proof was reversed. The crown did not have to prove its case. Those charged had to prove their innocence. Immediately after the law was passed, coordinated police raids were conducted on CPA offices. Plans were drawn up to establish internment camps, with 16,600 people listed to be rounded up. After initially voicing some criticism of the ban, Labor folded, waving Menzies’ ban through the Senate, where Labor had a majority. However, a group of left-wing Communist-aligned unions immediately launched a legal challenge. Defying a barrage of right-wing vitriol, Doc Evatt, soon to take over as ALP leader following Chifley’s death, presented the unions’ case in court. The judges ruled the ban unconstitutional in peacetime. But this did not deter Menzies. Re-elected over a bitterly divided ALP in a “reds under the beds” election campaign, Menzies pushed through a new round of anti-union laws and called a referendum to ban the CPA for 22 September 1952\. The media and the entire establishment vociferously backed him. Opinion polls indicated Menzies would romp it in. But a concerted campaign initiated by the CPA and left-wing unions won the backing of civil libertarians and sections of the ALP and pushed back the red-baiting tide. The Labor left feared the sweeping powers Menzies was seeking would lead to the banning of not just the CPA but a variety of working-class organisations and the ALP itself. Doc Evatt, as Labor leader, played a pivotal role touring the country in a campaign that dramatically shifted public opinion and narrowly defeated the ban by 2,370,009 votes to 2,317, 927. Despite this setback, Menzies proved unrelenting. Numerous other laws were used to crack down on strikes and trade union militants. The public service was purged. Menzies’ next major opportunity came in 1954 with the defection of Russian spy Vladimir Petrov. Menzies immediately announced a royal commission into espionage, which helped him win the 1954 elections despite Labor polling a majority of the vote. Menzies carefully handpicked right-wing lawyers to be his attack dogs in the royal commission, which sat from 17 May 1954 to 31 March 1955\. It was a star chamber: rules of evidence were abandoned. Rumours, innuendo and smears of being Russian agents were weaponised against Communists, union leaders and anyone even vaguely left wing or Labor-aligned. When Evatt’s own staff came under attack, he intervened before the royal commission to defend them. So effective was he in exposing the lies and slander that, to shut him up, the commissioners banned him from appearing. And because the broader left and important sections of the unions stood up to the onslaught, everything did not go Menzies’ way. He could continue to win elections with red scare campaigns, but basic union organisation remained resilient and McCarthyism did not reach anything like the extreme proportions it did in the US. The fact that Evatt—who was far from being a radical leftist and for a period was allied with Labor’s right-wing industrial groupers—was prepared at the height of the Cold War hysteria to defy the ruling class and stand up for democratic rights just underlines how craven today’s ALP leaders are. Today, it is not the Liberals but Albanese’s Labor government, operating at the behest of the capitalist class, that has pushed through reactionary laws giving the government the right to ban organisations, not on the basis of what they have actually done but what they might do. The role of the trade union leadership has been just as politically disgraceful. For over two years, they refused to mobilise against the genocide in Gaza. Worse, in the wake of the Bondi attack, they denounced the Palestine movement and red-baited socialist opponents of genocide. The union leaders refuse to lift a finger to defend even the most basic democratic rights, instead backing draconian laws that can be used against any working-class mobilisation, including those directed at bosses. This sharply contrasts with the role of the left unions in the 1950s. Then, the left unions played a vital role in defying Menzies’ attacks and in forcing a split in the ALP, driving out the party’s hard right. This helped blunt the McCarthyite assault and prevented Australia from going down the road of the US, where militants were driven out of the unions and the left was virtually destroyed. This underlines the urgent need to build a larger and more militant socialist movement today: one that forthrightly opposes all attacks on democratic rights like the royal commission and mobilises workers to transform their unions into fighting bodies that vigorously defend living standards and stands against atrocities like the genocide in Gaza. ### Three days in Minneapolis URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/three-days-in-minneapolis/ Last updated: 2026-02-12T06:13:18.000Z During the three days I spent in Minneapolis, a week after the ICE murder of Alex Pretti forced the Trump administration to yank Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, it was clear that the federal occupation of the city was not over and that a clear-cut victory over ICE had not been achieved. There was a confidence in the movement activists I spoke to—despite suffering two deaths at the hands of federal agents—that Minneapolis had created a political panic in the White House, with potentially disastrous political consequences for the Republican Party. And while Minneapolis certainly propelled forward a movement against ICE across the country, no-one I met thought the movement was over. On the contrary, many people felt not only that organising on the community and workplace levels needed to deepen, but were waiting for the next shoe to drop under the new head of the federal occupation, the notorious White House “border czar”, [Tom Homan](https://borderlessmag.org/2024/12/11/chicago-trump-tom-homan-brandon-johnson-asylum-refugees-immigrants-deportations/?ref=redflag.org.au). Homan recently [announced](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/04/trump-homan-minnesota-ice-immigration.html?ref=redflag.org.au) the withdrawal of 700 federal agents from Minnesota, leaving 2,000 in place. He attributed this to “unprecedented cooperation” with state and local authorities. Homan repeatedly declared that the Trump administration “is not surrendering”. ### **A city in political ferment** Visitors to Minneapolis immediately notice the frozen lakes and rivers. The successful and widespread community defence against ICE in such arctic conditions is remarkable even for hearty Minnesotans. The big march on 23 January, which attracted more than 50,000 people and possibly as many as 100,000, demonstrated how politicised and radicalised the population became during the ongoing federal occupation. It’s obvious that Minneapolis is a city in political ferment. The type of widespread and sustained struggle involving “ordinary people” that we haven’t witnessed since the later years of the Vietnam War. Signs of this are everywhere. After Paul K-D, publisher of the *Twin Cities Labor Report,* picked me up at Union Station, we drove into Minneapolis to meet Kieran Knutson, the working president of Communication Workers of America (CWA) Local 7250, at a well-known pub called the [Prodigal](https://www.prodigalpub.com/?ref=redflag.org.au). It is located in the Whittier neighbourhood, where Alex Pretti, the VA nurse, was murdered by federal agents four days earlier. I didn’t realise that Pretti was murdered in a commercial district promoted by the city as a tourism destination. The candlelight memorial dedicated to him was incredibly beautiful and solemn. There was a vigil happening where several people spoke, and we stopped by for a few minutes in the frigid temperatures. It’s worth noting that there are large and small posters of [Renee Good and Pretti](https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10240584017042829&set=pcb.10240584019682895) all over Minneapolis, another sign of how politicised daily life has become. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/02/Pretti-memorial-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/02/Pretti-memorial.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/02/Pretti-memorial-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/02/Pretti-memorial-2.jpg) Memorial for Alex Pretti, a nurse murdered by federal agents in Minneapolis CREDIT: Joe Allen ### **The Whipple federal building** On my first full day in Minneapolis on Friday 30 January, Kieran took me to the daily, early morning pickets, involving a few hundred people at the Whipple federal building, the staging ground ICE and the Border Patrol’s operations in Minneapolis. The wind chill was well below zero degrees Fahrenheit (-18 degrees Celsius). The federal building is a nondescript looking structure just outside of Minneapolis. Every morning, hundreds of people picket and at times sit-in or block briefly Border Patrol and ICE convoys leaving the area. Because the Whipple building sits in an unincorporated territory, it’s policed by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. Despite the well-publicised clash between Trump and both Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, the sheriffs’ approach to the protests is a daily reminder of the cooperation between the Minnesota Democratic Party (formally known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party) officials and the Trump administration. For example, there’s a long access road that connects the Whipple building to the adjacent highway leading into Minneapolis. It is lined with hundreds of concrete carriers, generally used for major highway construction projects, with high fencing on top to stop protesters from stopping ICE or Border Patrol vehicles. The cost of this can’t be cheap and may run into the hundreds of thousands, if not possibly millions of dollars, eventually. During the short time I was there, 50 more protesters entered the road through an opening at the parking lot and marched as far as they could towards the Whipple building before the sheriff’s tactical squad slowly and gingerly pushed them back. The sheriff’s deputies with clubs in hand are all suited-up in tactical gear looking more like soldiers than cops. At first, I thought they were ICE: they all look the same these days. I posted a [reel](https://www.facebook.com/joe.allen.125760/videos/1561742231616213/) of this encounter on my Facebook page. It’s common for every picket, rally or demonstration to have support staff to provide legal representation and medical aid, as well as hot coffee, water and hand warmers. National Guard trucks, built for service in Afghanistan and Iraq, were [stationed](https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10240571549691153&set=pcb.10240571723695503) in the parking lot. The Minneapolis resistance is well practised at this. I noticed that a visible number of people at the Whipple protest wore highlighted vests branded “AFL-CIO” or “Union Peace Keeper”. Kieran told me that the protests at the federal building are one of the key places that the official trade union movement plays a role. He introduced me to a local Service Employees International Union 26 officer. I’m not surprised by this. Public-sector unions have historically been close to Walz, but this relationship has gotten [rockier](https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/05/30/friction-builds-between-walz-public-sector-unions?ref=redflag.org.au) lately. I suspect the unions expected to play a moderating role in the protests. I was only there for an hour and didn’t see anyone arrested. However, later in the morning, the Sheriff’s Department announced it had arrested an undisclosed number of people. The Whipple building is notorious for the [deplorable conditions](https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/federal-whipple-building-ice-lawmakers-visit/?ref=redflag.org.au) suffered by those kidnapped by ICE and the BP. ### **Picketing target** Kieran then took me to the first of two protests I attended at two different Target stores. Target, the retail giant, is headquartered in Minneapolis. The retail chain started out in Minneapolis and blossomed into a global giant. Soon after the George Floyd uprising, it was one of the most prominent corporations to implement diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. However, soon after Trump was sworn into office, he launched a major political and legal attack on DEI. Target capitulated and dropped almost all of its diversity programs, which led to boycotts and protests across the country. There is an ongoing campaign against Target, [according](https://twincitieslaborreport.substack.com/p/twin-cities-labor-report-23-dba) to Paul K-D, “to get Target to stop collaborating with ICE. It’s being led by Unidos, a non-profit out here that has long been in a collaborative relationship with SEIU”. Target also contributed [$1 million](https://www.yahoo.com/news/target-donated-1m-trump-inauguration-190201931.html?guccounter=1&guce%5Freferrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce%5Freferrer%5Fsig=AQAAAJKG0xUk6a2lRcoLU-LazpgAkT6KHcR6BYUjUwcku037js5vMFCC2o6-fremcWWohGJkaBXVzA7r4gtyMskLpIJNFviFWIXCyfK-DXn3YouCBSHGPOFcPai-mPtYw4YF2GL7hkoQrORB47HAgBXUUB-XM5uodrHwamhfnU3jATWC&ref=redflag.org.au) to Trump’s presidential inaugural fund to win his good graces. ICE [arrested and injured](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc%5Fd6O2C4pk&ref=redflag.org.au) Target workers on company property, notably in Richfield, a close suburb of Minneapolis. The first Target [protest](https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10240571490689678&set=pcb.10240571492049712) I attended was in the Dinkytown section of Minneapolis, a commercial district where a large number of university and college students live. There I met veteran socialist and union activist [Kip Hedges](https://inthesetimes.com/authors/kip-hedges?ref=redflag.org.au). The picket was about 60 people, a good mix of young and older activists, where Socialist Alternative (a US socialist group not aligned with Socialist Alternative in Australia) played an important and positive role. Many of the younger people there were Socialist Alternative activists and supporters. We protested outside for a while and then entered the store, chanting and protesting with signs and a bullhorn. The Target store had a hands-off policy—we pretty much did what we wanted and left the store after about fifteen minutes, and continued to picket outside. The far right has been marginal to irrelevant during the federal occupation of Minneapolis; after all, many of them are in ICE. When the fascist YouTuber [Jake Lang](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7AR7qONJXY&ref=redflag.org.au) tried to hold a rally a few weeks ago, he was easily run off. Kieran did notice a camera crew with two guys trying to look tough across the street from the Target picket, and he and friend made it clear to them to stay on the other side of the street and not mess with anyone. They did. I’m sure a hit piece will show up on YouTube in the future. The following day, Saturday 31 January, Paul K-D and I attended a [sing-in and sit-in](https://www.facebook.com/joe.allen.125760/videos/872273402448221) at the Target in Richfield. About 80 to 100 people attended the event. It was really fun. Once again, the store director, who in this case looked like a Special Forces veteran, again took a hands-off approach as people [marched](https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10240584938105855&set=pcb.10240584940985927) around the store. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/02/Target-protest-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/02/Target-protest-2.jpg) Protesting against Target in Minneapolis CREDIT: Joe Allen The biggest event by far I attended was the big march on Friday 30 January, when 20,000 people, maybe more, came out to march on what was declared to be a second day of no work, no shopping. Many activists I spoke to were worried about the turnout because it was organised with only a few days’ notice, largely through groups linked to the Party of Socialism and Liberation. Despite the fact that the march was half the size of the previous week, it was clear to me that it demonstrated the ongoing radicalisation of the population. And, again, despite the frigid temperature, people came, and thousands didn’t go to work or let out early to participate. The march was far more militant than anything I’ve been to in many years. I tried to capture the [size and militancy](https://www.facebook.com/joe.allen.125760/videos/1658334432212000) with my phone. ### **Life during wartime** In between events, I spent a lot of time talking to people and going out into various Minneapolis neighbourhoods. Paul K-D and I visited one of the neighbourhood defence watches in the [Powderhorn](https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10240584577456839&set=pcb.10240584652058704) neighbourhood, which was quite a festive barricade with twenty or so people performing the Macarena. I visited the site of Renee Good’s murder, where a growing [memorial](https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10240587722415461&set=pcb.10240587790497163) is located. Many people were there when I stopped by. I also visited [George Floyd Square](https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10240598596447305&set=pcb.10240598602167448), where the neighbourhood built a huge memorial. In each of the neighbourhoods I visited, there were posters on light posts that declared, [“ICE kidnapped our neighbor here”](https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10240588507555089&set=pcb.10240588512795220). Another example of how daily life has been politicised in Minneapolis. It is also a city under occupation. The Talking Heads’ old song “Life during wartime” kept popping into my head when Kieran and Paul shuttled me around the city. Driving down one of the main streets with a high concentration of Latino businesses, it was pointed out to me that some were completely shuttered, others were darkened as if to try not to attract too much attention from ICE, but everywhere you had to knock to be let in. One night, I joined Kieran and his family at a popular local diner. The place wasn’t very busy, but it took a long time to be seated. After we sat down, the restaurant manager came over and said, “Sorry for the delay, half of my staff is in hiding”. ### **Reviving the general strike** I’ll wrap up by saying it’s very important to understand what is happening in Minneapolis by listening to the people active there and what their political experience tells them about what happened and why, and at this point what happens next. Paul K-D’s “Twin Cities Labor Report” is a vital resource for everyone to follow. I think Paul K-D has the [best take](https://twincitieslaborreport.substack.com/p/twin-cities-labor-report-126) on the events of 23 January. On 23 January, the Twin Cities held a mass day of action that came pretty close to being a real general strike. Hundreds of businesses closed their doors, and many others worked with skeleton crews. A rally in downtown may have drawn about 70,000, with more staying home due to the weather or keeping watch in their neighbourhood. On the other hand, the economy did not fully shut down. My personal over/under for a successful event included a shutdown of Metro Transit and of substantial amounts of business in the suburbs on the high end, neither of those things happened. That’s important because while Minneapolis has really been the hotspot of ICE resistance, there are both huge immigrant populations and huge employment centres in the suburbs. A shutdown of the massive UNFI warehouse in Hopkins, for instance, would have shut down grocery deliveries to pretty much the whole state. Where to go from here? According to Paul K-D: > “I hope that this action gives union members nationally the courage to start talking about political strikes and mass action outside of just voting. In order to be truly effective, though, this needs to happen at least five times the scale. That will take, for a start, the thousands of people who made this day a real thing going to their union meetings and explaining why it was so important and necessary. And it will take the unorganised workers who participated in organising unions at their shops bringing this energy into the labour movement. Actions like these only work when the rank and file are activated enough to push both their employer and their union leadership in the right direction.” Organisation in the workplace is key. According to Kieran Knutson, his local union of telecom, satellite TV, home security and video game workers, 80 percent of the members were absent from work on 23 January. He also thinks that one of the next steps in the resistance in Minnesota is an assembly of all community defence groups and supporters to meet and decide what their next step is. We appear to be in a different place now. As the movement against ICE spreads across the country, we should remember that we are still at the beginning of a movement that could have a transformative impact on the working class and the left in this country and beyond. ### From the US to Australia, we won’t be cowed URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/from-the-us-to-australia-we-wont-be-cowed/ Last updated: 2026-02-08T09:15:30.000Z > “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” > —George Orwell, *1984* This quote has featured widely on posts about the public execution of nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis. Despite footage from several angles being quickly published online, United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem insisted that we should disbelieve our own eyes. The video evidence is clear: Pretti was holding nothing but a phone as he tried to assist a fellow protester who had been struck to the ground. But Noem demanded that we instead believe her lie: that Pretti had “committed an act of domestic terrorism” by “brandishing” a weapon at the pack of agents. This is par for the course for the Trump administration. The truth is irrelevant if a lie better serves its interests; “alternative facts” are the antidote to inconvenient realities. It’s a misconception that totalitarian states endure because the “sheeple” are too dumb, ignorant or naive to see through the lies. Such regimes rarely convince anyone—they survive by threatening and enacting violence against those who dare to dissent. The wonderful thing about the United States these past few weeks is that thousands of people have refused to accept the lies. Instead, they are fighting back. Protests, strikes and school walkouts have snowballed across the country—and amid the frigid northern winter, snowballs have been thrown at the ICE agents. It’s a reminder that despite the increasingly authoritarian nature of the US government, people have not been cowed. The administration’s lies against and attacks on migrants and those who defend them are shocking, but these crimes are not unique. Of course, there is Gaza. For more than two years, politicians and the media across the world have told us to ignore the footage we watch on our phones, to ignore the pleas of Palestinians who have been bombed, starved, shot at and tortured, and to ignore the genocide. But, as with Noem’s lies about Alex Pretti, the people at the top have utterly failed to convince us. Millions of people globally have seen through the lies and have protested in massive numbers. Hundreds of thousands marched across the Sydney Harbour bridge in defiance of the police and the Labor state government. Students camped at universities. Writers pulled out of festivals. Principled journalists resigned from the major media outlets. In some places, workers went on strike. All to fight for the Palestinians and to resist our own governments’ complicity in genocide. Having lost the argument, they are resorting to force. In the UK, more than 2,700 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act for peacefully protesting against the banning of Palestine Action, an anti-war activist group. Kids are being kicked off social media, presumably partially because they can access the truth broadcast from Palestine in real time. A recent article in the *Australian* newspaper documented that the University of Sydney basically begged government officials for a legal justification to shut down 2024’s Gaza solidarity encampment. And now the Labor Party, at a state and federal level, is imposing serious restrictions on the rights to free speech and protest, using the Bondi massacre as cover for a long-desired crackdown on the Palestine solidarity movement. It is unclear exactly how the new hate speech laws will be enforced. But left-wing and social justice organisations could be targeted if ASIO unilaterally declares that they meet the criteria of inciting hatred or causing a reasonable person to be intimidated. Considering that politicians, the media, university vice-chancellors and workplace managers insist that peaceful protests, Palestinian flags, keffiyehs and even watermelon badges count as acts of violence and intimidation, this is extremely concerning. NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns has floated severely restricting protests in the CBD. This is an offensive against not only the Palestine solidarity movement, but future movements against war and injustice. It’s in line with the increasingly illiberal, authoritarian direction that capitalism is taking in the US, the UK and Europe. It must be resisted by those who want to end the genocide and protect basic civil liberties. We won’t be silenced. We won’t accept their lies. And we won’t stop fighting for a world free from racism, bigotry and war. ### SA Socialists gear up for March state election URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/sa-socialists-gear-up-for-march-state-election/ Last updated: 2026-02-02T09:06:14.000Z [SA Socialists](https://www.sasocialists.org.au/?ref=redflag.org.au) are gearing up for the 21 March South Australian election, contesting the lower house seats of Croydon and Enfield and offering a socialist challenge in a political landscape dominated by a right-wing Labor government and a discredited Liberal opposition. South Australia desperately needs a socialist fightback. Adelaide is ranked in the top ten most unaffordable housing markets in the world, with rents and house prices surpassing Melbourne’s for the first time on record. Public transport costs are extortionate. Hospitals remain in crisis, with ambulance ramping still at shocking levels nearly four years into the Malinauskas Labor government—despite Labor having been elected on a promise to fix it. At the same time, South Australia is facing the consequences of a worsening climate crisis, including devastating algal blooms along the coast. Rather than confront corporations or reverse privatisation, Labor has doubled down on a pro-business status quo, introducing draconian anti-protest laws and targeting the Palestine solidarity movement. Labor’s dominance in the polls is not the result of popular enthusiasm. It reflects widespread disgust with the Liberals and the absence of a credible left-wing alternative. This is the political space SA Socialists are organising to fill. Since launching in May 2025, the party has grown rapidly, reaching more than 400 members. Following the announcement that Victorian Socialists would expand nationally, the organisation quickly surpassed the 200-member threshold required for party registration. The campaign is already gaining momentum on the ground. Members have doorknocked more than 1,000 homes across Croydon and Enfield, alongside organising forums and building visible socialist contingents at every major protest in the state. SA Socialists are running [Ahmed Azhar](https://www.sasocialists.org.au/candidates/ahmed-azhar?ref=redflag.org.au) in Croydon and [Leila Clendon](https://www.sasocialists.org.au/candidates/leila-clendon?ref=redflag.org.au) in Enfield. Ahmed, a local renter and prominent pro-Palestine activist, is mounting a grassroots challenge against Premier Peter Malinauskas in his own seat. In late 2025, Ahmed was arrested following a peaceful protest in Rundle Mall, spending seventeen hours in custody under anti-protest laws Malinauskus introduced. “While the premier indulges in racist culture wars and destroys the Adelaide Writers’ Week”, Ahmed told *Red Flag*, “I’ve been knocking on doors across the community. People are fed up with Labor. The Malinauskas government was elected on the promise of fixing ramping and bringing down the cost of living, but while banks and big corporations rake in profits, life has only gotten harder for everyday people. “I’m running because I know South Australia can be a place where everyone has what they need to live a decent life. There is no reason that, while millions of dollars are poured into weapons companies, or fossil fuel giants like Santos dodge their taxes, a single person shouldn’t have a home.” Leila Clendon, the SA Socialists candidate for Enfield, is a public-school teacher who has been active in union and community campaigns. She is also running a grassroots campaign grounded in organising and collective struggle. “People in the northern suburbs are struggling with rising rents, insecure work and a health system that’s failing them”, Leila told *Red Flag*. “For too long, Labor has taken the people of Enfield for granted, while letting our services deteriorate. We need a party that sides clearly with workers, renters and young people—not developers, bosses and big corporations.” With the state election approaching, SA Socialists are working to build a fighting political force that puts people before profit. ### Oxfam report shows the staggering inequality at the heart of capitalism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/oxfam-report-shows-the-staggering-inequality-at-the-heart-of-capitalism/ Last updated: 2026-02-01T01:34:18.000Z The 2020s have been “a good decade for billionaires”, according to [Oxfam’s annual report on global wealth inequality](https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2026-01/EN%20-%20Resisting%20the%20Rule%20of%20the%20Rich%5F0.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au). It’s somewhat of an understatement. In the first half of the decade, the number of billionaires [passed 3,000 for the first time](https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/?ref=redflag.org.au). According to *Forbes* magazine, 3,028 “entrepreneurs, investors and heirs” (otherwise known as parasites) own a record US$16.1 trillion. In the past year alone, they increased their wealth by 16 percent. As the Oxfam report makes clear, the billionaires aren’t content simply ruling over the economy—they almost completely control our political systems as well. Billionaires are estimated to be 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens and spend substantial sums financing major parties, increasingly including far-right parties. “Oligarchy” is a fitting term not only for Russian billionaires but also for the wealthy elite worldwide. As US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once said: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both”. In other words, capitalism and democracy don’t mix. The 12 richest billionaires now have the same wealth as the bottom half of humanity—4 billion people. That billionaires with more money than they could ever spend can cohabit the Earth with billions who struggle to afford food and shelter is the ultimate indictment of modern capitalism. These two facts are rarely mentioned in the same sentence, but they are actually two sides of capitalism’s inequality problem: wealth at the top has always come at the expense of those at the bottom. For many years, defenders of the system could point to slowly rising living standards as evidence that so-called trickle-down economics was working. This trend has reversed over the past decade. The number of people experiencing food insecurity, for example, has risen by 42 percent, from 1.6 billion in 2015 to 2.4 billion in 2024\. And 3.83 billion people were living below the poverty line in 2022. Inequality is increasing in Australia as well. We have our very own class of billionaires who are just as ruthless as their better-known American counterparts, if a little less wealthy. According to Oxfam, Australian billionaires increased their wealth by an [average of $600,000 per day](https://media.oxfam.org.au/2026/01/average-australian-billionaire-wealth-grew-by-over-half-a-million-dollars-a-day-in-the-last-year-oxfam/?ref=redflag.org.au) in 2025; the richest 48 control as much wealth as the poorest 11 million Australians. [National Geographic](https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/nature-wildlife/2017/05/australias-giant-parasitic-christmas-tree/?ref=redflag.org.au) claims that the largest parasite in the world is Western Australia’s giant Christmas tree, “whose greedy roots stab victims up to 110m away”. It appears they failed to consider another specimen from our western state: Gina Rinehart, whose net worth tops $38 billion. Rinehart is a regular at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, and has used her considerable wealth to support far-right groups Advance Australia and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, who promote the idea that migrants, rather than Gina Rinehart and her rich list buddies, are to blame for society’s problems. Number two on Australia’s rich list is Harry Trugiboff, the country’s largest landlord and property developer. Another recent [Oxfam report ](https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/why-australian-billionaires-are-falling-behind-their-uber-rich-peers-20260119-p5nv33.html?ref=redflag.org.au)found that the growth in his $29 billion hoard in the last year alone would be enough to fund the construction of 10,600 homes. The rich in Australia, along with their paid mouthpieces, like to claim we live in the “lucky country”. But [3.7 million Australians](https://media.oxfam.org.au/2026/01/average-australian-billionaire-wealth-grew-by-over-half-a-million-dollars-a-day-in-the-last-year-oxfam/?ref=redflag.org.au), or one in seven people, now live in poverty—the highest rate in 25 years, and [worse than the UK, France, Germany, Canada or New Zealand](https://www.monash.edu/msdi/focus-areas/sustainable-development-goals/transforming-australia/explore-the-data/goal-1-no-poverty?ref=redflag.org.au). Food insecurity was higher in Australia in 2022 [than in the US and Europe](https://www.monash.edu/msdi/focus-areas/sustainable-development-goals/transforming-australia/explore-the-data/goal-2-zero-hunger?ref=redflag.org.au). Homelessness has increased massively as rents surge, and our poverty-level welfare rates are well below those of most other wealthy countries. All of this has been overseen recently by the Labor Party, which claims to be creating a fairer Australia. What a load of rubbish. Meanwhile, [Melbourne’s *Age*](https://www.smh.com.au/property/living/meet-the-professionals-who-manage-luxury-houses-for-a-living-20251215-p5nnx8.html?ref=redflag.org.au) reports a boom in the hiring of drivers, private chefs, gardeners, art curators, assistants and butlers by “high-net-worth Australians” to service their Toorak and Vaucluse mansions. The billionaires in Australia, helped by their servants in the Labor, Liberal and far-right parties, have simply had it too good for too long. How did it come to this? Oxfam and most other critics of wealth inequality, including the Greens, attribute the problem to specific government policies. In response, they propose a range of reforms such as wealth taxes and changes to the capital gains tax and negative gearing. These would be welcome—Oxfam found that a 5 percent wealth tax on Australia’s billionaires last year would have raised $17.4 billion, “enough to deliver cheap childcare for all families, extend energy bill relief for another two years, and increase the humanitarian budget almost seven times over”. But such reforms don’t get to the heart of the problem, because they treat inequality as an aberration that can be managed. Under capitalism, inequality is baked in. A minority of capitalists own all the companies, mines, factories and shops, and they get all the profits from them, while the rest of us own nothing and have to work for the capitalists for a wage. Billionaire wealth comes, ultimately, not from tax avoidance, but from exploitation—robbing the mass of the population of the value they produce. If you want to know what that looks like, you only need to know the figure “93 percent”. That’s the proportion of wealth produced in Australia between 2008 and 2019 that went directly into the pockets of the top tenth of wealthiest households, [according to the Australia Institute](https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/inequality-on-steroids-as-bottom-90-get-just-7-of-economic-growth-since-2009/?ref=redflag.org.au), a think tank. Think of all the shelves stacked, the iron ore dug up, the code written, the food produced—all the value produced by millions of workers, only for the parasites at the top to take 93 percent of it. It’s no wonder inequality is increasing. When we have a system that is so radically unequal and undemocratic, the only real solution is a radical one. Nothing short of ending capitalism will ever end the blight of inequality and poverty. ### US workers shut down everything to stop ICE URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/us-workers-shut-down-everything-to-stop-ice/ Last updated: 2026-02-08T09:15:15.000Z On 23 January, English teacher John Reuss stood in -30C temperatures on the streets of Minneapolis and explained why he was on strike: > “In the middle of my lesson ... \[a\] student messaged me and said, ‘ICE is outside of my house right now, what do I do?’ ... Thank god his neighbours were out there, outside of his house, and they chased ICE out of their neighbourhood. Those agents had been circling around his house all morning. This is our last option, we need to shut it all down, and so I’m calling on every educator in this state, in this country, to shut it down, with Minneapolis and St Paul ... because if we don’t shut it down, your city is next.” Reuss is one of many Minnesotans who have drawn a line in the sand, and who are no longer willing to accept the Trump administration’s campaign of terror against migrants, workers and anyone who dares to challenge the government’s terror campaign. Citywide strikes are not an everyday occurrence in the United States; to find a precedent for the Minneapolis strike, you have to go back almost a century, to the 1940s. But it happened on 23 January. School teachers and airport workers walked out. Government offices and call centres were effectively shut down. Businesses and public institutions closed across the city as their employees rallied in the streets. Trump’s shock-and-awe ICE tactics were intended to terrorise people into submission and make them feel that resistance is impossible. But instead, they provoked a widespread radicalisation and generalised determination to fight back. When Alex Pretti was murdered a day later—executed in broad daylight by ICE agents after he attempted to defend a fellow protester—this determination only hardened. Pretti’s death followed that of Renèe Good, a Minnesota woman who was shot dead in her car by ICE agents, and another six who have been killed during ICE’s rampage through US cities. Pretti’s final act was one of defiance. Minnesotans are memorialising him by spreading the rebellion. On 28 January, standing outside Minneapolis City Hall, the president of the Somali Student Association, Dahir Munye, announced plans for another strike on 30 January. This time, organisers called for nationwide participation. “They wanted to intimidate us and to spread fear in our hearts, but that isn’t going to work”, Munye told the [*New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/us/weekend-ice-protests-strike-shutdown.html?ref=redflag.org.au). “That’s exactly why we are going back ... The only way to truly fight back is to extend and expand the shutdown movement from last Friday.” The movement has clearly taken on a national dimension. Thousands of high schoolers walked out from Los Angeles to Austin to New York. One high schooler who organised a walkout from her school in New Hampshire told [*Vermont Public*](https://www.vermontpublic.org/2026-01-29/concord-high-school-walkout-ice-protest-immigration-nh-students-kristi-noem-dhs?ref=redflag.org.au): > “I thought my voice was not going to matter at all. I thought maybe ten people would make it. Your voice does matter. You do have an effect. All it takes is that tiny little spark and the whole fire will be lit.” Entire school districts in Colorado shut down due to the number of teachers refusing to work. In Portland, everything from restaurants to pet stores was closed. This incredible wave of solidarity with migrants has dealt Trump his biggest defeat since the 2024 election. Greg Bovino, the jackbooted commander of the Minnesota operation, has been demoted and faces imminent retirement. His core coterie of hard-right immigration officers has been moved out of the state. Reeling from the backlash, even some Republicans are calling for the resignation of Kristi Noem, secretary of Homeland Security. A planned ICE offensive in Maine has been completely abandoned. The mass revolt has also exposed the fallacy of liberal identity politics: supposedly “privileged” US-born workers have embodied the labour movement’s timeless refrain: an injury to one is an injury to all. They have thrown themselves onto the front line and mobilised in outstanding numbers on behalf of, and alongside, the most marginalised. While the fight against ICE and Trump’s broader authoritarian agenda is going to be a long one, the events in Minneapolis are a huge step forward for popular resistance. This isn’t just because of the gritty determination of the protests. It’s because, in looking for a way to resist, they’ve rediscovered the greatest weapon our side has: the mass strike. Working-class people have flexed a power that has been tragically underutilised in recent decades—their ability to withdraw their labour and bring society grinding to a halt. The week before the 23 January shutdown, postal workers had already begun successful protests to kick ICE out of their facilities. The Letter Carriers’ Association in Pennock, Minneapolis, [said ](https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/postal-workers-rally-minneapolis-against-ice-raids/89-51a1c05a-764a-4341-adfe-ad35722bc094?ref=redflag.org.au)agents had been using post office carparks as staging posts for immigration raids throughout December. State employers have collaborated with ICE and allowed them to operate on post office property, on school grounds and at transit points. An estimated 2,000 people have been deported via the Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport, with the assent of bosses and administrators. Employers might advise cooperation with ICE agents, but none of this can continue when workers do not comply. Growing numbers of working-class people have simply started to disobey orders—refusing service to ICE agents in hotels, chasing them out of supermarkets, shutting them out of schools. Hamsa Hussein, a Somali Uber driver and unionist, told [Labor Notes](https://labornotes.org/2026/01/twin-cities-massive-strike-against-ice?ref=redflag.org.au) about being accosted in his taxi by ICE agents while he waits to pick up passengers from the airport: > “They ask you, ‘Are you a citizen?’ If you say, ‘Yes, I am a citizen,’ they ask you, ‘Where were you born?’ And it is an illegal question. I've been here for almost 17 years. So I am not afraid to come out for my rights.” Hussein said that in 2022, his Service Employees International Union organising committee numbered a few hundred. Today there are 3,000 members. “When they see what the union is doing, they get energised and they get confidence.” As the national shutdown unfolds, a growing number of workers are looking to their own power to take on Trump. Minneapolis has shown, in real time and at spectacular scale, not only who has the power to defeat Trump, but who is really fit to run this world as well. It is not the capitalists who bow down to Trump, nor the Democratic politicians who are more concerned about mass action than ICE overreach, nor the bureaucrats labouring under the illusion that the system can be made good. It is the working class, the millions of men and women who have chosen, in the face of fascistic terror, to take matters into their own hands and stand against the armed might of the state. Instinctively, they have drawn on the power they have but so often are not conscious of: the power to bring the economy to a halt. In doing so, they have shown that everything that happens, and everything we need, is designed, produced and transported by workers. Politicians, ICE thugs, bosses: working people need none of them. This is the heart and soul of socialism: workers standing together to assert their common humanity against the barbarism of capitalism. So how did this happen? First, resistance to ICE has been galvanised by a bold minority willing to take the risks involved in standing up to the state. As ICE terror has spread from city to city, rapid response networks monitoring and obstructing ICE operations have followed them, from Los Angeles to New York to Chicago. In Minneapolis, this resistance has been particularly intense. The scale of the Trump offensive demands it: the city has been inundated with 3,000 ICE agents, who have effectively taken over. Residents have likened it to a foreign occupation. Migrant workers have been forced to stay home and forgo their wages to avoid capture. Their families survive on grocery deliveries [coordinated](https://sahanjournal.com/immigration/volunteers-deliver-food-as-ice-surges-minnesota/?ref=redflag.org.au) by local teachers’ unions. Importantly, Minneapolis has been the site of deep and determined organising well before now. It was ground zero for the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement—Alex Pretti and Renèe Good were both murdered less than a mile from the site where George Floyd was killed by a racist cop in 2020\. These past struggles have left a legacy. Activist networks established during the Black Lives Matter protests have endured. But Trump’s second term of brutality has drawn in thousands more organisers. Since ICE’s rampage began, at least 65,000 people have undertaken anti-ICE training. The sheer force of this effort has united huge swathes of the city against the ICE occupation. This is why the call to escalate the struggle with a call for “no work, no school, no shopping”, initially spearheaded by church and community groups, turned into a reality on 23 January. The upsurge put pressure on union leaders, who have so far been acquiescent in the face of Trump’s attacks, to swing in and support the mobilisation. On 23 January, members and supporters of the SEIU, the American Federation of Teachers and the Communications Workers of America filled almost all of the 20,000 seats of the home stadium of the Minnesota Timberwolves. The national AFL-CIO union federation in Minnesota was forced to put out a statement endorsing the demonstrations. This process echoes developments in Italy last year when determined workplace activism compelled leaders of the main union federation to support a mass strike in solidarity with Palestine. The political general strike is back on the agenda. In a world of far-right authoritarianism, imperial aggression and assaults on living standards, workers are beginning to mount a challenge. All the institutions that claim to uphold democracy or to act as a bulwark against authoritarianism have buckled. The only effective bulwark is the organised working class. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that throughout history, class struggle has been “carried on in an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight”. For too long, the power of workers has been hidden and the tension at the heart of society obscured. But the barbarism of capitalism is starting to bring it back into the light. Minneapolis is drawing the battle lines. It’s up to the rest of us to follow. ### Australian right radicalises as One Nation rises in polls URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/australian-right-radicalises-as-one-nation-rises-in-polls/ Last updated: 2026-02-08T09:15:05.000Z The bust-up in the Coalition over the hate speech laws—with the Liberals joining Labor to vote for the bill in the face of National Party opposition—and feverish talk of a leadership spill in the Liberal Party are just the latest indications of turmoil on the Australian right. The key beneficiary of this crisis, as well as an important catalyst for it, is Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Its ascension in polling to be on a par with the Liberals in primary votes is a watershed moment in Australian politics, and one that the left needs to understand in order to build successful opposition in response. The right inside and outside the Liberal Party currently have the wind in their sails. Inside the party, the right is on the offensive, and now dominates the parliamentary caucus. In the likely event current leader Sussan Ley is replaced, it will most likely be by someone from the far-right faction, possibly Angus Taylor or Andrew Hastie. The membership of the party too is dominated by the hard right whose ideas are shaped by Sky after Dark, the Murdoch media and a cabal of far-right lobby groups. One Nation’s surge in recent months, and the threat it now poses to the Liberals in regional and rural areas, is a further factor pushing the party to the right. This is doubly so for the National Party, which is threatened with a wipe-out if One Nation polling translates into votes in coming state and federal elections. It’s unlikely Barnaby Joyce will be the last of their defections. In order to staunch the flow of support, the Nationals are shifting right. This was evident late last year when the Liberals dumped their net zero carbon emissions target under pressure from the Nationals. Although the Coalition arrangement has broken down for now, this chain reaction of radicalisation, from One Nation to the Nationals to the Liberals, is likely to continue. It’s currently evident in the Nationals demand that the Liberals dump Ley in favour of an even more right-wing leader as the price for any discussions for reunification. The crisis in the Liberal party, although pushed to front page news by the surge in support for One Nation and the end of the Coalition, predates both of these. Its roots lie in John Howard’s 2007 defeat. Howard, prime minister from 1996 to 2007 and the party’s second longest-serving leader, created a right-wing Liberal Party, driving out many of the party’s so-called “moderates”. He brought together a right-wing electoral constituency that allowed him to win four straight elections thanks in part to rising living standards underpinned by the mining boom. Howard was able to use his authority to discipline the party and hold One Nation at bay. Following the 1998 breakthrough by One Nation in Queensland, when the party scored 23 percent of the vote and won 11 seats, threatening the Nationals in their heartlands, Howard convinced the Liberals and Nationals to put One Nation last on their how-to-vote cards. This, along with One Nation’s internal shambles, sent it into reverse for several years. The Liberals and Nationals were able to re-cohere their right-wing base in the rural and regional areas. The Howard government was eventually destroyed by overreach, as it attacked working-class living standards through its 2005 WorkChoices industrial laws. The resulting backlash cost the prime minister not just government but his own seat at the 2007 election. Since 2007, the Liberals have been thrashing around, trying to recreate their glory days. The Coalition was returned to office in 2013 and the conservatives won the following two elections. But the Liberals’ internal leadership churn—Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull again, followed by Scott Morrison all taking the helm—told the real story. Whether “moderate” or hard right, they can’t find a leader with mass appeal, something only reinforced by then opposition leader Peter Dutton’s spectacular failure at the 2025 federal election. The failure of party leaders to command authority has made it harder for the party to hold together its electoral base. In addition to the Liberals bleeding support in the cities, fragmentation on the right is rife. This is evident in the splintering of the right-wing vote in regional and rural areas in recent years, with right-wing micro-parties, some little more than vanity projects, taking advantage of disillusion with the mainstream parties and notching up quite substantial votes at the mainstream conservatives’ expense. In Launceston, Devonport, Goulburn, Dubbo, Broken Hill, Whyalla and Alice Springs, the Liberals suffered big swings against them in the last federal election, and in Ley’s own electorate of Farrar in western NSW, there was a savage swing against her in the city of Albury, where she failed to win a single booth. This is significant, given the Liberals are now, with a few exceptions, restricted to seats in regional and rural areas. They cannot win a federal election by relying solely on these seats, given two-thirds of electorates are in the cities. In many cases, rural and regional electorates are losing population, and thus seats, as regular seat redistribution occurs. One Nation, as the standard bearer of the hard right with the biggest brand recognition, has now seized the moment to make hay from this chaos. Unlike the Liberals and Nationals, One Nation has not held office and therefore disappointed their supporters, and since they have not been the main opposition party have not been under pressure to respond to every policy debate that might potentially alienate sections of their base. Because One Nation can pick and choose where they engage, they are united in their ideological message: anti-immigration, anti-“woke”, anti-socialist and anti-welfare (except for small business, farmers and mining companies). Given the character of the right-wing radicalisation outside the big cities, which is whipped up by right-wing social media companies directing a curated diet of right-wing conspiracy theories into the feeds of so many, the old loyalties to the establishment right-wing parties, usually led by ruling-class politicians, have weakened substantially. This has opened the door for supposedly “anti-system” right-wing parties. They feed on the anxieties and hatreds caused by a sense of abandonment, the closure of regional facilities as populations shrink, an increasingly multicultural immigration intake shaking their conception of what it means to be Australian, challenges to gender and family roles, the covid pandemic and associated emergency measures to deal with the virus and, for some in the outer suburbs in particular, economic insecurity associated with a cost of living crisis and housing unaffordability. The Liberals, Nationals and One Nation are all fishing in this pool of voters and One Nation is for now landing the biggest catch. It is not just on the right that the Liberals are losing their base. The most devastating blow to the party has been the loss of virtually every blue-ribbon wealthy seat in the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne to the teals. These are not just any old seats. For many years Liberal branches in these electorates provided the party with their leaders, their front bench, their up-and-comers, their funding and their access to business executives and other channels of influence. These were the branches that mattered. Almost all of them were lost in the 2022 election, and the follow-up defeat last year suggests that these seats aren’t coming back any time soon. For now, at least, the socially liberal, economically neoliberal teals have stolen this element of the Liberal base. Combined losses in the cities to the teals and Labor mean that the Liberals now hold just 34 seats out of 151 in the lower house, half the number they had before the 2022 election. The party is left with no seats in Tasmania after last year’s election. None in ACT. None in NT. In NSW they lost four seats, in Queensland, five and two in Tasmania. Millions spent by Advance to promote the Liberals’ cause did nothing to help them. In the Senate, the Liberals (including the LNP in Queensland) hold 25 spots and the Nationals another two out of 75, as against 39 for Labor and the Greens, the biggest deficit faced by the mainstream conservatives since the 1940s. The Liberal Party is faring no better in state government, holding only Queensland and Tasmania. The result—leadership instability—is the same there: eight leadership changes at state or territory level since August 2024. The Liberals are losing ground across important demographics. They have little support among young people. But nor are they winning among millennials, those in their 30s and early 40s who might once have transitioned from Labor to the Coalition as they aged. The housing affordability crisis is giving them no reason to identify with the party advocating multibillion dollar tax breaks for property investors. Last year, the conservative parties won only two seats where more than one-third of the electorate are renters. The Coalition is becoming increasingly dependent on older voters, born during the postwar boom decades but who are now literally dying out. Nor is the Coalition advancing in seats with migrant groups the Liberals hope to win sympathy with. In a range of seats, the Liberals have selected non-Anglo migrant candidates and assiduously worked their respective business associations, but this has not translated into votes. Indeed, at the 2025 election, the Liberals went sharply backwards in electorates with significant Chinese populations, as well as those with large Muslim and Arab populations. Dutton concluded from the No victory in the 2023 Indigenous Voice referendum that No-voting outer suburban seats traditionally held by Labor were ripe for the picking on the basis of an anti-woke, economically aspirational platform. The hope was that gains here might offset the loss of the party’s traditional inner-city base. Dutton failed; the Liberals won none of these seats at last year’s election. Then there is the Liberals’ “women problem”, a euphemism for the party’s sexism, which consistently repels female voters. This, combined with the fact Labor has made women a significant focus and women are on average more progressive than men, means the Liberals are starting from behind with nothing to offer half the electorate. The mainstream conservatives are in crisis, then, because they are losing two key constituencies, in the cities and in regional and rural areas. The more the Liberals swing further to the right in an attempt to hold on to the latter, the more they are likely to alienate the former. But judging from the experience of the Turnbull leadership, and, today, Ley, positioning as “moderates” won’t win the teal supporters back either. One Nation may not be able to sustain its current surge. It lacks the organisational structures of its major rivals and has repeatedly blown up in the past. It has not, so far, received much in corporate backing outside open ideologues like Gina Rinehart. It appeals primarily to older people living in regional and rural areas who are insufficiently numerous or socially or economically powerful to sustain a party that can win and hold government. It is identified almost exclusively with Hanson herself, who at some stage will retire or die. It lacks a traditional hard right or fascist base such as exists in France or Italy or which has propelled right-wing US Republicans since the days of Barry Goldwater in the 1960s. Nonetheless, even if One Nation does fail, this does not spell an end to the radicalisation of the right. It is here to stay. Whatever happens to One Nation, the Liberals and Nationals are unlikely to shift back to the centre again, a space now firmly occupied by the ALP. Right-wing strategists only need to look at Europe, the US, India and Latin America to see that the far right is on the march and that liberal centrism has had its day. Even without winning power, the right can still advance by hardening a critical mass of the population for the conflicts that are to come, whether wars, economic crises or climate disasters. These are the circumstances the hard right can break through using poisonous “divide and rule” rhetoric to destroy social solidarity and pave the way for a nastier and more vicious right to grab power. Labor and the Greens will be no bastion against this. Whether in opposition or in office, Labor pursues an uninspiring program that is incapable of responding to the widespread cost-of-living crisis. Its nationalism, its racist immigration policies, its anti-protest laws and its military expansionism and slavish loyalty to the US only reinforce and legitimise right-wing positions. The Greens have been more forthright in fighting the right. But their middle-class liberalism means they cannot meet the need for a working-class opposition to the right, one which points not to parliamentary negotiations over the wording of clauses but collective mobilisation by workers—strikes, demonstrations, picket lines—that give courage to our side and demoralise the right. The bifurcation in the Greens voting base, in some ways similar to that plaguing the Liberals, between young white-collar workers being squeezed by rising rents who might once have voted Labor, and middle-aged home-owning professionals with whom the Greens compete with the teals for votes, also limits the Greens’ ability to give a clear lead. To push back the right, we need to fight them, not appease them or apologise for their supporters, and this fight needs to have at its centre working-class politics and action. The current trade union leaders, loyal as they are to the Labor Party, will likewise not lead this fight. They have quashed strikes and collective struggle for years, and refuse to oppose seriously Labor policy, even when it means remaining silent about a genocide. They have sat on their hands as the cost-of-living crisis rolls on into its fifth year, and their refusal to organise strikes has allowed the bosses to get away with murder. This leaves the considerable number of people who want higher wages and are willing to do something to get them, who are disgusted by genocide backed by Western powers, and who want to see money going to health and education rather than nuclear submarines, without any mainstream leadership. This is the constituency the Socialist Party is attempting to connect with and give hope to. It is both a strength and a weakness that this left pole is currently largely unorganised and without credible leadership: it is less influenced by the apologists for the system that dominate official politics, but also it is a huge endeavour to begin to organise this layer into a political force that can make an impact on the political landscape. This is why involving more people in socialist organising is such an urgent priority: we need an anti-capitalist force that argues for working-class unity against racism, for improving living standards through unity in action against the bosses and their servants in Canberra, and that shows the real power workers have, which means we do not have to rely on political “leaders” in parliament or the unions to change things for us—we have that power ourselves. This, then, tells us the priorities for our side. There is no point bemoaning the failure of the centre to hold back the far right. The sustained anti-war movement that has mobilised on our streets for well over two years and the widespread disgust at the Albanese government rolling out the welcome mat to Israeli President Isaac Herzog tell us that millions are pissed off with what’s currently on offer. The continued turn-up at Invasion Day rallies despite the loss of the Albanese government’s insipid Voice to Parliament referendum shows that people will resist racism even if the government won’t. Across the country, the Socialist Party is preparing to mobilise for local, state and federal elections in the coming years to put up a real challenge to the ALP and Greens. If you want to be part of resisting the rise of the right and fighting for a working-class alternative, there has never been a better time to get involved. ### Hypocrisy, racism and silence: the attempted bombing of Perth’s Invasion Day rally URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/hypocrisy-racism-and-silence-the-attempted-bombing-of-perths-invasion-day-rally/ Last updated: 2026-02-06T04:43:28.000Z The facts: a man threw a bomb into a Perth/Boorloo Invasion Day rally. The protest was against the historic and ongoing racist treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. Luckily, the bomb did not explode. But the police said that if it had, it would have caused a “mass casualty event”. That hundreds of First Nations people and their supporters narrowly escaped slaughter ought to have triggered national outrage. Instead, the incident has been minimised and buried. This attempted violence toward First Nations people and those who stand in solidarity should not be viewed as an isolated incident. It is reflective of the normalisation of violent racism and the suppression of those who stand in solidarity with oppressed people. Globally, the war in Gaza has normalised the slaughter of Palestinians. In the USA, Trump’s Gestapo thugs in ICE have normalised the kidnapping and brutalisation of migrants and the murder of protesters. Here, mass marches of racists were encouraged and built by the Murdoch press and the political right, resulting in a physical attack by neo-Nazis on an Aboriginal protest camp in Melbourne. In Perth, the legitimacy of this year’s Invasion Day mobilisation was deliberately undermined when the City of Perth cancelled a regular Survival Day concert organised by Noongar groups, replacing it with a Gina Rinehart–Hancock Prospecting-sponsored Australia Day event. That decision sent a clear political message: Aboriginal resistance is disposable, while corporate nationalism is welcome. This is the atmosphere in which someone felt empowered to throw a bomb at a rally for Indigenous justice. The attempted attack was designed to terrorise. But it also mirrors the everyday, systemic violence meted out to Australia’s First Nations populations. Noongar people in south-west Western Australia are subjected to extreme and systemic racist violence on a daily basis. They face significant social and economic oppression, characterised by severe economic disadvantage and deep-seated health inequalities. WA also has some of the highest incarceration rates in the country, with the adult Aboriginal imprisonment rate reported at 3,663 per 100,000\. Inside the prisons, Aboriginal people are tortured, often kept in solitary confinement, denied medical care and subjected to racist harassment by guards. Nowhere is this clearer than in Unit 18, a detention facility for young people, located within the maximum-security Casuarina Prison. Perth’s coroner, Philip Urquhart, condemned the conditions inside the prison as “inhuman”. In the wake of the suicide of 16-year-old boy Cleveland Dodd, his mother said: > “I believe that Cleveland’s death was the product of institutional abuse and neglect, and it breaks my heart to know that Cleveland spent 23 hours a day, or more, for days on end, locked down in a filthy cell with no end in sight. I can understand why my son lost hope and the will to live.” A society that jails kids and keeps them in tiny, airless, sunless kennels is sick. It is a depraved and racist society, and it is no wonder that outside of those prisons, individuals feel justified in bringing that violence to the streets of our cities. This is the backdrop to the systematic and hypocritical downplaying of the incident by the mainstream media and politicians. The initial media coverage buried the story as merely one element of Australia Day celebrations and Invasion Day rallies. Right-wing political figures such as Queensland Premier David Crisafulli preferred instead to focus on the burning of an Australian flag by protesters in Brisbane, describing it as “disgraceful as you get”. It is no wonder that Crisafulli thinks the burning of a piece of cloth is worse than the attempted murder of Aboriginal people and their supporters when his government wants to be able to jail kids as young as 10, which would overwhelmingly affect Indigenous kids. Many of the political figures who, in the wake of Bondi, denounced the scourge of racism and antisemitism offered not even a whimper of condemnation of this racist attack. Pauline Hanson, despite her newly minted role as crusader against antisemitism, also refused to condemn the open antisemite and Nazi who spoke at the Sydney March for Australia and concluded his speech by chanting “Heil White Australia”. This silence is not accidental. It reflects whose lives are considered worthy of protection. In the wake of the attempted bombing, some voices—including from within progressive circles—have called for increased policing and tighter “anti-terror” legislation. This is a dangerous mistake. The police are not a neutral force standing between racism and its victims. They are a central institution through which racist violence is administered. Aboriginal people are already among the most policed, surveilled and incarcerated populations on the planet. Expanding police powers will not protect them; it will be used against them. So-called anti-terror laws have never been applied evenly. They are overwhelmingly deployed against Muslims and migrants, while white supremacist violence is downplayed as individual pathology or “lone wolf” behaviour. Strengthening these laws will give the state more tools to repress protests, criminalise dissent and surveil those fighting racism — not those perpetrating it. The answer to racist terror is not more cops, more cages or more authoritarian laws. It is collective resistance: mass movements that confront racism in the streets, expose its institutional foundations and challenge the political forces that nurture it. ### The 2026 US military strategy URL: https://redflag.org.au/the-2026-us-military-strategy/ Last updated: 2026-01-31T04:21:18.000Z The unclassified version of the [US National Defense Strategy](https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/23/2003864773/-1/-1/0/2026-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY.PDF?ref=redflag.org.au) quietly dropped a week ago. The world awaits the Pentagon’s Global Posture Review, which will outline where and to what extent the US military will maintain its forward-positioned assets and troops in the coming years. Like fashion correspondents obsessing over the soft power conveyed by a sculpted blazer at a high-society event, political analysts often parse every sentence of these types of official documents, trying to uncover subtle messaging and potential strains in relationships. But sometimes a tiara is just a tiara: worn to remind everyone else where they stand in the social hierarchy. So is this NDS, at least to a degree, another notice that the US is an overbearing beast and intends to remain so. In that sense, there aren’t many surprises here and probably won’t be in the GPR, either. According to the most recent figures from the Pentagon’s [staffing data](https://dwp.dmdc.osd.mil/dwp/app/dod-data-reports/workforce-reports?ref=redflag.org.au), the US military has more than 170,000 active-duty personnel (about 13 percent of the country’s 1.3 million active troops) stationed in some 170 countries. That is up by 3,000 from a year earlier—so there has thus far been no real change of the force posture under this president. Once reservists and civilian staff are included, the figure rises to more than 230,000 “defence” personnel stationed overseas (out of 2.8 million total). These numbers are unlikely to shift much under the Trump administration’s “[unlike-anything-you’ve-ever-seen-before](https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2026/01/trumps-national-defense-strategy-unlike-anything-s-come-it/410999/?ref=redflag.org.au)” military strategy—which has been seen many times before, by the way, by tens of millions of victims worldwide. The Global Posture Review will likely lead to troop drawdowns in Europe and the Middle East and to reallocations in the Western Hemisphere—a key feature of the NDS, as in last year’s National Security Strategy, is the regional shoring-up operation. The overall international footprint of the US military might be marginally reduced. But the US is an empire regardless of who occupies the White House, and the empire will continue to look something like this: The map is deceptive, of course—most places have only a handful or dozens of US operatives stationed in embassies (which also house CIA staff, who aren’t covered by the Pentagon’s numbers). About 90 percent of active-duty personnel outside of the continental United States are in the ten territories hosting more than 1,000 troops: Deceptive or not, consider row 13 in the table above: for the September quarter, the official data list 8,480 active-duty troops as “unknown” in location. Not knowing the whereabouts of two brigades’ worth of soldiers would be news in most countries. For the Pentagon, it’s a rounding error—an imperial system of measurement, for sure. Perhaps they are “unknown” because they are doing just the sorts of things that the US government usually denies that it does. At any rate, another key takeaway from the NDS is that US imperialism is not letting go of Asia, regardless of the reorientation the Trump administration claims to be pursuing. There is no evidence of retreat in this region; instead, the US military is going to dig itself in like an Alabama tick: > The Indo-Pacific will soon make up more than half of the global economy. The American people’s security, freedom, and prosperity are therefore directly linked to our ability to trade and engage from a position of strength in the Indo-Pacific. Were China—or anyone else, for that matter—to dominate this broad and crucial region, it would be able to effectively veto Americans’ access to the world’s economic center of gravity, with enduring implications for our nation’s economic prospects, including our ability to reindustrialize. That is why the NSS directs DoW \[Department of War\] to maintain a favorable balance of military power in the Indo-Pacific ... our goal is to ensure that neither China nor anyone else can dominate us or our allies. Notably, Western-aligned countries in Asia, like European ones, are being served a half-reheated version of the [Nixon Doctrine](https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d29?ref=redflag.org.au), accompanied by a side of war preparations. So on one hand, there’s stern talk about everyone fending for themselves, the US demanding all allies worldwide meet the military spending targets set at last year’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit: 3.5 percent of GDP on “core” military plus 1.5 percent on “security-related spending”. That would be a massive reallocation of resources for any country, let alone for the range of South and South-East Asian states that have not yet managed to establish universal social welfare. On the other hand, US military engineers are deploying across the Western Pacific, revitalising World War Two-era airfields to accommodate fighter jets and launch bombing raids, expanding naval and marine bases, and prepositioning supplies. For example, there’s the new [US$9 billion marine base](https://www.stripes.com/branches/marine%5Fcorps/2026-01-07/marine-corps-camp-blaz-guam-20325967.html?ref=redflag.org.au) in Guam, the reopening of what was once one of the [largest airbases in the world](https://tinianmayor.cnmi.gov/focus-u-s-restoring-pacific-island-wartime-airfield-for-deterrence/?ref=redflag.org.au) on nearby Tinian Island, along with other upgrades or new bases in Palau, Micronesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. They call all this, and more, “President Trump’s vision for peace through strength”. Spare us. Australia isn’t mentioned in the NDS, and hosted “only” 314 active-duty US personnel in the September quarter of 2025, according to the Pentagon data. But the integration of this continent into US strategic planning for a major confrontation with China has not abated. Canberra is spending up to $17 billion on [bases in northern Australia in 2024-34](https://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/29090046/The-cost-of-Defence-2025-2026-1.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) (p.134), an area that is now [reportedly](https://www.reuters.com/world/us-military-seeking-strategic-advantages-builds-up-australias-northern-bases-2024-07-26/?ref=redflag.org.au) “the top overseas location for US Air Force and Navy construction spending”. US and British nuclear submarines begin rotations out of Western Australia from next year; air bases in the north have been repurposed to accommodate the largest US nuclear bombers; the marines have their own dedicated and upgraded facilities in Darwin; and prepositioning of US munitions, vehicles and fuel has begun in Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory. Greg Grandin, a Yale University history professor, suggested in [a recent segment](https://www.democracynow.org/2026/1/30/latin%5Famerica%5Fgreg%5Fgrandin?ref=redflag.org.au) on Democracy Now! that we’re witnessing a “new form of imperialism … an arrangement with kind of transactional details that we’ve never seen before … \[a\] kind of technovassal imperialism”. Without wanting to downplay the brazen gangsterism of the Trump regime, some of this talk about unprecedented action is overblown. The last newsletter quoted Dwight Eisenhower’s [1953 remarks at a governors’ conference](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-governors-conference-seattle-washington?ref=redflag.org.au) outlining the rationale for the US backing the French in Indochina. It’s worth revisiting those remarks, made right at the beginning of the “rules-based international order” that now appears to be fracturing as Washington goes rogue: > Now let us assume that we lose Indochina. If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The Malayan peninsula, the last little bit of the end hanging on down there, would be scarcely defensible—and tin and tungsten that we so greatly value from that area would cease coming. But all India would be outflanked. Burma would certainly, in its weakened condition, be no defence ... All of that weakening position around there is very ominous for the United States, because finally if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia? Comparing the NDS section on Asia and Eisenhower’s address, there is scarcely any difference between the underlying interests offered to justify US aggression internationally. Eisenhower’s remarks are gilded by a little “free world” cant. But in 1953, as in 2026, naked self-interest was the rule. The devastation unleashed by the US around the world in the 60 years following Eisenhower’s address is incomparable to anything—other than Gaza—more recently. And the Gaza genocide, like the carnage in Vietnam, mostly occurred under a Democratic administration. The devastation in Iraq from the 2003 invasion is another case in point: it was pure gangsterism to try to install a pliant government and impose US hegemony over the entire Middle East. More than 1 million people lost their lives as a result. The Trump regime may be the crudest expression of imperial hubris and aggression in generations, but it is not a fundamental departure from past US administrations. This is not a “new” type of imperialism; it’s just more naked in its ambitions. ### Tony Abbott’s Australia: A history unlikely to make history URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/tony-abbots-australia-a-history-unlikely-to-make-history/ Last updated: 2026-01-31T08:51:32.000Z Australian conservatism is having an identity crisis. The Liberal Party is in the electoral doldrums. The Coalition have lost two elections in a row, former leader Peter Dutton registering the lowest approval for a major party leader in four decades according to the Australian Electoral Study. Among people under 35, the Greens now out-poll the Liberals. On university campuses, the situation is even worse. Last year, an article in the Age detailed the unpopularity of the Melbourne University Liberal Club, which included prominent club members admitting that joining the Liberal Club is “social suicide”. The failure of the right to win the “history wars” is typical of its problems. The wars were launched by historian Geoffrey Blainey, who railed against the supposed dominance of a “black armband” view of history. He denounced the “multicultural lobby” and “elite groups” for spreading the idea that violence, dispossession and racism were at the heart of Australia’s national identity. Liberal party ideologue and former Prime Minister John Howard eagerly took up the cause, backed by a cottage industry of conservative historians like Keith Windschuttle who set out to deny or minimise the brutality of colonisation. But for all their efforts, the “white blindfold” right has failed to establish a consensus around their views, in particular among young people. A majority of younger people, for example, support changing the date of Australia Day—a sentiment animated by an understanding of the long history of Indigenous oppression. For this significant layer, conservatism is uncool. In an attempt to solve this problem for the far right, a fresh new thinker has stepped forward—former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. His new book, Australia: A history, is an attempt to intellectually shirtfront left-wing opinion. It launched with a three-part companion Sky News documentary for everyone missing Abbott’s face on TV. For the truly masochistic, there is an audio book read by Abbott himself. The book’s argument is that Australia has lost its sense of pride in its Anglo-Celtic (white) culture and Judeo-Christian ethic. The idea that Australia is something to be proud of has been destroyed and as a result, modern Australia, like the rest of the West, is “spiritually poor”. Everything has gone downhill since his valiant efforts in office—the rise of woke, lockdowns in the name of public health, Palestine protests and mass migration. We live in a time, Abbott argues, in which a governmental and media class are obsessed with “luxury ideas” such as climate change and oppression. To turn this around, Abbott implores us to learn the “right lessons of history”. Thankfully, those lessons are quite simple: love Australia and allow great men to put us back on track. Men like Arthur Phillip, Robert Menzies, B.A. Santamaria, Bob Hawke and the best of all men, John Howard. Any and all problems are temporary speed bumps that can be solved by a good Liberal government. The point of Australia: A history is simple. Abbott wants to spin a narrative of national pride that makes white blindfold history palpable again. Abbott’s research efforts were backed by a small team of historians and hard-right think tanks—for no man is a suppository of all wisdom—including the Institute of Public Affairs and the Menzies Institute. The book is less a work of history than a sermon of the Trumpian right with footnotes, oozing distaste for Indigenous people, migrants and the left. In Abbott’s telling, Australia since its creation has been run on liberal principles in which everyone enjoys a fair go. Indigenous people may have had it bad sometimes, but everything would have been much worse if the French had settled Australia. The book spins every crime committed against Indigenous people as a story of progress. The word genocide does not appear until the footnotes. Colonisation was a civilising mission. The Frontier Wars were misunderstandings, and the death totals of tens of thousands of Aboriginal people are just “guesstimates”. Assimilation was actually humane and the child removals that created the Stolen Generations were done with the best of intentions. Any disadvantage Indigenous people face today is because of “welfare dependency” and culture. More horror is reserved for the voice to parliament proposal than any crimes against Indigenous people. Class in Australia, “if it ever really existed”, is nothing more than a temporary inconvenience in the land of the fair go. Convicts transported across the world in shackles were actually given a great entrepreneurial opportunity. The trade union movement is implicitly painted as a hindrance to the polite liberalism of the Australian character. Labor is not to be trusted as it is supposedly too close to the socialist left—Abbott seems to think its 2023 national platform derives some inspiration from the Communist movement of the 1920s. Abbott’s obsession with immigration is on full display. Barely below the surface of the book’s call for a “team Australia” civic nationalism is the anti-migrant racism of the right. The White Australia policy was perhaps a tad regrettable, but helped maintain “social cohesion”. Besides, we shouldn’t judge too harshly because everyone was racist back then. Postwar migration is the supposed success story held up against Middle Eastern migrants of the 21st century. The brutal anti-migrant racism of the 20th century is whitewashed. Australia: A history presents a “god-and-country” reading of the past in the hope that Abbott and the far right can impose this vision on the present. It is an attempt to modernise the worldview of the far right and make nationalism popular and palatable again. The book is a thinly veiled propaganda piece. Thankfully, it is unlikely to win many hearts and minds. Soon enough, it will end up where it belongs—in bargain bins and North Shore nursing homes. ### The Eatock family: proud Aboriginal communists URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-eatock-family-proud-aboriginal-communists/ Last updated: 2026-01-31T22:30:55.000Z The Eatocks were a family of Aboriginal communists who fought for Aboriginal and working-class rights. At the head of the family was Lucy Eatock, who, attracted to radical working-class politics during the great strikes of the 1890s, became an activist against conscription in World War I and subsequently a communist matriarch who led her large family in the fight against evictions and the 1930s depression-era austerity imposed on the working class in Sydney. Lucy, whose life is documented in *Delusions of Grandeur*, a history of her family written by her granddaughter Joan, believed in working-class politics that sought to achieve equality against all the divide and rule politics that capitalism threw up. She became a member of the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World and then the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and was determined that all of her family were to become revolutionary militants, throwing them into the battle against Australian capitalism. Born in 1874 in rural Queensland, Lucy came across the shearers’ union as she served meals in the shearing shed. Militant shearers spoke of the benefits and lessons the Australian Shearers Union brought them: equality, solidarity and the collective struggle of the working class. Lucy also learned the impact of class struggle on ordinary people. The shearers, when on strike and picketing, promoted a “them and us” attitude, identifying the boss as the enemy of workers fighting for their rights and interests. This attitude was not confined to the shearers but common to huge swathes of the Australian working class in the 1890s, as major class battles broke out, including the maritime strike of 1890, the miners’ strike of 1892 and the shearers’ strikes of 1891 and 1894\. Unfortunately, the strike wave eventually ended in defeat, but those strikes bore out what Lucy had learned from the shearers: that there is a class battle between those at the top of society, who live lavishly, and those at the bottom, who are exploited and oppressed. After Lucy married Aboriginal stockman William Eatock in 1895 and the first of their nine children was born, the Eatocks moved between NSW and Queensland to find work. Constantly moving in rural areas was dangerous for the Eatocks, because such areas in Australia then were more overtly racist and massacres of Aboriginal people were still known to happen. When Lucy’s children went to school, the threat of child removal by the Aborigines Protection Board was a constant concern. The Australian state at the time was removing Aboriginal children from their families, creating what became known as the Stolen Generations. The children taken away from Aboriginal families frequently became servants and labourers for non-Indigenous families or wards of the state. In defiance of all this, Lucy began to become more politically active. She participated in the anti-conscription campaigns during World War I. The anti-war sentiment in the working class that had built up by 1916, as workers were sent into the meat grinder of war while their bosses profited, climaxed in the fight against the referendums put on by Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes to establish conscription for the war effort abroad. The two referendums were defeated, a victory for workers pushing back against a war that had sent workers across the world to their deaths. During this time Lucy also joined the Industrial Workers of the World and, following that organisation’s destruction, the Communist Party, fostering her ideas of the working class needing to fight for equality amongst all—women, men, black and white. In the 1920s Lucy worked in Sydney, where on Sunday afternoons she would go to Speakers’ Corner in the Domain. Speakers’ Corner was a popular site where individuals of many political persuasions would stand on a soapbox and argue their politics. Speakers’ Corner is where Lucy first came into contact with the CPA. A CPA member, on the soapbox, argued the need for socialism and what it would bring for working-class people—the CPA member ended each passage of his speech with “under socialism everything will be peaches and cream!” The playfulness of the speech was engaging for Lucy, even more so when conservative watchers yelled out, “I don’t want peaches and cream!” Unlike this response, the argument for socialism invigorated Lucy to become a speaker herself against the ills of capitalism and, eventually, a member of the CPA. Lucy’s membership of the CPA and constant rabble rousing in the streets of Sydney made her a known figure to workers, and to the police and state. In Sydney Trotskyist Nick Origlass’ biography, written by Hall Greenland, a Glebe detective sergeant claimed that Lucy was “one of the principals in all communist disturbances in the city and suburbs”. In an article titled “Who’s Who in Communism: The Complete List”, *Smith’s Weekly*, a pro-war newspaper, listed Lucy and her sons and daughters as prominent communist agitators and organisers. Lucy’s children Lindsay, Noel, Alex, Adam and Roderick followed their mother’s example, subscribing to revolutionary socialist politics, and becoming union militants in the brickyards, factories and building sites where they found work. They joined the CPA and were prominent socialist activists in their own right. Lindsay stood as a Communist Party candidate for the 1930 NSW state election. She was a powerful orator whose speeches could draw crowds to block roads. Arrested at an unemployed demonstration in November 1930, she was charged with riotous behaviour, assault and damage to a constable’s watch. Despite eight days in jail as a result, she later wrote that, if necessary, she would do it again. The younger children, Roderick and Noel, were a part of the Young Communist League, the CPA’s youth organisation, while all of Lucy’s children who were in Sydney battled against forced evictions during the Great Depression as members of the combative Unemployed Workers Movement (UWM), the leading organisation of the anti-eviction campaigns of the 1930s. Living up to their notoriety of being communist disrupters, the high point of the Eatocks’ anti-capitalist activism in this period was their role in the anti-eviction movement and the UWM. The Great Depression was a huge economic calamity. Capitalist crisis destroyed the living standards of working-class people. By 1932, unemployment reached 29 percent, with unemployed workers often unable to pay rent and dependent on a demeaning dole system for the necessities of life. For many Aboriginal people, there was no dole, just meagre food rations. The NSW state initiated swathes of evictions—as late as 1935, five and a half thousand orders of ejectment were made by the NSW courts. In response to this horrific reality, the communist-led UWM was created as an organising body for radical workers and unemployed people to fight back against evictions. The Eatocks were part of many anti-eviction struggles in working-class suburbs like Redfern, Glebe and Bankstown, where they were met with violence. At the infamous Bankstown anti-eviction riot in 1931, Alex Eatock was shot by police and then imprisoned for eighteen months. The following year, after the Glebe dole riot in October 1932, where Lucy, then almost 60, was whipped by a police inspector for attending, Noel Eatock was handed the heaviest prison sentence of any unemployed activist—even though there was extensive evidence he was not present at the time of his alleged offence. The riot was a protest of unemployed people against the application of the “means test” for the dole. The “means test” was a state assessment of those applying for the dole of their families’ finances, savings and possessions to determine whether they would receive the dole. This was a humiliating process in which the NSW state often drastically cut benefits to unemployed people and families if any other income existed—even if that meant a child working or someone having a pension. Noel was arrested on a charge of battering a police sergeant, receiving a two-and-a- half year sentence. The CPA published articles in its newspaper, the *Workers’ Weekly*, calling for Noel’s release and created the Eatock Defence Committee, focused on protesting and campaigning for Noel’s freedom. Noel’s arrest and the subsequent campaign for his release combined the struggle against the depression-era economic hardships with the right to protest. However, in the course of the free Eatock campaign, the CPA slowed down the campaign and refused to organise further rallies and meetings. Joan E. Eatock, the biographer for the Eatock family, references that Noel and other CPA rank-and-file members became frustrated with the leaders of the party, who were also denying the right of its members to be involved in protests and meetings on local issues. Noel’s growing frustration with the CPA and the campaign to release him slowing down resulted in him associating with the Left Opposition. The Left Opposition was created by Jack Sylvester, the campaign treasurer and founder of the Eatock Defence Committee, after he was expelled from the CPA in 1932\. It was Sylvester who argued to Noel Eatock to join the Left Opposition, Sydney’s first Trotskyist organisation. The Left Opposition organised a “Release Eatock” rally in Glebe, and ran articles in its newspaper, the *Tocsin*, demanding the release of Noel and fundraising for the Eatock Defence Committee. The CPA, by this point thoroughly Stalinist and run by leaders who took their politics straight from Moscow, abused the Left Opposition group for its affiliation with Trotskyist politics. The experience of the free Eatock campaign led Noel and Jack Sylvester to become partners in fighting the NSW courts and police. Other Eatocks like Lucy also left the CPA due to it dropping the campaign to free Noel and refusing to support the families of those who were arrested during the anti-eviction rallies in the 1930s. Biographer Hall Greenland argues that the arrest of Noel Eatock and the campaign to release him were crucial in the formation of the first Sydney Trotskyist group. While it was tiny compared to the CPA, it was important that a space was created for the growth and development of a genuine revolutionary alternative to Stalinist politics, which had turned Marxism from working-class revolution into an apologist for dictatorial regimes like the USSR. The Eatocks were targeted by the police and the state, but this did not deter them from fighting for workers and the oppressed, displaying militancy and courage. Later generations of Eatocks remained socialists and militants, from [Lucy’s granddaughter Pat Eatock’s](https://redflag.org.au/article/pat-eatock-1937-2015) involvement in the setting up of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972 to Pat’s children Cathy and Greg’s role, alongside Pat, in campaigning against Aboriginal deaths in custody in the 1980s, to opposing the racist Northern Territory Intervention from 2007\. Learning about the history of the Eatock family should be inspiration for new generations of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal activists to become radical socialists fighting for a better world. The Eatock family history contains an array of lessons, from understanding the class struggle and taking up the fight against the state, to not being cowed by the inevitable repression. We need more activists like the Eatocks—people willing to fight against capitalism and for a world controlled and run by ordinary working-class people. Whether you are Aboriginal or not, we have a world to win together. ### Minneapolis strikes against ICE terror URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/minneapolis-strikes-against-ice-terror/ Last updated: 2026-01-28T22:45:54.000Z Emma and Chloe talk about Trump's ICE gestapo terrorising American cities and the inspiring working class resistance to their murderous regime in Minneapolis. Also, an update on the continued ruling class campaign to silence pro-Palestine protests in Australia. Links: [Marxism Conference!!](https://www.marxismconference.org/?ref=redflag.org.au) [Register to protest Isaac Herzog!](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfA87D1WrHHFZAyYO1JU9Fms-zRpSF%5FEW7ZVEziirWYWH3%5Fcg/viewform?ref=redflag.org.au) ["Our union leaders are unmoved by genocide and indifferent to pay cuts" by Zak Borzovoy](https://redflag.org.au/article/our-union-leaders-are-unmoved-by-genocide-and-indifferent-to-pay-cuts-we-need-a-stronger-extreme-left/) ["Protest against war criminal Israeli President Isaac Herzog" by Shovan Bhattarai](https://redflag.org.au/article/protest-against-war-criminal-israeli-president-isaac-herzog/) ["The burgeoning resistance to Trump's deportation regime" by Joe Allen](https://redflag.org.au/article/minneapolisthe-burgeoning-resistance-amidst-the-crackdown/) ### The union that refused to listen: how allied health workers fought their own union and won URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-union-that-refused-to-listen-how-allied-health-workers-fought-their-own-union-and-won/ Last updated: 2026-01-28T22:27:37.000Z The conditions of health workers affect everyone. Ongoing state and federal cuts to health funding and the consequent degradation of working conditions in the sector are increasingly compromising access to safe and reliable health care—the right to which the workers’ movements won in the 1960s and ’70s. Over the last four months, a group of hard-headed allied health workers have fought and won a battle with their union leadership over democracy. It is a story of a union leadership’s extraordinary resistance to member participation and the equally extraordinary rank-and-file organising in response. Allied health refers to any health professional who isn’t a doctor, nurse or dentist. It is a critical section of the health workforce that often goes under the radar, making it easier for governments quietly to rip through these services and undermine workers’ conditions. Yet according to Allied Health Professions Australia, there are 300,000 allied health professionals in the country. These are essential workers, who represent almost a third of the health workforce and deliver more than 200 million health services annually. They include paramedics, radiographers, radiation therapists, social workers, optometrists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists and many more. They provide physical and mental health services across diagnosis, treatment, prevention and rehabilitation. Their work includes support for chronic illness and disability, and is delivered in hospitals, clinics and community settings. The Health Services Union (HSU) is the main union covering health workers. It is a federated union, which means it has individual branches in different states and territories, each covering different groups of workers depending on their workplace or job type. Two of these branches cover a majority of allied health workers in Victoria: the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association (VAHPA), covering allied health workers in public, private and community health, private practice and aged care; and the Health and Community Sector Union (HACSU), covering health workers employed in disability, mental health and alcohol and other drug services. A planned merger between VAHPA and HACSU became public in October last year. The announcement triggered a rapid, organised and significant rebellion from VAHPA members, led by the rank-and-file network VAHPA Pulse. VAHPA Pulse was formed in early 2025 to support VAHPA members’ communications and union activity. It aimed to create a space to share workplace stories, issues and strategies and build members’ confidence. The network was established after years of frustrations at the union’s failure to facilitate communication between members or to respond respectfully to these member complaints. This was becoming increasingly important for the upcoming enterprise bargaining agreement, in which short staffing, unfilled positions, crushing workload and low pay are burning issues crying out for a serious industrial fight. The current Victoria public sector agreement has given annual headline pay increases of just 2 percent annually over the past four years, a total of 8.2 percent. Meanwhile inflation (as measured by the consumer price index) has surged by a total of 18.8 percent over that time. The union leadership opposed the establishment of VAHPA Pulse. It repeatedly made claims and insinuations about the network undermining the union. At a union delegates’ conference, a union official went so far as to yell at a network organiser and accuse VAHPA Pulse of “bullying” the union secretary—to the horror of members watching on. Nevertheless, the network grew. It launched a [website](https://vahpapulse.weebly.com/?ref=redflag.org.au), [newsletter](https://substack.com/@vahpapulse?ref=redflag.org.au), WhatsApp chat and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/vahpa%5Fpulse/?ref=redflag.org.au) account. Within months of forming, it became the rallying point against the proposed VAHPA/HACSU merger and the fight for union democracy. Cecilia is an allied health professional in a public hospital, a workplace delegate and one of the VAHPA Pulse organisers. “There’s nothing inherently wrong with two union branches looking at merging”, Cecilia told *Red Flag*. “It’s not like members were like ‘never, no way’. But there are many reasons it didn’t make sense from an industrial perspective. And the way VAHPA and HACSU have gone about it is utterly appalling.” When asked what members’ reservations were, she said: > It was one red flag after another. But in short, the process was undemocratic, lacked transparency, the timing and reasoning provided \[for the merger\] was really questionable and misinformation was rife. Once members raised questions and concerns, the leadership seemed intent on railroading us into it. First, VAHPA members (and HACSU members for that matter) were not consulted about the proposed merger. They weren’t even promptly informed. VAHPA members found out about it through the rumour mill and then from workmates in HACSU, who had been informed by their union. Once VAHPA members began contacting VAHPA leadership, the union issued a media release. No apology was provided to members for the poor communication. “From the get-go, VAHPA leadership seemed unconcerned with including and representing members. And they just got worse from there”, Cecilia said. “The statements put forward in VAHPA’s media release were vague and didn’t add up. It left everyone wondering if it was member or leadership benefits that were really at the heart of the merger.” The VAHPA media release put forward very general arguments: that the merger would provide greater union resources, and that the combined membership would lead to increased union size, reputation and bargaining power. Regarding these arguments, Cecilia says that “members aren’t confident in the ‘trust us, it’ll be great’ approach VAHPA is taking. Take the resources, for example: members have been asking the union for more organisers for years. But a member did the numbers and it seems like the organiser-to-member ratio may well go down”. With regard to bargaining power, she agrees that > in theory, a bigger workforce can have more industrial power. But that is only realised if that power is actually wielded. Size isn’t the only power—unions need to take seriously and adequately support member activity, and the track record on that recently has not been great for either of them. Members feel like we’re just looking at a bigger and more powerful do-nothing bureaucracy than we already have. Both unions have an underwhelming track record when it comes to fighting for members. There is a significant history of complaints against VAHPA from members, including for slow or missing replies to requests, poor general communications and high turnover and loss of organisers. In the case of HACSU, its recently negotiated agreement left allied workers in the dust. In 2024, HACSU won one of the best pay increases in Australia—28 percent over four years—but only for its nurse members. This matched the pay rise won by Victorian public sector members of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation in 2024, after a [rank-and-file revolt](https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-nurses-reject-pay-deal/) torpedoed an annual 3 percent headline pay deal between the Victorian government and the nurses’ union leadership. The leadership of HACSU called off industrial action very soon after the government matched this offer to their mental health nurse members. This left their allied health members with headline annual pay increases of just 3 percent per year – less than half what the nurses won. This [continued a widening](https://vahpapulse.weebly.com/uploads/1/5/4/3/154341374/hacsu%5Fnurses%5Fvs%5Fahps%5F2.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) of the existing disparity between allied health and nursing staff wages – often for workers on the same team doing similar work—and represented a major motivating factor in the opposition to the merger. Cecilia said: > This was a win for nurses and we wholeheartedly support what they’ve won—they deserve this and much more. But HACSU prioritised one set of workers over another and kicked our colleagues in the teeth. Now they \[VAHPA leaders\] are telling us how great it’s going to be to join with this union. Other members’ concerns included that the merger seemed more akin to a takeover of VAHPA by HACSU than a genuine merger; limited allied health representation in the post-merger leadership; VAHPA members falling immediately under the existing HACSU agreement and therefore losing their current bargaining opportunity; the questionable timing of the merger; and concerns about HACSU’s formal affiliation with the Labor Party and how this will be managed post-merger. “Too much was in the air”, Cecilia said. “It was clear members needed to have a say.” When members raised concerns with leadership, they were told that members would be consulted on the *process* only, but the merger itself was a done deal. This was not true. When they were told this, the merger still required a Committee of Management vote, a National Committee vote and Fair Work approval—which requires the union to demonstrate it has the members’ support. Wanting members to have a say on the merger, a VAHPA Pulse member discovered a clause in the union constitution: if 200 members petitioned the leadership, an extraordinary special general meeting would have to be called. They immediately started a petition and a publicised campaign for member input on the merger and quickly gathered 400 signatures. “We actually submitted three petitions before the leadership accepted it!”, Cecilia said. “The first two were rejected for errors. We ended up having an industrial lawyer see the campaign and offer to help us. This says a lot about barriers to democracy in the union!” Meanwhile, the leadership was fast-tracking the merger process, hoping to outrun the petition. They brought their Victorian Committee of Management vote forward by a week. And once they received the third petition, which they couldn’t reject, they scheduled the SGM for a week *after* the National Committee merger vote. The leadership also called some “town hall” meetings and suggested this was all that was needed. As Cecilia describes, “Members felt this was cynical. The meetings are discussion spaces; they don’t have the voting and decision-making authority that the SGMs do. Yet suddenly people are being told that we don’t really need the SGM any more, the one thing which could actually force the leadership to change course”. Nevertheless, the extraordinary SGM was scheduled for 11 December. “We knew it wasn’t enough to have won the right to have the meeting”, Cecilia said. “Without at least 200 members at the meeting, any vote wouldn’t be valid. We campaigned like fury to get members along. The support amongst members was strong; people really wanted to have their say.” VAHPA members span regional areas of Victoria, and many were struggling to get time off work and cover costs for missed shifts and travel in order to get to the SGM. The union refused to help get members to the meeting, so VAHPA Pulse started a GoFundMe campaign instead. “Over $3,000 was raised through Go Fund Me”, Cecilia said. Fifty union and community members contributed: > But along with raising money, the campaign really laid bare how hostile the union was to members having a say—and people really backed us. We even got support from social media celebrities and an artist. It created solidarity and boosted our confidence to push on. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/T-shirt-pic.jpg) The t-shirt designed by Melbourne artist and supporter of the campaign Sam Wallman CREDIT: Vanessa Rae In the end, 276 members attended from across Victoria—coming from as far away as Gippsland, Warrnambool and Wangaratta. “People moved heaven and earth to get there, some losing up to a day’s pay”, Cecilia said. At the opening of the meeting, members were informed about the presence of non-VAHPA observers, including HACSU Secretary Paul Healey and officials from the national HSU office. An attendee raised a point of order that the inclusion of observers needed to be voted on. Members voted to kick out the observers. “The tone for the meeting was just set from the get-go”, Cecilia said. “Members were really making it clear—this is our meeting, our union, and we will choose how it runs.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/SGM-outdoor-placards.jpg) VAHPA members campaigning against the proposed merger of their union with HACSU outside the special general meeting CREDIT: VAHPA Pulse The meeting moved on to discussion of the merger, and it was obvious that the room was overwhelmingly against. Of the five people who spoke for it, four were from the VAHPA Committee of Management. The cheers for the many speakers against were loud and long, at one point prompting the chair to ask people to settle down. Cecilia recounts that the speakers for the merger made claims that were “manipulative and without strong basis in fact”, one implying that those opposing the merger would be responsible for VAHPA staff being overworked, and another announcing that a communication worker would have to be laid off if the merger didn’t go ahead. That worker was in the meeting and became noticeably distressed. “It was so out of line”, Cecilia said, “and we later got word that this claim wasn’t even necessarily true”. In the end, the merger was voted down overwhelmingly—267 against, six in favour and three abstentions. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/att.Pzo8KdmmHZ_ZdcYYe6GWiM9DCdbSg88vn1ZyB0UvKFg-2.jpeg) VAHPA members voting against the merger at the special general meeting CREDIT: VAHPA Pulse Showing contempt for democracy, the union officials dismissed the outcome. *Workplace Express* published responses from union Secretary Craig McGregor that “he expected the amalgamation to proceed” and that only a vote from the National Committee or a member plebiscite could stop it. Cecilia said: > The union’s attitude basically was ‘nice that you voted, but the merger is a done deal—it’s been endorsed by the union’s committees’. They planned to seek final approval from Fair Work by arguing that the union leadership is elected by members, so therefore their views represent those of the membership. Just appalling. Members filed to Fair Work to have a rank-and-file representative at the hearing. They also started gathering stat decs from members who couldn’t attend the SGM. They were not going to back down. On 12 January, they won. The withdrawal of the merger was announced. HACSU published a media release referencing the importance of listening to member voices. VAHPA didn’t formally comment; it simply pulled the merger announcement from its website. VAHPA Pulse published an emotive announcement saying this “is a direct result of all the rank-and-file member power ... we have shown over the past couple of months that we can fight and we can win!” This successful but unexpected battle came right in the middle of bargaining for a new agreement for allied health workers. VAHPA Pulse is hoping to build on the increased member interest and participation in the union to strengthen the campaign for a better agreement. “\[N\]ow is the time for all members to turn their attention to our EBA”, argues the group’s latest article. “This is an important fight ... that will have a major impact on the future of Allied Health ... We need to continue our fight—for our professions, for our patients and for our communities!” Cecilia reinforces the point: “We can’t afford to be passive with the working conditions we are facing. The fight against the merger is a powerful example of what organised members can do. It’s great we have that success to draw from. We need to use it to improve our conditions and in so doing, the quality of the health system overall”. ### Our union leaders are unmoved by genocide and indifferent to pay cuts: we need a stronger ‘extreme left’ URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/our-union-leaders-are-unmoved-by-genocide-and-indifferent-to-pay-cuts-we-need-a-stronger-extreme-left/ Last updated: 2026-01-28T03:59:45.000Z Australian unions have a long history of defending civil liberties and standing against imperialism. So why, as our government maintains its support for Israel despite the ongoing murder, starvation and dispossession of Palestinians, are our current union leaders lining up with the political and media establishment in their post-Bondi offensive against the Palestine movement and the right to protest? Speaking to the arch-reactionary *Australian* in late December*,* Health Services Union National President Gerard Hayes and Victorian Trades Hall Council Secretary Luke Hilakari slammed pro-Palestine activists, with Hayes describing them as “obscene” and Hilakari saying they should “back off”. Echoing the state and federal Labor governments’ talking points, they attack activists for continuing to take action against genocide and endorse proposed restrictions on the use of slogans like “globalise the intifada”. Hilakari specifically targets socialists—who he describes as the “extreme left”—for the crime of encouraging workers to join their unions and fight for Palestine, calling them “horrible, absolutely horrible”. This shows how far the current Labor-aligned union leaders have departed from the traditions of internationalism and solidarity historically championed by the union movement. During the Cold War anti-communist witch-hunts, when Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies tried to ban the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1951, Labor-aligned union leaders did not run to the mouthpiece of the rich and powerful to back their attacks on the left. The Labor leader at the time, Doc Evatt, by no means a radical, fought the proposed ban, describing it as “totalitarian” and “a step towards fascism”. The referendum to ban the CPA was defeated in large part because of the organising efforts of the unions and the Labor left. More recently, the Victorian Trades Hall Council defended the right to protest against the Napthine Victorian state government’s expansion of police powers in 2014. Unions have also long played a leading role in protesting against apartheid regimes, including calling a general strike in Queensland to protest the 1971 visit of the Springbok rugby team, representing apartheid South Africa. The president of the ACTU at the time, future prime minister and non-radical Bob Hawke, said of action during the tour: “Take whatever action is necessary as an act of conscience to obstruct the tour”. So how does the supposedly left-wing Hilakari justify his attacks on the left in the unions today? According to him, standing up for Palestine is not “union business”. He and Hayes argue that the majority of their members demand they avoid “divisive” political issues in order to focus on “bread-and-butter” industrial issues like pay and conditions. One would think, then, given their refusal to lift a finger for Palestine, that their industrial victories must be piling high. The reality is the opposite. Writing in the *Guardian* last year, economist Greg Jericho calculated that, on average, workers are 8.9 percent behind where they would be had wages kept up with inflation since 2021\. This historic attack on living standards is made possible by union officials routinely selling workers sub-inflationary pay deals. The consequences are significant—according to the Employee Living Cost Index calculated by the ABS, workers are worse off by around $20,000 a year since 2021. So while Hayes and Hilakari can draw on and encourage the idea that unions shouldn’t worry themselves with international affairs and instead focus on pay rises, they both fail to deliver those pay rises—where they are not a direct impediment to them—and help to further break down an understanding in the union movement that solidarity and battles for social justice outside the workplace are part of building a stronger union movement and greater industrial strength. And while these “leaders” invoke member disinterest to justify their positioning, there is plenty of evidence to indicate that workers would get behind pro-Palestine action. A YouGov poll last year showed that 69 percent of Australians supported an end to Israel’s attacks on Gaza and 57 percent supported sanctions on the Israeli government—indicating there is a real basis for more serious action. That our union leaders are happy to use their powerful apparatuses to get out the vote for Labor at each election, regardless of members’ attitudes towards the party, but are unwilling to mobilise to challenge the Labor government’s support for a genocide, gives some indication of the problem. Mobilising to fight, whether for higher wages or against war, and whether it’s popular or not, is not what informs the approach taken by our union leaders today. Much more important is getting Labor into power or keeping them in power, whatever attacks the party might make on workers or democratic rights. More often than not, a seat in parliament is waiting for the union official who does this best. It has not always been this bad. There is a rich history of Australian unions acting as fighting organisations, prepared to take on the warmongering billionaires who run our society around both industrial and political issues. One of the high points of this history was the late 1960s and 70s. What was different then? The role of the so-called “extreme left” was decisive. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam War was the issue that, like Palestine today, exposed a generation to the barbarity of capitalism and the bloody hypocrisy of Western governments. A wave of anti-war radicalism revived the left after years of Cold War conservatism; new left groups sprang up, and existing ones like the CPA and its offshoots were pushed to take a more radical stance. This wave of radicalism and left-wing organising led to the most militant period in the history of our unions, both politically and industrially. Some unions were led by the left, while others were just pushed into more militant action by left groups organising from within the membership. The NSW Builders Labourers Federation imposed bans on work connected to the war effort, while seamen refused to load ships supplying the US military. Union action was decisive in shifting mass opinion against the war as the left unions supported draft resisters and the 1970 moratorium marches against the war. This period was also when Australian workers made some of the most significant industrial gains in our history, including significant pay rises, reductions in working hours and four weeks of annual leave. The combination of political and industrial militancy was not an accident—it was a strategy brought to the unions by a left that was conscious of workers’ power to fight and win progressive changes both inside and outside of our workplaces through strikes and mass protest. And we don’t have to go back decades to demonstrate the role that taking up political issues can have in galvanising industrial strength. In Italy last year, the radical left dockworkers in the Autonomous Port Workers’ Collective threatened to close the port of Genoa in support of the Global Sumud Flotilla for Palestine and called on the wider union movement to back them, helping spark two general strikes across the country that brought around 2 million workers into the streets. These strikes for Palestine provided important momentum and confidence that Italian workers needed to take on far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s war and austerity budget the following December, in what became their third general strike in less than three months. One striking Italian worker reportedly summed up the dynamic with a placard that read: “We wanted to liberate Palestine, but instead Palestine liberated us”. That the “extreme left” has ruffled the feathers of the likes of Hilakari and Hayes is a good sign. These people have ruined our unions and eroded the political traditions that have made them strong. The revival of the socialist left is what we need to finally take a stand against the warmongers and capitalists screwing us at work while committing atrocities overseas. ### The burgeoning resistance to Trump’s deportation regime URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/minneapolisthe-burgeoning-resistance-amidst-the-crackdown/ Last updated: 2026-02-06T04:43:21.000Z Since the murder of Renee Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent [Jonathan Ross](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/us/ice-agent-minneapolis-jonathan-ross.html?ref=redflag.org.au) on 7 January, the world’s attention has turned sharply to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Good, a mother of three children, had just dropped off her youngest child at school when she had a [chance encounter](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/14/renee-good-family-reveals-new-details-about-the-morning-she-was-killed-by-ice/88183565007/?ref=redflag.org.au) with ICE and attempted to leave the area. She was shot four times and denied medical care. Her last words, captured on video, were, “I’m not mad at you”. Outraged, thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets in protest. Good’s murder was followed by the ICE shooting of a [Venezuelan](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/us/minneapolis-federal-agent-shooting-immigration.html?ref=redflag.org.au) man that also led to further militant protests on Minneapolis’ north side. Following these events, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 2024, delivered an extraordinary televised address. It was notable for both capturing the severity of the political crisis and putting forth feeble solutions. Walz [told](https://www.kttc.com/2026/01/15/full-speech-gov-tim-walz-addresses-minnesota-one-week-after-minneapolis-woman-is-shot-by-ice-agent/?ref=redflag.org.au) Minnesotans: > What’s happening in Minnesota right now defies belief. News reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos and disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down upon our communities. Two to three thousand armed agents of the federal government have been deployed to Minnesota. Armed, masked, under-trained ICE agents are going door to door, ordering people to point out where their neighbours of colour live. They’re pulling over people, indiscriminately, including US citizens, and demanding to see their papers, and at grocery stores, at bus stops, even at our schools. > They’re breaking windows, dragging pregnant women down the street. Just plain grabbing Minnesotans and shoving them into unmarked vans. Kidnapping innocent people with no warning and no due process. Let’s be very, very clear: this long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement. Instead, it’s a campaign of organised brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government. Walz called the federal presence an “occupation” and warned that worse was to come. President Donald Trump promised “the day of retribution and reckoning is coming”. Yet, what was Walz providing as a solution to this unprecedented crisis? He repeats verbatim the refrain of other Democratic politicians, high and low throughout the country: remain “peaceful” and “accountability is coming at the ballot box and the court”. Most importantly, Walz concluded: > We’re an island of decency in a country being driven towards cruelty. We will remain an island of decency, of justice, of community, of peace. And tonight, I come before you simply to ask: Don’t let anyone take that away from us. Meanwhile, Trump, on top of ominous threats he has already made, once again threatened to escalate the repression by invoking the [Insurrection Act](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/insurrection-act-explained?ref=redflag.org.au). This ancient federal law would allow him to deploy active-duty troops to Minneapolis, turning the rampant criminality of ICE and the Border Patrol into a full-fledged military occupation. The Brennan Center for Justice [warns](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/insurrection-act-explained?ref=redflag.org.au) that the act “has not been meaningfully updated in over 150 years, is dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse”. The latest [reports](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/18/pentagon-alaska-troops-minnesota-deployment?ref=redflag.org.au) are that the Pentagon has put 1,500 combat troops on standby. Trump, however, has wavered on invoking the act, faced with his growing unpopularity. Most polls put his job approval rating below a 40 percent. The latest CNN poll [says](https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/16/politics/trump-economy-first-year-cnn-poll?ref=redflag.org.au): “A majority, 58 percent, calls the first year of Trump’s term a failure”. The report revealed even deeper popular concerns across party lines and loyalties: > A 55 percent majority say that Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, with just 32 percent saying they’ve made an improvement. Most, 64 percent, say he hasn’t gone far enough in trying to reduce the price of everyday goods. Even within the GOP, about half say that he should be doing more, including 42 percent among Republicans and Republican-leaners who describe themselves as members of the “Make America Great Again” movement. Only one-third of Americans now say they believe that Trump cares about people like them, down from 40 percent last March and the worst rating of his political career. Decency and waiting for the November elections in the face of this looming authoritarian threat, however, are unlikely to deter Trump. He is sending [1,000 more](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/us/politics/border-patrol-minnesota-surge.html?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=of%20Renee%20Good-,Trump%20Officials%20Are%20Sending%201%2C000%20More%20Immigration%20Officers%20to%20Minnesota,deployed%20to%20the%20Minneapolis%20region.) federal agents to join the already 2,000 already deployed to the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, popularly known as the “Twin Cities”. Trump and his cabinet of [billionaires](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/trump-white-house-billionaires-musk/?ref=redflag.org.au) and former [Fox News](https://deadline.com/gallery/fox-news-personalities-trump-white-house-list/?ref=redflag.org.au) talking heads hold the reins of power in the commanding heights of the federal government, and they wield them with near impunity, despite his unpopularity. It is the weakness of the opposition from the Democratic Party and a handful of Republicans that allows him to get away with what he does. Trump attacked Venezuela and [killed](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/venezuelas-interior-minister-says-100-people-died-us-attack-2026-01-08/?ref=redflag.org.au) 100 people, kidnapped its President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The Democrats responded by saying they weren’t informed beforehand. A short-lived and very mild dissent by five Republican Senators to a Democratic initiative to implement the War Powers Act to rein in Trump was easily [squashed](https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5689992-hawley-young-reverse-venezuela-resolution/?ref=redflag.org.au) when two flipped after being threatened by Trump. Faced with growing opposition to ICE’s reign of terror, Democratic leaders have threatened to hold up Department of Homeland Security (DHS) [funding](https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5692032-democrats-dhs-funding-ice/?ref=redflag.org.au). Democrats are demanding ICE and the Border Patrol be unmasked and wear body cameras. Trump responded that ICE and Border Patrol agents have federal “immunity”. What Trump means by that is he can pardon them at will. With pen in hand, he wields vast and absolute pardon powers. Trump has pardoned [6 January fascist insurrectionists](https://www.jan-6.com/full-list-of-people-pardoned?gad%5Fsource=1&gad%5Fcampaignid=22662596135&gbraid=0AAAAAoRYyDSP5ejAQAp1l7u1z8KOABxSx&gclid=Cj0KCQiAg63LBhDtARIsAJygHZ6mlNPr-6UG%5FZiOTi5flomLgT3mULUn5m1b0P88Oea9aXpS3JCDjdkaAluHEALw%5FwcB&ref=redflag.org.au), [fraudsters](https://inewsource.org/2026/01/16/trump-pardons-south-bay-fraud/?ref=redflag.org.au), [drug dealers](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/nyregion/honduras-congressman-drug-sentence.html?ref=redflag.org.au), and [political cronies](https://apnews.com/article/steve-bannon-trump-pardons-broidy-66c82f25134735e742b2501c118723bb?ref=redflag.org.au); it’s hard to see any ICE and Border Patrol agents ever being held accountable for their crimes. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, led by Trump appointee Kash Patel, has so far successfully sabotaged a federal investigation into Renee Good’s murder and instead has begun specious investigations into Good’s wife, Governor Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Six veteran prosecutors have so far [resigned](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/us/prosecutors-doj-resignation-ice-shooting.html?ref=redflag.org.au) in protest. Paul Krugman, the former columnist for the *New York Times* and now popular on Substack, [summed](https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-minneapolis-crucible?utm%5Fsource=share&utm%5Fmedium=android&r=4zu49&fbclid=IwY2xjawPXw75leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFKMlZGQWJ2SWdBdXBXd3NJc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHqJ5WBMXaPDqv17gECWIfkNofTXyfWRiFIcSyBAlkFsnRzm73onWYCY1zmFQ%5Faem%5FqcGwS9kdrZHOJMpB7Blzbw&triedRedirect=true) up the dreary political situation: > Our vaunted institutions, our system of checks and balances, either capitulated quickly or were overrun by Trump’s onslaught. Big business quickly bent the knee, immediately directing its focus to how to make money through Trump trades. The Supreme Court and the Republican Congress abetted and even encouraged every fascist move. While there have been small victories in the federal courts in [Minnesota](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgprwlplqwo?ref=redflag.org.au) and [Chicago](https://immigrantjustice.org/press-release/federal-judge-in-chicago-orders-ice-to-release-hundreds-of-people-from-detention-centers-who-were-arrested-in-likely-violation-of-consent-decree/?ref=redflag.org.au), where some judges have attempted to curb ICE violence towards protestors, they’ve been weak reeds for our side to hold to. Initial rulings against ICE in Chicago were [overturned](https://immigrantjustice.org/press-release/federal-judge-in-chicago-orders-ice-to-release-hundreds-of-people-from-detention-centers-who-were-arrested-in-likely-violation-of-consent-decree/?ref=redflag.org.au) on appeal. Federal court rulings are also a cue for the Democratic Party-controlled local and state governments to step in and police anti-ICE protestors. In Broadview, Illinois, [state police](https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/12/protesters-keep-getting-arrested-at-broadview-by-state-police-despite-promise-to-protect-free-speech/?ref=redflag.org.au) and local cops took over policing after weeks of [militant protests](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57PQXFP7bso&ref=redflag.org.au) at an ICE detention centre. It is the Illinois state police that now arrest anti-ICE demonstrators. Hopes that Walz’s mobilisation of the Minnesota National Guard is to protect anti-ICE protestors is misplaced. A recent [post](https://x.com/MnDPS%5FDPS/status/2012614253090619619?s=20&ref=redflag.org.au) on X by the Minnesota Department of Public Safety made this clear: “At Gov. Walz’s direction, the Minnesota National Guard have been mobilized and are staging to support local law enforcement and emergency management agencies”. ### **Civil and labour resistance** Minneapolis holds a special place of hatred in Trump’s heart and all far-right bigots across the United States. It was the site of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, which ignited the national uprising against racism, the [largest civil uprising](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html?ref=redflag.org.au) to date in US history, and also spread globally. The uprising was a major contributor to Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s hatred for Somali refugees is well known, calling them [“garbage”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ7bpGaGNd8&ref=redflag.org.au). He recently had their temporary legal status terminated. Trump’s obsession with Minnesota Somali-American congressional representative Ilhan Omar is just creepy; he’s [demanded](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPFKB0TDwfs&ref=redflag.org.au) that she be stripped of her citizenship and deported. Yet, the Democratic Party establishment has proved to be weak defenders of the Somali community, at best, where actions don’t rise to the level of their rhetoric. Kieran Knutson, the working president of the Communication Workers of America (CWA) Local 7250, recently posted on his Facebook page: > The government of the state of Minnesota and the City of Minneapolis are offering NOTHING to stop what both the Governor and Mayor admit is a reign of terror by ICE and other Federal agencies. Walz called it an ‘occupation’; Frey famously called on ICE to ‘get the fuck out!’ So in the absence of any other force or plan to counter this reign of terror—the people of Minneapolis, St Paul, Richfield, St Cloud, and other communities have rightfully taken it upon ourselves to organize resistance to these murderous forces. The fightback has impacted ICE’s operations, but revealed the role of the local Democratic party controlled police forces, according to Knutson: > While ICE has abducted and deported hundreds of Minnesotans - they have also often been delayed, prevented, and defeated in their campaign by this civil resistance. The resistance has also proactively taken it to ICE at the Whipple Federal Building, causing ICE to have to expend a great amount of resources and personnel to protect their base and detention center that otherwise would have gone towards abductions. The response by the State and City governments has been to criminalize and repress the resistance; to offer protection for ICE when the resistance and the communities impacted have confronted the Feds. The only arrests the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) has made during this campaign of terror - is of those resisting ICE. Dan Troccoli, a public school teacher and union activist, recently [told](https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/minneapolis-resistance-trump-ice/?fbclid=IwY2xjawPYkkNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeBPneNsD8TvvYKYfvohaZL6pMmdkkjhgTAqm0hHWsq%5FvahEhxEYw9bds6W88%5Faem%5FyVYE-mSJ6MwBtKP1QuJTUw&ref=redflag.org.au) the *Nation* magazine’s Dave Zirin: > Many people around the city have been going around patrolling and keeping an eye on these agents. There are estimates as high as 10,000 people that have been involved in the city in these efforts in the last six weeks. Given the legacy of the uprisings after George Floyd, people in the city have been activated for years now. I would argue we were Trump’s target for that reason, but it’s not going exactly like they planned, and people need to know that. Among the “unplanned” events were student walkouts at Roosevelt High School following Renee Good’s murder and an ICE invasion of the campus pursuing someone—who later was revealed as a US citizen—as school was breaking for the day. ICE assaulted and gassed the students. The Minneapolis Public Schools administration closed all public schools for several days. The existing Deportation Defense Group, based in the Minneapolis Federation of Education, one of two unions that represent teachers, kicked into action. Troccoli told Zirin: > This past weekend, we had a training at one of our high schools, and there were something like 300 parents and staff mixed together, working together to try and organize in their buildings. At recent meetings of this same network of Unionists in MFE, there have been something like 60 to 70 percent of schools represented. And I would imagine it’s much higher now since Renee’s murder, with more buildings getting activated, involved, mostly out of fear and concern for their students’ safety. For veteran Minnesotan trade union and socialist activist [Kip Hedges](https://workersresist.substack.com/p/whistles-vs-guns-and-tear-gas?utm%5Fsource=share&utm%5Fmedium=android&r=4zu49&fbclid=IwY2xjawPYosZleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETF3YjJGT0ZBN2VNU0tQYWFZc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHgQAKO70DFGosLmkD-lecHtUkgWUjed66TvXeYDLhnJMIhwkvXBuePfIwTSW%5Faem%5FN2L6slyfmNw-Yok3K5Tubw&triedRedirect=true), > Minnesotans are also beginning to go more on the offensive. On Saturday, January 10 thousands of people poured into the streets for an ICE Out of Minnesota rally and march. The crowd was made up of high school students (some of whom had been tear gassed only days earlier at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis), retirees, union members, immigrants and community members. A larger turnout is expected on Friday, 23 January, the date chosen by many faith leaders, union representatives and community activists. [“ICE Out of MN: Day of Truth and Freedom”](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinCities/comments/1qdtbug/ice%5Fout%5Fof%5Fminnesota%5Fday%5Fof%5Ffreedom%5Fand%5Ftruth/?ref=redflag.org.au) calls on all Minnesotans not to go to work, school or go shopping. Auxiliary minister JaNaé Bates Imari, of St. Paul’s Camphor Memorial United Methodist Church, [called](https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-day-of-truth-and-freedom-economic-blackout-ice-operation-metro-surge/?fbclid=IwY2xjawPYpk9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeHk2lAtqvu1E1coNAwgthLdC3MwPm5QxO0PMs%5FFwGYSLJKLDkyr4ypPcUFkE%5Faem%5F9APk%5FaAMCBIS4f1R-Njz5w&ref=redflag.org.au) for Minnesotans to > leverage our [economic power](https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/richfield-target-ice-immigration-raid-corporate-minneapolis/?ref=redflag.org.au), our labor, our prayer for one another. What we have seen and what we have witnessed, what we have all gone through is not normal. \[Renee Good was\] standing up for her neighbor. Her whistle blowing was returned by bullets. We will not, we cannot let that stand. Minnesota will not continue to be [a testing ground](https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/border-patrol-greg-bovino-interview-ice-end-immigration-crackdown-minneapolis/?ref=redflag.org.au) for the kind of fear and violence that is expected for the rest of this country. The day of action is very much modelled after several [“A Day Without an Immigrant”](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/16/515555428/a-day-without-immigrants-promises-a-national-strike-thursday?ref=redflag.org.au) events of past years. The broad array of trade unions, community and immigrant rights groups supporting the day of action is breathtaking and points to how deep the hatred of ICE and the Border Patrol runs in Minnesota right now. I spoke to several long-time and knowledgeable activists in the Twin Cities, who are involved in the daily organising for 23 January, and asked them about their expectations. All of them believe the demonstration will be bigger than the one on 10 January. Many thousands of workers, union and non-union, are expected to take sick, vacation or personal days to attend the march and other actions. Talk of a general strike has caught on as momentum builds towards 23 January, despite the far more cautious and ambiguous [announcements](https://www.facebook.com/minneapolisunions) from the official trade union leadership. We should also keep in mind that many public sector unions that have endorsed 23 January, under heavy political pressure from the Democratic establishment, have also made it clear they are not telling their members to strike. The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1005, for example, which represents Minneapolis’ city bus drivers, in a recent Facebook post disappointingly [told](https://www.facebook.com/ATU1005) its members: > The ATU IS NOT participating in the general strike. While we support the purpose of the rally, we encourage members to engage in alternative forms of protest, such as refraining from shopping or other lawful actions that do not conflict with their work obligations. Yet, several people told me that they wouldn’t be surprised if some workplaces did walk out. Abdikarim Hassan Qazi, a Somali-American rideshare driver, [talking to](https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-day-of-truth-and-freedom-economic-blackout-ice-operation-metro-surge/?fbclid=IwY2xjawPYpk9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeHk2lAtqvu1E1coNAwgthLdC3MwPm5QxO0PMs%5FFwGYSLJKLDkyr4ypPcUFkE%5Faem%5F9APk%5FaAMCBIS4f1R-Njz5w&ref=redflag.org.au) the CBS New affiliate in Minneapolis, called on his fellow drivers to shut down service on 23 January. “We’re facing a tsunami of hate sponsored by our own federal government. The masks are gonna come off. We’re going to hold them responsible for all their actions”. The extensive use of sick days in some workplaces may take on the feel of an actual strike, but we will have to see how things turn out on 23 January and where the struggle goes from there. Meanwhile, education workers and students in [New York City](https://www.instagram.com/p/DTky6tpFONb/?ref=redflag.org.au) are planning on walking out and rallying in solidarity with Minneapolis on 23 January, and activists in many other cities are starting to mobilise, but much more needs to be done. ### The McCarthyite campaign after Bondi URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/the-mccarthyite-campaign-after-bondi/ Last updated: 2026-01-28T22:43:34.000Z Chloe and Emma take down the rightwing, racist campaign against the Palestine movement since the Bondi massacre. NB: Since we recorded this episode, the Greens have indicated they will vote down the Hate Speech bill. ### Gaza: What ceasefire? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/gaza-what-ceasefire/ Last updated: 2026-02-06T04:43:12.000Z Ahmad Abu Saadi celebrated when the ceasefire was announced last October. In late December, he [married](https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/loss-is-not-always-in-death/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) his wife Walaa Jaha in a small ceremony in a Gaza displacement camp, attended by those left of their loved ones. Missing were all five of his brothers, killed during the genocide. The couple were both 20 years old. Three days later, a wall collapsed onto their tent and Walaa was killed as they lay together in bed. In videos and photos of him afterwards, Ahmad lies on their mattress with a pool of blood next to him, refusing to move from the place his wife was killed. While politicians and media in the West attempt to paint a picture of the end of a war and a new era of peace, in reality, Gazans are entering a new phase of hell. Since the ceasefire was signed, more than 449 Palestinians have been killed. Israel has breached the terms of the ceasefire at least 969 times. Thousands of tents sit among the bones of bombed buildings, and under the rubble are an estimated 9,000 bodies. Israel controls more than 50 percent of Gaza, and has systematically destroyed 2,500 buildings since the ceasefire, some of them more than 270 metres outside of the “yellow line” demarcating Israeli control. Palestinians like Niveen Nofal, 35, are being forced to watch as their neighbourhoods are flattened. “Our hopes and dreams have been turned into mounds of rubble”, she [told](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/12/world/middleeast/israel-cease-fire-gaza-demolition.html?smid=nytcore-android-share&ref=redflag.org.au) the *New York Times*. The so-called yellow line through which Israel demarcates its occupation remained invisible at first. Then, Israel began dropping yellow concrete blocks outside tents and homes. Those blocks now mark the line, and anyone who approaches can be shot and killed by Israeli troops. Shortly after the ceasefire began, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, [urged](https://www.palestinechronicle.com/israeli-ministers-call-to-shoot-children-and-donkeys-near-gazas-yellow-line/?ref=redflag.org.au) soldiers to shoot “children and donkeys” who approach the line. Israeli troops have also entered Palestinian-controlled areas to shoot and kill Palestinians. And the missiles haven’t stopped. In November, the Israeli military [launched](https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/liveblog/2025/11/22/live-israel-3?ref=redflag.org.au) a wave of missile and drone strikes at northern and central Gaza, killing 22\. In January, missiles pounded into the land around tents and killed at least thirteen. Al Jazeera has [reported](https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/liveblog/2026/1/16/live-israel-continues-deadly-gaza-attacks-as-deal-moves-into-phase-two?ref=redflag.org.au) that, up to 14 January, Israel had attacked Gaza on 82 of the previous 97 days. Since November, storms have pelted Gaza. Extreme winds have repeatedly destroyed hundreds of tents, forcing people to construct new ones out of inferior materials because Israel is [preventing](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/20/look-at-us-with-mercy-displaced-palestinians-dread-onset-of-harsh-winter?CMP=Share%5FiOSApp%5FOther&ref=redflag.org.au) tent poles from entering the territory. Now, tents sit in deep mud. Disease is spreading through these squalid encampments, which are periodically completely flooded. Many, in particular children, are dying of [hypothermia](https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/1/13/eight-dead-in-gaza-as-storm-brings-extreme-cold-collapses-buildings?ref=redflag.org.au). On top of this, the bombed shells of buildings are unstable, and some have collapsed, killing their inhabitants. Still, people with nowhere else to go are forced to sleep in partially destroyed buildings that lean dangerously. In early January, Eman Abu Zayed wrote that the ceasefire had “invisibilised” Palestinians. This is undoubtedly true, in that many political figures in the West have used it to argue that the war is over and the demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine should end. In particular, the ceasefire has obscured Israel’s ongoing role in the killing of Palestinians. Storms, flooding and freezing temperatures can be presented as natural disasters. But Israel is blocking the construction materials and aid that would enable Palestinians to survive these events. At the end of November, UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric [told](https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166462?ref=redflag.org.au) reporters: “Not a single hospital in Gaza is fully functional”. Only eighteen of the territory’s 36 hospitals are even partially functioning, after many were targeted for bombing during the most intense months of the genocide. On 15 January, the United States government announced the beginning of the second phase of the ceasefire. The same day, Israeli forces bombed two houses belonging to the al-Hawli and the al-Jarou families in the central town of Deir el-Balah, killing six people, including a 16-year-old. The new phase will be carried out by a committee overseen by a “board of peace”, which US President Donald Trump will chair. The board will include Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, US special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Tony Blair, who led Britain into the Iraq war. Trump, Kushner and Witkoff have been some of the key backers of Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza. Their government, as did the Democratic administration of Joe Biden during the first phase of the genocide, gave Israel’s regime carte blanche to wreak as much destruction as it wanted. Now, these monsters have put themselves in charge of Gaza’s future. Ali Shaath, a former deputy minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA), will head the broader committee. It’s widely being described as technocratic, staffed by bureaucrats rather than political figures. But the personnel have been approved by the United States, which means they are made up of those they know they can bend to their will. Many of those now staffing the committee were formerly bureaucrats for the PA. The PA has long governed the West Bank as a de facto cop for Israel, suppressing Palestinian dissent and [arresting](https://www.newarab.com/news/west-bank-settlers-attack-farm-hamas-slams-pa-arrest-campaign?amp&ref=redflag.org.au) political figures who oppose it and Israel. It [runs](https://redflag.org.au/article/palestinian-authority-complicit-occupied-west-bank) the largest per-capita police force in the world, and uses it to conduct mass arrests, surveillance and repression of Palestinians on behalf of Israel. And before 7 October, the Fatah leadership of the PA collaborated with Israel in the oppression and killing of Palestinians in Gaza. The PA faces a [legitimacy crisis](https://theconversation.com/the-palestinian-authority-is-facing-a-legitimacy-crisis-can-it-be-reformed-to-govern-a-palestinian-state-263042?ref=redflag.org.au) and governs in a top-down manner, which has led to protests in recent years. Even so, Israel has [refused](https://www.timesofisrael.com/gaza-technocratic-panel-meets-for-first-time-as-officials-fear-its-hobbled-from-get-go/?ref=redflag.org.au) to equip it with even the basic civil servants necessary for it to begin administration. Trump, Netanyahu and Blair will have nothing but horrors in store for the Palestinians. The committee is unlikely to stand up to them seriously. In these dark hours, those who stand with Palestine can’t look away. To do so would be to let the criminals who run our world get away with the worst crimes of our generation. ### The new phase of colonisation in the West Bank URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-new-phase-of-colonisation-in-the-west-bank/ Last updated: 2026-01-19T02:10:53.000Z Classes were in session on 6 January at Birzeit University, near Ramallah in the West Bank, when Israeli soldiers entered the campus firing tear gas, sound bombs and live rounds on students and staff. [Al Jazeera reported](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/6/israeli-forces-injure-11-palestinian-in-university-raid-in-ramallah?ref=redflag.org.au) that 41 people were injured, including hospitalisations for five who inhaled tear gas, three hit by shrapnel and three shot in the legs. Ghaied Hijaz, an activist and Birzeit University graduate, told *Red Flag* that more than 150 soldiers stormed the university: > This is not the first time \[Israeli forces\] break into the university campus. But this time was different. For the past ten years, they would break in during the night. But to come in during the day when the university is full of students, shooting live bullets and tear gas, is something that was surprising to all of us, because that didn’t happen since the Second Intifada \[a period of Palestinian revolt against Israeli occupation from 2000 to 2005\]. In the north, the Israeli military’s Operation Iron Wall has been a campaign of total destruction in the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps. [Middle East Eye reported](https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/genocide-continues-gaza-west-bank-pushed-new-nakba?ref=redflag.org.au) that 40,000 refugees were expelled in early 2025 and that entire neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble. Israel has broken another boundary: these areas were supposed to be under Palestinian control, and now they have a permanent Israeli military presence. Things have shifted decisively in the West Bank since October 2023\. The violence and theft of Palestinian land have increased to levels that were perhaps untenable a few years ago. The support that Israel has received for its genocide in Gaza has been taken as a green light for stomping on the rest of Palestine. Al Jazeera reports that, since October 2023, at least 1,102 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and about 11,000 injured, either by Israeli military forces or by settlers looking to steal more land; around 21,000 more are locked in Israeli prisons. More than 2,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented more than 1,800 attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank in 2025 alone. The goal is to eradicate Palestine “between the Sea and the Jordan” river, as the original charter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party reads. For this, the West Bank is crucial, as it is where an imagined Palestinian state would be formed with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel is now taking the opportunity wipe Palestine off the map. Armed settlers roam the hilly West Bank countryside, terrorising Palestinians trying to protect their homes. They are regularly backed by soldiers and have the full support of Netanyahu’s government. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, himself a settler, has been making it easier for settlers to obtain weapons: some 230,000 gun licences have been distributed in Israel in the two years to November 2025, as [reported by Drop Site News](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-organized-settler-militias-west-bank-palestinians-funding-arms?ref=redflag.org.au). The settlers are at the front line of stealing Palestinian land. Since October 2023, at least 152 new settler outposts have been set up, making up more than 42 percent of all outposts established since 1996, according to monitoring by Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now. The outposts are not officially sanctioned by the Israeli government, but many eventually become recognised as settlements. On top of the new outposts, the Israeli government approved eleven new official settlements in December of 2025, adding to dozens of others in the past two years. By exploiting an Ottoman Empire-era law, Israel “declares” land owned by Palestinians “state land” as long as it hasn’t been cultivated. The “state lands” are then often used for further development of settlements. Israeli human rights group B’Tselem [estimated in 2010](https://www.btselem.org/download/201007%5Fby%5Fhook%5Fand%5Fby%5Fcrook%5Feng.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) that about 16 percent of the West Bank has been stolen in this way. Peace Now recorded that at least another 40 square kilometres have been taken since then, with 2024 the largest year since they began recording in 1998. The most significant ongoing land theft is the imminent development of the E1 zone, stretching east from the outskirts of Jerusalem. It was approved by the Israeli government in August 2025, but the plan had been in limbo for twenty years because it was considered too much for Western states to stomach. Now, it’s going ahead, and developers are bidding for the right to build 3,401 housing units to connect existing Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem to others deep in the West Bank. The settling of E1 will plug the hole in the separation barrier, a concrete wall Israel has built through the West Bank stretching as high as nine metres. It will physically separate East Jerusalem from the West Bank and cut off the northern part of the West Bank from the south. The point is to establish “facts on the ground” that kill any possibility for a Palestinian state. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, also a settler, put it bluntly as he announced the approval: > This reality finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state, because there is nothing to recognise and no one to recognise. Anyone in the world who tries today to recognise a Palestinian state will receive an answer from us on the ground. If the two-state solution was ever anything more than a fantasy, soon it will be a geographical impossibility. All of this is an acceleration of a process that has always been part of the Zionist project. In 1948, Israel was established on top of most of historic Palestine. In 1967, Israel defeated Jordan in the Six-Day War and began its occupation of the West Bank. Since then, Israel has progressively encroached further and further, eating away at the area Palestinians have access to or control over. B’Tselem’s 2010 [*By Hook and By Crook* report](https://www.btselem.org/download/201007%5Fby%5Fhook%5Fand%5Fby%5Fcrook%5Feng.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) includes invaluable documentation of the mechanisms and policies Israel has used to this end. Israel immediately began requisitioning land for settlements, claiming them as necessary for security and military functions. By 1981, 53 settlements had been established in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That year, the Israeli government adopted a policy known as the [Drobles plan](https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-186771/?ref=redflag.org.au), named after its author Matityahu Drobles, then chairman of the World Zionist Organization settlement department. It spelled out in no uncertain terms the goal for the West Bank, which Israel calls “Judea and Samaria”. The policy pre-empted Smotrich’s above-quoted boast about the E1 zone by several decades: > The state-owned lands and the uncultivated barren lands in Judea and Samaria ought to be seized right away, with the purpose of settling the areas between and around the centres occupied by the \[Palestinians\] so as to reduce to the minimum the danger of an additional Arab state being established in these territories. Being cut off by Jewish settlements, the \[Palestinian\] population will find it difficult to form a territorial and political continuity. There mustn’t be even the shadow of a doubt about our intention to keep the territories of Judea and Samaria for good. The Drobles plan makes gestures towards “the cohabitation of Jews and Arabs side by side”, but no such peaceful coexistence was meaningfully pursued. Insofar as the Jewish and Palestinian populations in the West Bank are “side by side”, it is on the two unequal sides of apartheid. Israeli settlers are subject to civil law; Palestinians are under military law. Settlers get highways built for them and enjoy total freedom of movement; Palestinians are restricted to slower roads blocked with military checkpoints and require Israeli-issued permits to travel. Israelis have political rights; Palestinians in the West Bank have none. After 1979, Israel slowed down (but didn’t stop) the military requisitions of West Bank land and switched to the “state land” declaration strategy. Most declarations were made between 1979 and 1992, and are where most settlements near built-up Palestinian areas were established. The carve-up was codified in the signing of the second Oslo accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1995\. This defined three areas in the West Bank: Area C, under total Israeli control, was the only geographically contiguous and the largest area, making up 60 percent of the land; Area B is jointly administered by Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), and was 22 percent of the area; Area A is the smallest—18 percent—and the only area ostensibly under Palestinian control through the PA. It was a stitch-up heavily in favour of Israel, but it did not end there. Peace Now estimates that, from 1994 to 2006, the municipal areas of 92 settlements were expanded in defiance of Oslo. And settlers have continued establishing outposts. During the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, construction began on the separation barrier, with a route designed to claim even more land for settlements and to make movement for Palestinians even more difficult. The barrier now spans almost the entire length of the West Bank. To build it, Israel routinely requisitioned land and demolished Palestinian homes. In 2005, when Israel removed its settlements from the Gaza Strip, it also retreated from four of them in the north of the West Bank. In March 2023, Netanyahu’s government re-authorised those four settlements. If these decades were death by a thousand cuts, then what Israel is doing now is hacking and slashing. While all eyes have been on Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank has accelerated. Israel’s aim is total control and ownership, from the river to the sea. ### Secret police and murder in the streets: year one of Trump’s deportation regime URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/secret-police-and-murder-in-the-streets-year-one-of-trumps-deportation-regime/ Last updated: 2026-02-06T04:43:03.000Z Renee Good, a legal observer in Minneapolis, was [murdered](https://redflag.org.au/article/ice-murder-sends-shockwaves-through-the-us) by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross in the first week of January. After [dropping off](https://people.com/renee-good-dropped-6-year-old-off-at-school-before-ice-encounter-11881867?ref=redflag.org.au) her child at school, she and a small group of others felt a moral compulsion to protect their neighbours. So they documented the military-style raid of Gestapo-like masked goons in a residential community. ICE met them with brutal force. Multiple agents shouted contradictory commands while attempting to rip Good out of the car. She tried to drive away, but Ross shot her in the face. Bystanders pleaded for them to give her medical attention, but they refused. She was untreated for precious minutes until paramedics arrived. Almost immediately, US President Donald Trump falsely claimed she ran over an officer. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem smeared her as a domestic terrorist. Vice President J.D. Vance promised “absolute immunity” for the murderous ICE agent, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept state and local officials out of the investigation There have been at least [thirteen](https://www.wsj.com/us-news/videos-show-how-ice-vehicle-stops-can-escalate-to-shootings-caf17601?ref=redflag.org.au) instances of federal agents firing into civilian vehicles since July, but this episode of someone being murdered in broad daylight sparked a big response. A [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9CJY5p0xz4&ref=redflag.org.au) of the shooting went viral that day and people came out to protest at the site of her killing as well as around the country. These protests have been broad and bitter, at the centre of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. There was enough pressure from below for Mayor Jacob Frey to [tell ICE](https://www.startribune.com/mayor-jacob-freys-remarks-after-ice-agents-fatally-shoots-woman-in-minneapolis/601559829?ref=redflag.org.au) to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis” the day the shooting happened. Immigration agents are still there, asking protesters if they have [not learned](https://www.rawstory.com/renee-good-2674874951/?ref=redflag.org.au) what happens when they watch them, and implying that they might end up dead like Renee Good. The Justice Department has opted not to conduct a criminal investigation of the shooting but instead investigate [Good’s widow](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/doj-attorneys-resign-minneapolis-ice-shooting?ref=redflag.org.au) for her activism. This is the new normal one year into Trump’s second administration. Paramilitary police forces descend on migrant communities, brutalising targeted minorities, protesters and bystanders. ### **Shock and awe** The murder in Minneapolis came during the largest raid yet, targeting Somalis and Somali Americans in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Dubbed “Operation Metro Surge”, the attack brought more than 2,000 agents into the area, and in the wake of recent protests, the Trump administration then sent [hundreds more](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/twin-cities-on-edge-as-ice-raids-ignite-fear-and-protests?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=In%20recent%20days%2C%20hundreds%20of,St.%20Paul%20police%20departments%20combined.). There are now more immigration agents than regular police in the Twin Cities. Last June, the [template](https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/11/04/us-ice-abuses-in-los-angeles-set-stage-for-other-cities?ref=redflag.org.au) for this onslaught was set in Los Angeles. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) tactical commander Gregory Bovino led mass raids using highly confrontational tactics against migrants and protesters. It marked a switch from investigating individuals with known immigration issues to conducting rapid raids in migrant neighbourhoods to racially profile people for quick interrogation and arrest before “turning and burning” to the next target. The questionable legality of the assault did not hide a clear strategy: use overwhelming force, arrest at will, and create a political crisis for city administrators. Border Patrol took control over this operation, bringing its distinctive brand of violence to a major Democratic-run city. Every opportunity was used to stoke confrontation, extending to [shows of force](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-14/border-patrol-conducts-immigration-operation-outside-gov-newsom-event?ref=redflag.org.au) at the governor’s press conference. This launched Bovino’s career to new heights, and he expanded operations to more cities. The crescendo of “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago came when hundreds of militarised federal agents raided an apartment complex. They busted in, rappelling from helicopters and dropping stun grenades. They arrested citizens and non-citizens alike. More than just shock and awe, the operation was planned to produce an [action-movie-style trailer](https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1973796727615598738?ref=redflag.org.au) of the raid to promote their work. “Operation Patriot 2.0” ripped through Massachusetts. “Operation Charlotte’s Web” hit North Carolina. The brutal “Swamp Sweep” terrorised New Orleans. People with [no criminal background](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/04/us/ice-arrests-criminal-records-data.html?ref=redflag.org.au) were the biggest victims of these urban raids. This distinct mix of terror and spectacle became the hallmark of the regime. Washington, D.C., became a testing ground for [combining objectives](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/us/trump-immigration-dc-crime.html?ref=redflag.org.au). They fabricated a crime crisis to allow a federal government takeover of the city and leveraged this manufactured crisis to force local police into immigration duty. One day after the murder of Renee Good, Kristi Noem announced “Operation Salvo” targeting Dominicans in New York City, and we have yet to see its scale. ### **An increasing number of raids** Early in Trump’s second term, [racial profiling](https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/supreme-courts-decision-racial-profiling-immigration-raids/?ref=redflag.org.au) became openly accepted, and [watchdog](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/us/politics/trump-civil-rights-homeland-security-deportations.html?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=Immigration%20Looks%20Like-,Trump%20Shuts%20Down%203%20Watchdog%20Agencies%20Overseeing%20Immigration%20Crackdown,Mr.) organisations were shut down. Immigration courts are now open [hunting grounds](https://www.npr.org/2025/12/22/nx-s1-5583971/trump-ice-immigration-arrests-deportation-no-shows?ref=redflag.org.au) to arrest migrants, leaving people in a double bind of weighing up if it is more dangerous to make or miss an appointment. Small armies in full military gear descend on motorists in petrol stations, day labourers waiting in Home Depot parking lots, workers at construction sites and anywhere else migrants might be. These arrests are getting [shockingly violent](https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2026/01/09/us/dhs-immigration-crackdown-ice-arrests-protests-vis/index.html?ref=redflag.org.au). It is common for masked agents to smash car windows and body slam people. Protesters are routinely brutalised and even targeted later. In one instance, agents caused a car crash near the site of raids and protests. They let the other driver go but later decided to label him a dangerous activist who impeded their work. A Border Patrol [SWAT team](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ws1r6CaSXs&ref=redflag.org.au) used explosives to raid his house and terrorise his family while searching for him. All charges against him were dropped, but the agency used the raid as an opportunity to film a promotional [video](https://x.com/CMDROpAtLargeCA/status/1945569571122843895?s=20&ref=redflag.org.au) to threaten protesters. Immigration agents even [arrest politicians](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/new-york-democratic-politicians-arrested-ice-jail-manhattan-2025-09-19/?ref=redflag.org.au) who question their actions. The administration has looked for every opportunity to expand its definition of criminality. Federal agents targeted Palestine solidarity activists for arrest and deportation, using their political solidarity as grounds to threaten legal status. One activist, Leqaa Kordia, remains detained [almost a year](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-last-columbia-protester-in-ice-detention?ref=redflag.org.au) after her arrest. The regime stripped the [legal status](https://www.npr.org/2025/12/23/g-s1-103001/trump-immigration-deportation-migration-legal-status?ref=redflag.org.au) of more than 1.6 million people, mostly Venezuelans and Haitians, criminalising them overnight. Travel bans were implemented for a wide range of countries, followed by [pausing ](https://www.npr.org/2025/12/03/g-s1-100218/trump-administration-halts-immigration-19-nations?ref=redflag.org.au)all citizenship, residency and benefits applications for people from these countries. The only group with increased access appears to be white South Africans, in a nod to white supremacists. Mass surveillance is playing an increasingly important role in fabricating new criminals. [Facial recognition](https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/ice-facial-recognition-app-mobile-fortify-dfdd00bf?ref=redflag.org.au) and [licence plate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQxw9fhmBv4&ref=redflag.org.au) tracking systems are used to identify patterns immigration authorities deem suspicious, creating an ever expanding list of targets. ### **A domestic army** The already bloated border enforcement regime has exploded to [catastrophic proportions](https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/enforcement-regime/?ref=redflag.org.au). This year, the administration fused a key pillar of the repressive state into a secret police force under opaque leadership. A slew of [executive orders](https://forumtogether.org/article/trumps-executive-actions-escalating-immigration-enforcement-and-mass-deportation/?ref=redflag.org.au) created a unified military force with wide parameters on who it could target. The scope stretches beyond the vast Department of Homeland Security. The conservative Cato Institute has documented how tens of thousands of officers from [other agencies](https://www.cato.org/blog/ice-has-diverted-over-25000-officers-their-jobs?ref=redflag.org.au) get diverted for immigration blitzes. This is in addition to 900 local law enforcement agencies that [deputised](https://maxwellcommons.substack.com/p/everythings-ice) their officers to act as immigration agents this year Soon after, they directed this force internally to terrorise major cities. The attack on Los Angeles served as a prelude to the funding expansion for the deportation machine. It is set to be one of the [biggest armies in the world.](https://inthesetimes.com/article/ice-immigration-chicago-trump-broadview?ref=redflag.org.au) The budget was tripled for ICE, bolstered with 10,000 new agents. It adds 10 percent to the already massive CBP budget for an additional 3,000 agents. As the Trump administration rushes to make use of these funds, successful applicants are offered US$50,000 sign-on bonuses and student loan relief. The nature of these recruits is predictably disgusting. ICE [uses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0iPoV81ess&t=6s&ref=redflag.org.au) openly racist and xenophobic advertising strategies, which it plans to expand through a US$100 million “wartime recruitment” advertising [blitz](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/12/31/ice-wartime-recruitment-push/?ref=redflag.org.au) this year. And during the rush to hire as many as possible, vetting and training standards are [dropped](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/new-ice-recruits-showed-training-full-vetting-rcna238739?ref=redflag.org.au) to get enough warm bodies armed and ready to terrorise communities. The wartime recruitment is paired with wartime wares—ICE weapons spending increased by more than [600 percent](https://popular.info/p/ice-boosts-weapons-spending-700?ref=redflag.org.au) this year. ### **The damage** Trump set a goal of deporting 1 million immigrants in a year. DHS is claiming 600,000 victims, with another 1.9 million “self-deported”. The official figures on self-deportations are unreliable, but the government wants big deportation numbers. The architect of the immigration regime, Stephen Miller, [cracked heads](https://www.wsj.com/us-news/protests-los-angeles-immigrants-trump-f5089877?ref=redflag.org.au) at local ICE offices for missed quotas, and Border Patrol officers were put [in charge](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-plans-install-border-patrol-officials-lead-aggressive-migrant-cr-rcna240102?ref=redflag.org.au) of more ICE offices to encourage more aggressive tactics. However, it is wrong to see this as a failure for the administration. There has been a 60 percent increase in total arrests since the June offensive in Los Angeles. ICE now arrests [four times](https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/12/28/ice-deportations-data-trump-arrests/?ref=redflag.org.au) as many people outside of jails as it did during Trump’s first term. A record number of migrants are jailed in shoddy, overcrowded detention centres, creating the [deadliest year](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/04/ice-2025-deaths-timeline?ref=redflag.org.au) for immigrant prisons in decades. The array of detention centres has expanded to some of the least habitable sites imaginable, such as an [abandoned airport](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyrnrnxy7yo?ref=redflag.org.au) in the Florida Everglades. They aim to double bed capacity, but this will not improve conditions in the labyrinth of for-profit immigrant detention centres, where cutting corners is the business model. ### **Beyond the border** Ending mass migration is the first priority listed in Trump’s [National Security Strategy](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) document, and it ties this into its broader objective to dominate the Western Hemisphere. The US aims to “enlist” regional allies and to “expand” US influence to dominate less compliant countries. Trump readily enlisted El Salvador by outsourcing some of his most grotesque imprisonment work to the hard-right regime. The black zones of [CECOT](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-conditions-inside-the-infamous-el-salvador-prison-where-deported-migrants-are-held?ref=redflag.org.au) are even harder to see into than the worst onshore for-profit prisons within the US. Threats to turn financial aid on and off based on election results help keep other allies in the hemisphere, from Argentina to Honduras, deeply in the fold of US interests. Every opportunity is being used to increase pressure on regional players. Even though Mexico aided Trump’s efforts by sending massive troop deployments to both of its borders, the US regime thinks Mexico could always do more. Demonising migrants as dangerous members of terrorist drug cartels served as a rhetorical battering ram to justify further destabilising the Venezuelan regime. Kidnapping migrants and shipping them to gulags preceded the bombing and hijacking of boats in international waters and the eventual kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro. Harkening to racist tropes about [Europe](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/23/trump-un-general-assembly-speech?ref=redflag.org.au) “being ruined” by migrants, Trump demands they follow his path towards even more draconian border regimes. It seems to be [working](https://www.afr.com/world/europe/trump-urged-europe-to-halt-migrant-decay-leaders-are-scrambling-20251211-p5nmoi?ref=redflag.org.au) as it aligns with insurgent right-wing forces across the continent: 27 countries signed a statement supporting suspending human rights and deporting migrants to third countries. They are looking to emulate a system long admired by Trump, Australia’s horrific [Pacific ](https://redflag.org.au/node/5566)solution. ### **The fightback** Protests erupted almost immediately after the killing of Renee Good and have not yet stopped. They keep [pushing](https://apnews.com/video/protesters-face-off-and-chase-federal-agents-from-minnesota-neighborhood-as-tensions-flare-9d185f0f4b87426db0b03e70f1c089a7?ref=redflag.org.au) immigration agents out of the neighbourhood where she was killed. They respond to pepper spray by [pelting](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/18/snow-midwest-ice-raids-trump?ref=redflag.org.au) agents with snowballs. Minnesotans continue to mobilise mass demonstrations, disrupt hotels where ICE agents sleep, organise school walkouts and build networks of rapid responders against the onslaught of the deportation machine. On the weekend after her death, more than a [thousand protests](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/10/protests-ice-renee-nicole-good-philadelphia?ref=redflag.org.au) exploded across the country. In the face of rampant brutality and escalating repression, heroic people keep fighting. Los Angeles showed what a [rebellion](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-battle-of-los-angeles) against ICE can look like. Chicago continues to provide a [model](https://redflag.org.au/article/chicagos-fightback-against-trumps-deportation-machine) for sustained resistance. Maybe this moment in Minneapolis is the beginning of a turn towards deeper struggle. Unions and community organisations are calling for a [city-wide strike](https://inthesetimes.com/article/minneapolis-renee-good-ice-shooting-labor-unions?ref=redflag.org.au) against ICE on 23 January. This will be an opportunity and a test of momentum. ### Defending the Palestine movement from slander URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/defending-the-palestine-movement-from-slander/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T05:13:31.000Z In the wake of the terrible massacre at Bondi, carried out by supporters of ISIS, Labor governments, the far right and sections of the media have launched a renewed assault on the Palestine solidarity movement. Rather than confronting the real sources of racist violence, they have cynically weaponised a tragedy to smear a mass movement that has, for over two years, mobilised hundreds of thousands against genocide in Gaza. The accusations have reached fever pitch, with the *Australian* newspaper leading the charge. A particularly egregious example came last week from Megan Goldin, former Middle East correspondent and novelist. In an article titled “The march to the Bondi massacre began at the Sydney Town Hall”, Goldin directly linked pro-Palestine marches with the massacre. She maintained that the movement against Israel’s offensive in Gaza was somehow motivated by hate. In a fabulous exercise of minimising the obvious, Goldin merely mentioned the slaughter in Gaza. The 70,000 plus Palestinian’s murdered by Israel could not be a justification for the demonstrations, she argued. Rather, the only possible reason for the unprecedentedly large anti-war demonstrations is hatred, foreign influence and terrorist sympathies. The rest of the article rested on racist assertions and outright slander to back up such claims. That a speaker at one of the Australian rallies once “studied in Qatar”, the country where some Hamas leaders lived, was enough “evidence” for Goldin. The Palestine movement did not emerge from hatred. It emerged from opposition to slaughter and has been led by people who understand the long history of Israel’s violence toward the Palestinians. This history was why our movement was determined to move quickly. We understood from the very beginning that Israel would massacre thousands of Palestinians after Hamas’ 7 October attack. We were entirely justified in such a prediction. Indeed, many of us underestimated the lengths to which Israel was prepared to go. We didn’t anticipate the degree of depravity enacted upon the besieged population of Gaza. Since 7 October, the Israeli state has unleashed a campaign of mass killing that has left tens of thousands, at least, dead. Indeed, Israel’s leading English-language newspaper, *Haaretz*, argues the number of dead could be more like [100,000](https://archive.is/o/QTmYi/https:/www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-26/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/100-000-dead-what-we-know-about-gazas-true-death-toll/00000197-ad6b-d6b3-abf7-edfbb1e20000?ref=redflag.org.au). Hospitals have been destroyed, entire neighbourhoods levelled and famine imposed as a weapon of war. It was this horror that motivated people to take to the streets demanding an end to the bombing, an end to the siege and justice for Palestinians. To call this antisemitism is to drain the word of all meaning. Antisemitism is a real and deadly form of racism, with a long and horrific history. It culminated in the Holocaust and continues today in violent attacks on Jewish people and institutions. But opposing a state’s actions—even fiercely—is not racism. Opposing genocide is not hatred. Demanding freedom for Palestinians does not require hostility to Jews, and in practice it has generated the opposite. From its earliest days, the Palestine movement has involved large numbers of Jewish people. Jewish anti-Zionists, socialists, students, Holocaust survivors and their [descendants](https://archive.is/QTmYi?ref=redflag.org.au#selection-3621.0-3633.201) have marched, spoken, organised and been arrested alongside Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike. Indeed, many Jewish people have asserted that it is because of their knowledge of the history of the Holocaust that they feel compelled to take a stand. And many Jewish people and organisations have protested precisely because they reject the claim that Israel speaks in their name, or that Jewish safety can ever be secured through apartheid, ethnic cleansing and mass murder. This is one of the movement’s greatest strengths—and one of the reasons it is so threatening to those invested in Israel’s impunity. The presence of Jewish activists explodes the lie that criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. It shows that the real dividing line is not between Jews and non-Jews, but between those who defend oppression and those who resist it. The reality is that the Palestine movement is a mass movement. It reflects Australian society as it actually exists—multicultural, multiracial and deeply connected to the world beyond our borders. Yet, again and again, the movement is judged not by what it does, but by what it refuses to do—namely, endorse Israel’s narrative that its violence is “self-defence”, that Palestinian resistance is uniquely illegitimate and that the lives of Palestinians are expendable. In a political culture in which unquestioning support for Western-aligned states is the norm, dissent is treated as extremism. The thinly veiled panic about “migrants”, “foreigners” and “Middle Eastern influence” echoes some of the oldest racist tropes in Australian politics. The “war on terror” propaganda, a Western ruling-class campaign to drum up support for war in the Middle East, justified its own brutality through reference to the dangers of a terrorist fifth column in Western societies. It is no accident that Muslims and Arabs are singled out, portrayed as inherently dangerous, disloyal or prone to violence. Such narratives served, and continue to serve, our rulers. They turn our attention away from imperial violence. Crucially, the movement has consistently stood against all forms of racism, including antisemitism. When antisemitic incidents occur, they are condemned. When far-right forces attempt to exploit the crisis, they are opposed. This is not accidental. It flows from the movement’s politics: a commitment to universal liberation and opposition to all systems of oppression. Those now attacking the Palestine movement are not interested in combating antisemitism or preventing violence. If they were, they would confront the rise of the far right, the mainstreaming of racist conspiracy theories, and the brutalisation produced by a society riven with inequality and alienation. Instead, they target a movement that has challenged imperialism, exposed Western hypocrisy and mobilised solidarity on a scale not seen in decades. The attempt to link the Palestine movement to the Bondi massacre is obscene. It diverts attention from the real causes of racist violence and seeks to silence opposition to genocide through fear and intimidation. We should reject it outright. Defending the Palestine movement is not just about defending one cause. It is about defending the right to protest, the right to dissent and the right to stand against mass murder without being smeared as racist or violent. In a world where atrocities are increasingly normalised, that defence could not be more urgent. ### Protest against war criminal Israeli President Isaac Herzog URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/protest-against-war-criminal-israeli-president-isaac-herzog/ Last updated: 2026-02-01T01:30:54.000Z > *To receive updates on planned protests against Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who will arrive in Australia in the coming weeks at the invitation of the federal government, join the rapid-response network:* [Yes, I want to protest](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfA87D1WrHHFZAyYO1JU9Fms-zRpSF%5FEW7ZVEziirWYWH3%5Fcg/viewform?ref=redflag.org.au) --- Isaac Herzog is about to arrive in Australia. As president of Israel for the duration of the genocide in Gaza, Herzog bears responsibility for the deaths of more than 71,000 Gazans, the forced displacement of more than 2 million people and a massive escalation in settler violence in the West Bank. In a just world, the moment Herzog stepped onto the tarmac, he would be detained and face prosecution for war crimes committed under his watch. Instead, he will be welcomed by our political leaders with open arms. Throughout the genocide, Herzog has consistently justified Israel’s targeting of civilians. In October 2023, [he declared](https://x.com/OmarSShakir/status/1713379904392204493?lang=en&ref=redflag.org.au): “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible \[for the 7 October attack on Israel\]. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true ... And we will fight until we break their backbone”. Two months later, he was photographed [signing bombs](https://x.com/declassifiedUK/status/1963911689264312648?ref=redflag.org.au) set to be dropped on Gaza. Herzog’s claim that “there are no uninvolved in Gaza” was a slogan taken up by Israeli soldiers. It was a [rallying cry](https://www.instagram.com/p/C0iu9ZJoouQ/?ref=redflag.org.au) anda justification for targeted executions of aid workers, journalists and children. Statements made by Herzog were included as evidence in the suit filed by South Africa with the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide. In September last year, a [UN commission of inquiry](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds?ref=redflag.org.au) found Herzog, along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, guilty of inciting genocide. Bigotry has been a feature of Herzog’s political career. In 2016, [he reportedly told a meeting of activists](https://www.972mag.com/no-herzog-arab-lovers-is-the-last-thing-you-can-say-about-labor/?ref=redflag.org.au) that he didn’t want his party to be seen as a bunch of “Arab lovers”, and his election campaign of that year accused Netanyahu of not being *harsh enough* towards Palestinians. He boasted about being a veteran of the [Unit 8200](https://electronicintifada.net/tags/unit-8200?ref=redflag.org.au) “Israeli Big Brother” spy agency known for its mass surveillance and blackmail of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. In 2018, Herzog parroted the line of the most unhinged Jewish extremists when he [said on national television](https://mondoweiss.net/2018/06/israeli-intermarriage-solution/?ref=redflag.org.au) that Jewish people in the US being “married or coupled with non-Jewish partners” was “an actual plague” requiring “a campaign, a solution” to combat. Nothing can justify the Albanese government extending an invitation for Herzog to visit Australia. The Israeli president is coming to cynically exploit the tragedy at Bondi to rehabilitate public support for the apartheid, ethno-supremacist regime in Israel. But the past two years of ongoing genocide against the Palestinians cannot be swept under the rug so easily. A coalition, including a number of Jewish activist organisations, is planning nationwide protests for Herzog’s arrival. Join us to send a message loud and clear that war criminals are not welcome here. --- *Shovan Bhattarai is the Sydney convener of Students for Palestine.* ### Anti-democratic hate speech bill must fail URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/anti-democratic-hate-speech-bill-must-fail/ Last updated: 2026-01-21T06:59:23.000Z Labor is rushing through one of the most significant attacks on freedom of speech and association in decades. The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026, hastily assembled after the Bondi shooting, is set to be introduced to parliament on 19 January. Labor has allowed only 72 hours for the public to make submissions about it, and it will be introduced to parliament just four days after the closure of submissions. Among many other attacks, the bill will give the Home Affairs minister, the Australian Federal Police minister and the ASIO head sweeping powers to ban organisations, jail individuals and prevent migrants from entering the country based on broad and vague criteria. It will also make it a criminal offence to engage in conduct “intending to promote or incite hatred” of a person or group because of their race, colour or national or ethnic origin. The Liberals are set to vote against the legislation because of their concern for the free speech of Christian bigots. This gives the Greens the power to pass it or block it. To wave it through would be a terrible concession to the climate of intimidation that has been created by the right, and it would be a historic blow to democratic rights. The Greens, as of 15 January, have not yet decided whether to block it or to pass it with amendments. These amendments merely tinker with the bill, for example, adding protected categories like LGBTI+ people or Muslims. This would not change the fact that the bill is fundamentally designed to give a small handful of ministers the power to crack down on democratic rights, it would simply smooth the passage of an authoritarian bill. Dangerously, the legislation lowers the threshold for what constitutes hate speech. It changes the test from whether a reasonable person would have felt threatened to whether a “member of a protected group” felt threatened. Since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, many pro-Israel students have complained to their universities that they felt threatened by the existence of protests or by the appearance of posters on campus which accused Israel of genocide. When defining hate speech, the bill includes speech directed at a group based on “national origin”, which means it could apply to both Americans and Israelis. It lowers the bar from inciting hatred to “promoting”. As constitutional expert Anne Twomey has pointed out, it could mean simply honestly describing in a public setting (including online) war or violence perpetrated by those of a specific national origin. An obvious example is the genocide in Gaza. There is no truth-based defence, so even if completely accurate, simply describing atrocities could be deemed to have promoted hatred against that group. Twomey uses the example of displaying Picasso’s Guernica as an example of an act that might contravene these laws, because it depicts war crimes carried out by Germans, and which therefore could be deemed to be promoting anti-German hatred. The bill is Albanese’s attempt to meet the recommendations in antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s 2025 report, which calls for stronger measures against “intimidating protest activity”, among other things. The passing of this bill would represent a major victory for those who have sought to create conditions more favourable for the repression and criminalisation of support for Palestine and criticism of Israel. Since the Bondi attacks, the right wing of Australia’s political establishment has ramped up attempts to smear, denigrate and silence the Palestine movement. In this, they have been backed by representatives of the capitalist class like the Business Council of Australia, the Minerals Council, the Australian Banking Association and the Australian Institute of Company Directors. This bill is an attempt to establish in law that criticism and protest against Israel, and Australia’s foreign policy positioning in general, is a criminal act, or perilously close to it. The amendments to the Migration Act extend the power of the Home Affairs minister to reject visa applicants on ideological grounds. Anyone the minister accuses of being a member of, or of supporting the aims of, a group deemed a hate group can be prevented from entering the country or have a current visa cancelled. The person does not need to have been convicted of a crime to be barred, and the minister could choose which groups this applies to without going through parliament. This could easily be used against many Tamils, Lebanese and Palestinians. The attack on the freedom of association is extreme. When the British government proscribed Palestine Action as a terror organisation last year, they had to pass the order through parliament. Albanese’s bill would centralise the power to ban an organisation in the hands of just three people. It specifically states that “the AFP Minister is not required to observe any requirements of procedural fairness in deciding” whether to designate an organisation. And groups don’t even need to have actually engaged in any hate speech to be banned. They can be designated hateful for “praising” someone who has engaged in hateful conduct. According to the government’s explanatory memorandum, a person can be guilty of membership of a designated group even “where the organisation does not have a formal membership arrangement.” The proposed bill is so expansive and general that it’s difficult to be sure of the full implications. But this in itself will have a chilling effect—it will serve to create fear and uncertainty about what exactly constitutes a hate crime, and intimidate some who would otherwise engage in protesting and organising. When the same people who rushed to blame the Bondi massacre on the 300,000 people who marched across the Sydney Harbour bridge are lobbying for and approving these measures, it’s not hard to work out who needs to watch themselves from now on. The powerful have always wanted to scuttle the efforts of oppressed people who organise against them, and particularly against their foreign policy objectives and positioning. In the 1950s, the union movement was crucial in standing up to Menzies and defeating his referendum on banning the Communist Party. The unions now need to come out in opposition to these laws, as does every progressive organisation in Australian society. This legislation is an extreme, broad, and convoluted attempt to give three individuals the power to decide who is allowed to speak and organise in Australian society. It comes amid a hysterical campaign to preserve “social cohesion”, which really means the silencing of mass opposition to genocide and total acquiescence by the public to Australia’s imperialist backing of Israel and the US. It reflects a fear that the powers that be have failed to ideologically cohere the population behind support for Israel, and is an attempt to do this by intimidation and, ironically, force. Perhaps, as Brecht quipped, it would be easier for Albanese to simply dissolve the people altogether. ### Iran’s uprising under fire URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/irans-uprising-under-fire/ Last updated: 2026-01-14T02:31:06.000Z The following piece was first published by the Iranian Revolutionary Marxist Tendency. --- Iran’s nationwide uprising continues amid mounting evidence of a systematic and deadly campaign by the state to crush popular resistance. Reports emerging from hospitals, despite a near-total internet blackout, reveal the scale of violence being unleashed against unarmed protesters—overwhelmingly drawn from the working class, youth and urban poor. Medical staff at two hospitals in Rasht, in northern Iran, and Tehran, the capital city, have confirmed that at least 110 bodies were transferred to these facilities alone. Doctors inside the country report that on 8 and 9 January, numerous patients arrived with live-ammunition gunshot wounds to the head, neck, and eyes—clear indications of intentional lethal force. Human rights defenders had warned that the nationwide internet shutdown would be used as a cover for mass killings. Under these conditions, obtaining reliable nationwide figures is impossible. Current estimates of the death toll range from hundreds to potentially thousands, reflecting not exaggeration, but the deliberate obscuring of reality by the state. According to multiple external sources, the Iranian regime has reportedly sought to reinforce its repressive apparatus by drawing on foreign paramilitary forces, including members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Hashed al-Shabi. While independent verification remains difficult, such reports underscore the regime’s growing dependence on militarised networks to maintain power against its own population. Yet repression is not the only danger confronting this uprising. As blood is shed in the streets, monarchist and royalist factions, long detached from the lived realities of Iran’s working people, are attempting to politically hijack the revolt. These forces seek to redirect the grassroots, class-driven uprising into a project aligned with elite restoration and foreign patronage. The role of the United States has been particularly revealing. While issuing statements of concern for “human rights”, Washington has simultaneously signalled implicit support for royalist currents, reproducing a familiar imperial strategy: backing compliant elites while presenting intervention as solidarity. This double game is neither new nor misunderstood by Iranians. Iran’s modern history, from 1953, is the best justification of people’s fear and disgust of any foreign state intervention. At that time, the US and England engineered a coup d’etat to overthrow the first democratically elected prime minister, Mosaddeq, and enforced a dictatorship on the Iranian people that continued until 1979\. They again orchestrated another hijacking of the revolt by the clergy-capitalist state that continues to rule the country up until now. They brought incredible economic, political and social consequences to Iran and have created a bankrupt country whose price is paid by the majority of the working class and urban poor of the society, while a small oligarchic class lives in unbelievable luxury. The monarchists are attempting to manipulate the situation in their favour. They do not understand that what has driven millions into the streets is not nostalgia for past rulers, but decades of economic dispossession, rampant inequality, privatisation, unemployment, inflation and the militarisation of everyday life. The Islamic Republic has functioned not as an alternative to imperial domination, but as a local manager of capital accumulation and repression, enriching a narrow ruling layer while condemning vast sections of society to precarity. Sanctions, far from weakening authoritarianism, have deepened class polarisation, allowing the regime to shift the burden of economic collapse onto workers, pensioners and the poor while expanding its security apparatus. At the same time, Western governments instrumentalise human rights discourse selectively—invoking it loudly when it serves geopolitical pressure and quietly discarding it when it threatens strategic interests. This hypocrisy has been fully internalised by Iranians who have lived through war, embargo and covert intervention. The danger now is that the uprising’s radical potential—its capacity to articulate demands for social justice, democratic control and economic redistribution—will be neutralised by forces offering only a change of flag or figurehead. Monarchist currents, amplified disproportionately by foreign media and exile networks, present themselves as a ready-made “alternative”, while remaining fundamentally hostile to popular participation and to working-class self-organisation. Their project is not emancipation, but restoration under new branding. Against this backdrop, the Iranian people face a dual struggle: resisting a state that kills to survive, and rejecting external and internal actors who seek to discipline the uprising into safe, controllable outcomes. The most dangerous moment for any revolutionary movement is not only when it is attacked by power, but when it is spoken for—when its voice is replaced by intermediaries claiming legitimacy without accountability. What endures, however, is the political consciousness forged in struggle. Strikes, neighbourhood resistance, student mobilisations and grassroots solidarity networks—often ignored by international coverage—point toward an alternative political horizon rooted in collective power rather than elite negotiation. These forms of organisation, fragile yet persistent, represent the embryo of a politics that neither kneels before clerical authority nor appeals to imperial guardians. History does not repeat mechanically, but it does issue warnings. Iran’s past revolutions were derailed when popular movements were isolated, fragmented, or subordinated to external interests. The lesson emerging once again from the streets is uncompromising: freedom cannot be delivered by executioners, nor negotiated by exiles backed by foreign states. As repression intensifies and narratives multiply, the central task remains clear for Iranians and for those in solidarity abroad: to defend the independence, class character and democratic substance of this uprising. Anything less risks turning yet another mass sacrifice into a footnote in the long record of betrayed revolutions. ### Support the rebellion in Iran URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/support-the-rebellion-in-iran/ Last updated: 2026-01-21T06:59:13.000Z The collapse of the rial, Iran’s currency, has triggered perhaps the biggest uprising since the 1979 revolution. In the capital, Tehran, the grand bazaar, one of the world’s oldest markets, erupted on 28 December. Merchants closed their shops and took to the streets, chanting, “Shut it down!” Within 72 hours, protests had spread to at least 21 of Iran’s 31 provinces. From the Mashhad metro to the tiny town of Farsan, demonstrators converged on street corners and squares. “Death to the dictator!”—a reference to the 46-year-old Islamic theocracy—featured prominently as a chant. Rebellion on the streets soon reached the universities. From Tehran to Tabriz, students joined rallies demanding an end to poverty and corruption. Activists at the Khajeh Nasir University warned, “We will go on until the overthrow and death of the dictator”. Echoes of the 2022 “women, life, freedom” uprising were everywhere, such as women with headscarves in their hands declaring, “no headscarf, no veil, freedom and equality” and “women, life, freedom”. The stakes were raised again when oil workers at two South Pars refineries in Asaluyeh, Bushehr, initiated strike action. In a joint statement with other independent unions, the coordinating committee for organising protests of contract oil workers warned the regime: “We unite our ranks with slogans against poverty and corruption ... now is the time for revolution”. The rebellion in Iran has continued for almost three weeks despite severe state repression. The government imposed an internet and telecommunications blackout on 8 January and unleashed a wave of terror, massacring thousands of civilians. The few [reports](https://www.amnesty.org.au/iran-massacre-of-protesters-demands-global-diplomatic-action/?ref=redflag.org.au) that have surfaced reveal harrowing scenes of bodies piled up at hospitals, young men and women with gunshot wounds to the eyes and others shot in the head at close range. ### **Roots of the rebellion** This is the latest in a series of uprisings that have rocked Iran over the past decade. In 2017, workers went on strike across the country to demand bread, jobs and freedom. They burned down police stations and attacked banks. The sugarcane workers in Khuzestan established workers’ councils to fight for control over production. In 2019, there was a November uprising, sparked by a 200 percent increase in the price of fuel. Students rioted under the slogan “strike and revolution”. The strike committees active in 2017 re-emerged, and new sections of workers joined the struggle. The regime drowned the rebellion in blood but could not crush the will of the people for long. Strikes continued to ebb and flow in the first year of the pandemic. Then, in 2021, protests erupted in Khuzestan in response to severe water shortages and soon spread to other cities and towns. A few months later, oil workers went on strike to protest the sham election of Ebrahim Raisi as president. Protests and strikes continued through 2022, from the smallest province, Khorasan, to the capital. This cycle of revolt reached its climax in the 2022 women, life, freedom uprising, triggered by the police murder of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Gina Mahsa Amini. This was the largest uprising since the 1979 Iranian revolution, which overthrew the US-backed shah’s dictatorship. The successive rebellions in Iran have deep economic and political roots. Runaway inflation and a collapsing national currency have been compounded by decades of government corruption and Western sanctions. Despite Iran having the world’s second-largest gas reserves and third-largest oil reserves, nearly 70 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, according to a report by the Iran Human Rights Monitor. The minimum wage for Iranian workers is the worst in the region, behind even Afghanistan and Yemen, and the labour force participation rate has fallen to 41 percent, according to the *Middle East Forum Observer*. The collapse of the rial, the value of which has declined by at least 40 percent since June, has further eroded people’s purchasing power, making it even harder to buy already hyper-inflated goods like food and medicine. Meanwhile, the cabal of criminals ruling Iran lives in luxury. Oil tycoons, steel magnates, politicians and the elite military and police make billions in profit from exploiting and oppressing the working class. According to an Iranian-based economist, Ali Heidari, nearly one-third of the country’s wealth is now concentrated in the hands of just 1 percent of the population. The regime has responded to the crisis by doubling down on austerity measures: gutting health care and infrastructure, and attacking workers’ wages and conditions. ### **A regime in crisis** All this has further fuelled the regime’s longstanding legitimacy crisis. It has little popular support, instead maintaining its rule through sheer force, backed by at least sixteen intelligence agencies and one of the largest civil militia organisations in the world. But Iran’s rulers know that they can’t completely crush dissent. The election of the Reformers’ Party candidate Masoud Pezeshkian to the presidency in July 2024 was the state’s attempt to soften its image. But the hopes that some Iranians had in his presidency were quickly dashed as it became clear he’d continue the policies of his predecessors. The regime also suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Israel and America, which last June launched a twelve-day war that largely destroyed Iran’s most important nuclear sites, destroyed or damaged crucial oil, gas and water resources and targeted civilian infrastructure, killing more than 1,000 people. The fallout from the war contributed to the collapse of the rial. Israel’s all-out assault on the region—its Gaza genocide, war on Lebanon and bombing campaigns in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, weakened Iran’s regional allies. Added to that, the overthrow of the dictatorship of Iranian ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria left the regime a sitting duck. ### **The dynamics of the current movement** The dynamics of the current protests can’t be understood without this context. The crisis is so deep that it has started to break one of the regime’s historically loyal support bases—the bazaaris, the traditional merchant class. The alliance between the merchants and the regime has deep roots going back to before the 1979 revolution. They formed an alliance against the US-backed shah dictatorship in 1963, establishing the Islamic Coalition Party. During the 1979 revolution, the bazaaris provided important financial support to the clergy, who, under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, eventually defeated the revolution and established the Islamic Republic. The clergy relied on the bazaaris to secure their power and, for many years, maintained a strong, albeit at times unstable, alliance. But the worsening economic situation and the growing financial dominance of Iran’s repressive state forces gradually weakened the influence of the bazaaris, who no longer enjoy the relative privileges they once had. In response, they have organised increasingly frequent protests, including participation in the 2018 general strike, during which they raised slogans that, for the first time, transcended their own commercial interests. The bazaaris’ initiation of the current protests is not unprecedented but represents a significant breakdown in the relations between the traditional middle class and the Iranian regime. Meanwhile, students and the youth have swung back into action after being the centre of the women, life, freedom uprising. Through their Telegram channels, students circulated footage of protests on university campuses in Tehran, Isfahan and Yazd. They gathered in their hundreds, chanting, “Freedom! freedom! freedom!” and “Don’t be afraid! We are all together!” At night, when security forces came to kidnap students from their dormitories at Tehran University, they bravely fought back, inspiring more students to rise up. At Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, students declared: “Protest is our right, sit-ins are our tool, and resistance is our path. The young generation will not accept injustice and will not surrender the future at the cost of fear”. Many student groups, including independent student unions, that were active in the women, life, freedom uprising, have re-emerged. The memory of this rebellion is fresh in their minds—they turned the universities into hubs of resistance, defying gender segregation rules, burning their hijabs and occupying buildings. Students joined forces nationally and compelled teachers to go on strike in solidarity with their struggle. Their participation in this moment can inspire broader layers of society to act. In the words of the students at Khajeh Nasir University, their protest “is a warning from students to the rulers who have become comfortable with corruption; we remind them that the normalisation of misery has failed, and the student is still standing”. Much of the mainstream media reporting focuses on the bazaaris and the students. While it’s true that they’ve been at the centre of the current protests, workers have been on the battlefield for many months. They feel the economic crisis most acutely. Teachers, nurses, truck drivers, goldminers, steel, oil and gas workers have been striking and protesting to demand wage increases, health and safety measures and the abolition of the predatory contract labour system. Workers are the beating heart of Iran’s economy and have the power to topple the regime. In the two days prior to the nationwide rebellion, goldminers, sugarcane and petrol refinery workers initiated smaller protests outside Tehran. Before that, in early December, 5,000 contract oil and gas workers went on strike in the biggest industry-wide mobilisation since the 1979 revolution. These workers are stationed in Asaluyeh, at the world’s largest natural gas field. They provide more than half of the country’s income. It’s why they were targeted by Israeli airstrikes back in June. In the aftermath of the Israeli attack, politician Hassan Nowruzi tried to deter workers from protesting, arguing that bosses and workers are “in the same boat”. But this attempt to build national unity failed miserably—the oil and gas workers continued to strike. Their independent union pushed back, replying: “No sir! We workers and you plunderers are not in the same boat. You and your government have punctured the boat that carries our livelihood, and through these holes you are looting everything we have”. ### **Western imperialism and debates on the left** America and Israel are cynically trying to exploit this popular uprising to further their imperial domination over the Middle East. Trump last week signalled that he was considering a direct attack on Iran, warning Iranian leaders that the US military was “locked and loaded and ready to go” if they continued to kill protesters. This is from the man who has unleashed federal agents to systematically hunt down and lock up migrants and execute those who defy government terror. Meanwhile, some Israeli leaders, still high from bombing Iran last June, urge America to Make Iran Great Again by conducting a Maduro 2.0 to take out Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. They want a re-run of the oppressive Pahlavi monarchy, under the rule of Reza Pahlavi, as a pliant ally for Western imperialism. Butcher-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu, with no sense of irony, said that he hoped Iranians would be free from the “yoke of tyranny”. But animosity from the US and Israel does not mean socialists should support Iran, an authoritarian capitalist state that brutalises its own population and which has been a key counter-revolutionary force in the Middle East. During the Arab revolutions in 2011, Iran ordered its Revolutionary Guards, with the support of Lebanon’s reactionary Hezbollah, to drown the Syrian revolution in blood to prop up the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship. Iran’s rhetorical support for Palestine is one of the ways that its brutal dictatorship tries to win popular legitimacy at home and abroad. But while Iran might aid certain factions, it has never and will never lift a finger to help the Palestinians. Like all capitalist states, Iran’s only principle is self-interest. Those who champion the Iranian regime betray the heroic workers and students who have paid with their lives fighting for liberation. It is impossible to fight for working-class solidarity across borders if you are backing the dictatorship that Iranian workers are fighting to overthrow. Socialists should stand unequivocally with the resistance in Iran, while also rejecting attempts by the Western imperialists to exploit the movement for their own gain. In the words of the Tehran Bus Workers Union in a recent statement: > The path to the liberation of workers and toilers does not lie in the path of a leader carved from above the people, nor in reliance on foreign powers, nor through factions within the government ... we must not allow ourselves to be victims of the power games and interests of the ruling classes once again. ### **Challenges and prospects** The hope for the rebellion in Iran rests on the deepening of the working-class struggle. Workers have shown in recent years how they can lead the whole of society in battle against their rulers. During the women, life, freedom uprising, the sugarcane workers of the Haft Tappeh union forged solidarity with student protesters, recognising that freedom from oppression is bound up with the class struggle. They declared: “This great uprising should be linked with the strike of workers everywhere ... to have bread and freedom, let us not leave the women of the revolution alone”. More fundamentally, it is only through working-class struggle that the forces of capitalist reaction and imperialist oppression can be defeated—whether that be the ayatollah of Iran or Trump in the US. The rebellion in Iran is a glimmer of hope in a dark world. Even if this struggle ends, the fire will continue to burn as long as the Islamic Republic stands. The regime is caught in a perpetual crisis with no clear solution. The decade of crisis and class struggle has made clear that its days are numbered. ### Brisbane should cancel the Olympics URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/brisbane-should-cancel-the-olympics/ Last updated: 2026-01-12T03:20:46.000Z Brisbane is hosting the 2032 Olympic Games. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli says the Games are a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to make Brisbane a world city and create a “lasting legacy” of improved tourism, transport and infrastructure. This is typical Liberal Party spin. The Olympics are a gross waste of money and a social and political nightmare. Combined federal and state spending on the Olympics will total $7.1 billion. This is triple what Queensland’s [2025-26 budget](https://budget.qld.gov.au/files/Budget-2025-26-SDS-Department-of-Housing-and-Public-Works.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) has put aside for housing support (the majority of which is handouts to developers). With more than 50,000 people on Queensland’s public housing wait list, this splashy Olympics spending is unconscionable. Brisbane’s Victoria Park is being demolished to build the Olympic stadium. Deputy Premier Jarod Bleijie mocked the [Save Victoria Park](https://www.savevictoriapark.com/about?ref=redflag.org.au) campaign when unveiling the stadium plan on 6 January, saying: “This park ... was a golf course, and before it was a golf course it was a dump for goodness sake”. Victoria Park was a gathering point for Indigenous peoples prior to and during the Frontier Wars. At times up to 800 people would meet around the central lake, known as Barrambin by the Yuggera and Turrbal people. This is no secret. As recently as 2020, Liberal National Party Lord Mayor of Brisbane Adrian Schrinner told the *Brisbane Times* that “Victoria Park has a really rich Indigenous history” when announcing that city council would establish an Indigenous history centre to make sure the history “is acknowledged, recognised and celebrated”. Those plans have been scrapped for the Olympic stadium. The Olympics, and the destruction of Victoria Park, will also make Brisbane more unequal. After Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympics, house prices in suburbs near the stadium grew by more than 66 percent, according to the *ABC*. This does not augur well for Brisbane’s inner-North, where Victoria Park is located, which already has some of the most expensive houses, highest rents and exclusive schools in Queensland. Countries hosting the Olympics reliably use the occasion to attack civil liberties, militarise the police, commercialise public space and restrict the right to demonstrate. Brazil deployed 65,000 police officers and 20,000 soldiers during the 2016 Rio Olympics. At least[ six people were killed by police](https://www.amnesty.org.uk/deadly-side-rio-2016-olympics?ref=redflag.org.au) during the Games. Queensland has recent experience of using global events to attack democratic rights. Police raided the homes of activists involved in protesting the 2018 Gold Coast [Commonwealth Games](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6289). Earlier, in 2014, $400 million was spent on policing and surveillance for the G20 meeting in Brisbane, [the largest security operation in Australian history](https://redflag.org.au/article/qld-turned-police-state-g20). So, the Olympics aren’t packing goodies for Brisbane. Even if they were, the Games promote nationalism and conservatism on steroids. What foosball is to soccer, the Olympics are to imperialism. The world’s richest nations, engaging in the most cut-throat military and economic competition, send their athletes out in little proxy wars. “Doing the nation proud” mostly means beating the main diplomatic enemy. As [Wanning Sun wrote in ](https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/08/14/paris-olympics-2024-usa-china-doping-geopolitics/?ref=redflag.org.au)[*Crikey*](https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/08/14/paris-olympics-2024-usa-china-doping-geopolitics/?ref=redflag.org.au)in August 2024*,* “a country’s gold medal tally is a crude but effective way of showcasing a nation’s strength”. Unsurprisingly, the United States and China have been the closest competitors, biggest winners and biggest spenders in recent years. The Games are a seemingly innocent chance to stir national fervour and remind observers to be passionately invested in the fate of their team and flag. The Games are also vehicles for right wing culture wars. The International Olympic Committee announced the return of sex testing of athletes in 2025, following the example of World Athletics the previous year. This measure discriminates against and excludes transwomen while humiliating cisgendered women like South African champion runner Caster Semenya and Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif, who do not meet criteria of biological sex arbitrarily defined by Olympic committees, or their image of a “proper woman”. As far as sports go, the Olympics promotes the worst, most elite version: ultra-competitive, hyper exclusive, institutionally oppressive, obsessed with perfection measured to the millimetre or millisecond. Many athletes are ruined in the Olympic grind and there are endless stories of abuse. Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history, was among many Olympians who spoke out in 2021 of repeated sexual abuse by team doctor Larry Nasser. Biles told a Senate committee, “I blame Larry Nasser, and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse”. For these reasons, there is a long history of left-wing opposition to the Olympics, and a symbolism and tradition of protesting the Games. Most famously, in 1968, Black United States athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists during a medal ceremony in solidarity with the struggle for civil rights and to highlight the murder of Mexican student activists days before the Games began. French rebels carried on the tradition in Paris 2024, the most recent Olympics. Workers servicing the Games, from garbage collectors to dancers, went on strike in the lead up, and the events were punctuated by protests opposing Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Activists should support the Save Victoria Park campaign—and call for the Olympics to be cancelled. It is a shame to see former opponents of the Games like Greens MP for Maiwar Michael Berkman join the dialogue about the Olympics posing a generational opportunity to reshape Brisbane for the better. Not only is it naive, backing the Olympics is a terrible way to win the rights and amenities workers need. We should reject glitzy corporate mega-spending during a cost-of-living crisis, and the litany of right-wing values the Olympics promote. If former Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews could withdraw Victoria’s pledge to host the Commonwealth Games in 2023 (three years before the event), Queensland can pull out of the Olympics. While the “eyes of the world” are on Brisbane, we should turn the tables on the sanitised “Sunshine state” image politicians are promoting. We should expose and protest the inequality championed by Australia’s elite and the Games. ### Racism is about oppressing the working class URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/racism-is-about-oppressing-the-working-class/ Last updated: 2026-01-12T02:59:59.000Z First, they came for the migrants. Then, they murdered Renee Good. Bit by bit, for decades, repeated hysterias about migration have brought us here. Official politics has pushed what can acceptably done to the poor and oppressed further and further. It has had many justifications: stopping terrorism, preventing crime, protecting jobs, putting citizens first. These days, migration is supposedly why we can’t afford housing. For decades, both sides raced to outdo each other on persecuting migrants: Republican and Democrat, Liberal and Labor in Australia. Donald Trump didn’t invent racism or border controls. He took the tools built by the mainstream parties of capitalism and pushed them to the extreme. Racism is constantly used by the ruling class to lower the bar for how everyone in society is treated. Once an injustice becomes normalised against one section of society, it’s easier to extend it to others. In Australia, Islamophobia was used to justify repressive anti-terror laws after the 11 September attacks in 2001\. These laws laid the basis for draconian powers to be used against unionised construction workers. The racist Northern Territory intervention introduced welfare quarantining debit-cards for Aboriginal communities, which was later rolled out to working-class communities in Western Sydney. American society was told the crackdown against migrants was just about criminals who are supposedly in the country “illegally”. Then all of a sudden it wasn’t just the undocumented. “Safety” suddenly required greater surveillance powers, more restrictive laws, more weapons for the cops already killing Black people with impunity, and now armed right-wing thugs are running rampage in US cities. Renee Good was a US citizen. She was white. But she was working class. And she stood up for those she was supposed to hate, against her own rulers and their armed thugs. To the system, that was her greatest crime. In some way, racism has always been about fear. But it’s not about the fear we have of each other; it’s about the fear our rulers have of us. Ordinary people have always been the spanner in the works for our rulers and their system’s rapacious and violent drive for profit. Workers have fought and pushed back against the greed and exploitation of our bosses, winning better conditions and pay. The struggles for women’s and LGBTI rights have won things our rulers were determined to deny us. Mass movements and revolutions have ended wars and brought down brutal regimes. Six years ago, that same solidarity Rachel Good embodied became a raging storm when George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police just a few blocks away. The city rose up. Millions of people took to the streets across the US. Solidarity demonstrations swept the world. The sheer power of the movement even forced Democratic politicians, who had spent decades building these same racist systems, to cynically take a knee so they could co-opt the movement. The authorities were forced into taking action against Derek Chauvan, Floyd’s killer, to put the genie of mass struggle back in its box. In the last two years, the torch of global anti-racist solidarity has been taken up by the Palestine movement. Millions have defied their governments attempts to deny and excuse a genocide. The general strikes by Italian workers in solidarity with Gaza have been unprecedented, in a country run by a far-right government after decades of intense Islamophobia. We have seen past the racist dehumanisation of Palestinians in the face of growing repression and persecution. We have taken to the streets for 2.3 million people somewhere else in the world—people we have never met, and who the media and our governments have encouraged us to ignore, hate and fear. What’s most dangerous of all is not any individual struggle, but the fact that opposition to injustice and oppression brings us together. It shows us who the real enemy is and who our allies are. It builds our confidence. Working-class people don’t spend our lives fixated on increasing profits by grinding other human beings into the dirt. We don’t have wealth or power in this society. We get through our days only by working together and taking care of each other. Collectivity and solidarity are part of who we are. But the biggest reason our rulers fear us and our capacity for solidarity and the potential power it could unleash. Black Lives Matter in 2020 gave confidence to the activists who went on to unionise in Amazon’s warehouses. Before that, the civil rights movement gave confidence to Black workers who brought their militancy to unions in the public sector and the auto industries. Standing up to racism doesn’t just improve the lives of people of colour, it builds the fighting capacity of the working class as a whole. If together, US workers refused to work until immigration agents were driven out of their communities, the loss of profits would be unbearable for the corporations and governments who have collaborated with them. If workers everywhere shut everything down like they did in Italy, the entire global economy would be thrown into chaos. If workers took over the economy and collectively ran everything ourselves, the power of capitalism itself could be ended. Jeff Bezos couldn’t pack every Amazon package, Gina Rinehart couldn’t haul all that iron ore by herself. They need us. We don’t need them. That is why every racist attack on one section of the working class is an attack on the working class as a whole. Without unity, neither white nor black or brown workers can use our collective power. We need each other. Racism is not natural; it is manufactured. It is cultivated by those with wealth and power to hold down those of us who are denied any say over the world whose wealth we work to create. But despite the billions spent on weapons, borders and propaganda campaigns to try and get us to turn on each other, even in these darkest of times, they’ve never managed to completely stamp out our humanity. The people of Minneapolis hurling snowballs to drive immigration agents out of their neighbourhoods, and the thousands now mobilising around the US, are the latest to take up the torch of solidarity in the face of racism. All power to them! Their fight is crucial to pushing back against the racist brutality of Trump and rebuilding the kind of working-class power and confidence we’re going to need in the years ahead—to fight racism, war and the system built on profit that oppresses us all. ### Liberals’ hate speech hypocrisy after Bondi URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/liberals-hate-speech-hypocrisy-after-bondi/ Last updated: 2026-01-21T06:58:56.000Z Sussan Ley’s Liberals will back Labor’s proposed changes to hate speech laws, which would introduce a new offence for “aggravated hate speech”, targeting religious “hate preachers” who incite violence, and another offence for “serious vilification” on the basis of race. But only as long as they focus exclusively on her areas of interest. “I want to be very clear, tackling hate speech is not a licence to go after free speech”, Ley told a press conference in Sydney. “There are clear issues that this legislation needs to address. It needs to be targeted to the threats that we face, and those threats are radical Islamic extremism and antisemitism.” It’s a great relief to hear from Ley, Australia’s most credible oppression umpire, that Islamophobia, homophobia and anti-Indigenous racism are all sorted. Only one form of bigotry remains to be knocked out. This fits with a well-worn pattern of selective outrage on the political right. For the last two years, the proudest racists in the country have worked double shifts, promoting hostility toward Muslims and migrants in the morning, and then mouthing concern about rising antisemitism in the evening. Former Liberal Attorney-General George Brandis provides one of the crudest examples. He once famously defended attempts to water down the racial discrimination act by praising the “right to be a bigot”—but is now one of most vocal advocates of tougher penalties for antisemitism. Why is antisemitism the one form of bigotry that the political right vocally opposes? The answer is simple: When they say “antisemitism”, they don't really mean antisemitism. They mean any expression of pro-Palestine sentiment or opposition to Israel’s war. When it comes to the real antisemitism, which is overwhelmingly found on the racist right, they turn a blind eye. Look for yourself: try to find a statement from George Brandis condemning the National Socialist Network’s vile antisemitic rally outside NSW parliament last November. Try to find a Liberal who says we should cut ties with the [Nazi-infested](https://www.npr.org/2025/05/14/nx-s1-5387299/trump-white-house-antisemitism?ref=redflag.org.au) Trump administration. They couldn’t care less This episode also exposes the free speech hypocrisy of the right. Just a few years ago, the Liberals were posing as free speech warriors, facilitating a review into a “crisis” of free speech on university campuses and threatening to penalise universities that censored students and staff. Now they advocate withdrawing funding from universities that *fail* to censor criticisms of Israel. From banning marches to banning specific slogans, there’s been no area of political expression they won’t trample on when it comes to Palestine. But Sussan Ley still shamelessly cites “free speech” as a reason not to include protections for LGBT people. Who at this point takes the free speech rhetoric of the right seriously, when it so clearly only pertains to their pet concerns? The debate also shows the limits of hate speech laws as a means to challenge bigotry. As the Albanese government announced its plans to rework hate speech laws in December, the ABC reported that just four people had been charged under the new laws across the year. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke says this shows the need to tighten the legal framework, because they’ve been unable to stop hateful speech that sits “just below the threshold” of prosecution. But the lack of charges just reveals how ineffectual these legal frameworks are for challenging the real roots of bigotry. In our legal system, biased toward the capitalist class and the right, hate speech laws are never used to challenge the bigotry of the elite. And there’s been no shortage of elite bigotry to confront. Last year, the Murdoch press, sections of the Liberal Party and well-funded conservative groups like Advance Australia promoted marches of thousands across the country that called for mass deportations and hosted Nazis on their speaking platforms. In the aftermath of the Bondi shooting, Bob Katter, a sitting senator, claimed that migrants in Australia live in “radical ethnic enclaves” and warned that white people are “eradicating themselves from the gene pool”—an invocation of the fascist “great replacement” theory. No capitalist legal framework for criminalising “hate speech” is ever going to challenge any of this, because promoting racism, scapegoating and social division are core elements of capitalist politics. The qualified support the Liberals have given to Labor’s proposed law just shows the cynicism at the heart of the current debate about tackling antisemitism. It’s not an anti-racist campaign. It’s an operation by the political right to attack their enemies and silence legitimate criticism of Australia’s support for Israel. ### Chris Minns exploits Bondi to attack democratic rights URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/chris-minns-exploits-bondi-to-attack-democratic-rights/ Last updated: 2026-01-21T06:58:43.000Z Did you know that climate protests cause terrorism? That the Knitting Nannas are a potential gateway to ISIS recruitment? That demonstrating to stop cuts to workers’ compensation is a threat to public safety? That rallying against Nazis is antisemitic? That protesting against record levels of Aboriginal deaths in custody would “rip apart our social cohesion”? Or, the real kicker, that 300,000 people (including several NSW government MPs and ministers) marching over the Sydney Harbour bridge against a genocide caused the Bondi attack? This is the insane rationale put forward by NSW Premier Chris Minns and virtually the entire media establishment to justify a new regime banning all protests in NSW for up to three months following a terror attack. The new laws were rushed through by Minns on Christmas eve, in a textbook case of an authoritarian government not letting a crisis go to waste, as he sought to exploit the horrific Bondi attack for his and the establishment’s own ends. For years, NSW governments have been imposing more and more anti-protest laws, often targeting the climate movement and lately focused on trying to silence the mass movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Minns even received a letter of praise from Israeli President Isaac Herzog last year—himself indicted for incitement to genocide by the United Nations—for his service to the apartheid regime. While Minns often accuses protesters of wanting to bring foreign conflicts to Australia, it is his government that just two months ago sponsored a weapons expo in Sydney with Israel’s biggest weapons companies. On that day, “social cohesion” was ensured the way Minns likes, through police repeatedly charging, punching, pepper-spraying and arresting people—and breaking the bones of two peaceful protesters. The new laws enable the NSW police commissioner, with approval from the attorney general, to issue a “public assembly restriction declaration” for up to fourteen days following a terrorist attack, which can be repeatedly extended for up to three months. The declaration enables the designation of any area in the entire state, within which protesters cannot have a “form one” accepted by police, and no court can overturn this opposition. A form one is the usual way protesters in NSW obtain the legal right to march on our streets. Without it, police can arrest protesters for things like obstructing traffic. So the laws effectively ban all street marches. In addition, police have been given extra powers to issue “move on” notices even to static assemblies where no march takes place. All the police have to say is that the protest is obstructing pedestrians. The combined effect of all this is that the people of NSW now have no right to protest at all, about anything, in the entire state, on penalty of arrest. Any protests allowed to go ahead will be entirely at the police’s discretion. This is an extreme and outrageous attack on our fundamental democratic rights. Already, a protest to commemorate the killing of Indigenous man David Dungay Jnr, who was suffocated to death by six prison guards and who has still received no justice, has had its form one revoked. Protest organisers are vowing to defy the ban and march anyway on 18 January, which they had planned to do long before the Bondi attack. The ban is predicted to be extended to cover the annual Invasion Day March on 26 January, and an upcoming protest against the Israeli president. It is utterly obscene that a protest ban, ostensibly in place to combat antisemitism, a form of racism, will be used to threaten and prevent demonstrations against the racism faced by Aboriginal people. Even more so when we face a growing street movement of extreme racists and fascists, the so-called March for Australia, which is also planning to mobilise again on 26 January. Well before Bondi, NSW police were notorious for opposing Palestine and other anti-racist protests while allowing neo-Nazis to demonstrate freely. Logic, consistency and anti-racism have nothing to do with the current agenda. Many of the media outlets now spewing the preposterous lie that opposing genocide is antisemitic and laid the basis for Bondi, are the same that built and promoted the Nazi-led March for Australia. Israel lobbyist and antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s partner is a financial contributor to the far-right, racist outfit Advance Australia. She [says](https://www.deepcutnews.com/p/watermelons-deemed-an-antisemitic?ref=redflag.org.au) that watermelons are an antisemitic symbol, but failed to make any statement condemning the recent Nazi rally outside the NSW parliament. They all support the biggest racist atrocity of our time—the genocide being carried out by the Israeli regime in Gaza. The Palestine Action Group Sydney, Blak Caucus and Jews Against the Occupation ’48 have launched a constitutional challenge to these anti-protest laws. Minns has already lost two constitutional challenges to anti-protest laws. This will be the biggest fight yet, as it occurs in the context of a full-blown McCarthyite witch hunt being waged by the entire ruling establishment against the Palestine movement and the left, culminating in a royal commission that they intend to use as a year-long show trial of anyone who has dared to oppose the genocide. We will not win the courtroom battle unless we win the political argument in society. We must resist this tide of irrationalism and hypocrisy now coming from every institution. There are millions upon millions of us who can see through all this bullshit and know that the biggest racists in society are accusing us of racism, the biggest supporters of violent atrocities and racist terrorism are accusing us of such things, precisely because we have opposed them. They will not silence us. ### Greens capitulate to right-wing campaign against the Palestine movement URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/greens-capitulate-to-right-wing-campaign-against-the-palestine-movement/ Last updated: 2026-01-21T06:58:33.000Z The Greens this week welcomed the government’s announcement of a royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. After a month-long vitriolic campaign against the Palestine movement, the Labor government and the right to protest, the Greens have followed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in capitulating to the ruling-class demand for a federal inquiry. Reading the media release of acting leader Sarah Hanson-Young makes you wonder what planet Greens leaders are living on: “A balanced, careful and powerful royal commission is a chance to learn hard lessons while minimising divisive politics in crafting a national response to the anti-Semitic Bondi mass shooting”. The idea that this royal commission could be “balanced” is pure fantasy. Those pushing for it have little interest in learning “hard lessons” about the Bondi attack. They made their minds up on day one, evidence be damned, that blame for the shooting should be pinned on the Palestine solidarity movement. Those who call the legitimacy of this argument into question will never be given a fair hearing—as evidenced by the fate of *Age* cartoonist Cathy Wilcox, who has faced a barrage of attacks for a cartoon that correctly criticised the royal commission call as an “astroturf” campaign driven by the pro-Israel establishment. Hanson-Young’s media release continued: “The strongest national response will be based on bringing together multicultural Australia to reinforce our values of tolerance, democracy and respect”. But democracy is precisely what is threatened by the royal commission. Already, the Bondi attack has been cynically weaponised as a pretext to ban protests in NSW. The Albanese government has agreed to implement one of antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s most Trumpian and authoritarian proposals: to threaten funding to universities that don’t clamp down on Palestine solidarity activism. The drivers of the royal commission—the Liberal Party, Jillian Segal, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Murdoch press—want to use it to extend and deepen this authoritarian and anti-democratic push. The Greens urged the commission to tackle “all forms of racism ... as part of the Commission’s social cohesion mandate”. But the terms of reference for the royal commission make clear that it will be focused solely on antisemitism, which is code in the twisted lexicon of the pro-genocide establishment for criticism of Israel’s genocidal war. Beyond this, the invocation of “social cohesion” has only ever been about silencing some voices to the advantages of others. Opponents of Israel’s war have been told to stop marching, self-censor and shut up in the name of national unity, while vocal promoters of Israel’s genocide are never accused of disrupting “social cohesion”. The suffering of the families and friends of Palestinians and Lebanese murdered by Israel simply don’t count in this calculation of “cohesion”. They are told that their outrage and grief is racist and hurtful to members and supporters of the oppressor nation carrying out genocide. The left has a responsibility to call out the cynicism and hypocrisy of this campaign and rally our side to defend the Palestine solidarity movement and basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech. Instead, the Greens are giving the royal commission a progressive paintjob, attempting to spin it as a process that could be fair and balanced. This isn’t just the product of political confusion—it’s reflective of the Greens’ desire to go with the flow. The Greens are a party of small l-liberals. Their strategy for achieving a more just world is to act as a right-on but “respectable” and “reasonable” wing of capitalist politics. This is why the Greens have a long-established practice of mouthing criticisms of government policy and then lining up behind it. They rightly argued that Labor’s 2023 and 2025 environment bills would worsen climate catastrophe by entrenching fossil fuel use, but then voted for both bills. While positioning themselves as the “party of renters” under Adam Bandt’s leadership, they passed Labor’s bogus housing bill, which has done nothing to address the rental crisis. These actions are all about proving to the ruling class that the Greens, for all their progressive policies, can be constructive players in the Canberra game rather than disrupters of the system. Greens members and MPs who buck this trend of collaboration and compromise have been marginalised and excluded by the party hierarchy. When left-wing Greens in NSW’s Marrickville council created a political firestorm by adopting a BDS policy in 2010, Greens leader Bob Brown intervened aggressively to have the policy overturned. Sarah Hanson-Young herself has been instrumental in pulling left-wing Greens into line, joining a campaign to drive out Senator Lee Rhiannon when she got in the way of the Greens striking a crap deal with the Liberal government over education funding. Over the past two years, the Greens have shifted to the left on Palestine, mirroring the massive shift in the sentiment of young people. They’ve gone from condemning violence on “both sides” during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza to now labelling Israel’s actions as genocide and calling for sanctions. Since 7 October 2023, they’ve supported and spoken at anti-war demonstrations. This has been a welcome development. But adopting a good policy platform and sending an MP to the odd rally isn’t enough if you are just going to fold under ruling-class pressure. The Greens’ capitulation in the face of a dishonest and cynical campaign to slander the Palestine movement shows the difference between socialists and small-l liberals. Socialists don’t just take radical positions when it’s popular or easy. The Greens have folded at precisely the time when it matters most. It’s our job to continue to hold the line—and our principles—against the right-wing onslaught. ### Another Latin American country turns to the far right URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/another-latin-american-country-turns-to-the-far-right/ Last updated: 2026-01-10T10:11:22.000Z Jose Antonio Kast, a far-right figure, won Chile’s recent presidential elections in December. His victory in the second round with 58.2 percent of the vote against his opponent from the Communist Party, Jeanette Jara, consolidates the shift on the Chilean right from mainstream conservatism to a new brand of Trump-inspired politics. Jara served as minister for work and social provision in the current government of Gabriel Boric of the Frente Amplio (FA, or Broad Front). In this role, she implemented mild pro-labour reforms such as the 40-hour week and wage and pension increases, which helped her become the centre-left Unity for Chile coalition’s candidate. Boric’s presidency is the backdrop to the election. A left-wing former student leader, he came to office in 2021 in the wake of a mass social rebellion, which occurred two years earlier. That movement culminated in the then-president, a conservative billionaire, agreeing to redraft the constitution, which was a relic of the Pinochet dictatorship. Boric and other leaders in his coalition, which included the Communist Party, played a crucial role in demobilising the movement and channelling its aspirations into their electoral campaign. Two years later, on a platform of higher taxes on the rich and greater social spending, he won the presidency. How Chile went from such a moment in 2019 to a victory for the far-right can only be explained by the failure of Boric and the FA to implement the demands of the rebellion. By the time a constitutional convention put a new document to a vote in late 2022, there was a chasm between the demands that millions had fought for in the streets and what was actually in the draft. Some of those demands included the nationalisation of key resource industries, land rights for indigenous groups, an overhaul of the loathed private pension system, increased education spending and a range of other socially progressive measures. But even the FA had voted against some of these measures being constitutionally enshrined. As such, 62 percent of the population voted to reject the draft. A second draft, which further rejected key demands of the movement, was again rejected by 56 percent of the population. Boric’s response was to abandon any further constitutional process and make further concessions to the right. This political trajectory was entirely predictable. As I wrote in *Red Flag* after his election in 2021: > While the victory of Boric is welcome in so far as it represents a rejection of the legacy of the dictatorship and a repudiation of the attempt to elevate a Trumpian, Bolsonarist figure, it is clear that the president-elect is both unable and unwilling to fulfil the demands of the October 2019 movement ... “\[W\]avering and concessions on the part of Boric will likely cede more political ground to the right, which, despite losing the elections, has a newfound sense of confidence. This outcome was the logical conclusion of a political project that rejects mobilising the working class, instead channelling popular sentiment into an electoral campaign. Boric and the FA sought only minor reforms to capitalism and thoroughly rejected the self-activity of the working class. Once in government, they faced the pressures that come with running capitalism. They were now responsible for overseeing a system in which a tiny minority rules over the vast majority. This meant ensuring a stable environment for profitable investment, cordial relations with the US and attacking anyone who challenged this state of affairs. All of this runs totally counter to the vision that millions of Chileans fought for in 2019 and then elected Boric to implement. Is it any wonder then, that after such betrayal and demoralisation, the ground would become fertile for the far right? A similar story has been playing out across Latin America over recent years. Parties with the same program and politics as Boric have been tossed out by the electorate and replaced with a more radical and right-wing replacement. In Argentina, a self-declared “anarcho-capitalist” president, Javier Milei, is implementing one of the most vicious austerity programs in recent memory. In El Salvador, the authoritarian Nayib Bukele has turned his country into a gulag. President Daniel Noboa is following suit in Ecuador and wants to base US troops in the country. And former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is currently serving 27 years in prison for attempting his own 6 January-style “insurrection” to maintain power, which had support in the top echelons of the military. Several governments are now some of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders, lauding the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president. Trump, for his part, is more than willing to support them, such as when he offered a US$20 billion lifeline to Milei’s government shortly before the mid-term elections to help stabilise the economy and improve his electoral prospects. Given recent events in Venezuela and El Salvador, it’s not hard to imagine a return to the strong-man military regimes that ruled the region in the 1960s and 1970s. Over recent decades, Latin America has given rise to many Borics—left-wing reformists who ride the tide of class struggle to power. But the region is now turning to the far right in large part because of the failure of these governments to improve people’s lives. With Trump open about his intentions to shore up US domination over the Western hemisphere and the far right on the march, the need for an anti-capitalist political alternative to reformism has never been greater. --- *Tom Sullivan will present the session* [*Franco and Pinochet: military fascism?*](https://www.marxismconference.org/program/franco-and-pinochet-military-fascism?ref=redflag.org.au)*at the Marxism conference in Melbourne, 2-5 April.* ### In solidarity with the popular uprising in Iran URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/in-solidarity-with-the-popular-uprising-in-iran/ Last updated: 2026-01-09T05:31:28.000Z > The following is a statement from the Iranian Revolutionary Marxist Tendency (IRMT). The IRMT was founded in early 1979, initially under the name Iranian Socialist Workers’ Party. Its founders began political activity in the 1960s, establishing an Iranian Commission within the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. The organisation’s theoretical foundations are rooted in Trotsky’s Transitional Programme and the first four congresses of the Communist International. Today, IRMT is part of International Standpoint and remains the only Iranian Trotskyist organisation. --- The recent protests sparked by the sharp rise in the dollar exchange rate—initially led by Tehran’s bazaar merchants—quickly evolved into a broader social uprising. What for a privileged layer meant a partial reduction in profits translated for the vast majority of people into deepening poverty, worsening living conditions and an acute cost-of-living crisis. Combined with fuel price hikes, higher taxes and soaring prices of basic goods, millions are now pushed to the edge of survival. Since the brutal suppression of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, Iranian society has been subjected to relentless economic pressure, unemployment, insecurity, and hunger. Under these conditions, protests rapidly spread beyond the bazaars to include workers, youth, women, students and striking labour sectors across multiple cities. Increasingly, demonstrators are expressing opposition not only to specific policies but to the ruling system as a whole. The state has responded, as always, with intensified repression, mass arrests and the deployment of security forces and plainclothes enforcers. Runaway inflation has removed essential items—bread, rice, meat, and other staples—from the reach of large sections of the population, while basic goods have become luxuries. Unemployment, homelessness, addiction and social disintegration are the direct outcomes of Iran’s capitalist order. No reshuffling of officials or factions within the regime can resolve these structural crises. Class polarization continues to deepen. A small elite, tied to state power, the security apparatus and religious foundations, accumulates vast wealth through the exploitation of labour and the plunder of public resources. Meanwhile, millions survive through precarious and degrading work, child labour and informal street trade, while the children of the ruling class live in comfort abroad. The Tendency of Revolutionary Marxists of Iran expresses full and unconditional support for the just struggles of the Iranian people. Past experience has shown that spontaneous protest alone, without organization, is vulnerable to repression and exhaustion. For this reason, the linkage between mass street mobilization and organized working-class struggle is decisive. Only the convergence of labour struggles and popular protest can shift the balance of forces and open the path to lasting gains. Self-defence against state violence is a legitimate right of workers and oppressed people. Sustainable resistance requires organization, solidarity and coordination across sectors. The fight in Iran is not a single episode, but part of a longer struggle for workers’ power, social equality and democratic control over society through workers’ councils. We salute the courage of Iranian workers, youth, women, teachers, students and retirees who continue to resist repression in streets, workplaces, schools and universities across the country. We call on trade unions, workers’ organisations, and left movements internationally to stand in active solidarity with the Iranian working class and oppressed masses. Forward toward the overthrow of capitalist rule and the establishment of a council-based, workers’ government in Iran. ### Royal Commission a win for the ruling class offensive against the Palestine movement URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/royal-commission-a-win-for-the-ruling-class-offensive-against-the-palestine-movement/ Last updated: 2026-01-18T04:51:51.000Z So it’s official. The Albanese government has appointed former High Court justice Virginia Bell to head a royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. It will begin its hearings soon, with a deadline for reporting to the government in mid-December. This is a win for the ruling class, which has mounted a weeks-long offensive to use the Bondi massacre to attack the Albanese government, the Palestine movement and civil rights more generally. The royal commission will give them the means to do this. There can be no overstating the sheer cynicism of this campaign by the ruling class, spearheaded by the Liberal Party, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation and the Murdoch press, but which has drawn in a broad spectrum of establishment bodies, ranging from big business lobby groups, former heads of security agencies, judges and barristers to the ABC and Nine newspapers and university vice chancellors. Those campaigning for a royal commission have been united in their determination to link the Bondi killings to a supposed “national crisis of antisemitism”, the blame for which, they argue, lies with the Palestine solidarity movement and the Albanese government’s supposed support for this movement. Everything that might point away from those goals has been pushed to one side. The leaders of this campaign aren’t really interested in understanding the massacre. They simply brushed aside the fact that the killers had no known identification with the Palestine solidarity campaign. They have dismissed as irrelevant national gun laws to limit ownership of the kind of high-powered guns used in the attack. No, the popular revulsion at the Bondi killings had to be the springboard for a malicious and much broader agenda—one of crushing the Palestine movement and legitimising a more repressive political and legal environment in the name of tackling “antisemitism” and “religious and ideologically motivated extremism” and protecting “social cohesion”. We know that by “antisemitism” they mean the unprecedented Palestine solidarity campaign that has brought millions onto the streets since 7 October 2023\. By “ideologically motivated extremism”, they mean chants like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” or “Long live the intifada!” By threatening “social cohesion”, they mean Palestine supporters wearing keffiyehs or watermelon earrings. It’s not like they’ve tried to hide their agenda. The Liberals demanded before Christmas that a royal commission examine “the threat posed by far-left wing and neo-Nazi extremists”, where by “far left” they mean anyone who has marched for Palestine. They wanted a thorough purge of the universities and the arts and cultural institutions. And in response to the Albanese government tabling hate speech legislation, the Liberals will only back this if it’s restricted to hate speech against Jews or Christians. If it identifies Muslims, LGBTI, disabled people or racial minorities as targets of hate speech, well, “freedom of speech” must prevail. If the architects of this campaign were really so worried about neo-Nazism, they might have tried to do something about it. Instead, Ley has refused to speak out against the rise of One Nation, the far-right anti-immigration marches or the recent Nazi demonstration outside NSW state parliament. If Israel’s supporters in Australia are so opposed to fascism, perhaps one of their leading figures, Alex Ryvchin, shouldn’t have excused Elon Musk’s fascist salute at one of Donald Trump’s inauguration events as an “appreciative gesture”. If they cared about calming community anxieties, why have they cheered on Israel’s barbaric war in Gaza? Their motivations were clear when they tried to block the appointment of Virginia Bell on the grounds that the NSW Supreme Court had used one of her High Court judgements to overturn the Minns government’s ban on the pro-Palestine march across the Sydney Harbour bridge last year. The right will now use the royal commission hearings to attack the Albanese government and demand a crackdown on the Palestine movement. The commission is a gift to the Liberals as it will give them a point of unity after nearly a year of internal dissension. Whether supposedly “moderate” or right wing, they all agree in hounding the Palestine campaign and trying to push society in a more authoritarian direction. The widening of powers of the security agencies that will result from the royal commission will allow the police and security forces greater leeway to attack the freedoms of the Palestine campaign to organise. Its terms of reference, specifically “strengthening social cohesion”, will legitimise the Minns government’s legislation that allows the police to ban street marches for up to three months, and the Allen government in Victoria which has threatened to do the same. The racists will be encouraged by the focus on immigration and surveillance of supposed hotbeds of extremism in western Sydney. The government’s announcement that it will implement all the recommendations of Jillian Segal’s report on antisemitism will stiffen the resolve of university vice chancellors to crack down on Palestine solidarity campaigns on campus. The focus on strengthening “social cohesion” will give governing bodies of cultural and artistic bodies, like the Adelaide Festival board, even more excuses to cancel Palestinian artists like Randa Abdel-Fattah. The Albanese government has capitulated to this ruling class offensive, which should come as no surprise. The government has defended Israel’s “right to defend itself” as it slaughters 70,000 Palestinians, turns Gaza into a hellscape and steals more and more land on the West Bank. How could we ever rest our hopes in such people? The Greens have been no better, with acting leader Senator Hanson-Young welcoming the decision to call a “balanced, careful and powerful” royal commission that might “bring together multicultural Australia” and “tackle antisemitism and all forms of racism”. Can they not read? It’s a royal commission into antisemitism, where “antisemitism” means the existence of the Palestine solidarity movement. But we won’t give in to this ruling class offensive. We will continue to march for Palestine and campaign against Israeli atrocities until Palestine is free. ### Adelaide Festival reaction shows we can push back the anti-Palestine repression URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/adelaide-festival-reaction-shows-we-can-push-back-the-anti-palestine-repression/ Last updated: 2026-01-18T04:51:40.000Z In the aftermath of the Bondi massacre, nothing says “social cohesion” quite as emphatically as sacking an invited Palestinian-Australian guest from the country’s premier writers’ festival. At a time when the prime minister and political leaders are appealing for unity and calm, they are turning a blind eye to blatant and obvious anti-Arab racism. This is the only conclusion we can draw from the decision of the board of the Adelaide Festival to “dis-invite” writer and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah from the writers’ festival on the grounds that she has previously made comments that might make people uncomfortable. It is worth letting the festival board speak for itself: > We have today advised scheduled writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah that the Board has formed the judgment that we do not wish to proceed with her scheduled appearance at next month’s Writers’ Week. > Whilst we do not suggest in any way that Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s or her writings have any connection with the tragedy at Bondi, given her past statements we have formed the view that it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi. This is a shameful position for the board of a leading cultural festival to take; to argue that removing a Palestinian speaker promotes “community cohesion”. It’s not clear what the festival organisers were hoping to achieve, but it is clear that board members were pressured into taking this decision. South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has made clear his opposition to the Palestine movement and support for Israel. While he is legislatively prevented from directly intervening in festival matters, he has made his distaste for Randa well known through extensive media appearances and statements. In the wake of the Bondi tragedy and the announcement of a royal commission into antisemitism, we can expect the right and pro-Israel politicians to push for more pro-Palestinian voices to be silenced. It is clear that this is what politicians like Josh Frydenberg and the Murdoch media have been pushing for in their relentless campaign for the royal commission. It is also clear, [as David Brophy writes at *Overland*](https://overland.org.au/2026/01/universities-and-the-arts-after-bondi-from-definitions-to-ambient-antisemitism/?ref=redflag.org.au), that the push to censor pro-Palestine voices will be extended across the arts sector and higher education this year. Brophy notes the chilling new phrase “ambient antisemitism” that animates the sinister push to clampdown on cultural and academic activism. Apparently, according to its authors, “ambient antisemitism” is whatever makes a pro-Israeli Jewish person uncomfortable. This is exactly the sentiment behind the Adelaide Festival decision to sack Randa. In this climate, it would be easy for people to duck and cover. But this is not what has happened. On 8 January, within hours of the board publicising its ban on Randa Abdel-Fattah, [the Australia Institute](https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/statement-from-the-australia-institute/?ref=redflag.org.au)—a left-liberal think-tank—announced it was withdrawing its sponsorship and participation. By late that day, over 35 participants also withdrew their participation. Within 48 hours, it had grown to more than 50, including several prominent international guests. Among them are well-known feminist Jane Caro, Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, English author Zadie Smith, journalist and academic Peter Greste, Indigenous writers Amy McQuire and Evelyn Araluen, journalist Amy Remeikis and many others. Significantly, high-profile Russian writer and Putin critic Masha Gessen also withdrew. Gessen was previously cancelled for comparing [Israel’s actions in Gaza to the Nazi holocaust](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust?ref=redflag.org.au). In December 2023, in another ironic action, [the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought was snatched back from Gessen](https://www.mediaite.com/uk/german-foundation-withdraws-from-awarding-jewish-journalist-hannah-arendt-prize-over-new-yorker-essay/?ref=redflag.org.au) for criticising Germany’s support for Israel and the suppression of the Palestine movement at home. It is fantastic that so many writers and artists have joined a protest in solidarity with Randa. It shows we can fight back against the heavy repression and intimidation that pro-Israel forces are trying to impose on us. Writers’ week staff have also voiced their opposition to the board’s decision in an email to the guests who have withdrawn. The festival workers are members of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, and the union issued a statement condemning the censorship of Randa. But the MEAA could take this further by calling union members working at the festival to take industrial action. However, while it is worth celebrating that the Adelaide Festival’s attempted censorship of Palestinian voices has blown up in its face, it is not enough. It is vital that we continue our public protests, our union organising and all other forms of solidarity with Palestine. We can take heart from Randa’s own strong statement in the face of censorship: > This is a blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship and a despicable attempt to associate me with the Bondi massacre ... Australian arts and cultural institutions continue to reveal their utter contempt and inhumanity towards Palestinians ... I remain confident that the writing community and the broader public will ultimately respond with principle and integrity. We must repay Randa’s confidence with our actions, just as we must recognise that the right will be pushing hard to silence us so that Israel can continue its genocide in the shadows. It is time for all of us to step up. Let’s take the great example of the writers who are standing in solidarity with Randa and build a movement that won’t go away at the first signs of intimidation. There’s never been a better time to “globalise the Intifada”. --- Marty Hirst is the author of [*There’s no good news: journalism, crisis and philosophy of praxis*](https://www.routledge.com/Theres-no-good-news-Journalism-crisis-and-philosophy-of-praxis/Hirst/p/book/9781032758817?ref=redflag.org.au) (Routledge, 2025). ### Forty-five Bondis a week in Gaza. Where’s the royal commission to root out Australia’s genocide supporters? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/forty-five-bondis-a-week-in-gaza-wheres-the-royal-commission-to-root-out-australias-genocide-supporters/ Last updated: 2026-01-09T06:00:14.000Z For more than two years, in a population less than half that of of Sydney, the equivalent of 45 Bondi massacres have been carried out, on average, every week. More than 71,000 murdered and more than 9,000 missing, presumed dead and buried under rubble. The scale of the crimes committed by Israel in Gaza is incontrovertible. [The United Nations](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds?ref=redflag.org.au) charges Israel with genocide. [Amnesty International](https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/?ref=redflag.org.au) charges Israel with genocide. [Israeli human rights group B’Tselem](https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507%5Four%5Fgenocide?ref=redflag.org.au) charges Israel with genocide. [Physicians for Human Rights](https://www.phr.org.il/en/genocide-in-gaza-eng/?ref=redflag.org.au), another Israeli organisation, charges Israel with genocide. [The International Association of Genocide Scholars](https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS-Resolution-on-Gaza-FINAL.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) charges Israel with genocide. [Human Rights Watch](https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-extermination-acts-genocide-gaza?ref=redflag.org.au) charges Israel with the crime of extermination and acts of genocide. The International Criminal Court charges Israeli PM [Benjamin Netanyahu](https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu?ref=redflag.org.au) and former Defence Minister [Yoav Gallant](https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/gallant?ref=redflag.org.au) with war crimes and crimes against humanity. And yet, within our midst in Australia are racist scum who support, justify or provide aid to the terrorist murderers carrying out atrocity after atrocity in Palestine. Instead of a royal commission into who exactly is complicit in these crimes, who exactly is giving succour to terrorism, who exactly is preaching genocide, the federal government has extended an invitation to Israel’s president to visit and is carrying out a royal commission into the opponents of genocide. We are governed by sickos. Randa Abdel-Fattah, whose people have been starved and exterminated, has been [cancelled by the Adelaide Festival board](https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/news/2025/adelaide-festival-board-statement?ref=redflag.org.au) because “it would not be culturally sensitive” for her to appear at its upcoming writers’ week. Imagine Gary Foley being cancelled because some racist whites wouldn’t like what he has to say about what this country has done to Aboriginal people. It is unimaginable. But not for a Palestinian in Australia today. Embedded in every institution of Australian capitalism, even the ones of purported “high culture”, are racist filth for whom Palestinian lives don’t count for shit. Those who aren’t racist scum are cowards who won’t speak up. These middle-class liberal toads are worse than the Andrew Bolts of this world. They say all the right things around their dinner tables with all their “sophisticated” friends and their fair-trade coffee beans that give a few extra cents on the dollar to poor Ethiopian farmers. They tut-tut about Donald Trump’s vulgarity and about the bad things that happened in the past—all of them on the right side of history on political questions that were long ago settled. They’re anti-racist only when it’s safe; only when anti-racism is officially sanctioned; only when its sponsored by official society and a bunch of NGOs. You can bet they turn up to Invasion Day marches—now that that’s a popular thing to do, not when it was only handfuls of outcasts—and applaud and sob and nod along. You can bet that they talk admiringly of Nelson Mandela and love how Desmond Tutu was so cheerful, so forgiving. [Tutu said more than a decade ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UTHTszgg1Q&ref=redflag.org.au) that the situation in Palestine was “in many instances worse” than what he experienced in South Africa. Well, it is now infinitely worse. But when it counts, when push comes to shove, Australia’s cultural, political and business elites are siding with Israeli apartheid, with the genocidal ethnostate. Polite society? What a scam. A casually racist, cowardly scam. White Australia never really died. It just became more sophisticated. It became social cohesion. It became culturally sensitive. It became a royal commission. It became the Adelaide Festival board. ### Three scum bags behind the royal commission push URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/three-scum-bags-demanding-a-royal-commission/ Last updated: 2026-01-08T07:10:15.000Z Over the Christmas break, while most people were enjoying big lunches, long walks and engaging in general merriment, every ghoul and ghastly figure from the last five decades of Australian political, sporting and business history came out of the woodwork to demonise the Palestine solidarity movement. In print and on the airwaves, in a wall-to-wall media campaign, was a coordinated call for a royal commission following the terrible Bondi massacre. This was not motivated by a desire for “justice” for the victims of the attack. The political right and the Australian ruling class sniffed an opportunity to crack down on civil liberties, reduce the space for democratic protest and shift society further to the right. It would take up too much space to list all the has-beens, freaks and opponents of anti-racist activists who were behind this campaign. So I have chosen just three of the more prominent ones. **Dawn Fraser** Dawn Fraser today is more known for her racism than her sports acumen. She has been an opponent of immigration for decades, and once [told the ABC](https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/from-olympic-bans-to-one-nation-dawn-fraser-no-stranger-to-controversy-20150707-gi6sgw.html?ref=redflag.org.au), “I mean I wish I could be as outspoken, I suppose, as Pauline Hanson and say, ‘Look, I'm sick and tired of the immigrants that are coming into my country’”. During one press conference—standing alongside Nova Peris, a fellow Olympian who once[ shared posts](https://nit.com.au/16-06-2025/18575/nova-peris-accused-of-sharing-anti-muslim-content-on-social-media?ref=redflag.org.au) describing Muslims as "Satan worshipping cockroaches \[that\] need to be eradicated”—Fraser said she had been "accused many times of being a racist”. Well, where there’s smoke there’s fire. In 2015, she went on a racist rant targeting tennis stars Nick Kyrgios and Bernard Tomic, saying, "If they don't like it \[Australia\], go back to where their parents came from. We don't need them here in this country if they act like that”. The idea that this bigot has any authority to lecture us about racism or antisemitism is laughable. **Janet Albrechtsen** After the Bondi massacre, Janet Albrechtsen penned no fewer than eleven articles attacking the Labor Party and calling for a royal commission. She attempted to appeal to good old Aussie larrikinism with a piece in the *Australian*, “[Call a fair-dinkum royal commission, Albo, or be forever damned](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/how-albaneses-political-tactics-on-antisemitism-have-backfired-on-his-government/news-story/6aeb2508c87560ce891aef63f36c302f?ref=redflag.org.au)”. Albrechtsen blamed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong for the massacre because the federal government recognised a Palestinian state. “But the Australian public needs to know whether, when she \[Wong\] adopted the hugely performative but completely useless decision to recognise a Palestinian state that doesn’t exist, she was advised this could lead or contribute to blood on Sydney’s streets”, Albrechtsen wrote. She continued: “Neither could Albanese use the old ‘conflate anti-Semitism with Islamophobia routine’ to confuse any royal commission or muddy its terms of reference”. Albrechtsen wouldn’t want a royal commission into Islamophobia, as she’d be sitting on the “accused” bench. Back in 2001, she wrote: “Pack rape of white girls is an initiation rite of passage for a small section of young male Muslim youths”. She claimed that French psychotherapist Jean-Jacques Rassial had shown this to be true. But, [as the Saturday Paper later noted](https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2024/04/20/who-janet-albrechtsen?ref=redflag.org.au), this was bullshit. Albrechtsen has nothing useful to offer on the question of anti-racism, except perhaps as an example of how not to conduct yourself. **BHP chair Ross McEwan** Ross McEwan is not a household name, but he is the chair of BHP, the Melbourne-based multinational mining company. He’s one of many capitalists who came out in support of a royal commission, illustrating the high level of ruling class support for this anti-Labor, anti-Palestine mobilisation. I could have chosen any number of the [130 “business leaders”](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-02/business-leaders-call-for-bondi-attack-royal-commission/106193032?ref=redflag.org.au) who signed an open letter calling for a commission, but Ross chairs a particularly odious company board. BHP is renowned for riding roughshod over Indigenous peoples, from Australia to Brazil, Bougainville to Colombia and beyond. In Colombia, a BHP mine was [using](https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/bhp-backed-coal-mine-in-colombia-rocked-by-human-rights-claim-20200617-p553n5.html?ref=redflag.org.au) 24 million litres of water a day and contaminated the drinking water. In Brazil, a mine [co-owned by the company](https://theconversation.com/they-do-not-respect-our-land-they-do-not-respect-our-people-brazils-traditional-people-take-on-bhp-in-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-class-actions-241777?ref=redflag.org.au) collapsed and released toxic mud and waste more than 700km beyond the mine. This led to the death of nineteen people and the contamination of land and rivers. In Australia, BHP has shown disregard for the Indigenous people and their land, [recently](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-23/bhp-wa-aboriginal-heritage-site-damaged-pilbara-rio-tinto-juukan/13184826?ref=redflag.org.au) destroying significant cultural sites in the Pilbara. The company has also underpaid its employees in Australia. [In 2023](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-01/bhp-wages-underpaid-28500-workers/102419890?ref=redflag.org.au), BHP was ordered to pay almost 30,000 employees backpay totalling $430 million dollars. So, again, what does a company responsible for human rights abuses, environmental destruction and exploitation have to tell us about the need or otherwise for a royal commission? The royal commission is part of a coordinated campaign led by the Australian ruling class, which has no business lecturing people about anything. ### Why we must oppose the royal commission URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-we-must-oppose-a-royal-commission/ Last updated: 2026-01-15T06:52:10.000Z The royal commission is a central element in a reactionary campaign by the core sections of the Australian ruling class to cynically take advantage of the Bondi terrorist attack to push society sharply to the right. It needs to be stridently opposed. This orchestrated McCarthyite assault on the Palestine movement, on the left, on workers, on basic democratic rights and anything seen as vaguely progressive with week after week of wall-to-wall media coverage is the most concerted right-wing campaign in Australia for decades. It is a systematic and extremely well organised attempt by the capitalist class to push the major institutions of society—the state apparatus, political parties, the trade unions, the courts, the universities, cultural institutions and so on—further to the right and to greatly strengthen the powers of the police and the security apparatus. They have blamed the murderous actions of two ISIS inspired gunmen on the hundreds of thousands of decent people who took to the streets to oppose genocide. They want to use manufactured charges of antisemitism against opponents of the genocide in Gaza to severely curtail free speech and the right to protest and to create a harsher more authoritarian climate in society. This sets a very dangerous precedent for the future for campaigns by workers to defend their living standards, to oppose the threat of war between the US and China, to stand up for Aboriginal rights or any progressive cause. This is not simply a campaign by Zionist forces, far-right figures like Pauline Hanson and the reactionary Murdoch press. The whole of the ruling class has joined forces in a concerted fashion—CEOs and the big business organisations, all of the mainstream media, military figures and the Liberal Party. They choreographed demands from judges and lawyers to churches to Olympians and other supporting stars and cultural figures to ex-Labor MPs, plus the Teals and an array of small l liberals and do-gooders like David Pocock, with the likes of Lidia Thorpe trailing in their wake. The Minns Labor government in NSW, a longstanding bitter opponent of the Palestine movement, also played an appalling role by rushing through draconian anti-protest laws, strengthening police powers and announcing its own scapegoating state based royal commission. The trade union leadership, which has for decades refused to stand up for workers’ living standards and basic rights, played a notably despicable role. They consistently refused to mobilise workers to support the mass movement against genocide. Then, in the wake of Bondi, the supposedly left-wing Victorian Trade Hall Council Secretary Luke Hilakiri denounced pro-Palestine protesters and rank-and-file workers active in Trade Unionists for Palestine. He declared that “they just need to back off” because they had supposedly “made all the points they need to make about Gaza”. The Albanese government has strongly backed and armed Israel throughout its war on Gaza and denounced pro-Palestine protests as antisemitic. Then, in the wake of the Bondi attack, Albanese invited Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who a UN Commission has charged with “inciting genocide”, to tour Australia. Albanese also promised to fully implement the outrageous anti-democratic demands of Jillian Segal, the far-right special envoy on antisemitism. Segal called for defunding broadcasters, universities and other public institutions that don’t ban criticism of Israel; Zionist oversight of the entire media; and compulsory pro-Israel “education” in schools. However, all of this was nowhere near enough for the mainstream media and the rich and powerful who run this country. They demanded the government launch a full throttle McCarthyite witch hunt. So when Albanese initially drew the line at calling a federal royal commission into antisemitism they unleashed an all out barrage of attacks to force the Labor government to fall into line and implement the ruling class’s full agenda. The capitalist class clearly is out to discipline Labor and humiliate Albanese to show who the real power in this country is. Albanese has officially caved to the ruling class’s demands. This simply further confirms that we can’t rely on Labor governments to protect, let alone advance, the interests of workers and the oppressed. However, Albanese agreeing to a royal commission will not in any way bring this concerted right-wing campaign to an end. The capitalist establishment is determined that the royal commission will not limit itself to the motivations and actions of the two ISIS inspired terrorists. Behind the spurious rhetoric of combatting “antisemitism” the royal commission will be turned into a ferocious assault on the left and on democratic rights. They want to curtail pro-Palestinian voices, have the dangerously broad definition of antisemitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance recommended by the royal commission, and severely undermine the right to protest. We need to stand our ground and resolutely oppose this ruling class offensive. ### Why you should march for Palestine this Sunday URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-you-should-march-for-palestine-this-sunday/ Last updated: 2026-01-07T03:25:31.000Z The Melbourne Palestine movement is taking the streets this Sunday, 12pm at the State Library, to protest the federal government’s decision to invite the Israeli president to visit Australia, to demand an end to the Gaza genocide and occupation of the West Bank, and to defend our right to protest. The Gaza genocide continues. Israel has violated the so-called ceasefire nearly 1,000 times in less than three months. At least 418 Palestinians have been slaughtered. All those people, with hopes and dreams that will never be fulfilled. [According to the United Nations](https://www.un.org/unispal/document/gaza-strip-ipc-reports-19dec25/?ref=redflag.org.au), 1.6 million people in Gaza, including 800,000 children, are suffering acute food insecurity. That is more than three-quarters of the entire population. Gaza is buried under at least 50 million tonnes of rubble, making it impossible for the Palestinians to rebuild their lives. Meanwhile, Israel continues to tighten its suffocating blockade, banning essential construction materials, energy resources and humanitarian aid. The Gaza genocide has also given cover for Israel to rapidly advance its colonisation of the West Bank. Early last year, the military launched a full-scale assault in the north,[ ](https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/largest-forced-displacement-west-bank-1967-oxfam?ref=redflag.org.au)[displacing 40,000 Palestinians](https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/largest-forced-displacement-west-bank-1967-oxfam?ref=redflag.org.au)—the largest ethnic cleansing since 1967\. Recently, in[ ](https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israeli-military-raids-west-bank-force-entire-communities-lockdown-keeping-children-out-school?ref=redflag.org.au)[Tulkarm](https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/israeli-military-raids-west-bank-force-entire-communities-lockdown-keeping-children-out-school?ref=redflag.org.au), hundreds of Palestinian families were again expelled from their land as the Israeli military bulldozed scores of homes. Amid these atrocities, the Australian political establishment is weaponising the Bondi massacre to crush Palestine solidarity. How dare they. Liberal leader Sussan Ley slandered our movement, linking it to the massacre, [arguing](https://nswliberal.org.au/melissa-mcintosh/news/remarks-made-at-the-bondi-pavilion?ref=redflag.org.au): “First they came for the Opera House, then they came to the Harbour Bridge, now they’ve come for Bondi”. Her lies were echoed by a chorus of politicians, journalists and the business elites. These people have been crusading against the Palestine movement for the past two years. People like veteran racist Pauline Hanson, who has repeatedly called for Palestinian refugees to be deported back to Gaza. The ghouls from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry who slammed our rallies for disrupting business as usual. The media outlets, from the *Age* to the ABC to the *Herald Sun*, that lined up to defend Israel’s crimes against humanity. They are using the post-Bondi moment to claw back lost ground. Mass opinion has shifted in favour of the Palestinians and against Israel, which put the Australian political establishment on the back foot. Now, they are on a massive offensive. Chris Minns, the New South Wales Labor premier, has banned protests and criminalised pro-Palestine phrases like “globalise the intifada”. Just last week, a woman was arrested for wearing a shirt with the slogan, which refers to supporting the Palestinians rising up against their oppression. Our movement has rightly put the political establishment on notice for their complicity in genocide. The Labor government has helped arm Israel, supplying the barrel cannons for their F-35 fighter jets. A death-machine designed to fire over 3,000 bullets per minute. How dare they accuse us of stoking violence when they are up to their necks in this genocide. Anthony Albanese has personally invited Israeli President Issac Herzog to address the federal parliament. This man has blood on his hands for the Gaza Holocaust, justifying the slaughter of Palestinian civilians, arguing: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible” (for the 7 October 2023 attack). In a just world, Herzog, along with the entire political establishment here and around the world, would be tried for war crimes. But in this capitalist hellscape where profit and power rules, human life is expendable. Supporters of Palestine must redouble our efforts to build the solidarity movement and stand up to the ruling class offensive. The road to a free Palestine is a long one, but the past two years have given us a glimpse of hope—from the global Freedom Flotilla to the general strike in Italy. We have faced down attacks on our movement because we know that we stand on the right side of history. This moment is another test; we must rise to the occasion. ### The Trump doctrine: a new prewar era? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-trump-doctrine-a-new-prewar-era/ Last updated: 2026-01-15T06:51:55.000Z Suddenly, Greenland doesn’t seem so outlandish. Not since before the end of the Cold War has the United States so forcefully and directly intervened in the Western Hemisphere. Amassing an armada to blockade Venezuela before bombing the country and kidnapping its president. Threatening the president of Colombia with a similar fate. Suggesting action against Mexico as well, while intimating that it’s the end of days for the Cuban government—and indeed any government that doesn’t toe Washington’s line. The US government couldn’t be clearer about its intentions, which White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller [outlined in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper yesterday](https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/05/politics/video/senior-white-house-aide-stephen-miller-says-us-military-threat-to-maintain-control-of-venezuela-digvid?ref=redflag.org.au): > We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world—the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time ... The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we’re going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. The audacity is shocking, but this didn’t come out of nowhere. And it is certainly [not unprecedented](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-long-and-bloody-legacy-of-the-us-in-latin-america). The first Trump administration made no secret of its desire to shore up what it, and almost every US government of the last 200 years, considers to be its property and primary “sphere of influence”. So in 2019, national security adviser John Bolton, [while announcing sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua](https://ni.usembassy.gov/national-security-advisor-ambassador-john-r-bolton-delivers-remarks-at-bay-of-pigs-veterans-association-brigade-2506/?ref=redflag.org.au), declared: “Today, we proudly proclaim for all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well”. That policy, outlined in 1823 and later named after its originator, James Monroe, the country’s fifth president, was a warning to the European powers that the US would not tolerate them interfering in the region. It was a bold assertion by a pre-industrial state that had only recently gained independence: we claim an exclusive right to oversee the Western Hemisphere. Eighty years later, [the so-called Roosevelt Corollary](https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/roosevelt-corollary?ref=redflag.org.au#transcript), named after Theodore Roosevelt, expanded the Monroe Doctrine. The president addressed the Congress in 1904, declaring that the United States would not only oppose European influence, but directly intervene into the affairs of regional states: > Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. This was a precedent setting doctrine for more than a century of overt and covert interventions into the Caribbean and Central and South America. Now, the White House is asserting the “Trump Corollary”, outlined in the latest [national security strategy](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au), issued in November. The document lists the “restoration of American power and priorities” as one of five “*core*, *vital* national interests”: > \[T\]he United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets. So much for all the ink spilled by foreign policy commentators about Trump’s purported “isolationism” and reluctance to deploy US power. The national security strategy at times reads like a white supremacist manifesto. Understandably, much of the commentary related to it has focused on its warnings about the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe and its attacks on European governments for facilitating decades of non-European people’s migration into the continent. Yet, for all its departures from convention, the core goal of this administration is consistent with all other US governments: retaining US geopolitical pre-eminence. Indeed, ever since the [first formal strategy document](https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1987.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) issued by the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan in 1987, US governments have used the language of mobilising or employing “all facets of national power” to maintain US dominance of the world. This motif appeared in the grand strategy documents of presidents [Bill Clinton](history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1997.pdf) and [George W. Bush](history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss2002.pdf), Barack Obama’s [2010 national security strategy](obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss%5Fviewer/national%5Fsecurity%5Fstrategy.pdf), Trump’s [2017 national security strategy](trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf) and [2018 national defence strategy](dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf), and Joe Biden’s 2022 [national security](whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf), [national defence](media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF) and [national military](jcs.mil/Portals/36/NMS%202022%20%5F%20Signed.pdf) strategies. Key differences today are, first, that there is a belated recognition in Washington that a war against China in Asia is probably unwinnable; and, second, that the growth of Chinese industrial power and economic sophistication have been severely underestimated. Indeed, Trump’s and Biden’s attempts to use the tariff weapon have resulted only in Beijing increasing it’s industrial output and positive trade balance with the world, while precipitating a series of Chinese high-tech breakthroughs considered almost unthinkable just a decade ago. The “Trump Corollary” is therefore refining US imperialism’s approach. China is now South America’s main trading partner; Beijing has invested billions of dollars in nearly two dozen seaports and the broader continental logistics network, firmly integrating several supply chains into its economic orbit. Plus there are increasing financial and military links. So US strategists are initiating what they consider a rearguard action to shore up their region as an exclusive US domain. Last year, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino [alleged](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/16/panamas-president-alleges-us-threatening-to-revoke-visas-over-china-ties?ref=redflag.org.au) that the US embassy threatened to revoke visas of Panamanian officials because of China’s close ties to the country. And after the US bailed out Argentina, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that President Javier Milei was “committed to getting China out” of the country. Now, the “Corollary” is in full view: a full-throated strategy not only of political interference, but of economic imperialism: > We must re-secure our own independent and reliable access to the goods we need to defend ourselves and preserve our way of life. This will require expanding American access to critical minerals and materials … \[And\] establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations… > Non-Hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our Hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future. Allowing these incursions without serious pushback is another great American strategic mistake of recent decades. > Successfully protecting our Hemisphere also requires closer collaboration between the U.S. Government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts. Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed. All countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, then, have been put on notice that a new era of US imperialist meddling has begun. It’s here that Greenland again comes into focus, both as a resource rich territory—with significant deposits of rare earth elements, other minerals and metals, and offshore oil and gas—and as an island of military value. In the interview with CNN’s Tapper, Miller, the White House aide, reiterated that the position of the Trump administration, going back to the president’s first term, is that Greenland should become part of the US and that there is no basis for Denmark’s territorial claim. Indeed, the formal position of the US government is that Greenland is a required territory for NATO’s operations in the arctic. Because the US is the only NATO signatory capable of projecting power in that area, Miller concluded, “obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States”. There’s a precedent. During an April 1941 White House conference, Denmark’s ambassador to the US, Henrik de Kauffmann, told reporters: “Greenland \[belongs\] to the American continent”. The *New York Times* concurred, [noting](https://www.nytimes.com/1940/04/11/archives/greenland-raises-hemisphere-issue-monroe-doctrine-to-be-applied-if.html?ref=redflag.org.au) that the island “lies well within the Western Hemisphere on all standard maps”. A short time later, President Franklin Roosevelt [declared](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/excerpts-from-the-press-conference-42?ref=redflag.org.au): “We are applying to Denmark what might be called a carrying out of the Monroe Doctrine ... and we are protecting Greenland against any other European nation”. This was all occasioned by Germany’s occupation of Denmark, beginning the previous year. Roosevelt turned Greenland into a US protectorate, establishing military bases and taking control of its minerals, using the territory as a base of operations when it later entered the Second World War. So again, the “Trump Corollary” isn’t as radical a departure as many suggest. But it is nevertheless a major escalation. We have become accustomed to referring to postwar periods: the post-Second World War era, the post-Vietnam era, the post-Cold War era. But we have potentially entered a new and dangerous prewar era of intense superpower jockeying in which bloc politics returns to the fore. ### The long and bloody legacy of the US in Latin America URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-long-and-bloody-legacy-of-the-us-in-latin-america/ Last updated: 2026-01-04T02:20:43.000Z President Trump’s intervention in Venezuela is just the latest move in a long and bloody history of US imperialism in Latin America. As US leaders prepare to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary this year, there is little to celebrate for the region south of its border, which Yale University academic Greg Grandin has aptly labelled the “workshop” of the US empire. When the thirteen former British colonies on the North American east coast formed the United States in the late eighteenth century, the dominant power on the American continent was the Spanish empire. But it was an empire in decay and, by the early 1820s, a series of independence wars ended over three centuries of Spanish rule in most of Latin America (as well as Portuguese rule in Brazil). The defeat of the Spanish, however, only intensified imperialist competition in the region as other European powers saw opportunities on the resource-rich continent. The US entered the contest with its Monroe Doctrine: a declaration of US hegemony in the region, ruling it off limits to the European powers. Through a series of treaties it was fairly successful in stopping any direct recolonisation of the area. The threat of European imperialism was one of the main factors guiding US actions in the region in the early nineteenth century. The other was slavery. From the time of independence, the US southern states had maintained slavery in the face of a northern abolitionist movement by incorporating new slave states into the union. This gave rise to a strong movement in the South pushing for expansion into Mexico and Central America. The strategy bore fruit with the Mexican–American war of the late 1840s, US victory ending with the incorporation of the land roughly from Texas to California—more than half of Mexico’s territory. The US emerged from the war as a true continental power, its borders now stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. After the defeat of the southern confederacy in the 1860s, US imperialism in Latin America took on a different form. Territorial expansion was no longer its primary objective. With slave labour abolished, the forces of industrial capitalism were unleashed. Vast plains to the west, enthusiastic investors, and millions of former slaves and impoverished white workers provided the three essential ingredients for capitalist development: land, labour, and capital. The result was that the US in the second half of the nineteenth century experienced rapid capitalist development. Within a few decades, it became the world’s largest industrial and agricultural producer. But underneath the growth hid a dangerous contradiction. The productive capacity of the US economy grew so large that by the end of the century the domestic market could no longer absorb its output. Rapid growth, consequently, was accompanied by a series of deep recessions due to severe falls in prices as supply so quickly outpaced demand. The expansion of the post-civil war period, therefore, was also a period of extreme crisis for the US ruling class. Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge, in an 1898 speech, acknowledged the problem: “American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours ... Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? ... The power that rules the Pacific ... is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and will forever be the American Republic.” This is the background to the Spanish–American war of the late 1890s. The US could never reach its true imperial potential while the European powers denied it access to certain markets and held colonies. The defeat of the last remnants of the Spanish empire, which still held important Caribbean islands such as Cuba and Pacific islands like the Philippines, was the pre-condition for the US entering a new period of imperialism in the early twentieth century. As one lawyer, Brooks Adams, wrote: “This war is the first gun in the battle for the ownership of the world”. Victory in the war in 1898 established Cuba as nominally independent but an effective US colony. The only reason it did not become the 51st state was because the US sugar industry opposed the additional competition that would have come from Cuban sugar being sold tariff-free in the US market. The Philippines, however, was the real prize. The US occupied the country until the end of the second world war, crushing several independence movements. With dominance secured in both the Atlantic and Pacific, a central priority became the construction of a canal linking the two oceans, allowing US firms privileged access to a key global trade route. The only problem was that the proposed site lay in Panama, which at the time was a province of Colombia rather than an independent state. When Colombia rejected a proposal to lease the territory, the US threatened military action and backed a separatist movement. A treaty was then swiftly concluded with a small group of Panamanian elites, granting US control over the canal in exchange for diplomatic recognition. This period, beginning with the Spanish–American war, opened a period of even more aggressive US imperialism. The supposedly peace-loving liberal President Woodrow Wilson expressed the sentiment in 1907: “Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.” Wilson’s words quickly became true. As Sydney Lens writes in his book *The Forging of the American Empire*: “By 1913 ... the United States had gained control of the tin industry in Bolivia, copper in Chile and Peru, and meat packing in Argentina and Paraguay. Its economic role was still distinctly secondary to Britain in that part of the world, but the American star was rising. J.P. Morgan and W.R. Grace operated the Chilean-Andean railroad, and American firms were making inroads into river transportation in Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. John Bull \[England\] was already outpaced for the trade of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela, and being pressed in Peru and Ecuador ... By making the Caribbean an “American lake” the United States guaranteed its dominance over the banana industry of Panama and Guatemala, the coffee industry of Haiti and El Salvador, the sugar industry of the Dominican Republic.” And when economic means failed, military force was always available. In 1915, the US invaded Haiti because it would not cede control of its customs houses, resulting in a nineteen-year occupation. A year later, it invaded the Dominican Republic. A 1922 report from the US Congress, while the occupation was ongoing, admitted that “homes were burned; natives were killed; tortures and cruelties committed; and ‘Butcher’ Weyler’s horrible concentration camps were established”. But for the US rulers, nothing would be allowed to stand in the way of the country’s rise. In the twenty years after the Spanish–American war, US manufacturing output increased six-fold. The two world wars further accelerated this trajectory. As the Cold War began and the European powers lost the last remnants of their empires, US control over Latin America was stronger than it had ever been. Despite US hegemony, however, Latin America was one of the regions in which Soviet influence reached furthest. Through local communist parties, Russia established itself in some countries within the working class and the left. In other cases, such as Cuba and Nicaragua, pro-Moscow groups took state power. In the post-war period, therefore, the battle to maintain Latin America under US domination against Soviet influence became the lens through which foreign policy planners viewed the region. As US diplomat and the great theoriser of Soviet containment, George Kennan, said in 1948: “We have half the world’s wealth, but only 6 percent of its population. Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity”. That “pattern of relationships” in Latin America took the form of direct US military interventions (including biological and chemical weapons attacks, and forced starvation through the poisoning of crops), backing military coups, sponsoring right-wing death squads, and plunging entire countries into years-long civil wars. In 1944, a popular revolution in Guatemala overthrew a dictatorship and led to the election of a reformist government. But after ten years and subsequent democratic elections in which Jacobo Arbenz was elected, the US had had enough. This was particularly the case when the interests of the US United Fruit Company were threatened. Arbenz initiated a mild agrarian reform program, expropriated only unused land and offering compensation to the owners. The land reform program, consequently, had virtually zero impact on the United Fruit Company. Nonetheless, in 1954, the US orchestrated a coup to overthrow Arbenz. The military and paramilitary units unleashed horrendous violence upon the civilian population, murdering, raping and torturing thousands. The Arbenz government was what US scholar Noam Chomsky calls “the threat of a good example”: any government or movement that, even in modest fashion, tries to improve the lives of ordinary people, is a threat to US interests because it offers the example of an alternative. This idea took on increased importance for the US after the Cuban revolution in 1959\. When the forces led by Fidel Castro overthrew a US-backed dictator 90 miles from Florida, it set off major alarm bells for US foreign policy planners. Two years later, when those same rebels declared themselves to be communists and allied themselves with the Soviet Union, the US decided to make an example of Cuba. A strict trade embargo was placed on the island and, in 1961, the CIA trained a group of right-wing mercenaries to invade and overthrow the government. Although it failed, a clear message had been sent to the entire continent: this was the price of defiance. The problem for the US, however, was that the Cuban revolution inspired the Latin American left. In nearly every country, guerilla groups formed with the goal of repeating some variation of the Cuban revolution. This combined with the radical period of the 1960s and 1970s, in which a series of urban mass movements developed across the continent. In some cases, the movements toppled governments, both democratic and dictatorship. In response, the US unleashed its infamous death squads in Central America and backed military regimes in South America, such as Chile. Nicaragua was a prime example. Its case goes back to the early 1930s, when President Roosevelt, under the “good neighbour” policy, supported a military coup that brought Anastasio Somoza to power. He and his two sons established a family dynasty that ruled for 43 years. Nicaragua suffered a particularly violent fate because it was the only other country after Cuba in which a left-wing guerilla group actually won state power. The Sandinista National Liberation Front, financially and politically backed by Castro, won mass support among the peasantry and working class and played the leading role in the revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. When the Sandinistas took power, they gave land to the peasantry, expanded healthcare and education, and lifted a big group of the population out of poverty. As a result, Washington decided that Nicaraguans had to be punished. It was another case of the “threat of a good example”. When President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981,the US became uncompromisingly committed to the violent overthrow of the Sandinista government. The CIA trained opposition paramilitaries and by early 1982 had launched airstrikes in the country. Despite the Sandinistas holding and winning elections in 1984, they lost in 1990\. After a decade of civil war and more than 30,000 lives lost, they voluntarily gave up power to a US-backed candidate. The early decades of the 21st century in Latin America gave rise to the so-called pink tide. Across the continent, left-wing, reforming leaders won elections on the promise of wealth redistribution to the poor and the working class. Many governments achieved significant improvements in quality of life for millions of people, largely thanks to China’s vast demand for Latin America’s resources. But the economics of this model were undercut around 2011 as China’s growth began to slow, leading many left governments, like the Workers’ Party in Brazil, to implement austerity. While some were prepared to challenge US economic control in the region, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who partially nationalised the oil industry, they were all bound to the logic of capitalism and the necessary alliances with imperial powers that stems from it. As such, the independence from the US that some of them won was replaced by reliance on China. Remembering the bloody history of the United States in Latin America is essential in light of Washington’s latest criminality in Venezuela, home to the world’s largest known oil reserves. With China rapidly catching the US economically and militarily, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza having laid bare the sham of international law, there is little need for Trump to cloak US imperialism in the language of “democracy” and “liberty”. The might makes right imperialism of the early twentieth century is returning. ### US gangster regime kidnaps Venezuelan president URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/us-gangster-regime-kidnaps-venezuelan-president/ Last updated: 2026-01-15T06:51:43.000Z The US has launched airstrikes against Venezuela, kidnapped its president, Nicolas Maduro, and is attempting a regime change—although at this point the government still stands. The order for this naked display of gangster imperialism came from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida club for the one percent, where just days earlier he auctioned a portrait of Jesus for US$2.75 million and said his new year’s resolution was “peace on Earth”. There can be no peace with the Washington regime enforcing order. On every continent, military bases, CIA stations and multinational companies are engaged in a global war to continue or expand US domination. Extortion and terrorism are the norm for this rogue state. But this latest act is so brazen, so arrogant, that it beggars belief. This is the lawlessness of a criminal syndicate; the act of a mob-boss state. Regime change in Venezuela has been a long-held goal of US foreign policy planners since the left-wing Hugo Chavez won the presidency in 1999 and initiated a program of wealth redistribution towards the poor and the working class. The country’s oil wealth underpinned the new president’s program. With the world’s largest known reserves, Chavez partially nationalised the sector. He and his successor Maduro increasingly turned to China as Washington turned the screws, including signing deals to sell oil at below world market prices. Trump’s actions must be understood in the context of intensifying imperialist tensions between the United States and China. For Washington, the world’s largest oil reserves in a region it considers its “backyard” being sold at cut-price rates to its principal geopolitical rival was scandalous. This was part of the motivation for the US-backed coup attempt in 2002, when Chavez was detained for two days but ultimately failed. It also inspired the first Trump administration’s recognition of little-known politician Juan Guaido as the country’s “true” president. Guaido unsuccessfully called for the military to oust Maduro in a coup and publicly supported a US invasion. While oil is important in US calculations, Maduro’s ouster is part of a broader attempt to shore up the Western hemisphere under US domination. Many governments have been overthrown in this region purely for not toeing the US line and displaying some concern for their own citizens’ wellbeing. Also, the region is home to crucial natural resources and has gradually been slipping out of US control. Such a brazen move to oust the leader of a country that has forged closer ties to China and Russia sends a clear message about what the US is prepared to do to maintain its hegemony. Why now? Regional dynamics are important. The first decade and a half of the 21st century was dubbed the “pink tide”, as left-wing or left-leaning governments came to power across the continent. These leaders often used Chinese demand for their natural resources to lift millions of people out of poverty. But this model began to break down around 2011 when Chinese economic growth began to slow. Many of pink tide leaders turned to austerity and authoritarianism. Over the last decade, the political pendulum in the region has tipped back to the right. But it was not the same right as before the pink tide. Today, it is a hardened and radicalised right, inspired by Trump. Such governments are in power in Argentina, El Salvador, Bolivia and just won elections in Chile. Crucially, there is also a government-in-waiting in Venezuela. Since Chavez’s first election victory, Venezuela’s far right have openly supported US intervention. Now, they have finally got their wish. At the time of writing, it’s unclear how much, if any, of the US’s actions were coordinated with Venezuela’s far-right leaders and dissident military officers. Should they end up in power, however, the plan is clear. Their most prominent leader, Maria Corina Machado, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, recently summed it up: “We will bring rule of law. We will open markets. We will have security for foreign investment and a transparent massive privatisation program that is waiting for you.” That’s the “peace on Earth” that Trump, and apparently the Nobel committee, desire: a fire sale of public assets to predatory US companies, and a government pliant to Western corporate and geopolitical interests. Many questions remain unanswered. The role of the Venezuelan military looms large. Its top echelons are deeply integrated into the Venezuelan capitalist class, running important sections of the economy. Along with Venezuela’s large military budget, this has underpinned their loyalty to the government for many years. It is unclear how the leading generals will respond to Maduro’s ouster, but voluntarily handing over their control of the world’s largest oil reserves seems unlikely. There are more questions. Will the opposition unite around a clear program and person? It’s impossible to know, but the more moderate sections are not unanimous in supporting US intervention. How much of this is driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose political career has been animated by an almost manic desire for regime change in Venezuela and Cuba? What political impact will this have domestically in the US and on Trump’s MAGA movement? The legacies of Iraq and Afghanistan left a section of Trump’s base strongly opposed to regime change operations. It is notable that the few statements by Trump and Rubio have framed the actions as a “law enforcement” operation to bring a “criminal” drug trafficker to justice. Most important of all, how does the Venezuelan population respond? Having turned the country into a corrupt, authoritarian state stalked by poverty weakened the strong support Chavez enjoyed, but the Venezuelan population also has a long history of opposing US imperialism. Many understand that Washington’s crippling sanctions regime has been a key source of economic misery in the country. They know that Washington will only plunder them further. Whatever the answers to these questions may be, the ouster of Maduro marks a step towards greater, and more naked, imperialist aggression. After Israel’s genocide in Gaza, there now appears little need for even the pretence of international law. Might makes right is the guiding ethos of US imperialism. There will be no peace until the empire falls. ### Supporters of Palestine must stand up to the post-Bondi right-wing offensive URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/supporters-of-palestine-must-stand-up-to-the-post-bondi-right-wing-offensive/ Last updated: 2026-01-10T10:42:03.000Z Since the Bondi massacre, the right-wing press has been saturated with vile slanders against the Palestine solidarity movement and the left. Racist pig Pauline Hanson led the charge, but she’s been followed by a slew of political figures and editorialists blaming the Palestine solidarity movement for the murders. Even former PM John Howard is part of the chorus. Howard savaged the Australian working class and led the country into the criminal invasion of Iraq, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. That the corporate media still take this war criminal seriously says it all. Some are using language that wouldn’t have been out of place in Hitler’s Germany. In one piece for the *Australian*, John Carrol contrasted the clash of civilisations he claims is at the root of the Bondi shooting with “monocultural Japan, which has preserved its ethnic and cultural purity, helping make its cities today, clean, orderly and smoothly running”. Left-wing people must stand up to the vitriol and the disgraceful, cynical slanders. The people and institutions going after us have spent decades stoking racism in Australian society, torturing refugees—or justifying it—and punching down and attacking the vulnerable. For the last two years, they have backed the genocide in Palestine. Those trying to make political capital from the Bondi attack were baying for blood in Gaza as bombs rained down and as people starved. Their goal is to shift public opinion hard against the Palestine movement. They want to strike a blow against the political left and the Labor Party—which has backed the genocide, but apparently hasn’t been enthusiastic enough in its support for Israel or open enough in its racism. They want to make up the political ground that they lost over the last two years. From 7 October 2023, the political right and supporters of Israeli apartheid lost a series of debates on the Palestine question. The depravity of Israel’s genocide has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets and has shifted broader public opinion against both Israel and the US. Two years into Israel’s offensive, [polling showed that](https://apan.org.au/media%5Frelease/poll-finds-australians-back-sanctions/?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=New%20poll%20finds%20widespread%20opposition,without%20being%20attacked%20or%20penalised.) 57 percent of Australians supported sanctions on Israel and 58 percent said a genocide was taking place. In August last year, despite two years of the right smearing all those who stand with Palestine as antisemites, demonstrations flowered in even the smallest country towns as more than 300,000 took to the streets in the [largest Palestine solidarity mobilisation in Australia’s history](https://redflag.org.au/article/australia-rises-for-palestine). NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns, arguably Australia’s most pro-Israel premier, was defeated twice in the courts by Sydney’s Palestine Action Group and definitively in the streets when 300,000 defiantly marched across the Harbour Bridge. Now, he’s joining the right’s crusade to turn the tide. Minns has introduced a law allowing the state government to temporarily ban demonstrations. Antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal and her deputy Greg Craven have taken specific aim at students, claiming that university-based protests contributed to a climate of hatred which led to the massacre. This is the same antisemitism envoy who failed to issue any statement when a Nazi organisation took centre stage at mass racist protests last year. Segal has used this moment to again insist that the government adopt a raft of anti-democratic measures that would lead to a severe crackdown on freedom of speech in universities, including proposing that she be given the right to block funding to universities and arts organisations. We cannot let them turn the political tide. Gaza is strewn with broken concrete and smashed homes, under siege from every direction by the Israeli military. Underneath the rubble are an estimated 9,000 bodies. Tents perch on stretches of land that form valleys surrounded on all sides by shelled buildings. The people are starving; even the animals are going hungry. One mother told news outlet Electronic Intifada: “I stay awake all night guarding my children from the dogs”. Israel is refusing to let in anywhere near adequate aid, and has revoked the operating licences of 37 aid groups delivering some relief, including Doctors Without Borders and the Norwegian Refugee Council. But Gaza is not chaos. The Israeli government is a skilled social architect, using the most brutal methods to physically and psychologically torture the entire population. [From the beginning of the siege in 2007](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/17/israeli-military-calorie-limit-gaza?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=13%20years%20old-,Israel%20used%20%27calorie%20count%27%20to%20limit%20Gaza%20food%20during%20blockade,needed%20to%20sustain%20the%20population.), for example, the military limited the number of calories allowed into the territory to a bare minimum as part of a campaign of economic warfare. In November, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir [reportedly urged troops](https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-ministers-debate-shooting-gaza-children-near-yellow-line?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=Israeli%20ministers%2C%20including%20Ben-Gvir,Mute) to shoot “children and donkeys” who stray near the newly established “yellow line”, which has cut Gaza in two and allows Israel to occupy 60 percent of the land. This is what the so-called ceasefire looks like. As Palestinians suffer through a freezing winter, we must continue to fight for Palestinian liberation. This means standing up to an emboldened and rabid political right, and to any and all attacks on the right to demonstrate for justice in Gaza. ### The Marxist alternative to settler-colonial theory URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-marxist-alternative-to-settler-colonial-theory/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T05:19:17.000Z Indigenous people are treated like rubbish in this country. Beneath all the waffle about reconciliation and recognition lie the brute facts of racism. Last year, states and territories across the country rushed through draconian “anti-youth crime” bills. The result has been an explosive increase in incarceration rates and police violence. In NSW, the Indigenous incarceration rate increased tenfold, and more Indigenous people died in police custody last year than in any other year on record. In May, the National Native Title Tribunal gave the green light to a huge gas project against the Gomeroi people’s strident opposition. On every metric of standard of living—including education, income, health and housing—the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is entrenched. The most recent Closing the Gap report was forced to concede that only four of nineteen socio-economic targets were on track. Why are Indigenous people so oppressed? The most common left-wing answer is that we live in a settler-colonial society. It is argued that the central cleavage in Australia is an exploitative colonial relationship between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people. Non-Indigenous people, no matter what class or background, are settlers and colonisers who benefit from the suffering of Indigenous peoples. “The extent to which settlers benefit from colonization is modified to varying degrees by their skin colour and cultural background (not all settlers are white or Anglo), and by class, gender, sexuality and physical ability”, admits Sarah Maddison in her book *The Colonial Fantasy*. But she maintains that settlers “are all complicit in sustaining colonial relationships ... We are none of us outside or above these relationships. Migrants are still settlers, white progressives are still settlers”. For many progressives, slogans such as “Invasion is a structure, not an event” or “Just another day in the colony” are ways to link anti-Indigenous racism to this continent’s invasion in 1788\. However, it is a deeply misleading way to understand the real causes of Indigenous oppression. And it avoids the elephant in the room: capitalism. This isn’t just some semantic point. If we want to change the conditions under which people suffer, then we have to understand why they suffer, not just indulge in moralistic rhetoric. African Americans suffered enormously under slavery. It is at the heart of the origins of their racial oppression in the United States, and its legacy can still be felt. But no-one says that African Americans suffer from a system of slavery *today*, because “slavery” doesn’t describe the machinery of oppression that they face in contemporary society. The origins of Indigenous oppression do, of course, lie in the violent colonisation of this continent and the exploitation and marginalisation that Indigenous people subsequently suffered. However, to argue in 2026 that all Indigenous people are being colonised by all non-Indigenous people explains nothing. It obscures the fact that Indigenous oppression is in the interests of the Australian ruling class and is enforced by capitalist institutions that benefit them, not the majority of the population. The working class, who make up most of society, do not benefit from mining bosses overturning land rights, from racist police violence or from the crippling poverty and inequality that plagues Indigenous people’s lives. The argument that capitalism—not colonialism—is the cause of Indigenous oppression today in no way means downplaying the racism they face. It simply means being clear about who is responsible for the oppression of Indigenous people: the bosses, the state and the capitalist system that enriches a minority at the expense of the rest of us. Theorising about settler colonialism leads away from an anti-capitalist analysis. The socialist academic Sai Englert ends up arguing in an article for *Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography*, that “even if working-class settlers are exploited by their ruling classes, overthrowing the settler state would mean overthrowing a system in which they share, however unequal the distribution of the colonial loot”. This is rubbish. While rarely acknowledged today—particularly by liberal academics who make a living out of writing about other people’s oppression—there are deep links between the workers’ movement, the socialist left and the struggle for Indigenous rights, which are inexplicable if workers are all colonising settlers. From the Day of Mourning and Protest in 1938 and the post-World War Two strikes of Aboriginal workers in the Pilbara and Darwin to the land rights and Black Power struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Indigenous and non-Indigenous working-class activists have fought side by side against the same enemies. The reasons behind this aren’t that hard to fathom. The capitalists who drove Indigenous people off their lands in the 1800s and who exploit that land today are the same bosses that workers fought and organised against for more than 200 years. The police who murder Aboriginal men and women are the same oppressors who have frequently broken picket lines, arrested strike leaders and harassed socialist activists. The economic system of capitalism, which prioritises profits and exploits millions of Australian workers, is the same system that creates the poverty and discrimination in which most Indigenous people find themselves trapped. This doesn’t mean that Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have the same lives under capitalism. Indigenous people are obviously particularly oppressed in specific ways because of the racism directed towards them. The Stolen Generations, the huge levels of incarceration and police violence, the denigration of Indigenous identities and culture and the vicious discrimination and lies about Indigenous peoples are all products of capitalism, but it is Indigenous people who have had to face these vile cruelties. Far too many non-Indigenous people are ignorant or indifferent to the suffering of Indigenous people. And this racism of neglect can undoubtedly help governments and bosses get away with racist crimes. This doesn’t change the fact that non-Indigenous and Indigenous workers share a common interest in fighting against the capitalist system that exploits them. It is the existence of this common interest that makes solidarity a reality rather than a nice dream or a desperate moral plea. Proponents of the colonial argument, like Englert, often draw an equivalence between non-Indigenous workers in countries like Australia and the Israeli working class. In Israel, there is compulsory military service. So significant sections of the Israeli working class have direct experience in oppressing Palestinians. There is also a sizeable number of Zionist settlers involved in violent struggles with the Palestinians over land control. The question of the expansion of the Zionist state and the subjection of the Palestinians is the major issue of Israeli politics. Most of what passes as the left and the socialist movement in Israel disgracefully supports the continued oppression of the Palestinians. There is no real equivalent to the Zionist settler population among the Australian working class. While some racist workers have acted in appalling ways, and others are indifferent, the vast majority of the working class has never been involved in violent conflicts with Indigenous people over their land. The battle over Indigenous rights in Australia is very much contested, but there is not the same hegemonic support for oppressing Indigenous peoples here as there is in Israel. We hold mass demonstrations every year in Australia on Invasion Day to support land rights and Indigenous issues. In Israel, mass demonstrations call for the expulsion of Palestinians. The focus on Indigenous vs. non-Indigenous people can also lead to other political dead ends. In her book *Home Rule*, academic Nandita Sharma has shown that it has become common in left-wing circles to argue that migrants are “settlers” or even “colonisers”, that immigration is “conquest” and that Indigenous people need to be centred at the expense of migrants. Migrant populations, including those that suffer from racism, are portrayed as a privileged layer who benefit from anti-Indigenous racism. It is commonly asserted that anti-racist campaigns by migrants merely contribute to colonialism rather than challenging it, and that Indigenous people are the only truly revolutionary group in Australian society. This is a profoundly conservative worldview that expresses some of the most self-defeating aspects of contemporary identity politics and privilege theory. At best, it downplays the racism faced by migrants; at worst, it apes the racist arguments of the far right. It shows the dangers of leftists pitting the interests of one section of the oppressed against another, rather than looking to what could unite them against the capitalist system. The argument that non-Indigenous workers and bosses are simply squabbling over the spoils stolen from Indigenous people doesn’t capture the actual dynamics of class struggle in Australia. The capitalist society that has been created on dispossessed lands is filled with exploitation, oppression and cruelty. It is not in the interests of non-Indigenous workers that this society continue to exist as it currently does. Rather, it is in their interests to build a radically different society based upon workers’ democracy, economic planning and genuine equality. It is notable that when working-class struggle has become more intense, the tendency has been for more solidarity with Indigenous people. If workers’ struggle were about gaining more at the expense of Indigenous people, then the opposite would happen. The conditions for Indigenous people would deteriorate the more workers won. History shows that such a proposition is utterly preposterous. All the periods in which there were serious advances in the struggle for Indigenous rights, in particular the immediate postwar years and the 1960s and 1970s, were times of mass working-class struggle. If we want to uproot and destroy anti-Indigenous racism, then the anti-colonial lens doesn’t provide us with a strategy to challenge the underlying causes of this oppression. If we want to build a powerful, mass, democratic movement of ordinary people fighting for a better world, then we can’t do it on the basis of settler colonial theories. They provide no framework for uniting workers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, in a common revolutionary fight against the system. Instead, we should look to the politics of working-class struggle, socialism and Marxism. ### Palestine and imperialism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/palestine-and-imperialism/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T05:15:58.000Z > “We make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve got a lot of them. And we’ve given a lot to Israel, frankly ... But you used them well. It also takes people that know how to use them, and you obviously used them very well.” These were Donald Trump’s boastful words to Israel’s parliament in October 2025\. But he was saying only what the whole world already knew: that the United States has played a critical role in enabling the Gaza genocide. Why? What motivates the world’s pre-eminent power, and states all over the world, to offer full-throated support to the eradication of Palestinian life and society in Gaza, already one of the poorest patches of earth on the planet? One of the most common explanations, that the US (or Australia) has been misled by a powerful pro-Israel lobby to act against its interests, falls short. Proponents of this argument include Josh Paul and Tariq Habash, former advisers to President Joe Biden, who resigned over his Gaza policy and established their own rival lobby group, A New Policy. Paul and Habash argue that “the relationship with Israel is not, on balance, in America’s interest in its current form”, and that “overcoming the reach of organizations like the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) ... can only begin when the narrative about the US-Israel relationship is corrected”. While there is certainly a pro-Israel lobby that advocates for the relationship, this fact does not explain why the US government would listen to it more than any of the thousands of other lobby groups. Lobbying is a surface-level explanation, which in its worst forms arrives at a conspiratorial world view that the most powerful empire in world history has been hijacked by savvy salesmen. The underlying assumptions of the lobbying argument are wrong. They assume that the US has no essential affinity with Israel, and often simply conclude that the answer lies in establishing a new lobby to advocate for different foreign policy positions. But there are plenty of pro-Palestine lobbyists, whose appeals for a more humane foreign policy routinely fall on deaf ears, just as climate lobbyists are battered out of the equation by the dull economic compulsion of fossil fuel extractivism. The much more sinister truth is that the United States and many other states around the world support Israel because their interests converge with those of a genocidal ethno-state. The United States, the pre-eminent global power, has a direct stake in controlling the Middle East and its vital trade routes and vast oil reserves, as do local Israeli allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Jordan. Israel has simply proved an invaluable asset to them—not through corrupting the spirit of the US empire, but by developing into one of its most loyal attack dogs. And for much of the world, like Australia, Britain and Germany, being close friends with the United States means welcoming its genocidal ally as a pledge of loyalty. ### **Imperialism and the Middle East** Marxists call this geopolitical wrestling part of imperialism. It is a fundamental feature of modern capitalism, in which economic and state competition are intertwined. Just as corporations scramble for market share, states fight to establish geopolitical spheres of control and influence: who controls which trade routes, markets, international institutions and so on. These aren’t two separate processes; economic competition and military conflict are like conjoined twins. Without navies to keep canals open and governments to negotiate trade deals, companies can’t move their commodities in and out of markets. Without advanced economies with high-tech manufacturing, communications and research capabilities, it is impossible to build the cutting-edge militaries to stay on top. For nearly two centuries, this process has scarred the globe, producing two cataclysmic world wars in which the largest military-industrial powers fought one another, annihilating human life on a scale unknown before in the history of our species. First, it was Britain and Germany; then, the United States and the Soviet Union; and today, China’s rise has ushered in a new period of great-power rivalry over who will dominate the globe. Beneath these large powers, there are small and medium powers like Australia, jockeying to bump themselves up the pecking order by making powerful allies and dominating their neighbours. To our rulers, the whole world is a chessboard in which whole nations, like Palestine, can be sacrificed for power and position. Palestinian suffering is ultimately a consequence of their existing on land that is important to this system of insatiable competition for money and power. The Middle East sits at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa, and is traversed by critical trade arteries. According to the US Naval Institute, the Suez Canal, which passes through Egypt, carries 12 percent of all world trade and 30 percent of container transport, at an annual value of approximately US$3.8 trillion. Likewise, the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway, connects the region’s immense oil and gas producers to the world market. These resources are the other key feature of the Middle East’s strategic importance. Oil, modern capitalism’s lifeblood, vital for energy, manufacturing and militarism, is abundant. International Energy Agency figures demonstrate that, as of 2019, the Middle East produced a huge share of global energy resources, with 31 percent of oil and 16 percent of natural gas production. Oil juggernaut Saudi Aramco, the world’s fourth largest corporation, boasts a staggering annual revenue of US$480 billion. Controlling these resources and waterways provides enormous strategic leverage in the battle for both economic and geopolitical supremacy in modern capitalism. The Middle East has mattered since well before the creation of Israel. Since the discovery of oilfields in the early twentieth century, ravenous international competition has shaped the region. The establishment of corporations such as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now known as BP) at the beginning of the century gave way to open military conquest within a decade. During World War One, Britain and France waged a deadly campaign to carve up the Ottoman Empire, producing the infamous 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that handed Britain control of Palestine, which would eventually be the basis for the 1947 partition. In 1956, a major crisis erupted when Israel, Britain and France invaded Egypt to force open the Suez Canal and Strait of Tiran for their ships. More recently, the Australian government spent twenty years alongside the US and Britain brutally occupying Afghanistan and Iraq in an attempt to establish what advisers described as a “new American century” of dominance. According to the Watson Institute’s Cost of War Project, these wars killed more than 900,000 people and indirectly caused at least 3.6 million further deaths. Perpetual war is no accident, but a product of the strategic centrality of the Middle East to the world system. Our rulers are open about the capitalist logic behind imperialism. During the 1990 Gulf War, when the US went to war with Iraq over oil-rich Kuwait, former assistant defence secretary Lawrence Koth candidly explained, “If Kuwait grew carrots, we wouldn’t give a damn”. During the Gaza genocide, Anthony Albanese had a similar moment of clarity. In a statement explaining Australia’s intelligence contribution to the joint British-American bombing of Yemen, he justified it on the basis that Yemen’s Houthi rebels “threaten lives, the global economy, and the free flow of commerce in the region’s critical waterways”. And so goes the jig. Places like Yemen, which the World Bank ranks among the ten poorest countries in the world, can have missiles and bombs rained down on them by the world’s most powerful militaries simply because they stand in the way of profit. A whole region can be subjected to well over a century of invasion, occupation, genocide and slaughter simply because there is oil beneath their feet and trade routes traversing their land. So pro-Israel lobbyists didn’t need to convince world powers that the Middle East mattered. But Israel did, over time, manage to provide a compelling answer to the question of how best to dominate it. ### **Israel: attack dog** Understanding the Western powers’ unconditional support of Israel starts with the unique role that it plays in the infrastructure of conquest and control in the Middle East. It is the most important outpost of the United States-led geopolitical bloc in the region. This is crucial to understanding the “special relationship” between Israel, the United States and, by extension, the rest of the US-led bloc. It underlies why Israel has become, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, the largest recipient of US aid in history, at a cumulative US$300 billion, adjusted for inflation. This is no swindle, but a handsome retainer to be made good on when required, by attacking neighbouring states and acting as a powerful anchor for US interests. Various high-profile US politicians have highlighted Israel’s strategic importance. In the 1980s, Joe Biden declared: “If there was not an Israel, we would have to create one”. Reagan-era Secretary of State Alexander Haig described Israel as the “largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk”. This is the real rationale behind the United States’ virtually unconditional support for Israel, and why it is a bipartisan article of faith in US politics and foreign policy circles. It is a permanent base for the world’s most powerful state to fulfil its objectives in one of the most contested arenas of the global chessboard. For US allies like Australia, supporting Israel comes as part of a package deal. When Israel was first conceived, its supporters understood that the project of setting up a brand new state in the middle of Palestine could not succeed unless it attached itself to a major power. The founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, first appealed to the British Empire for support on that basis: “England with her possessions in Asia should be most interested in Zionism, for the shortest route to India is by way of Palestine ... I believe in England the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea, should be easily understood”. This sense of reciprocal benefit, between the Zionist project of colonising Palestine and the imperialist project of dominating the Middle East, was and is the cornerstone of the “special relationship”. After British power began to decline, it took time for Israel to find a new significant other in the form of the US. The fundamental driver of this new partnership was not ideological affinity nor suave lobbyists, but sheer pragmatism. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, US strategists sought alliances with all sorts of regimes in the region, including the new Arab nationalist states and the Pahlavi monarchy in Iran. Israel had to prove its practical worth. The US viewed the Arab regimes as unreliable friends, but the watershed moment came in 1967, when Israel routed the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian militaries in the Six-Day War. After this, the money started to flow from Washington. Aid increased by 450 percent in 1968 and continued to climb in the following decades. The overthrow of Pahlavi in 1979 left Israel as the United States’ most trusted and loyal ally. Even today, when the US has formed close relations with the Gulf monarchies and former foes like Egypt, Israel is an outlier. Its colonial nature and lack of independent oil wealth make it uniquely dependent on its Western sponsors to survive. The increasing strategic centrality of Israel to the US also helps to explain why it receives carte blanche to oppress, terrorise and massacre Palestinians. Conquering Palestine is core to Israel’s success, and Israel is core to the Americans’ success. Palestine has also become a proving ground for Israel’s destructive capacities: literally as a place for high-tech weapons to be “battle tested” on civilians, as Anthony Loewenstein’s *Palestine Laboratory* documents. But also, by proving its murderous credentials in Palestine, Israel can menacingly project Western power across the region. ### **The Gaza genocide** This history puts the genocidal war on Gaza, and its global enablers, into perspective. To normal people appalled by the way that global governments have participated in this murderous frenzy, the search for the source of this moral rot is understandable. But our rulers haven’t been duped by lobbyists. Horrifyingly, Israel has been supported in its bloodletting because the Western powers understand that Israel’s success is their own success. Since the offensive began in October 2023, Israel has received record-breaking US assistance, amounting to US$34 billion. This money has flowed from all sides of the political spectrum, from “democratic socialists” Jamaal Bowman and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, through to far-right Republicans like Trump himself. Western support for the genocide is about more than eradicating the Palestinians, though. Tellingly, in October 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not only declared that he would “turn Gaza into a deserted island”. He also pledged to “change the Middle East”, indicating a broader strategic vision behind the war. And Israel has done so. Since 7 October, Israel has carried out military operations in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran and Qatar. The war on southern Lebanon resulted in Hezbollah, one of the last remaining obstacles to American regional supremacy and a key rival of Israel, being pummelled into submission. Iranian nuclear facilities, long opposed by the United States, were obliterated in June 2025\. Again, Israel proved its worth. In the words of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Israel was doing the “dirty work for us” by attacking Iran. Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza is the sharp edge of an imperialist order that has, for over a century, subjected the people of the Middle East to untold misery. Understanding the deep structural roots of Western support for Israel is important, because it sheds light on the gravity of what is required to confront it. To confront this system, far greater power will be required than persuasive lobbyists of our own. We must break not just the global military-industrial supply chain that provides the bombs, missiles, jets and weapons for Israel to commit its crimes. We must also challenge the underlying logic of a system rooted in power, profit and rivalry, which shamelessly tramples on human life in the pursuit of trade routes and resources. ### Why did the Russian Revolution fail? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-did-the-russian-revolution-fail/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T04:55:12.000Z Socialists talk a lot about the Russian Revolution because it shows that the working class can overthrow capitalism and build a different kind of society—one based on genuine democracy and which meets human needs, rather than the undemocratic, unequal society that we live in today. Opponents of socialism talk a lot about Russia as well. For them, it is proof that communism is evil and/or unworkable—that any attempt to transform society fundamentally will end in dictatorship and human suffering. What is the reality? It’s clear that the man who became the country’s ruler, Joseph Stalin, instituted a regime that was a far cry from the goals and aspirations of the brave workers who embarked on the revolution in 1917\. So how do we explain what went wrong? By starting at the beginning. The February revolution in 1917 was sparked by the First World War. Almost everyone had a loved one who had died in the conflict. The working class was starving, but the tsar (king) and the wealthy were dancing at balls and making a killing. Leon Trotsky, a key leader of the socialist movement, wrote in his *History of the Russian Revolution*: > “Enormous fortunes arose out of the bloody foam. The lack of bread and fuel in the capital did not prevent the court jeweller Faberget from boasting that he had never before done such a flourishing business. All came running to grab and gobble, in fear lest the blessed rain should stop. And all rejected with indignation the shameful idea of a premature peace.” The rich wanted the war to continue; the workers and the oppressed demanded that it end. On International Working Women’s Day, women factory workers took to the streets and called the men out to join them. The revolution had begun. Soon, workers set up factory councils and district councils referred to as soviets, the “embryo” of a new society. Soldiers enforced democracy in the army. Peasants kicked landlords out of manor houses and demanded control over the land. The Romanov monarchy, which had ruled Russia for more than 300 years, was overthrown. In October, the revolution entered a new stage: workers demanded not just reforms, but to be their own rulers and to form their own government. Critics of the revolution guffawed at the idea of workers running society. One piece in the conservative newspaper *Novoe Vremia* scoffed at the idea of socialism: > “Who will govern us? The cooks perhaps, those connoisseurs of cutlets and beefsteaks? Or maybe the firemen? The stableboys, the chauffeurs? Or perhaps the nursemaids will rush off to meetings of the Council of State between the diaper-washing sessions?” In *Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?*, Vladimir Lenin, the key leader of the revolution, said in response: yes, the cooks shall learn to run society. But he wasn’t naive about the challenges: > “We are not utopians. We know that an unskilled labourer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of state administration ... In our opinion, to ease the incredible burdens and miseries of the war and also to heal the terrible wounds the war has inflicted on the people, *revolutionary* democracy is needed.” ### **Civil war** The tragedy is that this radical democratic experiment was soon punctuated by a brutal civil war that devastated the working class. In his epic biography of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher conveys the country’s ruination: “Russia stood alone, bled white, starving, shivering with cold, consumed by disease and overcome with gloom”. But this was not the logical result of workers’ democracy; the civil war was initiated by the very people who had ridiculed the idea of workers running the country. It was murderous sabotage. Russia was invaded by foreign armies determined to destroy the fledgling workers’ democracy. A blockade was implemented, cutting access to food and munitions. Then, former generals of the tsarist army organised themselves into a murderous reactionary force, referred to as the White Army. These forces of reaction mounted an increasingly violent counter-revolution from 1918\. In Finland, where another revolution had developed, the White Army crushed it terribly. British socialist John Rees explains in “[In defence of October](https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/rees-j/1991/xx/october.html?ref=redflag.org.au)”: > “In Helsinki the Whites made workers’ wives and children walk in front of their troops as they recaptured the city street by street. One hundred of the women and children died. In all, some 300 corpses were found in the streets. Later, 40 women were laid out on the ice and shot. In Tavastehus, 10,000 prisoners were interned and many died in the massacre which followed, during which ‘murder of the wounded was the norm’.” Rees quotes Kornilov, an army general who had attempted to destroy the revolution in 1917: “‘The greater the terror, the greater our victories’, declared Kornilov. ‘We must save Russia’, he argued, ‘even if we have to set fire to half of it and shed the blood of three-fourths of all the Russians!’” It was in this context that the workers’ democratic revolution began to founder, and the Cheka, an internal police force later used to destroy genuine revolutionary forces, was established. A range of measures constraining democracy were introduced in Russian society and within the Communist Party (the renamed Bolshevik party). Internal party factions—organised groups that opposed policies of the leadership—were banned. Freedom of the press was restricted. Other parties were outlawed. These measures were not something to be celebrated. They were introduced during a civil war that had claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The choices open to the Russian revolutionary leaders were limited. In fact, often the choice was between the bad and the worse—the revolution was holding on for dear life. “Any socialist party that came to power in Russia today must pursue the wrong tactics so long as it, as part of the international working-class army, is left in the lurch by the main body of this army”, Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg wrote in late 1918\. That is, only the European working class could save the Russian Revolution—by turning it into the first phase of the world revolution. ### **The crisis of the revolution deepens** The revolutionary forces, the Red Army, led by Trotsky, emerged victorious out of the civil war. But the cost that was exacted on the revolution was high. Red Russia lost most of its industry, food-producing land and the very basis of a revolutionary democracy—the industrial working class itself. When the civil war began, the most politically dedicated workers volunteered to fight. Workers who had won their revolution perished in the bloody civil war. Those who survived returned to cities in which factories could no longer function because there was not enough fuel or raw materials. Deutscher wrote: > “The dispersal of the old working class created a vacuum in urban Russia. The old, self-reliant and class-conscious labour movement ... which used to ... seethe with political activity—that movement was now an empty shell.” The possibility of socialism is premised on capitalism having created a social class with both the power and the interest to overthrow the old order, and on capitalism having laid the economic groundwork for abundance—that is, enough productive capacity to fulfil everyone’s needs. Without a working class, and in the midst of material scarcity, the revolution hung in the balance. From very early on, socialists had argued that they would be condemned without the revolution spreading across Europe. Lenin argued in 1918, at the extraordinary seventh congress of the Communist Party: “It is the absolute truth that without a German revolution we are doomed”. Capitalism is a global system. The causes of a revolution in one country are often present in others. So the same dynamics that led to the overthrow of Russia’s old order were present in countries such as Germany, Italy, France and even Britain. The only way out of Russia’s internal crisis was through a European revolution. Capitalism is internationally linked through production chains. To build a socialist society, all links in the chain (or at least the most important ones initially) must be brought under workers’ control. As well, the capitalist classes would not allow a socialist state to blossom under their noses. The only way to stop the violence against the fledgling socialist state was for revolutionary workers elsewhere to arrange mutinies in their own armies, as the Russian workers had done to end their participation in the First World War. There were general strikes, workers’ councils, uprisings and mutinies across Europe in the years after 1917\. But what these countries lacked was a party like Lenin’s Bolsheviks. The process of revolution requires the intervention of socialist workers who refuse to settle for concessions and who understand that the only solution to their problems is a new society built after a revolution. So the Russian revolutionaries helped foster the growth of mass communist parties across Europe and in the colonial world, aiming to secure victory beyond Russia’s borders. Ultimately, however, the revolutions elsewhere were defeated. ### **The rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy** So the revolution was battered, isolated and economically destroyed, and workers sat idle at their workbenches or had moved back to rural areas in search of food. In the face of this, those who led the revolution had to figure out a path out of the quagmire. Some wanted to continue to fight for the revolution, both inside Russia and internationally. There were attempts to address the situation and repair the economy, such as the introduction of the New Economic Policy—a temporary retreat that allowed limited private trade and businesses in non-core sectors of the economy. Trotsky argued for greater economic planning. There were retreats, but there were also debates within the party about how to face the economic situation. For example, Trotsky had argued that the trade unions should be integrated into the state. Lenin, by contrast, argued that the process of building a workers’ state and socialism was not complete, and that the working class still needed independent unions to defend its economic interests. Trotsky argued that it was right to reintroduce the private market in some sectors of the economy, but that it was important to plan the state-run sectors so that the private sector did not outstrip them and so that living standards could be improved. Lenin initially opposed these arguments but eventually came to agree. The debates indicated that the revolutionary leaders were not united on what to do. The economic crisis, like the civil war, produced grave problems. Opponents of the Bolsheviks, such as anarchists, argue that Lenin was power-hungry from the beginning, that he wanted to concentrate political and economic power in his own hands, and that he set the stage for Stalin’s dictatorship. But Luxemburg, who was often critical of the Bolsheviks, understood better the predicament, attacking “the spineless jelly-fish, the moaners” who couldn’t see that the issue wasn’t Lenin’s self-interest, but the party’s “unshakable resolve to defend by any means possible the power they had gained in Russia, in order to use it for the most energetic and radical changes” while they held out for the European revolution. Above all, she blamed the German socialist leaders for turning their backs on the Russian workers in their hour of greatest need. The measures that were introduced could provide breathing space to the revolution, but they couldn’t solve the problem of its isolation, or the fact that the working class was exhausted and revolutionary democracy now hardly existed. Lenin had argued in the face of this that it was important always to tell the class the truth; not to lie and say you were building socialism when you weren’t. Stalin represented something wholly different to this perspective. Stalin became the leader of the Soviet state following Lenin’s death. As the revolution attempted to “hold on”, a layer of bureaucrats, administrators and party functionaries began to form into a social layer with different interests from the workers. The spirit of self-sacrifice gave way to cowardice and careerism. These people wanted to climb the state bureaucracy, and criticising Stalin or party policy would have resulted in their removal from positions of power. Trotsky wrote that the leadership of the party “lost touch with the lower ranks and had become transformed into a self-sufficient bureaucratic machine”. This bureaucratic machine “evoked the working class as something like a myth”, according to Deutscher. Disagreement and discussion were essentially banned, and purges of oppositionists began. And new theories were developed to justify the bureaucracy’s existence. Chief among them was the theory of “socialism in one country”, pushed by Stalin and his lackeys. This was a reactionary and anti-Marxist position. That socialism cannot be developed in a single state was previously accepted as a fact. But Stalin used Marxist rhetoric to prettify a brutal increase in the exploitation of the labouring population. ### **The struggle for socialism continues** In this way, the revolution was crushed from within, and by some of the people who were associated with the revolution itself. It wasn’t inevitable that things would turn out like this. At all times, revolutionaries fought valiantly to forge a different path. From the revolutionaries in western Europe who attempted to win revolutions in their own countries, to the opposition movements that developed within Russia, to Trotsky, who was hounded by Stalinist agents until he was ultimately murdered in exile. Opponents of the rising bureaucratic regime were purged, exiled and assassinated because they represented a politics that was antithetical to Stalinism—that is, they represented the genuine Marxist tradition. Trotsky and his supporters argued that, to save the revolution, industry needed to be rebuilt, in conjunction with the rebuilding of democracy in society and in the workplaces, and, crucially, with a renewed fight for an international revolution. For the Stalinist regime to survive, these ideas had to be destroyed. Those who resisted kept alive Marxist politics in the face of reactionary Stalinist distortions. In his memoir, Leopold Tropper, a Polish Jewish communist, wrote: > “The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honour. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice-axe, they fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did ... > “Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not ‘confess’, for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.” We need to build the forces of the revolutionary left everywhere, so that the next time workers take power, they aren’t isolated in a violent sea of capitalism and imperialism. ### Worldwide revolution is possible and necessary URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/worldwide-revolution-is-possible-and-necessary/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T04:34:24.000Z From the moment Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels urged workers of the world to unite, in the final line of their 1848 pamphlet *The* *Communist Manifesto*, the goal of international revolution has been at the core of Marxist politics. An international workers’ revolution is the only way to replace capitalism with socialism—because, unlike previous societies, capitalism is a globally integrated economic and political system. ### **A world system** “For the first time in history”, the late British Marxist Colin Barker wrote, “capitalism has created a genuinely world society, where all our lives are entwined together in a common history and a common fate”. Every state has now been linked into chains of production stretching across continents. Take your mobile phone, for example. It was likely assembled in China using computer chips manufactured in Taiwan, powered by coal exported from Australia, produced with minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to specifications developed in Europe or the United States. No single country can produce everything necessary to satisfy its population’s needs, unlike the various pre-capitalist societies, which were mostly self-sufficient and organised around small local economies. Socialism has to be an international project not only because we live in an interconnected global economy, though. The capitalist classes that rule each country use immense violence to defend their interests internationally—militaries, police forces, intelligence services, mass surveillance and so on. They are perennially concerned with defending their place at the top of the social hierarchy and maintaining their access to resources. Reforming governments have been demolished with the aid of the world’s capitalist powers countless times in the past century, from the 1973 overthrow of President Salvador Allende’s government in Chile to the 2019 attempt to topple a centre-left government in Bolivia (“We will coup whoever we want”, Elon Musk boasted at the time). The international capitalist class won’t tolerate revolution in any single country. Toppling this transnational coterie of capitalists is clearly a huge task. But the good news is that capitalism’s international interconnectedness makes it possible, not just necessary. The global integration of production itself transmits resistance from one country to another. In 1974, for instance, opposition to Chile’s newly installed military dictatorship spread to East Kilbride, Scotland, of all places. Workers at the Rolls-Royce factory there learned that the engines they were repairing were being used by the Chilean air force to drop bombs on workers resisting the coup. They refused to work on the engines, keeping them out of the hands of the military junta for four years. Capitalism’s global nature also means that workers today share increasingly similar experiences: conditions of work, forms of consumption, lifestyles and political cultures. Increasingly, it has become clear that the world’s main divide is between the minority capitalist class and the majority working class; between the rich and the poor. So when revolts break out in one part of the world, people in other parts of the world instinctively identify with the causes and motivations of the struggle, and draw comparisons with their own situation. “Languages remain different”, Marxist writer Chris Harman observed in 1992, “but what they say is increasingly the same”. Harman’s words ring true across the decades. Since the “European Spring” of 1848, every great social upheaval has spread beyond national borders. ### **Global revolts** 1968 is remembered as a year of global revolt, when millions of workers, students and oppressed people drew inspiration from each other’s movements. Activists in the US were radicalised by the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese people to American imperialism. Irish civil rights activists emulated the militant politics of the Black Panthers. When students and workers united to launch a massive general strike in France in May, it taught student radicals in Australia that they, too, needed to link their campaigns to workers and to the power of the organised working class. The movements of 1968 united people across superficially very different societies. For two decades after the Second World War, common sense said that the most significant divide on the planet was between Western capitalism and Stalinist “Communism”. But in 1968, both sides of the Iron Curtain exploded in revolt. The triggers may have been different, but they were all responses to similar issues: inequality, exploitation and war, imposed by monstrous bureaucratic states. In 2011, an impoverished Tunisian street vendor burned himself alive to protest against police harassment. This individual act tapped into widespread resentment at inequality, unemployment and state violence. Within days, anti-government protests had erupted across the country. Within weeks, the protests had escalated into a regional revolt that toppled or challenged regimes across the Arab world. The radical wave spread even further: at a massive demonstration against an anti-union bill in the US city of Madison, Wisconsin, a man held up a poster with a picture of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak beside Republican Governor Scott Walker. The caption read: “One dictator down. One to go”. The Arab revolutions went on to inspire the Occupy movement, which spread to more than 80 countries. The global Palestine solidarity movement over the past two years is a further illustration. People have protested, occupied and taken strike action from Australia to Spain, to defend a group of people most have never met. They’ve rallied around the banner of Palestine, not only in solidarity with a brutalised and defenceless civilian population, but also as a symbol. The Palestinian flag has united millions fed up with a system of liars, hypocrites and murderers who preside over an economic system of exploitation, authoritarianism and war. As one striking Italian worker noted: “The hand that bombs the Palestinians is the hand that exploits us in our workplaces”. ### **The Russian Revolution** Capitalist rule is a global process, as is working class resistance. No event in history has underlined this as sharply as the Russian Revolution. In 1917, workers, radicalised by years of war and economic crisis, overthrew the country’s monarchy and eventually established a workers’ government to implement socialism and eliminate capitalism once and for all. In response, the capitalist powers of the world, in alliance with local reactionaries who wanted to restore the monarchy, united to crush the new workers’ state. Unless revolutions spread internationally and challenge the imperialist powers that have an interest in destroying them, they will be crushed. A heroic effort by Russian workers and peasants repelled sixteen invading armies, but at a great cost. The working class was decimated, the factories were depopulated, and the radical working-class democracy withered. The isolation and poverty imposed on Russia made socialism impossible, and a new dictatorial regime led by Joseph Stalin emerged, reversing most of the revolution’s gains. Russia’s revolutionary socialists pinned their hopes on spreading the revolution across Europe, but they were ultimately defeated. Ever since, the Russian example has been used by defenders of capitalism as a cautionary tale: revolution leads only to disaster and dictatorship. Yet while the Russian Revolution is cynically deployed as the ultimate argument against international revolution, it actually shows that the goal is not only necessary but also possible. News of workers seizing power in Russia, overthrowing their government and withdrawing from the First World War, created shock waves across the planet. Workers in Germany rose in revolt a year later, finally ending the most destructive war the world had ever seen, and establishing soviets—a form of radical working-class democracy inspired by the Russian example. Uprisings followed in France, Italy and Hungary. The revolutionary wave spread further. A classified British government report from 1919 noted a “very widespread feeling among workers that thrones have become anachronisms, and that the Soviet may be the best form of Government for a democracy”. The rising tide of radicalism also reached Australia. Meatworkers in Townsville, Queensland, donned red jumpers, stormed the local police station to free jailed unionists, and placed the city under workers’ control. The editor of the conservative *Townsville Daily Bulletin* lamented: “Townsville for the last year or so has been developing Bolshevism ... \[T\]he mob management of affairs in this city differs very little from the Petrograd and Moscow brand”. ### **Politics for world revolution** The Russian Bolsheviks, the revolutionary party that led workers to victory in 1917, viewed their revolution as one part of a global upheaval. Workers across the world faced the same problems: the horrors of imperialist war, attacks on their living standards and right to organise, economic breakdown that proved the capitalist class was unfit to rule. The Bolsheviks understood that these objective prerequisites, while important, were not enough. The international dynamics of capitalism wouldn’t inevitably produce successful revolutions worldwide. Political organisation in every country was necessary. In 1919, they established the Communist International, to facilitate the creation of mass revolutionary workers’ parties. Revolutionaries from Russia met with those in Italy, France, Germany, the US, Australia and elsewhere to discuss how to turn capitalist crisis into socialist revolution in their own countries. For several years, workers came close to overthrowing capitalism in many places. But in none of these countries was there a party like the Bolsheviks, which had been hardened through years of organising working-class struggle to overthrow the state for decades beforehand. The tragic defeat of the international revolutionary wave wasn’t due to a lack of working-class resistance, but a lack of political organisation. In periods of stability, when social conservatism dominates, international revolution might seem like a pipe dream. Defenders of the status quo work to reinforce this illusion. But history shows that capitalism’s crises are international and inevitably provoke international resistance. Capitalism is a global system. It requires a global movement to tear it up, root and branch. The most important thing that socialists can do, whether in Tunisia or France, Italy or Australia, is to start organising for it today. ### The Marxist alternative to parliament URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-marxist-alternative-to-parliament/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T04:50:22.000Z “The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” This sentence was the only addition Karl Marx made to the *Communist Manifesto.* It was written in 1871, after the Paris Commune was brutally put down. As early as the *1850 March Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League*, Marx recognised the need for workers to build institutions that could provide an alternative to the power of the capitalist class. The defeat of the Commune proved decisively to him that this alternative power could not come through the existing institutions of capitalism. What, then, is the Marxist alternative to the parliaments and congresses that govern many countries today? The first thing to understand is that parliaments, as we know them, are constrained by written constitutions, judicial review and other separations of powers, which limit their ability to govern in the interests of workers and oppressed groups. Parliaments (and the constitutions that underpin them) are designed specifically to maintain the rule of the capitalist class and their property rights, and to maintain class divisions. So parliamentary powers are limited relative to the power of the capitalists, which rests on their control of the economy and therefore of most of society’s wealth. At any rate, governments rarely contemplate significant challenges to capitalist power, because another part of their function is to coopt political opposition into a pro-capitalist framework. The parliament creates highly paid professional politicians, divorced from the rest of the population, who live more like capitalists and depend on the capitalist status quo for their social position. As well, the parliament is only one component of the broader state apparatus, which includes the police forces and military, the judiciary and the courts, and the permanent bureaucracy (public servants in various government departments). They all work together to manage the capitalist system. Marxists are for a totally different type of state, with something called a workers’ council at its heart—akin to a workers’ parliament. There are many differences between a regular parliament and a workers’ council. First, capitalists and their representatives are excluded from participation in workers’ councils. The exploiting class has no right to political representation. Second, councils are based on workplace voting, linking the economic power of the working class to its political power. Third, workers who become delegates to a council never become professional politicians—they remain workers on a workers’ wage and are instantly recallable. Fourth, workers’ councils are the supreme democratic authority: they cannot be limited in their power by previous capitalist conventions or institutions. That is, they build a new system of institutions whose sole purpose is to destroy the capitalist system and institute socialism. In practice, workers’ councils arise organically out of revolutionary situations. They are not set up as a blueprint for a new society, but are messy affairs that try to address the immediate problems workers face as they fight for a better world. The most far-reaching system was established during and after the 1917 Russian Revolution, so it’s worth looking at what happened there to give us an insight into what this alternative can look like. Workers’ councils first emerged in Russia to administer a mass strike that swept the country during the 1905 revolution. Inevitably, debates needed to be thrashed out and strategic questions clarified. So workers developed an ecosystem of delegated meetings to coordinate the revolt. They named this council system the *soviet*. Its activities flowed organically in response to the developing situation, such as helping print workers confront censorship and forming armed brigades to protect civilians from counter-revolutionary violence. In February 1917, the second Russian Revolution started when women textile workers in the capital, Petrograd (St Petersburg), struck on International Working Women’s Day. Before long, Russia had erupted and workers re-created the soviets—this time, more widespread than ever. As Leon Trotsky later explained in his *History of the Russian Revolution*: > “The revolutionary leaders did not have to invent it; the experience of the *Soviets* of 1905 was forever chiselled into the consciousness of the workers ... As a matter of fact, thanks to the tradition of 1905, the soviets sprang up as though from under the earth, and immediately became incomparably more powerful than all the other organisations which later tried to compete with them (the municipalities, the co-operatives, and in part the trade unions).” The soviets were based on a system of delegates who weren’t paid more than the average skilled worker and who received no special subsidies or compensation. A simple mass meeting could recall a delegate at any time. The democracy of the soviets was totally different to what we call democracy under capitalism. “No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented”, John Reed, an American communist and eyewitness to the revolution, recounted. “And this was necessary, for in time of revolution, the popular will changes with great rapidity.” This democracy and mass engagement in politics are what made the soviets important. They became the nerve centre for workers’ power, coordinating the functioning of entire cities and regions. An example of the authority was Order No. 1 of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies—the most important soviet during 1917\. This placed the military under the control of the citywide soviet and its weaponry under the control of elected soldiers’ committees. Weapons, the order read, “shall by no means be issued to the officers, not even at their insistence”. The goal here was to prevent the upper classes, overwhelmingly represented among the officers, from organising against workers and soldiers’ control. The soviet then took control of the postal and telegraph bureaus, the radio stations and printing presses, and all train stations. By and large, this was all part of workers asserting their own control over the economy. As Trotsky noted: > “In order to remove financial resources from the hands of the officials of the old power, the Soviet decides to occupy the State Bank, the Treasury, the Mint and the Printing Office with a revolutionary guard. The tasks and functions of the Soviet grow unceasingly under pressure from the masses ... The workers, the soldiers, and soon also the peasants, will from now on turn only to the Soviet. In their eyes, the Soviet becomes the focus of all hopes and all authority, an incarnation of the revolution itself.” The soviet wasn’t the only centre of organisation. There were separate factory committees, trade unions, educational and agitational bodies like newspapers and political organisations, youth groups and militias and more. The residents of apartment buildings would get together to make decisions about the buildings, and teachers at a school would meet and debate radical curricula for their students. All of these elements and more played some role in the new revolutionary society. But the Petrograd Soviet was like the backbone to them all. In 1917, its primary place of residence was the Tauride Palace. It is perhaps more associated with the Smolny Institute, where it later moved and where Lenin would later reside. The institute’s previous occupants, residents of a boarding school for young women of the aristocracy, had packed their bags and moved to the more pleasing environs at the heart of counter-revolutionary territory. Technically, it relied on delegates at a ratio of one representative for every thousand workers, peasants or soldiers. Trade unions, factory committees and district soviets could also send delegates. The rules were flaunted with enthusiasm. In two weeks, 3,000 people appeared as delegates, most of them soldiers. The building buzzed. John Reed noted: “The order of business can be, and usually is, smashed to pieces in the first half hour”. Unable to be confined to the allocated rooms, the footprint of the Soviet expanded into the palace halls. Trotsky again: > “An uninterrupted flood of soldiers, workers, soldiers’ wives, small traders, clerks, mothers, fathers, kept opening and shutting the doors, sought, questioned, wept, demanded, compelled action—sometimes even indicating what action—and converted the Soviet in very truth into a revolutionary government.” In this context, an executive committee was formed, with representatives from each of the parties that supported the revolution. This body evolved in size and composition. There were many other sections, usually known as commissions, that addressed all the pressing questions, from food supply and housing to the military aspect of the revolutionary struggle. Collectively, they gathered in plenary sessions to debate whichever critical question was of the greatest urgency at that time. And, inspired by events in Petrograd, workers set up soviets across the country. “Already early in March, soviets were coming into being in all the principal towns and industrial centres”, Trotsky wrote. “From these, they spread in the next few weeks throughout the country. They began to arrive in the villages only in April and May.” The various soviets sent delegates to an All-Russian Congress of Soviets every few months, the first of which was convened in June 1917 and was attended by delegates representing more than 50 regional, provincial and district associations of soviets as well as several dozen soldiers’ organisations. The second congress, which occurred during the October insurrection, is immortalised in Reed’s *Ten Days That Shook the World* and its film adaptation, *Reds*. When asked about their political affiliation, the number of Bolshevik delegates increased dramatically between the first and second congresses. At the first, the Bolsheviks were less than 10 percent of delegates. The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), a peasant-based party, were the largest group, followed by the Mensheviks, a conservative socialist group competing with the more radical Bolsheviks. In the Petrograd Soviet, which shared these leanings for the first half of 1917, this balance had several implications. According to Trotsky, these two largest parties fostered the influx of attendees likely to bolster their own standing. For the SRs, this meant encouraging soldiers, who were primarily peasants, to attend. “There were over 150,000 soldiers in Petrograd”, Trotsky wrote. “There were at least four times as many working men and women of all categories. Nevertheless, for every two worker-delegates in the Soviet, there were five soldiers.” The SR and Menshevik leaders welcomed any number of individuals by private invitation, further diluting the Soviet’s working-class character. This meant that in the first half of 1917, the Petrograd Soviet was prone to take more conservative positions on the questions of the day. Refusing to countenance rebellion in the army, it encouraged soldiers to stay at their posts. Refusing to take power into its own hands, it campaigned for loyalty to the provisional government, which had been set up by the capitalists. Yet as the revolution progressed and the moderate, conciliating political forces disgraced themselves, mass consciousness shifted. As well, the leaders of various political parties were drawing more radical conclusions, and the parties were diverging into two camps, with the Bolsheviks leading the insurrectionary side. In July 1917, there was a unity congress of the Bolshevik Party, now with 240,000 members, and several other groups. Chief among them was the Mezhraiontsy, whose 4,000 members included Leon Trotsky, David Riazanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and other leaders of the revolution. As a result of all these shifts, by the beginning of November, the Bolsheviks had perhaps 90 percent of the delegates in the Petrograd Soviet, up to 60 percent in the Moscow Soviet and most of the delegates in another 80 local soviets in industrial cities. Interestingly, the influence of the Petrograd Soviet was primarily political rather than practical: its resolutions were enacted by local soviets and other committees. “The sole practical measure carried through by the Petrograd Soviet in the matter of food supply was the limitation of the consumer to a strict ration”, Trotsky wrote. The local district soviets executed decisions most directly. They were responsible for dealing with housing, helping workers with clerical and legal issues, caring for orphans and supporting returned prisoners of war. They developed programs for adult education, for theatre shows and publishing newspapers. Specialisation was uncommon. Once the most pressing elements of a task were resolved, another area of work would immediately materialise. This was not an example of socialists in these councils greedily accumulating more and more control for themselves: quite the opposite. The Bolsheviks in particular resisted the trend to subsume responsibilities under the district soviets, working to leave as much work as possible in the hands of the pre-existing municipal apparatus to relieve the overworked soviet delegates of those responsibilities. They preferred an oversight role. Typically, it was sabotage by public servants of a particular department that compelled the district soviets to absorb its responsibilities. With very few resources available from a war-drained and poor population, amid counter-revolutionary violence and international isolation, the soviets managed striking feats. Consider housing. The revolutionary society drastically reduced the number of overcrowded apartments, shifting residents into the requisitioned rooms and homes of the upper classes. They also understood that the question of the home was not just overcrowding, but the burden of housework placed on women. Collective childcare sites, laundries and kitchens were all built. Moving the bulk of this infrastructure out of each apartment opened precious space. “No less important than the separation of Church and State”, declared Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent Bolshevik leader, is the “separation of kitchen from marriage”. They worked hard to shift the burden away from individual women to the community. “In Petrograd during 1919-20, almost 90 percent of the entire population was fed communally”, she wrote. Ultimately, in October, the soviets assumed all political power, dissolving the capitalists’ provisional government. This created the first workers’ state in history and paved a path for socialists today to follow. Russia proved that we cannot rely on the institutions of capitalism, like parliament, to achieve socialism. Instead, workers must create their own democratic councils to build the sort of liberated society we deserve. ### Capitalism is sociopathic URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/capitalism-is-sociopathic/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T04:25:55.000Z The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald noted more than a century ago that the very wealthy aren’t like the rest of us: “Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different”. Today, if anything, they are more different. And much, much wealthier. Altrata, a global consultancy, [estimates](https://altrata.com/reports/investable-assets-of-the-global-wealthy?ref=redflag.org.au) that about 16 million people worldwide, roughly 0.2 percent of the population, have at least US$1 million in investable wealth. The combined riches of these “high net worth” individuals topped US$67 trillion last year—about 28 percent of the world’s total investable assets. Within this privileged layer is a [subset of billionaires](https://altrata.com/reports/billionaire-census-2025?ref=redflag.org.au): 3,500 people, 0.000043 percent of the population, who collectively hold more than US$13 trillion in investable assets. A dozen individuals sit at the apex of the wealth pyramid, with a combined wealth greater than that of the poorest 4 billion people. ### **Sociopaths** The ultra-wealthy live differently. This much we know from photos of their mansions and private jets, media coverage of their travels and escapades, and magazine advertisements aimed at them. Yet Fitzgerald was talking not about lifestyle but attitude—how these people *think differently*. Was he right? Are they different from the rest of us? In more recent times, social scientists have attempted to find out. Indeed, there is a burgeoning literature on the topic. One [group of studies](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109?ref=redflag.org.au), “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior”, appeared in the US *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* in 2012\. The findings included that wealthier people were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies, lie in a negotiation and “cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize”. They even found that wealthier people were more likely to take lollies set aside for children. Upper-class people’s “more favorable attitudes toward greed” was one of the explanations for these character failings. Other studies have made similar findings, such as narcissists becoming CEOs more quickly and psychopaths being over-represented in the upper echelons of the business world compared to the general population. So we might conclude that there is a greater tendency to selfish, anti-social behaviour—even sociopathic behaviour—among those most likely to accumulate personal wealth. These tendencies find their most disturbing expressions not in lab studies, but in responses to the Earth’s proliferating crises and potential crises, such as the threat of [civilisational collapse](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328722001768?ref=redflag.org.au), an often discussed topic among scientists and a preoccupation of many among the world’s ultra-wealthy. Rather than thinking about the wellbeing of humanity and how we might collectively get through a crisis as a society—or putting their immense resources to work solving immediate problems such as climate change, world hunger and poverty—the ultra-wealthy often prioritise their own interests. Increasingly, people like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are acting out fantasies of interplanetary colonisation, transhumanism and Robinson Crusoe-style survivalism. Indeed, survivalism is now a ubiquitous movement among the ultra-wealthy. Talking to the *New Yorker*’s Evan Osnos in 2017, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman reckoned that “50-plus percent” of billionaires in Silicon Valley, the tech centre of the US, had “apocalypse insurance”. By that, he meant escape plans to designer bunkers in disused intercontinental ballistic missile silos and private islands, often with private militias and staff, in the event of social disintegration. And Hoffman was talking well before the coronavirus pandemic added a whole new dimension to the wealthy’s hyper-individualist escapist tendencies. One peculiar case involving the now-jailed former billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried [came to light](https://qz.com/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-nauru-court-case-money-laundering-1850662899?ref=redflag.org.au) in a *Quartz* article a couple of years ago. During legal proceedings, lawyers tabled an exchange between Bankman-Fried’s business-partner brother and an officer of their company’s “charity” wing about a scheme to buy the Pacific island state of Nauru. The plan was to construct a bunker on the acquired territory in preparation for “some event where 50%-99.99% of people die”, build a lab and develop “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement”. An aside noted: “probably there are other things it’s useful to do with a sovereign country, too”. ### **Capitalism and dehumanisation** How do we understand such callous, socially detached “me first and fuck the rest of you” attitudes? How are these sorts of people constantly elevated into positions overseeing our society? The answer is that the system we live in, capitalism, not only encourages and rewards sociopathic behaviour (up to a point) but requires people who run the economy to be ruthless. German-born revolutionary Karl Marx was among the first to recognise this after years of studying the inner workings of capitalism. Writing in the preface to the first volume of *Capital*, his systematic attempt to outline the nature of the modern economy, he explained: “I do not by any means depict the capitalist \[the business owner or boss\] and the landowner in rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests”. Marx thought bosses were arseholes. But he knew that this fact couldn’t explain how the system worked. He went on to show that business owners have economic responsibilities that lead them to act in socially destructive ways, regardless of their individual characters. Capitalists privately own the things that are needed for society to survive: the farms, the offices and factories, the telecommunications infrastructure, the shipping and trucking fleets and so on. But to stay in business, and therefore retain ownership of these assets, their companies have to be financially profitable. That is, they must make more money than it costs to run them. Capitalists are in the business of reinvesting their profits to expand the scale of production and, therefore, the size of their company. If they don’t, they risk being put out of business by rival companies. There is a ferocious competition between businesses for sales, resources and contracts—and to reduce costs and increase output. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”, Marx wrote of the capitalist imperative. It is important to emphasise that this capitalist competition is life or death, hence Marx’s gesture to the biblical ten commandments. But “thou shalt make profits” is more than an abstract decree. Capitalists without profits are not simply unprofitable. If their business sinks, they can be saddled with debt and bankrupted, jettisoned from elite society, their children pushed out of private schools, their family, without means, forced to sell up and move to a different part of town. To avoid this fate, they must ruthlessly exploit their employees. Profits are maintained or increased by paying workers less than what they produce is worth and by intensifying the labour process by introducing machinery and imposing greater workplace discipline (that’s what most managers are for). So, from the start, regardless of whether they are a nice person in their private life, a boss or employer is economically pitted against their employees. To be a boss, they must be an exploiter. They must view workers not in their full humanity but as means to an end and, ultimately, as disposable if they don’t generate enough economic returns for the company. Indeed, the capitalist is a workplace overlord, deciding who works, how they work (for how long and at what pace), what they produce, how they dress and what they get paid. They are trained to give orders and to treat employees as cogs in the corporate machine. At the extreme end, take as an example Telstra’s former chief operations officer, Greg Winn, [who spoke candidly some years ago about how to be a boss](https://www.smh.com.au/national/telstra-stress-linked-to-suicides-20070619-gdqf5k.html?ref=redflag.org.au), unaware that he was being recorded: > “We run an absolute dictatorship and that’s what’s going to ... deliver results. If you can’t get the people to go there and you try once and you try twice ... then you just shoot them and get them out of the way.” But capitalism is about more than just treating workers like shit. Capitalist competition is characterised by the transfer of private costs and risks onto society as a whole. For example, companies generate pollution and waste that they are often not required to clean up (economists call this an “externality”). They sell socially destructive products, such as addictive substances or services, the consequences of which they are not required to take responsibility for. They restrict access to necessities such as food and shelter solely to keep prices higher. They produce things to fall apart (economists call this “planned obsolescence”), so that customers have to keep buying them. They create a society in which workers are indebted for most of their lives, and through which the risks of the immensely profitable financial system are loaded onto everyone outside it. It’s all morally reprehensible. But viewed from a boardroom or an executive suite, such practices are considered “prudent”, “innovative” and necessary for a company to thrive against competitors. Once this way of operating is normalised and justified among capitalists, the results are both privately profitable and publicly catastrophic. So tobacco companies are still thriving decades after the link between cancer and smoking was established. Fossil fuel extraction continues decades after the link between climate change and carbon emissions was established. Wage theft and unpaid overtime are still rampant despite *everyone* saying that they are crimes. Hunger is still a feature of society despite there being more than enough food to feed everyone. On and on it goes, not primarily because the people who run the world are arseholes, but because running capitalist society requires people to act like arseholes. The system puts profits before people and demands that its managers act accordingly or be booted from ruling circles. ### **Just business?** Now that we can see how the system itself is sociopathic, it’s easier to understand how people at the top become god-awful arseholes. While the general behaviour of individual capitalists is a function of their social position, human behaviours can’t neatly be siloed into “business” and “personal” spheres. Indeed, there is a link between how we regularly behave and how we view the world. If someone spends their waking hours as a petty workplace dictator, acting abhorrently but being rewarded and celebrated for it, their character will be affected: to dehumanise people as a matter of course, to treat them as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves, reduces one’s own humanity by degrees. That’s a burden for the capitalists to bear, even if most are oblivious to it. Moreover, profits aren’t only accumulated within a business. The owners, unsurprisingly, also take a share for themselves. But money has a corrupting power on those who have lots of it. The rich live better and longer and grow accustomed to getting what they want not just in a workplace, but in society, simply by purchasing whatever it is they desire. So in 1844, Marx caustically remarked: > “The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my—the possessor’s—properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is nullified by money ... > “I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?” Capitalism doesn’t create just a separate business world of dehumanised relations; it creates a class of people who are generally less socially conscious, more indifferent, more callous, more selfish and less attuned to the needs of others. Sociopathic billionaires have internalised their roles as rulers of the capitalist economy—the dictator-manager, the self-interested firm—and become individual incarnations of its inhumanity. Arguably, nothing highlights this fusion of business and personal spheres more than capitalist hostility to collectivist sensibilities and to impulses towards solidarity. This is particularly true when workers join trade unions. Capitalists simultaneously display a personal revulsion at the idea of the downtrodden exercising their own power and a managerial aversion to a less pliant workforce and the prospect of paying higher wages. So it should come as no surprise that the most anti-union figures in society are billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, whose personal fortunes have been built on rigid labour discipline in their companies. Where, then, does this leave us? If it’s true that we can best understand the sociopathic tendencies of billionaires as expressions of a system that relegates human need to an afterthought of profit-making, then the options for changing the world become clearer. Attempts to reason with or humanise those at the top will go nowhere. Even if you could convince a billionaire to become a better person, they would just be replaced by someone else. Further, attempts to reform capitalism will always be limited by the system’s own logic, which is rooted in its class structure—the reality that a tiny minority privately owns the economy while the majority have to sell themselves to make a living. We can legislate for less worse outcomes, but we can’t legislate away the class division between capitalists and workers, or the competition between capitalists that is the root of so much destruction. To deal with the inhumanity of the system itself, the competitive capitalist class society needs to be replaced with a cooperative socialist society organised to fulfil all human needs and sustain all human life. ### What do we mean by revolution? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/what-do-we-mean-by-revolution/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T04:30:16.000Z The history of class societies is awash with revolutionary uprisings, but no class system has seen more revolutionary ferment than capitalism. Throughout its 250-year history, not a decade has gone by without revolutionary struggle breaking out somewhere, and periodically, waves of revolution sweep across several countries. The most recent was the Arab Spring in 2011, in which revolutions erupted one after another across the Middle East and North Africa. The outcomes of revolutions vary greatly. They have toppled governments, defeated imperialist armies and brought down centuries-old repressive regimes. Some have introduced new forms of popular control over society. Others have been brutally defeated before claiming any victories. Many have had contradictory outcomes, combining elements of victory and defeat. Regardless of the outcomes, revolutions open up possibilities that no other form of struggle does. Slow, gradual reform cannot shake loose the nuts and bolts that hold together the existing social order in the way revolutions can. Most commonly, it merely makes minor changes to laws and policies. Regular protests and strikes can win limited victories and be important in advancing political consciousness, but on their own, even when mass, they do not create a new form of society. Revolutions are qualitatively different. Business as usual, politics as usual and daily life as usual are all suspended. Every institution and section of society is affected by revolution, and almost all are forced to take a side one way or another. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin described two important features of revolutionary situations: the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way, and the oppressed are no longer willing to accept being ruled in the old way. The inability of the ruling class to continue ruling in the old way is demonstrated by widespread defiance of laws and repressive conventions. People take over public spaces, occupy government buildings, go on strike to join the movement and start to take aspects of society into their own hands. The ruling class no longer has control, and its distress is palpable. During the Tunisian revolution in 2011, one employer commented about the situation: “We are seeing everything nowadays: workers who get rid of officials they don’t like, citizens who do not recognise any authority in court decisions and even a government which is not capable of saying ‘no’ to the streets”. After World War One and the successful Russian Revolution, revolutionary struggle broke out across Europe, including in the key industrial heartland of Germany. The situation prompted British Prime Minister Lloyd George to write to French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau: “The whole existing order, in its political, social and economic aspects, is questioned by the masses from one end of Europe to the other”. While the ruling class feel mortally threatened, the feeling among the masses is the opposite. For the first time, millions of people who have been downtrodden and oppressed are able to take some control over their lives and the society around them. Within days of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 erupting, the people had broken through the tyrannical repression of Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship and established permanent protests all over the country, including a spectacular mass occupation of the central square in Cairo. One protester described the experience: “It is like we have lifted our heads for the first time in our lives. We have seen the sun, and we will never look down again”. In Budapest in 1956, security police opened fire on a peaceful protest and kick-started a mass revolutionary movement against the Stalinist Hungarian state. Marxist historian Chris Harman wrote of the immediate effect of the revolution on its participants: > “The energies of a whole population were turned within minutes from the normal round of daily life, with its essentially private concerns, to intense discussions and arguments about what had just happened and how they should respond. Practical politics became a public, popular affair. A mass a-million-and-a-half strong was beginning to think how it should take control of its own society and to act accordingly.” In most revolutions, popular committees are formed to coordinate and better organise the struggle. In the Arab revolutions, neighbourhood and other community revolutionary committees sprung up. In some countries, such as Sudan in 2019, workers also set up workplace activist committees that began organising strikes and making demands. In Hungary in 1956, workers’ revolutionary councils were established three days after the revolution broke out. Harman again: > “As the Hungarian people ripped into the fabric of the old order, they used these new organs of power, which were directly under their own control, to begin to build an alternative order. Such tasks as the running of factories, the distribution of food, the publication of newspapers all passed from the disintegrating apparatus of the old state to the new organs of popular power.” In establishing these committees, people demonstrate not only that they have the creative and organisational abilities needed to run society, but also that they would do so in a far more decent, democratic and rational way than the capitalist class. But not all revolutions are the same. There is a critical difference between those that remain political revolutions, such as the recent Arab uprisings, and those that become social revolutions, such as Hungary in 1956. Political revolutions demand political changes—usually the removal of particular governments or politicians, or greater democratic rights. Social revolutions, by contrast, “rip into the fabric of the old order”. They extend into workplaces and the wider productive process, and forge new ways of doing things that affect every area of life and society. They involve a different class taking political power and reorganising the economy and society in its own interests. The capitalist class itself had to wage this sort of revolutionary struggle in order to defeat the feudal system and establish a new status quo according to its principles. To establish a society on socialist principles, revolution is needed on a more far-reaching scale than anything that has gone before. A socialist revolution doesn’t just replace one ruling minority with another; it establishes a society without class distinction of any sort. It brings into being a society free from exploitation and oppression, in which production is for human need and resources are controlled collectively and democratically. The working class is the only social force capable of creating a socialist society. It has an interest in ending its own exploitation and oppression, and therefore in waging revolutionary struggles against the capitalist class. But it is also a class that has no capacity to exploit or oppress another. Therefore, workers are unique in history, in that their struggle for emancipation is also the struggle for the abolition of all class society and the liberation of humanity. Not all revolutions are led by the working class. Many are initially led by middle class forces, which seek to bring together significant layers of the population in what is often conceived of as a fight for the soul of the nation. As revolutions deepen, the more moderate forces or leaders tend to want to settle for a few reforms, whereas more radical and oppressed sections often want to fight for more. Where workers are able to play a more leading role, and establish independent organisations that can make decisions about the direction of the struggle, there is greater chance for the movement to grow into a social revolution. The balance of forces going into any revolution is critical in this process. If radical and revolutionary organisations exist, and there are established traditions of workers organising, revolutions are more likely to develop in this direction. There have been several workers’ revolutions over the history of capitalism, starting with the Paris Commune in 1871\. In the twentieth century, there were workers’ revolutions in Russia in 1905 and 1917, in Germany 1918-23, China 1925-27, Spain 1936-37, Hungary in 1956, Chile in 1973, Portugal in 1974-75 and Poland in 1980-81. All of these involved workers taking control of society to some degree. For instance, in Poland in 1980, thousands of workplaces were occupied by striking workers, and, under the leadership of the Gdansk shipyard strike committee, restarted production on their own terms. The striking tram drivers and railway workers returned to work and adorned their vehicles with posters declaring: “We are on strike too, but we are working to make your life easier”. They also organised for bakeries, canneries and essential services to be reopened, to be used by the workers. Another important feature of workers’ revolutions is the arming of the working class. In some places, like Spain and Hungary, this happened almost immediately. In others, it took serious debates. Either way, it is a critical step: when the capitalist state cannot control its forces of repression, it is severely weakened. In many workers’ revolutions, a situation of dual power emerges. This involves structures of workers’ power competing with the old state apparatus. Nowhere was this more advanced than in the months leading up to the 1917 October insurrection in Russia. Revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin described the situation: > “Dual power is evident in the existence of *two* governments: the one is the main, the real, the actual government of the bourgeoisie, the ‘Provisional Government’ ... which holds in its hands all the organs of power; the other is a supplementary and parallel government, a ‘controlling’ government in the shape of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which holds no organs of state power, but directly rests on the support of an obvious and indisputable majority of the people, on the armed workers and soldiers.” Whether workers can seize power at this point determines whether or not socialism will be possible. The history of revolutions teaches us many things, but a key one is that the ruling class will hold onto power with all of its might, cunning and brutality. This is true at all stages of a revolution, but it is especially the case when their whole social order hangs in the balance. There are both certainties and uncertainties when it comes to revolutions. Certainly, the injustices and contradictions of capitalism will open revolutionary situations. Certainly, revolutions hold the potential to overturn the social order. And certainly, socialism can be brought about only through revolution. But whether a revolution can move from the political to the social, and whether it can succeed in overthrowing the ruling class, are outcomes determined only by subjective political factors. Most importantly, the level of class consciousness, the existence of revolutionary organisations and, ultimately, the balance of political forces. As German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg put it: > “The victory of socialism will not descend from heaven. It can only be won by a long chain of violent tests of strength between the old and the new powers. The international proletariat ... will thereby learn to try to take its history into its own hands; instead of remaining a will-less football, it will take the tiller of social life and become the pilot to the goal of its own history.” Our task is to learn the lessons from the long chain of revolutionary struggles behind us and to build the revolutionary forces needed to win. ### The Marxist alternative to fake communism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-marxist-alternative-to-fake-communism/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T04:59:47.000Z Nation-states, those geographical entities you see on a map of the world, appear to be the fundamental, and natural, units of the global system. There are big ones, small ones, old ones, new ones, rich ones and poor ones. Powerful states oppress the small or weak, squeeze them of wealth, bomb them into submission or occupy them outright. Nations without a state, like the Palestinians, can suffer even worse. Hatred of Western states’ hypocrisy and aggression has therefore led many people to identify with states, such as China or Vietnam, whose independence from the West was achieved via self-described “socialist” or “Marxist” regimes. Yet socialism’s real meaning is lost by its reductive association with “Third World nationalism”, “state-led economic development”, or anyone who claims to be “anti-US”. For Karl Marx and Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, socialism is when the working class runs society in its interests, something achievable only through international revolution. Fake communism’s ugly vision—the national rule of a self-defined socialist government—reflects a politics in which practically anything goes *except* workers’ democracy. ### **The real Marxist tradition** So what’s the genuine socialist tradition? First and foremost, Marxism begins with social classes, not states. All states are divided into rich and poor, exploiters and exploited. The United States, for example, is much richer than Cambodia. Yet American billionaires and Cambodian capitalists have far more in common with each other than they do with the workers they each exploit in their respective countries. So the inside of an Amazon warehouse in New York City bears much closer resemblance to a Phnom Penh sweatshop than a Manhattan penthouse. Without the world’s division into states, two workers on different continents would feel a much closer affinity than a worker and boss within the same territory. Nationalism*,* the ideology of nation-states, encourages workers to identify with those who exploit them. Although opposed to all oppression and therefore committed to the right of national self-determination, Marxists are not nationalists. Marxism aims to organise mass working-class struggle for the overthrow of capitalists and capitalist states in every country, with the goal being the creation of a global socialist system. Second, Marx was never “for the state”. Educated elites wielding state power for the common good is a dream as old as philosophy. Marx had an entirely different approach: the state is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Even the most democratic capitalist republic disguises and upholds inequality by protecting the “equal” right to profit and exploit others. As capitalism concentrates extreme wealth at one pole and a gigantic working class at the other, the state maintains the status quo. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement for businesspeople, and for government bureaucrats, generals, judges, and politicians, for whom state power is their own kind of private property. Instead of looking to perfect the state, Marx wondered where an equal society without private property or the state could come from. He found the solution to the problem in the modern working class: workers own no private property (by this he meant wealth-producing property, not personal property), but have to generate more and more wealth, therefore property, for the very people who exploit them. If the working class ruled society, he reasoned, it would govern in its interests too. But, unlike all previous ruling classes, workers actually create the wealth they seek to control. Since modern industry cannot be divided up, and every workplace depends on every other to meet our human needs, the working class can enjoy the fruits of its collective labour only as one big collective. Marx’s socialism is the product of class struggle, not state policy. A working-class revolution has to seize the entire economy from *below*, smashing through the repressive state with democratic, bottom-up power. Society will gradually shed all need for authority, coercion and violence against anyone, as complete social equality replaces the oppressive division of society into classes. That’s *real* communism. Marx did not conspire to install rulers who really agreed with his theory. Anyone who teaches you how to ride a bike by riding it for you, will take you for a ride. Workers *themselves* have to overcome society’s class division by developing skills, habits and structures for self-government and the abolition of classes altogether. They learn this through direct, mass, and ultimately revolutionary struggle against exploitation. Yet, as capitalism developed, so did state power. “State socialism”, rather than withering before Marx’s facts and logic, only grew in attraction as a potential model. After the defeat of a European-wide revolutionary wave in 1848, French Emperor Louis Bonaparte and Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck rose to power, building modern states with nationalised banking and industry, larger armies and police, and some limited social welfare. In his 1852 pamphlet *The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte*, Marx wrote in disgust of this “enormous bureaucratic and military organisation ... this appalling parasitic body ... a state authority whose work is divided and centralised as in a factory”. These were precursors to the kinds of developmentalist states that fake communists support as “objectively progressive”. China’s dictatorship, they claim, deserves support for unifying the country and raising living standards. Marx, whose yardstick was human freedom, did not support capitalist progress for its own sake. He only relished its historical irony: every tool used to “perfect” humanity’s enslavement—science, industry, globalisation—also improves workers’ capacity to overthrow their masters and finally liberate humanity. So despite being a demand of the 1848 revolution, Marx did not praise Bismarck’s unification of Germany. Instead, he called it “a satire of the revolutionary strivings involved, and thus the deadliest weapon in the hands of the irreconcilable foe” in an 1859 article for the weekly *Das Volk*. Bismarck legislated government health insurance, old age pensions and workplace accident pay, inviting his free-market opponents in an 1881 parliamentary speech to “call it socialism or whatever you like. It is the same to me”. Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels called it something else, already in his 1877 polemic *Anti-Dühring*: states intervening to regulate and stabilise capitalism are the “personification of the total national capital”. Third, Marx understood that to win socialism, workers would need organised, centralised resistance to the capitalists and their state. But this alternative political structure would have to be built by workers’ struggle itself. When the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871 created a wholly new ultrademocratic system, Marx became its greatest champion. The Commune opened every state position to election, paid them all “workman’s wages”, deprived them of special privileges and subjected them to re-election at any time. The police force was abolished and a standing army over the people was replaced by the people armed. Marx called it “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour”, in his 1871 published address, *The Civil War in France*. This vision of a democratic workers’ state was realised in Russia on an enormously vaster scale in October 1917\. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik party led an insurrection of the soviets (councils of workers, peasants and soldiers) with precisely Marx’s Commune-inspired writings in mind. Lenin’s pamphlet *The State and Revolution*, written that year, draws extensively from Marx and Engels to show that reformism (the main fake socialism of the time) had mangled the view of state power beyond recognition: > “The mass of the population will rise to take an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but in the everyday administration of the state. Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.” ### **Stalinism and its children** Stalinism, named after the dictator Joseph Stalin, whose counterrevolution destroyed Russia’s isolated workers’ state, turned the fetish for state management into “Marxism-Leninism”. In Stalin’s Russia, a ruling class of bureaucrats planned a fully nationalised economy to ruthlessly exploit workers and peasants. This model of state-run, breakneck industrial capitalism was called “socialism in one country”. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Russian-dominated empire that ethnically cleansed millions of non-Russians, organised the partition of Poland with Nazi Germany in 1939, and occupied Eastern Europe after World War Two. An international apparatus of bullshit artists taught socialists it was their duty to slavishly back the USSR-led “Eastern bloc” against the US-led Western one. They said that whole countries had been paved with socialism by Russian tanks, like steamrollers paving roads. Geopolitical “campism”—taking the side of the Eastern bloc against the West—not only overshadowed working-class struggle but crushed it. When Hungarian workers, revolting against Stalinist rule in 1956, established a nationwide network of democratic factory councils, the Russians slandered it as a CIA-sponsored plot and invaded the country. After the “communist” Russian government massacred Hungarian workers, most communists worldwide parroted Moscow’s lies or abandoned communism in despair. Stalinism acquired an anticolonial rebrand with the 1949 Chinese Revolution. The Communist Party led a victorious mass army into Beijing, defeating corrupt warlords and foreign imperialist powers, and establishing an independent, unified national state. So far so good—except the party followed the USSR in establishing a cult of personality around party chair Mao Zedong, totalitarian party rule and a regime of extreme labour exploitation. Over the next decades, dozens of militarised, anticolonial revolutions followed suit, dousing Cold War Stalinism in a romantic Third World perfume. ### **Lenin versus Stalin in the colonial world** Marx and Lenin had championed anti-colonial revolutions, but with a very different outcome in mind: the oppressed peoples of the colonised world and European workers uniting to crush world capitalism. But revolutionaries in the oppressed nations needed to “uphold the independence of the working-class movement even in its most embryonic form”, Lenin argued in 1921, maximising the democratic space for workers to lead all of the poor in a struggle for socialism. They should not fall into line behind, or “give communist colouring” to, middle- and upper-class leaders of anti-colonial movements. The early Chinese Communist Party took this task to heart, organising millions into trade unions. By 1927, armed strikers had formed southern China’s “Government Number Two”, and a workers’ insurrection seized Shanghai. But then came Stalin. His agents in China browbeat the Communists into merging with the Nationalist Party—led by merchants and warlords through whom Moscow bureaucrats hoped to secure a stable alliance with an independent, capitalist China. Stalin demanded Shanghai open its gates to the Nationalist general Chiang Kai-Shek. The revolutionary workers obliged. They were slaughtered by the tens of thousands. Fleeing to the countryside, the Communist remnants built “Red Bases” among farmers and returned to conquer the cities with practically zero working-class members. There were no mass strikes; factories were ordered to carry on production as normal. Immiserated farmers could not govern directly like the concentrated mass of urban workers. Instead, military party leaders took power for themselves. Marx’s 1852 description of the countryside’s relationship to strongmen anticipated well Mao’s subsequent police state: > “\[The peasantry\] cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, an unlimited governmental power which ... sends them rain and sunshine from above.” The “sunshine” of Maoist land reform was quickly followed by the “rain” of forced collectivisation, forced labour and a catastrophic Great Leap Forward in which up to 30 million people starved to death. ### **The logic of states** Capitalist competition is global, brutal and constant. Therefore, Stalinist regimes, like all capitalist states, feel an urgent need to militarise, which they say is for national defence. The Nazis said the same about German rearmament; the Americans claimed they had to stop a “domino effect” by invading Vietnam; Mao’s China built the “workers’ bomb”, a nuclear weapon capable of wiping out hundreds of thousands of workers. The European Union today is spending hundreds of billions for military “self-defence” after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, itself justified as protection from “NATO’s expansion”. Marxism aims to break this death logic, not perpetuate it. That’s why Marx, Engels, Lenin and Leon Trotsky, another leading Russian revolutionary, fought for *international* revolution. The world produces absolute abundance, but a single beleaguered country cannot shorten working hours while raising living standards—the basis of a stable socialist democracy. Spreading revolution is the only way to defeat counterrevolution without devolving into a class-divided garrison state. Fake communism refashioned socialism into nationalistic grotesqueries: Peru’s Shining Path, Arab Ba’athism, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. The brotherhood of “socialist” states was often a band of hostile siblings, like when Vietnam deposed the Khmer Rouge in 1979, followed by China’s invasion of Vietnam, and the Soviet Union threatening to invade China. In response to Russian nuclear sabre-rattling, Mao had formed an alliance with US president Richard Nixon in 1972\. Maoists performed a globally synchronised backflip and supported US-allied genocidal wars against national independence in Bangladesh and Angola. China provided diplomatic support to Chilean general Augusto Pinochet who, backed by Washington, toppled the left-wing government of Salvador Allende and repurposed a football stadium for the torture of socialists. The Cold War is over, but campism has adapted to new terrain. Today’s “anti-imperialist” camp includes Vladimir Putin’s mafia oligarchy, Iran’s anti-communist theocrats, Beijing’s “communist” billionaires and, until his overthrow, the “socialist” torture dungeons of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Uprisings against repressive governments in this broad camp—such as in Syria, Libya, Hong Kong and Iran—are forever discovered to be CIA-funded Trojan horses, by Redditors trained in Marxism-Leninism. Now, campism’s militaristic nationalism is pipelining some into the “anti-woke” right. The election platform of pro-Palestine UK politician George Galloway, and others in Europe, bundles together opposition to NATO, mass migration and trans rights. Harsh new anti-homosexuality laws in military-led Burkina Faso and Mali are defended as anticolonial “African sovereignty” as the countries realign from French domination to Russian and Chinese influence. There’s much more to be said about Stalinist betrayals and distortions. But the substitution of national struggle between elites for class struggle led by workers is at the heart of the difference between fake communism and genuine Marxism. Some time in 1864, Marx wrote the opening line of the International Workingmen’s Association’s general rules: “Considering that the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class themselves ...” If socialism is to have a future, it must return to Marx’s idea that socialism is the rule of the working class, or it is nothing at all. ### We need a revolution to end women’s oppression URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/we-need-a-revolution-to-end-womens-oppression/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T05:03:41.000Z A little more than 50 years ago, the UN designated 1975 as the International Year of Women. The Melbourne *Age* responded with the headline “$2 million for the Sheilas: Surprisingly it’s Not a Joke”. Sydney’s *Sunday Telegraph* described it as the “Year of the Bird” and ran an article about a women’s conference titled “Mum’s the Word as the Big Yak-Yak Begins”. With this being the public line, you can only imagine what was being said behind closed doors in editorial offices, board rooms and parliamentary corridors. Fast forward half a century, and the official attitude towards women is somewhat different. “Creating opportunity for women is a matter of national interest”, declared Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at a parliamentary breakfast co-hosted by the UN to launch International Women’s Day last year. “It grows our workforce, lifts our living standards, boosts productivity, liberates the talent and capacity we need to build Australia’s future.” This contrast reflects the dramatic change in the position of women in Australia over the last 50 years, and in the attitudes towards them of government and business. Women today earn more and have achieved formal equality in most spheres of life. They have much greater choice about what to do with their lives. But they are still a long way from being equal to men, and even further from liberation. This contradiction befuddles many liberal commentators. Their solutions—whether it’s agonising about whether the right voices have been “elevated”, the desirability of quotas or different strategies to eliminate individual prejudice—feel wholly inadequate in the face of the juggernaut that is gender inequality. But there is no great mystery to it: what matters most has not changed. Human life still comes second to profit-making, and women’s second-class status is inseparable from that. Women’s involvement in paid work is a good example. Women have always worked in the formal economy, but before the 1960s and 1970s, their involvement was more marginal. In 1979, for example, only 40 percent of partnered women with children were employed at all (today it is more than 75 percent), and only a tiny minority of households included two parents working full time. Today, the participation rate of women in paid work is at a historic high of 67 percent. Yet working women face as many difficulties as advantages. On the one hand, they earn more money and have greater financial independence than in the past. They also gain the prestige and connections that come from spending more time working outside the home, and they are more easily able to be involved in political and union activities. All of this has an important impact on their self-image and on the general view of women. But on the other hand, there is a continued dependence on partners, as it is increasingly difficult to survive on a single income, especially with kids. Consider the impact of rising housing costs, which are usually the single largest item of household spending. House prices in Australia today are 16.4 times the average pre-tax income. In 1970, they were 4.5 times. This makes the nuclear family—a couple with children—just as hard as ever to escape for women who might want to. And for many working-class women, the overall impact of longer work hours, combined with still-significant domestic obligations, means more work and more stress. This is particularly the case as the burden of unpaid work falls more heavily on women. According to a 2017 report by PwC, a consultancy firm, women perform three-quarters of all the unpaid work in the Australian economy. And it is a lot of work—unpaid child care alone, if counted in dollar terms, would constitute the largest single industry in Australia, bigger than any in the formal economy. In the home, women on average perform 22.3 hours per week compared to 15.3 for men, according to the Melbourne Institute and Roy Morgan’s Taking the Pulse of the Nation survey. The gap between women and men who both work full time is smaller—15.8 compared to 14.3—but still significant. This work is indispensable to capitalism. It ensures the working class is healthy, reliable, and motivated to work, and that a new generation is raised healthy, well-socialised, and compliant. It also takes the pressure off the government to provide proper services to the sick, the elderly and children. While home and family life for many people (certainly not all) also offer emotional fulfilment and make them feel valued in ways they don’t at work, it obscures the symbiotic relationship between the domestic sphere and the workplace and formal economy. The continuing central role of women in maintaining the household and family life is therefore of enormous advantage to the capitalist class. It also helps explain why stereotypes about women’s natural propensity to care for children and nurture others persist. Involvement in paid work likewise intensifies gender inequality, while also mitigating certain aspects of it. The potential independence women can gain from work is undercut by their entrenched second-class status in the workplace. A 2023 study by Eliza Littlejohn and Greg Jericho from the Centre for Future Work highlights the economic disparity between working women and men. They estimate that men as a group are paid at least $3 billion more than women are per week, despite women making up 48 percent of the workforce. And women earning the median wage can expect to earn $1 million less than their male counterparts over their lifetime. When looking at the real earnings of women and men, they conclude: “The gender pay gap across all employment and pay types was 29 percent in November 2022, with women earning $476.3 less than men per week. This means that women earn 71 percent of a male weekly wage”. Women’s low pay, combined with the increasing need for households to have two full-time incomes, means that the nuclear family model persists. Divorce reduces the lifetime income of women with children by 40 percent, according to the University of Melbourne’s Breaking Down Barriers report. The situation is even worse in terms of assets: an AMP study found that newly divorced women have just 10 percent of the assets a married woman has, and debt levels 2.3 times higher than married women and three times higher than divorced men. Whichever way you look at it, women are not equal today. This is the context needed to understand the deterioration of attitudes towards women. Despite all the much-vaunted advances, women are still belittled, objectified, ignored and trivialised every day of their lives. Too often, they are abused, assaulted and killed. Mistreatment starts very young—the 2019 Growing up in Australia report found that one in two girls under the age of 17 had experienced unwanted sexual behaviour. Over their lifetimes, one in five women experiences sexual violence, and one in five will be stalked. Women also continue to be objectified and judged according to their looks. If anything, the pressure on women to look a certain way has gotten worse since the 1970s and affects women for a greater proportion of their lives, starting younger and extending further into old age. This is despite an overall better and more accurate representation of women in public life and in some aspects of pop culture. More women than ever today are taking drastic measures to conform to this punishing standard—according to the Australasian College of Cosmetic Surgery and Medicine, Australia has a higher number of cosmetic surgery procedures per head than the US, and one of the highest in the world. The vast majority of people undergoing these procedures are women—in the US, 92 percent are women and around 86 percent worldwide. In research released in 2023, the ACCSM cites “low self-esteem” as the most important reason patients seek out cosmetic surgery. Why wouldn’t women have low self-esteem in a society that deems them less worthy than men? Meanwhile, the ever-expanding consumption of porn and the normalisation of the sex industry are helping to drive grossly sexist attitudes among men, especially young ones. The Growing up in Australia report found that boys are six times more likely to engage in unwanted sexual behaviour if they have been exposed to porn than if they haven’t. The 2019 National Community Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women Survey likewise found more than a third of young men believed women preferred men to be in charge in relationships, and one in seven young people felt men were justified in raping women if they changed their mind during sex. And this is all getting worse as the political right repopularises and re-legitimises reactionary ideas, particularly sexist ones. Figures like pro-rape influencer Andrew Tate are normalising extreme sexism and finding a willing audience among young men. A 2024 study published by Melbourne University found that just under 20 percent of Australian men agreed with the statement “Feminism is damaging to our society and should be resisted by force if necessary”. Support was even higher among young men. This is a dire situation. To change it, we need to challenge and organise against the reactionary politics of the right. They aim to roll back all the gains of the 1960s and 1970s, limited though they were, and without serious resistance, they will likely succeed. But to resist effectively, we need to know what needs to change to bring real equality for all the oppressed and exploited. We need to be committed to challenging all the structures that sustain these ideas and that maintain gross inequality, not just tweaking some policy settings or rallying behind politicians who want to put a more friendly face on the same unfriendly system. The experience of women over the last 50 years demonstrates that formal rights, increased involvement in paid work and greater representation in the halls of power do not lead to equality. So long as the structures that subordinate the lives of the majority to profit-making—to turning up to work each day, making goods and services that bosses can sell for far more than they pay workers and bringing up children to do the same when they’re adults—genuine equality is impossible. For women, who play a vital role through the work they do in the home and at work—both of which are indispensable to capitalism—this is particularly the case. So to make any meaningful progress, we need radical change. First, we need to transform work. Work under capitalism is controlled by those who control the machines, tools, infrastructure and land that make our work productive. And it is directed towards profit, so people are under constant pressure to work harder, longer and for less. The capitalist class needs to be overthrown and work organised democratically by those who do it and who need the goods produced by workers to best serve their needs. That means work can and should be organised around and integrated with caring for people: children, the elderly, the sick and disabled. Second, we need to break down the stark separation between work and home life. This is an efficient model for profit-driven capitalist production. But it is not conducive to human beings reaching their full potential, being happy and connecting meaningfully with others. This means integrating the production of what people need with the necessary work of caring for others. This is the only way to eliminate the compartmentalisation of women’s lives, which often makes them feel they cannot do anything satisfactorily. This sort of change is incompatible with capitalism and the profit-making that is its sole objective. Therefore, to liberate women, we need to get rid of capitalism. We need a revolution, in which the mass of workers take control of the world around them and decide, based on what is in their collective interests rather than those of a wealthy elite, how to organise production and distribution. Such a revolution could call into question every aspect of life and social organisation, and unleash the creativity and potential of the mass of people to solve problems that capitalism simply can’t, of which just one is eliminating gender inequality. Things that seem impossible to change, or that we’re told are the inevitable result of human nature, can be challenged when workers and the oppressed start acting together, discovering their power and thinking of new ways to work and live. This is what socialist revolution is all about and is the starting point in the fight for a world without sexism and oppression of any sort. ### The socialist alternative to the capitalist economy URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-socialist-alternative-to-the-capitalist-economy/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T04:45:44.000Z The New York Stock Exchange is perhaps the premier institutional expression of the capitalist economy. It’s difficult to conjure an image of American capitalism without including the Wall Street sign at the corner of Broad, the stone streetscape of the exchange with its US flags, or the bronze “charging bull” statue at Bowling Green. Wall Street is, for some, a wondrous emblem of American exceptionalism. For most of us, it is a picture of moral desolation and criminality. Indeed, since it became the centre of US finance in the nineteenth century, Wall Street has repeatedly been the target of protests by workers who recognise it as a place where their enemies organise to rip them off and destroy their lives. So when you think “socialism”, you might, not unreasonably, conjure images of the storming and burning of stock exchanges everywhere. Yet a socialist economy would likely retain the machinery of Wall Street, albeit for refashioned ends. To understand why, and how a socialist economy might work, it’s important first to grasp just how remarkable the capitalist economy is. No human society before it has come close to developing the science, technologies and industrial capacities that we now take for granted. Take the production of one of the most essential things for human survival: food. Before capitalism, economies were primarily agrarian, the continued existence of any given population being almost entirely dependent on seasonal crop yields. Survival was a year-by-year proposition, famine just one flood, one drought, one failed harvest away. “A bad year such as 1817 could, even in tranquil Switzerland, produce an actual excess of deaths over births”, the late historian Eric Hobsbawm noted in his book *The Age of Revolution*. Today, thanks to capitalist development, scarcity is a thing of the past. The amount of food available to an individual in France, for example, is estimated to be more than twice what it was before the 1789 Revolution, even though the population has more than doubled, from 28 million to more than 68 million. Across the world, the volume has increased by nearly 50 percent in the last 60 years, from fewer than 2,200 calories per person per day to more than 2,900, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The recommended daily caloric intake is 2,000-2,500—indicating that more than enough food is available for everyone on the planet. There’s an obvious problem, though, isn’t there? All around the world, billions of people are going hungry. The humanitarian organisation Action Against Hunger estimates that more than 800 million people are undernourished. Even in the richest of countries, there’s an issue. In Australia, for example, more than one in six adults and more than 1 million children routinely miss meals, according to Foodbank, a charity. This minor detail—more than enough being produced but billions of people struggling—is replicated in almost all areas: housing, incomes, health care, education and so on. The problem is that while capitalism excels at producing large numbers of goods, it fails dismally at distributing them equitably. “The workman is the source of all wealth”, an article in the *Lancashire Co-operator* noted of nineteenth-century England: > “Who has raised all the food? The half-fed and impoverished labourer. Who built all the houses and warehouses, and palaces, which are possessed by the rich, who never labour or produce anything? The workman. Who spins all the yarn and makes all the cloth? The spinner and weaver ... \[Yet\] the labourer remains poor and destitute, while those who do not work are rich.” Things haven’t changed that much from those early years of capitalism. According to one recent estimate by the financial group UBS, the top 1.5 percent of adults on the planet together own more than 47 percent of the world’s total personal wealth. Yet the poorest 40 percent have just 0.5 percent of the wealth—on average about $1,600 per person. It’s not just that the distribution of personal wealth is unequal. It’s that the productive infrastructure—the factories, the mines, the office blocks, the arable land, the telecommunications systems, the transport networks and so on—is owned and controlled by the rich and used to enrich themselves further. One of the first goals of a socialist economy would be to place all critical economic resources under the collective ownership and control of workers. By doing so, most of the population would gain the ability to decide the priorities for production and distribution. This brings us back to those stock exchanges. Every day, the Australian Securities Exchange in Sydney executes more than 2 million trades. The system is remarkably efficient in pairing buyers and sellers of a diverse array of financial instruments. By and large, this is just wealthy people making themselves wealthier by buying and selling claims to the ownership of companies and other things. They, or their brokers, simply get online, look at what’s available to purchase, and trade away. In a socialist economy, this technology, rather than being used to link capitalist traders worldwide, could be used to link every workplace and every suburb in a city, every city in a country, and every country in the world. Instead of endlessly trading claims to ownership of different companies, the trades could be simple declarations of needs and availabilities. That is, any given region could inform the system how much it had produced of certain goods and how much of certain other goods its population needed for the week (or the day, as appropriate). The system could then balance all claims, and society would immediately identify excesses and shortages and adjust production and distribution accordingly. It sounds so simple as to be utterly utopian. But this is basically the way the world works already. Take the extensive global supply chains linking farms to ports, to food manufacturers, to warehouses, to supermarkets—everything is coordinated down to the last kilogram between buyers and sellers. When it comes to this sort of distribution, capitalism is, in general, incredibly efficient. As you read this, somewhere a supermarket line manager is scanning a series of barcodes and entering the corresponding quantity of units for each item; tomorrow, a truck will arrive with several pallets of whatever it was that they ordered. It’s as simple as that. If you went back in time 200 years and tried to explain this to someone, they would likely consider you utterly mad. Yet here we all are, living in a world in which a stranger in a truck turns up with a mountain of goods after someone points a laser gun at a series of black lines on a small piece of paper. Marvellous. The process today is overseen by a small number of owners of the production and distribution chains, who permit their workers to place orders and process deliveries only if they believe their companies will make money. That’s the limit to the capitalist economy and its efficiency. But there’s no technical reason that this operation could not instead be run to meet human needs. The whole process is already carried out by workers—from producing the food to driving the trucks to stacking the shelves in the shops. All that would need to happen is for production and distribution to be put under the democratic control of the people who do all the work. Under capitalism, bosses like Jeff Bezos reap the rewards of their impoverished, exploited workers, then turn around and say, “I want to go to space”—and it happens. Under socialism, working people would reap the rewards of their own labour and communities would turn around and say, “We need a hospital”—and it would happen. It’s not materially or technically different; it’s just a different set of priorities and beneficiaries. Along with its inability to distribute resources equitably, capitalism generates substantial waste. First is the mountain of items that are discarded because they aren’t sold. Again, take food. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, nearly half of all fruit and vegetables produced globally is wasted. In the United States, it’s about 30 percent of all food. Of that, up to a third of the wastage occurs at the farm, and one-quarter at the retail level. It’s actually *extra work* to keep people starving—food producers and sellers must put extra time into organising the dumping or removal of unsold produce, rather than allow it to be distributed, in the usual way, to those who need it. Plus, they wasted all the labour producing it in the first place, only to see it rot. It was also a massive waste of soil nutrients and precious water resources. Second is the vast amount of planned obsolescence in capitalist production: many things are designed to fall apart or have short lifespans so that people keep buying them over and over. Industrial-scale planned obsolescence reportedly originated in the early twentieth century with the Phoebus Cartel in light globe manufacturing, which decided to limit the lifespan of bulbs to around 1,000 hours. The idea is now embedded in pretty much every industry. It’s such a waste of labour and resources, but it’s the production model that makes companies the most money. In many cases, it is cheaper to lower workers’ wages and produce more and more new things than it is to create durable or serviceable products. (Did you know that some 24 billion pairs of shoes are sold every year?) Third is the monumental waste of entire industries and the labour associated with them, such as the legal profession and sales and marketing. One estimate of the cost to end global hunger (using existing capitalist economic means) is about US$33 billion per year over ten years. Compare that with global marketing investments: a few years ago, the US consulting and research firm Forrester estimated that the total was US$4.7 trillion per year. That’s trillions of dollars and millions of labour hours, every year, outlaid by companies trying to convince us to buy their products, which will soon fall apart, rather than their competitors’ products, which are generally the same and also fall apart. It’s madness. A socialist economy would get rid of most of this waste almost overnight by starting with simple questions that the whole population can respond to: “First, what do we all need? Second, what do we want? Third, how many resources do we have? Fourth, what are our priorities?” A considerable amount of office space, factory space, fertile land, machinery and, above all, labour time, would be freed up by starting with those questions, rather than the capitalists’ questions (“How do I make people want to buy this product? How can I generate a profit?”). Think of all the millions of hours of wasted labour that could otherwise be used to increase the production of things in short supply, or to reduce the working week by either producing things to last (therefore reducing the need to create so much) or by bringing in a greater number of workers into productive industries and reducing everyone’s working hours, while still providing for everyone’s needs. Finally, a socialist economy would be more rational. Defenders of capitalism always talk about how innovative their system is. As noted at the beginning, it is. But again, it has severe limitations. Take the ongoing economic addiction to oil, coal and gas. How innovative is it, really, to be wedded to energy sources from the nineteenth century? The problem again is profits: the huge companies already invested in and determined to squeeze every cent out of the fossil fuel economy just won’t let go. A socialist economy, being run by the majority in the interests of all, would not allow our planet to be trashed so that a few of us could live better than the rest. Achieving a socialist economy will not be simple—we need a workers’ revolution to move beyond capitalism. But once we are there, it will be relatively easy, using existing technologies and processes, to organise the world according to the maxim, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. The poet Bertolt Brecht put it best in his poem “In praise of communism”: > *It is reasonable. You can grasp it. It’s simple.* > *You’re no exploiter, so you’ll understand.* > *It is good for you. Look into it.* > *Stupid men call it stupid, and the dirty call it dirty.* > *It is against dirt and against stupidity.* > *The exploiters call it a crime.* > *But we know:* > *It is the end of all crime.* > *It is not madness but* > *The end of madness.* > *It is not chaos,* > *But order.* > *It is the simple thing* > *That’s hard to do.* ### Who is Socialist Alternative? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/who-is-socialist-alternative/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T04:17:50.000Z Socialist Alternative is a revolutionary socialist organisation. The point of a socialist group is ultimately to fight to overthrow the capitalist system and create a world run democratically by workers—one that prioritises human need, not profit. In moments of mass resistance, which break out periodically under capitalism, the question of which political forces are the best organised becomes crucial. The ruling class have numerous defences to protect their rule, from repressive laws and armed police to the loyalty of “moderates” in the movement—reformist politicians, well-heeled NGO leaders, union officials and more. A socialist party is necessary to challenge these “respectable” and “pragmatic” leaders, who usually enjoy a privileged position within the system and want to keep it that way. They tend to argue that change comes through the official channels, rather than workers’ own power. Socialists, by contrast, argue that real social change is possible only when the mass of people are actively engaged in bringing about change. In workplaces, this means workers taking control and deciding for themselves what to produce and how, in a collective and democratic manner. This is exactly what tends to happen at high points of social struggle or during revolutions—but at such moments, the movement can be crushed or coopted by those looking to preserve the system. This is another reason why a mass socialist party is necessary: to push in the direction of mass action and stronger grassroots organisation. That requires people who can convince others of the need to dismantle the police, armies and parliamentary institutions that back up the rule of the rich, and to begin building a new society based on democracy and solidarity. We’re a long way from this today, but this gigantic task isn’t going to be accomplished by pontificating in armchairs and waiting until the barricades go up. It requires an organisation of people committed to building resistance wherever possible in the here and now. Through campaigns and organising, socialists can gain experience in fighting for and winning things, figure out what tactics and strategies are effective and learn who are allies or enemies. This is why we expect our members be active wherever they are—whether at work or on a university campus. It’s why we take working in campaigns seriously—from the fight for LGBTI rights to campaigns against war, racism and fascism, to struggles for workers’ rights and against education cuts. We want to win reforms because we support workers and the oppressed having as much control over their lives and the highest living standards possible within the confines of capitalism. And every struggle is a chance to learn how to challenge the power of the capitalist class and its defenders. So whenever or wherever the oppressed and exploited have a grievance against the system, socialists want to stand with them, strengthen the fight, learn from it and, through this process, demonstrate in practice that socialist politics can both explain the capitalist system and provide a strategy to fundamentally change the world. This is particularly important at work. Our members often do the painstaking and unglamorous work of convincing individual workmates to join their trade union or to raise their voices about seemingly small workplace grievances. But this work, which builds union culture and marks out socialists as workplace leaders, is invaluable. It can at times lead to fairly impressive union activism. So Socialist Alternative members have led or been an important part of a number of strikes across Australia, and more recently multiple walkouts of community service workers in Melbourne in solidarity with Gaza. Also, socialists can’t expect workers to follow their lead in a radicalisation if they have not already proved themselves to be committed, principled workplace activists. Any organisation that is serious about its claim that workers have the power to bring about socialism must be part of the workers’ movement and aim to win the respect of other workers. We are also involved in the task of building a genuinely radical electoral alternative to Labor and the Greens, establishing the Victorian Socialists, which has begun to put socialist ideas back on the political map. The election campaigns have involved conversations with tens of thousands of people, in which we must make socialist ideas accessible and convincing to those not already involved in political activism. Last year, we expanded Victorian Socialists nationwide, quickly growing to 5,600 members and becoming the largest socialist party in Australia since the Second World War. In all the campaigns we’re a part of, our approach is determined by our socialist politics. Because we are revolutionaries, we don’t limit what we demand to what we think will be acceptable to those in power. This stands in contrast to moderate organisations and NGOs, which often oppose even minimal demands and activism for fear of alienating their friends in high places or being seen as “extreme” or “fringe” and not listened to by those in power. We are one of only a few organisations that has held the line on Palestine in the face of constant government and media attacks. Decades of perseverance were crucial in laying the basis for the massive solidarity movement of the last two years, giving successive generations of activists the arguments to stand up to the smears and the confidence that they’re on the right side of history. The consistent activist work of Socialist Alternative members has allowed us to initiate some of the most important Gaza solidarity actions in Australian history, from the university encampments to the March for Humanity over the Sydney Harbor bridge. Like the NGOs and moderate organisations, most union leaders have been utterly silent since Labor won government federally in 2022, while workers’ living standards have taken a battering. Socialist Alternative is a small group; we don’t pretend that we can transform the union movement. But when we argue against the conservative union leaders, we can find an audience—because lots of workers want their unions to fight for them. For instance, during the pandemic, members of Socialist Alternative led a national campaign to defeat a proposed 15 percent wage cut on every worker in the university sector, a plan that was being pushed by the university union itself. All the various campaigns raise participants’ political horizons, give them experience in organising and allow them to draw practical lessons. They demonstrate in practice that the instincts and attitudes of workers are frequently well in advance of their “representatives”, but so often are invalidated by those with a more conservative agenda. ButYet campaigning alone is not enough. Small victories can be overturned. And many campaigns don’t win their demands. This doesn’t mean that they are a waste of time. But defeat often demoralises people. This is not inevitable—defeats can be important learning experiences that make victory next time more likely. And, if the appropriate political conclusions are drawn, they help establish political lessons in the eyes of those who take part that are important for future struggles. Socialist organisation plays an important role here, helping to ensure that the skills, insights and political principles learnt through generations of class and social struggles are passed on and built on in a way that can shape the future of the workers’ movement—toward overthrowing the entire system. That’s why socialists meet, discuss and write about struggles, and attempt to draw the participants into ongoing political activity, rather than let them drift away when a campaign ends. Winning in the long term will require building a mass socialist organisation. This is why we don’t just organise activism: we are constructing an experienced, collaborative group. There are many elements to this. First and foremost, we constantly grow our ranks. To challenge capitalism, we will need socialist organisers in every workplace, every campaign and on every university campus. That starts with recruiting individuals, educating them in socialist ideas and giving them the political experience to become effective organisers and recruiters. This is why we promote our politics at rallies, sell a publication and regularly host anti-capitalist meetings after the demonstration concludes. Contrary to the complaints of some, this isn’t “hijacking” or bringing an “outside agenda”. This is what every serious organisation, and even many individuals, do in every struggle. Every campaign is a battle of ideas, bringing together people who want to work for a common goal but who have different political approaches. What’s more, many activist campaigns have been sustained only because a minority of participants were convinced to become ongoing socialist organisers, turning a moment of protest into a lifelong political commitment. The more socialists we recruit today, the more people there will be to build resistance in the future. For a socialist group to be effective, it must build a culture of serious political activity. This is why we make regular activity a requirement of membership. This is not only about maximising Socialist Alternative’s impact. It is also necessary for the organisation to be democratic. We make decisions, carry them out and evaluate them collectively. Only an active membership can hold the leadership to account and learn how to be leaders themselves. All the work that Socialist Alternative does takes significant resources. Running multiple campaigns, publishing a magazine and a theoretical journal, renting and booking venues to organise in, hosting the Marxism conference every year—all this costs money. We are funded through members’ financial contributions, which vary according to their personal situation. For a revolutionary organisation, this is even more important than for other parties because it’s a question of political independence—to function as a radical group, we can’t rely on corporate donations as the ALP does, or government grants as is the case for NGOs. We organise weekly branch meetings in every area where we have a presence. These meetings allow members to discuss what’s happening in the world and in campaigns we are involved in, and to deepen our collective knowledge of history and political theory. And we democratically decide the direction of the group—unlike most traditional political parties, which operate according to a top-down model. We have elected leadership structures at a campus, city and national level to coordinate the activities of our group, all of which are democratically accountable to the members. Socialists need to be well organised to have an impact. But revolutionary groups don’t build themselves. They have to be built by those who believe it’s possible for workers to create a society fit for human existence. We still have a long way to go—from an organisation of around 800 to many thousands. But we also know that our politics stand a chance of winning the fight for a better world. If you agree with these ideas, you should join the largest and most serious group of revolutionaries in Australia—you should join Socialist Alternative. ### How the world is preparing the ground for the next Palestinian genocide URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/how-the-world-is-preparing-the-ground-for-the-next-palestinian-genocide/ Last updated: 2026-01-10T10:41:50.000Z Suppose we accept the fiction that none of us expected Israel to launch a full-scale [genocide](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds?ref=redflag.org.au) in Gaza—a premeditated campaign to erase the Strip and exterminate a significant portion of its inhabitants. Let us pretend that nearly 80 years of relentless massacres were not a prelude to this moment, and that Israel had never before sought the physical destruction of the Palestinian people as outlined by the 1948 Genocide [Convention](https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1%5FConvention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au). If we go so far as to accept the sterile, ahistoric claim that the [Nakba](https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/?ref=redflag.org.au) of 1948 was “merely” ethnic cleansing rather than genocide—ignoring the mass graves and the forced erasure of a civilisation—we are still left with a terrifying reality. Having witnessed the unmasked extermination that began on 7 October 2023, who can dare to argue that its perpetrators lack the intent to repeat it? The question itself is an act of charity, as it assumes the genocide has actually stopped. In reality, the carnage has merely shifted tactics. Since the implementation of the fragile [ceasefire](https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-hamas-gaza-ceasefire-agreement-10-10-25?ref=redflag.org.au) on 10 October, Israel has [killed](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/20/israeli-troops-kill-palestinians-sheltering-in-gaza-school-hospital-chiefs?ref=redflag.org.au) over 400 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more. Others have perished in the frozen mud of their tents. They include infants like 8-month-old Fahar Abu Jazar, who, like others, [froze](https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/11/world/palestinian-baby-dies-hypothermia-intl-latam?ref=redflag.org.au) to death. These are not mere tragedies; they are the inevitable results of a calculated Israeli policy of destruction targeting the most vulnerable. During this two-year campaign of extermination, more than 20,000 Palestinian children were [murdered](https://www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-20000-children-killed-23-months-war-more-one-child-killed-every-hour?ref=redflag.org.au), accounting for a staggering 30 percent of the total victims. This blood-soaked tally ignores the thousands of souls entrapped beneath the concrete wasteland of Gaza, and those currently being consumed by the silent killers of famine and engineered epidemics. The horrifying statistics aside, we bear witness to the final agonies of a people. We have watched their extermination in real-time, broadcast to every handheld screen on earth. No one can claim ignorance; no one can claim innocence. Even now, we watch as 1.3 million Palestinians [endure](https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/spread-famine-gaza-strip-averted-palestinians-face-starvation-128549483?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=Aid%20groups%20say%20nearly%201.3,shelters%20and%20relying%20on%20assistance.) a precarious existence in tents ravaged by winter floods. We share the screams of mothers, the hollowed-out faces of broken fathers, and the haunted stares of children, and yet, the world’s political and moral institutions remain paralysed. If Israel resumes the full, unrestrained intensity of this genocide, will we stop it? I fear the answer is no, because the world refuses to dismantle the circumstances that permitted this slaughter in the first place. Israeli officials never bothered to hide their intent. The systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians was a primary export of Israeli media, even as Western corporate outlets worked tirelessly to sanitise this criminal discourse. The record of intent is undeniable. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly [championed](https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-s-ben-gvir-renews-call-to-occupy-gaza-encourage-palestinian-migration/3620645?ref=redflag.org.au) the “encouragement of migration” and [demanded](https://x.com/MarquardtA/status/1714349157144564112?lang=en&ref=redflag.org.au) that “not an ounce of humanitarian aid” reach Gaza. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich [argued](https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/57/NGO/107?ref=redflag.org.au) that the starvation of two million people could be “just and moral” in the pursuit of military aims. From the halls of the Knesset to the pop charts, the [refrain](https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240314-shager-israeli-song-promises-to-erase-gaza-and-shoot-rockets-like-rain/?ref=redflag.org.au) was the same: “erase Gaza”, “leave no one there”. When military leaders refer to an entire population as “human animals”, they are not using metaphors; they are issuing a license for extermination. This was preceded by the hermetic [siege](https://euromedmonitor.org/en/gaza?ref=redflag.org.au)—a decades-long experiment in human misery that began in 2006\. Despite every Palestinian plea for the world to break this death grip, the blockade was allowed to persist. This was followed by successive wars targeting a besieged, impoverished population under the banner of “security”, always shielded by the Western mantra of Israel’s “right to defend itself”. In the dominant Western narrative, the Palestinian is the eternal aggressor. They are the occupied, the besieged, the dispossessed and the stateless; yet they are expected to die quietly in the world’s “largest open-air [prison](https://www.warchild.net/stories-of-children/rami/?ref=redflag.org.au)”. Whether they utilised armed resistance, threw rocks at tanks, or marched unarmed toward snipers, they were branded “terrorists” and “militants” whose very existence was framed as a threat to their occupier. Years before the first bomb of this genocide fell, the United Nations [declared](https://news.un.org/en/story/2015/09/507762?ref=redflag.org.au) Gaza “uninhabitable”. Its water was a toxin, its land a graveyard, and its people were dying of curable diseases. Yet, aside from the typical ritual of humanitarian reports, the international community did nothing to offer a political horizon, a just peace. This criminal neglect provided the vacuum for the events of 7 October, allowing Israel to weaponise its victimhood to execute a genocide of sadistic proportions. Former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant explicitly [stripped](https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-paints-palestinians-as-animals-to-legitimize-war-crimes-israeli-scholar/3030278?ref=redflag.org.au) Palestinians of their humanity, launching a collective slaughter directed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The stage is being set for the next phase of extermination. The siege is now absolute, the violence more concentrated, and the dehumanisation of Palestinians more widespread than ever. As the international media drifts toward other distractions, Israel’s image is being rehabilitated as if the genocide never happened. Tragically, the conditions that fuelled the first wave of genocide are being meticulously reconstructed. Indeed, another Israeli genocide is not a distant threat; it is an encroaching reality that will be finalised unless it is stopped. The 1948 [Convention](https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1%5FConvention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was a legal [vow](https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1263&context=gsp&ref=redflag.org.au) to “liberate mankind from such an odious scourge”. If those words possess a shred of integrity, the world must act now to abort the next phase of extermination. This requires absolute accountability and a political process that finally severs the grip of Israeli colonialism and violence. The clock is ticking, and our collective voice—or our silence—will make the difference. *First published at* [*RamzyBaroud.net*](https://ramzybaroud.net/?ref=redflag.org.au)*.* ### Australia’s right-wingers want a post-Bondi racist movement URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/australias-right-wingers-want-a-post-bondi-racist-movement/ Last updated: 2026-01-08T04:55:24.000Z Will the Bondi massacre result in a new wave of anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racism? Australia’s right-wing politicians certainly hope so. The murders took place on a Sunday evening. The right-wing response was clear within hours. By Monday, Liberal MP Andrew Hastie had published a short video manifesto: “The prime minister has failed this country ... What we need to talk about is immigration”. The same day, Pauline Hanson claimed on Sky News that her decades-long attack on “multiculturalism” had been [vindicated](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm6fyDoy98s&ref=redflag.org.au), demanding a “hard look at our immigration”. On Tuesday, she and her new party comrade Barnaby Joyce toured the crime scene like Winston Churchill inspecting wreckage of the blitz. They, two of Australia’s most brazen professional racists, were welcomed as heroes. Bondi has not been Australia’s Charlie Hebdo, its Bataclan or its Manchester arena. The traditional response to a terror attack—the stifling atmosphere of national unity, in which all dissent is smothered and some kind of patriotic liberalism becomes mandatory—has not been in evidence. Instead, Australia’s broad right-wing political networks have seized the opportunity to supercharge anti-immigrant sentiment and turn it against the Labor government. The ground was already shifting. Polling indicates a surge in anti-migrant sentiment in Australia in the last five years. For much of the 2000s, only about a third of Australians thought there were too many migrants, but that number is [now more than 50 percent](https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/12/immigration-panic-comes-in-waves-data-shows-who-worries-most-and-when?ref=redflag.org.au), with a steep climb since COVID. When it comes to racism, Australia is in a peculiar position. Despite the deep roots of racism in official Australian politics, the country has not yet seen the full development of a Trumpian, supposedly “anti-establishment” nativism on a mass scale. For years, Australia’s right-wing politicians have struggled to find a way to initiate a shift like it, and ride it to electoral success. The lag is sometimes attributed to Australia’s unusual electoral system, which does tend to prop up unpopular but broadly tolerable centre parties. The fact that both major parties, Labor and Liberal, tended to uncritically adopt extreme anti-refugee policies also meant that far-right challenges sometimes seemed superfluous. Trump himself has a strange impact: his success in the USA inspires right-wing co-thinkers around the world, while his conduct in office exposes the disturbing reality behind his demagoguery, as Peter Dutton found out to his disappointment when his Trumpian campaign fizzled after Trump’s second inauguration. But the biggest factor was likely economic. Australia, almost uniquely in the wealthy capitalist countries, was never seriously affected by the financial crisis. Around the world, the centre-left and centre-right parties alike faced a rising tide of genuine hatred. Australia’s politicians have never faced the same rage that ultimately consumed the Clintons, Bushes and Blairs of the world. Left- and right-wing populism rose throughout Europe and the USA in 2015-16; in Australia, these were the years of Malcolm Turnbull. Australia had neither a Sanders nor a Trump. The neoliberal consensus had a reprieve. But the logic of capitalism has caught up. The grinding impact of decades of neoliberalism, combined with post-COVID inflation, have created a crisis-like sense of unsustainable pressure on living standards. Even before Bondi, right-wingers sensed an opportunity. In early December, polling by the Nine media empire indicated that an astonishing 64 percent of Australians would support a complete ban on all immigration “until our housing situation has caught up”. That poll was, in effect, political research on behalf of the Liberals: the question itself is an anti-immigration slogan, suggesting that housing would “catch up” if migration were stopped. But it proves that a majority might assent to even the most extreme anti-migrant position if they’re told it will improve the housing situation. Around the same time, [poll](https://archive.is/N3EMC?ref=redflag.org.au) after poll showed support for the far-right One Nation surging. At the time of the Bondi massacre, the Liberals were preparing to unveil a new immigration policy focused on “[turbocharging deportations](https://archive.is/EtfiQ?ref=redflag.org.au)”. Little surprise, then, at the spring in One Nation’s step and the open opportunism of the Liberals in the post-Bondi days. It is a disgrace and a warning that Pauline Hanson, the most consistent extreme racist in the Australian parliament, could claim to be the defender of Australia’s Jewish population when she attended the site of the massacre. Barnaby Joyce—never a model of restraint—felt bold enough to call an anti-migrant rally in defiance of the inevitable calls for calm and national unity. How far can they go? Joyce’s racist rally, like others called on the same day, was small. It’s less than a year since Dutton’s Trumpian election campaign failed. You don’t need to be a seasoned politico to know that Hanson, Joyce and their gang of creeps are not to be taken seriously. But whether or not their immediate campaign succeeds, the future is clear. Australia’s conservative politicians want the new brand of ultra-extreme, violent, “populist” racism to dominate political life here, as it does elsewhere. They think the time is near, and they’ll stoop to any low, seize on any tragedy, if it helps them build that project. Whether it’s Hanson, Hastie or some unknown figure who emerges as its leader, the conditions for a hardened racist movement are falling into place. Around the world, centre-left political forces have collapsed in the face of this onslaught. Yet the Trumpian argument is not hard to beat. Living standards have been run down thanks to decades of policies favouring the wealthy, employers and big corporations. Scapegoating migrants and racial minorities serves those same interests. Anti-immigrant populism can be defeated, but not by mealy-mouthed neoliberal “multiculturalism”: it takes a real attack on the capitalists who make all our lives harder while turning us against each other. And that is not exactly the Labor Party’s speciality. ### Five lessons from 2025 URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/five-lessons-from-2025/ Last updated: 2026-01-06T04:41:20.000Z 2025 will go down as a turning point in world politics—a year characterised by the ascendancy of the far right, savage attacks on living standards and imperialist brutality from Gaza to Ukraine. But it’s also been a year in which millions have been grasping for ways to resist this state of affairs—from general strikes in Europe to communities facing down immigration agents in US cities, from left electoral challenges to youth revolts in the economically underdeveloped world. There is no shortage of will to fight. What socialists make of this potential will play a role in shaping the future. Here are some lessons from the year. ### 1\. Capitalist politics is showing its true face The Trump administration in the US has radicalised at breakneck speed, encapsulated by the president’s recent speech to top-ranking generals, pledging to use the military to destroy the left-wing “enemy within”. Trump has built his own Gestapo in the form of an army of deportation agents that now receives more funding than most national militaries. This is a far-right insurgency not on the fringes of world capitalism, but at its centre. The notion that “capitalism”, “freedom” and “democracy” were essentially synonyms has long been an article of faith in mainstream politics—as former Vice President Kamala Harris expressed in September: “I always believed that if push came to shove, those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy”. But Trump came to office with the “titans of industry” sitting in the front row, and no amount of deportations, war crimes and coup threats seems to have dimmed their enthusiasm. As billionaires cosy up to the far right, traditional conservatives are basking in their glow—from Britain’s Tories, to German Chancellor Frederich Merz, to Emmanuel Macron in France. Vice President J.D. Vance, once lauded as a “never Trump” moderate Republican, embodies this shift. Politicians of the liberal centre, who have spent the past decade promoting themselves as the only viable barrier against far-right advance, have proved that, when push comes to shove, they crawl and simper before it. This goes beyond the cringing statements of fealty to Trump, as shameful as these are. Centrists and liberals are the prime drivers of a new militarism, fulfilling Trump’s demands for Western countries to build their armed forces. Germany’s Merz, for instance, has been able to rely on support from the Social Democrats and Greens for his plans to raise military spending to 5 percent of GDP. Britain’s Kier Starmer has attempted to roll back disability support payments in the quest to build a “battle ready” military. This should surprise nobody. The pretence that the “sensible centre” stood for a “rules-based” liberal international order based on human rights was shattered by their wholehearted support for Israel’s war on Gaza. As Israel has spent two years bombing hospitals, massacring hungry children at “aid distribution” points and burying Palestinians in mass graves, the arms from Israel’s Western allies have kept flowing. All the pro-capitalist political currents have shown themselves to be part of the same sordid game of power politics, in which the lives of the poor count for nothing. ### 2\. The resistance will not go away 2025 wasn’t just a year of right-wing ascendancy. Resistance to the new normal of austerity, authoritarianism and war has rocked every continent. Some of the sharpest struggles have occurred in the global south, where a wave of struggle over the past few years, dubbed the “Gen Z revolution”, has pitched millions of young people against their governments, from Paraguay to the Philippines. This is a generation for whom capitalism has broken all of its promises—of “development”, jobs and democratic rights. The movement in Bangladesh last year, which reached revolutionary proportions, contains important lessons. Protesters faced down mass arrests, torture and massacres to topple Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Hasina fled to India and has been sentenced to death in absentia. But Bangladesh’s movement also shows that replacing a leader or political clique at the head of the state will not be enough to address the demands that fuelled such heroic resistance. Hasina’s replacement, Muhammad Yunus, has doubled down on implementing the International Monetary Fund’s austerity directives. A year on from the revolt, two-thirds of young women in Bangladesh are still classified as “NEET”—not in employment, education or training. The sense of frustrated expectations is also felt in the West. Young people are priced out of their own cities by the real estate market, face mountains of student debt and diminishing prospects of finding a stable, well-paying job. This underlying resentment is constantly looking for new outlets. The global movement for Palestine has given a generation a unifying banner—a focal point for opposition to a discredited, genocidal political establishment. The urgency of defending Palestine has also acted as a source of courage, helping people across the world sweep away decades of demoralisation and apathy, and reviving traditions of mass protest. In standing up for the brutalised population of Gaza, people are also learning again to stand up for themselves. As one placard wielded by a demonstrator in Rome said: “We wanted to free Palestine, but instead Palestine is freeing us”. Another expression of the desire for an alternative is the emergence of new left-wing political forces. La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) has consolidated into the largest radical left party in Europe, with 400,000 members. The German Die Linke (The Left) party has grown from 58,000 to 120,000 this year. In Britain, the Greens have turned sharply to the left, increasing their membership by more than 100,000\. The Socialist Party in Australia, formed this year, has already attracted more than 5,000 members, making it the largest socialist organisation in the country for generations. ### 3\. The working class has the power to change the world For decades, it has been fashionable to write off the working class. Liberal academics have argued that workers are too precarious and atomised to act effectively in their own interests. Postcolonial writers claim that Western workers are a privileged layer, beneficiaries of the imperialist exploitation carried out by their rulers. Many question whether the working class meaningfully exists any more—and when workers are noticed, it’s usually to pin blame on them for the latest disaster. Trump’s 2016 victory was dubbed the “revenge[ of the white working class](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/09/how-trump-won-the-revenge-of-working-class-whites/?ref=redflag.org.au)” by commentators of conservative and liberal persuasion alike. Both sides agreed that “the white working class” was irredeemably conservative and racist. This was never rooted in genuine analysis, but reflected middle-class prejudices and a desire to legitimise a further shift to the right in mainstream politics. This rubbish was blown out of the water this year by the incredible actions of workers in solidarity with Palestine. Dock workers were the first to put themselves on the line. In the Greek port city of Piraeus, Marseille in France and Genoa in Italy’s north, they have repeatedly taken industrial action over the last two years to stop the loading of arms onto ships bound for Israel. In September, inspired by the upsurge in Palestine activism and the courage of those on board the Global Sumud Flotilla, dock workers decided to raise the stakes, calling for a general strike if Israel dared intercept the delivery of aid to Gaza. This culminated in an incredible moment in October: more than 100 cities were seized by mass demonstrations and strikes involving an estimated 2 million people. The promise of left-wing unions and the Palestine movement to “block everything” for Gaza was made good. Society was paralysed, from the ports to the railways to the factories. Schools were blockaded and universities occupied. The attempts by Italy’s fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to demonise, trivialise and repress the movement all fell flat. An authoritarian “security decree” that her government passed earlier this year to criminalise disruptive protests was torn to shreds as hundreds of thousands blocked major intersections and highways. It’s not the case that workers are always at the forefront of struggles against oppression and injustice. The workers’ movement is misled by politicians and bureaucrats who want to use workers as nothing more than a voting base and discourage any struggle. After decades of defeats and demoralisation, many people have understandably adapted and lowered their horizons on what is possible. But this can change quickly—once workers’ power catches on, it’s infectious. When workers withdraw their labour, they can halt the flow of profits, stop the flow of arms, end wars and even topple governments. The common interests and experiences of workers in vastly different situations across the globe, and a sense that all face a common enemy, push working-class solidarity back to the fore. As one participant in the Italian general strike for Gaza wrote: “The hand that bombs the Palestinians is the hand that exploits us in our workplaces”. If a new left is built that can play a role in turning the tide of reaction, it has to restore at its heart the idea that the organised working class is the most powerful potential force for social change on the planet. ### 4\. A radical minority, when organised, can move millions While the horrific direction of world capitalism has generated many spontaneous movements, resistance has reached its greatest heights where organised groupings of radicals have given a lead and inspired masses of people to join them. The world isn’t going to be changed by sitting around complaining about capitalism with your friends or arguing on the internet. Turning discontent into a political movement requires organisations experienced in arguing, educating and mobilising people. This was shown clearly in Italy, where the sustained organising and bold action of a left-wing minority galvanised the strikes. They were not the initiative of the liberal parliamentary opposition to Meloni, nor of the largest union federation, the CGIL, which is a conservative and cautious bureaucracy. First came the actions of militant students, organised by various socialist and communist groups, who blockaded high schools, organised university encampments and bravely stood up to police violence, generating sympathy from the public and statements of solidarity from sections of the union movement. The baton was then taken by radical unions dominated by the far left, which operate independently of the CGIL. The call of workers in the radical Autonomous Port Workers Collective lit the fuse for the movement. Millions of people fed up with government complicity and looking for a way to offer meaningful support to Gaza took up their call to block everything in successive days of mass strikes. The left didn’t move millions into action by sucking up to their equivalents of the Labor Party or the ACTU—they planted a flag and challenged the “moderates” to follow. The first day of mass strikes on 22 September was not supported by the CGIL, but was nevertheless a massive success, with half a million taking to the streets. Many CGIL members took the day off work despite their union’s stance. The CGIL then felt it had no choice but to reverse course and endorse a general strike on 3 October or risk discrediting itself completely. The strike was a rare and exceptional day of workers’ unity, with the left and the country’s biggest union federation working together to shut down the country. In Germany, Die Linke has played an important role organising opposition to the fascist Alternative fürDeutschland (Alternative for Germany). As mainstream politicians have moved to normalise the party, Die Linke leader Heidi Reichinnek used her platform in parliament to call for people to take “to the barricades” against the far right. Socialists in Australia have also played a modest but crucial role in mobilising resistance. The 300,000-strong demonstration in July, which defied the NSW state Labor government to march across the Sydney Harbor bridge, was the initiative of experienced Socialist Alternative members working through the Palestine Action Group. Socialist Alternative campus clubs also organised a national “student referendum” on university ties to weapons manufacturers and Labor’s complicity in Israel’s genocide, which culminated in the biggest wave of mass student meetings since the 1970s. ### 5\. Socialists have an enormous opportunity—and a responsibility The good news: socialism is becoming more popular. As the Liberal Party-aligned Institute for Public Affairs [bemoans](https://ipa.org.au/realities-of-socialism?ref=redflag.org.au), polling conducted in Australia, Canada, the United States and the UK shows that around half of young people see socialism as the ideal economic system. Politicians who adhere to the socialist label are winning elections from the Irish Republic to New York City. It’s no wonder—the mass cynicism towards politics as usual, the discrediting and fracturing of established parties and political polarisation have created an opening. But the scale of the crises and injustices of 21st-century capitalism places an enormous responsibility on socialists. It’s not enough to win elections. Socialist leaders and organisations have to be judged on the extent to which they contribute to the organisation, struggle and consciousness of workers. Socialist politics is fundamentally about organising people around a radical world view, based on an understanding of working-class collective power, shared interests and a hostility to capitalist institutions like the state and mainstream political parties. Unfortunately, the most popular self-described socialists of recent years haven’t done this. US Senator Bernie Sanders raised the hopes of millions by calling for a struggle against the hated Democratic Party establishment, before becoming the left flank of the Biden administration as it armed Israel and broke strikes. In New York City, mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s “socialism” consists of a series of reforms such as free buses and rent controls, which, while deserving support, have nothing to do with challenging the priorities of capitalism. Worse, his “strategy” for achieving these reforms is to conciliate and collaborate with the Democratic Party establishment and the billionaires who run New York. He has stacked his transition team with Democratic Party bigwigs and Goldman Sachs executives, and disgracefully praised Trump’s supposed commitment to an “affordability agenda”. This won’t cut it. This type of politics has never won meaningful change for working-class people. In a world defined by widening inequality, climate crisis, authoritarianism and war, it is dishonest to promote Mamdani’s agenda as a “socialist” project. Rebuilding a real socialist movement to meet this moment means restoring a sense among people that victories won’t be delivered by enlightened progressive politicians, through clever negotiations or accommodation to the institutions of capitalist power. They will come about only by building organisations that encourage the self-organisation of workers, raise political horizons and demand a fight against the rich and powerful. The discrediting of the capitalist mainstream, the overlapping crises facing the world and a sense of injustice have gripped a generation. This has created new opportunities for the socialist movement. But these can be seized only if there is a break with decades of demoralisation and moderation. The socialist movement must be bold. We have a world to win. ### From Hitler to here: the journey of the far right URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/from-hitler-to-here-the-journey-of-the-far-right/ Last updated: 2025-12-26T01:25:36.000Z It’s a great time to be a neo-Nazi. For fans of the Third Reich, 2025 was probably one of the best years since the battle of Stalingrad. Hitlerian podcaster Nick Fuentes could take to Tucker Carlson’s massive online platform to denounce “organised Jewry” and receive the backing of an august conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. Elon Musk unveiled the world’s first automated global fascist propaganda publication, Grokipedia, where modern theorists of antisemitism and white nationalism like Kevin Macdonald, David Irving and Jared Taylor are praised in glowing terms. In Australia, underground Nazi organisations led mass marches against immigration, with the enthusiastic support of right-wing media outlets and mainstream politicians. The sects and gurus of the Nazi fringe can now influence, and sometimes even lead, the mainstream right. For most of the last 80 years, that has seemed pretty unlikely. Hitler’s empire was blown to smithereens, and Mussolini was lynched by his compatriots. The world seemed to move on comprehensively. By the 1970s, biological racism, medieval sexual politics and antisemitism were viewed by many as historical relics that could never be revived in the Western mainstream. The programs, methods and doctrines of first-generation fascism seem strictly bound to a particular time and place: a Europe of mass political parties, nascent revolutions and colonial empires challenging one another in open conflict. Fascism’s particular combination of those political elements—building a mass party to repress the revolution and rearm the empire—seemed irrelevant for much of the intervening period. The ditching of so many distinctive elements of fascism led scholars like Enzo Traverso to use terms like “post-fascism” to describe far-right movements that emerged after the 1950s. Until fairly recently, describing right-wing governments as “fascist” could generate a cringe of embarrassment among liberals (afraid of seeming like overexcited socialists) and among socialists (afraid of seeming like scaremongering liberals). But now even neo-Nazi sects recognise, if not an identity, then a certain common project with the president of the United States. There are no great conceptual gaps in the chain of world views linking Australian neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell to Tommy Robinson, to Musk, to Farage, to Le Pen, and to Trump, the great peacemaker and leader of Western democracy. The fascist and conservative movements, today merged as a nebulous “far right”, have grown towards each other. Fascist activists have spent decades finding creative, entrepreneurial ways to recast their doctrines and forms of organisation to suit new political periods, and conservative parties have been open to imitating, absorbing and, at times, exceeding those innovations. Fascism was hardly eradicated after the Second World War. Right-wing dictatorships remained or emerged on the European continent throughout the postwar period, and many ex (or not so ex) Nazis found comfortable positions within the postwar political and business elites. Fascist sects continued to operate underground, sometimes as adjuncts of Western intelligence services. But to rehabilitate it as a mass social phenomenon, or to allow it to influence mainstream right-wing thought openly, would require a series of political manoeuvres and programmatic shifts. The anti-colonial movement and its aftermath provided an opportunity. Colonialism had been an inspiration for the first generation of fascists: acquiring colonies, preserving colonies and applying the open violence of colonial rule against the domestic left. The rise of anti-colonial movements allowed fascists like France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen to relate to a broad right-wing fury at the impending loss of overseas possessions, and to the humiliation of defeat at the hands of lowly Algerian Muslims. In 1957, his National Front of Combatants organised a nationwide “Caravan for French Algeria”, a propaganda tour rallying support for the crushing of the Algerian independence movement. It was an early step towards the construction of what would be one of Europe’s most successful and influential postwar far-right parties. But if colonialist pro-war politics allowed the European far right a platform, it did not give it a long-term future. The powers that had retained colonies soon lost them; independence, whether *de jure* or *de facto*, became practically universal. There was little to be gained by arguing for the military reconquest of Indochina, Algeria or the Indian subcontinent. By the late 1960s, the far right turned to the issue that would give them a new life and sustain them to this day: immigration. Opposition to immigration could unite and grow multiple constituencies for fascist-adjacent politics. For extreme reactionaries in Europe, the presence of migrants from former colonial possessions was an insult and a humiliation. For racists, the mere rumour of African, Caribbean, Arab and Asian populations settling in for good was, and remains, an unthinkable horror. But perhaps most importantly, opposing immigration could seem like a simple nationalist solution to almost any economic problem. Two years after Jean-Marie Le Pen led his pro-colonial caravan, British fascist Oswald Mosley campaigned in a by-election in West London. Mosley had founded the British Union of Fascists and led their infamous march through the Jewish district of Cable Street. But he was also a former Labour politician and knew precisely how to relate to frustration at wealth inequality; now, he openly directed that anger towards working-class immigrants. In his memoirs, he wrote: “For nearly two generations, the repeated pledge to rebuild the slums and to house our people properly had been broken. Without lifting a finger to fulfil the forty-year-old promise, the government piled a new population on top of people already suffering from an acute housing shortage and widespread slum conditions ... My proposal was simply to repatriate immigrants to their homeland.” Mosley was disappointed with the 8 percent he garnered in this election, but he had been one of the pioneers of a strategy that would define far-right politics forevermore. Writing in 1968, Mosley hinted that the full potential of the anti-migrant strategy would become apparent in the future: “An electorate never moves decisively except under severe economic pressure, which is nearly always unemployment”. Sure enough, as the postwar boom exhausted itself and unemployment ratcheted up through the 1970s, anti-migrant far-right movements gained momentum. By 1977, Britain’s National Front had become a genuine mass phenomenon, with 15 percent of young men expressing support for it; from Mosley’s 8 percent support in the North Kensington by-election, the National Front polled 8 percent nationwide. The anti-migrant stance was helped by the economic stagnation of the 1970s. That same stagnation gave rise to the era of neoliberalism: the centre-left parties would more openly embrace privatisation, deregulation and attacks on working-class living standards. The neoliberal era, in turn, supercharged the potential of anti-migrant politics. It was not only far-right parties that embraced this scapegoating strategy: the right-wing press, mainstream conservatives and even centre-left parties spent the decades since the 1970s directing frustration and resentment towards migrants, even when the targeted immigrant population was so small as to be completely economically irrelevant, like refugees in Australia. But for far-right parties, the neoliberal era created a special opportunity to present themselves as the defenders of the redistributive traditions that had been abandoned by the mainstream centre left. The “post-fascists” adopted a stance that became known as “welfare chauvinism”, the 1990 coinage of Danish researchers Jørgen Goul Andersen and Tor Bjørklund. The welfare state should be preserved by banning migrants from accessing its generosity. Immigrants were attacked as the parasitic beneficiaries of a marketised, unequal society. While railing against the new neoliberal consensus, in the same decades many of the fascist-derived parties sought to “mainstream” and shed the last embarrassing vestiges of their associations with Hitler’s traditions. Antisemitism was deprecated and largely replaced with the fashionable Islamophobia of the War on Terror: the “dédiabolisation” of the French National Front culminated with the expulsion of its founder for his open Holocaust denial; the street-fighting British National Front gave birth to the “respectable” British National Party, which by 2008 was being described as having “one of the most Zionist” stances of any British political party. Far from Hitler’s revolutionary calls for bloodshed, dictatorship and war, the far right of the 2000s often presented itself as a defender of democracy, liberalism, civilisation and social welfare. Its Muslim-bashing leaders were women like Marine Le Pen, gay men like Pim Fortuyn and self-proclaimed “social democrats” like Jörg Haider. This was the rehabilitated, sophisticated and relatively popular “post-fascist” right that entered the political maelstrom of the 2010s, when the aftermath of the global financial crisis led to explosive hatred of the established political elites, and the civil war in Syria led to a new focus on immigration. The new politics provided a template by which right-wingers could convert anti-establishment sentiment into reactionary madness. In some countries, such as the United States, the mainstream conservative party, after an internal crisis, largely adopted a far-right framework. In other cases, new far-right parties surged and displaced the old conservatives, as in France. In some, both processes unfolded one after the other, as in Britain, where Boris Johnson’s Conservatives rode the tiger of Brexit only to be consumed by it and replaced by Nigel Farage’s Reform. But as that process unfolded, something changed. In the decade after the Brexit vote and Trump’s election, the “post-fascist” far right has become a little less “post”. Right-wing activists with mass followings now sound less like Geert Wilders and more like Goebbels. Having surged, the mass far-right subcultures have also radicalised. Right-wing tech giants have rediscovered the traditional capitalist hostility to democracy and interest in social Darwinism, exemplified by Elon Musk’s musing that the vote should be restricted to “high status males”. Biological racism, extreme misogyny and thuggish 1950s-style homophobia have become normalised. Even Nazi-style antisemitism is increasingly welcome in the global conservative community, the natural and logical conclusion of an ultra-nationalist reactionary world view. When fascism first emerged, the Communist movement’s leaders were thrown back on their heels. It took some time to understand the seriousness of the threat and the novelty of its methods. A degree of complacency existed. “At first, the prevailing view was that fascism was nothing more than violent bourgeois terror”, Clara Zetkin told the Comintern in 1923—an audience intimately familiar with “violent bourgeois terror” and not inclined to underestimate it. But fascism was “quite different”, with its base “in broad social layers, broad masses, reaching even into the working class”. That required new methods of political combat. But distinguishing too sharply between fascism and “traditional” reactionary politics can be misleading too. Fascism’s first generation pioneered new tactics—mass parties, revolutionary demagoguery and street violence—that could be adopted as needed by pro-capitalist political forces. The next century was marked by open and hidden collaboration, mutual inspiration and competition between fanatical fascists and mainstream conservatives. The fascist activists who swarmed around Trump, and the post-fascist parties he inspires, have helped to create a broad political movement with few clear barriers separating the underground Nazi sects from the tech CEOs and the think tank chairmen. ### The impact of the Palestine solidarity movement URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-impact-of-the-palestine-solidarity-movement/ Last updated: 2026-01-06T04:40:32.000Z One night in June 2024, balaclava-clad pro-Israel thugs descended on the Deakin University Gaza solidarity encampment. The next night, a Turkish woman in her 40s turned up at the camp. She mostly sat back from the flurry of activity, but by 3am we realised she wasn’t leaving. She stayed that night, and many more after, as our self-appointed sentry, leaving early each morning to take her kids to school and go to work. She later explained that she had been one of the thousands of protesters who camped in Istanbul’s Gezi Park to defend it from demolition in 2013\. When Turkish riot police carried out vicious pre-dawn attacks, the protests transformed into a mass revolt calling for the downfall of the president. She sat watching over us all these years later because, to her, we were the next generation, taking up a fight that was in some way the continuation of her fight. The mass struggles which draw people out of their routines and into the streets shape official politics and the minds of millions. The Gezi Park protests, for example, imbued a sense of defiance and opposition to police in Türkiye. Black Lives Matter spread anti-police consciousness and a desire to fight racism in millions across the world. The environmental movement, especially Extinction Rebellion and the School Strikes for Climate, pointed the finger at the corporations and the rich that are wilfully hurtling us towards disaster. These movements showed again and again that, when confronted with brutality and injustice, throwing ourselves into protest is the natural and logical thing to do. To win most of our demands, we will have to go further than this—to mass working-class action—but protest continues to be how the powerless initially demand to be heard. The Palestine movement has hit the world in a different way. It has become the core issue animating a bitter anger at the system among a new layer of leftward moving young people and millennials. And, significantly, those who march have felt themselves part of an international struggle, not just a local question. The sheer depravity of Israel’s war has shaken people from all walks of life, the deliberate bombings of hospitals and schools destroying any remaining illusions in the Western powers’ respect for human rights or the rules of war. From the beginning of the genocide in 2023 to the aftermath of the latest ceasefire, tens of thousands of people have repeatedly hit the streets in major cities across Australia. The movement overall has involved many hundreds of thousands of people. The movement has had ebbs and flows. When the extremity of the starvation in Gaza began making headlines in May 2025, the weekly demonstrations surged. By August, public anger was at its peak. Sydney-based Palestine Action Group battled the Minns Labor government over the right to march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The activists won, and 300,000 people defiantly marched in pouring rain. This was followed by a nationwide day of protest that mobilised hundreds of thousands across the country, including large numbers in small towns. This defeat of Minns, a more active supporter of Israel than other premiers, was an important political win for the movement. So was the constitutional challenge against his attempted anti-protest laws in October 2025. The extremity of the war has laid bare the fact that our world is not governed by rules and that even the most extreme human suffering is tolerated in the name of projecting Western power. Organisations like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, which are meant to stand above nation-states and protect human rights, have proven impotent in the face of atrocities committed by Israel and backed by Western imperialism. Mass sentiment shifted significantly over the course of Israel’s war and genocide. In November 2023, 49 percent of Australians said that they thought the government [shouldn’t](https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/9398-roy-morgan-islamic-society-of-south-australia-survey-november-2023?ref=redflag.org.au) take a side in the war. By [October](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/over-half-of-australians-support-sanctions-on-israel-and-its-leaders-for-ongoing-attacks-on-gaza-poll-shows?ref=redflag.org.au) 2025, 57 percent of Australians supported sanctions on Israel and 58 percent [said](https://apan.org.au/media%5Frelease/poll-finds-australians-back-sanctions/?ref=redflag.org.au) a genocide was taking place. Support for the United States has likewise tanked. In 2020, a Lowy Institute [poll](https://poll.lowyinstitute.org/files/lowyinsitutepoll-2020.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) found that 51 percent of Australians trusted the US to act responsibly in the world. In 2025, the result has dropped to just 36 percent, with more than 62 percent saying they did not trust the US to act responsibly. This is the lowest level in the history of the Lowy poll. The Palestine movement has created a new culture of activism. Groups of friends in capital cities don’t just go clubbing or to gigs any more—for two years they have planned their lives around protesting for a group of people on the other side of the world. Parents of young kids contended with how to explain what they were protesting about to their children, and workers marched with workmates and talked Palestine over lunch. All this despite the near consensus on the part of official politics for backing Israel—with the honourable exception of the Greens, who took a commendable stand against the genocide that likely impacted large numbers among their heavily millennial voter base. In Melbourne, campaign groups cropped up everywhere early on. At first, they were mostly framed around campaigning to get local councils to pass motions condemning the genocide, pledging to divest or to raise the Palestinian flag. These didn’t just crop up in the leftie ghettos or heavily Arab areas, but across the city. After a few months, many of these groups transitioned to other tactics. Some organised protests outside of local Labor MP offices or focused their efforts on picketing factories that are part of the global F-35 supply chain. Workers in all sorts of industries formed union groups to campaign for Palestine. ASU for Palestine, which has organised two walkouts by community and legal sector workers, stands out. Most of these council and workplace groups wound down by 2025, but they left an important imprint and meant the movement itself was deeper than just central demonstrations. In April 2024, when the demonstrations waned somewhat, student encampments blossomed across the country. Inspired by students at Columbia University in New York, University of Sydney students set up tents and camped out through winter to demand divestment. Many other campuses followed, with the camps becoming an important focal point for activism and education. Activists exposed the links that universities have to Israel, their role in facilitating weapons research and the political nature of the institutions. The camps connected with each other, discussing and updating a shared [statement](https://overland.org.au/2024/05/statement-from-11-palestine-solidarity-encampments/?ref=redflag.org.au) in regular meetings. Socialists played a key role in establishing them in most cases, and in connecting them to each other. University managements have used heavy-handed repression against students, including expulsions at Melbourne University and the Australian National University and suspensions at Deakin. Many students have now been dragged through disciplinary processes for their activism, and notably in most cases they have won. To a far greater degree than during the climate movement or Black Lives Matter protests, those who wish to stand with Palestine must take risks to do so. The fight around the political question has opened many more battles over the question of free speech and expression. In 2024, two bakery workers were [sacked](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/17/melbourne-black-star-pastry-employees-sacked-wearing-keffiyeh-work-discrimination-case?CMP=Share%5FiOSApp%5FOther&ref=redflag.org.au) for wearing keffiyehs at work. Academics, teachers and public sector workers have been faced disciplinary processes or had their funding cut. Many have had to fight for the right to wear a keffiyeh or badge at work. This means that even though support for Palestine is widespread, it’s also a real fight in people’s everyday lives and, as a result, more politicising than issues that are less controversial among liberals. Cultural institutions have also been forced to take sides and reveal their political affiliations, discrediting their liberal reputations in the process. Melbourne Symphony Orchestra terminated the contract of Jayson Gilham after he dedicated a recital to assassinated Gazan journalists. When three actors in a Sydney Theatre Company production of the Seagull wore keffiyehs on stage during a curtain call, donors pulled funding and three board members resigned. Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre refused to host a performance by feminist activist Clementine Ford, citing “safety” fears for Jewish patrons because of Ford’s strong stance against Israel’s genocide. And once again, the highly partisan nature of the Australian media has been exposed. There’s been a systematic burial of Palestinian voices, while Israeli and pro-Israel figures are given a front seat. Journalists have [resigned](https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/07/04/four-israel-gaza-letter-signatories-departed-nine/?ref=redflag.org.au) from the ABC, Nine, the *Age* and other outlets over the coverage of Gaza. In 2024, ABC journalists [revealed](https://archive.is/K6B0c?ref=redflag.org.au) that management had tried to ban them from using words including “genocide” and “occupation” when covering Palestine. Australian politicians from both sides have backed the genocide. The Labor government has only strengthened its commitment to the F-35 supply chain for fighter planes to Israel. Labor’s political support for the genocide is, if not more so, as important as its arming of Israel. Albanese’s statements have always led with assertion of solidarity with Israel, and he’s done his best to denigrate, demonise and belittle those who protest against Israel’s ethnic cleansing operation. He has appointed an antisemitism envoy to assist in his campaign to portray pro-Palestine feeling as antisemitic bigotry. He travelled to the US to pose with US President Donald Trump, and forced Senator Fatima Payman out of the party for daring to stand firm in her support for a Palestinian state. Labor state governments have proved some of the most determined opponents of the Palestine movement. The Victorian and NSW governments in particular have helped the political right charge supporters of Palestine with antisemitism. The Minns government deliberately withheld information that showed organised crime was responsible for the attacks. It did so to use them as a pretext for serious anti-protest measures, knowing that the protesters had nothing to do with the crimes. Now, the Minns and Allan governments are exploiting the tragic Bondi shooting to rush through laws allowing the state governments to ban protests for defined periods. The defence of civil liberties will continue to be a crucial fight for those who stand with Palestine. It is important to reckon with the fact that this significant, large and ongoing movement did not stop the genocide. When atrocities happen, people find they have no option but to protest. And while the genocide wasn’t stopped, people feel vindicated in their opposition and have been drawn into an international opposition to the brutality of our rulers. Only once people have been convinced to plant their feet on the right side of history, and to act in accordance, can discussions about strategy begin to take on real meaning beyond the ranks of handfuls of people. In this sense, the movement is an important beginning. And the response to government intransigence has largely been not demoralisation but demands to escalate. The mass strike against the genocide by Italian workers in solidarity with the Sumud flotilla showed a small glimpse of the type of action that is and was needed across the world to defeat Israel. Protests and pickets are essential acts of mass defiance, but they do not have anywhere near the power of workers striking at the point of production. To defeat Israel’s genocide, we would have needed to see sustained mass strikes in Western bloc nations like Australia and the United States, and revolutionary working-class uprisings involving strikes across the Arab world. This is not an impossible dream. Australian workers carried out a general strike in 1917, partly motivated by opposition to the First World War. In 1967, Australian Seamen’s Union members refused to crew the ship *Boonaroo*, which was meant to deliver military cargo to support the Western war effort in Vietnam, and Melbourne dock workers refused to load ships in solidarity with the struggle against South African apartheid. During the Arab revolutions of 2011, Palestinian liberation both inspired the anti-dictator struggles and was a thread running through them. In 2019, when Algerians rose against their own dictator, the Palestinian flag was draped on buildings and carried in crowds. In the words of Joseph Heller in *Catch-22*, “they have the right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing”. We might not have stopped them this time, but there will be more battles. The challenge for all those on the side of the Palestinians is to keep up the fight and build a movement with the power and the politics to defeat the ruling classes who carried out or backed this genocide, once and for all. ### Vietnow URL: https://redflag.org.au/vietnow/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T06:45:55.000Z > *Nazism emerged from a nation unable to stabilize itself and degenerated to unforeseen limits of depravity. The policy of aggression in Washington has brought a comparable degree of scientific extermination and moral degeneracy. The International War Crimes Tribunal must do for the peoples of Vietnam, Asia, Africa and Latin America what no tribunal did while Nazi crimes were committed and plotted. The napalm and pellet bombs, the systematic destruction of a heroic people are a barbarous rehearsal …* > > *\[T\]he heroic are the oppressed and the hateful are the arrogant rulers who would bleed them for generations or bomb them into the Stone Age. The Tribunal must warn of the impending horror in many lands, the new atrocities prepared now in Vietnam and of the global struggle between the poor and the powerful rich. These are themes as old as humanity. The long arduous struggle for decency and for liberation is unending ... \[and\] necessary until the last starving man is fed and a way of life is created which ends exploitation of the many by the few.* > > *Vietnam struggles so others may survive. The truths we must declare are simple truths. Great violence menaces our cultural achievements. Starvation and disease cannot be tolerated. Resistance at risk of life is noble. But we know this. Western Europe and North America are drenched in the blood of struggle for social change.* *— From Bertrand Russell’s closing address to the Stockholm Session of the International War Crimes Tribunal (May 1967)* The War Remnants Museum in Saigon, Vietnam, is both a testimony to the incredible resilience of the country’s independence movement over many decades, and a reminder that all the contemporary handwringing about the purported demise of the “international rules-based order” is so much liberal imperialist cant; another attempted deception about the historical character of US foreign policy. The exhibits display the full range of war crimes carried out in the decades after the Second World War by French and American civilizing missions that left millions dead, millions poisoned by dioxins and a country—its economy, society, and natural environment—in utter ruins, with deaths, mutilations and poisoning from chemicals and unexploded ordinance continuing into the 21st century. Some of the displayed images are so confronting it’s almost impossible to remain composed. A prisoner pushed and falling to their death from a US Army helicopter. Half-naked Vietnamese rope-tied by the ankles to US tanks, their bodies shredded by the rough roads and life ultimately dragged out of them. Platoon members proudly posing with the remains of independence fighters—who they’ve beheaded. A GI posing in front of a trophy skull, displayed openly on an army tent. An unarmed and stripped Vietnamese man lying in a ditch being kicked in the head and assaulted with a rifle butt as other soldiers look on. Rows of dead bodies. Another soldier, from the 25th Infantry Division, holding up a half a corpse—torso and head—what’s left of a resistance fighter blown in two by a grenade. Images of torture and wrenching suffering. My Lai, of course, features, along with testimonies of other massacres and atrocities for which justice was never served. Desecration after desecration. And then comes the room devoted to the effects of Agent Orange; a display evoking a feeling that humanity itself was poisoned and disfigured by the criminal Washington regime and its proxies and mercenaries. The original motives for US intervention were laid out in August 1953 by President Dwight Eisenhower during [remarks at a governors’ conference](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-governors-conference-seattle-washington?ref=redflag.org.au) in Seattle. Eisenhower’s Republican administrations wanted the French colonialists to crush the Vietnamese independence movement and its communist base as part of a shoring up operation for Western interests across Asia. The French failed just seven months later, their forces smashed by Viet Minh (League for Independence) guerillas. Ho Chi Minh formed a government in the North of a partitioned Vietnam; the US installed a puppet regime in the South, led by President Ngo Dinh Diem. The French went home to cry in their soup. Many of the worst crimes committed against the Vietnamese came after this victory, during the heroic phase of American liberalism, first under President John Kennedy, who, by the time of his assassination in November 1963, had sent 16,000 military “advisors” to South Vietnam, along with special forces, and supported a military coup against Diem, who by now was considered unreliable; not hawkish enough, reportedly having attempted to make peace with Ho Chi Minh’s northern forces. It was Kennedy who began and escalated the direct US aggression. Under Lyndon Johnson, fêted for his Great Society initiatives, things only got worse. By the time he left office at the beginning of 1969, more than half a million US soldiers were stationed in South Vietnam and atrocity was being piled on atrocity. Before Johnson’s time was up, the domestic glorification of the American cause led the country’s most prominent anti-war dissident, Noam Chomsky, to write of a “moral degeneration on such a scale that talk about the ‘normal channels’ of political action and protest becomes meaningless or hypocritical. We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the United States is dissent—or denazification”. (*American Power and the New Mandarins*.) Any pretence that some “rules-based” order was being adhered to was by this stage flimsy to say the least. Indeed, much earlier, in September 1965, just six months after the first official batch of US combat troops landed at Da Nang, Oregon Senator Wayne Morse [addressed the chamber](https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp67b00446r000300140014-9?ref=redflag.org.au): > *In Vietnam, we have totally flouted the rule of law, and we have flouted the United Nations Charter … Ever since our first violations of the Geneva Accords, starting with the imposition of our first puppet regime in South Vietnam, the Diem regime, we have violated one tenet after another of international law and one treaty obligation after another, and the world knows it. For more than ten years, we have written on the pages of history with the indelible ink of US violations of the Geneva Accords of 1954, as well as article after article of the United Nations Charter and even article I, section 8 of the Constitution of the United States, a sad and shocking chronicle of our repudiation of the rule of law in our foreign policy practices.* Morse today is remembered for being a voice of reason, but his prime concern was for the reputation of the empire—he believed the US was losing its way, making it more difficult to maintain itself as the world’s leading power. For Morse, this was lamentable. Nevertheless, the charge of hypocrisy is relevant to the question of a “rules-based order” that US liberals claim to defend and uphold, even if it’s somewhat naïve to exhort a hegemonic imperial power like the United States to restrain itself through international laws and conventions. The reality is that the rules just disappeared when the Vietnamese refused to submit to imperial power. There’s a broader point to be made. While the War Remnants exhibitions are primarily historical displays, it’s striking how contemporary much of it feels. For example, Eisenhower’s 1953 address appears no less transactional than the diplomacy of the current US administration, and offers scarcely any of the pious invocations of universal principles—or a proceduralism (say “a rules-based order”) purporting to be the basis of something intangibly greater than itself—that characterise other US justifications for military aggression: > *Now let us assume that we lose Indochina. If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The Malayan peninsula, the last little bit of the end hanging on down there, would be scarcely defensible—and tin and tungsten that we so greatly value from that area would cease coming. But all India would be outflanked. Burma would certainly, in its weakened condition, be no defence ... All of that weakening position around there is very ominous for the United States, because finally if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia?* Then there’s the revolutions of Richard Nixon, previously Eisenhower’s VP, who succeeded Johnson as president and began drawing down troops while expanding the air war into Cambodia and Laos. Nixon’s regime in hindsight feels remarkably Trumpian: an electoral realignment enacted through vile racism, a tariff and currency shock, detente with Russia and China (albeit more complicated today), the deployment of the National Guard against protesters (albeit by state governors), a belief among many on the left that the country was descending into fascism. More pressing, though, in terms of the contemporary feel, is the reality of imperialist history repeating, with the same press narratives about good intentions, strategic mistakes and difficult choices ad nauseum; the same deadly outcomes and indifference to the human suffering caused by naked military aggression. The words used in 1967—“genocide”, “war crimes”, “complicity”—and on which Bertrand Russell’s tribunal deliberated and found to be appropriate in relation to Vietnam, were ignored or dismissed or denounced by government and the press, as they continue to be today in relation to Gaza. So it’s the sense that Vietnam is Vietnow—which is why Russell’s words in Stockholm, quoted above, seems so apt. His warning that US was preparing a “barbarous rehearsal” to be replicated elsewhere echoed some French outlets’ concerns that the country was being used “as a proving ground and an experimentation field for the American science of destruction” (*La Tribune des Nations*, 4 March 1966). The words are displayed on one of the walls at the museum. As is the prescient note published in *Le Figaro* a year earlier, in April 1965: > *Vietnam has become an experimental place for all inventions from US military engineers. Their purpose was to use living targets to test their inventions for later use in other battlefields.* So it was with the napalm, the Agent Orange and other chemical weapons, the carpet-bombing campaigns and torture regimes, the counterinsurgency manuals, and later talk about the need to “win hearts and minds”. (As opposed to putting millions in concentration camps, which seems to have been deemed a strategic failure in South Vietnam, though no-one had to answer for this crime, either.) And so then came the US withdrawal, only for it to move on to operations elsewhere, such as those in Central America and the Caribbean—Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Grenada, Haiti and Panama—among other interventions in other places: “destabilisation programs”, coups, war crimes and ever more breaches of the so-called international rules-based order. Then Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, and, again, the testing of a range of equipment developed throughout the 1980s: laser-guided bombs, Tomahawk and Hellfire missiles, stealth fighters, new night vision equipment and surveillance technology—along with a brutal campaign of air warfare dumping more than 80,000 tons of regular bombs over six weeks and of course, [reports of war crimes](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/05/22/overwhelming-force-2?ref=redflag.org.au). It’s hard to know exactly how many people have been slaughtered by the capitalist military-industrial complex in the post-Vietnam War era. Brown University’s [Costs of War research](https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human?ref=redflag.org.au) in the 21st century, which estimates the human toll from US military operations and spending, notes: > *An estimated over* [*940,000*](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll?ref=redflag.org.au) *people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023\. Of these, more than* [*432,000*](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll?ref=redflag.org.au) *were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died “indirectly”, as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment. An estimated* [*3.6-3.8 million*](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2023/IndirectDeaths?ref=redflag.org.au) *people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.* Again, many of these “interventions” involved direct contraventions of a range of international laws and conventions that liberal America still claims the country has been fundamentally committed to. Over and over again, naked aggression on almost every continent. And then there’s Gaza, the modern [laboratory and “experimental place”](https://www.aljazeera.com/video/featured-documentaries/2025/1/30/the-palestine-laboratory-ep-1?ref=redflag.org.au) for military engineers. It may or may not be the worst atrocity of the 21st century, but it’s all the more condemnable for genocide being carried out and defended by a “civilised world” united in its attempts to destroy the basis of national life for an entire people. All the more condemnable for the Western liberal media and liberal establishment—again, the very same who lecture the world about international laws—being at the frontline of attempts to destroy the international solidarity movement with a devastated population. Yet for all the similarities, a clear difference is obvious, illustrated by Che Guevara’s remarks to the 1966 Tricontinental conference in Havana, Cuba: > *How close we could look into a bright future should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and the increasing hatred of all peoples of the world!* At that time, a growing sense of optimism was taking hold as the US seemed to be running aground: capitalism and imperialism were thought to be on the losing side of a brewing revolutionary upsurge. Hence the slogan “Two, three, many Vietnams!” caught on around the world. Today, we chant for an intifada in the absence of one. Palestine is a grinding slaughter, and Israel has come out stronger, not weaker, even if its mask has slipped. On the ground, Israel-Palestine is the opposite of Vietnam-USA. Yet Israel is empire, or at least a component part. And empires must eventually fall. But only under the pressure of two, three, many Vietnams, and two, three, many intifadas. --- 1. The War Remnants Museum displays part of this speech, but the curators have altered the original to make it appear as though Eisenhower was concerned almost entirely with Indochina, rather than also Malaya and Indonesia, and the broader “domino theory” that he outlined in Seattle: [↩](#footnote-anchor-1 "Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.") ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/2d7401dd-3775-4408-a7b4-ec7311717ec1_2886x1142-jpeg.jpg) ### Christianity and Class Struggle in Rome URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/christianity-and-class-struggle-in-rome/ Last updated: 2026-01-18T05:27:37.000Z _No content available._ ### A small victory for the left in the National Union of Students URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/a-small-victory-for-the-left-in-the-national-union-of-students/ Last updated: 2025-12-22T04:35:22.000Z Earlier this month, the National Union of Students’ annual national conference (or “NatCon” to initiates) took place at Federation University on the outskirts of Ballarat. Usually, NatCon comes and goes without much notice from the media or the broader public, but this year was different. A couple weeks ago, *Red Flag* [reported](https://redflag.org.au/article/labor-students-lock-out-left-from-the-national-union-of-students) on a deal struck between several factions of the student wing of the Labor Party—from both right and “left”—to block members of Socialist Alternative and Students for Palestine from being elected to any key NUS positions at the conference. We were told that this was because the union had been too hostile to the Labor government over the past year. The reason the NUS put up any opposition at all to the government this year was that Socialist Alternative members held three key positions in it, including the education office. We used those positions to organise students to fight for Palestine and call out our government’s complicity in the genocide, including by coordinating the historic National Student Referendum on Palestine. But in trying to keep Palestine solidarity activists out of the union, the Labor students overplayed their hand. Over the last two years, we’ve seen the emergence of a genuine Palestine solidarity movement in this country—and widespread revulsion at Labor’s continued complicity in the genocide. The Palestine movement had something to say about the lockout deal. Freedom Flotilla activist Robert Martin posted a [video](https://www.instagram.com/p/DR0leMGkirG?ref=redflag.org.au) condemning the Labor students involved in the lockout. Dr Mohammad Mustafa (a.k.a. Dr Mo) [called on them to scrap the deal](https://www.instagram.com/p/DSBbUfDkrwQ?ref=redflag.org.au). Before it had even started, this year’s NatCon had generated more public attention, and outrage, than any in recent memory. Sixty-odd socialists arrived in Ballarat on 8 December determined to break the lockout. We were there to fight for a left-wing and pro-Palestine national student union. We put forward Socialist Alternative member and leading Sydney Palestine activist Yasmine Johnson for the education office position. **What is NatCon?** At the yearly national conference, delegates elected by students from university campuses across the country come together to debate what the NUS’ policies and positions should be for the coming year. The conference also elects the incoming national executive. For some years, the dominant groups in the NUS have been the Labor right (Student Unity), Labor left (National Labor Students) and Socialist Alternative. With socialist clubs on a growing number of campuses across the country, Socialist Alternative has become a significant force in campus politics. In fact, after a series of splits and realignments inside the Labor factions, Socialist Alternative emerged this year as the largest single faction in the union. Not bad for an organisation with a few hundred student members across the country going up against the party of government. **NatCon 2025** With a little under 30 percent of votes on the conference floor, we could stop NatCon from going ahead, which is exactly what we did. Without our delegates, and some disgruntled Labor right delegates who were also locked out, quorum couldn’t be met. On Monday afternoon, when things were meant to be getting started, the conference room stood empty. As long as the lockout continued, there would be no NatCon this year. We did what we could to pile the pressure onto the Labor students about the disgraceful deal they had stitched up. We knew—and they knew—that people outside the world of student politics were paying attention. Footage [Yasmine Johnson being shouted down by a crowd of Labor students](https://www.instagram.com/p/DSBqdFvjjNM?ref=redflag.org.au) when she tried to talk about the lockout of Palestine activists went semi-viral. Student newspaper *Honi Soit* overheard Labor left students discussing [what they could do to stop the video from getting out](https://honisoit.com/2025/12/natcon-2025-day-0-5-nothing-ever-happens-yet/?ref=redflag.org.au). The next day came and went without a single motion being heard on conference floor. Socialist Alternative members had come to NatCon to discuss pressing issues for our national student union to take up: the occupation of Gaza, Labor’s attacks on healthcare and the NDIS, and the massive cuts being pushed through on campuses across the country. But there was no point debating any of this if next year’s NUS was going to be little more than an ALP warm-up act. Then, on Wednesday morning, Labor conceded defeat. The lockout was broken. Yasmine Johnson would be the NUS education officer in 2026\. It was a win for pro-Palestine activists and a good thing for student unionism. With the conference finally opening, the policy debate began. Five hundred pages of motions were crammed into less than a day and a half of discussion. Socialist Alternative successfully passed a motion endorsing a National Day of Action for Palestine at the start of the university semester next year. Students from the Labor left put forward a motion to congratulate (sic) the Albanese government for recognising a Palestinian state. When a motion came up to condemn the Australian government’s [barbaric treatment of refugees](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/sep/04/labor-coalition-pass-deportation-laws-naura-australia-penal-colony-australia-critics-say?ref=redflag.org.au), the same Labor left amended it to remove a reference to the Labor Party. When AUKUS came up for debate, the Labor right students broke out into a chant: “Let’s all build some union submarines”. Disabilities Officer Olivia Stronach, a member of Student Unity, defended her faction’s opposition to free education on the grounds that the world doesn’t have “infinite resources”. Never mind that, [by one estimate](https://andrewnorton.id.au/2023/06/22/would-free-university-increase-or-reduce-higher-education-participation-rates-in-australia/?ref=redflag.org.au), the amount being spent on the AUKUS submarine deal would be enough to fund free university education for 60 years. This is the face of the modern Australian Labor Party. Any notion that its youth wing might be more idealistic than the adult party is delusional. Young Labor members are just as cynical as their grown-up counterparts. Whatever their personal opinions on Palestine or anything else, making it in the Australian Labor Party means trading principle for power. Some Labor students like to tell us they want to “change the party from the inside”, but no-one believes that, least of all the Labor students themselves. It’s their euphemism for climbing up the party ranks. After all, if Labor’s bloody record on Gaza over the last two years isn’t a red line for them, what could possibly be? So it’s a damn good thing that the NUS won’t be solely run by the likes of these people next year and that Socialist Alternative can continue our record of principled left-wing politics. One takeaway from NatCon is that numbers matter in politics. The public pressure campaign against the lockout was important, but it was our size at the conference that meant we couldn’t be steamrolled by a coalition of Young Labor hacks. That said, we shouldn’t have any illusions. Only a tiny fraction of the student population votes in campus elections. Thirty percent of a small student vote isn’t a whole lot. The NUS has all but lost its capacity to mobilise students to fight; most don’t even know what the NUS is. But this is a self-inflicted injury. It’s a result of the union’s decades-long domination by careerist student politicians, run like a “crèche for would-be parliamentarians” in the words of writer Gary Younge, who was talking about the similarly run NUS in the UK. This means the situation could be turned around. The initiatives taken by members of Socialist Alternative in the NUS this year, like the National Student Referendum on Palestine, show that it’s possible. In Australia, there’s a long history of activist student unions taking on right-wing governments and imperialist wars. Socialists want to fight to revive that desperately needed militancy. While we shouldn’t overstate it, this was a little victory for the Palestine solidarity movement and for left-wing politics. It’s one that socialists will continue to build on in the National Union of Students in 2026. ### A new beginning for socialism in Australia URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/a-new-beginning-for-socialism-in-australia/ Last updated: 2026-01-06T04:40:53.000Z For the past three decades or more, socialism has been a very marginal current in Australian political life. There are signs, however, that our movement’s fortunes might be changing for the better. On Tuesday, 13 May, this year, just over a week after the federal election, the Victorian Socialists (VS) executive announced its plan to take the project Australia-wide. It called on people to sign up as founding members of parties modelled on VS in every state and territory. In the following weeks, thousands of people heeded the call. By early June, party branches around the country collectively had more than 3,000 paid members. Since then, the figure has risen to more than 5,600. This might, on the face of it, not seem very impressive. The New York mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani claimed to have mobilised more than 100,000 volunteers. The Democratic Socialists of America, which Mamdani is part of, claims a membership of more than 90,000\. In the Australian context, though, an explicitly socialist party growing from a membership of less than 1,000 to more than 5,000 in the space of half a year is something of a breakthrough. No other Australian socialist formation in the 80 years since the end of World War Two has come close to such rapid growth. Even the Greens, in their heyday, didn’t manage it (according to figures provided by Stewart Jackson from the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, cited by Ben Hillier in his 2010 [*Marxist Left Review* article](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/a-marxist-critique-of-the-australian-greens/?ref=redflag.org.au) “A Marxist critique of the Australian Greens”, it took the party ten years from its foundation in 1992 to reach a membership of more than 5,000). What are the factors that made this breakthrough possible? Why is it that Victorian Socialists, and now its sister parties across Australia, have enjoyed such rapid growth—even if, in the bigger picture, still on a very modest scale—where others haven’t? Around 1930, while he was languishing in one of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s prisons, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. By the old world he meant the kind of liberal capitalist order that had predominated in Europe prior to World War One. By the new world he meant communism. The monsters were primarily those of fascism. The same basic schema can be applied, arguably, to the fortunes of the socialist left in many Western countries in the decades since the collapse of the Stalinist eastern bloc states and Soviet Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The 1990s was a time when the “old world” of the left—one dominated, in Australia as (mostly) elsewhere, by the Communist Party and its various offshoots—was dead or rapidly dying. At the same time the “new world”—the promise of a renewal of revolutionary socialist politics unfettered by the dead weight of Stalinism—was very much struggling to be born. From the perspective of the socialist left, the obstacles and diversions of the 1990s and 2000s were the various shades of small-l liberal politics that appeared to many to be the only realistic alternatives amid the post-Cold War ascendancy of neoliberal capitalism. In Australia this meant, above all, the rise of the Greens and of various social movements and campaigns that, as the years progressed, became increasingly identity-based and suspicious of the kind of “grand narratives” of change and traditional models of organising adhered to by socialists. The biggest groups on the socialist left in Australia in the 1990s were, by a significant margin, the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP—which in 2010 dissolved into the Socialist Alliance) and the International Socialist Organisation (ISO—the Australian franchise of the British Socialist Workers Party-led International Socialist Tendency). The DSP peaked at around 400 members in the late 1990s, while the ISO reached 300. Looking back on those years, it’s now clear there was significant pressure on the socialist left to water down its politics to appeal better to liberals. This was evident, for example, in the decision of the DSP to wind up its newspaper *Direct Action* at the end of 1990 and relaunch it as the much more respectable-sounding *Green Left Weekly* in 1991\. It was also apparent in the increasingly desperate attempts made by the ISO to square the circle of its overblown “1930s in slow motion” perspective by downplaying the need for political clarification and argument with supporters and new members. When the anti-capitalist movement arrived in Australia in 2000, the ISO recruited widely among radicalising student activists. It didn’t, however, attempt to educate them in Marxist politics or even expect them to identify publicly with the group (for example, by selling its newspaper). As a result, it lost the vast bulk of them again in the 2001-02 period—to autonomism, the Greens and other more or less radical-liberal political currents (the remaining, much diminished, rump of the ISO later went on to unite with two other small IST splinter groups to form Solidarity). The last significant attempt to build a nationwide socialist electoral alternative in Australia came with the foundation of the Socialist Alliance in 2001—a joint initiative of the DSP and the ISO which, initially at least, was a genuine alliance of the bulk of the organised far left. The immediate context in which it was formed gave some justification for the high hopes of its leading participants. 2001 was the peak of the global anti-capitalist movement and a wave of radicalism was sweeping university campuses and (to a degree) high schools. Zoom out, though, and it’s clear the odds were very much stacked against it. The period in which the Alliance was founded coincides almost exactly with the moment when the rubber really hit the road for the Greens. The Greens were prominent participants in the anti-capitalist movement and the subsequent mass movement against the invasion of Iraq in 2003\. In the year 2000 they had, nationally, a little more than 2,000 members. By 2005 this had risen to just under 8,600 (figures, again, from Stewart Jackson at the University of Sydney). In the 1998 federal election, the Greens received 2.1 percent of first preference votes nationally in the House of Representatives, and 2.2 percent in the Senate. By 2004 this had increased to 7.2 percent and 7.7 percent respectively. At the same time, major party dominance, though declining, was still much more pronounced than it is today. The combined share of first preference votes going to Labor and the Coalition in the 2004 House of Representatives election was 84.3 percent. In 2007 it was 85.5 percent. Since then it has steadily declined, falling to 68.3 percent in 2022 and 66.4 percent in this year’s federal election. In 2001, then, the political centre was very much holding strong. And to the extent that there was space opening up to the left of Labor, it was rapidly being filled by the Greens. When looking, in retrospect, at the 1990s and early 2000s as a whole, it seems there was some truth to Francis Fukayama’s famously triumphalist “end of history” thesis put forward in his book *The End of History and the Last Man* in 1992\. Fukuyama saw in the collapse of Stalinist “communism” “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. And in the West at least, the overwhelmingly hegemonic view of politics in that period, both on the left and the right, was very much in line with that. Of course Fukuyama was wrong. However much history may have seemed to have ended in those years, it’s now very much back on. The first real revving of its engines occurred with the global financial crisis of 2008, which pulled the rug from under the dominant neoliberal economic and political framework of the time. When Barack Obama was first elected US president in 2008, he was almost universally feted by the global left. By the time he left office in 2016—replaced, shockingly and largely unexpectedly, by the Republican *bête noire* Donald Trump—he was widely despised. The GFC exposed the rotten core of a capitalist system built on the exploitation of the many by the wealthiest few. Its impact, in the West at least, was summed up by the slogan of the 2011 occupy movement: “We are the 99%”. Around the world, increasing numbers of people became conscious, for the first time, of the extent to which the system was rigged for “the 1%”, and the role of supposedly progressive politicians like Obama in protecting and advancing their interests. The hundreds of billions spent bailing out the banks while working-class people were left to rot. The violent police repression of occupy and other movements for change. The economic “recovery” built on the backs of workers, and the doubling-down of technocratic political elites on all the most hated aspects of the neoliberal order that contributed to the crisis in the first place. All this fuelled a deep-seated anger that gradually ate away at the foundations on which the political centre had rested securely for the preceding two decades. By the time the VS project was launched in early 2018, we’d already seen some of the consequences of this play out. A new consciousness was emerging on both the left and the right, and new political forces were attempting to relate to it. In 2015, Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the British Labour Party. 2016 brought the Brexit referendum in the UK, Bernie Sanders’ insurgent (though ultimately doomed) campaign for nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and the election of Donald Trump. VS’s growth, in its early years, was far from spectacular. Its vote, however, was from the start better than anything achieved by socialists in Australia in many decades. Its first test came with the 2018 Victorian state election. In the northern metro region of Victoria’s upper house—encompassing 11 lower-house seats and a voting population of around 500,000—VS came fifth out of nineteen parties, with just over 4 percent of the primary vote. In the working-class lower-house electorate of Broadmeadows in Melbourne’s north, VS candidate Jerome Small got 7.2 percent. The 2019 federal election included more good results. In the seat of Calwell in Melbourne’s outer northern suburbs, Jerome Small got 4.6 percent. In the inner north seat of Wills, Sue Bolton (an Alliance member who was running with VS at the time in line with the party’s Victorian branch’s decision to join VS when it first formed in 2018) got 4.5 percent. And in Cooper (formerly Batman), Kath Larkin got 4.2 percent. Between 2019 and 2025 VS’s membership and presence within Victorian political life continued to grow. Socialist Alliance members in Victoria decided to leave the party again in 2021, but this did little to slow its momentum. The scope of the party’s campaign work (both at election time and outside it) and its presence in local communities across Melbourne and some regional cities has steadily increased. And, come election time, its vote has risen accordingly. This process has been accelerated by another major political earthquake of the post-end of history era: the genocide in Gaza. Israel’s war brought the underlying tensions and divisions of society to the fore. This was particularly the case in a country like Australia, which has long numbered among Israel’s closest allies. For more than two years now, a mass movement for Palestine has faced off against the full force of the pro-Israel establishment (not just politicians and police, but also the media, universities, the NGO sector and so on). Socialists have long played a prominent part in the Palestine solidarity movement in Australia. And the work we’ve done to help build resistance to Israel’s genocide since October 2023 has helped further establish socialism as a visible force in Australian political life. Perhaps, in part, reflecting this, VS’s results in the 2025 federal election were its best yet. Kath Larkin got 8.4 percent in Cooper, Omar Hassan got 6.5 percent in Scullin, Jasmine Duff got 6.2 percent in Fraser, and VS’s candidate for the Senate Jordan van den Lamb (widely known by his social media handle “purplepingers”) got 1.5 percent statewide (a total of just over 63,000 first preference votes). Sue Bolton, running as the Socialist Alliance candidate for the seat of Wills and backed (financially and in terms of volunteer “boots on the ground”) by VS, got 8 percent. The growth of the new Victorian Socialists-affiliated parties across Australia this year has to be seen in this context. Van den Lamb’s nationwide profile as a campaigner for renters’ rights certainly played its part. But the fact that a figure like that would even think of joining and running as a candidate for a party like VS rather than, for example, the Greens, reflects the tireless work of VS members building it up organisationally and politically over many years. A big part of this picture is the role of members of Socialist Alternative (SA), publisher of *Red Flag*. The results VS has achieved in elections, and the profile it has gained, would not have happened without the energy, enthusiasm and, frankly, sheer bloody-mindedness of SA’s growing cohort of youthful socialist activists (and, it must be said, of the less youthful ones too). Nor would the expansion of the project Australia-wide have been possible without the organisational infrastructure and personnel provided by SA branches across the country. It’s clear now that in the period from the 1990s to today the “new world struggling to be born” was not to be found among the diminishing remnants of the old left, nor among those attracted to the respectable forms of “resistance” offered by the Greens, NGOs and other liberal organisations, and definitely not among the increasingly hollowed-out husks of union bureaucracies but—as has so often been the case throughout history—among students and the youth. Whatever the exact balance of factors that brought us to the current moment, though, it’s clear socialists now have an opportunity for growth unlike anything we’ve seen in decades. The thousands of people who’ve signed up to the new socialist parties across Australia this year won’t all, of course, be worked-out revolutionaries—willing to devote their lives to the struggle for socialism. Our challenge, made more urgent by the global upsurge of the far right, is to convince as many of them as possible to do just that. ### Why socialism always comes back URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-socialism-always-comes-back/ Last updated: 2026-01-06T04:40:42.000Z Socialism is having a moment. Polls across the West are showing increased support for the idea, particularly among young people repelled by what’s on offer under capitalism. It wasn’t meant to be like this. In the 1980s and 1990s, every respectable university lecturer, newspaper editor, government official and politician across the West was explaining that socialism was finished. The attacks on socialism came from many directions. The right wing, of course, is always hostile to socialism. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher argued in the 1980s that “there is no alternative” to unbridled capitalism and did her best to make it a reality. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 unleashed a right-wing propaganda barrage declaring socialism dead. Liberals, such as US Professor Francis Fukuyama, backed them up. But it wasn’t just the hard right and liberals attacking the socialist project. Postmodernist university professors, some of whom were former communists, made a name for themselves arguing that “metanarratives”, such as the idea that socialism could defeat capitalism and usher in a better society, were dangerous. This notion came to dominate university social science departments. Others preached a “third way”, a politics “beyond left and right”, which supposedly forged a path between rampant capitalism and socialism. Tony Blair’s government in Britain used the third way as an ideological weapon to batter socialists in the Labour Party. Former leftists justified their new positions by arguing that the neoliberal offensive of the 1980s and 1990s had destroyed the working class. But while these ideologues did their best to bury socialism, the brutal reality of capitalist society meant their efforts were in vain. Following the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001, the US invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, killing millions. Who could explain US aggression? Not those who had argued that capitalism was a force for progress, but socialists who had long argued that capitalism bred war and imperialism. The global financial crisis of 2008-09 soon followed. The crisis ruined millions of working-class lives while governments bailed out the billionaires. Who could explain economic crises and austerity? Not those who argued that capitalism led to prosperity, but socialists who pointed to the system’s inherent crisis tendencies. The evidence of capitalism’s failures is mounting. The climate crisis, the pandemic, the housing crisis and Israel’s genocide in Gaza have created a bigger audience for socialism. Those who would bury socialism must now reckon with its re-emergence in the belly of the capitalist beast—the United States. ### Cycles of development This cycle of developments from capitalist triumphalism to socialist revival is not new. Capitalism has a series of lines of defence that reinforce its rule. It deploys both force and fraud to justify its existence and crush its enemies. The everyday experience of life under capitalism and the powerlessness that goes with that for most of the time make systemic change seem impossible. Those who have given up on fighting the system can provide the capitalists with arguments as to why the struggle for a better world is futile. But capitalism cannot exist without attacking the working class. It cannot exist without dragging nations into war. It cannot exist without infringing on democratic rights up to and including installing fascist dictators. And it suffers the objective limit that it also depends upon those it exploits. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put it in 1848, capitalism creates its own gravediggers—the working class. The experience of oppression and, often, the experience of struggling against that oppression explain why the best efforts of the capitalists and their ideologues often come to nothing. They say capitalism is the best possible system. But they have no credible answers for those looking for a way out of the crises, hardships and wars capitalism creates. Only socialism can provide such answers. That is why every time that socialism is declared dead, it rises once again. ### Socialism in the nineteenth century We can go as far back as the nineteenth century to see how this works. The 1840s were a period of advance for the working class in the few pockets where it had established itself. In Britain, the Chartist movement organised monster rallies of hundreds of thousands to press for the right to vote and to organise. In 1848, the spirit of revolt extended to Europe as workers joined the throngs on the streets to demand the overthrow of the reactionary regimes across the continent. Marx and Engels fought to push the working class forward in these struggles, joining the radical movement and furnishing it with the *Communist Manifesto*. By 1850, however, the working-class surge was over. The middle classes, who were supposedly allies of the working class, swung behind the old order, leaving the working class to fight alone. The workers were defeated, and reaction triumphed across Europe. But soon, the red flag—a symbol of socialist internationalism—was once again flying as socialists, trade unionists, Marxists, anarchists and others came together to form the International Working Men’s Association, or the First International, in 1864\. It supported striking workers and the demand for an eight-hour day, universal suffrage, an end to militarism, the fight for Polish independence and a Union victory against the Southern plantation owners in the US Civil War. The First International was also a forum for intense debate among the movement’s different ideological currents. Marx sharpened his ideas in the process and won a wider following for what was at the time called “scientific socialism”. Then, in 1871, the workers of Paris showed the world working-class power in action as they formed the Commune to take over the running of the city after the capitalists and their government fled to Versailles in fear of an advancing Prussian army. The Commune set about organising production and distribution of essential goods and services through cooperatives. It made all officials and militia officers subject to election and recall and paid a worker’s wage. It declared a moratorium on rent and boosted labour rights. Socialists across Europe rejoiced at the Commune, seeing in it a revival of the spirit of 1848. The smashing of the Commune by the Versailles government put an end to the high hopes it had aroused. In the following decades, capitalism spread across Europe and the US. The working-class insurrection vanished. But as industry advanced, so too did the working class. By the turn of the century, new battalions of the working class had been created across Europe, North America, Australia, Japan and in pockets of the colonial world. And as the working class grew and began to fight for its rights, so too did socialism flourish. Everywhere, new socialist parties were winning the leadership of the working class and drawing in critical minorities of students and intellectuals. Alarmed ruling classes alternated between repression and concessions, but the tide was turning against them. ### War, revolution and reaction from 1914 The outbreak of the First World War in 1914, specifically the betrayal by socialist leaders who opted to back their own ruling classes in the conflict, once more sent socialism into sharp reverse. Those leaders who remained faithful to socialist internationalism, arguing for working-class unity across borders, were a small minority in most countries. Even in this situation, however, many workers refused to be swept away by jingoism. As casualties on the front rose along with misery in the rear, socialists who had stood against the tide began to win a bigger audience. In February 1917, Russian workers brought down the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and, in October, established the first workers’ state. Inspired by the Russian Revolution, working-class radicals established communist parties to fight for revolution in their own nations. Within two or three years, they had gathered hundreds of thousands in their ranks. It seemed that socialism might triumph. The failure of the working class to seize power outside Russia led to the defeat of the workers’ state. Joseph Stalin’s new dictatorship crushed everything that remained of the 1917 insurrection. The Russian leader purged the international communist movement of any genuine revolutionaries and allowed Adolf Hitler to take power in Germany. Capitalists in the West took advantage of the ebbing of the revolutionary wave to preach the end of socialism. Big US corporations used posters, films, pamphlets, workplace newsletters and community groups to spread pro-capitalist messages. Hollywood and the mass media joined in. The ideological offensive was backed by violent assaults on union organisers and socialists. In Australia, governments, bosses, cops and courts raided union offices, spied on union activists, broke up public meetings and deported radicals. ### Socialism bursts forth in the 1930s But the working class was not done. The Great Depression and fascism reinforced for millions of workers the belief that capitalism brought only misery for their class. Socialism once again came out of the shadows. Unlike the capitalist ideologists whose only answer to the Depression was yet more austerity, socialists explained that capitalism is a crisis-prone system that cannot serve humanity. By the late 1930s, socialism was making deep inroads. In 1936, millions of workers in France and Spain rose against their ruling classes and waged a serious fight with the capitalists and the reactionary forces they backed. Many wanted socialism. The socialist revival was also evident in Australia in the 1930s. Socialisation Units blossomed in the ALP, demanding the immediate implementation of socialist policies. The Communist Party (CPA) made headway, winning positions in many unions. University students radicalised by the Depression and the rise of fascism joined the CPA. The tragedy was that this appetite for socialism was then harnessed to Stalin’s authoritarian project, which sent it into a dead end. We see the same phenomenon in fascist-occupied Europe during World War Two and its immediate aftermath. Workers had had enough of what capitalism was delivering, but Stalinism choked off the prospect of liberation. ### Cold War counter-revolution The Cold War and the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 60s included a sustained capitalist offensive against socialism. In the US, where the Cold War reached its zenith, repressive wartime legislation was used to arrest dozens of Communist leaders, while the House Un-American Activities Committee and FBI drove thousands from their jobs, creating a climate of fear. The rightward turn in the West in this period was amplified by university professors, some former radicals, proclaiming the death of socialism and “the end of ideology”. They argued that the basic problems of capitalism had been solved. Workers were dismissed as bought off: “We’re all middle class now”. Socialism was labelled an anachronism. The relative affluence of the 1950s and early 1960s served to dull the urgency of class struggle in the West for a period. But prolonged full employment fuelled working-class confidence and raised expectations. ### Socialism stirs again in the late 1960s By the mid-1960s, a new generation of young workers was demanding more. The result was a steady rise in strikes and a willingness to strike for political ends. Newspapers began anxiously to discuss “wildcat rebellions”. The left in the unions began to feel the wind in their sails. In the US, the Vietnam War gave a radical edge to the discontents of this younger generation. As the war dragged on, young workers and students began to turn against it. Those who had been promoting capitalism had no answers other than to press ahead with the war. It was time once again for socialists to provide answers. Although initially small in number, socialists could explain why the US and Australia were embroiled in a war against a peasant army many thousands of kilometres away. Socialists could explain the connections between the racism suffered by African Americans and the imperialist project of the US and its allies in Indochina. Socialists could tie together the pressure to speed up in the factories and the war drive. Socialism once again came to the fore among young people questioning the system. The tragedy was that no coherent revolutionary socialist organisation had been built beforehand to lead the upsurge of strikes and demonstrations in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Communist parties were still too beholden to Stalinism to play a useful role. A new revolutionary left did emerge, but it was too small and too politically inexperienced to have a significant impact. The downturn in struggle that followed in the 1980s pushed socialism once again to the margins, only for war and economic crisis to open the door to its revival in the 2000s and 2010s. Crisis-ridden capitalism breeds resistance. Nothing about this is guaranteed, however. We cannot simply fold our arms and wait for history to turn in our direction. In countries without socialist traditions or organisations, decades of capitalist misery need not give birth to a socialist revival; barbarism may be the only result. A socialist organisation of some form is necessary to provide the answers that young people, in particular, will be searching for. What kind of socialist politics emerges in moments of socialist revival also matters. Unfortunately, in both the 1930s and the 1960s and 1970s, the politics of Stalinism or its derivatives dominated. Working-class independence and leadership were sacrificed in favour of some other social force, whether “progressive capitalists”, the peasantry, guerrillas, students or the most marginalised and jobless sections of society. This distorted the socialist revival and blew it off course, leaving it open to capitalist counterattack. ### A new revival? Today, we are witnessing a healthy revival of socialist sentiment, but there are limits to the current shift. Left-wing politics today generally takes the form of reformist electoral projects, which puts it at the mercy of the politicians who, like the Syriza government in Greece in 2015, sell out their base within months of taking office. Related to this, identity politics is still widespread, weakening the politics of class solidarity. Marxists advocate a world in which the working class is in the driver’s seat. In other words, socialism means smashing capitalism. Electoral challenges can be part of that process, but we must go much further than just changing the governing party. The working class must take things into their own hands. That involves mass agitation including strikes and demonstrations, all the way through to workers taking over and running society. We currently lack the kind of mass revolutionary parties necessary to harness and build on the new socialist sentiment. In the absence of this, we risk losing the opportunity to challenge capitalism once again. Now, as in the earlier socialist revivals, the task of building a revolutionary organisation is urgent. It cannot be put off; it has to happen now. ### Hunger-striking Palestine solidarity activists hospitalised URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/hunger-striking-palestine-solidarity-activists-hospitalised/ Last updated: 2025-12-22T03:14:13.000Z Two political prisoners in the United Kingdom, Amu Gib and Kamran Ahmed—activists with the protest group Palestine Action—have been hospitalised after weeks on hunger strike. According to Prisoners for Palestine, a prisoner collective, at least eight hunger strikers have now been hospitalised since the protest began in early November. All eight are being held on remand (not in the same prison) for alleged protests at Elbit Systems’ Filton research hub in August 2024 or at the Brize Norton airbase in Oxfordshire in June this year, during which military aircraft were allegedly sprayed with paint. The airbase protest led to Palestine Action being designated as a terrorist group. The prisoners report that guards have confiscated their keffiyehs, moved them around arbitrarily and given them non-association orders so that they can’t contact each other. Teuta Hoxha, 29, who has been awaiting trial for thirteen months, says that a scarf she had knitted in red, white, green and black was taken from her, [according to a report in the *Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/dec/20/palestine-action-activist-vows-continue-hunger-strike-teuta-hoxha?ref=redflag.org.au). At the time of writing, Gib and Qesser Zuhrah have been on strike for 50 days, making this the longest hunger strike in British prisons since the 1981 actions by Irish prisoners. On 1 March that year, Bobby Sands, a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, initiated the strike at Maze prison outside Belfast in Northern Ireland. Twenty-two others joined; ten died after an average of 62 days. “\[I have\] tried every means to avoid what has become the unavoidable: it has been forced upon me and my comrades by four-and-a-half years of stark inhumanity”, Sands wrote in his diary. It’s the same inhumanity that we’ve seen over the last two years that has pushed the Palestine Action prisoners to act. Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister at the time, refused to concede that Sands and his comrades were political prisoners. She allowed them to starve to death. Today, the justice secretary, David Lammy, refuses to meet with representatives of the hunger strikers. Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, when pushed by left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn, had nothing to say beyond some vague mumbling about rules and regulations. Will he follow in Thatcher’s footsteps and allow the prisoners to die? Another echo of 1981 is the role of mass resistance. When Sands began his strike, 3,500 people marched through West Belfast. More than 100,000 people attended his funeral. Two of the Palestine Action hunger strikers were transferred to hospitals only after protests outside the prison demanded that ambulances be let in. Several thousand people have been arrested for showing support for Palestine Action in sit-ins in London’s Parliament Square and Trafalgar Square. At its peak, the Palestine solidarity movement brought 500,000 people into the streets of London to protest against the genocide and the UK government’s complicity. The prisoners’ resilience is heroic. If they’re to win freedom, they’ll need the full support of the movement. [As Amu Gib wrote in the *Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/19/hunger-strike-british-prison-arms-to-israel?ref=redflag.org.au): “We have the power, agency, responsibility, creativity, resourcefulness and love it takes to be fuelled and moved to action not just once, but every minute of every day ... It doesn’t ever feel like what we’re doing is enough, but in another way it feels like the best thing in the world.” ### When Australian workers took on the American war machine URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/when-australian-workers-took-on-the-american-war-machine/ Last updated: 2025-12-26T05:49:22.000Z Italian dockworker Romeo Pelliccaria, whose union galvanised October’s [mass general strike for Palestine](https://redflag.org.au/article/italys-general-strike-shows-the-way-forward) in Italy, [explained to US outlet Drop Site News](https://x.com/ryangrim/status/1972339657250640081?ref=redflag.org.au) in the lead-up to the action: “\[Dockworkers\] are fortunate to work at the port because we do not see the horizon, we have only the sea ahead. And the sea allows you to dream constantly”. Pelliccaria and his comrades are part of a long, worldwide tradition of radical maritime workers with socialist convictions and internationalist politics. Indeed, Romeo’s father was also a dockworker and joined a humanitarian flotilla to Vietnam in the 1970s to break the US blockade. That war generated significant resistance in the West. Most people have heard of student radicals, draft dodgers and the big marches against the war in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But there’s also a history of maritime union action against the war. In particular, the Seamen’s Union of Australia (SUA) took anti-war strike action years before most people even opposed America’s and Australia’s invasion of Vietnam. Its members argued for workers in other unions to oppose the war and later took a leading role in the mass movement that eventually developed, protecting conscientious objectors and instituting work bans on US vessels. This history is detailed in two books—Rowan Cahill’s *The Seamen’s Union of Australia, 1872–1972: a history* and *Voices from the ship: Australian seamen and their union* by Diane Kirkby—from which the following account is largely drawn. The seamen’s anti-war strikes highlight three points that socialists make about the working class. Their actions to prevent arms shipments to Vietnam revealed the (usually dormant) power of organised labour to cripple the global war machine. They demonstrated that workers are often motivated not only by their own economic interests, but also by political questions. They also highlight the importance of socialist politics in the union movement—many rank-and-file members were motivated by a vision of socialism, influenced by the SUA’s Communist Party officials. ### Years of isolation The SUA had a very left-wing, active culture. Before the Vietnam War, Australian seamen campaigned for Chinese and Indian seamen’s rights under the White Australia policy, for Indonesian independence, against armaments for Britain in its war against a communist insurgency in Malaya, for unionists’ rights under the Greek military junta, for Nauruan independence and against war supplies to help the American-led invasion of Korea. They were standing up to the right-wing government, media and courts, often sticking their necks out alone. The internationalist streak came from the experience of the rank and file. Australian seamen were largely white, mainly of Irish and English backgrounds, with an increasing number of European migrant workers by the 1960s. As seafarers, they carried cargo across oceans and interacted with workers of every nationality. Their working lives fostered solidarity across borders, giving them a sense that they were part of the international working class. They were also influenced by the Australian Communists’ internationalism, which, as CPA historian Stuart Macintyre explains, involved opposition to “Anglo-American imperialism”, support for the anti-colonial independence movements and upholding the Soviet Union as “a servant of peace”. At their 1948 annual general meeting, the seamen declared their “implacable active hostility to imperialists’ war designs” and committed to a “peace offensive” against war. During the Cold War years, the seamen championed an anti-American, anti-imperialist position as a counter to the do-nothing Labor Party-aligned unions. The SUA’s Communist officials took defiant industrial action while other union bureaucrats opposed political strikes that could upset Labor’s electoral fortunes or discredit the ACTU. Communist Party member Eliot V. Elliott, elected SUA federal secretary during the Second World War, cultivated a high level of union member activity and engagement through fortnightly stop-work meetings and the monthly *Seamen’s Journal*,edited by Kondelea “Della” Elliott. Significantly, Cold War anti-communist hysteria meant the CPA officials would not have won support for anti-war boycotts without genuine rank-and-file support. The first action in solidarity with Vietnamese independence was in April 1954 against the French military’s ongoing attempt to crush Ho Chi Minh’s guerrilla forces in Vietnam. When British freighter the *Radnor* docked in Sydney, the crew sent a note to the SUA: “\[T\]his crew do not wish to carry the present cargo of guns, bombs and ‘ammo’, etc., to fight the war in Indo-China”. (French Indochina was a confederation of colonies, including what are today Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.) The *Radnor*’s cargo was black-banned by the maritime unions. The following month, the Viet Minh won a crushing victory against the French in the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Vietnam was partitioned, and Ho Chi Minh’s forces formed a government in the north. When the US later moved to prop up the pro-Western puppet government of South Vietnam, which was facing an insurgency coordinated by the northern government, Robert Menzies’ Liberal government began sending military aid. Between 1962 and 1965, the government sent dozens of military instructors, RAAF personnel, aircraft and then the first battalion of troops. At the time, only a minority of Australian society opposed the war. Opposition grew with the introduction of conscription in late 1964, but it still took years for it to become widespread. Maritime unionists took the lead. In March 1965, Sydney waterside workers struck for 24 hours, delaying 37 ships. After the first deployment of troops the following month, 2,500 Waterside Workers’ Federation members walked off the docks in Melbourne, and 500 seamen and watersiders picketed the US embassy in Brisbane. The SUA annual general meeting resolved to oppose the war and called for the withdrawal of Australian troops. After the meeting, SUA tug workers in Melbourne refused to dock the warship USS *Vancouver* and the submarine USS *Megregal* for a commemoration of the Second World War battle of the Coral Sea. Their strike garnered much publicity for the anti-war cause. The ACTU also adopted a policy against the war and in favour of troop withdrawal, but remained vague on its support for industrial action to end the war. ### Raising the stakes: the *Boonaroo* and *Jeparit* disputes The following year, 1966, Harold Holt’s Liberal government coerced seamen into sailing the *Boonaroo*, a merchant ship carrying general war supplies. At a meeting of the Department of Shipping and Transport, a representative of the Australian National Line (ANL) declared that the union was expected to deliver the supplies to the Australian military in Vietnam. When the news spread, 66 SUA crews sent outraged messages and reaffirmed their anti-war position. The *Empress of Australia* crew wrote: “We strongly protest Government’s decision to send Australia ship Boonaroo to Vietnam. We Seamen’s Union members sail for peace not war”. However, the *Sydney Morning Herald* misleadingly reported that the cargo would be “supplies of food, wood, cigarettes and beer for the troops” implying there were no military materials. The attacks on the SUA didn’t end there. The Holt government, the ANL bosses and the media united to “break the Union boycott”. Even Labor leader Arthur Calwell joined the pro-war chorus. The ACTU, too, backed the government and urged the SUA to fall in line. Other maritime unions left the SUA out in the cold. Despite rhetorical opposition, the ACTU and Labor refused to countenance industrial action against the war. Even the SUA’s traditional ally, the Waterside Workers’ Federation, refused to support their action. Federal Secretary [Charles Fitzgibbon](https://web.archive.org/web/20250124075902/https:/www.sa.org.au/interventions/workers.htm#:~:text=The%20Federal%20Secretary%20of%20the%20WWF%2C%20Charles%20Fitzgibbon%20declared%20that%20the%20union%20would%20not%20take%20%22%E2%80%A6any%20action%20that%20would%20prejudice%20the%20carriage%20of%20supplies%20to%20Australian%20lads%20forced%20into%20this%20war.%22) bowed to the government’s intimidation, saying his union would not take “any action that would prejudice the carriage of supplies to Australian lads forced into this war”. Two decades earlier, Communist Jim Healy had overseen the Federation’s black ban of Dutch ships in Australian ports to support the Indonesian anti-colonial independence movement. The federation’s reluctance to take action against the Vietnam War was a major blow against the SUA. On 18 May, at the Sydney Engagement Centre, a call went out for seventeen seamen to staff the *Boonaroo*. All 29 SUA members present refused and were penalised by the superintendent, losing their attendance money and being put last on the work roster. Then the union received notice that the Industrial Court would act if the ban wasn’t overturned. The threat of the courts was no small matter. The Commonwealth Crimes Act contained punitive powers, including the death penalty, for anyone acting “by any means whatsoever with intent to assist an enemy”—evenin the case of an undeclared war. Further, a person could receive a life sentence for “assisting or not informing” on “those who intend to take such acts”, or twelve months’ jail for “obstructing or hindering the performance of services”. The latter could include strikes, boycotts or pickets. According to Pat Geraghty, who later became the union’s national secretary, SUA offices had been raided when the union opposed the Korean War, and an editor of the Communist newspaper *Tribune* wasjailed for eighteen months due to anti-Korean War content. That workers were willing to face down public demonisation, fines and punishment on the job, and very serious penalties if the courts ruled against them (which was common), showed their deep political convictions against the Vietnam War. However, they were left isolated by the union movement. At the next stop-work meeting, SUA members voted to staff the *Boonaroo* “with great reluctance and under protest”. The *Seamen’s Journal* explained this decision, reporting that the unionists didn’t “fear a clash with the Federal Government nor were intimidated by threatened Industrial Court action, they were prepared to face such challenges (as they had in the past) but they were not prepared ‘to go it alone’”. The seamen used this chance to make political arguments about why they had opposed sailing ships to Vietnam. In the *Seamen’s Journal*, an article titled “Volunteers or conscripts? Voluntariness or coercion?” slammed any notion that the *Boonaroo* crew were “volunteers” when they were coerced to sail by the government. Itrebuked “the conscription of civilians for an undeclared war”. (While the Australian military had invaded Vietnam, Menzies never formally declared war.) The crew immediately set out to make it known that the *Boonaroo* sailed as an SUA peace ship. The crew hung banners on the vessel declaring “Boonaroo Seamen Oppose War in Vietnam”, “Y Dy for Ky” and “No Kids for Ky” (Ky refers to South Vietnam’s puppet Prime Minister Ky Nguyen). Before departure, the SUA members staged an anti-war protest at the port. The ship set sail the same day the *Australian*’s front page revealed news of the first Australian conscript killed in Vietnam. A month later, in June 1966, the ANL bosses announced a second merchant ship, the *Jeparit*, would deliver war supplies. The SUA held up the ship for a few days in protest, but then sailed. They were still isolated, the anti-war movement still being in its infancy. The same month, the pro-war frenzy led to an assassination attempt on Calwell for his anti-conscription position. Both the *Boonaroo* and the *Jeparit* crews distributed anti-war publications in Vietnam, fraternised with Australian troops and Vietnamese workers. They condemned America’s “kill-all burn-all destroy-all” and “shoot everything that moves” policies and the napalm bombing of schools and hospitals. They met the American conscripts opposed to the war and exploited Vietnamese labour in South Vietnam’s ports. If the government thought it had intimidated the SUA, it was sorely mistaken. The January 1967 edition of the union journal argued for more action and that staying silent made them an “ally” of America. In December 1966, the government upped the ante by including four 40mm cannons in the *Jeparit*’s cargo, which was loaded but then unloaded after union protests. Then the real test arrived. In February, the *Boonaroo* crew refused to load bombs destined for Vietnam at Port Wilson Explosives Depot near Geelong. Two days later, they rejected a second order to sail to the depot; their three spokesmen were fined. They were notified that the ship had been chartered to take 2,153 tons of aircraft bombs, three tons of detonators, 82 tons of non-explosive components, plus general supplies. Australian Council of Trade Unions President A.E. Monk shamefully urged no industrial interference with the loading and transportation of munitions. Liberal Minister for Labor and National Service Leslie Bury [attacked the union’s Communist leaders](https://web.archive.org/web/20250124075902/https:/www.sa.org.au/interventions/workers.htm#:~:text=In%20the%20Federal%20Parliament%2C%20Bury%20renewed%20his%20threat%20to%20use%20the%20navy%20on%20the%20Boonaroo%20and%20launched%20into%20an%20attack%20on%20the%20communist%20leadership%20of%20the%20SUA%20stating%2C%20%22I%20hope%20the%20crew%20will%20follow%20the%20Australian%20flag%20and%20not%20the%20hammer%20and%20sickle). “I hope the crew will follow the Australian flag and not the hammer and sickle”, he said. When the seamen refused for a third time to be complicit in America’s “filthy” war and the “slaughter” of the Vietnamese, the government was forced to retreat and enlisted the Navy to sail the ship instead. Soon, the union was told that the *Jeparit* would sail with combat weapons and ammunition. Stop-work meetings held across the country on 8 March overwhelmingly endorsed a non-cooperation policy of sailing armaments to Vietnam. Only eleven members voted against this policy. One opponent in Sydney spoke against the war but feared the action could “destroy” the union. Members in favour said they would refuse to ship ammunition for a war against the Vietnamese people, but reiterated their “willingness” to sail Australian troops home from the “filthy, unwinnable war”. [The *Sydney Morning Herald* suggested](https://web.archive.org/web/20250124075902/https:/www.sa.org.au/interventions/workers.htm#:~:text=ensure%20the%20triumph%20of%20Hanoi) that the union was more concerned with “ensuring the triumph of Hanoi” than protecting Australian troops. Later in the day, the Navy took over the *Jeparit*. To make their stance known to other trade unionists, the SUA produced 100,000 copies of a four-page leaflet, [“We cannot support a war against children”](https://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/objects/pdf/d0710.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au). The centre spread included testimony from six of the ex-crew members of SUA peace ships, which was published in the *Australian* and other newspapers. One ex-*Boonaroo* crew member, Basil Box, explained his view: “I have been at sea for fifty years ... I went right through the 39-45 war in Australian troop ships. I’ve been through bombings and my ship’s been sunk. I did this in a war against fascism but I won’t be conscripted into this filthy business to blow up women and kids.” Another seaman, Raymond Greenhough, asked: “What’s the point in blaming the German people for the rise of Nazism if we Australians co-operate in the oppression of Vietnam?” A third, Raymond King, remarked: “I was in Vietnam when they were getting rid of the French, it’s ironical that the government is now trying to railroad us into helping the Yanks take over the country”. In 1967, most trade unions in Australia either supported the war or refused to take any action to oppose it. By publishing and distributing their arguments, the seamen wanted to set an example for the rest of the working class to follow. But the SUA’s anti-war industrial campaign did not end there. ### The mass movement arrives In December 1969, at a meeting of shop stewards and delegates at Fitzroy Town Hall, the representatives of 26 left-wing trade unions voted to “encourage those young men already conscripted to refuse to accept orders against their conscience and those in Vietnam to lay down their arms in mutiny against the heinous barbarism”. The same month, Sydney watersiders voted for Federation member Harry Black’s motion to stop loading cargo onto the *Jeparit*, which, with a Navy crew, was still sailing war supplies to Vietnam. Wharf workers finally joined the seamen’s industrial boycott of arms shipments. The war had become increasingly unpopular. Students burned draft cards, and protest numbers swelled. Seamen and dockers’ economic power strengthened the mass marches and anti-conscription campaigns. It is a small glimpse into how different a world run by workers could look. The 26 unions, known as the “rebel unions” after splitting from the Labor Party-dominated Trades Hall Council, took a lead in Victoria by pledging to appoint a full-time organiser for Vietnam moratorium responsibilities, sponsor an advertisement in the *Sun* calling on rank-and-file unionists to stop work on 8 May 1970 and join the moratorium demonstration. The Seamen’s Union provided the moratorium campaign with its “staunchest and most valuable allies” according to M.J. Saunders, who wrote a PhD on the Australian moratorium movement. At the first moratorium march, seamen stopped work for 24 hours across the country, affecting 47 passenger and cargo ships. Saunders suggests that “in most, if not all cases”, the decision to strike was taken by crews of particular ships, and they were the only union whose branches in all states struck for the entire 24 hours. The day before, the union was taken to court to prevent the action. One seaman, outraged by the war, spoke from the gallery: “We were at sea when the last stop-work meeting took place. We have never been in touch with an official, but we, the crew, voted 100 percent for this stoppage. We have let our conscience guide us in this war of attrition ... People have been killed needlessly ... we do not condone the US forces nor the Australian intervention in Vietnam ... we held a meeting ... and passed the motion that we would stop in protest and in support of the moratorium.” ### Banning US ships On 8 May 1972, President Richard Nixon announced Operation Pocket Money, which involved the navy mining ports in North Vietnam. The following day, the US Air Force began a continuous bombing campaign. In response, the port of Fremantle was “paralysed” when 70 members of the Seamen’s Union and the Maritime Workers’ Union walked off their ships to protest the escalation. The port strike marched to the US consulate offices in Perth, where L. Troy, a tugman, addressed the maritime workers and then delivered the union resolution opposing Nixon’s actions. In December, Nixon ordered “torrential aerial bombardment” against North Vietnam. Operation Linebacker II was the heaviest bombing campaign since World War Two. Australian unions responded with protest resolutions. The SUA sent a telegram to Nixon threatening “reprisals” if he did not “cease most savage and cruel bombings”. The union then threw down the gauntlet, imposing a black ban on all US shipping to Australian ports. The seamen showed the whole world that workers could stop American trade and their war machine overnight. The right-wing press and farmers’ organisations were apoplectic. Dozens of telegrams from rural producers were sent to the SUA, demanding that the ban be lifted. They labelled the ban “anti-Australian and trade destroying”, urged an end to “RIDICULOUS POLITICAL STRIKES” and to “NEVER VOTE LABOUR AGAIN”. Yet dozens more congratulatory messages arrived. One telegram read: “CONGRATULATIONS ON ACTION ON VIETNAM THE HUMAN SPIRIT IS STRENGTHENED BY SUCH AN ACT OF INTERNATIONALISM”. Another handwritten note summed up the mood: “Dear Sir, Please convey to all your rank and file members and officials who are responsible for the black ban on U.S. ships my deepest admiration. It has given me and I’m sure many others, the finest New Year’s present of my life.” The *Australian* reported a Farrell Lines assistant manager complaining about “800 tons of frozen meat and crayfish” being wasted at the port. The liner *Monterey* had 200 American passengers held up for eleven hours off Sydney Harbour, eventually resorting to lifeboats to bring people ashore. The *Austral Envoy*, carrying cargo and passengers, was unable to dock in Melbourne. Early in the new year, the right-wing-controlled International Longshoremen’s Association in New York imposed a retaliatory ban on Australian ships, claiming “discrimination against American seamen”. But Waterside Workers’ Federation members at Port Melbourne voted to join the boycott of American vessels. They endorsed a resolution: “We tell \[union leader Teddy\] Gleason of the USA East Coast Dockers to stick his nose out of our business and fight for conditions for American wharfies comparable to ours”. The case demonstrated that left-wing politics is essential for the union movement everywhere. The workers also demanded that America “remove its bases” and “its troops” from Australia. On 9 January, a Seamen’s Union stop-work meeting voted to suspend the ban, pending the outcome of peace negotiations in Paris. Eighteen days later, a treaty stipulating a US military withdrawal was signed. The North Vietnamese had defeated the American war machine. ### Solidarity forever The Seamen’s Union didn’t stop their support there; each member agreed to donate $5 of each week’s wages for a month to the reconstruction efforts in North Vietnam. The union raised $75,979 despite anti-communist press slander. Della Elliott later recalled: “\[In\] 1974 the Vietnam Embassy advised of a proposal to use the SUA Aid to build a kindergarten in Hai Phong Port. The SUA replied it could ‘think of no more fitting way for seamen to donate than towards helping to develop the future generation of Vietnam in a seaport’.” Most histories of the anti-war movement fail to account for the working-class resistance. Universities and schools are reluctant to teach about workers’ power, solidarity and the opposition to US imperialism. Similarly, socialist politics are often relegated to an era that’s long past. For activists fighting against Israel’s war on Gaza, Italy’s mass political strikes for Palestine, spearheaded by Genovese dockworkers in October, point the way forward. The working class has the power to bring military empires like America to their knees. Workers, especially seamen and dockers with socialist and internationalist politics, have been critical to challenging wars in the past. Workers’ power, however, remains latent most of the time. The story of the Australian seamen against the American imperialist machine shows the need to get organised. ### When Australian high school students walked out against nuclear testing URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/when-australian-high-school-students-walked-out-against-nuclear-testing/ Last updated: 2025-12-22T03:09:27.000Z US President Donald Trump’s recent announcement that the US might resume nuclear weapons testing should be a wake-up call. Only North Korea has tested nuclear weapons this century; no major imperial power has done so since France ended an atomic weapons testing program in the South Pacific in January 1996\. French President Jacques Chirac’s announcement, in June 1995, that his government planned to conduct eight nuclear tests at Mururoa, ending a four-year moratorium, provoked a storm of global protest. Mururoa and its sister atoll Fangataufa, both part of French Polynesia, were subject to a barrage of nearly 200 nuclear tests between 1966 and 1996\. Up until 1974, these were atmospheric tests that dispersed radioactive fallout across the South Pacific, including in Fiji, the Cook Islands, Niue, New Zealand, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga and Tuvalu, according to a 1998 [report](https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1028%5Fweb.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) by the International Atomic Energy Agency. French nuclear testing followed a secret program of [British nuclear testing in Australia](https://redflag.org.au/article/70-years-operation-hurricane-shameful-history-british-nuclear-tests-australia), at the Monte Bello Islands off Western Australia, and at Emu Field and Maralinga in South Australia, between 1952 and 1963\. Concurrently, between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 [nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands](https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/marshall-islands/?ref=redflag.org.au), exposing 52,000 Marshallese to unsafe levels of radiation. The largest and most militant protests against the 1995 resumption of French nuclear testing took place in Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia in Tahiti, where indigenous *Māʼohi* have long demanded independence from France. In Australia, high school students were at the forefront of a wave of protests, including the largest high school walkout since the Vietnam War. Soon after Chirac’s June 1995 announcement, Brisbane anti-nuclear campaigners resolved to organise a 5pm protest in King George Square on each day that the French exploded a nuclear bomb at Mururoa. The first protest occurred on 6 September, following the detonation of an 8-kiloton bomb under Mururoa Atoll. Protesters condemned the hypocrisy of Paul Keating’s Labor federal government, which opposed the tests but refused to ban the export of uranium to France or to support Polynesian demands for independence. Among the participants were year 11 students from Aspley High School, Leela Cosgrove, Natalie Chapman and Erin Dunn. In an [essay](https://humanparts.medium.com/i-was-greta-thunberg-625829bb7814?ref=redflag.org.au) published at Medium, Cosgrove explains: “The protest we attended made us believe that maybe there were other people who cared and wanted change. We thought this experience might be valuable for other students. So, when we returned to school, my friend Erin and I asked to share an update on local protests at our school assembly.” Aspley High School principal Ian Isaacs not only rejected their request but also gave both students a stern lecture about how “inappropriate” it was for them as high school students to be involved in politics. Isaacs patronisingly demanded to know, “Who put you up to this?” Incensed by the accusation that they had been brainwashed, Cosgrove and Dunn decided to lead a mass student walkout. The plan was to walk out of school on the following Friday, 8 September, at the beginning of the next whole-of-school assembly. Cosgrove [recalls](https://humanparts.medium.com/i-was-greta-thunberg-625829bb7814?ref=redflag.org.au) their intention was “to protest both the French nuclear weapons testing, but also to demonstrate to the administration that even though we were teenagers ... we were still political beings with an environmental and social conscience”. The protest, however, did not go to plan. Instead of entering the school hall from the front door, Isaacs entered from the back, stood on a chair and yelled at students that they should have followed the “right channels”. When students attempted to walk out through the front doors of the hall, they found themselves locked in. In all, ten students defied school authorities and walked out that day. Isaacs promptly informed their parents that the students were suspended for a week. However, Brisbane’s daily newspaper, the *Courier Mail*, had sent journalists to the school looking for a story and the news soon broke. The students’ suspension became front page news. When the second bomb was detonated at Fangataufa atoll on 2 October, the socialist youth organisation Resistance [called for](https://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/206/news/45-brisbane-schools-walk-out-against-nuclear-testing?ref=redflag.org.au) a mass walkout of state school students on 5 October. The call came in support of an initiative by students at St Rita’s College to hold a rally in King George Square that day. The message was amplified by a *Courier Mail* front-page headline: “Youth group calls for mass walkout at schools”. In a vain attempt to divide the high school movement, Brisbane Lord Mayor Jim Soorley invited a select group of students from St Rita’s and several other elite private high schools to join him at a Brisbane City Hall meeting on 5 October to voice polite opposition to the nuclear weapons tests. The mayor’s office told the media that security guards would prevent Resistance members from “gatecrashing” the City Hall meeting. Unperturbed by threats of suspension, thousands of students from 45 high schools heeded Resistance’s call and rallied in King George Square on 5 October. The square had been the site of many militant protests in the 1970s and 1980s, when Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen imposed a ban on marches. [According to](https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/remembering-brisbanes-big-march--its-still-a-simple-case-of-freedom,10695?ref=redflag.org.au) historian Glenn Davies: “King George Square was the crucible for the city’s social disquiet and ferment, where thousands of protesters once risked the batons of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s police force, over issues as diverse as the Vietnam War, the Springbok rugby tour, Aboriginal issues, nuclear disarmament and the right to protest. When the protesters went to walk out of the square, there would be hundreds and hundreds of police in military ranks to stop the marchers. As people tried to step out onto the roadway, they’d be strong-armed to the ground by police who would try to push them back into the square.” In 1989, 32 years of National Party rule came to an end with the election of Wayne Goss’ Labor government. Mayor Jim Soorley, a key ally of Goss, was determined to return a semblance of order to Brisbane’s city streets. However, the high school protest was anything but “orderly”. One student, Jaay Taylor, captured the mood when he told the cheering crowd, “Pigs can fly, kids don’t have sex and nuclear testing is safe ... not!” Another exposed his bum on stage, declaring, “This is a message for Jacques Chirac!” When reports were received that security guards at the entrance of the adjoining City Hall were confiscating Resistance placards, leaflets and badges from students trying to enter, the crowd marched towards City Hall chanting, “Join us, join us!” A few students managed to get inside and called on their peers to come outside and join the rally. Hundreds poured out of the building, joining 4,000 angry students in King George Square. The students marched defiantly on (or rather ran towards) the French consulate, chanting, “Burn the flag, burn the building!”, according to a *Green Left Weekly* [report](https://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/206/news/45-brisbane-schools-walk-out-against-nuclear-testing?ref=redflag.org.au). When they got there, one student told the crowd that she had smuggled a Resistance placard into City Hall and held it high every time they red-baited Resistance. “They did not mention independence for Tahiti in City Hall”, she said. “They did not mention uranium sales to France. They just kept chanting, ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance’. This is *not* all we are saying. I’m a member of Resistance and I am saying let’s fight nuclear testing.” The *Courier Mail*, however, was not going to let Resistance gain any glory from the protests’ success. Five days later, after planning had begun for another student walkout, the *Courier Mail* ran an article [claiming](https://humanparts.medium.com/i-was-greta-thunberg-625829bb7814?ref=redflag.org.au) that six Aspley students had confessed to being “duped” by Resistance. All of the students had faced intense pressure to distance themselves from the socialist youth group, not only from their school administration, but also from the father of two of the students, who was a federal police officer. The *Courier Mail*’s hit piece formed part of a hysterical red-scare campaign by Queensland politicians and the media. [Reports](https://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/207/news/who-really-manipulated-students-aspley?ref=redflag.org.au) filtered in that Resistance members were being hauled into the principal’s office for questioning, and Resistance badges were banned on school grounds. Among those leading the charge against Resistance was, shamefully, Ian Mackie, the president of the Queensland Teachers Union. Nonetheless, the Brisbane protest spurred organising efforts by high school students across the country, with new coalitions being established. Working with these coalitions, Resistance called for a week of action leading up to the third nuclear test at Mururoa, on 28 October. [According to](https://www.greenleft.org.au/1995/209/news/high-school-students-take-action-against-nuclear-tests?ref=redflag.org.au) *Green Left Weekly*, 2,000 students from more than 35 high schools took part in protests in Sydney on 25 October, with some students having to scale school gates to get to the rally. Twenty-seven Sydney students were suspended for their participation. In Canberra, 1,000 students reportedly walked out of school on the same day, with 250 rallying in Garema Place. Hundreds of students also took part in rallies in Melbourne and Perth. The 1995 wave of student revolt had followed dedicated organising among high school students in the early 1990s under the umbrella of the Environmental Youth Alliance. The efforts led to sizeable World Environment Day rallies demanding action on climate change. Brisbane high school students were also at the forefront of another wave of student walkouts in 1998 to protest against Pauline Hanson after she formed the racist One Nation party to contest the coming federal election. The French nuclear testing protests also drew on the legacy of a strong anti-nuclear campaign in Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which had opposed US bases in Australia, visits by nuclear-armed US ships to Australian ports and [uranium mining](https://commonslibrary.org/leave-it-in-the-ground-union-bans-and-uranium-exports-in-the-1970s/?ref=redflag.org.au). In 1983, the incoming Labor government had pledged to end uranium mining, but reneged on its promise, allowing three mines to operate. Today, Australia remains among the top four exporters of uranium globally, principally exporting to Canada, the US and the European Union. The lion’s share of this uranium comes from the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia, which contains [the world’s largest deposit of uranium ore](https://www.ga.gov.au/digital-publication/aecr2023/uranium-and-thorium?ref=redflag.org.au). Although the Australian government claims that all exports are to countries that have signed bilateral safeguards agreements, “these \[agreements\] are self-regulated and the checks and balances are remarkably cursory”, [according to](https://redflag.org.au/article/not-here-not-us-long-fight-against-nuclear-australia) Dave Sweeney, co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. The renewed threat of nuclear weapons testing, and the AUKUS plan to service US nuclear-powered submarines in Australian shipyards (and eventually to build them here), requires a new campaign to end the mining and export of Australian uranium once and for all, and to remove Australia from the nuclear fuel cycle. The high school walkouts 30 years ago provide an inspiring example of young people taking a stand to safeguard their future. ### Shame on those using the Bondi massacre to slander Palestine solidarity URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/shame-on-those-using-the-bondi-massacre-to-slander-palestine-solidarity/ Last updated: 2025-12-30T02:23:48.000Z The news of the massacre at Bondi piled horror on horror. As the narrative developed, every awful fear was confirmed: yes, there were deaths. Yes, there was a Jewish festival nearby. Yes, in fact, the festival was the target: the attack was motivated by antisemitism. Yes, the death toll would continue to climb: and yes, at least one child was killed. At that point, it seemed hard to imagine how things could get worse. But then Tony Abbott, Jillian Segal, Sussan Ley and Benjamin Netanyahu opened their mouths. Right-wingers wasted no time in using this massacre for their political ends, facts be damned. There was no need to understand the worldview or motivation of the attackers—the long-term advocates of anti-Muslim, pro-genocide politics began grandstanding with no concern for empirical reality or political logic. Australia’s anti-immigrant right wing flooded the internet with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab propaganda of the vilest kind. Defenders of Israel’s genocide immediately blamed the massacre on the pro-Palestine movement. Many right-wingers did both, like Abbott, who blamed the massacre on “terrible marches ... across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and elsewhere” and declared that “we just have to be much more determined not to import hatred from overseas”. Abbott knows something about importing hatred from overseas. He and his hard-right faction in the Liberal Party have spent a decade trying to radicalise anti-migrant sentiment, inspired by the models on offer from European neo-fascists and the MAGA movement in the US. It is unsurprising that he and his co-thinkers would imply, or declare, that immigration is to blame. Equally unsurprising, and equally unacceptable, is the rapid reemergence of figures like Australia’s discredited “antisemitism envoy”, Jillian Segal, seeking to use this massacre to peddle their anti-Palestinian political agenda. The facts: in the hours and days after the massacre, little was known about the attackers’ worldview except a potential years-long interest in ISIS. That interest long predates the emergence of the large-scale global Gaza solidarity movement—Australia’s spies were investigating the younger attacker in 2019. ISIS and their international supporters oppose the Palestinian national struggle, have perpetrated abominable crimes against Palestinian refugees in the areas they control, and have an implacable hostility to the worldview and methods of the international solidarity movement. Although they may opportunistically refer to Palestine at times in their propaganda, they do so as part of a fundamentally counterposed project that seeks to expose the solidarity movement as a dead end that must be replaced with militarised sectarianism. They denounce the cause of Palestinian liberation as an “idol” and view even the most religious advocates of Palestinian national self-determination as apostates. So it is rather hard to see how, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims, the Australian government’s symbolic recognition of a Palestinian state has led to the massacre of Jews in Sydney. Likewise, one struggles to understand the relevance of Segal’s Trumpian proposals to tie Australian university funding to political discipline. Even more absurd are the widespread attempts to blame the Palestine solidarity movement in general, and the epic Sydney Harbour Bridge march in particular. Dave Rich, a purported expert in “left-wing antisemitism”, conceded in the *Guardian* that “we are yet to discover the detailed motivations of the Bondi attackers”. But this didn’t stop him from directly blaming the Palestine solidarity movement for the massacre: “\[T\]his movement has generated and sustained a political culture in which violence is both conceivable and enacted”. In fact, the political culture of the Palestine solidarity movement is the direct opposite of the sectarian religious violence of the Bondi attack. The Palestine movement transcends religious boundaries and national borders. It is not based on violence, but collective protest. The mass demonstrations in Sydney, the general strikes in Italy, the multinational aid flotilla to Gaza, and the countless peaceful sit-ins and occupations by enormously courageous anti-Zionist Jews in the United States are just a few examples of actions that could only take place on the basis of anti-racist solidarity. The Palestine solidarity movement is motivated by opposition to racist violence. Its methods are those of peaceful mass action. One of its central claims is the need to distinguish between the Jewish people and the Zionist political project. The Bondi attackers, just like the state of Israel itself, represent the rejection of these ideas and methods. In truth, many of the publicists and whitewashers of Israel’s genocide know this, and that is why they are so desperate to slander the movement and jump at any opportunity to repress it bureaucratically. Their attempts to reframe the oppression of Palestinians on sectarian lines—the implication that Jews, by virtue of their religious or ethnic background, are effectively identical with the Israeli government’s oppression of Palestinians, and to oppose that oppression is to hate Jews—reinforce the logic of communal violence. That many Jews believe that all Palestine solidarity is an expression of anti-Jewish hatred is a tragedy, and one that opportunistic political forces are seeking to intensify and exploit to break down solidarity between Jews and the Palestine movement. But around the world, more and more Jews like me have reacted with revulsion to this propaganda, and have rejected the idea that being Jewish means supporting genocide against Palestinians, and opposing it is antisemitism. The reality is that much of the world today is in a death spiral of racist oppression and violence. Western politics is increasingly dominated by a discourse asserting that any and all forms of violence—from arbitrary imprisonment to assassinations—are justified in the struggle against migrants, minorities, drugs and subversion. Some lost souls are drawn to the apocalyptic mirror image of sectarian murder-suicides. The conditions have been created for sectarian and racial violence in every direction. Jews and Muslims alike have been the victims of massacres by neo-Nazis, religious sectarians, and state actors. Across the world, the forces of reaction are trying to extinguish the principles of internationalist, anti-capitalist solidarity. The Palestine movement has been a shining light of solidarity and cooperation in a world increasingly darkened by racist and sectarian brutality. Those who opportunistically use the Bondi massacre to slander that movement should hang their heads in shame, and the activists of that movement must redouble their efforts to assert the importance of internationalism, cooperation and resistance to this unending nightmare. ### Capitalism: zero likes from Gen Z URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/capitalism-zero-likes-from-gen-z/ Last updated: 2025-12-26T01:29:55.000Z If young people didn’t already feel aggrieved enough, having a generation of social-media-obsessed scrolling addicts tell them they can’t watch YouTube must really grate. Yet that’s what the federal Labor Party, which by the way gave almost $20 million to tech bros at Meta and YouTube to help get itself re-elected last May, has done. And the worst part about it is not that young people are going to have to use someone else’s account to get access to unproven health and wellness advice, but that this is far from the worst affront to their dignity. On almost every conceivable measure, young people in Australia are being disadvantaged and excluded. Life milestones that previous generations took for granted are increasingly becoming luxuries, achieved later in life if at all. Society feels stacked against them, organised to enrich an obscenely wealthy elite, and governed by entitled charisma-evacuations without two political principles to rub together. This is most glaring in relation to housing. While no political party will even countenance stepping on the toes of property investors or developers, young people are locked out of the housing market, denied economic independence and forced to live with their parents into their late 20s either because they can’t afford rent or because it’s the only way to save for a deposit. If they can afford rent, they have to put up with substandard housing owned by landlords who think being required to remove mould is socialism. The result, as the Grattan Institute’s 2019 “Generation Gap: ensuring a fair go for younger Australians” report notes, is that “younger Australians are now less likely to own a home than young people were in the past. In 2016, 45 per cent of 30-year-olds owned a home; in 1981, the figure was 67 per cent. By contrast, older people are just as likely to own a home now as they were then—with about 80 per cent of 65-year-olds owning a home”. The most recent Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) report likewise found that only 18 percent of people born between 1994 and 1997 owned a house before age 28, compared to 26.5 percent of those born between 1974 and 1977\. And if they do own a house, young people are likely to be in more debt than any previous generation—the average home loan today is $694,000, up from $416,000 ten years ago. Low wage growth is a big factor locking young people out of home ownership, the price of an average house in Australia last December being 16.4 times the average household income, up from 9.5 times throughout the 1990s and 4.5 times in the 1970s. In capital cities, the discrepancy is even worse. And while young people are taking on record levels of housing debt, they also have to contend with unprecedented education debt, not having had the benefit of free or very low-cost education that their forebears enjoyed. According to the ATO, average student loan debt for people in their 20s has increased 145 percent over the last twenty years, well above the 62 percent total inflation over the same period. Graduates now take 40 percent longer to repay these debts than they did in the early 2000s, reflecting both higher debts and lower wages graduates are saddled with. Young people are also shouldering a disproportionate burden in relation to tax and government support. Older people have benefited from tax policies that favour investors, such as the capital gains tax concessions introduced by the Howard government, while younger people on average have been further disadvantaged by them. The result, as Robert Breunig from the Australian National University, writing for the *Conversation*, points out, is that “older Australians have much higher incomes than previous generations of retirees. The average 75-year-old’s post-tax and transfer income 25 years ago was little more than 75% of an average Australian income. Today it equals the average Australian income ... Older Australians also enjoy a post-tax income one third higher than Australians aged 18–30”. Older people typically have more assets than the young, but the gap between them has grown significantly over the last 30 years. The Grattan Institute reports: “The average household headed by someone aged 65-74 now has more than $1.3 million in net assets, up from $530,000 in real terms for a household of the same age in 1994\. Wealth for an average household headed by someone aged 25-34 increased only modestly—from an average of $190,000 in net assets in 1994 to $300,000 today. Over the past decade, wealth for younger households has barely shifted.” Age used to correlate with economic disadvantage in Australia, and it is positive that it no longer does. But aside from the fact that the benefits are not evenly distributed even among older people, this change is in part a product of tax and welfare policies that favour the already wealthy, to the detriment of young people. Then there are the social and political values young people have to contend with. A case in point is the unapologetic indifference of those in charge towards the climate catastrophe they are knowingly signing up future generations to endure. Profits from fossil fuel production and export come before any consideration of the irreversible impact these industries will have on people’s lives. The cynical spin and creative accounting that pass for climate action only compound the contempt many young people feel for the political class. There is likewise the sense that politicians and the powerful have no human decency, demonstrated most clearly by the almost unanimous official and institutional support for the genocide in Gaza. Add to that callousness towards the plight of refugees, Indigenous people and a general tendency to blame those with the least power for society’s problems. Even the changes that supposedly represent the pinnacle of human achievement and that young people are told will improve their lives turn out more often than not to be the opposite. The much-celebrated advances in technology over the last three decades, for example, have not axiomatically translated into improvements in quality of life or wellbeing, especially for those raised entirely in the digital age. More often than not, technological innovation seems to work against people—food delivery that further reduces social contact, image-crafting on social media that bears no relation to reality, endless marketing that plays on insecurities and low self-esteem to sell shonky crap. And that’s when it’s not being used by bosses to eliminate jobs and sack people, predators to groom abuse victims, misogynists to humiliate women or right-wing cranks to spread hate. The threat posed by AI to jobs is likewise projected to have the greatest impact on the young: 39 percent of entry level jobs already being replaced by AI according to a British Standards Institution survey of seven countries. The net result is that there is no longer a sense that life holds promise—that you can be independent and adventurous when you’re young without jeopardising your later financial security—or that your life, and the life you can offer the next generation, will be better than what has gone before. Society seems like it is working against young people, not for them. It is no wonder, then, the level of anxiety and distress among the young is at record highs. Writing for the *Conversation*, Flinders University academic Intifar Chowdhury notes, “Between 2011 and 2021, distress among 15 to 24-year-olds more than doubled, from 18.4% to 42.3%. For those aged 25 to 34, prevalence reached 32.7% in 2021 ... The 2025 Australian Unity Wellbeing Index survey found young Australians are some of the least satisfied with life, with adults aged 18 to 34 reporting the highest levels of mental distress and loneliness, and some of the lowest levels of personal wellbeing compared to any group across the adult lifespan”. In the age of unprecedented connectedness, young people are more isolated, have fewer friends and are lonelier than they have ever been, with loneliness among 15 to 24-year-olds increasing from 14.4 percent in 2008 to 24.9 percent in 2022, according to HILDA. Being connected to others in real life, accepted for who you are, valued for whatever contribution you are able to make to the collective good, is necessary for people to thrive. But it is anathema to the ideology of capitalism, and increasingly difficult to achieve in spite of it. Not surprisingly, all this is having political consequences. Young people are more leftish, in voting habits and social attitudes, than any other cohort. A 2024 YouGov poll found 53 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds preferred socialism over capitalism, well above the 27 percent national average. A similar poll taken the year before by the decidedly un-socialist Institute for Public Affairs and Canada’s Fraser Institute, likewise showed 50 percent support for socialism among 18 to 34-year-olds. It also found that Australia had the highest support for communism among under-35s (20 percent), higher than any of the other countries polled (the US, Canada and the UK). At the last federal election, Generation Y voters (under 29 years old) had the most pronounced two-party preferred vote for Labor (67-33) and the strongest Green vote at 27 percent, according to the Australian Election Study (AES) report on the election. And while the traditional pattern is that people become more conservative as they age, the factors that pushed past generations to the right are no longer as strong, if they exist at all. As the AES notes, “Millennials, a group now in their 30s and 40s, are not shifting to the right as they age, rather they have been shifting to the left. Millennials’ support of the Coalition has fallen from 38 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in 2025”. Accommodation of older people to the status quo is largely underpinned by a degree of financial security. But less than a third of 16 to 24-year-olds in Australia in 2017 expected to have a higher standard of living than their parents, according to an International Youth Foundation survey, well below the international average of 59 percent. And there is a basis for this sentiment. According to the Grattan Institute, if the long-term pattern of low wage growth in Australia continues, people born in the 1990s will have lower incomes than those born 10-20 years earlier. The challenge for those holding on to hope that a better world is possible is to organise this sentiment into a force that can challenge the system and the powerful interests that are invested in the status quo. Disgruntlement with capitalism manifests frequently as resignation, partly because there is so little living memory or direct experience of the sort of collective action that can win gains. Two generations now have lived through weak workers’ movements, the advance of the right and the retreat of social movements and living standards. Despite Australia being one of the countries least affected by the global financial crisis, and with relatively high living standards, it is nevertheless unable to give a critical mass of young people confidence in the future. This represents a challenge and opportunity for the left. History shows that when people do move, when they decide they have had enough, they look to the radical tradition of what has gone before. The more people are already committed to keeping that alive, and fighting for it today, the better are our chances of organising the next generation into a force that can win a better world. ### Hundreds take the Wollongong Sea Cliff Bridge for Palestine URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/hundreds-take-the-wollongong-sea-cliff-bridge-for-palestine/ Last updated: 2025-12-11T03:27:55.000Z 2025 will go down as the year of the bridge marches. The historic 300,000-strong March for Humanity across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The march across the Commonwealth Bridge in Canberra. On 7 December, it was the Illawarra’s turn, with a procession of several hundred across the scenic Sea Cliff Bridge in Coalcliff. Chances are you’ve seen this bridge before. It has featured in dozens of car ads and the film clip for Guy Sebastian’s song“Choir”. In 2011, it was the location for an impressive thousand-strong mobilisation to stop coal seam gas exploration in the region. The organising group, Wollongong Friends of Palestine, organises regular rallies in Crown Street Mall and community pickets against Bisalloy Steels, which manufactures armour for Israeli military vehicles. After a series of successful pickets and a great demonstration at the beach in October, we decided it was time to do something bold and take the bridge for Palestine. Just days before the demonstration, Israel launched a drone strike on a refugee camp at al-Mawasi, burning five Palestinian refugees alive in their tents. The Labor government has accepted the so-called ceasefire as a gift to wipe its hands clean of any complicity in the genocide. US President Donald Trump is orchestrating a process that will allow international armies to occupy Gaza. The message at the demonstration was clear: we need to keep the pressure on. Our movement will continue to call for sanctions on Israel and an end to the arms trade. The march across the bridge was one of the largest demonstrations for Palestine in the Illawarra for several years. It brought people from all walks of life: Palestinian uncles and aunts, parents, preschoolers, skaters, nurses, leftists, socialists and community activists. Some keen beans even had the foresight to make it to the top of the escarpment and wave the flag down at us as we crossed the bridge. There are several lessons to draw from this experience. One is about existing attitudes to the situation in Gaza. As the genocide enters a new phase, our side will likely lose some momentum. The ceasefire, by design, has taken the heat off Israel. Unlike in August, the media no longer has wall-to-wall coverage of starving Palestinians. It can be easy for people to feel despair at the situation. But many people refuse to let Gaza slip out of their consciousness. These are the people who can keep the movement alive and build greater numbers when the next controversy or atrocity occurs. Another is the importance of demonstrations to any campaign. The late Marxist art critic John Berger wrote, in “The nature of mass demonstrations”: “Demonstrations are essentially urban in character, and they are usually planned to take place as near as possible to some symbolic centre, either civic or national. Their ‘targets’ are seldom the strategic ones”. As far as we know, the Sea Cliff Bridge has no connection to the state of Israel. Nor did blocking it cause any significant disruption to profit-making and capitalism. But as the slaughter rages on, the cause of the Palestinians should be highlighted everywhere, all the time. Taking this landmark meant we could put the issue front and centre in our region. A third is the importance of being prepared to tackle a controversy head-on. Blocking a piece of infrastructure is a divisive thing to do at the best of times. For some residents of the northern Illawarra, who are very rarely inconvenienced, a two-hour traffic delay seems the worst human suffering they can imagine. In any case, this obviously cannot compare to the constant, inescapable suffering of Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza. We maintained that we have as much right to our bridge as any popstar, car company or bike race. What helped was reaching out to gain support: the South Coast Labour Council endorsed the event, we gained support from sitting pro-Palestine councillors, and it was promoted by the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association and the NSW Greens. A lot of legwork went into spreading the word about the rally far and wide. Local communities were letterboxed, posters were pasted across town, and we even found some friendly lefty baristas who were happy to display a poster in their workplace after a simple ask. We discovered groups we didn’t know existed, like 2508 Parents for Palestine, from the small northern community of Helensburgh. It was clear this promotional work would be necessary even before we saw the numbers on the day: the police authorised our protest to march on the road only after weeks of public outreach. As the political right becomes more assertive, the left should be confident that we can stand up to their arguments and can carry working-class people with us. *Megan Guy is a member of Wollongong Friends of Palestine.* ### Adelaide’s university merger: built for business, not students URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/adelaides-university-merger-built-for-business-not-students/ Last updated: 2025-12-11T01:58:24.000Z The University of Adelaide and University of South Australia will be folded into a single mega-institution next year: Adelaide University, projected to be the largest in the country. For years, the state Labor government and senior university managers have sold this as a leap towards “global competitiveness” and a “top-100” ranking. But behind the glossy rebrand, a corporate giant is being built on cuts, restructuring and the degradation of education. The chaos already engulfing students and staff has been widely [reported](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-09/sa-adelaide-university-merger-challenges/105981104?ref=redflag.org.au). Enrolments are a mess, degree structures have changed without warning, and many staff still have no clarity about their future roles. Deloitte, the consultancy overseeing the merger, has pushed to slash 3,000 course offerings at both universities. Hours and in-person components are being stripped from many subjects, while staff are being worked into the ground as management attempts to build a new university on top of their existing workloads. But the administrative meltdown is not the core problem. It is a symptom. The merger is a significant step in the ongoing corporatisation of higher education, in which universities are run according to market logic rather than on the basis of teaching and research quality. Management has announced that lectures will be replaced with “asynchronous digital activities”. They boast that the new institution will [“deliver online education to more students than any other Australian university”](https://adelaideuni.edu.au/content/dam/adelaideuniversity/documents/about/pdfs/our-journey/AU%20Strategic%20Ambition%20and%20Direction%202024-34.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au). Students who struggled through online learning during and after the COVID pandemic know exactly what this means: lower engagement, and what the National Tertiary Education Union has warned will be the [“death of campus life”](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/sep/13/adelaide-university-dumps-face-to-face-lectures?ref=redflag.org.au). Alongside this, the merger will introduce trimesters—[opposed by 83 percent of staff](https://www.indailysa.com.au/news/archive/2024/07/04/new-adelaide-university-academic-calendar-under-fire?ref=redflag.org.au)—which compress teaching into shorter blocks, intensify workloads and, as at the University of New South Wales, pave the way for course cuts and job losses. Trimesters fit neatly with the broader shift to generic, common-core subjects and “stackable”, modular degrees designed to minimise contact time, recycle content and allow management to teach more students with fewer staff. These changes are not about improving education. They entrench a market-driven model that has already produced sector-wide casualisation, chronic overwork and wage theft, including the University of Adelaide’s [admission that it underpaid over 800 ](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-24/adelaide-university-underpayment/105911148?ref=redflag.org.au)[casual staff](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-24/adelaide-university-underpayment/105911148?ref=redflag.org.au)[ by $1.25 million](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-24/adelaide-university-underpayment/105911148?ref=redflag.org.au). Rather than addressing these crises, the merger exacerbates them. Worse, Adelaide University offers a bleak preview of Labor’s national agenda for higher education. Education Minister Jason Clare insists that qualifications must be “quicker and cheaper”. University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Bill Shorten has promised to [“break the tyranny of the three-year degree”](https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/shorten-demands-end-to-tyranny-of-three-year-degree-20250918-p5mw59?ref=redflag.org.au). Despite overtures to “access” and “equity”, Labor’s direction is clear: reshape universities to serve Australian capitalism—especially the technology and national security industries. In Clare’s words, higher education is “rocket fuel for the economy”. At Adelaide University, staff working overtime to design courses have reported being told to ensure they have little continuity so they can be chopped into “micro-credentials”. Lectures—sorry, “asynchronous digital activities”—may be broken into smaller segments that can be watched in any order, presumably to fit Gen Z attention spans. The real purpose is obvious: maximise profits and the number of fee-paying consumers. This is the “modular future” Shorten champions. The merged university also aligns neatly with Labor’s military priorities. [Adelaide University’s recently announced partnership with Saab](https://adelaideuni.edu.au/about/news/2025/defence-partnership-primed-for-the-future/?ref=redflag.org.au), whose parent company supplies components to the F-35 fighter jets used in Israel’s war on Gaza, is just the latest example of universities deepening ties with the war industry. Every degree is to be “industry-aligned”, including compulsory “work-integrated learning”. Whether or not this corporate behemoth succeeds on its own terms remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: Adelaide University’s priorities serve the interests of profit, not students and staff. ### Rising Tide + spying on the far right URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/rising-tide-spying-on-the-far-right/ Last updated: 2026-01-18T05:30:45.000Z ["Understanding the net zero circus" by Lily Campbell in Red Flag](https://redflag.org.au/article/understanding-the-net-zero-circus) ["The far right is organising. We have to resist" by Anneke Demanuele in Red Flag](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-far-right-is-organising-we-have-to-resist) ### ‘We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas’: Labor turns blind eye to Melbourne’s 100,000 empty homes URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/weve-tried-nothing-and-were-all-out-of-ideas-labor-turns-blind-eye-to-melbournes-100-000-empty-homes/ Last updated: 2025-12-06T04:01:18.000Z “Melbourne may be an unhappy home for its 24,000 homeless residents”, begins Prosper Australia’s [2025 Speculative Vacancy report](https://www.prosper.org.au/speculative-vacancies-2025-data-update/?ref=redflag.org.au), released on 27 November, “but it remains surprisingly hospitable to the 32,000 dwellings within the metropolitan area that sat entirely empty throughout 2024”. In a humane world there would be a simple mathematical solution to this problem: 32,000 houses minus 24,000 homeless people equals no-one homeless and at least 8,000 homes to spare. Instead, we live in a world where property hoarders speculate while the homeless are left to die on the streets. The report uses water usage to map empty homes across nearly 2 million dwellings in the greater Melbourne area. Those using zero litres of water per day over the year are classed as completely empty—that’s the 31,890 dwellings referenced above, the number of which has increased by 16 percent since the previous year. In addition to that there are the houses averaging between zero and 50 litres per day (50 litres is about equivalent to a dripping tap). The average daily water use in a single-person Melbourne household is 200 litres, so these houses are likely occupied for less than a quarter of the year. Many may be empty all year but have water leaks or use water for gardening. When you factor in these “underused” homes, the total number of vacant homes in Melbourne totals a shocking 100,945\. As the report points out, these houses “could theoretically house everyone on the Victorian [social housing waiting list](https://www.homes.vic.gov.au/applications-victorian-housing-register-vhr?ref=redflag.org.au) twice over”. That housing list includes people like Maya, interviewed recently by Kate Ashton in her [ABC article](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-15/social-public-housing-wait-times-victoria-family-violence/105655044?ref=redflag.org.au) “Family violence survivors waiting years for social housing as demand surges in Victoria”, published on 15 September. Maya fled an abusive relationship in 2017 and was eligible for social housing as a priority applicant on the Victorian Housing Register. Despite this, she was left waiting eight years for housing for her and her two children. Thousands pay with their lives for this artificially maintained scarcity of housing. In October the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released its [*Specialist Homelessness Services: feature analysis*](https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/homelessness-services/specialist-homelessness-services-feature-analysis/contents/about?ref=redflag.org.au) report, which collected data on those who have received support for homelessness. It estimates that in 2023 there were an average of “nine potentially avoidable deaths per day” in this cohort—that is, nine people every day who might have lived had they received the necessary care and support. Their lives are cut brutally short in a society that could have ended homelessness, but instead, politicians continue to allow the number of empty homes to grow while the social housing waiting list grows longer and longer. So why are so many homes left empty? Prosper Australia describes it as a “rational decision” on the part of the owners. And it is, in its twisted way. But this seems counterintuitive—surely, they’d want to make money from renting out their properties? The thing is that the real estate market is so hot, and the taxes on it so porous, that in just a few months the potential profits in capital gains can eclipse a whole year’s rent. *Domain*’s [“September 2025 House Price Report”](https://www.domain.com.au/research/house-price-report/september-2025/?ref=redflag.org.au) found that Melbourne house prices rose 2.2 percent from the June quarter, a median increase of $23,045 in just three months. In the same period an owner receiving Melbourne’s median rent of $580 (according to *Domain’s* [“September 2025 Rental Report”](https://www.domain.com.au/research/rental-report/september-2025/?ref=redflag.org.au)) might make around $7,500. If an owner is leasing their property, then they risk missing a peak in the market while they’re giving a notice of eviction to their tenants—losing potentially tens of thousands in profit. Governments aren’t just aware of these problems. Their policies have created them. Capital gains and negative gearing tax concessions have cultivated a financialised housing market that is not primarily about making money from rent, but about the increasing value of capital. The human right to shelter has been made dependent, in Australia today, on the whims of an investor class for whom housing is primarily a commodity rather than something designed to meet basic human needs. Rental properties at least have the side effect of housing people. Investment properties don’t even need to do that. Taxing empty properties would be a good start. But Labor’s Vacant Residential Land Tax (VRLT), which applies to residences that are empty at least half the year, was collected on only 1,779 properties in 2024\. “It’s a farce”, housing activist and former Victorian Socialists Senate candidate Jordan van den Lamb told *Red Flag*. “Labor is taxing less than a fiftieth of the 100,000 homes that we know are empty for most of the year. They get to look like they’re doing something while they let property hoarders get away with murder.” Van den Lamb, known for his social media handle “purplepingers”, has managed to build a database of more than 1,000 vacant homes in Victoria alone, some of which are squatted by those in need of housing. If he can do that with the help of community submissions, you can only imagine what state and local governments could do if they took this issue seriously. “But they’d rather spend millions [policing anti-genocide protests](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-19/israel-gaza-protests-in-melbourne-victoria-police-bill/105792396?ref=redflag.org.au) and [hiring security guards](https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/being-homeless-is-not-a-crime-cbd-security-guard-program-under-scrutiny-20250918-p5mw3r.html?ref=redflag.org.au) to harass homeless people than police the criminals responsible for our housing crisis”, Jordan says. Even if the VRLT were applied to all the empty houses, though, it’s unlikely it would make a big difference. Properties are taxed 1 percent of their total value for the first year they’re vacant, up to a maximum of 3 percent after three years. Given Melbourne’s median house price rose 7.7 percent this year, this is only a seventh of what property speculators stand to gain. If they’re willing to give up rent, this tax is unlikely to change their minds. A simple solution would be for empty investment properties to be seized and turned into public housing. This is the kind of drastic measure that would be appropriate for what amounts, in the context of our growing homelessness crisis, to a form of social murder. For Australia’s capitalist governments, though, this would be regarded as the greatest sacrilege against the right of property investors to turn a profit. ### Community sector pay cuts: four things we learned at the Fair Work hearings URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/community-sector-pay-cuts-four-things-we-learned-at-the-fair-work-hearings/ Last updated: 2025-12-26T05:50:57.000Z The view was wonderful. But the signals from the Fair Work Commission’s (FWC) “expert panel” were far from reassuring. In late October, I sat in on two days of public hearings in Sydney. The commission was taking submissions on its April interim decision to rewrite the pay scale and classifications of workers in the Social and Community Services (SACS) sector. The commission’s stated intention is to address “gender undervaluation”. So it’s astonishing, as well as appalling, that 73 percent of roles in this female-dominated sector would face pay *cuts*if the interim decision were implemented in full, according to an analysis commissioned by the Australian Services Union (ASU). I’ve previously written, in [September](https://redflag.org.au/article/fair-work-commission-plans-giant-pay-cut-for-community-sector-workers) and [October](https://redflag.org.au/article/sharpening-the-knife-fair-work-takes-another-step-towards-community-sector-wage-cuts), about this gob-smacking attack on pay rates in the community sector. But in the last week of October, I had a chance to see how the process works up close. In a way, there was nothing dramatically new. But the hearing provides insight into what to look for when the commission issues its final decision, likely sometime in the next week or two. It also shows something about the workings of the commission—and what’s needed in the fight ahead. Here are four things I learned. ### 1\. The view is pretty nice from the fifteenth floor of the Fair Work Commission building in Sydney It’s probably even nicer if you’re paid $10,000 per week to enjoy it—which, according to the remuneration tribunal, is the [total annual remuneration](https://www.remtribunal.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-09/FTO%202025%20-%20Compilation%20No.%202.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) for deputy presidents of the commission. The FWC expert panel for this case is made up of three deputy presidents on $533,550 per year, one vice-president on $659,000, and President Adam Hatcher, whose total package is $661,000, *plus*a judges’ pension. They’ve all had a pay rise of at least $12,000 in the past year—around $240 per week. It all feels a long way from a disability support worker with five years’ experience and no formal qualifications, whose award pay rate is threatened with a $107 cut (to just $1,248 per week) under the FWC interim decision. Or a caseworker in a community mental health, alcohol and other drug service with five years’ experience and a Cert IV, whose award rate faces a cut of 20 percent—some $364 per week. Or any of the other 138,000 workers in the community sector whose award pay rate will be cut if the commission’s interim decision is implemented in full. In serious court cases, we might expect our fate to be decided by a jury of our peers. But in this case, the decision makers are paid five or ten times the rate of those who will cop the consequences. ### 2\. Some members of the Fair Work Commission seem to believe that many community sector workers are “over-classified” rather than under-classified, among other concerning views. There was a series of concerning opinions expressed by members of the commission at the hearings in late October. Everyone agrees that the existing classification structure in the SACS sector is a mess. There’s a lot of woolly and ambiguous language involved—more than 6,000 words of it, in fact. Workers can be classified at a particular level (and therefore at a particular pay rate) according to four distinct criteria: their formal qualifications; their experience; the extent of supervision the worker receives from their manager; and the amount of supervision the worker gives to others. A study commissioned by the ASU as part of its “[Skilled, Respected, Equal](https://www.skilledrespectedequal.com.au/?ref=redflag.org.au)“ campaign found that *two-thirds* of all staff in the sector are under-classified on at least one of these measures. But, notably, the FWC’s April interim decision describes this problem not as “under-classification” but as “misclassification”. And in the public hearings in late October, FWC Vice-President Ingrid Asbury took this a step further. Asbury said that, “at first blush”, some of the workers in case studies tendered as evidence by the ASU “appear to perhaps be over-classified”—that is, paid at a rate that’s higher than they should be, based on the SACS classification schedule in the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services (SCHADS) award. It shouldn’t surprise us that this alleged “over-classification” worries Asbury. After all, she was a senior manager at a pro-business lobby, the Australian Industry Group, before being appointed to various industrial tribunals from 2000, and to the Fair Work Commission in 2013. But it’s a concern for anyone who cares about maintaining or even improving pay rates in the community sector. And it’s doubly concerning that FWC President Adam Hatcher commented along similar lines in the October hearings, saying that “the current structure in effect allows the employer to pick the classification and then justify funding on the basis that it’s an award classification without any objective criteria actually applying”. The horror. Imagine workers in a demanding, not-well-paid industry being paid a bit more than the absolute minimum interpretation of what’s allowed under the award, without “objective criteria actually applying”. Presumably, “objective criteria” were “actually applied” in setting Hatcher’s pay rate of well over $600,000 per year. Funding in the community sector is often based on what’s needed to pay staff an award wage at a particular classification level. So Hatcher’s comment, if carried into policy, would justify a large cut to both pay and funding across the sector. It’s appalling that someone who espouses these views has a central role in setting minimum wages for the entire country. And it tells us a lot about “Fair” Work. At one level, Hatcher’s fixation with supposed “objective criteria” for setting wages is just make-believe. The most important “criteria” determining what workers get paid is simple: their class power. The rich and the powerful make sure that they’re amply rewarded, along with their most important functionaries (including FWC members). For most of the rest of us, if we’re getting more than a bare minimum, it’s because our unions have fought for and won it somewhere along the line. At another level, though, Hatcher’s comments go to the issue at the heart of the current case: the ambiguities in the existing SACS classifications and what to do about them. As the ASU points out, the existing SACS classification descriptors are “archaic, complex and ambiguous”. Anyone who takes a look at the 6,000 words piled up in [Schedule B of the SCHADS award](https://awards.fairwork.gov.au/MA000100.html?ref=redflag.org.au#%5FToc209531566) will probably agree. Hence, the union’s wish to embark on a government-funded process to rewrite the schedule to eliminate, or at least significantly reduce, the risk of under-classification. As anyone who has followed this case knows, however, the FWC has rejected this course. At the hearing in late October, Hatcher delivered a minor tirade involving rabbits and hats when barrister Leo Saunders, appearing for the ASU, advocated setting aside the commission’s April interim decision and waiting until the classifications could be rewritten in a way that didn’t cut pay. Instead, the commissioners have taken a chainsaw to the whole structure—removing ambiguities in a way that will cut pay. The main way this has happened is by making qualifications the main criterion for determining a worker’s pay level. This would spell dramatic pay cuts for many thousands of community sector workers, many of whom have years or decades of practical experience but little in the way of degrees or higher qualifications. A few hundred words of nerdy analysis are [available here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wnfbQymGudn5V-aD0IwqC3AlVHskfFrlf-vDmHWnXNg/edit?usp=sharing&ref=redflag.org.au), detailing how this works. The short version is that the commission’s war against “ambiguity” in the name of “objective criteria” is, in large part, a war against clauses that workers, and sometimes employers, can use to justify a worker getting a living wage. The ASU’s solution to workers going backwards (beyond urging the FWC to scrap their whole approach) is threefold: raising the rates, introducing greater progression across the various levels and including “equal remuneration order preservation clause”. This would apply not just to existing employees but to all employees. It would ensure that the applicable award rate is whichever is the higher of the new schedule and the existing schedule, plus the equal remuneration order won by a union campaign in 2012—adjusted for future wage increases. This idea didn’t get any five-star reviews from the commissioners. And Saunders freely admitted it would be “extraordinarily difficult to apply in practice”. None of this, to put it mildly, is at all encouraging for workers in the sector. ### 3\. There are still bad and not-as-bad results possible from Fair Work’s decision As I’ve [previously reported](https://redflag.org.au/article/sharpening-the-knife-fair-work-takes-another-step-towards-community-sector-wage-cuts), and as was evident in spades at the commission five weeks ago, the commissioners aren’t at all inclined to accept the ASU’s primary submission. This is to abandon entirely the commission’s wage-cutting interim decision and instead start on a work value case, which the ASU hopes will lift wages in the sector. So unless something dramatic has happened during the confidential conferencing process in November, we’ll see some version of the FWC’s interim decision, or the ASU’s secondary submission, or some mash-up of the two, emerge in the next couple of weeks. Everything we know about these proposals suggests there will be cuts to award rates across large parts of the sector. There’ll be a fair bit of work to do sifting through the final decision to work out the details—how porous or rigid are the barriers between the levels? How strict is the wording regarding qualifications as the main factor in determining classification? Are there minimum classifications for particular roles? Without detailed modelling, it will be very difficult to work out the overall impact of the final structure across the sector. But it should be possible for everyone in the sector to look at the FWC’s revised decision when it’s released, work out where they would be classified and compare that to their current pay rate. It’s not science, but it will give an indication of how things will play out for each workplace and each part of the sector when the implementation date arrives. The implementation date of the new schedule is a crucial piece of the picture. The idea of a start date of July 2027, rather than 2026, for any new schedule setting SACS classification and pay was canvassed in the hearings in late October. Several parties, including both unions and the Australian Industry Group, favoured a later start date. A later start date might enable the ASU’s work value case to be completed before the implementation of any changes to the current SACS schedule. At least in theory, this would have the potential to undo some or all of the damage to workers’ pay rates from the outcome of the case, even before the new schedule is implemented. Regardless of the start date, though, if the result includes any pay cuts—which seems certain—the ASU campaign will have to continue and ramp up. This should mean city protests; more delegate training to work out what the best pitch to members is, and how to battle against the effects of the decision in every workplace and across the sector; more collective spaces like delegates’ and activists’ meetings in which debates can be had. Which gets to the final thought that kept distracting me on the fifteenth floor of the Fair Work Commission in late October. ### 4\. We need more Zelda D’Apranos—and need to revive the movement she was part of It’s perhaps the most famous worker action that’s ever happened in protest against a miserable result doled out by the Fair Work Commission or its predecessor organisations. It’s also the most dramatic and visible moment (so far) of the decades-long campaign for equal pay for women in this country. On 21 October 1969, [Zelda D’Aprano](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6222) chained herself to the doors of the Commonwealth building in Melbourne, which housed the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration. Like community sector workers protesting today, she was appalled at the outcome of an award review, which had the supposed objective of ending the gross, sexist underpayment of women. The award in question was the meat industry interim award. The female rate was $35.85 a week, compared to $44.25 for men. The ACTU and the Meatworkers Union ran a test case to abolish the lower, female, rate in the award and lift everyone up to the higher rate. D’Aprano was a Communist Party member and a staunch unionist. Like many community sector workers today, she’d helped to organise demonstrations outside the hearing. She’d sat in on the sessions. But any hopes of justice from the arbitration system were in vain. Socialist historian [Katie Wood](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/australian-unions-and-the-fight-for-equal-pay-for-women/?ref=redflag.org.au) writes that the decision in the 1969 equal pay case “was a bitter disappointment for those involved in the campaign”. The Arbitration Court laid down nine principles to be considered when deciding which women would receive equal pay, which meant the decision would benefit only a minority of women. And each union had to apply separately, meaning it would be several years before the limited benefits flowed through via the arbitration system. D’Aprano records in her autobiography: “\[A\] feeling of dejection and what can we do now prevailed ... knowing how people had become so despondent, \[we\] discussed the need for more dramatic action. I made a decision to protest against pay injustice meted out to women by chaining myself to the doors of the Commonwealth building, holding a placard which read: no more female and male rates – one rate only.” It’s this moment which is now immortalised in bronze by a statue of D’Aprano outside Melbourne’s Trades Hall building. D’Aprano’s dramatic demonstration was part of making history. And the most crucial part of that struggle, of course, was in a very different arena to the Arbitration Court. Katie Wood records: “The next battleground was not the courts but the metal shops. This reflected the limitations of the equal pay decisions and hostility from the bosses. Amalgamated Engineering Union members began local shop strikes to win equal pay, resulting in 90 percent of women members of the union receiving equal pay before the 1972 deadline. A corollary was of course the increase in female membership and activity in the union. The AEU journal declared: “‘Large numbers of female workers in unorganised shops became interested, and as a result our female membership has increased by 300 over the last two months, and a number of new shops organised. We now also have an increased number of female shop stewards ... \[A\] feature of the activity was the readiness of the women concerned to take industrial action to support their demand.’” All of this was in keeping with the times. Earlier in 1969, a mass strike had rolled around Australia, freeing union leader Clarrie O’Shea and smashing the anti-union penal powers. These laws had been used for decades to levy punitive fines on unions that dared to strike. In 1970, an epic five-week [mass strike](https://files.libcom.org/files/Chapter%203%20-%20the%201970%20margins%20strike.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) by builders’ labourers paralysed the construction industry in New South Wales. The result was possibly the fastest “work value” case in the history of the arbitration system, with building industry bosses begging the commission to quickly approve a massive pay rise to avoid further industrial unrest. Of course, we can’t just close our eyes, click our heels and transport ourselves back to those times. But we can keep our eyes open, study those battles and apply the lessons in the here and now. The experience of militant unionists and socialists in the ASU in 2009-12, when mass union protests played a crucial role in winning the equal remuneration order that significantly lifted wages in the community sector, contains many lessons. Veteran socialist and ASU member Adam Bottomley’s [recent talk](https://www.3cr.org.au/sticktogether/episode/equal-pay-campaign-asu?ref=redflag.org.au) to a meeting of [ASU Socialists](https://www.instagram.com/asusocialists/?ref=redflag.org.au), and [an article](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/still-fighting-for-equal-pay/?ref=redflag.org.au) co-authored by Adam with Cecilia Judge, are important material for both education and inspiration. Adam and Cecilia wrote in 2012: “We have won an important legal and moral victory, but the campaign also shows that even in a sector with little union tradition it is possible to organise and make important gains”. It’s up to a new generation of unionists to make this history again. ### We need a socialist NUS education officer who’ll stand up for Palestine URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/we-need-a-socialist-nus-education-officer-wholl-stand-up-for-palestine/ Last updated: 2025-12-06T03:33:24.000Z There’s a lot the National Union of Students, the peak representative body for tertiary students in Australia, should be fighting for. We are witnessing a genocide in Palestine, a housing crisis that has particularly affected young people, unfolding climate and environmental crises worldwide and the horrifying growth of the far right. Right now, Labor governments—federally and in most states—are continuing arms shipments to Israel, approving planet-destroying expansions of fossil fuel projects and refusing to cap rents or pour desperately needed funds into public housing. We need the NUS to campaign against governments that have picked the wrong side of every major political question facing students. That means overturning the [pact struck by student members of the Labor Party](https://redflag.org.au/article/labor-students-lock-out-left-from-the-national-union-of-students) to block Palestine solidarity activists from holding office-bearer positions in the union. The genocide in Gaza hasn’t ended. In fact, the entrenching of Israel’s occupation of Gaza is underway, and the Israeli military carries out atrocities daily. Some 350 or more Palestinians have been killed since the “ceasefire” was signed. Just last week, two young brothers, 8 and 10 years old, were killed in a drone strike while gathering firewood. The assassination of Fadi and Juma Abu Assi is just one more heart-wrenching reason why the campaign for Palestine needs to continue. We have a democratic mandate to continue to fight for Palestine. Polling over the last two years has shown a huge increase in the number of people who believe that the Australian government failed to act adequately to prevent Israel’s genocide in Gaza. More than two-thirds of people think Israel should stop its attacks on Gaza. Substantial majorities support Australia stopping all arms trade and agreements with Israel, and allowing peaceful pro-Palestine protests without penalties, according to recent [YouGov polling](https://www.deepcutnews.com/p/australians-overwhelmingly-back-sanctions?ref=redflag.org.au). Young people are [significantly more likely](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/08/albanese-government-israel-gaza-war-response-guardian-essential-poll?ref=redflag.org.au) than other sections of the population to be critical of the government’s failure to act against the genocide. Students have an important role to play in fighting for a free Palestine. Universities are up to their necks in the genocide. Every major campus in the country has partnerships with weapons companies and Israeli institutions involved in carrying out the genocide. University managers have spent the last two years implementing new anti-protest laws that restrict free speech, as the people’s i[nquiry](https://www.palestineinquiry.com/home?ref=redflag.org.au) into campus free speech has clearly demonstrated. Yet Labor students in the NUS are demonstrating that they would prefer, like their fellow Labor members in state and federal governments, that we forget about Gaza. Some of these Labor students claim to oppose the genocide. But the fact that they are willing to defend a right-wing plan to lock Palestine solidarity activists out of union positions, based on their criticisms of the government, tells the real story. This is why Socialist Alternative is campaigning for the education officer position in the National Union of Students—and it’s why I want to use that position to keep building our history-making movement. The education officer position *could* be used as a national coordination hub for campaigns to kick weapons companies off our campuses and to pressure our government to cut ties with Israel. If the current deal between the Labor student factions to lock out Palestine solidarity campaigners stands, we know that the union will lead no such campaigns. The failure of Labor students to use their numerous positions to make any serious criticisms of the Albanese government is evidence enough. It’s impossible to engage with students on the political issues that matter if you aren’t willing to fight the government currently causing the problems. Albanese’s government continues to make weapons deals with Israel, like the $20 million “iron fist” agreement with Elbit Systems this year. There have been at least 68 shipments of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel since October 2023, according to [Declassified Australia](https://declassifiedaus.org/2025/10/01/secret-cargo-f35-parts-pipeline/?ref=redflag.org.au). And Foreign Minister Penny Wong recently [told Sky News](https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/us-politics/foreign-minister-penny-wong-says-donald-trump-only-world-leader-who-could-have-minted-israelgaza-peace-plan/news-story/b8be2bd5e761774ec45c02b3d08fe4d4?ref=redflag.org.au) that US President Donald Trump’s disastrous plan for the occupation of Gaza “has been the greatest contribution to peace in the Middle East for a generation or more”. The appalling right-wing positions aren’t limited to the question of Palestine, either. The Labor Party demonstrates the same approach when it comes to questions of ending climate destruction, addressing the housing crisis and adequately funding higher education. This year, we’ve had a chance to see what we can achieve when steadfast pro-Palestine activists hold offices in the NUS. Students for Palestine activists held the education, queer and vocational education officer positions, and used them to engage and mobilise students in campaigns against weapons ties and Australian complicity in the genocide. Political institutions like the NUS must be prepared to take controversial and dissenting stands against the prevailing line in the political mainstream. In doing so, they can help give others the confidence to stand with us. We are going to need more of this attitude in a climate of increasing repression on campus and in society more broadly. We need a national union that’s up to the challenge. The NUS could spend the next year as a cheer squad for the Labor government. Or it could highlight the role our universities are playing in the injustice in Gaza, fight for the rights of students and staff to speak up about Palestine without fear and organise student protest action. This means standing up against the growing far right, which wants to push back movements against racism, and fighting the government, which has backed Israel’s genocide from the start. ### Mamdani and the dead-end of the Democrats URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/mamdani-and-the-dead-end-of-the-democrats/ Last updated: 2026-01-18T05:33:56.000Z **Some further reading:** ["Mamdani, that meeting and why the Left needs to wake up" by Sarah Garnham for Red Flag](https://redflag.org.au/article/mamdani-that-meeting-and-why-the-left-needs-to-wake-up) ["After the surreal summit" by Ashley Smith for Tempest](https://tempestmag.org/2025/11/after-the-surreal-summit/?ref=redflag.org.au) ### Labor students lock out left from the National Union of Students URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/labor-students-lock-out-left-from-the-national-union-of-students/ Last updated: 2025-12-22T03:36:03.000Z A coalition of Labor and self-described independent student unionists across Australia is planning to lock out pro-Palestine and socialist activists from the National Union of Students (NUS) at the body’s upcoming National Conference. The conference, taking place in Ballarat on 8–12 December, will elect NUS office-bearer positions for 2026\. This year, Socialist Alternative members hold three of those positions: queer, vocational education, and education (which I hold). We have used those positions to fight for a left-wing and activist national union. In particular, we pushed for the NUS to take an uncompromising and principled position of solidarity with the Palestinian people as our own government colluded in the Gaza genocide. Ahead of the National Conference, student Labor members of the right and left factions, along with nominal independents (for example, the group that runs the student guild at Curtin University) have signed a deal that will totally exclude socialist pro-Palestine activists from any office-bearer positions for 2026, even though Socialist Alternative has nearly 30 percent of the delegates at this year’s conference and is the second biggest faction in the NUS. The point of the lock-out, I was told by one of the Labor students who arranged it, is to have a national student union that won’t criticise or embarrass the Labor government but will instead cheer it on from the sidelines. They told me that Labor ministers wouldn’t want to meet with the NUS if it were anti-government. For starters, I consider it a job well done if our work in the NUS this year has made government ministers feel nervous at the prospect of meeting with us for fear of being publicly criticised. To any student who’s been living under the Albanese government rather than under a rock, it’s obvious that Labor deserves no praise from us. From the first, Labor has stood by Israel and its genocidal campaign in Gaza. More than just rhetorical support, the Australian government has continued to supply key components for Israel’s fleet of F-35 fighter jets as the bodies of Palestinians pile up. In Australia, Labor state governments have ramped up police powers and attacked the right to protest. They [tear down public housing](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/sep/29/as-melbournes-public-housing-high-rise-towers-await-demolition-some-residents-hold-out-against-relocation?ref=redflag.org.au) while hundreds of thousands, many students among them, struggle to keep a roof over their heads. The role of unions—on university campuses and in workplaces—should be to organise against any attack on our collective rights, wherever it comes from. Unions are meant to fight for a better world and to stand in solidarity with the struggles of the oppressed, be they students, workers, migrants, Indigenous people, or Palestinians. Today, that means campaigning against the Anthony Albaneses and Penny Wongs of the world. If the national student union refuses to even criticise the government—especially one so bankrupt as our current Labor government—it is fighting with both hands tied behind its back. More accurately, it is refusing to fight at all. That is what Labor students have set out to establish at this year’s National Conference. It makes sense when you remember that these students *are* the future Anthony Albaneses and Penny Wongs. For them, student unions are about building their careers and honing their craft as political operators. Those careers depend on their ability to shield the ALP from criticism, especially from the left, and build up the Labor Party machine on the campuses. It’s been harder to do that when socialists in the National Union of Students have spent the last year publicly condemning Labor for its complicity in a genocide. **Socialists in the NUS** This past year, the socialists in the NUS co-convened a People’s Inquiry that publicly exposed attacks on free speech by university bosses. We called a nationwide student strike that led university and high-school students off their campuses and into the streets to demand justice for Palestine. Most significantly, we organised the National Student Referendum on Palestine, in which more than 5,000 students voted on campuses across the country to condemn our universities’ and our government’s complicity in Israel’s genocide. This was the first nationwide student vote in decades, as [reported](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozskma2Zxyc&ref=redflag.org.au) on SBS program *The Feed*. Compare this with the achievements of our fellow NUS office-bearers in the ALP. Welfare Officer Lucy Fawcett, a member of the Labor right faction Student Unity, gave a presentation at the NUS Education Conference in July, which revealed that, after seven whole months in the position, all she had accomplished was launching a Student Wellbeing Survey that not even 100 students completed. This is typical of Labor students in the unions. Run some pointless survey that no-one will ever read so you can say you’ve been hard at it, “advocating” for students. Throw a couple of free food events into the mix and you can say you’ve been “[combating food insecurity](https://www.airmaster.com.au/post/airmaster-s-partnership-with-rusu-combats-student-food-insecurity-at-rmit-university?ref=redflag.org.au)“. The only thing close to an actual campaign initiated by Labor students in the NUS this year was a[ thinly veiled “vote Labor” campaign](https://www.instagram.com/p/DFww%5FNZyr7d/?hl=en&img%5Findex=1&ref=redflag.org.au) for the federal election. It’s a tale of two strategies. The socialist approach to student unions is to build them up as activist bodies that mobilise students to put them in the best position to defend their rights and win more. Labor students and other aspirational types see the unions as stepping stones to a career in parliament or in the trade union officialdom, so they suck up to university bosses and Labor politicians in particular. **Student life today** Sadly, Lucy has yet to publish the results of the Student Wellbeing Survey, so we can only imagine what fascinating insights it might contain. Let’s be real, though: you don’t need a Google Forms questionnaire to know that life is shit for students. The cost-of-living crisis is hitting young people like a ton of bricks, and university life gets worse every year. On several campuses, university bosses are planning [major cuts to courses and staff](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/aug/24/australian-university-course-cuts-jobs?ref=redflag.org.au). The very idea that higher education should be a fulfilling experience is giving way to a transactional and corporatised university model based on the grim accumulation of microcredentials. Broader political questions affect students, too. Globally, the far right has risen, and in Australia, it is increasingly setting the tone. Hatemongers like Pauline Hanson, whose One Nation party is now polling around up to 18 percent, are growing their base with a hardened racism that blames migrants, including international students, for the housing crisis. And then there’s Gaza: the crime of the century, carried out with the backing of the Albanese government. Students have watched in horror as it unfolded, and we have also thrown ourselves into the Palestine solidarity movement. We have protested, petitioned, donated, camped, rallied, locked on, turned up, fundraised, organised, learned, and educated—done everything we can to demand an end to the slaughter. Our universities have responded with [surveillance, censorship, and repression](https://redflag.org.au/article/peoples-inquiry-exposes-university-censorship-on-palestine). When challenged on their connections with the weapons companies that made the desolation of the Gaza Strip possible, our sandstone institutions have acted like tin-pot dictatorships. It is hard to imagine a situation in which an activist and left-wing student union movement—one that organised students into a force to be reckoned with—could be more sorely needed. Students don’t occupy the same position of strategic strength that workers do, but we do have power. In our numbers, we can disrupt, kick up a fuss, shut down a busy street. Our actions can inspire broader numbers in society to fight. Student unions are in a position to mobilise that potential and show students their power. Through our efforts in the NUS and in local student unions, socialists have shown what that could look like. We fought to make Palestine a live issue on the campuses. We pushed back on university attempts to silence political speech. At the ANU in Canberra, socialist students organised an impressive anti-cuts campaign this year, which toppled Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell and forced the university to shelve a planned “restructure”. **Rebuilding our unions** Labor students like to tell socialists that the ordinary student isn’t interested in protests or activism. They defend their conservative approach to student unionism behind the claim that they’re much more in touch with the needs and interests of *real* students, who supposedly want nothing more than an occasional sausage sizzle. Yet for every single student who filled in the NUS Student Wellbeing Survey, 50 turned up to vote in the National Student Referendum on Palestine, so the idea that “ordinary students” aren’t interested in protests just doesn’t hold water. In addition to the SBS report, the vote was featured on [Al Jazeera’s live news broadcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVUYyNoiw3A&ref=redflag.org.au), giving the NUS more high-profile media coverage than it has had in years. And while it’s true that not every university student wants to attend a rally these days, our unions should see this as a challenge to overcome, not a situation to gloat about. Any student unionist worth their salt should be seriously thinking about the next steps we need to take to rebuild an activist culture on the campuses where students feel empowered to fight for their rights and to demand more from a system that offers us less and less. That’s the approach that socialists take. And that’s exactly why the Labor students and their mates have teamed up to keep socialists out of the NUS next year. With two state elections in 2026 and the possibility that the Albanese government will send [Australian troops to occupy the Gaza Strip](https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/australian-troops-gaza-deployment-plans/barxp3cbw?ref=redflag.org.au), Labor students don’t want an NUS that can bring students out onto the streets to publicly condemn their own party. Their vision for the NUS is a troop of aspirational cheerleaders for the party of government. The campaigns organised by the socialists and pro-Palestine activists in the NUS, like the National Student Referendum on Palestine, demonstrate the potential for rebuilding a combative left-wing tradition on the university campuses. The situation in Australia today demands it. That is the goal that Socialist Alternative members in campus clubs across the country are working towards, inside and outside the NUS. ### Mamdani, that meeting, and why the left needs to wake up URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/mamdani-that-meeting-and-why-the-left-needs-to-wake-up/ Last updated: 2025-12-26T01:30:05.000Z Zohran Mamdani has revealed at astonishing speed that he is no leader of the left, no barrier to Trumpism, and certainly no champion of the working class. Before even being sworn in as mayor of New York City, he has already signalled to the capitalist class that he is safe and eager to play by their rules. Wall Street, the real estate industry, and business elites have all been courted. He kept Jessica Tisch—the hard-right police chief appointed by former mayor Eric Adams—and pledged to maintain NYPD numbers. He and fellow Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-aligned congressional representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez refused to support a DSA challenger to Democratic establishment kingpin Hakeem Jeffries. And now, the crowning humiliation: Mamdani sat down with US President Donald Trump to find areas where they could “work together”. This at a moment when Trump’s agenda grows more vicious by the day: the mass sackings, the Gestapo-like rounding up of immigrants, the love-in with the butcher of Gaza, the attacks on trans and women’s rights, the undermining of science and public health, the scrapping of environmental protections—the list goes on. And this at a moment when working-class people across the country are protesting Trump in record numbers—marching in the streets and putting their bodies on the line to stop Trump’s ICE brown-shirts kidnapping their neighbours and workmates. Mamdani was supposed to be the political expression of this resistance. He was supposed to be a voice for those in Trump’s crosshairs: “Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas”. as he promised in his victory speech. He pledged to “respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves”. But what Mamdani’s given us is a smiling photo-op with the world’s most tyrannical and dangerous ruling-class figure. God help us if anyone thinks this is socialism. “I am looking forward to delivering for New Yorkers in partnership with the president”, Mamdani said about the city’s most notorious parasite billionaire. The meeting was “productive” in addressing the cost-of-living crisis, Mamdani said, referring to the figure responsible for slashing funding for public education, food assistance and healthcare. Mamdani nodded and smiled, and nodded and smiled some more, as Trump dropped in references to all of his actual policies: deporting immigrants, increased policing, more hand-outs to property developers. The line being spun by Mamdani’s team and supporters is that this abject display of bootlicking constitutes a strategic masterstroke that has put Trump on the backfoot. This [statement](https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1355682693329968&set=a.201905705374345) from *Occupy Democrats* after the meeting was typical: “This was a masterclass on Mamdani’s part. He walked into the MAGA White House, conducted negotiations for the betterment of New Yorkers, and came out looking strong and respected. Meanwhile, Trump looked spineless and weak”. Yet Mamdani achieved not a single concession, not a single win. What Mamdani did achieve was a setback in the fight against Trump and his agenda. He succeeded in signalling to his supporters that Trump is not our enemy to oppose and challenge at every opportunity. At a time when Trump’s “populism” is being undermined by his Gatsby parties at Mar-a-Lago at the same time as food aid programs for the poorest Americans are being suspended, Mamdani helped him revive some of his “forgotten people” credibility. If Mamdani’s approach was masterful, then officials like Michelle Wu—the mayor of Boston who has refused to meet with Trump in protest at his anti-immigrant policies, among other things—must be woefully inept. What seems like principle, it turns out, is just bad political advice. In fact, we should be congratulating every head of state and every politician currently crawling after Trump—including the contemptible Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong—for their strategic genius. Every Democrat who has voted with Trump and capitulated to him should be lauded for their political acumen. Speaking truth to power is out; the age of fawning has arrived. The left should have no time for any of this. The only principled response to Trump is resistance. Yes, Trump controls the purse strings, but the powerful always do—that’s what makes them powerful. Our response can’t be appeasement so that we can fund free buses. Our response should be: let Trump cut off funding and make himself the enemy of free buses—then we’ll fight him some more. There is plenty of evidence that there is a basis for such a fight. The recent No Kings rallies saw record turnouts, and all across the country, people have been mobilised to defend themselves against the terror inflicted by ICE raids. Millions are choosing resistance, not appeasement and sucking up. At the very least, a self-proclaimed socialist should follow this lead. Genuine socialist politics is, at a bare minimum, about answering the power of the capitalist class, and its ability to sabotage and blackmail, with workers’ collective power. We use the weapons of *our* side—strikes, protests, walkouts—not theirs—schmoozing, sucking up, favour trading. We are not always strong enough to win the battles but by mobilising collectively on the streets and in our workplaces, and by refusing to capitulate, we demonstrate the way forward, gain experience and learn more about the sort of struggles that will be needed to win. The response to the Trump-Mamdani meeting has been just as instructive as the meeting itself. Right-wing, pro-Trump media celebrated Trump’s dominance and Mamdani’s acquiescence. The *Washington Post* opened its [editorial](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/21/zohran-mamdani-donald-trump-oval-office/?ref=redflag.org.au) with the quip: “What are a few deportation threats among friends?” Many Democrat-aligned outlets responded with respect and approval for the mayor-elect’s display of civility, which they believe won him the upper hand over Trump. Mara Gay in the *New York Times* [described](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/opinion/zohran-mamdani-trump-meeting-white-house.html?ref=redflag.org.au) Mamdani’s performance as: “a vivid display of political shrewdness and pragmatism”. The most unconvincing political interpretation came from the DSA—the organisation to which Mamdani belongs. Riffing off a Fox News statement that the meeting had been a “Showdown with Socialism”, the DSA posted on social media in response: “Socialism won!” It then put out a video snippet of the meeting with the caption: “Mamdani called Trump a fascist to his face”. Mamdani did no such thing. Trump saved him from having to answer the fascist question, thereby turning it to Trump’s advantage and making Mamdani look weak. This ludicrous claim was nothing but a desperate attempt to salvage left credibility from a disastrous political submission. Talk about fake news. DSA-aligned *Jacobin* has published numerous defences of Mamdani in a similar vein. One [piece](https://jacobin.com/2025/11/trump-mamdani-oval-office-meeting?ref=redflag.org.au)goes as far as to argue that because Trump once pledged to lower prices, Mamdani has enticed him to deliver. Another [piece](https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-democratic-socialism-trump-conservatives?ref=redflag.org.au) by Ben Burgis credits Mamdani’s obsequious behaviour for rescuing the reputation of socialists after Congress’s anti-socialist resolution. As if it is a win for the left that Mamdani has so emphatically proven he is no hardline socialist or oppositionist. In the same piece, Burgis also argues that democratic socialists of Mamdani’s ilk “want to empower workers and communities through social ownership and democratic control of society’s productive resources”. That this has nothing to do with Mamdani’s outlook does not appear to bother Burgis. And founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara has chimed in with a [long think piece](https://jacobin.com/2025/11/socialism-mamdani-dsa-organizing-leadership?ref=redflag.org.au) about everything that socialism is in the near and the long term, without even a fleeting consideration that maybe it doesn’t involve standing around smiling alongside a fascist in the White House. The approach from *Jacobin* and the DSA is to justify the inexcusable on the one hand while giving left cover on the other. [Once again](https://redflag.org.au/article/whatever-happened-to-the-squad), their aim is not to further working-class struggles but to defend their elected elites. For Sunkara “having patience and being supportive” of Mamdani is the highest priority. Power and relevance matters more than working-class power. This whole unsavoury episode raises broader questions about what the left should be fighting for. We know there is an audience for left-wing politics and solutions; polling shows it, the vote for Mamdani shows it. At the same time, people’s horizons are low, after years of neoliberalism, after defeats of the left and the general acceptance of liberalism. The fact that there has been no obvious backlash against Mamdani’s capitulation from his supporters tragically confirms this. But even before this capitulation, the fact that Mamdani was seen as a socialist in any sense reflects how drained of meaning the term has become, especially in the US. He is committed to working within the Democratic Party and there is nothing radical about his program of rent freezes, free public transport, and universal childcare. These are supportable measures, but they also fit within the parameters of capitalism. The crisis of capitalism requires much more radical solutions than this. We can’t pretend otherwise to avoid embarrassing progressive politicians. And we shouldn’t play down their limitations or be afraid to point them out when necessary. We need uncompromising resistance to the far right, and to capitalism. We need to understand that capitalism won’t be changed from on high by politicians committed to working within its structures, especially not those who capitulate at the first hurdle. As has always been the case, workers need to use their own power to win concessions, and to build up a democratic alternative to capitalism worthy of the name socialism. For years, the dominant sections of the US left have insisted that Bernie Sanders, AOC, and now Mamdani represent stepping stones toward socialism. Criticism was dismissed as sectarian. We were told the left needed patience, tact, and strategic flexibility. A decade on from Sanders, the “democratic socialist” current within the Democrats has produced no independent organisation, no class-rooted movement, no major struggles and no radical ideological current. Sanders reaffirmed his loyalty to the party of capital and empire. AOC voted to fund ICE and backed funding the Israeli war machine—and has been rewarded with a stable career in the liberal establishment. And now Mamdani, hailed as the next great hope, immediately dissolves into liberal conciliation before even taking office. We have also been told repeatedly by reformists and liberals that the electoral successes of figures like this can help build movements by raising expectations. But so far, that hasn’t happened. More often, people get dragged to the right justifying the manoeuvres of progressive politicians, or they become demoralised by the sell-outs, or just drift into passivity. On the far left, a version of this same argument is that when expectations are raised and then dashed (by betrayals and capitulations of reformist leaders), it is an opportunity for masses of people to learn important political lessons and break to the radical left. Sometimes this happens, but only when the far left and the workers’ movement are organised, have real weight in society and are politically confident. Without that, these disappointments often breed cynicism or push people back toward hopeless liberalism. . Moments like the Mamdani election might be opportunities for the revolutionary left to engage with newly politicised people. But the biggest danger is not “sectarian isolation”, it’s the opposite. The danger is that the genuine socialist left buys into the hype, lowers its standards and becomes a cheer squad for politicians whose main project is managing capitalism, not transforming it. If the left wants to defeat Trumpism and the capitalist system that produces it, we must confidently reject the strategies that led Mamdani into Trump’s office in the first place. We must not buy into illusions in reformist or liberal saviours, but remain committed to building grass-roots workers’ power as the first priority. And we must be committed to rebuilding a socialist movement rooted not in personalities or parliamentary manoeuvres, but in the independent power of the working class. ### Investors are making a killing from soaring house prices URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/investors-are-making-a-killing-from-soaring-house-prices/ Last updated: 2025-11-26T00:23:34.000Z House prices are soaring, and wealthy property investors are making a killing. Over the past year, the median national [house price](https://propertyupdate.com.au/latest-my-housing-market-home-prices-update/?ref=redflag.org.au) has surged 8.3 percent, or $96,424, to $1,253,522\. In Sydney, the median house price is now a shocking $1.75 million. Prices have risen fastest in the past couple of months, up by 1.1 percent in October alone. This jump in already unaffordable house prices is a consequence of a housing market that subordinates people’s need for a home to the profits of developers, wealthy investors and banks. Within that general framework, Labor’s 5 percent deposit scheme is supercharging price increases, and investors are benefiting at the expense of working-class households. Labor’s scheme allows first home buyers to apply for a mortgage with a 5 percent deposit, instead of the usual 20 percent. It is a policy that saddles buyers with more debt, increases competition at the lower end of the market and signals to sellers that they should hike prices to take advantage of purchasers’ increased borrowing capacity. *Red Flag* published [an article](https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-scheme-to-worsen-the-housing-crisis) about this policy last month, and the prediction that it would raise prices and make the housing crisis worse has already proven correct. Research by Cotality [reported](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-11/the-suburbs-and-towns-where-entry-level-house-prices-are-growing/105996180?ref=redflag.org.au) by the ABC shows that prices for properties that could be bought using the scheme increased much faster than those that couldn’t. For example, in Melbourne’s inner east, properties under the $1.5 million threshold increased by 1.7 percent in October, while those above it increased by 0.4 percent. Despite Labor’s assurances that the inflationary effect of the scheme would be minimal, property investors could spot the obvious: house prices were going to rise. Investors got in early, buying properties before the scheme began, in the expectation that prices would rise. As Greg Jericho reported in [the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2025/nov/13/the-5-first-home-buyers-scheme-is-a-miserable-policy-failure-and-the-latest-chapter-in-australias-housing-disgrace?ref=redflag.org.au), investor lending in September rose 18 percent, the biggest increase in twenty years, and investor loans are at their highest point since 2017\. Those investors are now making significant gains. If you’re able to buy a third, fourth, fifth or 100th property, a scheme sold as helping struggling working-class families is delivering you windfall returns. The median-priced property you bought in September is already worth almost $20,000 more in just two months, and with prices predicted to keep rising, so too will your profits. It is the rich who are benefiting from this Labor-backed investment bonanza, not the “mums and dads” of political myth. “The Everyman Archetype”, a [2019 study](https://documents.parliament.qld.gov.au/com/CSSC-0A12/HLAB2021-37A9/tp-20july21-2.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) published in the *Housing Studies* journal, found that households that own investment properties have, on average, double the income and three times the net wealth of those who don’t. The professions that claim the most tax breaks for rental properties are surgeons, anaesthetists and barristers. Only around 15 percent of Australian households own an investment property, and the majority of properties are owned by those who have two or more. Only 2,500 investors own more than ten properties, 172 investors own twenty or more properties, and the top 1 percent of investors own 25 percent of all properties. Contrary to another myth, these investors are predominantly not foreign buyers or migrants. Data from [the Australian Tax Office](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/foreign-buyers-china-hk-india-want-australian-property-housing/104024004?ref=redflag.org.au) show that in 2023-24, foreign buyers purchased only 1 percent of properties. There are no direct statistics on how many migrants are property investors, but a [Propertytology](https://www.propertyology.com.au/the-truth-about-australian-housing-and-overseas-migration/?ref=redflag.org.au) report based on Bureau of Statistics data found that, between 2013 and 2023, recent migrants accounted for 7 percent of all property purchases, including owner-occupied purchases, so they can hardly make up a significant number of investors. It’s people like Nathan Birch who are getting rich from property, not ordinary mums and dads or migrants. Nathan owns 300 properties worth almost $250 million and dreams of becoming a billionaire. Earlier this year, he told the [*Daily Telegraph*](https://www.realestate.com.au/news/aussie-who-owns-more-than-300-homes-drops-bombshell/?ref=redflag.org.au): “My goal is to have 10,000 properties one day ... I hope that when I die, my life will be like a corporate entity”. Asked whether she thought that Labor’s deposit scheme was a failure, Housing Minister Clare O’Neil told the[ ABC](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-12/are-five-per-cent-first-home-deposits-pushing-up-prices/105979708?ref=redflag.org.au), “What these numbers tell us is that this program is working”. Working for who? It’s not working for working-class households, who are being gaslit by Labor policies that promise to make housing more affordable but only increase the profits of the rich. ### Understanding the net zero circus URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/understanding-the-net-zero-circus/ Last updated: 2025-11-26T00:21:19.000Z In a public farce, the Liberal federal party room officially abandoned its support for reaching net zero emissions by 2050\. Despite the hue and cry in mainstream politics, Australia’s climate trajectory is unlikely to be affected by the decision. As Adam Morton noted in the *Guardian*, at least there’s some honesty in the decision—the Liberals and Nationals never supported net zero anyway. The significance of the Liberals’ abandonment of net zero can be understood as a symbol of bigger political dynamics. It’s a victory for the conservative factions of the Liberals in their battle to pull the party further to the political right. And it’s an indication of the impact that the global far right is having on Australian conservatives. Net zero targets took off as a global greenwashing fad in 2021, supported by former US President Joe Biden, former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Net zero never meant zero carbon emissions, or even reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it involves “offsetting” emissions: net zero is the magical moment when the amount of carbon dioxide released is roughly equal to the amount being “offset”. There are three main problems with the approach. First, the offsetting technologies do not work—at least, not anywhere near the level needed to offset the billions of tonnes of CO2 emitted every year. Second, even if these technologies did work, the net zero approach assumes it is possible to reduce the effects of greenhouse gases on the environment by simply swapping them in and out, like a Catholic trading repentance for sin each Sunday. In reality, the myriad consequences of fossil fuel extraction, refinement and combustion and the subsequent impacts of rising temperatures on the environment and human society are impossible to measure and contain within a spreadsheet equation. Last, net zero was designed to allow countries to “commit” to targets that require no disruption to big business profits. They can be agreed on without disrupting production in the coal, gas or oil industries. That the target was unveiled by former PM Scott Morrison four years ago speaks volumes. Morrison, champion of the “gas-fired recovery”, famous for fondling coal in parliament and fleeing to Hawaii while the country burned, viewed net zero as a veil for covering his crimes against the planet. Given that the net zero target was meaningless to begin with, but provided a modicum of green cover, it’s reasonable to question why the Liberals would make such a fuss about dropping the policy. As support for it has become somewhat synonymous with action on climate change, the prevailing opinion among political commentators is that dropping net zero is electoral suicide. But there’s more to it. For one, polling conducted by the Resolve Political Monitor in early November suggests that public opinion on net zero has shifted since 2021, most notably among Liberal voters. Overall, almost a third of voters preferred ditching net zero; just 17 percent of Coalition voters indicated they want Australia to keep the target and do everything it can to reach it. Among One Nation and National Party voters, support for net zero was even lower. It’s not hard to see the electoral logic for the right. Ditching net zero will likely cost the Liberals moderate city voters, but it’s part of a broader right-wing political program aimed at winning back votes from the likes of One Nation, which is polling at record highs. Whether this is a viable strategy remains uncertain, as the Liberals have continued to haemorrhage votes to their right since ditching net zero. But for people like Andrew Hastie, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Angus Taylor, there’s more to politics than immediate electoral victory. This confounds mainstream commentators, who have largely maintained since Labor’s 2022 election victory that the Liberal Party must reorient to the moderate centre, cut back on the culture wars and resolve factional bickering if it is to return to government. This is not what is happening. Dumping net zero is only the latest step in the long march of the party’s hard right and conservative factions, part of a very public battle to shape the party in their own image. These are people with a vision for society, one that fits with the new hard-right norms of the Western world, and they are seeking to transform the Liberal Party into a vehicle for the world they want to see. Perhaps the worst outcome of the Liberal Party dumping net zero is the greenwashing service it offers the Labor government. The government’s net zero plan is a hoax, designed to cover for its commitment to expanding fossil fuel production. But with the Coalition as the perfect foil, Labor can carry on its climate wrecking beneath a mask of lesser evilism. Undoubtedly, Labor’s record of deceit on climate policy and net zero has helped to build widespread scepticism about climate action and renewable energy. Amid the cost-of-living crisis and rising energy prices, in which Labor has overseen the destruction of working-class living standards, the right has exploited net zero scepticism by playing to concerns about the affordability of renewables and linking renewables to the agenda of “woke elites”. This emerging common sense is far from inevitable. Tackling the climate crisis is fundamentally in the interest of working-class people across the country, who already face the uneven burden of climate disasters. To turn the situation around, we need to ditch the pro-business sham of net zero. Tackling climate change requires challenging the profits of fossil fuel bosses, bringing the fossil fuel industry into public hands and massively expanding public investment in renewable energy. ### Trump’s final frontier of warfare URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/trumps-final-frontier-of-warfare/ Last updated: 2025-11-26T00:18:55.000Z “We will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” These were the words US President Donald Trump used in his inauguration address in January to declare a new phase in the second Space Race. By invoking Manifest Destiny—the ideology of the colonisation of North America and genocide of the indigenous population—Trump is staking out the US’s claim over space against its rivals. Trump’s second presidency has dramatically shifted towards the increased militarisation of space. The budget for the Space Force, a section of the US military under the Air Force established by Trump in his first term, increased by more than US$11 billion to almost US$40 billion this fiscal year. This is part of a US$113 billion increase in the overall military budget to more than US$1 trillion, which a White House [budget summary document](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) says is in part to “revive the warrior ethos of America’s Armed Forces”. Even ostensibly civilian agencies like NASA are being drawn in. As with many other areas of government spending, Trump has savagely cut NASA’s budget—except in areas relevant to waging war. Almost everything else has had its funding eviscerated: funding for climate science has been cut in half, astrophysics by two-thirds, and public engagement is entirely gone. Among the flurry of executive orders Trump signed at the beginning of his second term was one directing the Department of Defense to begin development of what would come to be known as the Golden Dome. This would be a network of projectile detection and interception infrastructure designed to destroy inbound missile attacks, much like Israel’s infamous Iron Dome and already existing anti-missile systems operated by the US military. Unlike the Iron Dome, the Golden Dome will not be based on the ground, but in Earth orbit. In reality, it will be less of a dome and more of a sphere made up of thousands of satellites sweeping across the sky above anywhere and everywhere on the planet. The satellites will be equipped with advanced rockets, lasers or particle beams designed to destroy nuclear warhead-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as soon as they’re launched by enemies of the US empire, instead of later on in their flight path. The idea isn’t new. An orbital missile “defence” system was first proposed in 1983 by then-US President Ronald Reagan in the form of the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars”, but it was never realised. Now technology has advanced such that the prospect of American weapons literally hanging over all of our heads at all times is within reach. Our planet’s orbit has been used for waging war for decades already. The US has had secret surveillance satellites collecting imagery of the Earth’s surface since as early as 1960, only two years after the first American satellite of any kind was put in orbit. Since then, satellite images have been extremely valuable intelligence for American wars around the world. Images from American satellites were shared with Israel as it executed its genocidal campaign of destruction in Gaza over the last two years. The National Reconnaissance Office, the US’s secretive department for space-based surveillance, has been working on putting potentially over a hundred satellites in orbit that can see the same level of detail as the Hubble Space Telescope—the difference is that these spy satellites are pointed down at us instead of out into space. The cherry on top of this global panopticon is the involvement of Elon Musk and his company SpaceX, which provides orbital communications for the US military through its Starshield satellite constellation. The militarisation of space is not uniquely American. Ever since the end of World War Two, the conquest of space has been seen as a vital element of global imperial domination. Space Race One, between the US and USSR at the height of the Cold War, has been mythologised as a competition of exploration, culminating in putting humans on the moon and returning them safely home. The reality is that it was an intense arms race with a simple logic: if you can land a rocket carrying people on the moon, you can also land an ICBM carrying a nuclear warhead on your enemy. Space Race Two is between the US and China. Both have plans to put humans on the moon in the next decade and have their sights set on even more distant landings. If they come to fruition, we will likely see humans walk on an extraterrestrial body again soon. But the main factor motivating these excursions to far-flung places is not so much the places themselves, but how they help the imperialist powers better dominate Earth. China has its own constellation of intelligence-gathering satellites, and has also been developing its capabilities for space-based warfare. In January 2007, China flexed its muscles by successfully destroying one of its own satellites with a missile launched from the ground. The *South China Morning Post* [reported](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3327224/china-fields-golden-dome-prototype?ref=redflag.org.au) in September that China has an operational prototype of a missile “defence” system similar to the proposed Golden Dome. That there may be not only one but two planet-engulfing machines of observation and destruction is terrifying. It foreshadows how much deadlier an all-out war between the US and China would be than any previous war. Governments in all of the most powerful countries are dragging us towards such a conflagration with their [exploding military budgets](https://redflag.org.au/article/world-military-spending-explodes). The drive to war must be opposed wherever it happens: sea, land, sky or above. ### Why did the Nazis call themselves socialists? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-did-the-nazis-call-themselves-socialists/ Last updated: 2025-12-11T03:02:38.000Z The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was founded in 1920, with Adolf Hitler not yet a member but a major influence. If, as we all know, they were a fascist party, why did they include the word “socialist” in their name? And how are we to understand that today? To start with, we must remember that the word socialism has historically been used to represent widely differing political views. Karl Kautsky, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), wrote in 1888 that Thomas More and Thomas Muenzner were two great socialists and that both of them “follow the long line of socialists, from Lycurgus and Pythagoras to Plato, the Gracchi, Cataline, Christ ...” The common concept is some form of collective management of society—that human needs should be met socially rather than just individually. At the time the Nazi party was formed, there were probably dozens of organisations and parties in Europe calling themselves socialist. Most had developed during the nineteenth century. Some advocated a form of socialism to be handed down by the state or, like the Fabians in Britain, a society to be designed by an elite. But Karl Marx and others proposed something entirely different: a new society to be brought about by the self-activity of the masses, particularly the working class. The Fabians recognised this distinction and talked about “a distinct rupture between the Socialism of the street and the Socialism of the chair”. So historically, despite the many forms of socialism being argued for and parties being established, there were, and continue to be, two main currents, which Hal Draper called socialism from above and socialism from below. This is a way of looking at the history of socialist ideas. But in the period immediately following World War One, there was an extremely sharp crisis in what these ideas meant in practice. On the one hand the SPD, the largest and most influential socialist party in Europe for decades, had repudiated its politics of international solidarity in 1914 and supported the German war effort. On the other hand, the revolution in Russia in 1917 overthrew traditional ideas and presented what at the time was an astonishing new idea of what socialism would look like—workers’ councils and the complete overthrow of the ruling class. And they added a new word, “communist”. So the meaning of words like “socialist” were quite fluid at that time, and therefore ripe for exploitation. This was the situation when German fascists first set up the German Workers’ Party (*Deutsche Arbeiterpartei* or DAP) in 1919\. The party changed its name to National Socialist German Workers’ Party (*Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei* or NSDAP) in 1920\. Why? The reason is that fascists have always attempted to gain influence in the working class, as a way of recruiting shock troops. The British Brothers League, a short-lived proto-fascist organisation prior to World War One, had a strategic orientation to the working class in the East End of London, where it could mobilise support by rehashing old charges: that Jews were ousting locals from jobs and houses and that they were the cause of crime. Formed in 1932, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) did not initially focus on Jews. Its core ideas at the start were nationalism, corporatism (in which social and economic interest groups control the state) and anti-communism—the corporatism gave it a semi-socialist gloss. In 1935, the party turned to building what David Rosenberg called a “belligerent street-level populist movement of agitation and provocation in predominantly working-class areas surrounding Jewish populations”. This strategy reached its peak in 1936, when their attempted march through the East End led to the mass opposition in Cable Street by more than 100,000 Jews and non-Jews. Mussolini also had an orientation to a corporatist state and used this to try to coopt workers. The Nazi party and Hitler derived their strategy from him—in the early days, while they were still building a base, they used populist and anti-big business rhetoric to appeal to disaffected workers and the lower middle classes. But at the same time, the party wanted to appeal to extreme right, racist, anti-communist and militarist traditions. As a result of this dual orientation, the name of the party is a mishmash: they tried to draw upon both left-wing and right-wing sentiments—socialist and workers on the one hand, and national and German on the other. In doing this, the Nazis were continuing a longstanding tradition of the German right—attempts to gain traction among workers, combined with antisemitism. Otto von Bismarck was the first German chancellor after unification in 1871\. His court chaplain, Adolf Stöcker, set up the antisemitic Christian Social Workers’ Party in 1878\. He hoped to foment hostility against non-Christians (i.e. Jews) among the SPD-voting working class. But when this failed, the word “worker” was removed from the party’s title and, instead, they targeted the petty bourgeoisie with their antisemitic message. After the end of World War One, there was rapid growth among nationalist, anti-monarchist and antisemitic currents in Germany, which provided a fruitful recruitment ground for Hitler. Although the Nazis presented themselves as anti-capitalist, this was largely conceived in antisemitic terms. Although they initially relied mainly on propaganda, coercive force began with the creation of an extreme right-wing militia in 1918\. It comprised discharged soldiers out of which Jews, leftists and workers were screened, though it was fronted by a Social Democrat, Gustav Noske. The Free Corps, or *Freikorps*, was 400,000 strong and commanded by officers drawn from the nobility. It was dissolved as an organisation in the mid-1920s, as Klaus Fischer explains, but the members went on to form “the vanguard of Nazism and ... produced the Judeophobic mentality that subsequently defined Hitler’s political foot soldiers”. There were other roots as well. Anton Drexler, for example, was a militant nationalist who opposed Germany’s loss of land in the Treaty of Versailles. Drexler also argued for a form of national corporatism in which profit-sharing would increase welfare for middle-class Aryans and would override class society by creating a “people’s community” (*Volksgemeinschaft*). It was these sorts of ideas that they could label “socialist”. It was Drexler who founded the DAP, but this was just one of many “völkisch” parties that flourished during the early Weimar Republic period of economic chaos and political instability (1918-1933). The party announced its 25-point manifesto in 1920, signposting much of Hitler’s later strategy—German expansion, especially to the east, Jew hatred and subordination of class interests to the state. At the same time, the party moved from discussion group to campaigning and agitation, particularly among disaffected young unemployed men. They were very open to the type of “blood and soil” nationalism of the *Freikorps* and other right-wing organisations. In 1923, the party grew rapidly to 20,000 members, cashing in on a rise in nationalist sentiment after France occupied the Ruhr industrial region. Antisemitism turned from propaganda to action in Berlin in November, with a pogrom in the *Scheunenviertel*, the area inhabited by poor and working-class Jewish refugees from eastern Europe. The trigger was the failure of the unemployment office to pay out entitlements, which rabble-rousers blamed on Jewish speculation. However, the actions were clearly well planned, as local racists were joined by a mob of up to 30,000 people whipped up by inflammatory speeches throughout Berlin. Police stood by while they beat up Jews in the streets and attacked Jewish homes and businesses. When the police did move into action, they arrested not the pogromists but hundreds of Jews on charges such as disturbing the peace! It is not clear who the leaders of the pogrom were, but it demonstrates the atmosphere of the time: rightists attempting to divert working-class attention towards scapegoating Jews. It is likely no accident that Hitler’s failed coup, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, occurred only a few days later, on 9 November. The Nazis continued their activities among the working class through their paramilitary Storm Detachment (*Sturmabteilung* or SA) starting in the early 1920s. One prominent activist was Horst Wessel, a leading participant in the extensive street fighting with Communists and other leftists in “Red Berlin” through the late 1920s. Assassinated by Communists in 1930, he became a martyr for the fascist cause. A song he had written became known as the Horst Wessel Song. Interestingly, the music was taken from a communist songbook. The fighting continued after his death. For instance, Communist Anti-Fascist Action engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Nazi stormtroopers. In Prussia between 1 June and 20 July 1932, street fighting between them killed 30 Communists and 38 Nazis. The Nazi party never changed its name, but its approach to workers—and bosses—changed completely after it gained power in 1933\. Having rammed through enabling legislation to give himself emergency powers, Hitler set about implementing the *Volksgemeinschaft*. But in no way did this have anything in common with socialism. With his slogan “One People, one Empire, one Leader” (*Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer*), Hitler attacked and incarcerated communists, socialists, trade unionists, Jews, liberals, queer people and oppositionists of all kinds. He also purged his own Nazi stormtroopers in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. While Hitler was first to last antisemitic, after he gained power, he focused first on the labour movement and only moved against Jews later on. The reason was that he had to destroy the left before advancing his full antisemitic program. He knew he had to destroy the movement that would provide the best defence for his victims. Hitler took care to remain securely within the capitalist economic framework, including private property and free competition. This made him very attractive to large sections of the capitalists and the educated classes. In February 1933, Hitler met with 25 leading industrialists, including weapons magnate Krupp and representatives of chemical giant IG Farben, who pledged financial and other support for the Nazis. They were well repaid by Hitler’s suppression of the working class and trade unionism. By the end of the 1930s, the full name of the Nazi party was less in the public eye than the shortened version—National Socialists. The Nazis themselves only rarely used the term Nazi (an abbreviation of the German pronunciation of the first word in the name). The word was most often used as a term of ridicule by opponents: it already existed as a short form of the name Ignatius, common in Hitler’s home region of Bavaria, and implied a backward peasant. The NSDAP’s name was therefore a ruse. As historian Ishay Landa says, “The trick was to benefit from the popularity of socialism, which was widely seen as the force of the future, but at the same time to distance themselves as much as possible from its substance”. We should not allow ourselves to fall for the trick. ### Socialist strategy in trade unions URL: https://redflag.org.au/podcasts/socialist-strategy-in-trade-unions/ Last updated: 2026-01-18T05:35:41.000Z _No content available._ ### The socialist left has an opportunity—and a responsibility URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-socialist-left-has-an-opportunity-and-a-responsibility/ Last updated: 2025-12-06T04:02:45.000Z Over the last year, the mask has come off: fascism is back as a global movement. The “right-wing populist” label, long used to obscure the rise of ultra-nationalist, anti-left bigotry, has increasingly been revealed for what it is. In country after country, neo-Nazis, fascists and far-right nationalists have dragged mainstream politics to the right—by winning national elections, by becoming the dominant opposition or by infiltrating existing conservative parties. As they have done so, feckless liberal and social democratic parties have capitulated down the line, often trying to prove that they, too, can practice the politics of inhumanity—bowing to the powerful, menacing the powerless and callously discarding workers and the poor like pieces of trash. Predictably, the beneficiaries have been billionaires and capitalists. In the United States since President Trump was elected, Oxfam, a charity, estimates that the wealth of the ten richest people has surged nearly US$700 billion. While this obscene trough gouging has proceeded, the federal government has announced some $1.2 trillion in cuts to working-class welfare and health programs. In Australia, Foodbank, a charity, estimates that one in three households experienced food insecurity in the past year. At the same time, Gina Rinehart, the country’s richest person, increased her personal wealth by nearly $6 billion. She is now rumoured to be backing One Nation, which, according to a recent Redbridge poll, has grown its support to 18 percent—not far behind the Coalition on 24 percent. Meanwhile, thousands have marched in anti-immigration rallies led by open neo-Nazis, and polls show that greater numbers of people believe migrants are the cause of the country’s cost-of-living pressures. The political mainstream is doing nothing to challenge any of this, or to fight for the working class. The Greens seem caught in an interminable contradiction between the aspirations of their wealthy middle-class membership and parliamentarians, and the wants of young voters squeezed by the economic system that has enriched the party’s old guard. In working-class suburbs, Labor’s vote has been declining for years. With the ALP’s rule-for-the-rich approach, and its fawning over big corporate interests, the danger is that the fascists will continue to grow here as they have elsewhere. Yet in many Western countries, there is evidence that the capitalist status quo and its far-right outgrowths can be challenged. Where the left has gotten its act together, it has tapped the well of discontent. Again and again over the last decade, self-identified socialists have galvanised support for a program of wealth redistribution away from the billionaires to workers, and against bigotry and division: Bernie Sanders in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France and, more recently, Zohran Mamdani in New York. The limitations of these electoral projects have also been exposed, one of which is that they have been bound up with leaders not under the control of a socialist party—leaders who, once elected or in a position of authority, act more like the freewheeling politicians they claim to differ from. Mamdani’s recent friendly meeting with global fascism’s hero, Donald Trump, and his sucking up to the NYPD and New York’s billionaire class show the limitations of “getting left-wing faces into high places”. While it is shocking just how low Mamdani has stooped here, the direction was predictable. As we wrote after his June victory in New York’s Democratic primary election: “Recognising these positives \[that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers voted against the establishment and for Mamdani’s left-wing program\] doesn’t mean drinking the Kool-Aid of municipal socialism ... Without the backing of a mass socialist party and an insurgent working-class movement, even the most principled of revolutionary Marxists would be incapable of withstanding the institutional and ruling-class pressures that are brought to bear on the chief executive of capitalism’s most important city. Given the current balance of class forces, a moderate like Mamdani has no chance.” So while socialists have an opportunity to provide an alternative to the centre and the far right, they also have a responsibility not to bullshit people that politics can be changed if only the right person is elected. One clear lesson from the rest of the world is that getting people excited enough to vote is not enough. A socialist movement encourages a shared understanding that the world can be fundamentally changed only by the mass, collective action of the working class fighting for its own interests. The role of a socialist party is not primarily to run in elections, but to build a self-confident movement—one capable of engaging in electoral politics in a principled way and, where relevant, using elected officials to build the movement, rather than simply mobilising workers’ sentiments at the ballot box to advance the politicians’ positions. In Australia, the project of establishing a Socialist Party has attracted more than 4,000 new members in a matter of months. The party’s total financial membership, 5,400, is larger than the Greens’ national membership was in 2002 after nearly a decade of party building. Nothing like this new socialist party has existed in generations. So there is an opportunity here, as in other parts of the world, to build a socialist movement that can challenge politics as usual. Longstanding socialists ought to join the project and help train a new generation of working-class fighters to understand that they themselves have the potential power to overthrow capitalism. ### Chicago’s fightback against Trump’s deportation machine URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/chicagos-fightback-against-trumps-deportation-machine/ Last updated: 2025-12-06T04:02:30.000Z The administration of US President Donald Trump launched a new wave of raids, arrests and harassment of immigrant communities in Chicago at the beginning of September. The ongoing attack, dubbed Operation Midway Blitz, follows the pattern of previous escalations in Los Angeles and Washington, DC: a campaign of shock and awe unleashed alongside de facto impunity for a range of abuses by agents from the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies. At the same time, community resistance to the attacks has grown into one of the main fronts against Trump’s agenda, as people find creative and inspiring ways to protect their neighbours and fight back. Chicago resident and member of the Tempest Collective **brian bean** has been part of rapid response networks to obstruct the federal operations in the city. They spoke to **Brendan Stanton** over Zoom on 13 November about the impact of Trump’s escalation operation and the resistance to it. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. --- ### **What has been the day-to-day experience in Chicago during this blitz?** In many neighbourhoods, there are continual encounters with these agents. It is ICE, Border Patrol and DHS driving around, raiding workplaces and grabbing people off the streets. There is a nearly constant presence of guys in SUVs masked up, with flak jackets and weapons, on the hunt. There have been military-style raids, like at the apartments on the South Side. They basically[ raided an entire apartment complex](https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/03/us/chicago-apartment-ice-raid?ref=redflag.org.au), took out kids and zip-tied them and had them standing on the side of the road. More routine raids happen at workplaces and houses all the time. Last week, two agents[ went into a daycare centre](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/05/chicago-ice-agents-detain-daycare-worker?ref=redflag.org.au), grabbed a worker and smashed her against the glass door. They brutally arrested her while the children watched on. There is disproportionate targeting of Latinx neighbourhoods and more diverse neighbourhoods with a higher density of immigrants, like where I live. You’re certainly not seeing the same raids in the fancy high-rises downtown. But at the same time, there has been activity in neighbourhoods that has been a bit surprising. ICE agents have been rolling through regularly in some more affluent areas and targeting people there as well, like where the daycare centre raid happened. While there’s a disproportionate focus on Brown, Black and immigrant neighbourhoods, the breadth of the scale of the attacks means they seep into other places as well. During raids, people stand up to confront agents and stand up for their neighbours, and the agents routinely respond with tear gas on residential streets, even outside an elementary school and a Halloween parade. Suburbs have also become a site of struggle, specifically in Broadview at the [ICE detention facility](https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-11-06/two-trials-in-chicago-reveal-the-brutality-inside-and-outside-the-broadview-migrant-detention-center.html?ref=redflag.org.au), where the kidnapped people are taken. There has been an almost daily street fight in front of this prison. At a minimum, people stand as witnesses against the kidnappings. At a maximum, they’re trying to stop the kidnappings with civil disobedience. When protesters sit down to block the ICE vans, agents and the state police in military-style armour attack them with pepper bullets, copious tear gas and all sorts of other riot weapons. The immigration regime has created a constant presence of militarised terror to confront resistance at this centre. ### **Who is leading these raids?** Border Patrol is at the forefront of these attacks, and they are more paramilitary than ICE agents, who are usually in plain clothes, although with masks and flak jackets. Operations use several agencies, with Border Patrol at the head coordinating with DHS, ICE, the FBI and even the ATF—the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Gregory Bovino is the leader of the operation. He’s the same intensely right-wing commander in Border Patrol who directed the Los Angeles escalation, and he’s been intent on[ making it a spectacle](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/07/trump-border-patrol-gregory-bovino/683617/?ref=redflag.org.au). Bovino has a film crew follow him around, making [videos](https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/11/06/watch-how-government-propaganda-techniques-portray-chicago-as-a-city-at-war-with-the-feds?ref=redflag.org.au) depicting these Border Patrol and ICE agents as some sort of war heroes. His team produces segments with dramatic music as the agents brutally arrest people and suppress protests. A few weeks into his operation, there was a moment outside Broadview when protesters were not being particularly antagonistic—just standing on the side of the road. All of a sudden, Border Patrol agents came out in heavy military gear with Bovino at the head—the only person without a helmet on. Three guys with cameras surrounded him, before he gestured in this dramatic way, and the agents just charged at the demonstrators. They pushed people back and arrested a couple of people who were not really doing anything, just to make a movie, like an advertisement, for the operation. You can see how it’s also a political escalation, targeted at “blue” cities with Democratic Party leadership and any semblance of progressive politics. The videos are designed to create the fiction of a war between supposedly brave federal agents and dangerous, faceless “antifa” protesters. It’s about promoting a narrative that these cities are unmanageable bastions of riotous activity that require the strong man Trump to regulate them. ### **What is the relationship between federal agents and local police?** Chicago is a sanctuary city and a sanctuary state, and so, by law, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) is not supposed to assist with immigration enforcement—nor stop it. On the ground, it appears that the police are taking a hands-off approach and not aiding the raids themselves. That being said, when ICE agents are met with protests, they claim things are out of control, and they call in the CPD to do crowd control. For instance, last week, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum[ shot a woman](https://abcnews.go.com/US/5-shots-7-holes-border-patrol-supervisor-appeared/story?id=127249645&ref=redflag.org.au), Marimar Martinez, and even bragged about it. (He texted friends: “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”). A couple of months before, Border Patrol[ shot and killed](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/immigrant-shot-dead-chicago-ice-villegas-gonzalez-family-answers-rcna231952?ref=redflag.org.au) Silverio Vallega Gonzalez, and provided dubious information about the circumstances of his death. These tragedies triggered immediate protests, and Border Patrol then called in the Chicago Police to do crowd control, or what we call suppressing the protest. Additionally, at the Broadview facility, \[Illinois Governor\] J.B. Pritzker consistently deploys state police to protect ICE and the Border Patrol operations. At daily protests against the kidnapping of community members, protesters are[ confronted by State Police](https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/12/protesters-keep-getting-arrested-at-broadview-by-state-police-despite-promise-to-protect-free-speech/?ref=redflag.org.au) with four-foot-long wooden batons, who mete out violence and random arrests. Pritzker is a Democratic governor positioning himself to run in the next presidential election. Many liberals would say he has put himself forward as a face of resistance and spoken very strongly against Trump and against the ICE escalation in Chicago. But, in reality, he’s a billionaire who runs the state as a billionaire would. His big words and a legal fight against Trump come at the same time his state police are at Broadview beating and arresting protesters, trying to suppress the movement, every day. ### **What has resistance against the attacks looked like?** There have been large demonstrations like the No Kings march and semi-regular protests against ICE downtown. However, the more exciting and hopeful form of resistance has been a[ flowering of community rapid response networks](https://inthesetimes.com/article/ice-trump-chicago-immigrants-rapid-response?ref=redflag.org.au). Most areas of the city have self-organised groups of neighbours coordinating to respond to immigration enforcement activity—and these networks are massive. In my neighbourhood, for instance, the rapid-response Signal group actually reached its membership limit. I’ve never seen that before. People in these networks patrol areas with vulnerable people, watch for suspicious activity and quickly share information about where agents are. They blow whistles and yell at agents, sometimes even physically confronting them to prevent them from kidnapping people off the streets. Neighbours are getting bold and creative. Some found immigration agents using alleyways to get around; they blocked their movement with dumpsters. People just get in their faces and yell “fascists” over and over again, disrupting their ability to carry out operations. In my neighbourhood, someone on a bicycle confronted a truck full of ICE officers with what he called “an angry mob” behind him—and ran them off the street. In every neighbourhood in the city, people are coming out of their houses in bathrobes to stand in front of ICE cars to stop them. And this has happened in other places, too. ### **Who is organising all this resistance?** The wide range of networks are organised differently, many by local community members, though some grew from existing grassroots networks. I know of at least one started by a left-wing alderperson \[city councillor\]. The citywide coordination feels a little bit lacking. These neighbourhoods have people communicating, connecting and fighting at a local level, but there doesn’t seem to be a sense of how that connects up to the bigger fight. It is an organisational challenge and also a product of the moment in which there’s such a surge of immigration enforcement activity that people are responding to. Whistles are becoming ubiquitous[ symbols of resistance](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-plastic-whistles-are-becoming-an-anti-ice-resistance-tool-chicago-2025-10-23/?ref=redflag.org.au). People will wear them as a sign to say, “I’m here to protect and defend my neighbours”. So, when ICE shows up, people start blowing these whistles, and instead of running away from them, other people usually run towards the agents. People are showing a change in consciousness and increased confidence in what they can do collectively. During the first major attacks in my neighbourhood, ICE grabbed a street vendor, and 300 people protested in response. On a random street corner—not where protests normally occur—hundreds of people defiantly chanted, “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!” High schoolers had a[ massive walkout](https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/little-village-lawndale-high-school-walkout-protest-operation-midway-blitz/?ref=redflag.org.au) after there was ICE activity near their school in Little Village. Two days after the childcare worker was kidnapped,[ hundreds were demonstrating](https://www.democracynow.org/2025/11/11/ice%5Farrest%5Fof%5Fchicago%5Fdaycare%5Fteacher?ref=redflag.org.au) in front of the daycare centre. Yesterday, I unexpectedly ran into a protest at a Target store in response to a raid there. The city is full of continual small manifestations of support for immigrant communities and resistance to ICE. More people are unafraid and are willing to stand up to them. ### **Has there been a backlash to the protests from right-wing groups?** Not of any notable frequency. The massive amount of support for people mobilising against the ICE escalation has meant any attempts by right-wing or pro-MAGA people have not been noticeable—aside from the police and immigration agents, of course. That fact is interesting because a couple of years ago, \[Texas Governor\] Greg Abbott[ grabbed busloads](https://news.wttw.com/2024/07/23/after-texas-gov-abbott-vows-keep-sending-buses-migrants-chicago-officials-brace-surge?ref=redflag.org.au) of desperate people, including many Venezuelans, at the border in Texas and dropped them off in the middle of Chicago. This was part of an attempt to provoke a political crisis in blue \[Democratic Party-run\] cities, and it fostered tense divisions even within the immigrant community. Some migrants were saying that these people broke the law and did not deserve support. Right-wing media amplified these messages, intent on stoking divisions between these communities and between Black and Brown Chicago more broadly. All of that was pushed onto the back burner by the enormity of the ICE attack and the dramatically increased sense of solidarity in the fight against it. In neighbourhoods that had these simmering tensions, people are now organising and mobilising to defend their neighbours. ### **The attacks target Democratic Party-run cities. And more of Trump’s recent rhetoric has been about attacking what he calls “the radical left”. Is this anti-left tilt coming out in attacks on the ground?** The reach of the activity in Chicago is so broad that it does not seem like a specific attack on any left organisation right now. The general activity is so broad and slapdash that it does not really feel like an attack on the left, but rather an attempt to create a general atmosphere of terror. At the same time, they did target and grab notable left-winger[ Eman Abdelhadi](https://chicagomaroon.com/48606/news/university-of-chicago-professor-arrested-at-anti-ice-protest/?ref=redflag.org.au) at a protest after an online campaign against her by the right. Overall, it’s like the Trump administration is showing the brute force of the federal state to show domination and to intimidate in a very Trumpian way. They are trying to force the people of Chicago, even Mayor Brandon Johnson, to do exactly what they want or face dire consequences. You see it with the sabre-rattling about the National Guard, which eventually came, but they still haven’t been deployed from their suburban base. The method Trump is taking is to throw a bunch of completely wild things at the wall—some stick, others don’t, but then he just moves on to the next thing. So, people are off balance due to the constant changes from this autocratic leader, and it’s a challenge to organise as things change rapidly. We are seeing a far more focused fight back against ICE in Chicago. ### **Mayor Brandon Johnson recently called for a general strike. As cynical as that may have been, have organised workers been part of the resistance?** He’s reflecting the resistance already occurring. The notion of a general strike is an initiative of[ May Day Strong](https://maydaystrong.org/?ref=redflag.org.au), a coalition of community organisations and labour unions. It aims to build a labour resistance against Trump that can hopefully culminate in a general strike. It’s hard to know if it will get there. We have a long way to go in the United States for that to be possible, but I think for anyone within the labour movement to have that as an aspiration—not just giving press conferences and legal injunctions—is really important. I think Brandon Johnson saying that helps more people know about it, but he will not be the person to make it happen. I will say that the schools have established themselves as safe places for immigrant families pretty much across the board, and educators have basically said that ICE will not be allowed in schools. There were a couple of minor instances in which ICE attempted to enter schools, and the Chicago Teachers Union helped initiate a quick response that forced ICE to leave. Since then, keeping schools off limits to ICE has had everything to do with CTU and the politics of struggle that they have carried out. ### **Where do you think the movement against ICE and the broader movement against Trump is going?** I think people feel a sense of power from the breadth and the depth of the resistance against ICE. You feel that walking around the street and the solidarity that you have with your neighbours. But it is also very obvious that the contours of the struggle are entirely defensive—everyone is focused on how to immediately resist these attempts to kidnap people. So there hasn’t seemed to be much on how to move past this and to really mount an opposition to the Trump administration. There’s a certain weakness of the far left, and we need to figure out how to organise a broader fight using the potential that we see in the resistance to ICE. People are not just showing anger, but a willingness to stand up and confront these paramilitary goons. It is really inspiring, but we need to figure out how to translate that into organising for a broader systemic change. Clarifying for people how ICE is an important part of the federal system, and the Democrats give no answers on how to stop them. In fact, the Democrats under Vice President Harris were[ trying to run to the right](https://redflag.org.au/article/what-we-learned-from-the-democratic-national-convention) of Trump on the question of immigration. It’s an open question about how to build resistance against Trump. People are mad about the cost of living and inflation. People are mad about the continual degradation of democracy. I think what people do about that is the question and challenge; the paths of resistance still need to be laid. The May Day Strong effort is one attempt to say that resistance means building a broader coalition to oppose Trump’s broader agenda. The resistance against ICE may translate into more durable and resilient organisations that can go on the offensive, but that is just a possibility at the moment. ### Students for Palestine hold first national conference URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/students-for-palestine-hold-first-national-conference/ Last updated: 2025-11-23T03:44:34.000Z Against the backdrop of the sham “peace plan” for Gaza endorsed by the UN Security Council, student activists from across Australia gathered on 22 November to discuss the future of the movement for Palestine on our campuses. Students for Palestine’s first ever conference, held at Brunswick Town Hall, brought together 270 people for a day of panels, workshops and a planning session for the group’s future actions. Delegates from Perth, Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra and Brisbane joined activists from seven Melbourne universities and numerous high schools. Between the opening and closing panels—“The Gaza genocide and the mass movement for Palestine” and “Freedom for Palestine: what kind of movement do we need?”—organisers reflected on the positive lessons of the past two years, in which unprecedented numbers took to the streets in support of the Palestinians. Discussion was tempered by a recognition of the ultimate inability of the movement to force the genocide to a halt, and the need now to organise on new terrain as the immediate horror of daily bombardment and starvation is pushed out of the news cycle. Closing panellist Amal Naser, from Sydney’s Palestine Action Group, posed the challenge to activists: that we must go from being a reactive to a proactive movement, not just waiting for the next massacre, but convincing people to join the fight now. Naser and co-panellist Monica Sestito also highlighted the importance of harnessing workers’ power, drawing on the electrifying experience of strikes that paralysed Italy’s economy in support of Palestine in October. Educational sessions, on apartheid in the West Bank with Palestinian filmmaker Mohamed Babai, and on the relationship between the US, Australia and Israel, aimed to give activists a deeper understanding of the structures that oppress the Palestinians and ideas to convince others of why the struggle must continue. Workshops also critiqued some “common-sense” attitudes frequently met among activists, such as identity politics—the belief that a person’s identity should be the source of their political authority rather than the efficacy of the strategies and tactics they propose. One salient example discussed was the University of Melbourne Gaza Solidarity Encampment, where attempts by Students for Palestine activists to argue for protest action to defend the camp from attacks were shut down on the basis that a prominent Palestinian disagreed. These were essential discussions for activists committed to establishing a robust culture of debate in our movement. As to where next for Students for Palestine, the Freedom Flotilla campaigns featured heavily in conference proceedings. Hamish Patterson and Robert Martin, both of whom attempted to break the siege on Gaza in separate missions this year, spoke alongside veteran flotilla organiser Michael Coleman in a Q&A panel. With the last Sumud Flotilla acting as a rallying cry for solidarity with the Palestinians, culminating in explosive strikes in Italy and Spain in late September and early October, SfP activists resolved to make the next flotilla mission a focal point for campaigning into the new year. Just as the last fleet managed to capture the world’s attention with its attempt to bring aid to a starving population, another attempt can highlight the enduring brutality that the population of Gaza suffers under a “peace plan” that entrenches the blockade and occupation and keep the issue of Palestine firmly in the spotlight. With the suffering in Gaza ongoing, and escalating raids, settlements and killings in the West Bank, it’s a healthy sign for the future that hundreds came together to sketch out plans to continue the fight for justice on campuses next year. ### Victorian treaty is just for show URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-treaty-is-just-for-show/ Last updated: 2025-11-23T03:42:40.000Z The Victorian Labor government signed a treaty with Aboriginal people on 13 November amid much celebration and back-patting. The treaty is the result of ten years of negotiations between the state government and the First Nations Assembly of Victoria—the elected body representing Aboriginal people. Under the treaty provisions, the First Nations Assembly will become a consultative body, providing non-binding advice to the state government on Indigenous policies and actions. The treaty has been a moment for Labor to trumpet its commitment to Indigenous rights and justice. It will bring “a future built on respect and partnership” and “strengthen culture for generations to come” according to Premier Jacinta Allan. But just a day before the treaty agreement was signed into law, Allan and Victorian Labor announced new “adult time for violent crime” laws. These laws will make children as young as 14 face adult courts if they are charged with a range of offences, and if found guilty, given adult sentences. Currently, children cannot receive custodial sentences longer than three years: under Allan’s proposal, they can potentially be jailed for life. Allan’s measures appear to be modelled on the Queensland state Liberal government’s “adult time for adult crime” laws, which increase jail terms for young people convicted of 20 offences. Allan and Labor’s celebration of treaty, while simultaneously moving to lock up children for longer, displays the shallowness of their commitment to achieving genuine change for Aboriginal people. This is not a mistake or the result of ignorance that might be solved by greater consultation. The effects of law-and-order policies and increasing incarceration rates on Aboriginal people and our communities are well known. Just last February, a federal government Senate report into the incarceration of young Aboriginal people found that young Aboriginal people involved in the child justice system experience poverty, inter-generational trauma and racism. This builds on a report by the National Children’s Commissioner released in 2024, and supplemented a month before Allan’s “adult time for violent crime” announcement, which argues strongly against incarceration of children and highlights the disproportionate effect this has on Aboriginal children and young people. Already in Victoria, young Aboriginal people aged 10 to 17 are around 9.5 times more likely to be placed into detention than non-Aboriginal children, according to the Sentencing Advisory Council. On top of this, draconian bail laws introduced last March by the Victorian Labor government have expanded the state’s ability to imprison Aboriginal people for longer. The Victorian Aboriginal Legal service has reported that since the bail law changes, there has been a 46 percent bail refusal rate for Aboriginal people, compared to a 6 percent rate for non-Aboriginal people. For young people, VALS reported that their youth legal practice, Balit Ngulu, has seen a 233 percent increase in its caseload due to bail being refused for Aboriginal young people because of the harsh laws. Allan’s proposed “adult time for violent crime” laws will only further entrench the over-representation of Aboriginal youth in jails, along with migrant youth who face similarly systematic disadvantage and marginalisation. There cannot be equality or “respect and partnership”, in a system that cannot solve but instead criminalises and punishes poverty and oppression. Achieving genuine justice for Aboriginal people would as a start involve measures to improve radically Aboriginal people’s living standards, including massive funding increases to communities and services, the expansion of public housing, improvement in the quality and availability of education and measures to address inter-generational trauma and cultural destruction. But all this comes at the expense of providing subsidies to fossil fuel companies and other business handouts—much easier just to have some advisers in the fold who government can pretend to listen to every so often. While there should be a treaty and it’s long overdue, the reality is it won’t be enough to challenge the fundamental dynamic and reality of the system we live under. Consultation serves as a smokescreen for government; it is intended to moderate the ambitions and goals of Aboriginal activists and stymie radical demands, the sorts of demands that need to be made and won if the situation for Aboriginal people is to improve meaningfully. And it does not stop government acting in interests opposite to those of Aboriginal people, as the earliest days of the treaty era have already shown. Ultimately, the capitalist system is fundamentally unwilling to provide the justice that Aboriginal people so thoroughly deserve. Instead, it regularly introduces measures that make the situation worse, and not due to a lack of good advice. We can’t rely on treaty to change this. What’s needed is a united fight against the system. ### An appeal for socialist unity URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/an-appeal-for-socialist-unity/ Last updated: 2025-11-23T08:06:24.000Z With the increasing polarisation of politics and the rise of the far right, socialism is making a comeback as a current. The Socialist Party, the expansion of the Victorian Socialists into a national organisation, currently has more than 5,400 financial members, a significant increase from the 800 members the Victorian Socialists had a year ago. The aim of the party is to unite all major socialist currents in Australia in a broad project. The following letter was drafted by former members of the Socialist Workers Party and Democratic Socialist Party to urge comrades in the Socialist Alliance to join the new project. --- ### **A plea to old comrades** The success of Victorian Socialists and its growth into a national organisation present socialists in Australia with a much awaited opportunity. Since the demise of the Communist Party of Australia and the failure of numerous unity processes among the socialist left throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the socialist movement has not been in a position where it could aspire to pose some sort of albeit modest mass alternative. The global context demands the socialist movement rise to this challenge. The heyday of neoliberal capitalism is behind us, crises abound, and the far right threatens. Comrades in the old SWP-DSP tradition who were part of attempts at regroupment in the 1980s will remember that these included a range of party building tactics: the intervention in the Nuclear Disarmament Party, the New Left Party process with the Communist Party, the fusion discussions with the Socialist Party and the work in helping to form the NSW Greens. In none of these were we the obviously larger numerical force. The critical element was the confidence and courage our tradition had accumulated after nearly two decades of party building, which put us in a position of playing a leading role in these regroupment attempts. During our discussion in this period, Jim Percy rightly observed: “Some \[on the left\] get caught in the trap of defining their role in ideological terms and general principles while failing to recognise the equally important role of active tactical approaches. Some simply proclaim their program and assume that this guarantees them a big future role. But programs are really products of life itself. They need living verification. It’s no use proclaiming the need for a party in general while failing to take the necessary and possible steps to build one. Such a course reduces formally correct positions to paper abstractions.” None of the opportunities for regroupment in the 1980s worked out the way we would have wanted, but we did the right thing trying. With hindsight, such ambitions were not likely to bear fruit in the context of a long retreat. Today we are in a very different situation. Difficult, yes, but different. While not all of the decay of the old left is behind us, there are the beginnings of the new. In any case, we haven’t the choice but to try again. Everywhere, the far right is growing, taking advantage of the blame social democracy has for the crises of neoliberalism, and the failure of the revolutionary left to build mass alternatives. We have to win back the language and the practical leadership of discontent. We have an opportunity now to take the advice Jim Percy put to our old party back in the 1980s: “What would we, as the SWP, do if a new party comes along more or less fitting our bill? Above all, we’d slip the SWP into idle mode and give the new party our best shot. The most important thing about our best shot will be our attitude. If we join a new party with the view that we have all the answers because of our past experience or theory, we could risk wrecking the whole project. “The real test of the organisational viability of the new party will be how soon decisions start to cut across old views and alignments. We have to approach things with open minds and assume that everyone else who joins a new party will do the same … The new party must develop its own life, and institutions that have the confidence of all members. A simple federation of factions wouldn’t last very long.” A number of us, long-term ex-members of the SWP-DSP tradition, long ago joined Socialist Alternative. We’ve been a tiny minority in an organisation where we have important differences that at some stage may well play out, but we have had the courage to put our perspectives in the context of the class struggle, as it is, which is so much bigger than the small organisations and programmatic positions of the historic tendencies of the far left. You work with what you have, and you put your confidence in the class (the long view of history), even if that puts you in a tiny minority. The challenge of Socialist Alliance joining the Socialist Party is, frankly, a much more modest ask than the risks the SWP was willing to take in the 1980s. There are already a lot of guarantees in place that were not certain in past regroupment attempts, including the right to maintain and build existing organisations publicly and as tendencies in the Socialist Party. This is simply a beginning, one step at a time without a predetermined path as to where it may lead. We hope comrades will look back to the rich history of the SWP/DSP and find in that the inspiration to take up this challenge. *Jorge Jorquera, Nick Everett, Kim, Bullimore, Andrew Ian Jamieson, John ‘Togs’ Tognolini, Margaret Perrott, Allen Myers, Helen Jarvis* ### Inside QLD teachers’ campaign URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/inside-qld-teachers-campaign/ Last updated: 2025-11-20T04:36:24.000Z Teachers in Queensland staged their first strike in sixteen years in August and are set to walk out again on 25 November. This would be the first time in more than three decades that Queensland Teachers Union (QTU) members have struck more than once in a year. Within the QTU, a network of radicals has been campaigning for the union to take more strident action to improve our pay and conditions: that network is called Queensland Teachers Fightback. The strikes are occurring against an intransigent Liberal National Party government, which has on three separate occasions offered teachers a desultory 8 percent pay offer over three years, with no improvements to workload. While the campaign continues, teachers have already scored a significant victory against the government, voting “no” in a significant majority against its offer on 31 October. But first, some context. During the last decade of successive Labor state governments, teaching conditions in Queensland significantly deteriorated. When the COVID-19 pandemic first broke out, the then Palaszczuk government froze teachers’ pay for eighteen months, costing teachers thousands. This was followed by an 11 percent wage “increase” over three years, which was so far below inflation that it meant a real wage cut for teachers of 6.5 percent. Queensland teachers also have the slowest salary progression of anywhere in the country, alongside Tasmania. The situation is so bad that a seventh-year teacher on the Gold Coast could earn $20,000 more by teaching over the border in NSW. Planning time for Queensland teachers is also below the national and OECD average. For high school teachers, our planning time (time when we’re at school but not teaching) hasn’t improved since the 1970s, despite a significant increase in reporting requirements. Our lunch breaks are technically unpaid, but we’re still required to do playground duty. We get two to three student-free days in January (of which only three hours is individual planning time), and then one student-free day in September (which is professional development, not planning time). There is a constant and steady stream of new curriculum updates, program changes and new assessments we write or modify every year without the time in the day to do them. Teachers regularly take sick days just to keep on top of work. While other states offer 15 days’ sick leave per year, Queensland teachers get only ten. And in a vast state with many regional cities and towns, the remote incentives are nowhere near enough to retain staff and to address the higher cost of living in those areas. What has not helped our situation is the lack of strike action. Fightback began in 2019 during negotiations for our last agreement, when 94 percent of union members voted to strike in support of our demands, yet our leadership didn’t follow through. Instead, members were encouraged to vote yes to an offer that made no serious improvements to wages or conditions. So, we got started by making some basic arguments—that we shouldn’t vote yes to any offers that aren’t worth voting for. Enterprise bargaining periods provide us with the opportunity to take protected industrial action, so we need to make the most of this—by striking! Previous offers, which members were recommended to accept by the leadership, would usually pass with 95 percent in favour. In 2019, though, nearly 20 percent of members voted against. This was a significant achievement for a newly formed group with no institutional weight within the union. Fightback tapped into members’ outrage and frustration with the union’s direction and gave them the arguments to use in their schools against the offer. In the past, disgruntled members would have simply left the union. Fightback provided them with a crucial alternative—stay, fight and help organise for something better. There have been several other industrial campaigns Fightback has been a part of, such as pushing for school closures during the pandemic. In 2023, we ran for the union’s presidential positions on a platform of class struggle and putting our leaders on a workers’ wage. Fightback candidates won between 38 and 44 percent of the vote across the three positions. But it’s not just industrial questions. Fightback members have made efforts to politicise our workplaces—inviting colleagues to rallies for Palestine, for refugee rights, against the far right and more. We haven’t shied away from speaking out against genocide and bigotry, which sometimes requires a discussion or argument, but is important for deepening our understanding of what fighting for workers’ rights and solidarity is all about. It was crucial that our members spoke up in defence of other unionists when the CFMEU was put into administration, and their democratic say overruled by Labor state governments. Solidarity isn’t charity; our rights and conditions are genuinely impacted by our government’s treatment of refugees, their support for Israel’s genocide, dictatorial control of other unions, tolerance for the far right and so on. We’ve had Fightback contingents and our banners at many protests this year, showing we don’t just talk the talk, but we walk it as well, and that has helped us identify and connect with sympathisers and fellow activists. Fightback began our intervention in the current enterprise bargaining campaign by getting some decent demands into our log of claims. We put together some example motions and provided them to our email list and Facebook group—demands such as 10 percent pay rise per year, doubling planning time and increasing sick leave to fifteen days. The motions were taken up with gusto—more than 30 branches voted for our pay demand to be 10 percent per year, and several branches voted for 15 percent. For many, it was their first time going to a union branch meeting. In one instance, three people who didn’t know each other independently printed the Fightback motions and turned up to the same branch meeting to move them! Pushing for a decent log of claims was important for raising members’ expectations of what we should be fighting for, rather than tailoring our demands to what we think the government considers acceptable. Part of Fightback’s intervention has been to push for the union to adopt a log of claims with teeth. The QTU has adopted an “interest-based” approach to bargaining, meaning that rather than raising specific demands, the union’s negotiators seek common ground with the government. Described by the [Fair Work Commission](https://www.fwc.gov.au/issues-we-help/collaborative-approaches-program/interest-based-bargaining?ref=redflag.org.au) as a “consensus-seeking and cooperative” approach to bargaining, interest-based bargaining stands in contrast with a “traditional” adversarial approach, where parties “approach the process with predetermined positions or a log of claims”. It also makes it much harder for workers to hold their representatives to account during negotiations, and vague demands are much harder to mobilise people to campaign for. Fightback has [pushed back](https://qldteachersfightback.org/need-more-than-ibb-to-fight-the-lnp.html?ref=redflag.org.au) on this approach, and, thanks to our intervention, more members are now arguing against interest-based bargaining. Fightback has been making the case for strike action and protests across all the union’s official channels. When the union backed away from implementing work bans last year, Fightback called a snap speak-out outside parliament, which mobilised dozens of teachers and supporters, and, importantly, attracted media coverage. The 6 August strike confirmed the arguments about strike action Fightback members have been making. These include that, when a lead is given, members will follow. The strike was widely observed, with approximately 50,000 teachers on strike. Five thousand mobilised in Brisbane at the strike meeting and rally, and a further 5,000 gathered across the state in other rallies. The strike also highlighted the union’s relevance to previously unorganised teachers: 2,300 joined the union just before the strike. And the public got behind the strike—disproving the idea that the public resents teachers striking or won’t back the action. As we marched through the city, the support was obvious, from people clapping and cheering for us to fellow unionists on construction sites downing tools to raise a fist and chant with us. Despite the positive energy from the strike, the QTU state council, comprising 120 delegates, “paused” consideration of further industrial action for four weeks. Fightback members pushed back where we could. We argued on the floor of council against the idea. In one school, teachers turned a members’ “briefing” on the pause into a proper meeting with debate, and won—carrying a motion opposing the decision. The strike was crucial for what came after: in late October, teachers were presented with another government offer which had a few minor changes, yet the substance remained: 8 percent over three years, no improvements to workload. The strike had helped raise teachers’ expectations and we had 50,000 teachers out on strike saying 8 percent wasn’t good enough. To be presented with the same pay offer felt like a slap in the face. Fightback activists jumped into action, campaigning against such an insulting offer. We were presented with the offer on Monday; voting closed that Friday. Our members were quick to put together a leaflet, and were circulating arguments about the pay, the lack of workload improvements and the need for strike action. While the official position from the union leadership was to request that members give the offer “due consideration”, their communications led with “QTU members secure an improved offer”, claiming it was the government’s “best and final offer” and spelling out the dangers of voting it down. These focused on arbitration: that it’s a lengthy process that would delay any pay increases, and that our existing conditions would be under threat if we voted no. As Fightback (and many other teachers) said in response, given how little there was to lose in the offer, members are ready to “roll the dice” on arbitration. What sitting commissioner is going to gut teachers’ conditions during a teacher shortage? In a stunning turn, with almost 29,000 members voting, 67 percent voted against the government’s offer. Members shared that they didn’t feel alone and that their faith in their fellow members had been restored. Union leaders had not been campaigning against the offer. The only voices in the media were the government and a right-wing ex-principal talking about how great it was. But Fightback members campaigned against the offer and carried members with us. Wherever we could, we pushed for special branch meetings. This involved checking the union rules and collecting the small number of signatures required. As of this writing, there have been six special branch meetings called by rank-and-file members in the last two weeks—something pretty unheard of. The special meetings have been positive for us for a few reasons. They’ve brought members out to vocalise their opposition to the government’s offers and sharpen their arguments for a better deal. They’ve been very well attended, with a combined total of more than 140 members taking part. With the prospect of arbitration looming, it’s not obvious why we should strike. The meetings have given union members the space to argue to colleagues about why strike action is still crucial: that it shows how important our labour is; that without us, schools stop. And that the past sixteen years without strike action demonstrate that when business isn’t disrupted, our pay and conditions decline. Strikes also make the point that we don’t have to accept what we’re told we deserve by others: not by the government or the union officials, all of whom enjoy much higher salaries and better conditions than teachers. Instead, we can decide what we deserve and fight for it. Throughout this campaign, members have had a crash course in how the processes of the union work: meeting procedure and protocol, moving and speaking to a motion; all valuable skills that have been useful in this campaign and invaluable for the fights to come. By using every forum available to make left-wing arguments and try to win rank-and-file members to our perspective, Fightback has won considerable influence among a wide layer of teachers. We have also helped to educate a wider layer to be leaders and fighters in their workplaces and branches. Fightback is here to stay, and we’re growing. Rebuilding class-struggle unionism is not going to happen overnight, but there are no alternatives. Wherever we are, in a big workplace or small, we’re there to make the key arguments, to give a lead to members who want to see the union fight for more and to argue that fighting for a better world involves pushing on any question, industrial or political, and looking to our collective power to win. ### ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’: Palestine after the ceasefire URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/blessed-are-the-peacemakers-palestine-after-the-ceasefire-2/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:24:37.000Z “BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!”, US President Donald Trump wrote on social media last month after Hamas and the Israeli government agreed to the first phase of the so-called Peace Plan for Gaza. The same day, as Palestinians began the annual olive harvest in the West Bank, armed and masked Israeli settlers descended on the village of Aqraba, south-east of Nablus. They brandished batons and guns, attacking farmers and their supporters to prevent them from accessing the farms. On this day, as on all subsequent ones, these settlers were backed by the Israeli military. Two days later, on 11 October, 13-year-old Ayssam Jihad Ma’ala joined his family to help with the harvest. He was teargassed by the Israeli military. For a month, Ayssam lay in a coma, suffering from brain damage. He died on 12 November, joining the ranks of more than 1,000 Palestinians killed in the West Bank and Jerusalem since October 2023\. This is what “peace” looks like. “Peace” sounds like the cheering and applause that [echoed through the Israeli Supreme Court](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israelis-applaud-soldiers-accused-raping-palestinian-prisoner-court-hearing?ref=redflag.org.au) in Jerusalem on 10 November. The reception was for two soldiers from Force 100, a special unit of the Israeli military, who face charges relating to the gang rape last year of a blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev desert. The soldiers were caught on CCTV carrying out the rape. According to a report in Israeli newspaper *Haaretz*, the detainee was so violently assaulted that he sustained a ruptured intestine, a torn rectum, broken ribs and damaged lungs. Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, responsible for overseeing Israeli prisons, described the accused soldiers as “our best heroes”. There have been other accounts of abuse at Sde Teiman. Khaled Mahajneh, a lawyer granted access to the site last year, [told *+972 Magazine*](https://www.972mag.com/sde-teiman-prisoners-lawyer-mahajneh?ref=redflag.org.au): “The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo”. A spokesperson for human rights organisation B’Tselem describes Sde Teiman as “the tip of the iceberg”. Discussing a B’Tselem report on Israeli prisons, titled “[Welcome to Hell](https://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/202408%5Fwelcome%5Fto%5Fhell%5Feng.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au)”, Shai Parnes told Al Jazeera’s Simon Speakman Cordall last year: “We heard similar accounts of sexual abuse, starvation and assault from separate prisoners held in sixteen different locations across Israel. It was depressing. As we gathered the testimonies, we realised that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic.” Blessed are the peacemakers. Since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, there has never been peace for the Palestinians. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, which [released an estimate](https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/post.aspx?lang=en&ItemID=5750&ref=redflag.org.au) in May last year, some 134,000 Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli state. In 2020, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [estimated that 3,624 Palestinians were killed and more than 100,000 injured](https://www.ochaopt.org/page/publications1?ref=redflag.org.au)over the previous decade. Of the killings, 87 percent were in Gaza, mostly during the 2012 and 2014 Israeli offensives, as well as in the Great March of Return demonstrations that started in 2018\. Three out of four Palestinians killed during the decade were civilians, including 805 children. This is the status quo that our political leaders would have us believe is the basis for a peaceful future. The violence in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem has a purpose. Israeli politicians such as Naftali Bennet, the former prime minister, have referred to the policy of regular military offensives in Gaza as “mowing the lawn”. Before 2023, this referred to a policy of semi-regular bombings of Gaza as a method of restraining Palestinian national aspirations. The Gaza genocide since 2023 represents something else: an apocalypse of Old Testament proportions, enacted upon a besieged population, designed to settle the question. The goal is to smash the Palestinians in body and soul, once and for all. “Peace” for the Israeli state and its backers in the West has only ever meant a pause in open warfare—a time in which they could get on with the somewhat quieter project of “everyday” ethnic cleansing and colonisation. In the West Bank, the Israelis have a longstanding project of creating “facts on the ground”—the expansion of Israeli-held territory in order to undermine the prospect of a Palestinian state. This project has been waged nonstop, through “peace” and war. “By the end of 2022, there were 483 Israeli occupation sites and military bases in the West Bank, including 151 settlements and 25 inhabited outposts that were considered as neighborhoods following established settlements, in addition to 163 settlement outposts, and 144 classified as other sites (industrial, tourists, service areas and Israeli army bases)”, notes the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics report. By the end of 2022, the number of Israeli “settlers” in the West Bank reached 745,467\. Under the fog of the most recent war, Israel rapidly increased the number of settlements in the West Bank. Peace Now, an Israeli NGO, [has documented 121 new outposts](https://peacenow.org.il/en/settlements-watch/settlements-data/population?ref=redflag.org.au) since October 2023, representing 40 percent of the 298 outposts established since 1996\. [Another United Nations report](https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1165988?ref=redflag.org.au), covering June to September this year, finds that the Israeli state has approved more than 20,000 housing units in the occupied West Bank. The hope among Israeli officials is that the ceasefire in Gaza will allow them to take more and more of the West Bank. The world’s major capitalist powers, such as the United States, aren’t religiously or ideologically invested in Israel conquering the West Bank. Nor is their sole focus the destruction of Palestine. Nevertheless, they do care about the strength of the Israeli state. And they care about profiting from death. The *Wall Street Journal*’s Middle East correspondent Benoit Faucon [recently described](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/the-gaza-war-has-been-big-business-for-u-s-companies-8830b54a?ref=redflag.org.au) the “unprecedented arms pipeline from the US to Israel” over the last two years. The trade resulted in billions of dollars in profits for companies such as Boeing, Caterpillar, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Profits are just part of the picture, though. The global capitalist order is built on savagery. In an era of big power rivalry, Israel, the US and their defenders also have a project to normalise extreme violence. They carried out a genocide and now present themselves as peacemakers. If the status quo in Palestine is “peace”, and those responsible for it are the peacemakers, then damn them. We should never leave them in peace. ### The rise and fall of the US Congress of Industrial Organizations URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-us-congress-of-industrial-organizations/ Last updated: 2026-03-28T00:34:01.000Z *In the 1930s, the United States experienced one of the most significant working-class rebellions of the century. The explosion of organising gave rise to the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a union federation that set out to organise the mass production industries across the country. It was a dramatic step forward for the US working class, but its limitations have decisively shaped America's political and industrial terrain for the next 90 years.* *The rise of the CIO raised several political questions that remain relevant today. What orientation should rank-and-file workers have towards union leaders? How should workers relate to capitalist political forces, such as the Democratic Party? And what role can and should the left play in a working-class revival? *Ryan Laws** *f* *rom Socialist Alternative’s workers’ organising committee provides some tentative answers.* **\--------------------** Kermit Johnson was growing nervous. He and the other members of the United Auto Workers’ strike committee had a plan. But a plan is one thing. Launching a sit-down strike to occupy the key factory of the mightiest corporation on the planet was something else entirely. In the 1930s, General Motors produced nearly half of all cars sold in the US. *Fortune* magazine described the company as “not big but colossal”, “the highest technological organism of our technological age” and “the world’s most complicated and most profitable manufacturing enterprise”. If it were possible for a company like General Motors to have a heart, it would have been in Flint, Michigan. The town held the largest concentration of GM factories in the country. As one UAW organiser said, “whatever happened in this central city of the corporation ... reverberated throughout the financial capitalists of the nation”. The mayor of Flint, the chief of police, the judges, the daily newspaper, the radio station, the churches, municipal relief and even the schools all rested firmly in the bottomless pockets of GM. In terms of industrial espionage, GM was in a class of its own. According to the company’s director for industrial relations, GM equipped all their plants with an arsenal. The town and its factories were saturated with spies from the notorious, worker-murdering Pinkerton Detective Agency under GM’s employ. Every plant manager engaged their own secret police. A congressional committee that later investigated the labour practices of GM found that the company employed “the most colossal supersystem of spies yet devised in any American corporation ... a far-flung industrial Cheka”. (The Cheka was the Soviet Union’s secret police.) Workers suspected everyone, and everyone was afraid. Throughout January 1937, GM had been rocked by a growing strike wave across 50 of its plants. At its peak, more than 150,000 workers were out. In the eyes of the managers, the UAW represented an existential threat to their absolute power, and the company was intent on systematically destroying the union. Police and the National Guard had brutally attacked the strikers at Fisher Body 2 with live fire and tear gas, only to be driven off by volleys of hinges, bottles and bolts that rained down on them from workers occupying the factory. This episode would be dubbed “The battle of running bulls”. The fight against GM was considered the most important industrial battle of the 1930s, and it was reaching its climax. The company had not yet folded, and the outcome was far from certain. It all came down to Chevrolet Plant 4, where Kermit worked. Plant 4 produced all the engines for Chevrolet cars—more than a million a year. This huge factory was considered the most important plant in the GM production chain, but only a quarter of its workers were members of the UAW. If it kept working, the company might be able to last one day longer than the workers. Its capture would be the final nail in the coffin for GM. The UAW strike committee got the word out that the objective was to shut down a decoy plant, the much smaller and less strategically important Plant 9\. Everything had so far gone according to plan. Stool pigeons in the union local told the company to redirect its forces for a battle at Plant 9\. Kermit waited impatiently for the union workers to enter Plant 4 for the real occupation. According to his remarkable account of the dispute: “The next few minutes seemed like hours, and as I ambled toward the door, my previous confidence was rapidly giving way to fear—fear that we’d lost our one big gamble. My thoughts were moving a mile a minute ... and then the door burst inward and there was Ed! Great big Ed, his hairy chest bare to his belly, carrying a little American flag, and leading the most ferocious band of twenty men I have ever seen. He looked so funny with that tiny flag in comparison with his men, who were armed to the teeth with lead hammers, pipes, and chunks of sheet metal three feet long. I felt like crying and laughing at the same time.” They were soon joined by hundreds more unionists, who proceeded to march up and down the aisles of Plant 4, shutting the factory down and signing up its workers to the union. They convinced the managers that “leaving the plant under their own power was more dignified than being thrown out”. As the workers sent the plant managers packing, they gave them “the same advice that most of us had been given year after year during layoffs. ‘We’ll let you know when to come back.’” The victory at Plant 4 was the straw that broke the back of General Motors. After 44 days of strikes, GM surrendered in humiliating fashion, signing its first union agreement, granting sole bargaining rights to the UAW. This sent shock waves through American capitalism. The wall of the open shop in the auto industry was finally breached, and the floodgates of class struggle opened. Workers from one end of the country to the other struck and occupied their workplaces—nearly half a million before the end of 1937. This indomitable wave of sit-down strikes was one of the turning points in the greatest industrial upsurge in the history of the United States. The creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) played a crucial role in this incredible saga. Over the course of the 1930s and early 1940s, the CIO opened the way for the organisation of the semi-skilled and unskilled workers of the new mass-production industries for the first time, most importantly in auto, steel, rubber, mining and electrical manufacturing. Soon after its stunning victory at GM, one corporate goliath after another fell to CIO unions, signing contracts that would have been inconceivable a year or two earlier. This represented a titanic shift in industrial relations in the United States. Much of the twentieth century cannot be fully explained without understanding the stunning successes and profound limitations of the CIO. **Safety and sanity** The CIO emerged from a split within the top ranks of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) leadership, which was driven by the tectonic forces transforming US capitalism in the 1930s. The Great Depression, beginning with the stock market crash of 1929, was a catastrophic event with few historical precedents. Hunger became widespread in the industrial heartlands of the Western world. By 1933, industrial production and national income in the US had fallen by nearly half. Society appeared to be on the brink of collapse, but the capitalists were determined to push the brunt of the crisis onto the working class. By 1933, a third of workers were unemployed and a third underemployed. Wages had fallen by nearly 50 percent. Republican President Herbert Hoover denied the severity of the situation. Demonstrations of the unemployed were met with brutal repression, with many killed, wounded or imprisoned. The enduring symbol of the depression became the tin-shack shantytowns, known as “Hoovervilles”, that mushroomed across American cities and towns as working-class families were thrown out of their homes. The response of the AFL leaders was summed up by the editor of *Advance,* organ of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers: “The Communists staged hunger demonstrations and marches. The liberals organized unemployment insurance conferences. The socialists advocated remedial legislation and relief measures. The men of the Conference for Progressive Labor Action promoted Unemployment Leagues. The AFL alone carefully guarded its record of safety and sanity and did about nothing.” The AFL had long since ossified as a conservative federation of craft business unions that jealously guarded their bureaucratic empires. This was most starkly illustrated by their approach to the new mass manufacturing industries that grew rapidly after the First World War. Workers in these industries were largely unskilled or semi-skilled, and heavily migrant—traits anathema to craft unions that maintained their narrow, sectional power largely by excluding unskilled workers (including Black people, migrants and women) from skilled jobs. They were intensely nationalist and anti-communist, and they largely viewed industrial workers with disdain, dismissing them as “unorganisable”. The AFL mostly abandoned the unorganised to the tender mercies of their rapacious employers. **Formation of the CIO** However, a section of the AFL leaders began to view things differently, most notably in coal mining and textile manufacturing. The nature of these industries forced the unions that covered them to organise on a more or less industrial basis. This group of unions was led by John L. Lewis, president of the largest and most influential union in the country, the United Mine Workers of America (UMW). Lewis is a fascinating, paradoxical titan of the American labour movement. No union leader was more ruthless or authoritarian. He viciously drove communists and all other oppositionists out of the union, to the point of bringing the union to the brink of collapse in the 1920s. He broached no challenge to his hold over the UMW machine. He did, however, possess several traits shared by no other union leader of the time. He rose to power among the coal miners, by far the most militant, unruly stratum of the American working class. He was baptised as the UMW’s president by the coal strike of 1919, an epic battle in which 400,000 miners walked off the job for 40 days. In other words, he’d learned how to “ride the tiger” of militant class struggle. He was audacious, and he knew a historic opportunity when he saw one. He could also hear deep rumblings from below. In 1934, there were spectacular strikes by truck drivers in Minneapolis, auto workers in Toledo and dockworkers in San Francisco, all of which shared three things. First, they were driven from below and bordered on mass insurrections, despite the best efforts of the union leaders to stop them. Second, they won smashing victories, including union recognition, drawing huge numbers of workers into the union movement. Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly for Lewis, they were all led by socialists and revolutionaries. Lewis realised that the working class now demanded to be organised and would not take no for an answer. A breakthrough was possible, but if the union leaders weren’t prepared to take this opportunity with both hands, other, more radical forces would. Lewis was determined to organise the unorganised. He launched a massive organising drive in the coal mines in 1933, and 300,000 miners flooded into the UMW. He then demanded that the leadership of the AFL put serious resources into organising the mass-production industries. His appeals landed on deaf ears; the AFL would do nothing. “They seduced me with fair words”, Lewis poetically declared, “now ... I am enraged and I am ready to rend my seducers limb from limb”. He began preparations to cohere the faction of breakaway unions within the AFL that would go on to form the CIO. The split was consummated when he strode to the podium of the 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City and cracked the jaw of the insolent president of the carpenters’ union, Bill Hutcheson, with a solid left hook. **The heroic years** Immediately after his “punch heard round the world”, John L. Lewis established the Committee for Industrial Organization as a faction of industrial unions in the American Federation of Labor. It eventually broke away in 1938 to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In the first twenty years of the CIO’s existence, the US working class unleashed a tidal wave of organisation and mass strikes. Total union membership tripled between 1933 and 1941, and wages increased substantially in unionised industries, despite most of these years occurring during the depths of the Great Depression. More than 42 million workers struck between 1936 and 1955\. According to Art Preis, author of *Labor’s Giant Step*, “Even allowing for workers who have struck more than once, this figure puts in the pale the corresponding strike figures for all other countries”. Although millions of workers flooded into both the AFL and CIO (indeed, the AFL actually grew more than the CIO), it was workers in the mass production industries of the CIO who led the way. However, contrary to popular belief, CIO leaders did not essentially differ from those of the AFL in that they saw strikes as a last resort. The history of the CIO represents the struggle of a working class on the move, straining against its own leaders to fight for meaningful improvements to their lives. This struggle between union officials and the rank and file played out very differently in each union, depending on the balance of forces. Over the year following the 1937 triumph of the United Auto Workers (UAW) at General Motors (GM), the union grew from 30,000 members to 500,000\. The explosive struggles that gave rise to the UAW created a union with a wildly democratic character. The sit-down strikes and flying squadrons of the early years gave the rank and file a power and confidence unsurpassed in the US labour movement. They could win in a few hours or days what union leaders could not through years of negotiations. The stormy conferences of the UAW became legendary, and the rank and file threw out three international presidents in just eleven years. The internal structures of the UAW were roiled by a succession of factional struggles, revolts and opposition movements until the late 1940s, when Walter Reuther finally established one-man rule over the union. The battle for the steel industry unfolded differently. The CIO established the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in 1936 and sent hundreds of organisers into the steel mills. In the wake of the GM victory, US Steel, which controlled about 40 percent of the basic steel industry, capitulated without a fight. However, unlike the rank-and-file-driven organisation of the UAW, the SWOC was tightly controlled from above. Hand-picked leaders were imposed on the workers by the captains of the CIO, who seemed to be responsible for the successful organising drives. The steel industry was eventually unionised, but without the same rank-and-file initiative, democratic flair or challenge to the supremacy of the CIO leaders seen in the UAW and other unions. **New Deal** One of the great myths about this industrial upsurge is that it was encouraged by the Democratic administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal legislation. Roosevelt is commonly idealised in left and liberal circles as a great reformer and friend of the working class. The main prop of this myth is that he gave labour “the right to organise” through Section 7(a) of his National Industrial Recovery Act. In reality, 7(a) did virtually nothing to further the right of workers to organise, and workers were already beginning to move by the time Roosevelt took office. Indeed, if there were no such right to organise, how could millions of workers already have been members of the AFL? Nevertheless, many workers were misled into thinking that the government would protect their rights. They were quickly disabused of this notion when the bosses launched a vicious civil war on the labour movement in the 1930s. Hundreds of workers were killed, thousands wounded and tens of thousands arrested. In 1935 alone, the National Guard was employed against 73 strikes across twenty states—most of them under Democratic administrations. Roosevelt never used his immense powers to stop any of this. He aimed to protect the capitalist system, nothing more and nothing less. He described himself as “the best friend the profit system ever had”. At the height of the Depression, being a friend of the profit system meant implementing some pitiful welfare programs, price controls and banking reforms to stabilise the economy. It also required recognising that the old way of managing industrial relations was no longer tenable. The labour movement had grown too big and too powerful. The situation was becoming dangerous. Roosevelt acknowledged this in his 1932 presidential acceptance speech, saying: “\[T\]o meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite disaster”. The administration, and the capitalist class that it represented, needed new legislation and government bureaucracies, such as the Wagner Act and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), to contain and control the labour movement by partially incorporating it into the machinery of the state. In this way, the reforms of the Roosevelt administration, as limited as they were, came as reluctant responses to pressure from below in an effort to redirect open industrial warfare into NLRB-sanctioned elections. While Roosevelt offered little for workers, the top leaders of both the AFL and CIO viewed his administration as an historic opportunity to establish a new arrangement between unions, business and the federal government that would manage American industry. These leaders felt for the first time, but by no means the last, that they could finally secure a seat at the table with government. They were horrified by calls from large sections of the CIO rank and file for the creation of a labour party, particularly when these calls came from the same corners of the union responsible for wave after wave of wildcat strikes. In their view, this unruly, dangerous movement had to be contained within the two-party system. Even the indefatigable John L. Lewis, who brazenly violated the CIO’s no-strike pledge during WWII by leading a series of colossal miners’ strikes in 1943, simply flipped from supporting the Republicans to the Democrats, and back again. Thus, the CIO and AFL poured tremendous energy and resources into the Democratic Party. They became the key electoral pillars for the Democrats’ smashing victories in the late 1930s and early 1940s, spending millions of dollars and mobilising tens of thousands of working-class volunteers to get out the vote for Roosevelt. One problem was that no-one on the left was willing and able to challenge the union leaders’ strategy. The Trotskyists played a historic role by leading the Teamsters rebellion in Minneapolis, and then organising virtually the entire midwest trucking industry. However, they were far too small to have a meaningful impact on events. The Socialist Party was revitalised somewhat in the early 1930s, but had long since lost its ability to cohere an independent left or rebuild a trade union base. It was eventually absorbed into the New Deal coalition. The Communist Party was the only force on the left that was large and coherent enough to challenge the union leaders seriously. It was key to furnishing the newborn CIO with activists and organisers, being a powerful force in the steel, rubber, auto and electrical unions. By the days of the CIO, however, the thoroughly Stalinised Communist Party was entrenched as a tool of Russian foreign policy. The American version of the Popular Front strategy dictated by Stalin required slavish devotion to the leaders of the CIO, Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats. During WWII, it became the hard right of the union movement, openly demanding the use of speed-ups, piecework and strikebreaking to lift the productivity of workers in the interests of the “war to defend the USSR”. By the beginning of the Cold War, it had lost all credibility in the eyes of the workers and was almost completely smashed and purged from the union movement. **Results** The end of the Second World War brought about the most colossal strike wave yet. In 1945–46, more than 5 million workers poured out of their workplaces and onto picket lines. In January 1946, nearly 2 million auto, steel, electrical and packinghouse workers struck simultaneously for the first and only time, bringing the industrial core of the US juggernaut to a halt. As Art Preis notes, “for the number of strikers, their weight in industry and the duration of struggle, the 1945–46 strike wave in the US surpassed anything of its kind in any capitalist country, including the British General Strike of 1926”. In some ways, this was the greatest triumph of solidarity in the history of the American working class. However, it also reinforced the end of the heroic era of the formation of the CIO. No strikers were killed, reflecting that employers generally did not try to break picket lines. The strikes were tightly controlled from above, and organised with minimal rank-and-file initiative. The union officials used the strikes to let off steam that had built up in the ranks during the war years and the Depression, while further centralising the power of national leadership. The postwar strike wave was a consolidation of the union bureaucracy and its supremacy over the rank and file of the labour movement. It also represented a recognition by employers and the state that the new trade union movement was here to stay. This dynamic would be consummated with the reunification of the CIO and AFL in 1955 to form the modern AFL-CIO. The differences that initially split the union leaders had been overcome. On one side, the AFL had quietly adopted the approach of organising along industrial lines. On the other, the CIO had tamed the unruly rank and file that ran amok in its early years. The reunification of the two represented the final triumph of bureaucratic business unionism. The victories of the CIO were many. For the first time, a considerable proportion of the US working class was organised into unions. Workers, particularly in the basic industries, took significant steps forward in wages and conditions. The sheer scale and force of the upsurge transformed the traditional approach of US capitalism to trade unionism. The US had long earned the distinction of being the most violently anti-union, savagely free-market country in the advanced capitalist world. After the late 1930s, however, the killing of striking workers became rare, as avenues developed for collective bargaining and a restricted right to strike. However, the CIO was equally defined by its defeats. The defeat of the left and the containment of the rank and file by the union leaders in the 1940s and 1950s limited the capacity of the CIO to make further gains. Enslavement of the union movement to the Democratic Party also had dire consequences. Unlike most other advanced capitalist countries, the US working class never won universal entitlements to health care, welfare, minimum wages and other basic rights. The Democrats also bound the union movement to the twists and turns of US imperialism as the Cold War heated up. The old civil war between craft and industrial unionism was replaced by an anti-Communist witch-hunt against the left. The CIO leaders exploited McCarthyism and new anti-union legislation, such as the Taft-Hartley Act, to drive out the Communists and raid the left-led CIO unions. These factors led to the catastrophic collapse of the CIO’s attempt to organise the south in 1946, known as “Operation Dixie”. Racism remained the Achilles heel of the American labour movement, and large sections of the US working class were left untouched by unionism or even basic federal minimum wage provisions. Could things have turned out differently? Unions are by their nature contradictory institutions—capable of uniting workers in struggle against the worst features of capitalism, while also accommodating capitalism in order to survive. Nevertheless, a mass socialist force in the working class could have made a profound difference to the way the CIO turned out. It could have united rank-and-file militants across industries to challenge more effectively the hold of the CIO leaders. It might have held together an opposition to the Democratic Party and US imperialism, while more successfully resisting the purges of the left. It might have more effectively challenged anti-Black racism and made greater inroads into organising in the south. During its more left-wing period in the early 1930s, the Communist Party, for all its limitations, demonstrated that this was possible when it made impressive gains organising and recruiting Black southerners. The CIO upsurge presented an historic opportunity for the far left to grow massively and take qualitative steps forward. For any of this to have been possible, the US left needed to already have established a large, cohered, anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist party. ### A tale of two union movements: Palestine and the unions in Italy and Australia URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/a-tale-of-two-union-movements-palestine-and-the-unions-in-italy-and-australia/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:25:47.000Z It’s hard to think of a starker contrast. In Italy last month, Israel’s attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla sparked a [general strike](https://redflag.org.au/article/italys-general-strike-shows-the-way-forward) backed by Italy’s largest union federation and a number of smaller union groups. Strikes and mass blockades shut down the nation’s ports and large sections of rail, logistics, education and other industries. Somewhere close to a million people marched in solidarity with Palestine in Rome the next day, the biggest protest in a generation. Meanwhile in Australia, record numbers have rallied—most notably 300,000 at the March for Humanity on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in August. But the response of the Australian union movement’s official leadership to Israel’s assault on the Sumud Flotilla was largely confined to a couple of [tweets](https://x.com/unionsaustralia/status/1974025863126503925/photo/1?ref=redflag.org.au). It was moving to see footage of seafarer Hamish Paterson, a member of the Maritime Union of Australia, [welcomed home](https://www.facebook.com/reel/1524377095418162) by a crowd of hundreds of supporters at Sydney airport. But the fact remains that not a single branch of a single union in this country has authorised industrial action in opposition to the Australian government’s role in arming Israel’s genocidal military. It wasn’t always like this. Fifty years ago, Australia’s union movement was [famous](https://redflag.org.au/article/when-australian-workers-struck-against-apartheid)for putting bans on companies that did business with the blood-soaked apartheid regime in South Africa. [“Stop work to stop the war”](https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C98588?ref=redflag.org.au) was likewise the slogan of the left wing of the movement against the US and Australian war in Vietnam—with many unions turning it into reality. In the 1970s, metalworkers regularly banned jobs connected to [uranium mining](https://redflag.org.au/node/6837), and sections of the union movement backed strikes, protests and [blockades](https://redflag.org.au/node/7540) for Aboriginal land rights. [Peter Close](https://redflag.org.au/article/recollections-militant), who as a tugboat crew member implemented the bans on South African shipping in Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay, spoke to *Red Flag* in 2013 about what it was like to be a militant at that time: “Proletarian internationalism, class politics, and class struggle itself was on the menu every day”. This doesn’t mean that everything was perfect. I remember Harry Bocquet, a Maoist who had worked on the Melbourne waterfront from the early 1960s, being very critical of the neglect of political discussion and education in that period. On one occasion, wharfies were pulled off a ship by the union leadership—but it was only when the workers got to the pub that they found out the stoppage was a protest against the war in Vietnam. The workers were supportive on this occasion, according to Harry. But this downplaying of political discussion and democracy meant any culture of militancy was hard to sustain, especially from the early 1980s, when the Labor government moved systematically to stifle union militancy through the Prices and Incomes Accord. The aim of the Accord was to impose sweeping neoliberal “reform”, including privatisations and deregulation of the labour market. This was carried out by the Labor government in partnership with business and almost all of the union movement’s official leadership. If you’re a union leader allied to a Labor government imposing neoliberalism on the working class, one thing you definitely don’t want is a politicised, militant current in the union movement. So the sometimes heroic traditions of the 1970s had to be smothered. A huge amount of effort was spent—especially by “left” leaderships like the key Metalworkers union—in “educating” union delegates out of militancy and browbeating them into compliance with the class collaborationist approach of the Accord. Rates of industrial action fell. Delegate organisation withered. Unions that refused to meekly go along with this shift were smashed, with a key role played by Labor governments. The union leadership that sold us this disaster hasn’t improved with time. This is evident from the lack of fight over wages during the recent inflationary surge. It’s no surprise, then, that Australian unions have overwhelmingly been reluctant even to entertain discussions about Palestine, let alone take industrial action. Not wanting to embarrass the Labor government is obviously a factor. Any party that governs Australian capitalism has to respect that holiest of holies—support for the US alliance, and thus for Israel. So long as acknowledging Palestine means criticising Labor, the union leaders will resist. Added to this, the political forces that led much of the working-class action against war and racism 50 years ago have all but disappeared. The Communist Party helped design and implement the Accord and then voted itself out of existence in 1991\. The Stalinist breakaways from the Communist Party also withered under the impact of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the embrace of capitalism by China’s totalitarian rulers. Forces to the left of the CPA and its splits were reborn during the late 1960s and early 1970s, but were too small to change the course of the union movement. In more recent years, Socialist Alternative members have compiled an [impressive record](https://redflag.org.au/article/socialist-alternatives-record-of-workplace-organising) of industrial disputes—including helping to lead the only [strikes for Palestine](https://redflag.org.au/article/community-sector-workers-to-walk-out-for-palestine-again) in Australia over the past two years. But the sort of active solidarity seen in decades past has so far not been re-created. This had also been the case in Italy, until the last few months. The wonderful response to the call for a strike in solidarity with Palestine has taken almost everyone involved by surprise. It’s not hard to understand why. Critical commentary on the state of Italy’s unions isn’t difficult to find. In February this year, the mainstream news agency Reuters [carried a report](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/big-toothless-italys-unions-blamed-wage-stagnation-2025-02-07/?ref=redflag.org.au) with the title: “Big but toothless—Italy’s unions blamed for wage stagnation”, noting that Italy is the only country in the European Union where real wages went backwards relative to inflation over the three decades to 2020\. More than 90 percent of major strikes in Italy last a day or less, while in the US, 80 percent last two days or longer. “Trade unions in Italy have mutated to become mainly service providers”, according to Filippo Barbera, an academic interviewed by Reuters: “They help you do your tax returns and calculate what your pension will be, but they won't take on employers to secure salary rises”. This is no surprise, given the politics of the three main union federations in Italy (the UIL, the CISL and the CGIL) and the parties they are associated with (respectively the Socialist Party, the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party—whose main political successor is the Democratic Party). Each has been every bit as committed as the Australian Labor Party and the leadership of Australia’s union movement in wanting to work in “partnership” with capital. One sign of this is the series of “[social pacts](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2022.2107044?ref=redflag.org.au#d1e325)” involving the Italian unions signing on to neoliberal “reform” from the late 1970s onwards. The intention of these pacts mirrored Australian Labor’s approach with the Accord: to assist the restructuring of capitalism along neoliberal lines. Such accords played a role in the ending of automatic wage indexation, the introduction of “flexible” contracts, privatisation of key state assets and cuts to Italy’s previously relatively generous pension scheme. This has not always been a smooth process, but overall, the main union federations in Italy have been ineffective in resisting neoliberal “reform”, and at times have been just as actively complicit as Australian unions. There is no system of government registration of unions in Italy. And the Italian far left of the 1970s—though plagued with all sorts of [serious political problems](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/workerism-and-autonomism-in-italys-hot-autumn/?ref=redflag.org.au)—was much larger than the equivalent forces in Australia. These two factors came together in Italy in the formation of “base unions” from the 1980s. Some of these are splits from existing unions, others are the creation of politicised militants who set to work organising the unorganised. The main premise of the base unions is to reject union bureaucracy as inherently conservative, and to attempt to build a more combative rank-and-file-driven movement. Even advocates of this approach admit its limitations, however. Donato Romito, writing from a sympathetic perspective in 2003 on the anarchist-aligned Libcom website, [noted](https://libcom.org/article/exploring-alternative-forms-workers-organization-anarchist-communists-and-italian-base?ref=redflag.org.au)that the CGIL “was systematically demonized, but there was never any strategy of dialogue with its members or with its internal opposition”. Further, Romito noted that the pressures of having to survive as a union can push towards conservatism, regardless of the formal politics of the leadership. There is also a serious tendency towards fragmentation among the base unions, where “everyone felt they were an alternative to everyone else ... Italian grassroots syndicalism remains trapped between the radicalism of its platforms and the need for bargaining, between its criticism of bureaucratism and the inevitable formation of a leadership class”. An informative [commentary](https://libcom.org/article/port-genoa-first-focaccia-then-class-struggle-article-autonomous-dock-workers-collective?ref=redflag.org.au)by Anna Jikhareva from 2022 paints a picture of the Autonomous Port Workers Collective (Collettivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali, or CALP) in Genoa. The CALP were key initiators of the recent strikes in solidarity with Palestine as part of the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) federation of base unions. Remarkably, in a major port with an on-site workforce of 4,000, including 1,200 dock workers, the CALP has only around 20 or so active members, according to Jikhareva. All of them are the sons of dock workers and continuators of a militant industrial and political tradition in the port of Genoa. Despite these small numbers, in the right circumstances the CALP can pull other workers behind them. Jikhareva describes relatively modest numbers of workers and supporters—dozens growing into a crowd of over a hundred—blockading the port in October 2021, as part of a one-day strike of the base unions on economic issues. In the extraordinary circumstances of late 2025, however, with a wave of revulsion sweeping the globe against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the modest forces of the CALP helped set something much more substantial in motion. Heading up a rally of 40,000 in Genoa at the end of August, CALP member Riccardo Rudino threatened to shut down the port—and every other port in Europe—if the Global Sumud Flotilla was attacked. Everyone understood that there was at least the potential of real power behind this threat. A series of factors were important in turning this threat into a reality. The fact that the Democratic Party (associated with the CGIL) is in opposition, and that unions are sidelined under the far-right Meloni government, probably removed one obstacle to the CGIL falling in behind the USB federation. The fact that there were two Democratic Party members of parliament on the Sumud Flotilla no doubt helped as well. And when Rudino threatened to “block everything” that night in Genoa, he was building on the substantial “block everything” union protests in neighbouring France. The mass strikes would never have happened without the movement on the streets and on the campuses in solidarity with Palestine. Also crucial was the presence of politicised militants in a string of workplaces, who were capable of leading something. There are valid and important criticisms of the base unions, but they got enough right to make some history. Of course, we don’t know what comes next. We make our own history, as Karl Marx once observed, but not in circumstances of our own choosing. The USB has now called for a general strike against the Italian war budget on 28 November. In Australia, those frustrating “circumstances” include the disastrous continuing consequences of Labor’s all-too-effective imposition of the politics of class collaboration on the country’s union movement. Rebuilding a different and more combative workers’ movement requires rebuilding the politics of class struggle. After all, which political forces are organised, and to what end, is one of the few “circumstances” we have some control over. But if recent events have reminded us of this, they should also remind us of something else—that not every damn thing is predetermined. Marco Bertorello, a socialist and writer who works at the port of Genoa, wrote a moving [account](https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article9157&ref=redflag.org.au) of the 40,000-strong protest in Genoa at the end of August, describing how the long-dormant traditions of struggle in Genoa were taking on a mass character before his eyes. His account is a reminder that, though we can be all too aware of the circumstances we’re in, sometimes we can still roll the dice and make history: “I think it was an important moment for my city. I don’t know what it might mean for the future and for other cities, but it seems to me to be a possible barometer of the social climate. I hope it is not just a passing anomaly. In difficult times, there is always room for the unexpected, the surprising—in short, for humanity.” ### Labor’s student clubs and Palestine activism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-student-clubs-and-palestine-activism/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:26:53.000Z For the Australian Labor Party, university campuses are a vital source of recruits and a training ground for future politicians and leaders. Through their control of the vast majority of the country’s student unions, student Labor members learn to manage budgets and bureaucracies, network and harvest votes, and to face down pressure from rival groups, mostly on their left—all vital skills for the Albaneses and Wongs of tomorrow. But they also have to prove themselves effective advocates, which means at times supporting or engaging in activism against governments, in support of education demands as well as broader social justice. So two years of campus activism against their party’s support for the genocide in Gaza have put them in an awkward spot. Labor students have had to balance the competing pressures of pro-Palestine sentiments on campus, their own personal views and loyalty to the staunchly pro-Israel line of their party and of university administrations. Predictably, and in line with the adult party’s stance, Labor-dominated student unions on many campuses have expressed outward hostility toward Palestine campaigning and used their resources to obstruct it. Labor students who run the University of Melbourne Student Union, fearful of spoiling relationships with the university hierarchy and drawing the ire of right-wingers, have rescinded union support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Last year, the union responded to a request signed by 1,200 students for a special general meeting (SGM) to reinstate a pro-BDS position by hiring lawyers from Labor-aligned law firm Slater and Gordon to find a legal basis to prevent the meeting happening. They then used similar tactics to defeat a campaign by office-bearers to donate $19,000—the remainder of their 2024 budget—to a Palestinian activist group in the West Bank. The Labor right-dominated Deakin University Student Association has used the precedent created by the disgraceful backdown at Melbourne University to refuse to hear pro-Palestine motions, arguing explicitly that the union should not take “political” stances. At Swinburne University, Labor students sabotaged last year’s SGM for Palestine, requested by 400 students, by scheduling it at the remote Wantirna campus. At Monash, Labor-left students reluctantly oversaw a requested SGM, but locked the doors before the meeting had reached quorum, rendering the meeting unable to change union policy. So far, so predictable. At some other places, however, the possibility of cynically harvesting pro-Palestine votes has softened their hearts to the plight of Gazans. At La Trobe University, Labor students registered the ticket “Social Justice—Free Palestine” in the student union elections to confuse students and compete with the left-wing ticket organised by Socialist Alternative and Students for Palestine members. And at Swinburne, the same Labor students who sabotaged the SGM called through attendees claiming to be from Students for Palestine to get votes for their group in elections. While not ideal, this sort of deviation from official pro-Israel talking points can be tolerated by Sussex Street so long as there are some votes in it and no-one important notices. But then there are the cases where Labor students have outright supported Palestine activism, a position at odds, to say the least, with their party’s policy. At RMIT, the Labor right-controlled union endorsed the campus’s Gaza encampment, even bringing fresh fruit to famished activists. At University of Wollongong, Labor members promoted and attended the SGM organised by Students for Palestine. Through the National Union of Students, leaders of the Labor right have used union resources to promote the People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine—a counter to Labor’s witch-hunt antisemitism inquiry—and endorsed a national day of protest against the government’s support for Israel. Even at Melbourne University, where the Labor students have more recently been hostile, their past conduct suggests this may be as much about toeing the line as conviction. In 2022, they supported the very BDS motion that they later rescinded under pressure. During the 2024 encampment, they gave limited behind-the-scenes support, including by booking lawn space for a camp, but avoided any public association with the event. This contradiction raises a question—if support for Israel is the great moral cause that Labor leaders claim it is, why do they tolerate such blatant disloyalty to party policy in their own ranks? For two years, Labor leaders have maintained the spurious line that Palestine campus activism is part of a detestable upsurge in antisemitic hate. Labor’s federal Education Minister Jason Clare labelled the University of Melbourne’s Gaza solidarity encampment “repugnant”, while Defence Minister Richard Marles asserted last May: “The levels of antisemitism that we have seen in the past few months are more than any that I’ve seen during my lifetime”. Labor supported a motion moved in the Senate by the Liberal opposition that condemned the traditional slogan of Palestinian resistance “from the river to the sea”, describing it as “used by those who seek to intimidate Jewish Australians via acts of antisemitism”. Labor have staked credibility on a bogus campus Senate inquiry led by Jillian Segal, a bigoted pro-genocide activist, that cynically and dishonestly conflated support for Palestine with threats against Jewish students. And anyone who dares speak up for the Palestinians, from former Labor Senator Fatima Payman to Greens Senator Mehreen Farouqi, has had the book thrown at them. And yet Labor turn a blind eye to their own future leaders when they associate themselves with this same campaign and sentiments on campuses. If Labor leaders really believe all this, you would expect them to extend their condemnations to party members who have associated themselves with these campaigns. The fact that they haven’t makes it hard not to draw the conclusion that there is a lot of cynicism at work here, and a willingness to say whatever is required in service of Australia’s imperial interests and alliances. It also reflects a lack of confidence in imposing their political line on their own student groups. Labor’s leaders have to give their student clubs a longer leash with the campaigning they tolerate because the clubs have to recruit from campuses that are populated by young people, the vast majority of whom are well to the party’s left, and where contempt for the party and its conduct in government is at record highs. So there’s an appreciation that pragmatic adaption to the prevailing pro-Palestine sentiment has to happen to keep the machine being supplied with raw material. Notably, it has been students from Labor’s right faction (Unity) in particular that have provided the most support to these campaigns. While the Labor left faction has been in long decline, Unity is overwhelmingly dominant and has the largest base amongst students. It recruits strongly among international students, many of who are from backgrounds where support for Palestine is widespread. Adapting to this sentiment is expedient, and whatever is expedient is acceptable, whatever the bombast about the moral righteousness of Israel. And there is an understanding that all this has very clear limits. Student politicians who want to climb the ranks accept that “serious politics” is ultimately about trading principles away for influence and power. Penny Wong explained how this “serious politics” works when Payman crossed the floor to vote for a pro-Palestine Greens bill in 2024: “Even when we disagree, we have those arguments internally, as you saw over many years in the marriage equality debate”, Wong told ABC Radio’s *AM* program. “That’s what I did, and I think that’s the right way to go about it.” Wong, who married her same-sex partner in 2024, adhered to Labor policy by voting against the Greens’ attempt to legalise same-sex marriage in 2008, and spent years publicly undermining the campaign for marriage equality. Her reward was the foreign ministry. Payman’s case shows what happens when you don't exhibit this highly nuanced and sophisticated conception of politics that involves shutting up about things that are important with the hope of gaining power and influence at some point in the future, and instead say what you think. Payman was immediately shunned and suspended from the Labor caucus, while anonymous Labor sources backgrounded the press that Payman might be ineligible to sit in parliament due to her Afghan background. Payman was the first to cross the floor and vote against party since 2005\. This is how Labor holds the line. For budding Labor careerists, the stick of discipline and ostracisation goes along with the carrot of career advancement. Some Labor students, as at University of Melbourne and Deakin, prove their mettle by openly defending Labor’s line against the movement, and copping the ensuing student outrage. Some others pretend to care about an issue they have no real interest in to harvest votes in elections. Others who, because of prior political conviction or family background, personally support greater rights for Palestinians, learn eventually to bite their tongues to get ahead. For the party to function, it counts on the people that matter becoming too cynical to ever want to really change anything. ### Workers go hungry while corporations rake it in URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/workers-go-hungry-while-corporations-rake-it-in/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:44:41.000Z The rich in Australia are experiencing massive wealth gains, but a new report reveals just how challenging life is for those at the bottom. The [*Foodbank Hunger Report 2025*](https://reports.foodbank.org.au/wp-content/uploads/documents/Foodbank%5FHunger%5FReport%5F2025%5FWeb%5FEdition.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) estimates that one in three Australian households (approximately 3.5 million) experienced food insecurity in the past year. Of those, two-thirds (or 20 percent of all households) were severely food insecure, meaning they had skipped meals or even gone whole days without eating. The most vulnerable in society are the worst affected—67 percent of households with a person with a disability or health issue experienced food insecurity in the past twelve months, as did 68 percent of single-parent households and 48 percent of low-income households, defined as those earning less than $33,800 per year. The report makes it clear that this is driven by the cost-of-living crisis. Only 21 percent of Australian households live comfortably on their current income, while 87 percent cite the cost of living as one of their top concerns. “Australia’s housing affordability crisis appears to be supercharging food insecurity in a way we haven’t seen before, with nearly 1 in 2 rental households reporting as food insecure”, Kylea Tink, CEO of Foodbank, said. Highlighting the direct relationship between the housing crisis and food insecurity, 35 percent of renters cited “changes in their household or living arrangements” as a cause of food insecurity. In response to the rise in the cost of living, households experiencing food insecurity have also reduced eating/drinking in restaurants, cafes and bars, dipped into household savings, cut back on fresh produce, protein, dairy or other food and grocery items, and relied more on credit cards or buy now, pay later apps. What has the federal Labor government done about this? Has it raised JobSeeker, the single-parent payment, the Disability Support Pension and other welfare payments above the poverty line? Has it placed price caps on groceries and other essentials? Has it capped rents and begun building a deluge of public housing? No. It has not. All of this comes as the rich are getting even richer. The Australian Council of Superannuation Investors’ most recent report on executive salaries found that the CEOs of Australia’s top 100 companies made, on average, 55 times the wage of an average worker. Some of Australia’s largest corporations are making major profits from the crisis. Coles and Woolworths made a combined $2.5 billion in after-tax profit last financial year, while Meriton Properties—a developer owned by Australia’s second richest person, Harry Triguboff—[recently announced](https://www.afr.com/property/residential/harry-triguboff-collects-222m-profit-as-rental-income-jumps-20251102-p5n74a?ref=redflag.org.au) that it made $222 million, an increase from $165 million the year before. According to the *Sydney Morning Herald*, [analysts expect](https://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/banking-giants-to-pocket-30b-in-profit-as-lending-ramps-up-20251029-p5n69z.html?ref=redflag.org.au) big Australian banks to have made $30 billion in profit this financial year, driven by growth in loans—particularly home loans. But not everything is as rosy as it seems for Australia’s wealthiest. While working-class families struggle to afford food, the *Australian Financial Review* [recently reported](https://www.afr.com/property/commercial/too-many-boats-not-enough-berths-why-marinas-are-hot-property-20250718-p5mfwl?ref=redflag.org.au) that the rich are suffering from severe super-yacht parking-space insecurity, driven by the increasing number and size of yachts in Australia. According to the Foodbank report, 35 percent of food-insecure households don’t seek help because they believe that others are in greater need. While those most in need are concerned about taking too much from society, the rich possess no such compunctions. Just take Elon Musk’s (successful) bid for a US$1 trillion (A$1.5 trillion) pay packet, or the estimated $165 billion in negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions housing investors are expected to receive from the federal government over the next decade. “The capitalist class is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because ... it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him”, Karl Marx wrote in the*Communist Manifesto*. “Society can no longer live under this class, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.” We need a society that uses its resources to meet everyone’s needs, ensuring no-one goes hungry or without a roof over their head ever again. Even more than that, everyone ought to live dignified and fulfilling lives. The wealth is there, but currently it funds the otherworldly extravagances of the rich. We have to take it from them. ### A system addicted to oil: review of Adam Hanieh’s Crude Capitalism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/a-system-addicted-to-oil-review-of-adam-haniehs-crude-capitalism/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:44:52.000Z Adam Hanieh’s *Crude Capitalism* starts with a simple graph, showing the increase in global emissions from the industrial revolution to today. As most of us know, that line steadily goes up from the moment the mass burning of fossil fuels begins in the nineteenth century. However, the graph is not a straight line but more of a hockey stick. From the middle of the 1950s, global emissions rise rapidly. In fact, three-quarters of global emissions were produced between 1950 and today. Why? The simple reason is oil. Ever since World War Two, oil has been crucial to the world economy. Some of the world’s largest companies are oil companies. And the industry is growing despite the supposed renewable transition—according to the International Energy Agency, oil still makes up 30 percent of the world’s energy supply. Through a global history of the oil industry, Hanieh shows why oil is so central to modern capitalism, and argues there is no hope of meaningfully reducing emissions and averting the climate crisis without dislodging oil from this central position. Oil is first and foremost a relatively cheap source of energy. It is the most efficient fuel source for the trucks, airplanes and ships that transport commodities around the world. But the industry produces much more than energy. The refining of crude oil produces by-products that are used to make materials including plastics, synthetic fibres and fertilisers. According to Hanieh, “it is almost impossible to identify an area of life that has not been radically transformed by the presence of petrochemicals”. Corporations in manufacturing, textiles and agriculture all profit from the cheap synthetic raw materials that are produced from oil. This means that in trying to stop the fossil fuel industry, we are up against not just the corporations that directly profit from it (and the scale of the largest oil companies is truly staggering), but also the broader system that depends on oil. Many in the climate movement still subscribe to the idea that the fossil fuel lobby is solely responsible for the continued expansion of fossil fuels. Hanieh shows us that it is in the interest of a wide array of businesses to keep the oil flowing. Hanieh builds on the work of previous Marxists to show a convergence between the natural properties of fossil fuels and the unique way that capitalism organises production. Coal displaced other forms of energy such as wood burning and water mills because it was portable and energy-dense. This portability empowered capitalists to set up their factories wherever it was most profitable, particularly where there were large numbers of poor and desperate people who could be readily exploited. Coal could also be commodified in a way that running water or wind could not. Oil’s rise to dominance was based on a similar convergence between its unique properties and the logic of capitalism. In particular, the rise of oil was entwined with the rise of the US as an economic and military power. War and militarism propelled oil to the centre of capitalist production. World War One was instrumental in consolidating oil’s supremacy over coal. New weapons of war (tanks, diesel ships and planes) could all be fuelled only by oil. This in turn reinforced US economic and political hegemony, on the back of its huge domestic oil industry. World War Two accelerated this, with the US military devising new ways to produce synthetic materials from petrochemicals. To this day, the US military remains the world’s single biggest emitter. If oil has fuelled wars, it has also been the object of them. Control over oil and the supply of it was at the centre of imperialist competition and conflict throughout the twentieth century. From World War Two to the Iraq War, empires have fought for control over this black gold. Hanieh details how the major US oil companies rigged oil prices to net themselves super-profits from Middle Eastern oil. The entrance into the game of the state-run oil companies of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Russia and China, has only entrenched the importance of control over Middle Eastern oil. Hanieh makes clear, though, that oil has never replaced coal, but rather complemented it. So, while it was primarily coal that powered the factories of the Industrial Revolution and the steamships of the British Empire, its displacement by oil has not reduced coal consumption. Indeed, since the beginning of the “oil age”, coal consumption has quadrupled. This is relevant to assessing the expansion of renewable energy as a solution to the climate crisis. Advocates of green capitalism argue that increasing investment in renewables means a move away from fossil fuels. Yet even if renewables were to surpass oil and coal, they would not replace these fossil fuels. They might slow down their expansion, but they will not replace them. That is why the largest oil companies are happy to increase their investments simultaneously in renewables and in traditional fossil fuels. The last chapter of the book refutes other greenwashing “solutions” to the climate crisis. Hanieh details the lies and creative accounting behind schemes such as carbon capture and storage, electric vehicles and green hydrogen. In the case of green hydrogen—where electricity is used to split water molecules—the overall emissions are greater than just burning coal or oil unless all the energy used is renewable. So even in the best-case scenario, the industry has no net environmental benefit. Taken all together, these are strong arguments for why capitalism cannot break its addiction to oil. Hanieh makes clear that the barriers to a rapid phasing out of oil and other fossil fuels are purely social. It is the relentless need by a small minority to accumulate greater and greater wealth that is propelling us towards environmental catastrophe. That is why Hanieh ends the book with a call for “eco-socialism”. While a new word for socialism is not really necessary, the concrete measures he proposes are sound: dismantle the oil companies, abolish other wasteful industries, demilitarise. He argues we need to take “political and economic power away from the market” and put it under democratic control. Hanieh doesn’t tackle the thorny question of how this might be achieved, but he compellingly shows that the goal of anyone serious about preventing environmental destruction must be to get rid of capitalism. For this reason, *Crude Capitalism* is a vital book for both climate activists and socialists. Accessible but detailed, it is a guide for understanding the world around us, which is necessary if we are to effectively change it. *Crude Capitalism* is published by Verso Books. ### Police are getting more violent, but black bloc tactics make things worse URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/police-are-getting-more-violent-but-black-bloc-tactics-make-things-worse/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:44:29.000Z The sound of an exploding flashbang grenade is hard to describe; the noise thunders through your skull and leaves you disoriented. They are violent, dangerous and potentially lethal devices, designed for use as part of military and armed police operations. Yet they are now being deployed regularly on the streets of Melbourne as a tool of protest management. So too is OC spray, a chemical weapon that’s banned from warfare due to its indiscriminate and potentially deadly impact. Then there are the batons, horses, water cannons, bird-shot rounds and rubber-coated steel bullets. The growing militarisation of police forces around the world is well documented. It is one reflection of the growing disconnect between capitalist governments and the mass of people they supposedly represent and who are increasingly expressing their opposition to genocide, economic inequality, climate inaction, racism and other injustices in significant numbers. Lacking positive reform proposals to address these concerns or improve people’s lives, the state is increasingly responding with brute force, as well as legal restrictions on the right to organise and demonstrate both at work and on the streets. This tendency towards repression and violence is a serious threat to left-wing organising. It is an attempt to make disrupting the status quo harder, and it often succeeds. Anti-union laws, for instance, have played a role in taming the workers’ movement and reducing strike activity. The NSW police successfully used the courts to stop a recent pro-Palestine demonstration from occupying the Opera House shore, and regularly deny all sorts of campaign groups the right to march. And most states have introduced laws that specifically target climate activists who dare to disrupt business as usual. It is possible to push back against these encroachments on our rights, and effective tactics that can be employed to do it. The most obvious is to mobilise significant numbers of people so that crude repression becomes significantly harder. Unfortunately, however, this is not always possible. When our numbers are smaller, it still matters what tactics we adopt. Tactics have to have the aim of making the action meaningful to those involved, helping encourage passive sympathisers to get more involved and being defensible to those not already invested in the issue. To do this, our message needs to be clear and our tactics must seem reasonable and effective. When mobilisations have a comprehensible message and approach, it makes it easier to win wider support to the cause. This doesn’t necessarily prevent repression, but it makes the political cost to the authorities much higher. Not every person and group involved in protesting the far right subscribes to this approach. The “black bloc”, in particular, does not, and its tactics are worth addressing. The black bloc is known for turning up to demonstrations as a distinct contingent wearing uniforms (black outfits, black hoods/helmets etc) designed to hide their identities and shield them from police attack, and with the aim of carrying out anonymous acts of violence. Sometimes this violence is targeted against police, as at the anti-fascist demonstration on 19 October in Melbourne and the attempted blockade of the Land Forces arms fair in Melbourne last year. At other times it has involved fairly random attacks on businesses and property along the path of broader demonstrations. These activities are justified by black bloc supporters as attacks against authority, fascism, capitalism or whatever the issue of the day may be. And unlike the regular “sheeple” who attend conventional demonstrations, creating “[banal spectacles](https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/in-defence-of-black-bloc/?ref=redflag.org.au)” within the rules, the black bloc sees itself as striking more serious blows against the system. But the truth is they do nothing to challenge the establishment, and often help strengthen it. Only a mass movement of the working class can seriously challenge capitalism. The same is true of the far right, which is now an entrenched part of politics in almost every country on Earth and in charge of the US military empire. While we’re not quite there yet in Australia, with Pauline Hanson polling at 15 percent nationally, and repeated street demonstrations numbering in the thousands, it feels like we’re catching up. In this context, thinking seriously about how we can build an anti-capitalist movement based in the working class is vital, even if it is a medium- to long-term prospect. Bashing a few fascists or throwing stones at police is the very definition of performative. It is pure street theatre, a chance for small groups to feel tough and radical by acting out their pseudo-revolutionary fantasies. Worse, these black bloc tactics expose the broader movement to violence at the hands of police and slander from the media and the political class, and give the state an excuse to further erode the right to protest. Sometimes such attacks can’t be avoided regardless of our tactics, but to provoke them for no strategic purpose is hugely damaging and irresponsible. Such tactics undermine our capacity to mobilise our existing supporters. Only the most committed activists will continually show up to events that end in widespread police brutality. This is especially so when the state then seizes the moment to introduce new repressive measures, as are now being floated in Victoria, confirming yet again to potential supporters that anti-fascism is an extreme sport better left to the experts. The scandals that follow black bloc actions also end up distracting from the actual issue being addressed by the protest, giving the media a free pass to jump instead to the predictably reactionary terrain of protester conduct and law and order. This then tends to isolate the movement from the wider public who might otherwise have been sympathetic or open to joining. In the current moment, this is particularly disastrous given that the key task the left faces is to convince larger numbers of people to take the far-right threat seriously, and to turn up when the call goes out. Currently, there are thousands of fascist and far-right scum mobilising on our streets every few weeks. They’re gaining strength inside the Liberals and Nationals, and One Nation has doubled its membership since the election. If the anti-fascist left is to get to the point where we can challenge and reverse these dynamics, we need massively more numbers. Sometimes the black bloc is defended on the grounds that a “diversity of tactics” is needed to maintain left unity. And in most movements, there is room for different approaches: fundraising, public forums, public postering, street art and so on are all useful activities with different audiences and rationales. But the black bloc is not some complementary part of a wide-ranging effort: its tactics are inherently counter-posed to it. Perhaps the worst aspect of the black bloc approach is how it relies on the very mass movement its adherents dismiss as not radical enough for cover and protection. If a group of masked militants were to attack a fascist event alone, they would easily be crushed by the state. But by deploying their violence within or around broader crowds, the black bloc make themselves safer by using the rest of us as shields when the police reaction inevitably comes—the very definition of parasitic. This behaviour is also profoundly undemocratic, in that it imposes the consequences of the block’s tactic—the state’s violent response—on others who did not necessarily support, agree to or carry out the tactic and could not reasonably be prepared for it. None of this is to excuse the state’s brutality. But knowing that the capitalists and their political lackeys are violent, anti-democratic scum doesn’t absolve us of agency and responsibility for our actions. Quite the opposite. Any serious approach to building a movement must take into account the way the capitalist system defends the status quo and organise in ways that can overcome it. As long as it has existed, the black bloc has been a barrier to doing that. It’s time for the left to draw a line in the sand and make it clear the black bloc is not welcome at our actions. ### Gaza Tribunal: The genocide continues URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/gaza-tribunal-the-genocide-continues/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:44:13.000Z *In a timely response to Donald Trump’s phoney “peace plan” and Israel’s continual violations of the ceasefire agreement, the concluding session of a [“people’s tribunal” on Gaza](https://gazatribunal.com/?ref=redflag.org.au) was held in Istanbul, 23-26 October. Over the four days, an audience of hundreds, plus many more online, heard compelling testimony from dozens of experts and individual victims of Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign, including the mass murder, deliberate starvation and destruction of medical care, housing, the environment and other civilian infrastructure. The statement below was issued at the conclusion of the Gaza Tribunal hearing. All talks from the Istanbul session are [available on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@GazaTribunal/videos?ref=redflag.org.au).* \-------------------- The Steering Committee members of the Gaza Tribunal issue this conclusion at a historic moment of darkness, but in a continuing quest for the light of justice. The Gaza Tribunal recognizes that the current genocide in Palestine, rooted in a century of colonization and oppression, represents a watershed moment in the history of our world. If the Israeli perpetrators and their western enablers are allowed to escape justice, and the Palestinian survivors are left without meaningful redress and, ultimately, their full liberation from the dehumanizing shackles of Zionism and colonialism, the world will have ratified one of the worst atrocities in history. The Tribunal notes that if colonialism, apartheid, and genocide are not moral redlines, then there are no redlines. And the world that presages will be a world of unprecedented horror. Every member of the human family has a stake in Palestinian justice. Cognizant of this, the Gaza Tribunal was established in London in November 2024, as a people’s tribunal in the tradition of the Russell Tribunal that was established at the height of US aggression in Vietnam. It convened public hearings in Sarajevo in May 2025, adopting the historic Sarajevo Declaration as a statement of the principles of the Tribunal and of the global quest for justice in Palestine. Its work over the past year has consisted of the collection of information and analysis, the hearing of witnesses and survivors, the archiving of evidence, and the issuing of appeals to humanity for action to end the genocide and to secure justice for the Palestinian people. Its convening here in Istanbul has brought together members of the Tribunal, witnesses, survivors, experts, and an international Jury of Conscience to issue a moral judgement on the crimes of the Israeli regime and those complicit in their perpetration, and to set the course for the next phase of the quest for justice in Palestine. The members of the Gaza Tribunal welcome the findings of the Jury of Conscience, applaud their moral clarity, and commit to the struggle to see their implementation in full. The accelerated genocide of the past two years had shocked the conscience of humanity. The images of its audacious cruelty are forever seared in the minds of decent people everywhere, and the echoes of the cries of its victims will forever ring in our ears. We will forget none of it. The brutal attacks on an imprisoned civilian population, the intentional infliction of hunger, thirst, and disease as weapons of genocide, the targeting of bullets and bombs and drones at innocents, the mass arrests and imprisonment in notorious dungeons, the systematic beatings, and torture, and sexual violence of the genocidal perpetrators, the sniping of toddlers for sport, the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, homes, refugee shelters, aid facilities, agricultural fields, food stores, even cemeteries, and the deliberate targeting of civilian truth tellers, journalists, medical personnel, aid workers, and other protected persons. So too will we remember the arrogant genocidal threats and declarations of the perpetrators, and their cruel laughter and public celebration of their crimes, all recorded forever in a catalogue of shame. We warn the world today that the genocide in Palestine has not ended. The Israeli regime continues to murder Palestinians in Gaza with its Western-supplied bullets and bombs. It continues to obstruct the delivery of food and medicine to the survivors. It continues to impose its unlawful siege on the survivors. Its two-year systematic imposition of hunger, disease, injury, the plaguing of all of Gaza with toxic chemicals and explosive ordinance, its destruction of most shelter as well as the infliction of mass mental disorder and impaired developmental capacities for surviving civilians, will all continue to claim victims of the genocide for years to come. Even as Gaza continues to bleed, the Israeli regime has extended the annihilation phase of the genocide to the West Bank, where land, and livelihoods, and lives are claimed every day in the ethnic cleansing and racist assaults of the Israeli army and its violent settlers. Nor do the colonial maneuvers reflected in the so-called Trump Plan, or in the New York plan, offer any hope for end to the genocide, or for freedom or justice for Palestine. Even as we welcome any ceasefire, we note that the Israeli regime has continued to violate with impunity the current declared cessation with daily killings of Palestinians and the continued obstruction of humanitarian aid. We reject the provisions of both plans that would violate fundamental Palestinian rights of self-determination, the essential elements of which are agency, sovereignty, authentic representation and unified leadership. The proposed Plans presuppose impunity for Israeli genocide and apartheid, normalize the Israeli regime, ignore the rights of the Palestinian people under international law, and impose proxy occupation and colonial control over the victims of genocide, while doing nothing to reign in the perpetrators of genocide. Palestinians must lead the restoration of Gaza, and Israel and its enablers must be held responsible for all reparations. We demand accountability for the perpetrators and their complicit enablers, redress for the victims and survivors, action to address the root causes of Zionist colonization, occupation, and apartheid, rejection of all efforts to normalize the perpetrator regime and its criminal acts, and freedom for Palestine. In sum, we demand justice. To these ends, we call on people of conscience everywhere to intensify their efforts to secure justice for the Palestinian people, through increased and coordinated efforts to isolate the Israeli regime, reject its normalization, and to hold it to account through boycotts, divestment, sanctions, military embargoes, criminal prosecutions of perpetrators and complicit actors, civil actions against those benefitting from harms, education of our neighbors, public protest and civil disobedience, and the amplification of calls for a free Palestine. ### The Mamdani moment URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-mamdani-moment/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:27:27.000Z “Improbable” doesn’t quite capture the political significance of Zohran Mamdani becoming mayor-elect of New York City. The left is not supposed to win capitalist elections, at least not big ones like this. And not in America, where corporate power’s grip on politics is more vice-like than anywhere else on Earth. Yet, while his victories this year might appear to be something out of the blue—and at odds with the triumphant moment the right is having, which is reshaping the US and much of Europe—this moment has been building for some time. A decade ago, we wrote in these pages of the insurgent US presidential primary campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who, like Mamdani, was running on a democratic socialist platform: “Something is happening in the United States. The political landscape is being transformed, though just how widely, deeply or permanently is still unclear ... It seems improbable that \[Sanders\] will defeat the machine of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ... But even if he ultimately fails, you get the sense that a genie has been let out of a bottle. The genie is not Sanders himself ... but the sentiment that he has tapped ... “Anger with the economic and political system has found a left-wing electoral expression, which is unlike anything seen in the US in generations. Whether it can be cohered into a movement to rebuild the left is another question. But there definitely is hope that it might.” Ultimately, the Sanders insurgency was unsuccessful. In the following years, the senator went on to betray the aspirations that he stoked, and the revolutionary left imploded just as it might have seized the moment to build something independent of the Democratic Party. These are cautionary tales for the Mamdani moment. Nevertheless, the broad shift in consciousness has continued. It was evident at the end of 2015 and became clearer as the presidential primaries unfolded the following year. The political establishments of both the Democrats and the Republicans were facing significant blowback from their left and right bases, respectively. Since then, the political polarisation in the United States and elsewhere has intensified, although it has been expressed somewhat asymmetrically; at least in the electoral sphere, the far right has made most of the running. That’s reflected in its leaders’ surnames gaining worldwide recognition: Trump, Meloni, Modi, Farage, Le Pen, Wilders, Milei. Everywhere, far-right organisations have been bankrolled by billionaires and masses of smaller capitalists while receiving free and positive publicity from sections of the reactionary corporate media. They have built a base among the personnel of the repressive arms of the state, such as the police and the military, and more broadly among the population by dishonestly selling their reactionary pro-capitalist programs as some form of “people power”. New York has now kicked back. Young working-class people have reacted to the consolidation of Trumpism, to ongoing economic hardship, to the new holocaust in Gaza, to the victimisation of undocumented migrants and the Gestapo-like raids being carried out across the country, and to the capitalist establishment’s complicity in it all. A member of the Democratic Socialists is about to take the reins of global finance’s most important city. A Palestine solidarity activist who rejects the idea of a Jewish state has succeeded in the heart of liberal Zionism. A 34-year-old who said that billionaires shouldn’t exist has won the metropolis that is home to the most billionaires on the planet. However, the main thing is that Mamdani’s victory came on the back of more than 100,000 volunteers and the city’s largest voter turnout in over half a century. This astonishing mobilisation reflects a very positive shift in political consciousness. Most of the mainstream commentary, naturally, focuses on Mamdani himself—his political talents, his campaigning acumen and his identity. From the left, numerous criticisms can and should be made of his increasing embrace of the establishment that he purports to oppose. Some of these were foreshadowed in [the *Red Flag* editorial](https://redflag.org.au/article/fairytale-of-new-york) following his victory in the primaries. Lance Selfa, writing from Chicago, [outlines the subsequent developments](https://redflag.org.au/article/trump-cops-a-pasting-in-us-election-rebuke). Nevertheless, this is a moment to grasp—New York has electrified people across the globe because they can see an alternative to the status quo in a world that is totally stacked against us. Increasingly over the last decade or so, that alternative has been given a name: “socialism”. This sea change in sensibilities is astounding. From a ridiculed word, it has again become the menace of the political right and the hope of millions. That is something to be built on. ### Trump cops a pasting in US election rebuke URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/trump-cops-a-pasting-in-us-election-rebuke/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:28:07.000Z There isn’t much to explain about the result of the off-year US elections on 4 November. In virtually every election held in every district and every state, Democrats improved on their performance in last year’s presidential election. And in many places, they exceeded their most optimistic predictions. “No Kings” went to the polls. In New Jersey, expectations of a close election melted before Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill’s 13-percentage-point victory. In New York City, Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani won a majority of votes in a four-way race for mayor amidst the highest turnout in the city’s mayoral election since 1969. The Democratic sweep wasn’t confined only to liberal strongholds like New York City or California. Mississippi Democrats managed to break the Republican super-majority in the state Senate. Two Georgia Democrats won election to the state’s public utility commission, marking the first time in twenty years that Democrats won a statewide race for state office. [Democrats turfed out local officials in conservative areas like Luzerne County, Pennsylvania](https://www.citizensvoice.com/2025/11/04/democrats-regain-majority-on-luzerne-county-council-flip-4-seats/?ref=redflag.org.au), considered a bellwether county for a Trumpist future. The right-wing city council member who promoted the Trump-amplified lie that Venezuelan gangs had taken over apartment buildings in [Aurora, Colorado, received a well-deserved ejection from her seat](https://sentinelcolorado.com/orecent-headlines/aurora-vote-2025-election-night-results/?ref=redflag.org.au). The explanation for the rout is simple. Voters wanted to voice opposition to Trump, and to support Democratic pledges to improve affordability. That was the winning message for Democratic candidates, whether the messenger was a self-described moderate or a social democrat. According to opinion polls, President Trump is more unpopular now than Joe Biden was when Democratic Party mandarins forced him out of the 2024 presidential race. Clearly, millions went to the polls to vote against Trump. Second, Trump’s 2024 promises to lower prices on necessities have not been fulfilled. Trump’s policies, such as his across-the-board tariffs and cuts to health-care subsidies, are raising prices. The [economic and political headwinds](https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/economic-anger-once-again-punishes-the-party-in-power?ref=redflag.org.au) that pushed against Kamala Harris and the Democrats a year ago are now blowing against Trump and the Republicans. [In 2024, it was “the economy, stupid”](https://internationalsocialism.net/its-the-economy-stupid/?ref=redflag.org.au) and in 2025, it still is. Only now, Trump and the GOP are the target for voters’ frustrations—as Harris and Democrats were in 2024. In 2024, voters who took a chance on Trump could tell themselves that he would, as he said, “bring down prices on day one” and that his deportation plan would focus on “violent criminals”. Since January, however, they have seen that Trump’s policies have served corrupt oligarchs and that federal goons are abducting day labourers and childcare workers off the streets. For these reasons, [2024 Republican gains with young voters and with Latinos have evaporated](https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/seven-data-driven-takeaways-from?ref=redflag.org.au). Even GOP “culture wars” couldn’t save it. The Republican candidate for Virginia’s governorship spent millions on anti-trans ads. She lost by 14 points. In California, more than 8 million voters turned out to endorse Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps to provide Democrats the opportunity to win five additional seats in Congress in the 2026 midterm election. Newsom touted this measure as “fighting fire with fire” against the governments of Texas and other Republican-led states who are trying to gerrymander their congressional maps to insulate Republicans from a building wave to throw them out of office. Liberals are cheering the overwhelming victory (by a margin of almost 2-to-1) of the Newsom-backed Proposition 50\. To them, Newsom deserves credit because his partisan ruthlessness broke the usual mould of Democratic Party fecklessness against Trump and the GOP. But from a socialist point of view, a manoeuvre to elect more Democrats shouldn’t be a cause for celebration. [The Democrats remain a capitalist party whose dedication to the status quo laid the groundwork for the horrors that Trump is enacting today](https://internationalsocialism.net/lessons-of-election-2024/?ref=redflag.org.au). In 2024, Kamala Harris touted her “tough on the border” credentials and defended the Biden administration’s abetting of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. A generation of Democratic Party support for the neoliberal policy agenda that destroyed labour unions and immiserated millions opened the way for Trump. Even today, after their landslide victories, the “centrist” Democratic governors-elect in New Jersey and Virginia won’t commit to basic policies to support working people. Mikie Sherrill, governor-elect in New Jersey, has yet to say whether she will extend the state’s law preventing its [law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration authorities](https://boltsmag.org/immigration-and-new-jersey-governor-election/?ref=redflag.org.au). Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s governor-elect, has already said she won’t support repealing the state’s [anti-union “right to work” law](https://www.virginiascope.com/spanberger-splits-the-middle-on-right-to-work-opposes-full-repeal/?ref=redflag.org.au). Electing more Democrats doesn’t guarantee support for democracy or for working people, any more than decades of Democratic super-majorities in California have produced affordable housing or [single-payer health care](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-16/single-payer-healthcare-meets-its-fate-again-in-the-face-of-californias-massive-budget-deficit?ref=redflag.org.au). For all their election campaign rhetoric about “standing with working people”, the Democrats have no plan, nor vision, that can combat Trumpism’s appeal to cynicism for politicians who talk a good game but don’t do anything to improve ordinary people’s lives. In this political wasteland, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old mayor-elect of New York City, stands out as something different and fresh. It’s not just that he cited socialist hero Eugene Debs in [his victory speech](https://jacobin.com/2025/11/zohran-mamdani-election-victory-speech?ref=redflag.org.au). Or that he ran a clever social media-driven campaign that embraced New York’s immigrant diversity. Or that he dared Donald Trump: “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us”. It’s that he captured the hopes of millions who expect him to stand up for them against the billionaire oligarchs. Mamdani’s relentless focus on affordability in one of the US’s least affordable cities inspired tens of thousands of volunteers to canvass for him, and more than 1 million to turn out for him against the decrepit Democratic Party establishment that couldn’t stop him. Mamdani focused his campaign on a simple set of promises, including pledges to freeze rents, make bus rides free and open city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani’s message resonated widely especially among younger and immigrant voters in New York. What can we expect from his administration? JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Mamdani a “Marxist” “pushing the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world”. In fact, Mamdani’s transition team relies on professionals who have worked in the last three New York City administrations. Despite all the ridiculous rhetoric branding him as a dangerous radical, Mamdani’s proposals are modest. Mamdani and his supporters in the DSA openly embrace the early [1900s model of “sewer socialism”](https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-mayor-socialism-nyc-strategy/?ref=redflag.org.au). This moniker originated as a put-down of Socialist Party city officials who eschewed radical politics in favour of humdrum provision of city services. But the reformers who implemented it—especially in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the bastion of some of the most conservative Socialists—chose to embrace “sewer socialism”. To them, “socialism” meant running “clean” (not corrupt) governments that delivered public services. This type of city administration is clearly preferable to corrupt cronyism, but it’s hardly the stuff of the transition to socialism. Moreover, Mamdani endorsed policies, like loosening regulations on small businesses and land use, that dovetail with [so-called “abundance” agenda that is all the rage with “centrist” neoliberal Democrats](https://www.semafor.com/article/06/04/2025/at-welcomefest-centrist-democrats-pick-a-fight-with-the-left?ref=redflag.org.au). Last September—before he announced his run for mayor—he met with Kathy Wylde, a leader of the city’s business elite. Wylde told the *Wall Street Journal*that “\[Mamdani\] said, ‘Look, I’m not in favour of government taking over your business ... He made clear that he’s not anticapitalist in that sense”. Two of his proposals—appointing members of the city’s Rent Stabilization Board committed to his pledge to freeze rents and fare-free buses—are within his power to implement as mayor. In fact, the previous liberal Democratic Mayor Bill deBlasio implemented similar rent-stabilisation policies. His plan for city-owned groceries is a pilot project aimed at providing one store in each borough as a “proof of concept”. In a city of more than 8 million, this is hardly a threat to the retail grocery sector. His more ambitious proposals, such as universal pre-kindergarten education, will require approval from New York state for the taxes to fund them. But here’s where Mamdani’s agenda will run up against other forces in the Democratic Party determined to coopt him or to break him. In his runs for office, Mamdani has always run as a Democrat. This may provide DSA-backed candidates with a more ready-made electorate, but it also makes them captive inside a capitalist party. Not wanting to be ostracised from people who hold influence over their agenda or their advancement leads candidates to make concessions to the mainstream that undercut their independence or even their ability to deliver for their supporters. This process helps to turn [nominal socialists into “regular old Democrats”](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-just-a-regular-old-democrat-now.html?ref=redflag.org.au). We’ve already seen that process taking shape with Mamdani. [Social democrat Eric Blanc may](https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/zohrans-historic-win-16-takeaways?ref=redflag.org.au) consider Mamdani’s rejection of “defunding the police” (a goal that Blanc called “performative ultraleftism”) as a brilliant stroke to avoid having to answer multiple “gotchas” from reporters and pro-cop trolls. But it’s not going to help him deal with the NYPD, a resource-sucking army that will declare war on him the minute he tries to take any action to curtail its abuses. In a meeting with executives in the Partnership for New York, the city’s *de facto* chamber of commerce, Mamdani said he was open to retaining the current police commissioner[, Jessica Tisch (daughter of Leow’s billionaire CEO James Tisch)](https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/mamdani-clarifies-globalize-the-intifada-stance-in-meeting-with-business-elites-?ref=redflag.org.au). At the same meeting, he also pledged to discourage activists from using the slogan “globalise the intifada”, a phrase which has been the pretence for multiple attacks on him, [even though he has said repeatedly that he doesn’t use it](https://inthesetimes.com/article/zohran-mamdani-adl-antisemitism-intifada-bogus-scandal-nyc?ref=redflag.org.au). What will hold Mamdani to fulfil his promises to working-class supporters, especially when he faces opposition from Wall Street, the police or establishment political forces? His supporters look to the army of canvassers his campaign mobilised. [As Liza Featherstone put it](https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-victory-hope-nyc-election?ref=redflag.org.au), “the mass movement that elected him must be prepared to help him succeed, as the ruling class (especially the real estate industry), the Trump administration, and the police make every effort to make his mayoralty a failure”. While this is theoretically possible, it has almost never happened. There are too many differences between the mechanics of an electoral campaign and a social movement needed to win reforms. Marxists have long contended that elections are the “lowest form” of politics, not requiring the type of political commitment or mobilisation that a true social movement entails. There’s also the compromised position that someone like Mamdani, as chief executive officer of a city and boss of hundreds of thousands of city workers, will face. First, he will have to staff an administration, undoubtedly pulling many grassroots activists into the government. That means many who could be pressuring the government from the “outside” will be on the “inside”, defending the mayor’s agenda instead. Will the nominal boss of the NYPD use his office to mobilise protests when the police brutalise or murder someone on his watch? Will the CEO and employer of teachers and other city workers support them if they strike against austerity? Will his administration arrest and prosecute Trump’s immigration goons for civil rights abuses? To ask these questions is to be clear-eyed about developments that will put Mamdani’s brand of “municipal socialism” to the test. ### Did Palestine set New York free? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/did-palestine-set-new-york-free/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:29:18.000Z “‘Palestine will free us all’—you know this slogan, right?” Michael Letwin, a co-founder of US solidarity group Labor for Palestine, was speaking with the enthusiasm of a recent convert, despite his decades of activism, over tea and coffee in Brooklyn’s Iris cafe last year. It was some time in May, and northerly gusts whipping off the East River still sent occasional chills through the city, even as summer threatened to burst through the spring. Letwin wasn’t making small talk about the weather, though; he wanted to stress a shift in New York’s political climate. As students in Palestine solidarity encampments across the city were being slandered and smashed by authorities, their defiance seemed only to grow. “The activists aren’t going through ‘stages’”, he said, referring to their political consciousness. “It’s more akin to something like ‘permanent revolution’—they are leaping over the old liberal progressive consensus and drawing much more radical, even revolutionary, conclusions.” I was a little sceptical, having been in Hong Kong five years earlier, embedded in [the siege of the Polytechnic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM7N9XICfes&ref=redflag.org.au), when police faced seemingly endless volleys of Molotov cocktails, petrol bombs, bricks and arrows from the city’s massive student movement. Almost everywhere across the city bore scars of a dramatic mood shift mobilised ferociously against the government—graffiti, boarded-up banks and shops, excavated footpaths, smashed signal boxes and traffic lights. New York, by contrast, appeared totally unaffected as an urban space and broadly indifferent. You wouldn’t have known there was a movement unless you walked onto the campuses or stumbled into one of the demonstrations. Of course, I was comparing apples and oranges. Hong Kong’s rage manifested as a scream of physical confrontations everywhere, but without a noticeably commensurate lifting in the political level of the participants. At any rate, despite my unspoken misgivings, it wasn’t hard to get caught up in the excitement of the New York campuses, where spectacular things certainly were happening. And Letwin wasn’t the only person talking about a momentous political shift—anyone with a long history on the left, and particularly Jewish leftists, all were saying similar things: Gaza had precipitated a generational crisis within liberal Zionism, the effects of which would be far ranging. It has been striking since then to watch the decline of the street-based Palestine solidarity movement in Israel’s key supporter. The resistance has been bigger in countries that matter far less than America: Australia, Italy, the UK, for example. Yet it’s clear now that Palestine didn’t disappear as an issue, and possibly played out in the New York mayoral election in ways that were not so evident from afar. John Ganz, a left-wing writer based in New York, [writes in his Unpopular Front newsletter](https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/thoughts-on-a-victory?ref=redflag.org.au): “Israel’s place in American politics was more the unquestioned status quo than ideological, even for many Jews ... Then there was Gaza. Suddenly, all those activists didn’t seem so crazy after all. Maybe they had a point—or two. And so Mamdani’s views \[that Israel ought to be a democratic state with equal rights for Palestinians\] rapidly go from being an eccentric force in American politics to a central one. It wasn’t so much that the election was a referendum on Palestine, Israel, or, even less, the Jews, as some race baiters want us to believe, but that Mamdani now sounded reasonable and attached to reality, while the people who were defending Israel tooth and nail and calling everyone else antisemites and terrorists now sounded like the wild-eyed ideologues.” That is, Palestine as a signal of political sanity. Perhaps even more than this, Mamdani’s stance might have become a signal to people that he was genuinely different from other politicians in other ways. “When pressured to temper his criticisms of Israel, Mamdani has barely flinched”, [Eric Lach writes in the *New Yorker*](https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-mamdani-era-begins?ref=redflag.org.au). “These qualities convinced many young voters, in particular, that he might have what it takes to follow through on his promises.” While bread and butter issues appear to be the singular driving force of the campaign, Palestine figures here not as a background foreign policy issue irrelevant to running a city, but as a bellwether for political character. It not only played a role as a moral question that helped drive the young volunteer mobilisation but as an indication of political spine and integrity that pushed up Mamdani’s vote. After all, someone who can withstand the unending and vicious barrage of the Zionist movement surely has a shot at tackling a rental crisis, delivering free child care and buses, and taking two cents on the dollar in tax from incomes above $1 million—none of which are likely to be as ferociously denounced as the call for equality in Palestine. In this sense, “Palestine will free us all” suggests something akin to a revelation about the operations of capitalism and the nature of mainstream politics: Gaza shows that the rule of naked, brutal, unapologetic power is ubiquitous. The jettisoning of reason, the silencing of arguments and the resort to brute force are happening not only “over there”, but are mirrored in day-to-day establishment politics, and in the marginalisation of people speaking the truth in workplaces, campuses and the public sphere everywhere. Michael Letwin and others, then, might have been proven right, not only about New York’s spring being more than a seasonal change, but about how Palestine became central to even local politics, albeit in ways that many would not have predicted. ### Why we protested the weapons expo of war criminals URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-we-protested-the-weapons-expo-of-war-criminals/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:44:02.000Z On 4 November, Judge Navi Pillay, former member of the UN special commission of inquiry that found Israel guilty of committing genocide in Gaza, addressed the National Press Club. “Under the Genocide Convention, every state has the legal obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, to deal with the commission of genocide, and to protect against genocide ... Be careful what you’re doing”, Pillay said. “You may one day face charges of complicity in genocide.” As Pillay was delivering her speech in Canberra, two major Israeli weapons companies were spruiking their wares in Sydney at the Indo Pacific weapons expo, officially sponsored by the NSW government and the Australian Navy. Elbit Systems and Rafael have enabled and profited from the genocide in Gaza, and even [use their war crimes as selling points](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-weapons-firm-rafael-uses-gaza-killing-marketing-campaign?ref=redflag.org.au) for their weapons systems. They were joined by a host of other arms dealers that have amassed fortunes by turning Gaza into a mass grave, including Lockheed Martin, Leonardo and Thales. While the Israel connection was the most morally repugnant feature of the expo, it went well beyond this. The main game for Australian imperialism is bolstering its military power and further integrating with the US military, to better contain and combat China. These priorities were reflected in the convention, which [celebrated](https://indopacificexpo.com.au/news-media/latest-news/74-american-companies-come-together-at-indo-pacific-2025-to-celebrate-innovation-collaboration-and-250-years-of-the-us-navy/?ref=redflag.org.au)the US bringing the “largest national presence to date to Indo Pacific 2025 with 74 leading American companies representing nineteen states present at the show”. These companies are competing to get their snouts in the trough of the global arms race, now worth about US$2.5 trillion annually, and with Australia set to nearly double its military spending to $100 billion per year by 2033-34. The weapons expo encapsulated the barbarity and the banality of the evil of present-day capitalism. Thousands of senior military and government personnel rubbed shoulders with war profiteering corporations, many of which are run by ex-military or government personnel themselves. Far from being a barrier to entry, complicity in the genocide in Gaza was almost a requirement of entry, and the rosy dawn being hailed was one of mushroom clouds and future holocausts. Free gifts for participants included hand-grenade plush toys. Despite officially sponsoring the event, the NSW government tried to downplay its involvement in the expo, a spokesperson for NSW Industry Minister Anoulack Chanthivong [telling the](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/30/israeli-weapons-companies-elbit-rafael-should-be-removed-sydney-defence-expo-over-gaza?ref=redflag.org.au) *Guardian* that the state government was not paying international companies to attend and was not involved in planning the expo. Information leaked to the Palestine Action Group, however, claims that the NSW government has spent at least $1.6 million to secure the hosting of the expo in Sydney, and that staff from the Premier’s Department were involved in setting up and running the exhibition. Federal Labor ministers were much less coy. The keynote speaker, Defence Minister Richard Marles, gushed that the machines of death before him spanned “the breadth of the beautiful, the menacing and the extremely cool ... the very best of human ingenuity”. While these “beautiful” weapons were being bought and sold inside, other weapons were being deployed outside—against anti-war protesters. Pepper spray is banned for use in warfare under the Chemical Weapons Convention. But NSW Police did not hesitate to repeatedly spray hundreds of demonstrators with this chemical weapon, which causes severe pain and blindness for up to half an hour. The attacks on our demonstration began as soon as people arrived in Darling Harbour, police violently charging protesters from 6:23am, riding horses into the crowd, punching demonstrators in the head, emptying whole canisters of pepper spray into people’s faces and making violent arrests. One protester, Amy, a journalism student, was thrown to the ground, fracturing her tibia (shin bone). The police attacks continued intermittently for several hours, even after we were driven away from the International Convention Centre and into Tumbalong Park, a “designated protest area”. At one point, the police escorted an expo attendee into the park and through the middle of our protest, just to have an excuse to pepper spray the crowd again. I was sprayed directly in the face while trying to help up another protester who had been knocked down and blinded. Senior police later lied about events, telling a media conference that they had been “set upon by a pack of very angry people”. Several [videos](https://www.instagram.com/p/DQoitfwE3kb/?ref=redflag.org.au) show that the exact opposite occurred. When I tried to ask a question at this press conference—about whether NSW Police had begun any investigations into war crimes by companies at the expo—I was [surrounded by police](https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/propalestine-protesters-to-blockade-nsw-governmentsponsored-arms-expo/news-story/837abdd47900072694e75780444c2b46?ref=redflag.org.au) and threatened with arrest. Despite all of this, the spirits of protesters remained high, as we knew we had stood together, defied police violence and at least shone a spotlight on this abominable weapons expo and the sick priorities of our rulers and their repressive police. Next time, we need thousands more of us to shut it down and demand our money be spent on public housing, the health system and wage rises, not weapons, and for a world without war and genocide. *Josh Lees is a member of the Palestine Action Group Sydney.* ### Public money given to private providers, and patients pay URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/public-money-given-to-private-providers-and-patients-pay/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:43:51.000Z The NSW government has announced it is making a [$190 million offer](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-21/chris-minns-government-takeover-northern-beaches-hospital/105914848?utm%5Fsource=abc%5Fnews%5Fapp&utm%5Fmedium=content%5Fshared&utm%5Fcampaign=abc%5Fnews%5Fapp&utm%5Fcontent=messenger&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR6wnKAVF0SW-MCmpLaRalQev4KUHf0W7A4G%5FbkD4iKJUcoRSDSOoEu6y1cD-w%5Faem%5FDNHjkIwP0nKTzqm9-4DFeQ) to return Northern Beaches Hospital to the public healthcare system. This follows the tragic and preventable death of a toddler—Joe Massa—in late 2024 [due to inadequate care in the hospital’s emergency department](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-deadly-cost-of-privatising-health-care). The public outcry about this case, and broader discontent about the performance of the hospital, have prompted strong criticism of the hospital’s management and the public-private partnership model it was controversially founded on. The government’s offer is $190 million too much. It has already contributed [$600 million](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-27/northern-beaches-hospital-mps-warn-over-private-operators/12006392?ref=redflag.org.au) to build the hospital, part of the $2.14 billion it committed to give the private provider in a contract signed in 2014\. The provider, Healthscope, has demonstrated it is not capable of operating a hospital properly and that this incompetence represents a danger to the public; it should be being sanctioned, not compensated. Workers are not compensated when they underperform at their jobs, and corporate executives shouldn’t be either. Meanwhile, Healthscope currently operates 37 hospitals across the country. The NSW government argues that buying Northern Beaches Hospital is about getting rid of public-private partnerships, but the details look a little murkier. It wants to make the hospital a “[fully public operation with private services](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-21/chris-minns-government-takeover-northern-beaches-hospital/105914848?utm%5Fsource=abc%5Fnews%5Fapp&utm%5Fmedium=content%5Fshared&utm%5Fcampaign=abc%5Fnews%5Fapp&utm%5Fcontent=messenger&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR6wnKAVF0SW-MCmpLaRalQev4KUHf0W7A4G%5FbkD4iKJUcoRSDSOoEu6y1cD-w%5Faem%5FDNHjkIwP0nKTzqm9-4DFeQ)”, but hasn’t provided any further detail about the operating model and partnerships with private providers. A parliamentary inquiry into the hospital has just begun. During its first day, the chair of the committee, Dr David Jollow (who is also the director of Women’s Health at Northern Beaches Hospital), has [cautioned against losing the 20,000 private surgeries that occur there each year](https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/fate-of-private-services-hangs-in-the-balance-at-northern-beaches-hospital-20251020-p5n3r1.html?ref=redflag.org.au), echoing concerns voiced by private doctors. Professor Keith Burgess, president of the medical staff council at the hospital, [put it like this](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/21/northern-beaches-private-hospital-sydney-nsw-government-buy-back?ref=redflag.org.au): “In the private sector, you can do what you like, and so a number of higher level procedures have been carried out, like cardiothoracic surgery ... that will be proscribed if it’s a completely public hospital”. Regardless of what implication the line “in the private sector you can do what you like” carries for the safety of patients in such facilities, concern is couched in terms of lost services for patients, and the long wait list for elective surgery in the public system. But it’s hard not to think it has more to do with defending the lucrative business model that doctors operating in the private system sense is threatened by a public takeover. And people shouldn’t have to rely on private hospitals for timely elective surgery. A properly funded public system could and should provide it. To most people, a public hospital with private services sounds like a contradiction in terms, but, strange as it sounds, privatising services within a nominally public hospital is not that uncommon in NSW. For example, cancer patients at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Camperdown have, since 2013, been treated at the private Chris O’Brien Lifehouse (COBL) centre at a cost to the government of $16.7 million per year. The private provider operates rent-free on the hospital’s grounds and has also been given $180 million of federal government funding. In 2016, the *Sydney Morning Herald* revealed that public patients being treated by the private provider had been told they would have to pay for these services, although COBL later claimed this was a “mistake”. Randwick’s Prince of Wales Hospital likewise has a privatised vascular surgery department. It also houses the [Eastern Heart Clinic](https://www.ehc.com.au/?ref=redflag.org.au), which provides interventional cardiology services. If you go to the hospital with a heart attack, you might end up on one of their tables having a a stent put in your coronary arteries. Bizarrely, one (geographical) half of the intensive care unit is also privately run. There has been a long-term commitment by both major parties to propping up private health care in Australia. In fact, the entire industry is unviable without public subsidies: every medical service delivered in private hospitals has an associated Medicare code and subsidy. In 2022-23, the Australian government [spent $7.6 billion](https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/health-welfare-expenditure/health-expenditure-australia-2022-23/contents/trends-by-area-of-spending/hospitals?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com#PrivateHospitals) on private hospitals, which represents 36 percent of their total funding. Neoliberal market worship is not just about making donations of public money to private providers; it also underpins the funding model used for public hospitals. This model is called Activity Based Funding (ABF), and it remunerates hospitals not for what it *actually* costs to treat a certain “type” of patient, but what it *would* cost an *efficient* hospital, as decided by the boffins over at the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority. ABF is meant to drive efficiency via arbitrarily decided price signals, but what it does in practice is intensify the exploitation of healthcare workers, provide perverse incentives for local managers to game the system and further commodify public health care. It also doesn’t take into account the individual circumstances that can make individual patient care more complex, violating the much touted aspiration of modern healthcare systems to deliver “person-centred care”. Health care should be a right, not a commodity. Privatised health care is dangerous and unfair. All privatised healthcare services should be brought into the public system without compensation, starting with all of the hospitals operated by Healthscope. But at the moment, the plan from Healthscope’s administrators is to [re-brand as a charity](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-20/healthscope-proposal-for-workers-tax-benefits-under-fire/105894910?utm%5Fsource=abc%5Fnews%5Fapp&utm%5Fmedium=content%5Fshared&utm%5Fcampaign=abc%5Fnews%5Fapp&utm%5Fcontent=messenger&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR4xOJ1RbGXjfWzQiLj7YgVjCVfs7qtiVdtr-UONNTGW3rJSTMc%5F6IKRrMSs%5FQ%5Faem%5F%5Fasao8DOhIIKdHhNWtxS%5Fg) (PurposeCo) and steal their remaining employees’ tax benefits. They are hoping this will be enticing to potential buyers. What a circus. Instead of wasting money propping up the private system or, worse, building nuclear submarines, the health system should get the funding boost it needs so that quality care can be provided to all. Without a fight, this won’t happen not at Northern Beaches Hospital, or anywhere else. ### Community health centre closures must be stopped URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/community-health-centre-closures-must-be-stopped/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:43:40.000Z Community members and workers across the health and community sectors have been reeling over the last fortnight following the sudden news that some of the longest running community health centres in the country are closing their doors. The decision by Cohealth to close its general practice services in the Melbourne suburbs of Collingwood, Fitzroy and Kensington by the end of 2025, and to shut the Collingwood site entirely by mid-2026, will leave around 12,500 people without a GP. The closure will also cut off pharmacy services, including opioid replacement programs, as well as nursing, counselling and allied health care. Thousands of people depend on these clinics for their everyday health and survival, including some of the most vulnerable in the community: refugees, newly arrived migrants, people experiencing homelessness, those living with disabilities, and patients managing complex chronic illnesses. Staff at Cohealth received notification of the closures via email on the same day the public announcement was made. There was no warning, no consultation and no plan to ensure continuity of care. For the communities affected, this is not just a policy change: it is a devastating loss of a vital lifeline. Having spent eight years working as a doctor in public hospitals before moving to general practice and community health, I thought I understood what strain looked like in our system. I have sat through ward meetings where doctors debated who was “least sick” and could be discharged to make room for new patients who had been waiting in the emergency department for days. I have seen people essentially bedbound for months waiting for “non-urgent” elective surgeries. But the crisis in general practice is different—quieter, more personal, and in many ways more insidious. I’ve had patients tell me not to bother taking their blood pressure because they know it will be high, but that the ensuing discussion will mean their appointment will run over the standard consultation time and they can’t afford the extra fee. I’ve had women ask whether a follow-up appointment after a medical termination of pregnancy is *really* necessary, because the cost of the medication already means they’ll be short on food for the week. These are the realities of general practice. Medicare’s promise of universal care has become increasingly hollow. A recent report from the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners found that only 12 percent of GPs now bulk bill all their patients, while 40 percent bulk bill few or none. Even in Victoria, one of the better performing states, the bulk-billing rate for non-concession card holders is an abysmal 19 percent. It is no surprise, then, that 9 percent of Australians delayed or skipped seeing a GP because of cost in 2023–24, up from 7 percent the year before. But those figures don’t fully capture the damage. Preventive care—the invisible work of managing risk factors and detecting illness early—is what keeps people well, and reduces overall disease burden. The positive effects of this sort of care are hard to measure—the absence of disease where it might have otherwise occurred—and long term, which is also hard to quantify and politically less rewarding for governments. When people delay seeing a GP because of cost, prevention disappears from the picture. The Australian government’s own Department of Health and Aged Care admits that every dollar invested in preventive health saves an estimated $14.30 in future healthcare and social costs. Yet Medicare rebates have stagnated for years, pushing more and more clinics to pass costs onto patients, while those who can’t pay fall through the cracks. For a time, community health centres held the line. We were able to offer bulk-billed services, integrated care and enough time to address the complex needs of patients in crisis. But now even that last line of defence is being dismantled. In addition to the Cohealth closures, the *Age* reports that two more community health centres are on the brink of closure. Many more of the surrounding clinics have closed their books to new patients because they are already at capacity, with wait times of two to three weeks for an appointment. Part of the problem lies in the fragmented way our healthcare system is funded. The federal government funds general practice through Medicare, while public hospitals are jointly funded by federal and state governments. This creates absurd incentives. When the federal government keeps Medicare rebates low to save money, the result is more people ending up in hospital—which costs the states (and taxpayers) far more. A non-urgent emergency department visit costs over $500, compared to $42 for a GP consultation. Yet Canberra continues to starve general practice funding, leaving states to mop up the fallout. The rollout of Urgent Care Centres is the latest example of patchwork policy masquerading as reform. These centres provide episodic, walk-in treatment for minor emergencies. They relieve some of the pressure on hospitals—but at five times the cost of a GP visit. They don’t support preventative health, continuity of care, or long-term management of chronic disease. And they further fragment and complicate the health system. Meanwhile, the federal government has trumpeted its new Bulk-Billing Practice Incentive Program, which began on 1 November. It offers a 12.5 percent incentive payment to clinics that bulk bill all eligible patients for certain services. On paper, it looks like progress. In practice, it’s a drop in the ocean. The flat 12.5 percent incentive does not scale with consultation complexity or length, incentivising short, frequent consults and penalising clinics that care for complex patients. Many community health services also rely on a mix of bulk-billing and small private fees from those who can afford to pay. These organisations may opt out of the program to preserve this income, as the incentive payment may not offset the loss from private billings. The government claims these changes will increase the number of fully bulk-billing practices to around 4,800 by 2029, with 90 percent of visits bulk billed by 2030\. However, an analysis conducted by the healthcare accessibility organisation Cleanbill suggests that the real number of new fully bulk-billing clinics is likely to be closer to 740\. So far, according to the government’s own figures, only 622 of the 4720 metropolitan practices have expressed interest in changing from mixed billing to the new bulk-billing system, despite months of government campaigning. The deep sense of anger and betrayal from the communities of Fitzroy, Collingwood and Kensington has been palpable. Hundreds have flooded mass meetings to voice their outrage, directed at the Labor government and the Cohealth board in equal measure. The people here have a strong memory of what community-controlled healthcare once meant. North Yarra Community Health, one of the precursors to Cohealth, was run by a board elected by the community: bi-monthly community meetings were attended by hundreds and interpreted into ten languages. Annual general meetings were held in tents, not boardrooms. When North Yarra merged with Western Region Health and Doutta Galla to become Cohealth, that democratic model was dismantled. The board became incorporated, community membership was abolished, and decision-making drifted away from those it affected most. The current crisis is a direct outcome of that shift. Today, unelected board members can decide to close clinics, terminate staff and sell off community assets without answering to the people affected. This fight is about more than one organisation. Australia’s public health system is at breaking point. Hospitals are overflowing, ambulance ramping has become routine, and exhausted healthcare workers are being pushed to their limit. Every year brings new promises of reform, yet the underlying issues—underfunding, privatisation, and the widening gap between rich and poor—remain untouched. If governments are serious about fixing the system, they must start with the basics: guaranteeing access to healthcare for all, fully funding preventive and community health services and returning control of those services to the people they serve. We must end the profiteering that treats health care as a commodity and rebuild a universal public health system—one in which healthcare is free, accessible and guaranteed as a human right for every person. On Saturday 8 November, community members and healthcare workers will rally outside the office of federal Labor MP Sarah Witty to demand just that—immediate intervention by the Victorian and federal governments to stop the Cohealth closures with no interruption to services, as well as a commitment to a public, fully-funded community health system—free, universal and democratically controlled by the communities it serves. ### The resurgent right in Latin America and the challenge for revolutionaries URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-resurgent-right-in-latin-america-and-the-challenge-for-revolutionaries/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:30:41.000Z SANTIAGO—Only six years ago, the left in Latin America was hailing the *estallido* *social* (social explosion) in Chile as a marker of a continental resurgence in the class struggle. Similar developments were occurring in Ecuador. Fast forward to this year, and Ecuador’s leader, Daniel Noboa, was one of three Latin American presidents to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, along with Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Milei has just claimed a victory in the midterm elections and is preparing to extend the workday to twelve hours and make holiday leave an employer prerogative. Most emblematically, the political party-movement that for many represented the hopes of a sustained resurgence of popular struggles and a left political alternative, the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia, has completely imploded. With the Cochabamba rebellion in 2000, the emergent political movement in Bolivia had re-awakened the left’s imagination and put the issue of movements “taking power” back on the debate stage. Bolivia became an international reference point. John Holloway’s *Change the World Without Taking Power* played out in all its messiness on this stage. In its early days, the MAS’s “democratic and cultural revolution” was celebrated as the success of a new model. In the 2009 elections, the MAS won 64 percent of the votes, which was unheard of in Bolivian political history. Then it won 61 percent in 2014 and a still convincing 55 percent in 2020\. In August, the MAS lost 73 seats, leaving it with two in a lower house of 130\. Bolivia is now back on the merry-go-round, like Brazil and Peru, of alternating centre-left and far-right regimes trying to resuscitate the neoliberal model. In Peru, the far-right-dominated coalition is taking no chances. On 24 October, the judiciary sentenced leftist congressional representative Guillermo Bermejo to fifteen years in prison for allegedly having ties to leaders of Shining Path, an outlawed guerrilla organisation. Bermejo was emerging as a potential presidential challenger. Enter Chile, Latin America’s model neoliberal regime and origin story of capitalist shock treatment economics under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-89). For decades, Chile has been lauded by neoliberal ideologues for its so-called economic stability, market freedoms, competitiveness and innovation. The country boasts the highest GDP per capita in Latin America and is one of just four continental members of the World Bank’s high-income category. The 2025 Allianz Global Wealth Report ranks Chile 34th in the world, above Mexico (43rd), Brazil (45th), Colombia (49th), Peru (51st) and Argentina (55th). Chile encapsulates the meaning of neoliberal “success”. In plain language, you find something that the national economy can produce and profitably sell on the world market, you squeeze the working class for every possible cent to maximise productivity, and bingo, economic growth (for some). Chile’s extractivist economy—highly specialised in and dependent on copper and lithium exports—has maintained high growth rates at the expense of manufacturing, and with a susceptibility to commodity price fluctuations and a generally weak currency, leading to high import prices. The result of this neoliberal “success” is that Chile remains one of the most unequal countries in the world: only 28 of 151 countries with data collected in the World Inequality Database present worse than Chile. The richest 10 percent own 80 percent of all national wealth; the top 1 percent own half. Almost half of Chilean workers earn less than 600,000 pesos monthly, equivalent to less than A$1,000\. Only 5 percent of workers earn more than A$4,000 a month. Yet the cost of living is not far off Australia, a litre of milk here setting you back around A$2\. In addition, unemployment, at 8.5 percent, is high even by Latin American standards, and 26.2 per cent of employment is in the informal sector. Not surprisingly, Chile’s “success” comes with permanent volatility—and not just economic. Working-class history here is steeped in struggle. Over the course of a century, it birthed several mass party organisations influenced or led by Marxists: the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Left Movement, and the Popular Unitary Action Movement, to name a few. This history casts a shadow over capitalist stability, so much so that post-dictatorship neoliberalism has relied on the calming influence of centre-left governments, which have held six out of eight presidencies since 1990\. The two Pinochetista presidencies of Sebastián Piñera (2010-14 and 2018-22) both fuelled important **estallidos sociales*: the mass student-led protests of 2011 and the even bigger explosion of 2019, which demanded a new constitution. Both governments controlled by the traditional right in these years generated institutional crises for Chilean capitalism. Chile heads into presidential elections this month with a sense of trepidation. On the one hand, the right has been gaining ground since the defeat of the 2019 **estallido*’s aspirations: while 80 percent of voters in an October 2020 plebiscite supported constitutional change, only 38 percent voted for the proposed new constitution the following year. Once students and the working class had been demobilised, the right took the initiative. Since former student leader Gabriel Boric was elected president in 2022, the political situation has worsened. His centre-left government’s tepidness has increasingly emboldened the traditional right and invited the growth of a new radical far right. A recently published survey suggests that, in the five years since the **estallido*, the proportion of people identifying with right-wing ideas has increased from 18 percent to 38 percent. The shift is fundamentally due to the centre-left’s association with neoliberal politics sprinkled with piecemeal, symbolic and inadequate social measures. Dissatisfaction with centre-left politics manifested clearly in the June primaries organised by the ruling centre-left block. The Communist Party’s candidate, Jeanette Jara (minister for labour and social provision in Boric’s government), trounced her main opposition, Carolina Tohá (from the Party for Democracy, a right-wing split from the Socialist Party) and Gonzalo Winter (from Boric’s Broad Front). Jara’s 60 percent reflected aspirations for a more decisive left-wing program. In the historical spirit of the Communist Party, fearing a radicalisation that would split the Popular Front with the bourgeois political parties that are part of the current government, Jara’s campaign since June has largely followed the agenda set by the right. She has emphasised her anti-immigration and public security credentials while wooing the most right-wing elements in the governing coalition, in particular the Christian Democrats. Jara will win the first round of the presidential elections but will likely face one of three right-wing candidates in the run-off: Evelyn Matthei, the candidate of the Independent Democratic Union, representing the traditional, unreconstructed Pinochetista right and a mirror political reflection of the Chilean capitalist class; José Antonio Kast, from the far-right Republican Party; or Johannes Kaiser, founder of the radical far-right National Libertarian Party, styled along Trump and Milei lines but arguably more offensive. Regardless of her opponent, Jara will come armed with a blunt instrument: a centre-left program incapable of fundamentally tackling the country’s social and economic problems and bound to a government associated with growing unemployment and underemployment, social spending cuts and the repression of mobilised opposition. Jara’s opposition will be armed with a far-right, populist agenda that claims to understand the general discontent and promises a new, shinier nationalism, robed in racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, and blaming everyone but the capitalist class for the country’s problems. In the global context of authoritarianism becoming the new normal of capitalist democracy, a victorious far right will double down on every channel of exploitation (pushing down wages, pensions and social spending) with a confidence that will not spare state repression, aiming to isolate the more politically advanced sections of the working class. If Jara wins, it will be “más de lo mismo” (more of the same), a continuing weight holding down the radicalisation of larger contingents of the working class, unable to resolve the problems borne of a model of accumulation nearing exhaustion, and fanning the spread of far-right ideas. If Chile does elect a “communist” president, it will not signal any major change. However, it will create new contradictions and opportunities for the revolutionary left. The Communist Party is not the post-Marxist left of the Broad Front. The CP’s history, especially its role in the anti-dictatorship movement in the 1980s, ties it to a political memory that the new left cannot claim. That political memory is an important glue shared by the working class’s more combative and radicalised elements. Every high school and university student protest, every major workers’ struggle, all manifest this political memory. This combativeness has barely got a look in during the presidential elections, bar the propagandistic interventions of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party, running 23 candidates in the parliamentary elections, and the Maoist Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action), whose presidential candidate has raised demands such as the nationalisation of the mines, an issue the centre-left won’t touch but which is critical to any meaningful left governmental program. If Chile elects a far-right president, it will encourage the hawkish sensibilities of the Trump administration. US imperialism hopes to regain influence in Latin America in order to boost its global pretensions. An alignment of far-right governments in Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia might even give a green light to the unimaginable—a US intervention in Venezuela. That would be a particularly complicated endeavour given that the Venezuelan military is not a ready-made proxy for imperialism. The challenge for the revolutionary movement continent-wide is to build influence amid the instability of a spent economic model that creates a merry-go-round of governments, dissolving previously long-lasting parties and alliances, creating monsters in an instant, and seemingly scattering political memory in the whirlwind. It’s a challenge that must be accepted. ### The fight for Palestine continues as long as Israel and Western imperialism exist URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-fight-for-palestine-continues-as-long-as-israel-and-western-imperialism-exist/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:31:11.000Z So this is “peace”. Seven days after the ceasefire came into effect, a family of 11 were blown up by an Israeli tank shell. On 19 October, Israel bombed a Gazan school, a makeshift coffee house and the area around Al-Ahli soccer club. The International Court of Justice has just confirmed that Israel is still forcibly starving people in Gaza by refusing to allow in enough aid. Israeli troops occupy 60 percent of Gaza, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has explicitly argued for soldiers to “shoot children and donkeys” on sight if they are deemed to be in the occupied area. This, they tell us, is peace. There can be no peace for Palestinians while Israel exists. Israel is an expansionist state committed to ethnic cleansing. The Gaza genocide is merely the latest—and particularly brutal—phase of annexations and forced displacement. Israel can do this with impunity because it is a crucial linchpin in Western domination of the Middle East and North Africa. In 2023, then US President Joe Biden repeated a line he first said in 1986: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one”. The Middle East and North African region is oil-rich, home to important trade routes and geopolitically vital. Without Israel, the US would have to maintain a significant—and unwelcome—military presence in the region to guarantee its interests. Instead, in Israel, it has a loyal ally that is well armed and belligerent. Israel has carried out a twofold process of ethnic cleansing since its creation in 1948\. On the one hand, through intense, devastating wars that fundamentally alter the region’s balance of forces and geographic boundaries. The Gaza genocide has been one of these. Before, it was the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and others. These wars are coupled with a continuous strategy of annexation, imprisonment, displacement and periodic massacres. In the words of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, “No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of the Land of Israel. A Jewish state in part \[of Palestine\] is not an end, but a beginning”. Ben-Gurion’s vision included all of occupied Palestine, as well as sections of Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In its brutal 1967 war, Israeli forces took Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights at the same time as occupying the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East and West Jerusalem. Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continue to argue for this expansionist vision, and have used this war to expand further into Lebanese and Syrian territory. In January, Israel began a new invasion of the West Bank and has carried out the largest expulsions there since 1967\. More than 40,000 people have so far been expelled in Operation Iron Wall. Israel sent snipers into Jenin refugee camp, conducted home raids and mass arrests, and carried out aerial strikes. The Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur al-Shams camps have been almost emptied. Hundreds of homes have been demolished, and the IDF has outlined a strategy to prevent destroyed roads and homes from being rebuilt. In late October, the Knesset passed a bill to annex the entirety of the West Bank, which even the Trump administration is not willing to support. But plenty in Israel do, which means Israeli encroachment in the West Bank could well accelerate in the near future. Our leaders talk of peace. In reality, we are witnessing the beginning of the brutality that is to come if the capitalists are allowed to blast their way through in the coming decades. Yet a different world is possible. The proof of this is every student who has protested, every grandparent arrested on terror charges to defend Palestine Action, and each of the Italian and Spanish workers who shut their countries down. We know that a radical workers’ movement can be rebuilt. The task of the resistance is to throw themselves into that project. We have to fight like hell with what we have, with a vision for a mass movement that can defeat imperialism and capitalism for good. ### Racist dehumanisation of Palestinians continues URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/racist-dehumanisation-of-palestinians-continues/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:32:01.000Z While the grieving of Israelis has been a media spectacle over the past two years—revisited again and again each time Israeli hostages’ remains have returned to their families—the trauma of Palestinians now returning to their destroyed homes receives relatively little attention. UNICEF estimates that over the past two years of Israel’s genocide, 28 children have been killed by the Israeli occupation forces every day on average. Let that sink in: a classroom of kids murdered each day. You won’t hear much about the tens of thousands of grieving Palestinian families in the corporate media. Yet you will hear, again and again, about Israeli trauma, even as Palestinians continued to be killed in their dozens. US President Donald Trump, addressing the Israeli Knesset on 13 October, claimed that the ceasefire deal he brokered will open a new “golden age” for the Middle East and end some 3,000 years of conflict. It was laughable. Yet a largely uncritical Western media seriously pondered whether the Trump administration—which, like the Biden administration before it, provided the finance and weaponry to Israel as it carried out genocide—really was some great peacemaker. The reality for Palestinians, however, is that the war is far from over. Israel continues to occupy 53 percent of Gaza, after withdrawing behind an invisible “yellow line”, and continues to prevent vital aid and recovery equipment from entering Gaza. In the first week of the so-called ceasefire, the Israeli army committed 80 violations, killing 97 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Imagine if it had been 97 Israelis killed. There would be no handwringing about the ceasefire holding. It would be wall-to-wall condemnations of Hamas and justifications for Israel to continue the genocide. In the Western media, Palestinian lives don’t matter. Israel has returned the remains of 1,718 living and 150 deceased Palestinians from Gaza, along with 250 Palestinian political prisoners. However, 154 of these political prisoners were immediately deported to Egypt by Israel, according to Hamas, denying them reunification with their families. According to the director of Gaza’s Health Ministry, Dr Munir al-Bursh, documents that accompanied 135 mutilated bodies of Palestinians returned to Gaza reveal that they were held in the notorious Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert. According to photos and testimonies [published in the *Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/23/whistleblowers-allege-widespread-abuses-at-israeli-detention-camp-sde-teiman?ref=redflag.org.au) last year, Palestinian detainees at Sde Teiman were held in cages, blindfolded and handcuffed, shackled to hospital beds and forced to wear nappies. On 20 October, [the *Guardian* reported](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/20/mutilated-bodies-palestinians-held-notorious-israeli-jail-gaza-officials?ref=redflag.org.au) that several of the recently returned victims were blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs. In one photo, a rope is fastened around a man’s neck. No identification accompanied the victims’ bodies, adding to their families’ grief and trauma. Imagine for a moment the media reporting if Israeli hostages had been returned like this. The images should have provoked the kind of outrage generated by the revelations of torture by US troops of prisoners at [Abu Ghraib prison](https://redflag.org.au/article/abu-ghraib-twenty-years-on) in Baghdad in 2004\. Yet these crimes received little reporting. The reunification of 1,718 Palestinian detainees with their families in Gaza was news for a day. Many told their families of brutal treatment in Israeli prisons, including beatings and torture. But those are the “lucky” ones. Some 9,000 West Bank Palestinians remain in Israeli custody, having been kidnapped and transferred to Israel in breach of international law. More than 3,500 are “administrative detainees”, who have never been charged with any crime, while 2,763 are deemed “unlawful combatants” by the Israeli military, according to [Israel Prison Service data](https://hamoked.org/prisoners-charts.php?ref=redflag.org.au). Their families’ separation from loved ones—in many cases for years—and their encirclement and harassment by an increasingly aggressive and violent settler movement, is not considered worthy of the media attention given to Israeli families whose loved ones were taken hostage on 7 October. American journalist Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Middle East Bureau Chief for the *New York Times*, is the latest to fall foul of the conservative media establishment. After being scheduled to address Australia’s National Press Club on 20 October, Hedges was informed that the event was cancelled. Everyone knows why: Hedges reports the truth, and the truth is embarrassing to Israel, Australia, and the corporate media. In a [*Late Night Live* interview](https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/chris-hedges-national-press-club/105913174?ref=redflag.org.au), the ABC’s David Marr took Hedges to task for accepting an invitation from the Australian Friends of Palestine Association to deliver the annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture, “Requiem for Gaza”. He claimed Hedges had compromised his credibility as a journalist by accepting such an invitation. This isn’t just a disgraceful slur against Hedges, but a racist attack on the Palestinians. If reporting the truth about what they face under the boot of Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide is a mark against any reporter, the insinuation is that Palestinian oppression itself is some lie. In the Said Memorial Lecture, Hedges hit back: “October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalisation and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine. “The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of an historical process. It is not an isolated act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state.” The obfuscation and lies of Western politicians and their media mouthpieces have enabled and emboldened Israel, Hedges argued: “The funding and arming of Israel by the US and European nations, as it carries out genocide, has imploded the post-World War Two international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilisation.” This loss of credibility—the exposure of the hypocrisy of the capitalists and their institutions—is perhaps the greatest achievement of our solidarity movement over the past two years. It should give us the strength to continue the fight for Palestine. *Nick Everett is the secretary of Friends of Palestine WA.* ### ‘This is absolutely political’: New Zealand rocked by mega strike URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/this-is-absolutely-political-new-zealand-rocked-by-mega-strike/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:43:29.000Z More than 100,000 essential workers, including nurses, teachers, and firefighters participated in a “mega strike” on 23 October, in New Zealand’s most significant industrial action in 40 years. More than 3.5 percent of the country’s working population struck, demanding higher wages and better working conditions. Workers were also protesting against ongoing cuts to public services by the right-wing government led by Prime Minister Christopher Luxson. Workers gathered in towns and cities across the North Island, tens of thousands protesting in Auckland and around 10,000 in Hamilton. Desiree Davis, a teacher at Whangārei Primary School, told *RNZ*that the current pay offer for primary teachers from the government is “absolutely atrocious”. “$1 extra an hour over a period of three years. Like, let that sink in. 60 cents one year, maybe 25 cents the following and 15 cents the following year. How does that keep up with the rate of inflation?”, she asked. Others pointed to collapsing health, education and emergency services as reasons for marching. While severe weather meant many could not gather outdoors in the rest of the country, those at home displayed their protest signs in their windows and on social media. In the lead-up to the strike, the government attacked unions and workers. The minister for public services, Judith Collins, published an [open letter](https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/open-letter-people-new-zealand?ref=redflag.org.au) in which she attempted to discredit the strike by portraying it as “politically motivated by the unions”, as well as whining that the government was “simply not earning enough to meet all these calls” (for wage increases). Collins penned this attack while [schmoozing with](https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/360863664/trump-administration-happy-new-zealand-stepping-defence-minister-judith-collins?ref=redflag.org.au) top figures in the Trump administration, including tea with her “[good friend” US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem](https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1MeqVK9m2U/?mibextid=wwXIfr). The government announced [plans](https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/national-security-brings-economic-benefits?ref=redflag.org.au) to spend an additional $9 billion on defence earlier this year, bringing spending to 2 percent of GDP by 2032\. It has also found billions for police, tax cuts for landlords, the wealthy, and corporations. Collins also claimed the unions were more interested in discussing Palestine than working conditions. Chris Abercrombie, president of the post-primary teachers associations (NZPPTA), clarified this was a reference to a motion moved at the last NZPPTA conference condemning the genocide in Gaza and stating that “peace is union business”. While the government’s comments were meant to discredit the strike, they nevertheless reflect something positive about the political climate. Many workers in New Zealand have been politicised and some radicalised by Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the government’s attacks on Māori, workers and the poor. This could be seen in the signs at various rallies, including “Toitū te Tiriti” (referencing a recent mass protest movement for Māori rights). Māori and Palestinian flags were also visible. David Phillips, station officer for Fire and Emergency NZ, responded to this attack when speaking to the rally in Auckland, saying; “Make no mistake, this is absolutely political. Last time we were on strike, it was a Labour government. It’s not about you ... This is about all politicians”, he said. “Your systems are broken.” Decades of attacks on unions from both sides of the political spectrum have undoubtedly led to this crisis, but many view this government’s viciousness as the last straw. Since being elected in 2023, the Luxson government has repealed fair pay laws, extended 90-day trial periods across more workplaces, introduced punitive measures for welfare recipients and cut spending on social services. The most recent [Social Cohesion Report](https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/work-programmes/community/social-cohesion/2024-social-cohesion-indicator-report-final.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) from the Ministry of Social Development found that the number of people cutting back on fresh fruit and vegetables had increased from 23 percent in 2018 to nearly 48 percent in 2023; a quarter of people went hungry sometimes or often because of a lack of money. Just under 30 percent said they had put off or delayed visits to the doctor because of financial considerations, up from 25 percent in 2018 and 14 percent in 2014\. More people are leaving the country than entering every year, overwhelmingly to Australia, where salaries are higher. The [average salary](https://academically.com/blogs/nurse-salary-in-new-zealand/amp/?ref=redflag.org.au) of a nurse in New Zealand is A$73,652, while in Victoria, Australia, the [average](https://au.indeed.com/career/registered-nurse/salaries/Victoria?ref=redflag.org.au) is $90,745\. The 2024 OECD Teaching and Learning International [Survey](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/results-from-talis-2024-country-notes%5Fe127f9e2-en/new-zealand%5F0906a779-en.html?ref=redflag.org.au) found that teachers in New Zealand worked the second-most hours in the world, behind only Japan. Many feel that public services will not function in a generation’s time as people either move overseas or into the private sector. Workers in New Zealand are refusing to sacrifice their quality of life while corporate profits and defence spending soar. The mega strike showed their potential power and sent a message to those in power that they can’t rely on business as usual so long as workers’ lives and the services they rely on are trashed. ### Chicago rises against Trump’s deportation regime URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/chicago-rises-against-trumps-deportation-regime/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:32:43.000Z CHICAGO—More than 200,000 people turned out in downtown Chicago on 18 October to join the “No Kings” demonstration against the Trump regime. At one point, the march from the gathering spot through the Chicago Loop (downtown) stretched two and a half miles (4km). The Chicago protest was part of a national effort, organised by a coalition of liberal groups, that brought as many as 7 million people—one in 50 Americans—into the street to protest Trump. Protests occurred everywhere, from the largest cities to small towns in conservative parts of the country. Democratic politicians boosted the national effort, and the liberal MSNBC network promoted it. This was a departure from earlier national “No Kings” (in June) and “Hands Off” protests (in April), when leading Democrats kept their distance. But protesters in Chicago didn’t need prodding. The Trump administration’s attack on the city and its surrounding suburbs, beginning in September, was more than enough motivation for hundreds of thousands. Trump ordered “Operation Midway Blitz”, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other militarised federal police forces descending on Chicago on 9 September. Trump’s racist crackdown on immigrants picked Chicago because it is a Democratic Party-dominated city, in a Democratic-dominated state, [where more than one in five residents was born outside the US](https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/09/12/chicago-immigrant-population-growth-trump-immigration-enforcement?ref=redflag.org.au). Since 9 September, Chicago has been on high alert. Each day, a battle with marauding federal agents unfolds. ICE, Border Patrol and other masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) drive through neighbourhoods in unmarked SUVs and arrest immigrants (and many citizens) going about their daily business. Parents dropping off their kids at school. Construction and landscape workers on job sites. Day labourers looking for work at Home Depots and Menard’s (“big box” hardware stores where contractors pick up building supplies and hire casual labour). People attending church services. Individual tamaleros/as (people who make and sell tamales from street carts) or vendors at neighbourhood swap meets (a flea market for multiple vendors). Even, seemingly, random people walking down the street or waiting at bus stops. Since the Supreme Court essentially [legalised racial profiling](https://eji.org/news/supreme-court-allows-stops-based-on-race-to-continue/?ref=redflag.org.au) at the Trump administration’s request, federal agents are making warrantless arrests each day. Apparently, having brown skin or speaking Spanish are the main pretexts that ICE is using for its stops and arrests. This, of course, gives the lie to Trump and his apologists who claim that they are focusing on criminals and dangerous individuals. As of 8 October, ICE [had reportedly arrested 1,500 people in its Operation Midway Blitz](https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/operation-midway-blitz-arrests-ice-crackdown-chicago-data-other-states/?ref=redflag.org.au). Even [ICE admits that only about 1 percent of them](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3Dq5IR%5FpiZRT0%23:~:text%3DICE%2520says%2520at%2520least%252013%2520people%2520with,32%2520Chicago%2520Live:%2520https://www.fox32chicago.com/live%2520FOX%252032%2520Chicago&ved=2ahUKEwi655zU7L2QAxX%5FGzQIHc2GBOIQ1fkOegQIAxAG&opi=89978449&cd&psig=AOvVaw3dWlwP95KgYMFAB2fbraW1&ust=1761430116144000) have violent criminal records. ICE agents have already killed one man, who they tried to arrest after he dropped his son off at school. ICE and its mouthpieces at the Department of Homeland Security—one node of the Trump Administration’s “Ministry of Truth”—accused Silverio Villegas González of trying to run into ICE agents with his vehicle. Subsequently, video, including body camera footage [from local police department officers](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwihider7b2QAxVQFDQIHZjCG-wQFnoECBkQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fus-news%2Fice-fatal-shooting-chicago-bodycam-footage-villegas-gonzalez-rcna233484&usg=AOvVaw3rb4QZ9R6IV%5FiIBYHQOA2V&opi=89978449), exposed DHS’s story as a fabrication. Another Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martínez five times while she was sitting in her car behind the agent’s vehicle in the Latino working-class neighbourhood of Brighton Park. Miraculously, she escaped life-threatening injury. But, again, video footage of the incident showed that the Border Patrol—which claimed Martínez had rammed the feds’ vehicle and threatened them with a weapon—[was lying about the confrontation](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bodycam-footage-conflicts-with-dhs-account-chicago-womans-shooting-by-border-2025-10-08/?ref=redflag.org.au). It’s becoming conventional wisdom among many in Chicago—activists, journalists and many everyday folks—that DHS’s statements are lying cover stories that unravel within a few hours. Perhaps the pinnacle (so far) of the ICE theatre of cruelty was the [30 September early morning commando raid](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/us/chicago-south-shores-border-patrol-raid.html?ref=redflag.org.au) on an apartment building in the city’s South Shore neighbourhood. ICE and other federal agents stormed the building, some of them rappelling down its five stories from helicopters hovering overhead. DHS was treating a dilapidated apartment housing poor African Americans and Venezuelan migrants as a militia stronghold in wartime Iraq. And DHS filmed the assault to provide the likes of Fox News and MAGA influencers with images of “heroic agents” taking on what they said was a den for Tren de Aragua gang members. The ICE agents marched dozens of people, in handcuffs, out of the building. They included barefoot children and adults in various states of undress. Agents racially segregated the detainees (Black people in one group, Latinos in another) before processing them. They arrested 37 people, only one of whom ICE alleges in court has any connection to a gang. And when people returned to their apartments, they found them ransacked, with doors torn off their hinges. Because of these terror tactics, the ICE processing centre in Broadview, a small suburban town to the west of Chicago, has become a flashpoint for face-offs between protesters and federal agents. In previous periods of immigrant rights activism, the Broadview facility was a focal point for often symbolic civil disobedience actions, including politicians and clergy. With Operation Midway Blitz, hundreds have turned out regularly to protest and resist. In response, federal agents have brutalised and tear-gassed crowds of unarmed people. In [one incident that went viral](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwixpoeH9r2QAxXvOjQIHWagJhwQtwJ6BAgHEAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D%5FSbX0UbBFaY&usg=AOvVaw27ufvJe-2NjumY3kvNdQ2O&opi=89978449), an ICE agent standing on the roof of the building fired a pepper ball into the head of Reverend David Black, a Presbyterian pastor, who was making a moral appeal to the ICE agents. This was yet another example of DHS’s gratuitous violence, as anyone watching the video could see that Black posed no threat to—indeed wasn’t even near—the agent who inflicted severe injury on him. These repressive actions, and similar ones in city and suburban neighbourhoods, against unarmed civilians have prompted a series of federal lawsuits from immigrant rights advocates and the media against these tactics. Federal Judge Sara Ellis has issued rulings barring federal agents from using tear gas and other violent measures against demonstrators and the press. [ICE has already flouted the judge’s orders](https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/24/us/gregory-bovino-chicago-immigration-tear-gas-hnk?ref=redflag.org.au). Yet the most important story in Chicago is one of resistance. Chicago was a centre of [mass protests for immigrant rights in the mid-2000s](http://socialistworker.org/2016/03/28/immigrants-marching-out-of-the-shadows?ref=redflag.org.au). Although the movement subsided, it produced thousands of activists and dozens of immigrant rights organisations rooted in communities across the region. As Chicago-based socialist [Sharon Smith wrote about the thousands](https://internationalsocialism.net/resistance-breeds-solidarity-a-report-from-chicago/?ref=redflag.org.au) who attended the Chicago “No Kings” event: “The demonstrations drew large numbers of people who had never attended a protest before, but also many who have already joined one of the ‘Rapid Response Networks’ that have been organized by immigrants’ rights activists, neighborhood by neighborhood, across the city and suburbs. “These neighborhood-based networks have been around as long as ICE, but they have mushroomed since Trump took office in January—to serve the many needs of the fearful migrant population. People volunteer to help distribute copies of ‘Know your rights’ brochures in immigrant communities. They set up phone and internet hotlines to notify the network of a suspected ICE sighting; once they have verified it, they then broadcast it to the entire neighborhood. They also hand out whistle kits to everyone in the neighborhood, along with the different types of signals to use when ICE has been spotted in the area versus when ICE is attacking someone in the immediate vicinity. Those driving cars beep their horns if they see ICE goons in the area. “Many migrants are too afraid to leave their homes to go grocery shopping, or to bring their children to school, so the network assigns volunteers to individual families to go and buy groceries, accompany their kids, and help with the other basic necessities of life.” The activism in neighbourhoods around the city is yet another example of the fact that thousands of working people are willing to stand against the authoritarianism coming from the Trump administration in ways that elites at institutions like universities, corporations and the Democratic Party have not. For many liberals, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire scion of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, is something of an exception to this elite capitulation. Pritzker has denounced Trump and his “lackey” Stephen Miller, the white supremacist White House domestic adviser who is thought to be the main architect of the anti-immigrant assault. Pritzker has warned federal agents of consequences if they violate Illinoisans’ civil rights. But Pritzker’s image is mostly based on talk, rather than action. In fact, Pritzker has ordered the Illinois State Police to set up a “free speech zone” at some distance from the Broadview facility’s driveway. The state police themselves have already beaten and arrested protesters in multiple confrontations there. In other words, while Pritzker touts his support for peaceful protests against ICE, his police force is performing crowd control for ICE—allowing it to maraud throughout the Chicago area. The Democrats’ commitment to uphold the status quo renders them accomplices to Trump, rather than serious opponents. At the time of writing, the Supreme Court is reviewing [the Trump administration’s emergency appeal](https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=c9b1f1883d48acc275630ae224deb6ca6d8e6f5a734fd2ae86e3df47d3f34176JmltdHM9MTc2MTI2NDAwMA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=10f13388-b905-653b-2029-26d3b8816423&psq=trump+appeal+to+supreme+court+illinois+national+guard&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy8yMDI1LzEwLzE3L254LXMxLTU1NzgyNjYvdHJ1bXAtc3VwcmVtZS1jb3VydC1uYXRpb25hbC1ndWFyZC1pbGxpbm9pcw&ref=redflag.org.au) of a district court ruling barring the federal deployment of the National Guard to Illinois. [Under a 150-year-old law](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/posse-comitatus-act-explained?ref=redflag.org.au), the federal government is barred from using the military for domestic law enforcement. But Trump’s order to deploy the National Guard in Illinois, following a similar deployment in Los Angeles earlier this year, is intended to usurp that authority. By law, Illinois’ claim that Trump’s order is illegal should be a clear-cut case. But the Supreme Court has been one of chief enablers of Trump’s effort to crown himself king. So, we shouldn’t expect that the court will stand in his way. A National Guard deployment into the streets of Chicago would mark another dangerous escalation. It would require the resistance to broaden and deepen. ### Labor’s scheme to worsen the housing crisis URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-scheme-to-worsen-the-housing-crisis/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:43:19.000Z The federal government’s expanded 5 percent deposit scheme is its latest market-based non-solution to the housing crisis. It will drive up house prices, saddle buyers with more debt, and put billions of dollars in the pockets of banks, investors and property developers. First introduced by the Liberals in 2020, it allows first-home buyers to apply for a mortgage with a 5 percent deposit, instead of the usual 20 percent. In addition, the government guarantees 15 percent of the loan, so buyers don’t need to take out lender’s insurance. Labor has expanded this to remove income and participant limits and has raised the cap on the price of properties it can be used to purchase. Announcing the scheme, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese [crowed](https://www.pm.gov.au/media/uncapped-5-cent-deposits-available-first-home-buyers-today?ref=redflag.org.au) that he is “making it easier for young people and first home buyers to achieve the dream of owning a home”. You wonder how he can say it with a straight face. The median house price in Australia is $800,000, and the median income is $55,000\. With a 5 percent deposit, a first home buyer would need to borrow $760,000, paying 71 percent of their income in mortgage repayments. Of course, even the notoriously profit-hungry Australian banks aren’t going to approve that loan; a mortgage lender interviewed by SBS’s [*The Feed*](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPk%5Fw3yAHFX/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==) estimated that a first home buyer on the median income with a 5 percent deposit could borrow around $250,000\. Some car spaces in Sydney sell for more than that. To purchase a median-priced house in Sydney, a household would need an income of more than $300,000, which is three times the average. Most first home buyers will not be able to use the scheme to buy a house without taking on unmanageable debt. If people do use the scheme, the effect will be to drive up house prices. A study by [Lateral Economics](https://insurancecouncil.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/HGS-and-LMI-report-Lateral-Economics-final.pdf?utm%5Fsource=substack&utm%5Fmedium=email) estimates that the inflationary impact on overall house prices will be 3.6 to 6.6 percent by next year. The price increase will be even higher in the bracket of properties that first home buyers might realistically buy, going up by 5.3 to 9.9 percent. As the report notes, most buyers will pay more in increased prices than they will save through the scheme. There’s good reason to think these predictions are correct. Deakin University academics estimate that the First Home Buyers Grant (through which the government gives first-time home buyers money towards the purchase price of a home) increased house prices by $57,000 between 2002 and 2012\. If the aim is to make housing more affordable, then the scheme is perverse. It is not accessible to most first-time home buyers, but the more people use it, the higher the prices will be, shutting out precisely the people the scheme purports to help. If shifting more wealth from working-class households to the rich is the aim, the scheme is perfect. An article published by [Deepcut News](https://www.instagram.com/p/DQAOE47CcJy/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==) estimated that banks will make $141,000 in extra interest on the average loan, or $24 billion, over the next five years. Investors will be licking their lips—further increases to house prices mean bigger returns when they sell. Developers will also be happy because they can set higher sale prices for properties and increase their profits. Labor claims it is taking action on the housing crisis, but in reality, the government is making it worse. It is ideologically committed to the market, the buying and selling of residential property for profit, as the only way to provide and regulate housing. The government’s role is limited to lubricating the market, pumping it up with public money that ultimately goes to increased profits, not more affordable homes. Labor rejects any idea that the government should intervene to undermine the market and profits to bring down prices. Instead of driving up house prices, Labor could use public money to build houses that people can afford. Instead of bankrolling debt to the banks, Labor could establish a public lender providing low-cost loans. Instead of protecting and promoting the interests of billionaires, Labor could improve the lives of millions of working-class households. Labor won’t do any of this; instead, it will continue to use the housing crisis as an opportunity to increase the profits and wealth of the banks, developers and wealthy investors. If we want homes that are for people, not the profits of the rich, we must fight Labor and its pro-market agenda. ### Cops huff and media puff—we need to defend the right to protest in Melbourne URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/cops-huff-and-media-puff-we-need-to-defend-the-right-to-protest-in-melbourne/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:41:24.000Z When Victoria Police Commander Wayne Cheeseman huffed into his media conference on 19 October, armed with a box of rocks allegedly thrown by anti-fascist protesters, he engaged in a piece of theatre intended to malign anti-racists and praise far-right protesters. Cheeseman was also doing his bit for the wider campaign, supported by the Melbourne City Council, the Liberal Party and the mainstream media, to crack down on protests in Melbourne. That day, there had been two opposing rallies in the city centre. One was a far-right protest, attended by angry, racist nationalists waving flags and demanding an end to immigration. This protest was led and addressed by Matt Trihey, a member of the National Workers Alliance, a fascistic organisation with links to the Nazi National Socialist Network. A similar protest a few weeks before had ended in violent attacks on Camp Sovereignty, an Indigenous protest camp in a city park. The other demonstration was an anti-racist counter-march. It involved at least 1,500 people marching against nationalism and white supremacy, the vast, vast majority of whom did so entirely peacefully. The police chose to target their fire on just one of these protests. Cheeseman ranted and raved at his press conference, about “issue-motivated groups” (left-wing people who are opposed to racism), and praised the far right who “protested by example”. This celebration of the well-behaved racists gave a predictable boost to the far right, some of whom called on social media for Cheeseman to become mayor. The mainstream media amplified the police commander’s calls, building on many months of campaigning about the need to restore “order” in the city. Chip Le Grand, political writer for the *Age*, quoted beleaguered business owners as part of his argument for scrapping democratic rights: “Prominent restaurant owner Chris Lucas wants the CBD to be declared protest-free for the rest of the year. While this would temporarily impinge on the right to assembly guaranteed by Victoria’s Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, it would protect the countervailing rights of business owners, residents and ordinary visitors to the city”. The reality is that this anti-protest campaign was under way well before the anti-racist protest over the weekend. Cheeseman was saying what most of the establishment were already thinking, and some doing. Rock throwing and other counterproductive tactics simply gave the police and their allies more authority to pursue it. Their real gripe is the Palestine movement, remarkable in its scope, depth and longevity, and which has organised weekly rallies in Melbourne throughout Israel’s stepped-up genocide. This show of internationalism and solidarity against Western-backed violence is part of what had motivated the far right to organise. And it has been the catalyst for the authorities, in particular the Melbourne City Council, to call for restrictions on the right to protest, such as exist in New South Wales. The permit system there gives police the ability to veto the right to demonstrate, and while activists can sometimes overturn this in court, it requires access to lawyers and costs time and money, which left-wing activists often don’t have. Already, the Melbourne City Council has approved a plan to request state and federal governments to restrict protest rights in the city. This would [include](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-20/city-of-melbourne-councillors-vote-amendment-protest-disruption/105674980?ref=redflag.org.au)altering the routes of protests, moving them to parks or “stronger police intervention to minimise disruption”. Brad Battin, the Liberal leader, has likewise called for limits on the right to protest. Battin has pledged to introduce a permit system if the Liberals are elected at the coming state election. A Liberal press statement has Battin saying, “Under a government I lead, law abiding citizens will be prioritised ahead of those who seek to disrupt the activities of Victorians or endanger public safety”. The Liberals sleight of hand includes discussing protests and demonstrations in the same breath as machete crime and gang violence. Premier Jacinta Allen has so far resisted calls for a permit system, but her government has introduced other laws restricting protests. These include harsher penalties for people who lock on or glue themselves to surfaces—things that mainly environmental and anti-war activists engage in. Whatever happens, we have to defend the right to protest. We can’t let the very forces we are often protesting against take away our ability to challenge them. And we can’t let profit making for city businesses trump democratic rights. The best way to uphold and defend the right to protest is to keep getting out and protesting, and to make it impossible for the authorities to stop us. ### Impressive result for socialists in WA council elections URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/impressive-result-for-socialists-in-wa-council-elections/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:41:13.000Z The WA Socialists achieved a solid result in their first electoral foray—into local council elections, which were completed on 18 October. Despite launching only in June this year, the party ran ten candidates across eight local councils, with grassroots campaigns concentrated in Bayswater, Canning and Fremantle. In Bayswater’s South ward, teacher Lewis Todman finished second with 15.8 percent of first preference votes. Also finishing second was nurse Rachel Goldsbrough in Canning’s Mason ward, with 24 percent. Finally, Nick Everett—longtime socialist and secretary of Friends of Palestine WA—finished third in Fremantle’s East ward with 19.7 percent of the vote. Among them, these campaigns mobilised more than 100 volunteers, many of whom were on the hustings for the first time. Together they knocked on 18,000 doors and spent countless hours getting the word out to voters. The message was straightforward: residents deserve a council that will put the interests of people ahead of the profits of developers and big business. This means, among other things, that councils should use their power to tackle the cost of living and housing crises head on. WA Socialists candidates argued for expanding or in some cases setting up council-run services, ranging from child care to aged care. Candidates also called for increasing council rates on vacant homes and for increased investment in community spaces. Over the course of the campaign, candidates also took up the big political issues. In Cockburn and Fremantle, we argued against the transformation of Perth’s southwestern suburbs into a hub for the AUKUS alliance. And in every ward, WA Socialists candidates argued for local governments to take up the issue of the genocide in Gaza. This message found an audience beyond those reached by our volunteers. With little more than a candidate statement sent out to voters along with their ballots, WA Socialists candidate Zoe Stevens won 17.7 percent of first preference votes in Armadale’s River ward. In Cockburn, where the field was heavily contested, Grace Redfern finished fourth out of eight with 10.1 percent of first preferences. With most other WA Socialists candidates winning between 7 and 10 percent of the vote in similar circumstances, it’s clear there’s an audience for socialist politics in WA. We can’t be content, though, with a couple of thousand people reading our policy and voting for us. We need more active socialists to keep up the fight for all the things we argued for in this election and to continue to establish WA Socialists as a radical left alternative to the political mainstream. ### Albanese visits Washington in the service of imperialism and war URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/albanese-visits-washington-in-the-service-of-imperialism-and-war/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:43:07.000Z Pass the sick bucket! You might have predicted that Anthony Albanese’s first White House meeting with Donald Trump would be bad, but it exceeded the worst expectations. What made the whole thing so dreadful? Was it Albanese fawning over Trump and congratulating him for “the extraordinary achievement” of a ceasefire deal in Gaza, even as Israel continues to kill dozens of Palestinians daily with US-made weapons? Was it Albanese hailing the countries’ military record, claiming the two had “stood side by side for freedom and democracy”? Did that include Vietnam, Anthony? Iraq? Afghanistan? Did that record include Australian and US backing for dictators across the Asia Pacific even as they murdered their citizens? Or their support for Israel as it wages its genocidal war in Gaza? Or was the biggest problem Albanese spitting in the faces of the 7 million Americans who had taken to the streets three days earlier in the “No Kings” protests against the right-wing authoritarian Trump regime? It’s hard to pick which one of these is most offensive. But that’s not how the national media saw things. There, it was celebration all around. The mainstream media praised Albanese to the skies for his achievements where other world leaders had failed. The prime minister had got into the good graces of the president and brought home the bacon. Trump had even called Albanese “a great prime minister”. The *Sydney Morning Herald’*s Michael Koziol called Albanese’s trip “a raging success”. Opposition leader Sussan Ley initially tried to make ground by demanding Albanese sack Australian ambassador Kevin Rudd for disrespecting Trump, but within 24 hours she too was forced to join in the establishment’s hurrahs. But what was it that they were celebrating? Nothing other than Albanese walking into the White House and coming out with an agreed plan to take the world closer to war. Albanese and the Australian ruling class, and the capitalist media that fight for their interests, wanted two things out of this meeting: to get Trump to openly support the delivery of AUKUS nuclear submarines to Australia, and to confirm US involvement in mining and processing Australia’s extensive deposits of rare earths and critical minerals. They got both. China’s emergence as a rival hegemon in the Asia-Pacific threatens US domination and, by extension, Australian power. Dealing with the threat from China is now central to American imperialist concerns. But the US is also involved elsewhere, from the Middle East and Latin America to Ukraine and the Baltic states. The Australian government wants the US to prioritise the Asia Pacific to ensure China is prevented from controlling the region. Their job, therefore, is to tie America down in the region and to reinforce in the eyes of successive US presidents Australia’s value as an ally. This is what the AUKUS pact is about, to convince the US (and Britain) to sell nuclear attack submarines to Australia with delivery to start in 2032 and, eventually, to build some in Australia. Their only purpose is to project Australian power into the South China Sea, the most likely arena for a clash with China, and to integrate Australia into US war plans. The cost of the submarines is already estimated at $368 billion, and given the whole history of military procurement, we can anticipate the final figure will be much higher. In the meantime, the Albanese government is paying $3 billion to US shipyards and $20 billion to build port facilities in WA to service the US nuclear submarine fleet. The cost to humanity if the submarines are deployed in a war with China will be incalculable. Before this week’s meeting, Trump had, from the perspective of Australia’s ruling class, been disconcertingly silent about AUKUS. What’s more, he had sponsored a review of the whole program, to report by the end of this year. So, when Trump told the joint press conference that it was “full steam ahead” with the AUKUS program, there were whoops of joy from Australia’s defence and security establishment. They can keep banging the war drums. Tick one for Albanese. Then there was the issue of rare earths and critical minerals which are an essential component in the production of a wide range of products, civilian and military. Over the past two or three decades, the Chinese government has invested huge amounts of money in securing for Beijing a virtual monopoly in processing these minerals. Two weeks ago, as part of the escalating tensions with Washington, China announced export controls, confirming US fears that China could cripple America’s military preparations. Enter the Albanese government. Over the past five months, Canberra has been working with Washington to expand the extraction and processing of Australia’s rare earth deposits as an alternative source of supply for the Pentagon. This week’s meeting saw Albanese and Trump sign off on an agreement to invest in or subsidise up to $8.5 billion into the industry to get things moving. This comes on top of $2 billion of public money paid or committed to two mines in the NT and WA, one of which is backed by Trump’s second favourite Australian, Gina Rinehart. The industry will be guaranteed a minimum price level to ensure the mine owners rake in profits. According to the White House, the agreement will achieve “critical mineral and energy dominance”, with Australia and the US having first pick of the minerals and control over exports, allowing Canberra and Washington to reward friends and punish enemies. Tick two for Albanese. That the nation’s politicians with few exceptions, foreign and military policy strategists, military chiefs of staff and newspaper editors can all cheer Albanese on for a splendid job in Washington tells us a lot about their priorities. They are cheering for an escalation of war planning in our region, for the diversion of funds from social services, education, health and welfare to military build-up, and for a more repressive environment that comes with such developments. And all in the hands of our Labor government, which is demonstrating once again its devotion to the interests of the ruling class. ### From socialist notes to anti-imperialism in the ‘Indo-Pacific’. URL: https://redflag.org.au/from-socialist-notes-to-anti-imperialism/ Last updated: 2026-01-20T02:04:36.000Z This newsletter began its life elsewhere as a series of notes about contemporary imperialism. It then became something more eclectic, and now feels a bit random and lacking in purpose. So we’re going back to the original conception, but with a focus on the region that has become the central geopolitical concept of our era: the “Indo-Pacific”. It’s orientation will be anti-imperialist, rejecting both Washington’s and Beijing’s designs on the region and its workers. Most attention will be placed on the countries with which I am more familiar, and which form the frontier of the power struggle between the US and China, namely those surrounding the Bay of Bengal, the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. The broader regional economic transformation here has been substantial. Thirty years ago, Europe and North America accounted for 56 percent of world economic output (in purchasing power parity terms), more than double the share of Asia. Today, the north Atlantic economies are less than 40 percent of global output, while Asia has increased to 42 percent and is projected to continue taking ground in the coming years. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, comprising ten states (eleven when Timor-Leste joins at the bloc’s summit this month) and 700 million people, appears to be a constant minnow in economic terms. But looks can be deceiving. In 1995, the Western European economies collectively were more than thirteen times the size of Southeast Asia. Today, they are just six times the size. While Singapore is the only truly “advanced” economy in this bloc, traversing through metropolises such as Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City (or Chennai across the Bay of Bengal), or smaller cities such as Medan, George Town, Da Nang and even Phnom Penh, one quickly gets a feel for the concept of “combined and uneven development” before ever consulting a statistical database. Much of this has been driven by the spectacular growth of China and the way that the region has been drawn into its industrial orbit. Those who hear “Southeast Asia” and picture in their mind’s eye only rice paddies with smiling farmers, or who harbour some romantic notion of guerrilla struggle from jungle bases, have missed the rapid, gargantuan metamorphosis here, including the epic growth of urban middle classes and state apparatuses. Moreover, the area to Australia’s north is a key site of imperialist confrontation. Domestic and regional political-economies increasingly are becoming framed by geopolitical tensions. Military spending is rising almost everywhere, and there are resulting trade-offs. Spending on health care, pensions, housing, and other social welfare is under pressure as governments up their outlays on weaponry. Two dynamics—expansive militaries and more challenging conditions of working-class life; imperialist war and class war—are becoming indelibly linked. All this makes South and Southeast Asia more interesting and important components of global political calculations. ### Australia in the US order Australia’s peculiar role in world affairs will also be a focus. While the Australian ruling class has always exploited workers and defended the property of capitalists, its orientation has been tied by a thousand threads to the broader imperialist project of protecting Western assets and the Western economic and political order, all the better to protect its own privileges. Throughout its modern history, this continent has been an outpost of the British Empire and then a distant moon of sorts in the US imperial galaxy. It has mostly been an outlier state attempting to increase its influence by aggressively allying with a more powerful state. Thus, governments for more than a century have pledged resources to, and sacrificed workers for, almost every significant British and American conflict while offering territory for weapons testing and foreign bases. Today, Washington has around 80,000 troops stationed in nearly 200 installations in Japan and South Korea, less than 1,000 kilometres from some of China’s biggest cities. But the increasing power of the People’s Liberation Army Navy is forcing the US to alter its force posture and spread its military footprint. The last US administration gained access to four additional military facilities in the Philippines and opened a new Marine base in Guam. And Australia has become far more important to US military planning, a situation the security establishment here has long dreamt for. Andrew Shearer, a senior research fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, wrote more than a decade ago: > Successive Australian governments from both parties have made sustained efforts to reinvigorate the alliance with the United States since the end of the Cold War. This was a key factor in Australia’s military contributions to coalition operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, in major Australian defence acquisitions (such as M1 tanks, Aegis-equipped air warfare destroyers, and F-35 aircraft), and in steps to institutionalise much closer defence, intelligence, counterterrorism, and other security links. As a result, only the United Kingdom is as broadly and deeply integrated with the United States as Australia is in security matters. That integration has only deepened. The federal Labor government’s 2023 Defence Strategic Review came after more than a decade of US force posture initiatives in the Northern Territory and after the 2021 announcement of the AUKUS strategic partnership. Billions have been spent on joint military infrastructure upgrades in the north and west of the country, allowing for the permanent rotation of 2,500 US marines, the hosting of long-range US nuclear bombers, an increase in the size and frequency of joint military training exercises and greater resources for the forward deployment of a range of US military assets. At least $20 billion has been pledged for HMAS Stirling in Perth and the adjacent Henderson industrial precinct to host and maintain US and UK nuclear submarines. “In a narrow sense, AUKUS is a trilateral partnership meant to enhance the defense capabilities of the nations involved”, Charles Edel, a former US State Department official, told Damien Cave and Edward Wong from the *New York Times* a couple of years ago. “But its broader significance lies in its intention to … deepen strategic coordination between the US, Australia and the UK. Ultimately, strategic convergence, and not submarines, is the big story behind AUKUS.” Jake Sullivan, former US national security adviser in the Biden administration, was more straightforward in January this year when talking to Demetri Sevastopulo, the *Financial Times*’ US-China correspondent: “It’s a strategic marriage between the United States and Australia for half a century”. This has not thrown into question Australia’s sovereignty—forever a point of contention for sections of the nationalist left and social democratic right. Australian capitalism cannot be understood, at any point of its history, without reference to its status as a component of empire. From being a far-flung colonial garrison, the country now sits on the edge of the most dynamic region of the world economy. Cognisant of this, the ruling class here is dragging us from the margins of world politics to the centre of imperialist conflict. And it is doing so on the basis of a longstanding calculation that Australian capitalism is strengthened, not weakened, by its close association with US imperialism. Not since General MacArthur set up the Allied South West Pacific Area Command in Brisbane after being driven out of the Philippines by the Japanese offensive in 1941 has this country been so relevant as a component of the Western alliance as it is today. But this time, Australia is no temporary beach head for an Allied counteroffensive—it is looking more like a permanent installation. Perhaps it will become something akin to the Israel of the southern Indo-Pacific. Those following these developments will no doubt note that this perspective is at odds with [the thesis put forward by Hugh White](https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/author/hugh-white?ref=redflag.org.au), Australia’s most prominent strategist, which is basically that America is retreating from Asia and is destined to become a hemispheric, rather than a global power. That case is certainly plausible, but, either way, the issue demands more attention. ### What now? So what will this newsletter become? Probably a bit of history, some backgrounders, interviews with people who know what they are talking about, analysis of sorts, journalistic jottings from the region, and guest posts. Narrowing the newsletter’s scope will no doubt make it appear more niche. Certainly, Europe and the United States will remain for the foreseeable future more important and influential politically due to the West’s ideological export machinery. Modern Asia is an economic behemoth, but it remains culturally and politically derivative of the West in so many ways—similar to Australia in relation to the United States. Unlike regions where geographical designations often coincide with shared political and cultural sensibilities forged out of common histories, struggles, intellectual movements, etc.—think Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, Western Europe—“Asia” exists primarily in the cartographer’s imagination. This is arguably changing due to the forces of economic integration, though significant linguistic and nationalist barriers place limits on any influential “pan-Asian” political culture developing. At any rate, the global economy’s industrial centre of gravity has shifted decisively to this region; the geopolitical weight of the states here have increased as well, though arguably not commensurately. With these developments, much else will follow. The aim of this newsletter will be to bring an anti-imperialist perspective to it all. On a technical note, in the coming month or so, *Red Flag* will move to a new website. This newsletter will shift from Substack to the new platform, on which we plan to host a couple of other socialist newsletters as well. ### Zack Schofield on the upcoming people’s blockade of the Newcastle port URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/zack-schofield-on-the-upcoming-peoples-blockade-of-the-newcastle-port/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:40:50.000Z Australia’s climate future is horrifyingly bleak. Already the continent has warmed by around 1.6 degrees, increasing the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, floods and bushfires. The recently released [National Climate Risk Assessment](https://www.acs.gov.au/pages/national-climate-risk-assessment?ref=redflag.org.au) estimates that, at 3 degrees of warming, 1.5 million people will be at risk of coastal flooding. As we barrel towards catastrophe, the federal Labor government has its foot firmly on the accelerator. Since taking office in 2022, it has approved 31 new fossil fuel projects. [According to a report commissioned by ](https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/fossil-fuel-subsidies-in-australia-2025/?ref=redflag.org.au)the[ Australia Institute,](https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/fossil-fuel-subsidies-in-australia-2025/?ref=redflag.org.au) in the past year, state and federal governments provided the fossil fuel industry with $14.9 billion in subsidies—equivalent to $28,381 per minute. From 27 November to 2 December, thousands of people from across Australia will join [The People’s Blockade of the World’s Largest Coal Port](https://www.risingtide.org.au/pb2025?ref=redflag.org.au) at the port of Newcastle. Rising Tide, the event organiser, argues that we need to step up our defence of the climate by taking mass direct action to stop the coal ships. At [last year’s blockade](https://redflag.org.au/article/turning-the-tide-the-fight-to-blockade-the-worlds-largest-coal-port), people power prevailed over repeated government attempts to shut down the protest. Seven thousand people mobilised over ten days; 173 people were arrested while obstructing the shipping channel. Zack Schofield, an organiser with Rising Tide and recently awarded Young Environmentalist of the Year by the Bob Brown Foundation, spoke to *Red Flag* about the upcoming action. \-------------------- **What led you to get involved in Rising Tide?** Climate activism has always been part of my political background. It has an outsized presence in Newcastle, where I grew up. The city is home to the world’s largest coal port, which alone is responsible for about 1 percent of total global carbon emissions, which is pretty extraordinary. Rising Tide and the people’s blockade also have a history in the town: the original iteration was active in Newcastle from 2005 until 2012. After the pandemic, one of the Rising Tide core organisers pitched their idea to me: restart the organisation with a long-term strategy, principles and a desire to grow beyond a small clique of radical environmentalists. I found this compelling and decided to throw my lot in. In the last three years, it’s grown into something that I think fills a serious gap in the Australian climate movement. And I’m really proud that it’s based in my hometown. **Rising Tide seems to revolve around the annual blockade of the coal port. What’s so special about the blockade as a form of protest?** The blockade of the port of Newcastle is a phenomenal tactic. A tactic doesn’t make a movement or a strategy, but it can underpin it in some important ways. For one, mobilising a significant number of people is relatively easy. Newcastle has a progressive population, and it’s pretty accessible for folks in the metropole. The city is also, conveniently, right next to the source of the problem: the coal port. You can see it with your eyes, it’s easy to access, and there are several infrastructural choke points. Lastly, being on the water adds a certain X-factor in terms of participant experience. The photos that come out of these actions are broadcast around the world—it just looks a bit more interesting and joyful than other actions. At the moment, the blockade is a form of civil disobedience, or storytelling with a material target. We’re putting ourselves in the way of the problem to tell a story about why there’s a problem and why people should do something about it. We impact the company’s bottom line a bit, but not enough for it to really matter. The objective is to build that mass of organised people to the level of civil resistance, where we become a force to be negotiated with, rather than policed away. By growing our numbers, we can make a material impact and actually stop business as usual. **What are your thoughts on the Labor Party in power?** I have dropped to new levels of cynicism that I didn’t think were achievable. They’re either utter cowards or the most nihilistic bastards imaginable. But even an ALP true believer would have to acknowledge at this point that external pressure is the only way to secure better climate policy in this country. So, whatever your take on the Labor Party, Rising Tide welcomes you to come along and take action with us. **You’ve been active in the Palestine movement in Sydney and were arrested recently alongside former Greens candidate Hannah Thomas outside SEC Plating. Do you think the issues of climate justice and Palestinian liberation are linked?** Absolutely, they are linked by two problems: colonialism and profit seeking. The colonisation of the global South created the extractive industries we see in Australia, which is why First Nations people have always been at the forefront of the fight against fossil capital. And we know there are massive, untapped gas reserves just off the coast of Gaza. It’s one reason why Gaza is an attractive bit of land to claim for the apartheid Israeli state. Capitalist profit seeking is destroying the planet, but it’s also the engine room of fascism and war. Israel is very good at both of those things. And Australia, similarly, is not only a major exporter of fossil fuels, but it also has serious ties to that profit-making machinery of war. That’s why we were outside SEC Plating, it’s a company that contributes to the F-35 program, producing jets used to bomb children in Gaza. You really do just have to follow the money to understand the politics of power in this world. It’s why the fossil fuel industry wields influence over our government, it’s why Israel is so influential in the Middle East, and it’s why they have committed genocide against the Palestinian people. **Last year, the Minns government tried to stop the blockade. Do you know what the government will throw at Rising Tide this year?** I don’t want to speculate because I expect they’ll come up with something we’ve never heard of before. But the fact of the matter is, this is a fight. I’m really happy that Rising Tide is prepared to run at fights, because frankly, that’s what it takes to make change—and it is in the fighting that people get inspired to join us. And the more people join us, the easier those fights are to win. Last year, 173 people were arrested. Some were dragged from their kayaks, others had their paddles stolen by police, and some were assaulted. But everyone who was arrested knew exactly what they were getting into; they knew it had to be done, and it can be an empowering experience to break bad laws. I think it’s time for activists of all kinds to stop justifying themselves and become the immovable object—the thing that’s going to happen, one way or another—and dare our opponents to live with the consequences of their climate vandalism. **What do you think socialist politics has to offer in the fight for climate justice?** I think materialist politics are critical to understanding how the world works and how change happens. Socialism also has a tradition of organised mass action, which is what’s required to make change. Socialists understand that change doesn’t come from ideas alone or radicalism alone; it comes from actually becoming powerful enough and accessible enough to as many people as possible to shape the dominant politics of the day. Rising Tide is also a part of reviving these traditions. And I think this commitment to mass politics is one of the things that has stood us in good stead. We live in unprecedented times. I think people involved in politics today need to be open to experimenting with the traditions of the past and taking what works from them to meet the moment that we face. ### ‘Peace with genociders is a farce’: students and workers strike across Spain URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/peace-with-genociders-is-a-farce-students-and-workers-strike-across-spain/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:33:42.000Z Hundreds of thousands of workers and students across Spain walked out of workplaces and schools on 15 October in opposition to the genocide in Gaza. Organised by the main trade union federations, student organisations and pro-Palestine groups, more than 200 full or partial strikes, pickets, rallies and demonstrations took place throughout the day, rejecting the “peace deal” brokered by US President Donald Trump and demanding that the Spanish government sever ties with Israel. The largest strikes took place in the autonomous northern region of the Basque Country, where 40 percent of public-school teachers and 5.3 percent of healthcare workers went on strike. Due to work stoppages, public transport across the region was paralysed in the early hours of the morning. In Bilbao, an estimated 15,000 people marched through the city, staging mass sit-ins outside companies denounced as complicit with Israel, including clothes retailer Zara and Banco Sabadell. In Vitoria-Gasteiz (the capital), 25,000 people marched out of a population of 250,000. Significant strikes were also held in other autonomous regions. In Zaragoza (capital of the northeastern Aragón region), hundreds of healthcare workers joined students who walked out of the University Clinical Hospital, holding a joint worker-student rally in the Plaza de Aragón. In Galicia (north-west), nearly 9 percent of workers in the legal sector and around 2 percent in the general administration, education and healthcare sectors went on strike. The Balearic islands off the eastern coast reported 563 teachers on strike—around 4 percent of the total. Protests and pickets took place in more than 40 cities throughout the day, including Léon, Logroño, Vigo, Córdoba, Málaga, Murcia, Valencia, Seville and regional centres with little living memory of struggle. In Pamplona (capital of the northern Navarre region), around 10,000 joined a midday march headed by a tractor draped in the Palestinian flag. Barcelona saw the most concerted efforts by young people to disrupt economic activity through pickets. In the morning, student-led contingents of thousands blockaded the central square of Plaça Universitat, the Gran Via central business district and key transport hubs, such as the main logistics area in the city, Zona Franca, and the port of Barcelona (where the boats of the Global Sumud Flotilla departed in September). The Catalan Transport Service reported that road closures and bottlenecks persisted as spontaneous protests of young people broke out throughout the rest of the day. The University of Barcelona suspended all academic activities due to “absenteeism”. In the evening, an estimated 30,000 people took to the streets, intense clashes breaking out between youths and Catalan riot police. In Madrid, pickets of students and workers sprouted across the city at strategic locations, such as metro stations, Airbus factories and the Telefónica headquarters. Huge numbers of university and high school students walked out of their classes. More than 25,000 predominantly young workers and students flooded Puerta del Sol under the slogans “Stop everything to stop the genocide” and “Peace with genociders is a farce”. Strike action by workers represents a significant step forward for the Palestine movement because it offers a glimpse of the immense potential power that workers can wield—the power to halt production and stop the flow of profits to the capitalist ruling class. Although these were partial work stoppages by a significant minority of workers rather than a concerted national shutdown, the predominance of students and young workers in the mobilisations reflects deep and ongoing opposition among these social layers to the genocide and the complicity of Spain’s centre-left Socialist Party-Sumar government. Everywhere, students and young workers were at the forefront of the actions: the first in the streets, taking over railways and roads, shutting down schools and universities. “The Spanish government has tried since the beginning of the genocide to have a pro-Palestine public position, but one that would not have any practical consequences against the rules of capitalism, of which they are organically part”, Ánxel Testas of Anticapitalistas, the largest Marxist organisation in the Spanish state, told *Red Flag*. This has included recognising Palestinian statehood and announcing a largely symbolic arms embargo on Israel, which leaves the bulk of Spain’s military collaboration with the Zionist state untouched, permits ongoing contracts with the Israeli defence industry and establishes no inspection mechanism for Israeli vessels docking in Spanish ports. Since October 2023, the Spanish government has purchased more than €1 billion worth of arms from Israel; between June and August this year, the Spanish government sold arms to Israel worth at least €1 million. The call for a national day of strikes and demonstrations began in early October, when an estimated 2 million people mobilised across the country in four days of unceasing demonstrations. Beginning in response to Israel’s attacks on the Global Sumud Flotilla, the massive pressure from below, combined with the explosive 3 October general strike across Italy, forced the major trade union federations to call for work stoppages. The Workers Commissions (CCOO) linked to Podemos and Sumar, and the social-democratic General Union of Workers (UGT), with nearly a million members each, called for two-hour work stoppages in each shift, covering morning, afternoon and night. The anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of Labour (CGT), with around 100,000 members, called a 24-hour general strike across all sectors and territories. In the Basque Country, the pro-separatist trade unions, including LAB, ELA, Etxalde and HIRU, called for three-hour stoppages and demonstrations in the main cities. The Student Union (Sindicato de Estudiantes), various youth organisations, pro-Palestine groups and the radical left joined in the calls for a general strike, agitating for a student strike in high schools and universities, alongside joint pickets with striking workers. “The call for a general strike on 15 October took place at a time of the movement’s rise and reflects both the immense pressure exerted by the movement and, paradoxically, an attempt at demobilisation”, explained Ánxel. “The majority unions \[CCOO and UGT\] had no intention that the partial stoppages they called would have force because the trade union leaders hoped a ceasefire deal would take the wind out of the sails of the movement. The minority unions, including the CGT, are too weak to achieve a successful general strike alone. “Although it is true that the rank and file are to the left of their leaderships and eager to mobilise on the Palestinian question, there is no situation of effective overflow from below as in Italy, nor does the fact that the big unions call for an effective mobilisation of the workers. The leaderships of these unions sought to prevent what happened in Italy.” With the notable exception of the Basque Country, where a more combative left has greater roots in workplaces and unions, Ánxel said, “the low participation in the strikes elsewhere is a clear indication that without strength in the workplaces the movement is very fragile when the peak moments of mobilisation pass”. Ánxel said that this illustrates the need to build a revolutionary socialist movement with roots among workers and students that can lead people in a radical direction and ultimately overthrow the entire capitalist system. “Although the ceasefire may slow down the size of the mobilisations, it is necessary to organise and educate the entire activist vanguard that has been born out of these mobilisations with internationalist and socialist politics”, he said. “It must become the engine of growth for both revolutionary and movement organisations to prepare for the coming phases in the ongoing struggle to liberate Palestine.” ### Sharpening the knife? Fair Work takes another step towards community sector wage cuts URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/sharpening-the-knife-fair-work-takes-another-step-towards-community-sector-wage-cuts/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:40:39.000Z This week we’ve seen the clearest indication yet that the Fair Work Commission (FWC) intends to proceed with its plan to cut the pay thousands of community sector workers. On 20 October, FWC President Adam Hatcher gave a flat rejection to a request from the Australian Services Union (ASU) to change course. “That’s not going to happen”, he declared in response to the ASU’s request, and an identical one from the Victorian government, at a [directions hearing](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-transcript-201025.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) on 20 October. The union had asked the FWC to hit pause on their wage-cutting interim decision from April ([detail here](https://redflag.org.au/article/fair-work-commission-plans-giant-pay-cut-for-community-sector-workers)), and to scrap hearings scheduled for the following week to discuss the disastrous proposal. The commission’s rejection of the union’s argument for a complete change of course means the FWC will proceed with hearings next week. These hearings are designed to finalise some version of the FWC’s wage-cutting interim decision from April, rather than scrap it altogether. And the news gets worse. As well as advocating for a complete rejection of the commission’s proposed wage-cutting plan, the ASU has filed a document outlining what the union believes is the best possible outcome within the strictures of the commission’s wage-cutting interim decision. The analysis of this “best case” scenario, done by UNSW Associate Professor Natasha Cortis, is included as an appendix to the union’s “[submission in reply](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-sub-reply-statement-report-asu-151025.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au)” to Fair Work, dated 15 October. It’s shocking. The analysis shows *that between 10 and 20 percent of all job roles in the sector will still get a wage cut,* even under this best-case scenario, if the FWC proceeds with its plan. Breaking this figure down by current employment level, 10 percent of all level four roles are *certain* to get a pay cut, with most of these positions losing between $80 per week and $350 per week. Another 9 percent of level four roles face a *potential* pay cut of up to $100 per week, depending on their current pay point within level four. Eighteen percent of current level five staff face a certain pay cut, mainly in the range of $80 to $300 per week. Three percent of disability support worker roles would definitely face a pay cut (with another 18 percent facing a potential pay cut, depending on their current pay point within their classification level). Nine percent of other practitioner roles face a definite pay cut, along with 20 percent of policy, research and project workers, and an outrageous 44 percent of office and facility support staff positions. And remember this is the very best-case scenario, which assumes that Fair Work decides to accept *all* of the ASU’s proposed modifications to the commissioners’ disastrous wage-cutting interim decision. There is no guarantee that they will. Indeed, FWC President Hatcher’s off-hand dismissal of the union case to abandon the FWC’s wage-cutting interim decision indicate that the commissioners, each on more than $10,000 per week, are intent on pursuing their course regardless of the outcome for many thousands of workers. The threat of wage cuts to tens of thousands of mainly women workers is very real indeed. This attack shines a light on the nature of the “Fair” Work Commission. The FWC is beholden to the profit-driven interests which dominate the national economy. This is why workers have never won gains through just stating a case at the commission and hoping for the best. The eight-hour day, annual leave, higher pay and health and safety have all been won, first and foremost, by workers organising, rallying—and most importantly, by going on strike. This means the ASU’s campaign against the commission’s wage-cutting can’t just consist of a single one-off rally—welcome though the ASU’s National Day of Action on 23 October is. A serious response needs, at a minimum, a string of mass meetings and delegates meetings to explain the attacks in some depth. This can equip members and delegates to better recruit their fellow workers to the campaign, and to the union. There’s a need for repeated mass mobilisations (like the ASU campaign which won the Equal Remuneration Order in the community sector in 2012), as well as a serious discussion about strike action. Both now and in the longer term, there’s an urgent need for workers to take a more combative approach, and to push back against the dominant, pro-Labor politics that have dominated this country’s union movement for far too long. One positive in this regard is the early efforts of [ASU Socialists](https://www.instagram.com/asusocialists/?ref=redflag.org.au), a part of Victorian Socialists’ [Socialist Workers Caucus](https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-socialists-launch-socialist-workers-caucus). ASU Socialists’ Instagram page is full of informative takes on crucial questions like “what the hell is going on with Fair Work?” and “Why Social and Community Sector cuts are normal under capitalism”, as well as explainers of the issue, promo for in-person get-togethers and the union’s day of action, and posts about the inspirational general strike for Gaza in Italy. The FWC isn’t stopping its attacks—so it’s up to workers in the community sector, and beyond, to step up the resistance. ### A new international political situation URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/a-new-international-political-situation/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:34:20.000Z It has been an extremely tumultuous year in world politics. The return of Donald Trump to the White House, Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians and the strengthening of the far right across the globe have shaken up politics in country after country. Tensions are mounting as the US and China increasingly manoeuvre against each other on the world stage. Russia presses on with the war on Ukraine, taking advantage of divisions within the Western bloc. Meanwhile, Europe is going through its largest rearmament project in decades. The international so-called liberal order, already in decline, has fragmented further in the face of these developments. At the same time, we’ve seen the rise of the global movement in solidarity with Palestine, which has radicalised a whole generation of young people around the world. Over the last two years, we’ve had massive protests, university occupations, the disruption of arms factories, civil disobedience, flotillas and now blockades and strikes for Palestine. All of this has strengthened the already existing polarisation across the world between progressive left-wing people who want to free Palestine, reject the far right and abolish the billionaires, and those who look to ultra-reactionary nationalist politics as a solution to the crisis of the global liberal order. While these developments have been gestating for years, their combination at this particular moment, alongside new developments such as the nature of Trump 2.0 and the impact of the Palestine movement, has created a new international political situation. In many ways this is a build-up of quantitative changes turning into a qualitative shift. What comes next is anyone’s guess, but it is important to recognise that we are entering into a new emerging political period. **The crisis of the global liberal order** In the last twelve months, there has been a significant retreat of liberalism and centrist politics around the world. Trump’s return to the White House, the Biden-Harris debacle, the backlash against identity politics and liberalism’s contortions over Gaza have all fed into a feeling that liberalism is incoherent in the face of a rapidly transforming world. This crisis of liberalism isn’t reducible to the state of the global economy. The inflation surge and subsequent steep rise in the cost of living that began in 2021 have slowed in most countries. This hasn’t stopped the advance of far-right forces whose momentum has gained a political dynamic of its own. However, it would be wrong to see the crisis of liberalism as just a superstructural crisis of ideology and political culture. It is underpinned by very real contradictions within the material structures of global capitalism. The global liberal order constructed in the wake of the collapse of the USSR has clearly exhausted its ability to contain the mounting pressures undermining its ability to produce a relatively safe and stable world for capital accumulation. This, in turn, has destabilised the systems of political representation that were constructed on the basis of this liberal order, particularly in the Western world. While each has its own dynamics, the result has been crises in the parties of conservatism and liberalism across the globe. This is largely a problem of the system’s own making. The neoliberal boom years of the late twentieth and early 21st centuries were primarily underpinned by the explosive growth of production chains in Asia, particularly in China and India. As is well known today, this laid the groundwork for the re-emergence of a multipolar imperialist system that has, in turn, undermined American hegemony. “The postwar global order is not just obsolete”, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has claimed. “It is now a weapon being used against us.” The Trump administration’s solution is to break apart this global order and reconstitute it on a more aggressively pro-US basis. This isn’t just rhetoric. Trump has undermined the power of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other multilateral institutions. He has wielded tariffs to an extent not seen in decades, threatening the stability of global markets and production chains. While it is still very unclear how far he is willing, or able, to actually restructure the global economy, this is the most serious attempt to do so since the advent of neoliberalism. There is also an imperialist logic to this that Trump’s ruling class critics can’t totally ignore. If a serious confrontation with China is a real possibility, then American capitalism is simply not prepared. Too much industry vital for such a war has been moved offshore, too much technological development has been shared with other nations, too many undisciplined US corporations have put their own interests ahead of American capitalism as a whole and, too often, ideological aversion to state intervention has constrained the projection of American power. And while Trump is the most aggressive proponent of this position, versions of it have increasingly become mainstream in the US political establishment and beyond. “Yesterday’s heresy—fears that globalization would destroy U.S. workers, for instance, or that increased economic integration would turn into a zero-sum game—has become, in most quarters of Washington, today’s conventional wisdom”, explains a recent issue of *Foreign Policy* magazine. “There is little daylight on economic policy between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and the only change in Trump’s second term is how much more eager he is to jettison any remnant of the old shibboleths.” China is seeking to ride out Trump’s action and gain influence over nations alienated by his erratic policies. They have pushed ahead with building up China’s military forces, which were put on full display at the China Victory Day Parade in September. Despite Trump’s trade attacks, China has also worked hard both to protect and, as far as possible, to keep expanding its insertion into the heart of the global economy. China’s exports to the US have dropped by 15 percent, and China’s domestic economy is struggling. On the other hand, Chinese exports to Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa have continued to surge to record heights. China’s trade surplus with the world is predicted to be its highest ever this year, possibly breaking the US$1 trillion mark. The shift towards a multipolar world also opened the space for other capitalist powers to settle old scores and flex their military might. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its provocative actions in Europe are one example. Israel’s aggression across the Middle East is another, as was the brief conflict between India and Pakistan in May, the underlying roots of which are far from resolved. Overall tendencies towards militarism and economic nationalism are increasing, another expression of the breakup of the old liberal world order. While there was initially hope that the rest of the world would resist the allure of protectionism in the wake of Trump, this seems to be fading as more and more countries adopt tariffs. The most recent example is the trade battles over Chinese restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals and the flood of cheap Chinese goods that can no longer enter the US into the European and South American markets. Debates over European rearmament are another example of the shifting patterns of economic nationalism. Germany’s leaked procurement plan is based on massively expanding European weapons manufacture, with only 8 percent of new spending being used to buy US weapons. Governments around the world are discussing how they can rebuild domestic industry geared towards military production. The pressures undermining the global liberal order go well beyond the geopolitical. While the global economy is growing, the cumulative impact of years of increasing inequality and job insecurity, punctuated by periodic economic crises and surges in inflation, has shattered people’s confidence that economic globalisation can continue to produce a higher standard of living. The stock market might rise or inflation fall, but most people don’t think their lives are going to get much better any time soon. This has intersected with the protracted crisis in political parties and governments across the globe. Establishment parties of both the centre right and centre left have collapsed or been radically transformed in country after country, while the space for new parties of various political hues has increased. All of this makes the business of political governance extremely unstable and complicated. The traditional capitalist parties of conservatism and liberalism have largely been taken over by the hard right, with their liberal wings either sidelined or breaking away. Or they have been eclipsed by new far-right parties. This is what happened with Reform UK and the Tories, and with the French Republicans and National Rally. Across all classes in society there is a deterioration of traditional political loyalties (or in the case of younger generations a total absence of loyalties). Beyond political parties, there is a deep cynicism towards anything that smacks of defending the status quo or the establishment. The lack of faith in the mainstream media, public health and social organisations of all kinds is prominent—as is the ability of mass protests, on either the left or the right, to occur without established institutional support. Outside of the advanced capitalist countries, the contradictions are even deeper. Faith in the ability of global economic forces to drive forward development and living standards in the global South has collapsed. Instead, a post-colonial capitalist class has enriched itself while dismantling what little protections existed for workers. The gulf between yesterday’s promises of prosperity and the reality of the present has underpinned social struggles over inequality, corruption and democracy in Morocco, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere this year. Considering all of this, it should be no surprise that the centrist political parties and institutions—which staked their legitimacy on the ability of globalisation to enrich larger and larger sections of the population, militate against wars and genocides, and produce a multicultural cosmopolitan world—have suffered the greatest crisis of purpose. This doesn’t mean that centrism, liberalism and what remains of social democracy are finished, but it does throw up questions about their future development. Keir Starmer’s UK government is trying to combine elements of standard Blairite politics with greater scepticism about globalisation, a turn towards state intervention and stronger lurches to the right over racism and opposition to trans rights. It is notable that the increased use of state intervention is primarily about toughening national borders and expanding military production. This is combined with vague promises of domestic industries providing better wages one day and steep cuts to social spending today. All guns and little butter seem to be the agenda. Whether this marks a new trajectory for centrist politics globally remains to be seen. What it does show is the difficulties for centre and centre-left parties in this transition period. **The consolidation of the far right** Far-right organisations have taken advantage of this crisis. Their success has intensified the crisis within the global liberal order as they seek to reshape the world in line with their agenda. Trump’s administration, with its control over the most powerful state in the world, has been a key factor in driving forward the far right’s project. His electoral victory and presidency have opened the floodgates for the mainstream legitimation of everything from crank theories of autism to conspiracy theories about the UN and George Soros. More importantly, Trump has used the power he wields to enact far-right policy. With the Republican Party firmly in the hands of the far right and with Vice President J.D. Vance being promoted as Trump’s successor, there is no chance of this changing any time soon. During Trump’s first presidency, significant sections of the US ruling class were willing to stand up to him. Now, they have overwhelmingly fallen in line behind the White House. With the forces of liberalism substantially weaker, this means Trump’s impact has been more far reaching and destructive. The far right is also a major political force across Europe. The prime minister of Italy is Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy. In France, Marine Le Pen, the leader of National Rally, has been the runner-up in the last two presidential elections, receiving 41 percent in the 2022 runoff and increasing the representation of her party in the National Assembly from seven to 120 in the last three years. In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland has gone from success to success despite embracing more and more radical right-wing, if not openly fascist, positions. In the elections at the beginning of this year, it came second, winning 21 percent of the vote. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party is currently polling at around 30 percent, the highest of any party, as support for the Starmer government collapses. The attendance of more than 100,000 people at a rally organised by Tommy Robinson in London was another sign of the strength of these forces. As these examples make clear, the far right is a significant political force in the very heart of European power and capital. These are just the more prominent examples. Across Scandinavia and Central Europe, the far right is also strong, and is gaining ground in more left-leaning southern European countries as well. Then there are influential currents within the more mainstream conservative parties that are very close politically to the far right. And, on the other hand, even more extreme far-right figures and organisations that criticise the larger far-right parties for not going far enough have emerged or expanded their influence. Several countries have seen the growth in far-right-led violent demonstrations, most notably in Northern Ireland and in the UK. Surrounding this are the broader networks of far-right social media personalities and influencers. The outcome of this is that, in many countries, the far right often sets the tone of mainstream politics. In England, widespread sexual abuse of children is exposed, and the far right transforms it into a crusade against migrants and refugees. In France, the so-called great replacement theory, which claims that millions of Muslims are invading the country to seize control, is treated as a serious point of discussion. In Germany, almost all of the political parties now agree that former Chancellor Angela Merkel should never have allowed Syrian refugees into the country in 2015— a position originally really argued only by Alternative für Deutschland. For years, we have noted the “rise of the far right” around the world. What we have seen this year is something qualitatively different. While the 2010s marked a period of political flux, in which far-right influences battled with traditional conservative forces over the future of right-wing politics, this has come to an end in most countries. It has resulted in what is likely a permanent right-wing shift in the traditional right-wing parties, combined with the solidification of far-right electoral forces either within them or in new stable formations. In the process, the whole structure of American and European politics has been transformed. The connections between the failures of global capitalism, the breakdown of the liberal order and the rise of the far right have become much more obvious and penetrated into global political discussion. For example, Clara Mattei’s *The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved The Way To Fascism* is an international best seller. The Global Progress Action Summit (featuring Albanese, Starmer and the leaders of Spain and Canada) was (hilariously) filled with calls for the centre-left to avoid being seen as defenders of the neoliberal status quo if they are to have any chance of defeating the far right. Too often, such connections are used as evidence that support for the far right is simply a confused but legitimate response to the crisis of global capitalism, and that the way to defeat fascism is to adapt to far-right concerns over the impact of migration and other issues. The consolidation of the far right doesn’t mean that it is invincible. Trump’s popularity remains low. The fact that right-wing governments are in power and are now responsible for managing the system opens greater possibilities for popular discontent. The entrenchment of the far right into positions of power does mean that dislodging them will require much greater levels of struggle and organisation than in the recent past. In most countries, we are well past the days when the radical left could nip the far right in the bud by disrupting their relatively small street marches. Instead, taking on the far right means thinking in terms of social struggle, general strikes, creating left-wing electoral alternatives and eventually building mass socialist parties. **The space on the left grows** The consolidation of the far right, the genocide in Gaza, and the inequality and alienation of modern capitalism have also created a larger audience for left-wing politics. While this has been building for a while, 2025 saw strong signs that this audience has grown substantially. The shift to the left has been strongly reinforced by the crisis of official liberalism and what remains of social democracy. Gaza exposed deep divides between establishment liberalism and its more left-wing variants. The clash between the Democratic Party leadership and young left liberals over the Gaza encampments in the US last year was one expression of this. In the UK, Starmer’s war against pro-Palestine sentiment, including the left wing of his own party, led to expulsions and resignations of large chunks of the Labor membership and elected representatives. This has fuelled the rise of the UK Greens and Your Party. Several prominent left-wing writers, such as Owen Jones and Yanis Varoufakis, have hardened their criticisms of the centre left. After briefly being a part of the New Popular Front, the French Socialists are now backing Macron’s unpopular neoliberal government, providing the necessary votes for his new prime minister in the face of widespread outrage from the country’s left. With the partial exception of the Spanish Socialist Party, the old continental social democratic parties are exhausted and weak. More broadly, the idea that centrism, liberalism and the centre left have paved the road for the triumph of the far right and Israel’s genocide has become a lot more mainstream on the left. While simplistic, it’s not for nothing that “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” has become a popular meme. While Gaza brought these tensions to a head, they have been developing over a long period and around a range of issues. Young left-wing people want to fight the far right, the billionaires, Israel, militarism, racism and war, at the same time as establishment liberalism is moving to the right on all of these questions. In some countries, new, or at least newer, left reformist parties have started to fill at least some of this space. *La France Insoumise* has shifted left in recent years and consolidated into the largest radical left party in Europe, with almost 400,000 members. The German *Die Linke* has grown from 58,000 to 112,000 this year. Around 800,000 people have signed up for Your Party in Britain. The growing confidence of a left liberal section of the Democrats around Sanders, AOC and Mamdani is another, albeit much shallower, expression of this phenomenon. However, the polarisation of a section of society towards the left has been expressed far beyond people signing up for left reformist parties. This year, the global Palestine movement intensified, culminating in general strikes for Palestine in Italy, Greece and Spain, and enormous worldwide demonstrations supporting the Gaza flotilla. Earlier this year, Germany had the largest demonstration since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which took place in opposition to the normalisation of the far right. Alongside this, there have been impressive blockades of far-right conferences involving tens of thousands of activists over the last two years. Despite Trump’s election victory, millions have taken part in the No Kings protests across the US. There have been flashpoints of resistance to his anti-migrant policies in LA, Chicago, Portland and elsewhere. In France, opposition to neoliberal attacks continues with the “block everything” protests and strikes. In Greece, there have been two massive general strikes against new anti-worker laws. In Belgium, a national strike against austerity measures in October resulted in clashes with police in Brussels. Across the global South, there have also been the “Gen Z” protests. While these rebellions take place in countries that rarely have much of a left or a workers’ movement, they are strong signs of discontent existing in country after country. There are echoes of the cycle of revolts that took place in 2018-19 before that wave was closed off by the pandemic. This has all been a positive development. The Gaza ceasefire plan reveals, though, that the political situation is also incredibly volatile and unstable. So it is likely that further developments on the left will be uneven as well. For revolutionaries, a key task is building socialist organisations that can combine firm Marxist principles with a strategic flexibility to relate to unstable political developments in a rapidly changing world. This is no small challenge when the revolutionary left is coming out of a difficult period and also confronts a situation with few useful historical analogs. In the past, the left was dominated by mass social democratic parties and trade union leaders who organised working-class action and broader social protest while seeking to contain this struggle and, in particular, the actions of its most radical activists. In this situation, a key task for the revolutionary left was to seek out the most radical elements of this broader movement and convince them of the need to form a revolutionary Marxist party separate from the reigning reformist behemoths. While building a revolutionary organisation remains crucial, the context today is very different. What remains of the traditional social democratic parties are very rarely the organisers of struggle, even in the compromised way they were in the past. The trade unions at least have links to their working-class members, but they have become far more conservative as well. Instead, the revolutionary left is mostly confronted by a growing sea of unorganised, polarised left-wing people with little to no pre-existing political framework outside of shaky commonsense liberal sentiments subconsciously internalised. This can make it difficult for revolutionaries to orient. At the same time, though, it is a historic opportunity for the revolutionary left. The decline of the old social democratic forces opens the possibility to shape the ideas of a new generation of radicals in a way that has been impossible for many decades. This places a big responsibility on the shoulders of the revolutionary left. Marxists have to show why revolutionaries have the answers to the problems of today, not just why everyone else is wrong. We have to explain why revolutionaries can lead struggles to victory, can intervene principledly but effectively into elections, can build a militant workers’ movement and, ultimately, a mass revolutionary socialist party that can fight for human liberation. If we are to shape the politics of a new generation, then that will mean putting revolutionary Marxist politics to the test. And as the revival of European left reformist parties shows, the space on the left won’t be relatively open forever. The world is rapidly changing—2025 has provided us with the strongest signs in years that the space for socialist politics is opening. Now is the time to seize the moment. ### Returning to the ‘party of Menzies’ is returning to fascistic reaction URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/returning-to-the-party-of-menzies-is-returning-to-fascistic-reaction/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:40:28.000Z The ongoing crisis and faction fighting in the Liberal Party have included repeated calls for the party to get back to what it was like under the reign of its longest serving leader, Bob Menzies. The Menzies years of the 1950s and 1960s are portrayed as enlightened ones of progress and national unity ruled over by a broad-church Liberal Party in which small l liberals and conservatives worked together in harmony for the collective good. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Menzies years were reactionary, dominated by Cold War authoritarianism, union bashing, red scares, murderous wars from Korea to Malaya to Vietnam and, of course, record profits for the bosses. As prime minister during this era of white picket fences, sexual prudery and fawning over royalty and everything British, it can be tempting to dismiss Robert Gordon Menzies—who revelled in the titles of Knight of the Thistle and Warden of the Cinque Ports and paraded his devotion to the queen, declaring: “I only saw her passing by, but I shall love her ’til I die”—as a pompous fuddy-duddy. But that would be to underestimate seriously the man who had been an admirer of Adolph Hitler in the 1930s. Menzies was a hardened class warrior for the Australian capitalist class who advanced their interests with relentless determination for sixteen long years as prime minister from the end of 1949 to January 1966\. That’s why John Howard, who presided over another vicious Liberal government that sought to transform society in the interests of the rich and powerful, so admires Menzies. Menzies came to office with two key aims. First, to take advantage of growing Cold War hysteria to launch a concerted attack on workers’ living standards and union organisation, the aim of which was to ensure that the capitalist class were the chief beneficiaries of the emerging postwar boom. That meant savage repression of the left. Second, to militarise Australian society in preparation for a new world war. Menzies openly advocated a nuclear strike on Russia and sought to develop Australia’s very own atomic bomb. Just as Howard and subsequent Liberal prime ministers built on Labor’s attacks on workers, Menzies built on the anti-worker policies of the Chifley Labor government before him. The immediate postwar years had brought a sharp swing to the left. Capitalism was seen to have failed. Workers had been seared by the horrors of the Great Depression, fascism and war, and were determined not to let that happen again. They demanded the 40-hour week, full employment, higher wages and improved social services, and aggressively went on strike to back up those demands, with some significant victories initially. However, after a series of bitterly fought strikes, the Chifley Labor government, backed by the top union leaders, gradually wore workers down. In the late 1940s, Chifley resorted to repression, most notoriously using troops to break the 1949 coal strike. It was this union-bashing legacy that Menzies built on with harsh anti-union laws and the attempt to ban the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). The CPA led many of the militant unions and was the overwhelmingly dominant force on the left throughout the Menzies years. Menzies’ 1951 horror budget savaged living standards and slashed jobs in the public service by 8 percent. There was a massive redistribution of wealth to the bosses. Workers’ share of gross national product fell dramatically. CPA leaders were jailed and their offices raided by police. Legislation was passed (with ALP support) to ban the CPA. Menzies drew up plans to establish concentration camps to intern dissidents. In NSW alone, 45,000 people were listed to be interned. Along with attacks on living standards and democratic rights came preparations for war. Conscription was introduced, and between 1950 and 1953 the size of the armed forces was expanded from 58,000 to 147,000\. Australian troops were sent to fight in Korea, Malaya and, later, Vietnam. Menzies encouraged the British to test nuclear weapons at Maralinga in South Australia, with terrible consequences for the indigenous inhabitants, in the hope that this would enable Australia to get its own nuclear weapons. On foreign policy, Menzies was a pillar of reaction, providing undying support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. But despite some important victories, it was no cake walk for Menzies. At every step there was resistance. The postwar vision of a new, more peaceful and fair social order still held broad appeal. By 1953, Menzies was extremely unpopular. There were sharp swings to Labor in by-elections. So while workers were on the back foot industrially, Menzies was never able to establish a McCarthyite regime as severe as in the US—where the left in the unions was smashed. Menzies’ 1951 referendum to ban the Communist Party was narrowly defeated after a massive campaign by the Communists, left unions and civil liberties supporters. Indeed, the CPA, after declining in the late 1940s, grew from 6,000 members in 1952 to 8,000 in 1955, despite its Stalinist politics. But as the horrors of Stalinism in Russia were increasingly revealed, there was growing disillusionment within CPA ranks, particularly after Russian tanks crushed the 1956 workers’ revolution in Hungary. This severely weakened its ability to lead working-class resistance to Menzies. There was every possibility that a genuine Marxist party committed to workers’ control could have at least held its ground during the difficult early years of the Menzies government and then grown steadily in the wake of the right-wing Democratic Labor Party (DLP) split from the ALP. This would have put it in a position to play a decisive role when the political situation improved in the 1960s. Despite the Cold War anti-Russian hysteria, opinion polls at the height of the Korean War showed 73 percent opposition to the use of nuclear weapons. By 1954, polls showed half the population opposed nuclear testing at Maralinga. 1953 was the real turning point in terms of the postwar boom. From then on, the economy surged forward. It was the most prosperous period in Australian history, with economic growth exceeding 5 percent per year for more than 15 years. Boom conditions led to a rise in home ownership. Workers for the first time got refrigerators, washing machines and eventually TVs. Most workers withdrew from active political involvement, and, after 1956, the level of strike action fell markedly. This led many on the left to write off the working class as a force for social change. Workers were dismissed as bought off, and most intellectuals blamed the dull conformity of Australia in the 1950s and early ’60s on the masses. The problem in their eyes was not the capitalist class and the Menzies government, which in order to ensure an orderly flow of profits was imposing rigid censorship to prop up authoritarian family values. No, the problem for the oh-so-enlightened liberal intelligentsia was rather the mums and dads in the suburbs who were obsessed with their new refrigerator or getting lino on the floor rather than the higher values of life. But the Protestant wowserism that Australia was notorious for in these years was a predominately middle-class phenomenon. And below the surface, forces were at work that were laying the basis for a revival in working-class struggle that was to explode at the end of the 1960s. Mass upheavals don’t burst onto the scene from nowhere. They have their origins in long-term economic and social developments. At the time it can be difficult to recognise the developing ferment, but in retrospect the signs of what was to come were there. The long postwar boom, even at its height, eliminated neither the working class nor the structural features of capitalism that impelled it to resist. There is no doubting the strident anti-Communism of the Cold War years, but underneath there were deep tensions—tensions that sharply intensified over the course of the 1960s. ### The militarisation of TAFE URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-militarisation-of-tafe/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:40:16.000Z It’s no secret that Australian universities are increasingly enmeshed with the defence sector and weapons companies. Now, TAFEs are being tuned up to serve Australian imperialism and the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. A recent federal government announcement of a $28 million National Security TAFE Centre of Excellence in Adelaide illustrates the trend. The facility boasts “state-of-the-art equipment” to help apprentices develop artificial intelligence and robotics skills. According to the South Australian government, it will be central to fulfilling Australia’s “national security needs”. What this actually means is training young people to build weapons of war and destruction. Another example is a recent advertising blitz by Roger Cook’s Labor government in Western Australia. The premier says that, as the country becomes increasingly tied to the US and UK military industrial bases, Western Australia “will play a central role” in building Australia’s military capacities. The state Labor government is spending $11.5 million on an AUKUS Defence Industry Incentive to provide handouts to military corporations and contractors to expand their workforces. In January, the state government invested another $14.6 million in a new WA Defence TAFE Centre of Excellence, which significantly expanded the number of military-related courses offered to meet the needs of the Henderson Defence precinct. The precinct, in the southern suburbs of Perth, will service and maintain nuclear submarines and employ 10,000 people. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced another $12 billion in extra funding for Henderson last month. Western Australia is key to AUKUS. In 2027, five nuclear-powered submarines from the US and UK will begin rotating through the HMAS Stirling naval base at Garden Island, 5 km off the coast of the Perth metro area. One thousand US military personnel and their family members will soon be based there as well, making the city a potential target in any major imperialist conflict. Defence Minister Richard Marles has repeatedly stated that Australia needs to build a “strong and resilient industrial base” to meet the demands of AUKUS. More broadly, the Australian ruling class wants to assert its regional power with a beefed-up military. To achieve this, the plan is to reshape attitudes and sections of the education system to cater to the needs of AUKUS. Strengthening Australian ties to the US military is central to this. The normalisation of militarism is also occurring in primary and secondary schools. A 2022 publication, *Minors and Missiles*, by the Medical Association for Prevention of War, reported an increasing trend for school STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) programs being tied to weapons companies, and that the Department of Defence is the lead agency in half of all national STEM initiatives. This is only the beginning, and none of it is in the interests of working-class students. While governments spend millions of dollars building new military-oriented TAFE programs, they neglect systemic problems in the TAFE system (such as poverty wages for apprentices, old and outdated facilities, and underpaid teachers and staff) and refuse to do anything substantive to address the key issue of economic security facing young people—the housing crisis. Instead of militarising our TAFE sector, students should be offered courses to help make the world a better place, not ones geared towards building weapons of mass destruction. ### How the Palestine solidarity movement discredits identity politics URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/how-the-palestine-solidarity-movement-discredits-identity-politics/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T05:11:22.000Z For going on 50 years, the left and workers’ movement have been in retreat. There have been important upsurges and small victories, but there has not been a revival of working-class power and radical politics on the scale of the 1960s and ’70s in the decades since. Many 1960s radicals moved to the right and were absorbed into the system—whether via academia, the media, NGOs or mainstream politics—while countless others have quietly given up hope of radical social transformation. The governments and institutions that briefly seemed vulnerable to challenge by mass movements have reasserted their dominance, to terrible effect. This shift has been reflected at an ideological level. As the possibility of radical change has retreated, so too has confidence in the ideas that underpin it. What was self-evident in the 1960s and ’70s—that the working class has the power to transform society and solidarity is possible and powerful—today seems implausible and, to some, like nothing more than apologetics for those who are part of the problem. Unsurprisingly, then, contemporary progressive sensibility is often characterised by a sense of powerlessness, scepticism and suspicion towards attempts at solidarity, and bitterness at the world’s injustices rather than a confidence they can be challenged and changed. This is reflected in a number of what have come to be seen as truisms among progressives in the West. These include that movements against oppression are legitimate only if they are led by the oppressed and informed by “lived experience”; that people who don’t experience oppression are inherently privileged and therefore cannot be reliable allies; that the integrity of movements depends on “centring” or “elevating” the right voices; and that expressions of solidarity are at best paternalistic and at worst do more to perpetuate oppression than ameliorate it. From suffering, in other words, comes truth, and those who don’t suffer are part of the problem. In an article written at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, British writer Sam Kriss highlights the paralysing nature of this approach, characterising the movement leaders’ contradictory commandments to would-be supporters this way: > *DO the important work of interrogating your own biases and prejudices. DON’T obsess over your white guilt—this isn’t about you!* > *DO use your white privilege as a shield by standing between black folx and the police. DON’T stand at the front of marches—it’s time for you to take a back seat.* > *DO speak out against racism—never expect activists of colour to always perform the emotional labour. DON’T crowd the conversation with your voice—shut up, stay in your lane.* > *DO educate your white community by providing an example of white allyship. DON’T post selfies from a protest—our struggle isn’t a photo-op.* There is on the one hand an acknowledgement that wider support is needed—after all, no oppressed group other than the working class is capable of liberating itself—but at the same time a dogged insistence that such support is insincere or a threat. The movement in solidarity with Palestine, which has been one of the most prolonged and widespread in recent history, blows all of this nonsense out of the water. It has overwhelmingly not been led by those with lived experience of Israel’s genocide, and nor has it been strongest where Palestinians are the most concentrated. Palestinians in Gaza have understandably been focused on survival rather than taking responsibility for an international protest movement. But it is not as though the countries that have mobilised the most for Palestine are countries with a large or particularly well-organised Palestinian populations. Of the ten countries which have had the most “large-scale” protests for Palestine since October 2023 according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, only one—Yemen—is even in the Middle East. Australia is second, and the rest are in Europe. The country that organised a historic general strike in support of Palestine—Italy—does not have a particularly large Palestinian population (0.002 percent of the population), and nor does Spain, where the strike has now spread. Likewise, the many hundreds of people involved in the various flotillas to Gaza, which provided an important focal point for the movement, were drawn from all over the world. The movement’s success therefore cannot be explained by reference to the prevalence of those with lived experience, although undoubtedly many Palestinians have been involved. Millions, if not tens of millions, of people with no direct experience of Israel’s violence have mobilised for Gaza—they’ve given up their weekends, foregone pay and, in some cases, risked their jobs and freedom to make a stand. They have decidedly not stayed in their “lane” or taken a “back seat”. Needless to say, this has not been to the detriment of the Palestinian cause. There has been no unnecessary burden of emotional labour placed on Palestinians, it has not crowded out their voices and it has not made the struggle about white people. Instead, it has helped bring the issue of Palestine to the fore everywhere, has made Western government military and political support for Israel more difficult and it has solidified a new generation behind the Palestinian struggle. The movement also demonstrates in living colour the underlying premise of solidarity: that an attack on one is an attack on all. Of course, the scale of the horror inflicted on Gaza is a major factor compelling people to act. But so too is a recognition that we all face a common enemy: the same governments lining up to cheer on Israel impose austerity and wage cuts at home. And their willingness to accept atrocities in Gaza when it is politically expedient indicate a degree of callousness that can just as readily be applied domestically. Solidarity is not and has never been about “taking over” struggles. It is about identifying and fighting a common enemy. Much more than insights gleaned from lived experience then, the movement’s strengths have been drawn from the political culture and traditions that already existed among workers in different parts of the world: the level of union organisation, the political history of the working class, the degree of repression faced and the size and nature of the political organisations on the ground. In other words, political consciousness and organisation, rather than personal experience, have proved decisive to building movements that can make an impact. In Italy, the existence of more radical unions independent of the established and conservative union leadership was a key factor in bringing about the momentous and historic general strike in support of Palestine, which has now spread elsewhere in Europe. Here in Australia, the presence of Socialist Alternative clubs on a critical mass of university campuses enabled the Gaza solidarity encampment initiative at the University of Sydney to become a national phenomenon and, later, mass student meetings in support of Palestine. As did the existence of off-campus campaign collectives committed to regular and continued street demonstrations, which have proved important in past campaigns. These organisations, and the political activists who constitute them, don’t all exist for the sole purpose of liberating Palestine. But they were nevertheless able to mobilise and make an impact when needed. The strength and organisation of our side, therefore, are crucial to liberating the oppressed and resisting injustice whenever and wherever it emerges. Of course, the political content of these traditions and organisations matters. Slavish loyalty to the Labor Party on the part of the mainstream union movement here meant the pro-Palestine mobilisations weren’t as strong or as workplace-based as they had the potential to be. On the other hand, this enabled the sort of smaller political forces that weren’t going to be placated by the government’s empty gestures—most importantly its bleating about recognising a Palestinian state once Israel had made it patently unviable—to wield more influence, which was positive. Revealingly, those subscribing most strongly to the idea that movements are best led by those affected (Hamas-aligned Palestinians in Gaza) tended to promote the most self-defeating positions, including illusions in the “axis of resistance” (which did precious little to actually resist the genocide) and that the Palestinians were likely to emerge stronger from the supposed tactical masterstroke that was Hamas’ 7 October attack (self-evidently untrue). This is in effect a continuation of the sort of thinking that has long proved disastrous to the Palestinian cause: that fellow Arabs—whether they’re the king of Jordan or a textile worker—will act to liberate the Palestinians. Illusions in solidarity around an Arab identity, rather than a class one, have let down the Palestinian movement repeatedly, from the Black September 1970, when the Jordanian regime drove the Palestine Liberation Organisation out of the country, to the complete inaction in the face of genocide today. The flip side of this argument—that privilege creates a conscious or unconscious bias towards the oppressor rather than the oppressed—is likewise not borne out by events. In the US, it has ironically been Jews who have disproportionately been at the forefront of Palestine solidarity actions—the very people in whose name Israel’s war has ostensibly been waged. Jewish Voice for Peace, for example, has organised more than 1,000 protest actions in the US and doubled its dues-paying membership since the genocide began. Supposed “privilege” in this particular case is the very thing that has politicised a new generation, understandably horrified at their religion being invoked to justify genocide. This again contradicts a core tenet of modern progressivism: that the division is between the oppressed—whose suffering automatically endows them with unique political insights that must be deferred to—and the non-oppressed, whose privilege automatically ties them into the status quo and the supposed benefits it brings them. If we are serious about changing the world and ending oppression, we need to learn from this experience and draw the appropriate conclusions about what actually makes a successful movement, not what makes us feel morally superior or momentarily powerful in a society that systematically disempowers us. Part of that is recognising that a perfect level of consciousness about oppression is not actually a precondition for resistance. A far-reaching and nuanced understanding of oppression is of course desirable, but what really makes a difference is having a sense of what side you are on, and our side being organised. The millions of people around the world who have marched for Palestine are not experts on the political dynamics or history of Gaza. What sets them apart is their refusal to look away when genocide is going on with Western backing, to keep coming out week after week, to not be intimidated by disingenuous denunciations of antisemitism and their willingness to see Palestinians as fellow human beings, not nameless, faceless terrorism sympathisers, as they have long been portrayed. The politics on our side will not always be perfect, but this doesn’t mean successful movements can’t or shouldn’t be built. The progressive obsession with policing the ideas, language and actions of people attempting to show solidarity, however imperfectly, gets us nowhere. We need to focus our fire on the powerful: the governments and bosses who run the world. We need to understand what makes them tick, and how they can be stopped. For all its strengths, the Palestine solidarity movement did not stop Israel’s genocide. To achieve that would have taken a threat to the imperial order and capitalist system on a much more significant scale. But the awesome gains it did make—opening the eyes of a new generation to the brutality and hypocrisy of Western imperial power, discrediting some important tenets of ruling-class ideology and making it clear that, although weakened, our side of politics still has the potential to mobilise and resist—are profoundly important. And, like all struggles whether they win or lose, the movement has been a testing ground for ideas and organisations, with important lessons to teach us. They are lessons we need to learn if we want to have a better chance of winning next time. ### Are we living in a new world order? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/are-we-living-in-a-new-world-order/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:38:32.000Z The term “new world order” (not the conspiracy version) generally refers to a major shift in world politics, in which the old economic, political and social structures are reshaped to fit the demands of a new era. 2025 is shaping up to produce precisely this—a more violent, authoritarian, hierarchical alternative. The United States under Donald Trump’s regime is the prime case in point. Trump has unleashed ICE agents pumped up on unbridled power, deployed National Guard troops to the streets of major cities, weaponised the Department of Justice against his personal enemies, enacted the largest cuts to health care in US history, attempted to scrub trans people from public life, imposed steep tariffs on dozens of countries, rebranded the Department of Defense the Department of War and much more. It is possibly the most rapid political transformation the world has ever seen outside of a major war. But it’s not just the United States. The far right is in power in Italy, Hungary and Finland, is the main opposition party in France, Germany, Portugal, Austria and Belgium, and is an established part of the political furniture everywhere else. In the United Kingdom, polls indicate that Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK would win a general election if it was held today. The situation is admittedly less severe in Australia, although there is clearly a coterie of wannabe führers waiting in the wings, from the ragtag group of March for Australia organisers to One Nation’s Pauline Hanson (who is rising in the polls) and Liberal MPs Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Politics is happening at a much faster rate than normal. A major new policy or directive is announced almost every day in the United States alone. Trump’s fascist former chief strategist Steve Bannon calls it “flooding the zone”: a deliberate strategy of overwhelming the media and public with a constant barrage of announcements and controversies, making it difficult to focus on any single issue or broader strategy. It’s like being punched repeatedly in the face so badly that it’s impossible to string together a coherent thought or exit strategy. But there is a method amongst the madness. Conservatism is driven by a reverence for capitalism and its foundational inequalities between the rich and the poor. They rule over us on a macro level by wielding state power, and on a micro level in every workplace. Conservative ideologies are derived as a defence of this status quo. That is why they so strongly venerate hierarchies in all social spaces—bosses rule over workers in the economy, powerful countries rule over the weak geopolitically and men rule over women in the home. One of the best ways of naturalising a historically specific social phenomenon is by reproducing it in all walks of life, thus making it feel eternal. Capitalism is also an extraordinarily violent society, from the everyday violence of poverty through to the violence of the police and imperialist war. Conservatives, again, venerate this state of being—there’s the stereotypical tough guy protecting his weak, fragile woman; the ICE agent bashing down doors and pelting with rubber bullets anyone who tries to get in his (occasionally her) way; and the warped world of the UFC. You might have noticed I’m talking about conservatives, rather than singling out the far right. The latter exist in the world of the former, and the lines between traditional conservatives and the new far right are murky. There’s a tendency to look at the conservatives of yesterday (pre-Trump) as though they were more palatable (pretty outrageous if you’re old enough to remember George Bush, the butcher of the Middle East). While it’s the case that some modern far-right parties and leaders were previously fascists on the margins, there’s also a general shift within conservatism further to the right—like the Republicans of old who have fallen in behind Trump. There’s also a through line between the generations, brilliantly depicted in Ali Abbasi and Gabriel Sherman’s 2024 film *The Apprentice*, which chronicled how Donald Trump was mentored and moulded by conservative lawyer Roy Cohn, who famously prosecuted the Rosenbergs during the height of McCarthyism. Conservatism is shifting in this direction because of a series of political, social and economic ruptures that have engulfed the globe over the last fifteen years. Every period of capitalist crisis has produced a new political form as the system tries to stabilise itself and adapt to new conditions. Out of the Great Depression and Second World War came an era of greater state intervention into the economy and increased social spending—all based on the new riches flowing from the postwar boom. The economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s produced the neoliberal era, as states and bosses privatised public assets, cut social welfare, intensified the exploitation of workers and opened the global South to even greater plunder. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 heralded a new, prolonged period of instability. The state bailed out the wealthy and paid for it through waves of austerity that slashed workers’ living standards. Consequently, the traditional parties of the political centre were discredited across much of Europe and took a beating in the US (hence Hillary Clinton’s failure and Trump’s ease in sweeping away the mainstream Republicans). Out of the ensuing polarisation emerged the far-right politics that dominate today, and waves of progressive social movements and new left-wing parties. A series of further crises compounded all this. The COVID years produced a new anti-lockdown, anti-vax conspiratorial audience for the right and the radicalisation of billionaires like Elon Musk, and was followed by years of steep inflation. Catastrophic climate change is no longer a concern for the distant future, but a reality bearing down on the world right now. As temperatures keep rising, a new series of crises will emerge as millions—and then billions—are forced to relocate, supply chains break down and crops fail. Even as our rulers fail to act on any of this, they are no doubt anxious about what it will mean for their system in the future. But the major global development is the rising imperialist conflict between China and the US and its Western allies. To put it simply, all things being equal, China is on track to overtake the United States economically, including in the most innovative high-tech industries. Economic might creates military might, and together they create global domination. That’s how the US rose to the top of the imperialist pecking order. This is a serious long-term crisis for the US ruling class, and every other country still betting on and benefiting from the Western alliance. The old order is no longer working for those who created it. Hence, a new world order is necessary. It’s impossible to understand anything about the political chaos of today without this context. Take Trump’s tariffs, which have been imposed on friends and foes alike, and decried by many as economic irrationalism. It’s an attempt to force companies to bring production back on shore. Why is this necessary? Here’s one pertinent example: shipbuilding has all but disappeared from the US, but naval power will be crucial in any future conflict in the Asia Pacific. There’s a method to the madness. Then there’s the crackdown on undocumented migrants, who compose a key part of many low-wage US workforces. To prepare a civilian population for war is to imbue them with a vicious nationalism and hatred towards perceived foreign enemies. Endless headlines and speeches about “a war on US borders” and “illegal aliens invading the US” are part of that ideological conditioning. There’s also the broader “war on woke”, which is a major offensive against the rights of the oppressed. Basic notions of fairness, equality, diversity and acceptance might be tolerated when the ruling class is trying to convince us that the entire world is fair and equal. But it’s antithetical to the conservative belief that “might is right”. It’s been obvious for years that the chaos of modern capitalism would produce a new (if partially reheated) form of politics. But 2025 has made that form a whole lot clearer. It includes rising militarism, the fortification of borders, state authoritarianism and the junking of progressive liberal values. To caveat this a little—it’s still early days, and we don’t have a crystal ball. But it would be wrong to ignore the reality unfolding around us. To change the world effectively, we must understand what is happening. One counter to the notion that we’re living in a new world order is that it is purely a product of the Trumpified Republican Party and its international allies: if Trump is booted in three years, then this will all be over. There are a few things that suggest the situation is not so simple. First is that when Joe Biden was president, he attempted to chart a different course. He used subsidies to entice industry to reshore, proposed a major spending package to rebuild America’s decaying infrastructure (both of which, it was argued, would create well-paying jobs to alleviate trashed living standards and social chaos), and imposed targeted tariffs on China and other adversaries, while putting serious effort into strengthening economic and political bonds with US allies. It too was a plan to strengthen US imperialism, but with more carrots and fewer sticks. It bombed. Much of the spending was blocked by Congress (including some Democrats) and the US capitalists made no serious attempt to discipline the detractors into supporting it. The “other way” failed. Second, aspects of the new approach are being adopted by parties *not* of the right, most notably UK Labour, which has imposed a harsh new border policy, cut social spending, designated Palestine Action as a proscribed terrorist organisation (which has led to the arrest of thousands of supporters) and continued the Tories’ fight against trans people. Third, the wheels Trump has set in motion will not necessarily just stop spinning when he leaves the White House. Some aspects of his program will probably be dropped, such as the open hostility to traditional allies. But some things can be so utterly transformed, or destroyed, that they are not easily reinstated. Take USAID: it could take years to rebuild the structures and networks of international aid distribution that have been obliterated by Trump, and there’s no certainty that any future administration would see this as a priority. Not to mention that we have no idea what will happen at the next election; Trump might seek an unconstitutional third term or successfully pass the crown to J.D. Vance. Finally, moments in which liberal centrism has stabilised in the past fifteen years have done nothing to stave off the radicalisation of conservatives and their quest for power. Joe Biden, after all, was followed by Trump 2.0 and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is warming the seat for Nigel Farage. More importantly, we should not desire to return to the old order. That one sucked too. It was an order in which Wall Street was bailed out while the poor were evicted, the US enforced its supremacy by dropping bombs on the Middle East, historic numbers of immigrants were deported and billionaires bought super yachts while millions went hungry. There is, however, another way, one that does not rely on bankrupt politicians and parties. We can instead look to the power of workers and the oppressed to fight the right, overthrow the billionaires and build a genuinely new world order based on equality and human liberation. There has been no shortage of mass struggles in recent years. More people protested in the 2010s than any other decade in human history. In just the last month, Gen Z protesters have overthrown governments in Nepal and Madagascar, and mobilised in Indonesia, Morocco, the Philippines, Timor-Leste and Peru. And in the last few weeks, mass workers’ struggle has returned to the streets and workplaces of Europe, with the Italian general strike in solidarity with Palestine, a similar general strike scheduled for Spain and general strikes against austerity in France. The people are furious, and rightly so. What we need is a politics that can draw together all these struggles, direct them against the rich and powerful and fight for a socialist society that replaces hierarchy with equality and violence with peace. ### Protesting with Gen Z in Morocco URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/protesting-with-gen-z-in-morocco/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:41:39.000Z Morocco is one of the latest countries to erupt under the “Gen Z” banner. Young people, organised largely through anonymous social media channels, have taken to the streets to demand an end to corruption and inequality. The hashtag #freekoulchi (free everyone) has also been a rallying cry for the release of political prisoners. The government in Morocco is made up almost entirely of wealthy capitalists, while most of the population increasingly struggles to survive. The president, Aziz Akhannouch, has a net worth of US$2 billion, and is the current CEO of the Akwa conglomerate, owned by the Akhannouch family, which is a major player in several key sectors of the economy. As agricultural minister from 2007 to 2021, Akhannouch allegedly stole $2.2 billion of public funds. Akwa has colluded with other corporations to keep the prices of fuel and other essential goods extortionately high, and the company was one of the targets of a 2018 boycott organised to protest these practices. Morocco has the largest wealth inequality in North Africa. The government maintains control by criminalising dissent, controlling the media and arresting journalists who criticise the government. While social services have been pushed to the brink of collapse by insufficient funding, the government is spending $3.3 billion on lavish stadiums and beautifying tourist areas of major cities in preparation for the African World Cup later this year and the FIFA World Cup in 2030\. A primary school in Benslimane, a city in the country’s west, was recently demolished to make way for a stadium. The former pupils were left without access to education. The national unemployment rate was [13.3 percent last year](https://sonofgao.substack.com/p/stadiums-are-cool-but-where-are-the), but among 15 to 24-year-olds it was 36.7 percent and as high as 48.4 percent in cities. This age group makes up a quarter of Morocco’s total population (in Australia, it is half that). [There are only 7.7 doctors for every 100,000 people](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.PHYS.ZS?locations=MA&ref=redflag.org.au), according to the World Bank, and in poorer areas like Agadir, on the southern Atlantic coast, it drops to 4.4, well below the World Health Organisation’s recommendation of 25. Neglect of public services has deadly consequences, especially in the most deprived cities. Last month, eight women died in a maternity ward in a public hospital in Agadir. After the deaths, residents held a small protest outside the hospital, unfurling a banner that read “Hospital of death”. The image and story spread across the country. On 29 September, an anonymous collective on social media called for protests across the country under the banner of GenZ 212 (+212 is Morocco’s country code), inspired by similar youth rebellions in places like Nepal. Protests began in the largest cities—Casablanca, Marrakech and Rabat—but soon spread. Young people gathered and marched, chanting, “The people demand the end of corruption!” and “The stadiums are here, but where are the hospitals?” In Agadir, protesters blocked the central highway, and in smaller rural cities, riots broke out. In Ait Amira, just south of Agadir, a bank branch was set on fire and police cars were overturned. The government’s response was severe. More than 500 protesters were arrested; many were beaten by police. But this only inflamed the anger. Protests and riots continued nightly, even after a 19-year-old student in Oudja, a town near the Algerian border, had his leg amputated after a police car drove into a crowd. On 1 October, three young men were shot and killed in Lqliaa after allegedly trying to storm a police station. The victims’ families have denied the allegation, pointing out that one of the victims—24-year-old Abdessamade—was a filmmaker documenting the movement to share with the world. A 22-year-old protester who is facing up to six months in prison [described](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/oct/14/this-generation-is-defiant-gen-z-protests-set-to-resume-in-morocco-despite-deaths-and-arrests?ref=redflag.org.au) [](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/oct/14/this-generation-is-defiant-gen-z-protests-set-to-resume-in-morocco-despite-deaths-and-arrests?ref=redflag.org.au)his motivations to the *Guardian*: “I went to protest because I’ve seen government violence all my life; not physical, but psychological. In hospitals, there are no doctors. In schools, classrooms are packed with over 50 students”. The GenZ 212 Discord channel, launched on 18 September, now has more than 200,000 people in it. Members discuss religion, key demands, and tactics and strategy. There is a main announcements server, on which only the anonymous admins can post, a general chat where anyone can message, groups for localities and districts, press videos, resources and much more. Decisions on whether to protest, and the time and location of the protests, are decided in real time through voting in the general chat. There is a heavy emphasis from the anonymous admins on peaceful tactics and on rallying rather than rioting. I attended a rally in the north-western city of Tangier on 2 October. It was in a park in the middle of the city, and police and military personnel, in uniform and plain clothes, were everywhere. Small groups of young people were scattered around, but, initially, there was no obvious congregation. In the Discord chat, people began to ask where the rally was going to be, and, if people were in the park, who was going to start it. Other messages, probably government and police bots, argued that there was no point rallying, that the king would listen to young people, that the movement was over, along with other generally derailing efforts. An hour and a half passed like this, with messages getting more frustrated and urgent. Eventually, five young men in their late 20s stood up in the square and began to chant. Instantly, twenty or so of us surrounded them and formed a circle, clapping and chanting. More people joined, mostly young men and boys, some who looked no older than four. The chants were themed around the movement’s demands: “The people demand the end of corruption!”, “The people demand Alhannouch leave!”, “The people want the king’s intervention!”. The rally slowly grew to a couple of hundred, all encircling the initial leaders and almost all young. A woman also arrived and led the chanting, and more young women joined. Some people wore Palestinian scarves. The police watched on, surrounding the action and likely outnumbering the protesters even at the rally’s peak. There were no arrests. At midnight on the Discord channel, a meeting discussed the demands the movement should make to the king. The next day, the admins shared a draft, and debates about the demands began. While there were disagreements about emphasis (many people wanted health care to be the focus), most people seemed to agree that dismissing the current government and implementing some reforms would be enough to resolve Morocco’s crises. There were also suggestions to create an organising committee and an electoral political party. However, these were not taken up, and the general mood was strongly in favour of a leaderless, anonymous movement. Political parties were banned from participating. Notably, there was no criticism of the king, which may be because such criticism can result in fifteen years’ imprisonment. However, it is a shift from earlier protest movements that called for an end to the monarchy. King Hassan is the fifth richest monarch in the world, and the richest in Africa, with a net worth of US$8.2 billion, according to *Forbes*. He is Morocco’s leading businessman, the Moroccan royal family holding the majority of stakes in [Al Mada](https://businessempires.africa/king-mohammed-vi-moroccos-reclusive-ruler-with-6-billion-deep-pockets/?ref=redflag.org.au), a previously state-owned conglomerate with holdings in almost every major part of the economy, from mining and banking to food processing. King Hassan has long been suspected of corruption. [WikiLeaks cables](https://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/239525?ref=redflag.org.au) [](https://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/239525?ref=redflag.org.au)previously revealed that he used his power to solicit bribes, especially in the real estate sector. To say the least, he is an unlikely ally in the fight against inequality and corruption, but his ability to dismiss the government seems like the easiest way forward from the point of view of many protesters. A rally the following evening started in the same way as the 2 October protest, but in a more prominent place close to the tourist area around the medina. Again, police and military personnel swarmed surrounding streets. The same five men from the night before began the chanting. It grew more quickly this time, and people were more confident. A woman in her 20s arrived halfway through. It was her first time at a protest, because her mother hadn’t let her attend initially because of the violent police response. But once the rallies seemed safe, she felt she had to come.“No one is going to help us, we have to fight for ourselves”, she said. The rally was bigger this time, although still less than a thousand, and much more visible to cars and pedestrians, which meant it attracted many honks of support, curious tourists and locals, and a significant media presence. There were also many more women than the previous night, making up probably half the demonstration, and they again led chants. At one point, a flag of the Berbers (an oppressed indigenous group in the region) was raised alongside the Moroccan flag. Protesters broke out into wild cheers. More people were wearing and waving Palestinian scarves. People had placards calling for the president to step down, for an end to corruption and to free all the political prisoners. After a couple of hours, people dispersed without any arrests or confrontations with police. On 3 October, an [open letter](https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2025/10/261456/moroccan-gen-z-212-issues-open-letter-to-king-mohammed-vi-demanding-accountability-and-reform/?ref=redflag.org.au) [](https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2025/10/261456/moroccan-gen-z-212-issues-open-letter-to-king-mohammed-vi-demanding-accountability-and-reform/?ref=redflag.org.au) to the king from the GenZ movement was released. It asked him to use his power to dismiss the government, and for decent health and education for all, an end to corruption and the release of all political prisoners. [An open letter from 60 journalists, artists and other key figures in Moroccan society](https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2025/10/262656/genz212-over-60-intellectuals-artists-and-activists-address-open-letter-to-moroccos-king/?ref=redflag.org.au) was also released in solidarity with the movement, calling for a complete overhaul of government practices and priorities. A boycott of corporations linked to the president was also initiated through social media. King Hassan’s annual [address](https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20251010-morocco-king-calls-for-social-reforms-amid-youth-led-protests?ref=redflag.org.au) [](https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20251010-morocco-king-calls-for-social-reforms-amid-youth-led-protests?ref=redflag.org.au)on 10 October reflected the pressure he was under. He called for more investment in social services and announced an initiative to create rural jobs, although he did not address any of the movement’s demands specifically. Through discussion and voting in the Discord channel, the protests then moved from nightly to specific dates. The next was called for 18 October, with a call out for everyone, not just young people, to attend. There were also calls to expand the resistance into other areas, like deepening the boycott movement. The GenZ212 movement is a beacon of hope for workers and young people around the world struggling under capitalism. The global Gen Z movement shows that many young people are prepared to resist in the face of deepening crises. ### What was the White Australia policy? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/what-was-the-white-australia-policy/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:40:05.000Z From the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901 until the government of Gough Whitlam in 1973, the “White Australia” policy was in place. Following earlier restrictions enacted by individual colonies, under White Australia, all non-white immigration was in effect banned. Around 7,500 Pacific Islander people who already resided in Australia before 1901 were also deported, many having been kidnapped or misled into servitude on Queensland’s sugar cane fields. Adopted unanimously by the new Australian parliament in 1901 as one of its first legal enactments, the *Immigration Restriction Act* was the cornerstone of White Australia. The act used a dictation test in a “European language” at the discretion of the Immigration Department to bar anyone not deemed white enough. The Australian Labor Party, far from opposing White Australia, was its most vociferous champion for much of its history. In 1901, the ALP moved amendments to the act to ban Asians outright, making it explicitly racist. The White Australia policy in common history is presented as a national shame representing the backwardness and bigotry of the past. The National Museum of Australia, for example, says of the period that “many White Australians feared that non-white immigrants would threaten Australian society”. White Australia has come up recently, the Nazis behind the “March for Australia” justifying their racist dreams of ethnic cleansing by referring to this supposedly glorious past. Support for the policy has remained a touchstone for the Australian far right, from Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech in parliament in 1997 to Fraser Anning’s in 2018\. Whether viewed with horror or nostalgia, the consensus is that “White Australia” reflected the wishes of most people in Australia. The reality is that White Australia was the product, not of an irrational fear or some broad conservatism among “white Australians”, but of the interests of a new capitalist state operating as a European outpost in Asia. White Australia was formulated by the nation’s leading liberals and humanitarian reformers of the late nineteenth century, who pitched it as “progressive” and “democratic”. Two main elements drove it: First, the emerging Australian ruling class desired to create a unified and independent state, and second, it wanted to build this state in Asia, facing competition from rapidly industrialising and expansionist Japan. No ruling class can rule without maintaining “hegemony”, which means presenting the interests of the ruling class as those of the whole of society. The Chinese emperors had the “mandate of heaven”, European feudal monarchies had the “divine right of kings”, and modern capitalism rules under the pretence of the “will of the people” and the “national interest”. Just as older ideas justified the social position of nobles and kings, the notion that capitalism is governed “democratically” or that the “national interest” represents everyone serves to maintain capitalist rule today. Australia’s colonial ruling class, which developed over the nineteenth century as Australia ceased being just a dumping ground for convicts, viewed White Australia as central to a national and “democratic” ideology for the new state. Alfred Deakin, the first attorney-general and prime minister on and off from 1903 to 1910, explained that White Australia “was the note that touched particularly the Australian born, who felt themselves endowed with a heritage not only of political freedom, but of an ample area within which the race might expand, and an obligation consequent upon such an endowment—the obligation to pass on to their children and the generations after them that territory undiminished and uninvaded”. The Australian ruling class understood that “White Australia” bound the interests of workers and bosses together, forging a common nationality. The idea that being “white” was a sign of civilisation pitted white workers against foreigners and helped to butter up the populace ideologically for Australia’s own expansionism in the Pacific, under the guise of “national defence”. Alfred Deakin, again: “Coloured aliens engaging in any occupation subject white men in the same occupation to an utterly unfair and improper competition. The secret of the coloured man’s success was his complete indifference to the moral and social standards of his white fellow citizens. He worked from dawn to dark on seven days a week, he ate little else than rice, he clothed himself in rags, he lived in a hovel. White men through no fault of their own would be driven from employment and production, simply because they adhered to the most elementary ideals of a civilised society.” It was argued by liberals—including much of the leadership of the Australian Labor Party and the trade unions—that building Australia as a “homogeneous community” of white civilization would preserve its supposed great qualities. By excluding non-white immigrants, mainly Chinese people who tried to immigrate during the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes, Australia would avoid the problems seen in countries like the United States, where importing African people as slaves led to civil war and segregation. The ALP’s first federal objective was White Australia, supported in these liberal terms: “The cultivation of an Australian sentiment based on the maintenance of racial purity and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community”. When modern liberals explain the White Australia policy, they often claim that ALP and union support meant a genuine working-class interest. For example, Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake, in *Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality*, suggest achievements like protectionism, industrial arbitration and the basic wage (what we today call the minimum wage) were the fruit of White Australia, benefiting (white, male) workers. But immigration restrictions, past or present, do not benefit workers. White Australia’s purpose was to create a false “national interest” that in reality propped up bosses’ authority and power. Protectionism—using tariffs to protect domestic industry—was justified as necessary for high wages, much as we hear today that higher wages depend on bosses’ profits. This means workers pay more for basics, as US workers now see under President Trump. Arbitration was favoured not just by the ALP and union officials but also by most of the bosses. Capitalists backed arbitration (and still do, as with the Fair Work Commission), because it limits workers’ ability to strike and regulates disputes, hoping to avoid large strikes like those in Australia in the 1890s. The basic wage, which Reynolds and Lake describe as challenging employer power, wasn’t a product of White Australia any more than similar minimum wages abroad. The minimum wage set what a family could survive on—the literal minimum—and paid accordingly. As socialists said at the time, “There is nothing radical about recognising that human beings require the same as a donkey—enough to live on”. Arguments blaming the working class for White Australia haven’t changed much in over a hundred years. The only difference: liberals back then believed in White Australia to build an “enlightened and self-reliant community”; today liberals still claim it benefited workers, and try to ascribe responsibility for such blatant racism and discrimination not to their own political forerunners, but to “unenlightened” workers. Besides providing the early Australian state with an ideology that could bind its population together, White Australia was also necessary because the Australian state confronted a rising Asian power in Japan. Australia was always an aggressive power, pushing for Britain’s and the US’s involvement in the Pacific and Asia. Australia urged Britain to annex Fiji in 1874; Queensland annexed Papua New Guinea in 1884\. During the Cold War, Australian governments supported US intervention in Vietnam and applauded the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. This aggressive imperialism continues today, with Labor spending huge sums on nuclear-powered attack submarines as part of the US war drive against China. While the fear is now about China, for most of the twentieth century it was Japan. From 1894, when Japan annexed Korea and embarked on its own colonial expansion, it was perceived as Australia’s key rival in the region. This view grew after Japan’s military victory over Russia in 1905, the first modern defeat of a European empire by a non-European state. The rise of Japanese imperialism was perceived as a threat to Australia’s capacity to develop as a white state. As George Pearce, Labor senator and later defence minister in World War One, put it: “The only doctrine that these \[Asiatic\] races respect is the doctrine of force. Our White Australian legislation is so much waste paper unless we have rifles to back it up”. Despite fighting alongside Japan in World War One, Australia strongly opposed and defeated Japanese efforts to have the League of Nations (forerunner of the United Nations) support racial equality. By the time Australia went to war with Japan in 1941, the ideological groundwork was done. Sydney *Daily Telegraph* headlines in 1933 said that “war with Japan is inevitable”, despite Japan being Australia’s second largest export market behind Britain, absorbing 12 percent of all exports. The parallels with China today are clear. Racist vilification of Japanese people—always central to the White Australia policy—was pushed to extremes in World War Two. A two-week campaign started by the government claimed Japanese people were warlike fanatics, possessed by an irrational hatred of whites: “The Japs have been educated to hate you from infancy. They have been preparing for a war like this since they were old enough to understand ... Even when they smiled on us and treated us ever so politely they hated us in their souls ... Young Japan learnt to hate while you were playing with marbles and enjoying the freedom and benefits of your democracy.” This systematic campaign of dehumanisation was summed up in the slogan: “We’ve always despised them, NOW WE MUST SMASH THEM!” In the Pacific War, this race hatred played out fully: Japanese soldiers were often executed instead of being taken prisoner, Japanese civilians were killed in the hundreds of thousands by US firebombing, and ultimately, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated by nuclear weapons. The White Australia policy is neither a glorious page in the nation’s past nor merely a symbol of ignorance. It was a deliberate effort by Australian rulers to manufacture nationalism and unity in a new state; a barbaric, dehumanising ideology to replace class struggle with racial hatred for imperialist aims. It stands as another mark of shame in the history of capitalism in Australia. ### The far right is organising—we have to resist URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-far-right-is-organising-we-have-to-resist/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:39:54.000Z Fascists in Australia are trying to build a movement. We have to stop them. On 19 October, we will be counter-protesting the next round of “march for Australia” demonstrations—protests that are trying to capitalise on fascism’s international success. The far right is no longer just small bands of drunken neo-Nazis praising Hitler and organising small marches and pub gigs. Across the globe, fascists have entered the political mainstream, and far-right groups have become ruling parties. They are in government in the United States, India, Italy, Argentina and across Europe. If elections were held in the United Kingdom, Germany or France today, fascists would likely take key ministerial posts in far-right governments. In Australia, the far right has organised some of the largest street demonstrations in decades, and One Nation has gained in the polls. Inside the Liberal Party, there is a battle between the right and the hard right—Andrew Hastie quitting the shadow ministry to further campaign against migrants and climate targets and for increased militarism, and to build the far-right brand as the future of Australian conservatism. The growth of the far right is, in many ways, inevitable under capitalism. The ideas of the far right are the ideas of capitalism taken to their logical extreme. And the program of the far right can suit the needs of the ruling class. That’s why, in the United States, the Trump regime is not meeting much opposition from the capitalists. What isn’t inevitable is the nature of the response to this growth of the far right. The Labour Party in the UK and the Democrats in the US offer one path: acquiesce, do nothing, and [repeat the core messages of the right](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-remarks-at-immigration-white-paper-press-conference-12-may-2025?ref=redflag.org.au) and by doing so legitimate them. Trump, in [a speech](https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-speech-department-of-defense-leaders-quantico-september-30-2025/?ref=redflag.org.au) to the army top brass, as good as called out the Democrats for their lack of political response to his agenda: “I thought it would be met with fury on the left, but they’re sort of giving up, I must be honest with you. They’ve had it. They’ve had it with Trump”. Where the centre parties do nothing, we have to stand against the growth of the far right. We need to build mass movements on the streets and take them on in other areas of our society. We need to make use of all political arenas that we can. That means organising forums and town hall meetings. It means postering campaigns, painting the town “anti-fascist”. We need left-wing political parties, like the Socialists, to grow everywhere and provide an anti-capitalist alternative to both the status quo and the far right. In 2023, we were able to deny Melbourne neo-Nazis their organising space, a gym in Sunshine, using protests and community pressure. Campaigns like that should be repeated when the far right attempt to set up spaces to build their movements. In Australia, we have the chance to push back against the far-right street movement because it still lacks coherent political leadership. We have to grow a confident and militant working-class movement. This is central because we cannot defeat the far right without taking on the capitalists. Only by getting rid of the system that breeds fascism can we ensure that this kind of politics cannot rear its head again. We may not be able to defeat the politics of the far right within the framework of capitalism, but we can challenge their current political organisations and build a left-wing alternative. In Italy, a far-right government is currently in power. Despite this, a mass strike wave has developed against the genocide in Gaza, and crucially against the government’s support for it and its opposition to working-class action. As workers continue to develop their struggles, they can start to create a crisis for the far-right government and hopefully remove it from power. This shows us a pathway for defeating the far right. We have a responsibility to build these kinds of movements everywhere. The fight against the far right has to be a fight against this brutal system. In Australia, 19 October will be a crucial opportunity to build an anti-fascist movement and build the confidence of our side to take on the whole racist, rotten system. ### What the Palestine solidarity movement has achieved URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/what-the-palestine-solidarity-movement-has-achieved/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:37:45.000Z For two years, millions of workers, students, the poor and oppressed around the world have counterposed their decency to their governments’ complicity in relation to the unspeakable horror inflicted on Gaza. Mass protests, along with smaller pickets and vigils, have demanded that governments sanction Israel and unions ban the export of arms to Israel. Students have struck in defiance of politicians and principals, football teams and their supporters have raised the Palestinian flag, filling stadiums with chants of “Free, Free Palestine!” Students in the US, Israel’s key supporter, began an international movement of encampments on university campuses, demanding an end to academic links with Israel. They withstood a barrage of both slander and police violence. Administrations accused pro-Palestine campers of threatening Jewish students, with no evidence, at the same time as they turned a blind eye to the violence of Israel’s supporters. Repressive censorship, victimisation of individuals and groups and increasingly authoritarian restrictions on the right to protest could not silence masses of people. Indeed, they provoked debates that, in turn, generated a wider knowledge of Palestinian oppression and the nature of the state of Israel. In response to the declaration of the ceasefire, the*Economist*’s deputy editor wrote, “It is a triumph for President Donald Trump’s transactional, bullying style of diplomacy”. Everything that happens is down to the genius, or at least agency, of the powerful from the point of view of the ruling classes’ hangers-on. But why did Trump choose to exercise his power, after previously backing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no matter what his crimes? We cannot know his mind. But as the Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd wrote in the epilogue to his book *Perfect Victims,* published earlier this year: “Through close inspection—watching state media, listening to the shifting global narrative, witnessing the renaissance of radical movements, even reading the inscriptions in random airport bathrooms—one discovers that this is a new dawn \[and this\] reminds us that liberation is attainable, the future is within reach.” A small group of activists in Sydney also sensed that new dawn. They seized the moment, standing strong against the state’s determination to suppress a planned march across the iconic Harbour Bridge on 3 August. And 300,000 answered their call to “march for humanity”. Then we witnessed a rising tide of protest actions in Europe. On 1 September, 50,000 marched in the Italian port of Genoa to support the Global Sumud Flotilla, the largest attempt yet to break Israel’s siege on Gaza. When Israel seized their boats and captured the activists, millions joined the call to *blocchiamo tutto* or block everything, with a campaign of mass strikes and huge street protests. Then Spanish unions called a 24-hour strike for Palestine. Everywhere, students are joining striking workers, blockading their schools and universities. At the end of September, the largest ever demonstrations in support of Palestine in both Berlin and Amsterdam filled the streets. Something Trump said on *Fox News* hints at some of the reason for Trump’s turnaround: “Israel can’t fight the world, Bibi”. That is true only up to a point. They have the might of powerful armed forces. This fight is not over yet. But for now, they have pulled back in the face of the passionate opposition to Israel’s atrocities finding its voice in mass actions. Governments, media, universities and supporters of Israel have smeared opponents of genocide as antisemitic supporters of terrorism. Draconian laws to shut down free speech and protests have proliferated. Journalists, writers, academics, actors, musicians and anyone else who tries to speak the truth has been cancelled. But opinion polls in the west have shown a clear shift away from support for Israel over the course of the war. Almost everywhere now, there is majority support for the Palestinians and strong support for governments to sanction Israel. Millions are sacrificing pay and risking victimisation for the Palestinians. The future for Gaza remains painfully uncertain. Ferocious ethnic cleansing by Israel in the West Bank means the struggle for Palestine is not over yet. Nevertheless, this is a moment to celebrate the solidarity movement and to note the lessons of these two years—lessons which can guide us in the next phase of the fight against Israel. This new dawn has been awakened by reaching out beyond the existing circles of activists, building mass protests and defying the powerful. In the face of such a movement, the ruling classes couldn’t cancel international solidarity with Gaza. Masses of people, in the face of frightening attacks on their rights, have stood firm against barbarism and created a vision of an alternative to the rule of capital. ### How did a bunch of crackpots get in charge of the USA? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/how-did-a-bunch-of-crackpots-get-in-charge-of-the-usa/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:37:00.000Z The cabinet secretary in charge of public health is an anti-vax crackpot implementing billions in cuts for medical research. The defence secretary is a third-rate TV host who, when he’s not receiving Botox injections, [must publicly insist](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/hegseth-boasts-i-know-exactly-what-i-m-doing-after-stunning-war-plan-leak?ref=redflag.org.au): “I know exactly what I’m doing”. The administration includes people who openly say that women should be in the home, not the workplace; some even think [the Nineteenth Amendment,](https://19thnews.org/2025/08/pete-hegseth-doug-wilson-women-voting/?ref=redflag.org.au) which guaranteed women the right to vote, was a mistake. Energy policy doubles down on fossil fuels and nuclear power, while abandoning successful renewable energy investments. Tariffs are raising consumer prices and hampering domestic firms, while impoverishing swathes of the farm economy. It all appears to be a leap into irrationalism. Why would the US government destroy the country’s research capability, sabotage its economy, and put crackpots and incompetents in charge of some of its most essential functions? Why does the Trump administration appear to want to turn back the clock to the 1950s, if not the nineteenth century? And why would leading corporate, government and university leaders support all of this? It's difficult to address these questions with one overarching explanation—unless it’s simply that all these factors historically have been associated with right-wing and authoritarian governments. In *The Reactionary Mind*, political philosopher Corey Robin defines modern-day conservatism as “that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammelled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth”. The corollary is the political right’s defence of traditional social and economic hierarchies. In the Trump government, echoes of this defence of “tradition” can be found in support for policies that push women out of the workforce and encourage them to have more babies, [to take one example](https://www.npr.org/2025/04/25/nx-s1-5371718/pronatalist-birth-rate-musk-natal-conference?ref=redflag.org.au). These “neo-natal” ideas are closely connected to other reactionary ideas such as white supremacy and transphobia. In some cases, Trumpist tropes are easy to explain. The fossil fuel industry is a traditional Republican constituency, and the government is heavily invested in economic and political alliances with petrostates, especially the Gulf monarchies. So it’s no surprise that the administration is stuffed with climate change deniers and is hostile to renewable energy. It appears not to care about the climate crisis’s impact on humans, nor, even from its narrow imperial mindset, 21st-century supremacy in [solar power](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/business/china-electric-grid.html?ref=redflag.org.au) and [electric vehicles](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/autos-chinas-electric-vehicle-juggernaut-is-reshaping-the-car-market.html?ref=redflag.org.au) being forfeited to the Chinese state. Another reason for the seeming self-destructive irrationality of the Trump administration is that its 2024 electoral coalition, and the government it created, is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of disparate right-wing elements. Analysts have described this shotgun marriage in different ways. [To liberal Josh Marshall](https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-three-headed-chimera-of-trumpian-destruction?ref=redflag.org.au), the “three-headed chimera of Trumpian destruction” is an amalgam of MAGA loyalists, Christian nationalists and “Tech bro” authoritarians. [To socialist Ashley Smith](https://tempestmag.org/2025/02/trump-seizes-power-in-d-c/?ref=redflag.org.au), the Trump regime is a combination of “three factions with totally different political programs—traditional conservatives, neoliberal tech bosses and MAGA nationalists”. Smith is closer to the structural components of the Trump regime, while Marshall is more concerned with its ideological composition. But both emphasise, correctly, the unstable nature of the forces undergirding Trump’s government. These disparate elements are mostly pulling in the same direction because the administration is on the offensive against “enemies” that they share: immigrants, “wokeness”, federal workers and the like. But there are underlying tensions between these groups. And a political payoff to one could undermine another. We’ve already seen a foreshadowing of this in [the fight between MAGA nationalists and tech oligarchs](https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/1/16/bannon-vs-musk-how-trumps-u-turn-on-h-1b-visas-has-split-maga?ref=redflag.org.au) over the question of visas for highly skilled migrant workers. Between 2020 and 2024, Trump expanded his electoral coalition with newly minted constituencies such as RFK Jr’s anti-vax followers. The MAGA right brought these forces inside the Trump tent. To maintain their loyalty, the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services and the nation’s public health agencies was handed to Kennedy and other prominent opponents of vaccines and COVID-era policies. Trump knows nothing about health or science, as his ramblings about drinking bleach or linking common painkillers to autism, show. But even as his administration’s policies have caused upheaval in the public health infrastructure, Trump has stood by Kennedy. Surely one might think that business and the tech oligarchs would oppose such anti-science thinking. We should remember that the likes of the [Koch network and the fossil-fuel industry](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/25/climate-science-deniers-downplaying-coronavirus-pandemic?ref=redflag.org.au)—in league with “[lumpencapitalist](https://jacobin.com/2018/10/donald-trump-lumpen-capitalist-class-elections?ref=redflag.org.au)” [supplement peddlers](https://counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/210324-The-Disinformation-Dozen.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) (the online snake oil hawkers of the 21st century)—financed much of the opposition to COVID public health measures. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, which focused on individuals’ health and diet choices, [aligns with neoliberalism’s “blame the victim” approach to cutting social spending](https://truthout.org/articles/make-america-healthy-again-aims-to-make-public-health-your-responsibility/?ref=redflag.org.au). Why should the government spend money on health care for those who make poor lifestyle choices, this Social Darwinist approach asks. Finally, the tech oligarchs think that artificial intelligence (AI), on which they are spending hundreds of billions, will be able to replace biomedical researchers, administer social programs and usurp skilled health care personnel. They plan to profit from all of these “innovations”. So, from one perspective, the US destroying its biomedical research enterprise makes no sense. [But to tech billionaires](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/business/larry-ellison-oracle-philanthropy.html?ref=redflag.org.au) who plan to use AI to remake that enterprise, it makes perfect sense. A large proportion of Trump’s mass support—the core of the one-third or so of the electorate that is the “ride or die” MAGA base—holds religious ideas that are [highly authoritarian and anti-modern](https://prri.org/research/one-leader-under-god-the-connection-between-authoritarianism-and-christian-nationalism-in-america/?ref=redflag.org.au). [Leon Trotsky’s observation](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm?ref=redflag.org.au) about Germany in the early 1930s comes to mind: “A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms ... Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters.” These are not simply people susceptible to believing the various conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and MAGA influencers; They are an audience for various “culture war” issues the right uses to build support. While the US government has long supported Israel, the Trump administration’s embrace of the Israeli far right coincides with the increased influence in the Republican Party of Christian Zionist organisations, [which cite Biblical prophecy in support of the Jewish state](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/christian-zionism-evangelicals-israel-trump-foreign-policy/?ref=redflag.org.au). And then there is the biggest wildcard, and source of chaos, in the administration: Trump himself. The president has longstanding ideological commitments that he refuses to drop, regardless of whether they make much sense economically or politically. Championing a tariff-driven, mercantilist economic policy is at the top of this list. Beyond a handful of commitments—mostly revolving around ways to boost his own power and to line his pockets—Trump is completely mercurial. Perhaps this is part of his self-promotion as a “strongman”, but it can also produce a situation in which, among his minions, “the knives are out for everyone”, [as Trump biographer Michael Wolff said earlier this month](https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/knives-everyone-author-michael-wolff-021305186.html?ref=redflag.org.au). That so much of what Trump and his administration does makes no rational sense doesn’t make them any less dangerous. And liberals who think that the 2026 midterm election or the end of Trump’s term will bring everyone “back to their senses” are deluding themselves. US imperial decline, societal rot, and corrupt impunity at the highest reaches have paved the way for the confederacy of dunces and malefactors that have taken over the US government. The people who helped pave that path aren’t going to lead us out of it. ### When Australian workers struck against apartheid URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/when-australian-workers-struck-against-apartheid/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:36:08.000Z Few things can match the feeling of hope generated by the sight of millions on the streets of Italy demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine. With a general strike at its heart, with industry after industry shut down, it gave a glimpse of the usually latent power of the working class. While there have not been similar scenes in Australia recently, there is nevertheless a history of mass political strikes against apartheid regimes here. The target was South Africa, an anti-apartheid action reaching a high point in mid-1971, when the all-white South African Springbok rugby team toured Australia. The tour was fully supported and aided by the Australian government. Initially, 85 percent of the population were in favour of it and only 7 percent opposed. Yet by the tour’s end, more than one-third had come around to opposing the government maintaining sporting ties with South Africa. The cricket tour of South Africa scheduled for the following year was cancelled, the chair of the cricket board explicitly saying, “We will not play them \[South Africa\] until they choose a team on a non-racist basis”. That position held right up until apartheid formally ended in 1994\. Bold working-class action, with the left taking the lead, was integral to bringing about this shift. The campaign against the apartheid team received unprecedented union support. The long campaign against the Vietnam War had legitimated political strikes amongst a wider layer of workers. As a result, more union activists had some experience of working with student radicals and were less likely to dismiss them as “long-haired ratbags”. The level of strike action in general had surged, raising working-class confidence and combativity. This shift in mood began to affect even the conservative upper echelons of the trade union bureaucracy.[ ](https://d.docs.live.net/de8e2d30993e856c/Documents/PC%20Backup/Diane%20Fieldes%20PhD%202002.docx?ref=redflag.org.au#%5Fftn1)While the ACTU had refused to support strike action against the Vietnam War, its moderate leader, Bob Hawke, now initiated action against the Springbok tour, urging unions to “take whatever action is necessary as an act of conscience to obstruct the tour”. It took off. Transport union members, especially Qantas staff, refused to carry the Springboks. Liquor and hospitality workers and Miscellaneous Workers Union members made sure drink supplies were cut off from hotels that allowed them to stay. Laundry workers refused to wash their clothes, and their mail deliveries were stopped. Maritime workers delayed ships carrying South African goods, and the entire Melbourne port was shut down by strike action for a week. Union opposition even included a one-day general strike in Queensland on 21 July. Forty unions took part in the action. The issue that galvanised them was the month-long state of emergency declared by the state’s far right Bjelke-Petersen government on 14 July. This was ostensibly to bring in hundreds of extra police and take over the well-fortified Brisbane Exhibition oval for the games. Ballymore Oval, the traditional Brisbane home of rugby union, needed extra facilities built to accommodate the expected crowds, and the unions would not cooperate. Bob Anderson, an Aboriginal man and a communist, was an organiser in Brisbane with the Building Workers’ Industrial Union (BWIU) at the time. He gives a wonderful account of persuading building workers not to build facilities for the tour: “There was a big team of plumbers working, installing temporary urinals, wash troughs and things like that. So I had a discussion with them, and said ‘the union policy is that we’re against apartheid, we’re not supporting the playing of this game here’, and I explained what it is to be black in your own country, and the workers said: ‘Well, if that’s the case, let them piss on the ground’ and walked off.” The Amalgamated Meat Industry Employees Union banned the transport of police horses to the Brisbane demonstrations. Workers at the Alice Street workshop of the Department of Public Works let the union know they had received an order to make 500 extra-large riot batons for the police. Bob Anderson and BWIU president Hughie Hamilton went to argue with the workers not to make them. Union policy prevailed and the damage the cops could inflict, while still brutal, was somewhat minimised. Then maintenance workers at the exhibition grounds struck, refusing to work while the police cadets were there putting up barbed wire around the oval. The fence itself then remained in place for a month as unionists refused to take it down. As their letter in response to a request to do so put it: “The coppers put the fucking fence up, the coppers can pull the fucking fence down”. There was a reinforcing effect between the defiant mood amongst important groups of workers and the militant student protests. Outrage at police violence deployed against a largely student protest outside the Springboks’ motel led to a packed meeting at the University of Queensland the following day. Dan O’Neill, a lecturer in the English department argued: “We can no longer beat the ... tour and fight racism in the streets ... The only way is ... to bring the industrial system to a halt”. To cries of “Strike now!” 3,000 staff and students voted to stop work and turn the campus over to anti-racist agitation. When Nelson Mandela visited Australia in 1990, a few months after his release from 27 years of imprisonment, he made special mention of the power of union solidarity: “It was the labour movement of this country, in the early ’50s, the dockworkers in this country, who refused to unload South African ships ... which gave the people of South Africa in their struggle a lot of strength, and a lot of hope. It was difficult to understand how workers, thousands of miles from our shores, could take the initiative, the lead, among the workers of the world to pledge their solidarity with the people of South Africa. The feeling that we are not alone, that we have millions of workers behind us.” That legacy of working-class internationalism is one we have to continue to build on today. ### Four important strikes that you (probably) don’t know about URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/four-important-strikes-that-you-probably-dont-know-about/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:36:26.000Z Australian history is riddled with strikes. Here are four that don’t get talked about as often as they should. **Rockchoppers’ strike, 1908** Beneath Sydney lie 27,000 kilometres of sewage and water pipes keeping the metropolis from descending into a pigsty. Few know about the hundreds of workers who hewed the sandstone to build this labyrinthine network. Even fewer know about the heroic struggle they undertook to tame Sydney’s underground concrete jungle. The dangerous nature of this work meant it attracted only the tough and the desperate. Cutting into the sandstone produced a fine—and deadly—dust that caused silicosis. Explosives produced toxic fumes that caused crippling headaches. Most workers were drawn from the poor Irish community. The morality of the employers was summed up by a contractor’s evidence to a 1901 board of inquiry: “A contractor does not take a job to slaughter men but at the same time he has to make a living like other people”. In 1908, the Rockchoppers Union formed and quickly recruited almost all 500 people working in the sewage network. A series of strikes on individual jobs followed as the rockchoppers pushed for higher pay, shorter hours and, most importantly, workers’ control over workplace conditions. In October, this erupted into a general strike in the sewers. The Water Board quickly moved to prosecute the strikers under new anti-union legislation. The rockchoppers felt they had nothing to lose. When strike leaders were hauled before the arbitration court, hundreds of sewer workers surrounded the courthouse shouting, “You’ll have to jail the lot of us!” and then marched to the prison to cheer on their comrades. Many were influenced by revolutionary syndicalism, which championed independent working-class activity. Labor politicians were banned from speaking at strike meetings, although independent socialists like Harry Holland were welcomed. The workers requested solidarity from other unions but were deeply suspicious of attempts by the NSW Labor Council to take over and moderate their struggle. After three weeks, the Water Board surrendered to all their demands. The most astonishing victory was securing the six-hour day, the first of its kind in the country and perhaps the world. Read more: [“Job control for workers’ health: the 1908 Sydney rockchoppers’ strike”, Peter Sheldon, *Labor History* journal](https://ozleft.wordpress.com/2003/10/22/rockchoppers/?ref=redflag.org.au#chop49). **The Balmain ironworkers’ strike, 1945** Left-wing accounts of strikes in Australia often look favourably on the Communist Party, which was the major force in the unions outside of the Labor Party for much of the twentieth century. The Balmain ironworkers’ strike of 1945 shows a different side to the Communists. It took place during the Second World War, which the Communists strongly backed. It was largely a revolt against the Communists’ bureaucratic control over the ironworkers and their attempts to service the war effort by limiting strikes. While strident anti-war sentiment was isolated, there was a widespread feeling amongst workers that the war effort shouldn’t lead to lower living standards. When the Soviet Union entered the war in June 1941, the Communist Party campaigned to convince workers that more sacrifices must be made to support the war against fascism. For a period, working-class sentiment converged with the Communist Party’s position due to the rapid advance of the Japanese imperial forces. By 1943, however, the Japanese offensive was declining, and war fatigue amongst workers was setting in. These issues came to a head in Sydney’s Balmain. The Balmain branch of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association of Australia (FIA) was the only one not controlled by the Communists. It organised a motley crew of Old Balmainers, including Labor left socialists, supporters of the ousted Labor Premier Jack Lang, syndicalists and a few Trotskyists. Throughout the war, tensions built up between the Communist leaders of the national Ironworkers and the Balmain branch. An unofficial strike of Sydney metalworkers kicked off 1943 when the New Year’s Day public holiday was cancelled. The strike was condemned by the Communists. “\[A\] day’s production has been lost and the trade union movement has been held up to ridicule for lack of discipline”, argued the *Ironworker*. “\[N\]o gain of any form whatsoever will flow from this stoppage.” Much criticism focussed on the Trotskyist Nick Origlass, who had been elected a delegate for the Mort’s Dock boiler shop. Further stoppages followed the New Years’ Day strike. Eventually, the federal leadership of the Ironworkers moved to remove the Balmain branch leaders after accusing them of financial irregularities. Hundreds of rank-and-file workers rallied around the local leadership at mass meetings. The Communists won a narrow victory in the branch elections of 1943, although they were accused of stuffing ballots. With the old Balmain leadership deposed, opposition to the Communists was organised by a small band of Trotskyist agitators led by Origlass, who built a base of support in the metal shops at Mort’s Dock and on Cockatoo Island. In March 1945, Origlass was removed from his position as delegate. At a mass meeting to elect new delegates, no-one in the boiler shop nominated, in solidarity with him. The union leaders appointed three new delegates, and the boiler shop workers announced they would stop work unless Origlass was returned. Within two days, most of the ironworkers at Mort’s Dock were on strike. The next union meeting ended in uproar when the chair and 100 supporters of the Communists walked out, declaring the meeting void. Five hundred ironworkers stayed and supported a motion to expand the strike. By April, almost 3,000 ironworkers were out on a strike that would last six weeks. By the time the strike ended, not only was Origlass reinstated, but the Communists abandoned Balmain, leaving the opposition in control over the local branch for years to come. Read more: [“The Balmain ironworkers’ strike of 1945”, Daphne Gollan, *Labor history journal*](https://ozleft.wordpress.com/2003/08/13/ironworkers/?ref=redflag.org.au). **Rubber workers’ strike, 1969** The jailing of tramway union leader Clarrie O’Shea in May 1969 triggered the largest general strike in postwar Australia. It was a watershed moment that broke the anti-union penal powers and initiated a new strike wave that involved increasing numbers of low-paid and poorly unionised workers. In October 1969, strikes organised by such workers rocked the rubber industry in South Australia. More than 1,000 workers struck for three weeks in defiance of their employers and the manoeuvres of right-wing trade union leaders. These workers were mainly migrants, mostly Greeks, and hundreds were women. A change in the way that wage increases for highly unionised workers flowed on to low-paid workers meant that they were falling far behind. In October 1969, a workplace meeting launched a strike for higher wages. In response, the rubber bosses refused to negotiate with the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union (MWU). Instead, they told the workers to talk to the Chamber of Manufactures. “At the second strike meeting a call was made for a march of protest to the Chamber of Manufactures”, reported *Tribune*, the Communist Party’s newspaper. “Almost to a man \[and woman\] the workers responded and marched fifteen abreast to the Pirie Street Chamber premises.” Once there, the workers invaded the building and sat in the board room’s red leather chairs waiting for the bosses’ negotiators to arrive—they never did. Striking workers, police and scabs regularly confronted one another on picket lines outside the rubber factories. “A driver was told to drive over the bastards”, reported *Tribune*. The bosses threatened to shut down workplaces across the state, leaving thousands without work. Maintenance crews at Rubber Mills then walked out in solidarity. Notably, migrant workers at Ford Broadmeadows in Victoria, who would stage their own strike in 1973, walked off the job in support of the rubber strike. At this point, the local Trades and Labour Council—controlled by right-wing unions—moved to take control of the dispute. They organised a meeting in which the MWU had the same number of representatives as smaller right-wing unions and pressured the workers to end their strike and wait for a court ruling. Rank-and-file rubber workers resisted this takeover, the Greek workers playing an important role. Many of them were connected to Platon, a Greek workers club led by migrant Communists. Platon had created a *εργατική επιτροπή* (industrial committee) in 1969 that played a key role in encouraging the strike in the first place. Nick Robakis, one of the strike organisers and a local MWU leader, was a Platon member. Under the influence of these activists, a stormy strike meeting rejected the Labour Council proposal to return to work by 300 votes to 283\. However, the pressure from the bosses, the courts and the Labour Council continued to build. A few days later, another strike meeting reluctantly voted to end the strike. Despite only a partial win on their demands, the strike left an important legacy. For years afterwards, the rubber industry in South Australia was rocked by protests and strikes led by the workers—men and women, migrants and Australian born—who went through the struggle of 1969. Read more: [“Profile of a strike” by Hal Alexander, *Tribune,* December](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/237504824?ref=redflag.org.au) 1969 **Warilla teachers’ strike, 1976** It wasn’t just low-paid migrant workers moving into struggle in the wake of the Clarrie O’Shea strike. There was also a growing movement amongst white-collar workers, many of whom previously considered themselves professionals. In October 1968, the first ever state-wide strike of NSW teachers took place. Eighty percent of teachers took part, and more than 10,000 attended a mass meeting. This opened the space for strike action at particular schools, the most important of which was the Warilla teachers strike of 1976. This remains the longest teachers strike in Australian history, lasting 28 days. Warilla High School in the steel town of Wollongong educated many children from poor working-class families. The strike began when the Department of Education transferred a science teacher out of the school and refused to provide funding for a replacement. Seventy-five of the 77 staff walked out in protest on 10 February. The strike quickly raised the wider issue of inadequate staffing for schools in working-class areas, winning community support. At the time, the NSW South Coast was a radical hub. A left-wing rank-and-file group had won the local union leadership of the BHP steelworks and organised large strikes throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Eighteen thousand steelworkers had launched a strike just days before Warilla. Left-wing activists were influential amongst the dockworkers in Port Kembla and the Illawarra coalminers. The South Coast Labour Council was known for supporting left-wing currents in the region’s trade unions. On 17 February, a mass meeting of 400 parents and students unanimously endorsed the strike, after a left-wing opposition overthrew the local P&C branch leadership. A series of sympathy strikes by students broke out at the Warrawong, Port Kembla and Berkeley high schools. On 25 February, 300 school students marched through the streets of Wollongong. The cleaners at Warilla high walked out on strike. The waterside workers at Port Kembla held a stop-work to hear from the striking teachers and discussed a sympathy strike. High school teachers in Sydney began a series of rolling solidarity strikes. At this point, some of the Warilla teachers were drifting back to work, but 40 voted to continue the strike. Victory came when members of the Firemen and Deckhand’s Union walked off the job, shutting down tugboats at Port Kembla. “Driving down Mt Ousley that night”, recalled South Coast teacher Jim Bradley in an interview with *Illawarra Unity*, “looking at those boats tied up off the Illawarra coast, we stopped the car and screamed in delight and knew we were close to winning”. The Education Department rapidly gave in to most of the strike’s demands. Read more: [“The Warilla High School Strike—a veritable class struggle” by Anthony Ashbolt, ](https://archivesonline.uow.edu.au/nodes/view/14203?ref=redflag.org.au#idx124982)*Illawarra Unity*, July 2006. ### The Palestine solidarity movement must continue URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-palestine-solidarity-movement-must-continue/ Last updated: 2026-01-17T09:34:55.000Z “From there we came outside and saw the stars.” ― Dante Alighieri, *Inferno* After two years, Israel’s genocidal campaign of bombing in Gaza could be over. In the days since the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was signed in Egypt, videos have emerged of children roller-skating through the ruins of Gaza City and hundreds of thousands of people making the long march northward along Rashid Street to return to blasted homes and ravaged land. For millions across the world who have fought for the Palestinians, time seems to have a different quality, no longer measured by videos of ashen limbs and wrecked bodies. While Palestinians rightly celebrate the reprieve, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s statement calling this ceasefire the “biggest contribution to peace in the Middle East for a generation or more” recalls the words of the Roman historian Tacitus: “They make a wasteland and call it peace”. The fate of Gaza is being decided by the very people who imposed starvation and approved the bombing of homes, schools and hospitals. The global Palestine movement must push for the right of Palestinians to self-determination, not a future designed by their killers. Of course, Israel could break the agreement—just as it did both previous ceasefires, in November 2023 and March 2025\. Under the “Phase One” arrangement, Hamas will release all Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. Israel will release thousands of Palestinians from its prisons, and the Israeli military will withdraw from cities. Once the Israeli hostages are released, Hamas will have no leverage left. At this point, the ceasefire looks likely to hold. The US military is sending 200 troops to oversee it, unlike the last ceasefires. And key US regional aims have been met, with blows struck against Hezbollah and Iran. Gershon Baskin, a US negotiator, wrote for the *Times of Israel*that Hamas agreed to something like the current deal in September 2024, and for more than a year, the outcome depended on whether the US government would push Israel to sign on. The role of President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration in this genocide must be remembered. But it’s important for those who stand with Palestine to be clear that Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians will never end until Israel is defeated. Israel is fundamentally expansionist. Since its foundation, its rulers have aimed at the creation of Greater Israel, incorporating Gaza, the West Bank, and sections of Lebanon. In that sense, any ceasefire is only a pause and we can be certain that the barbarity will resume. While President Donald Trump’s twenty-point plan has been widely publicised, it’s unlikely to be fully implemented; a special economic zone among rubble and devastation is far from reality. Gazan analyst Muhammad Shehada said, based on discussions with mediators involved in the negotiations, that he’s certain the plan is a propaganda exercise. While the details are yet to be settled, it’s clear that if President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu get their way, life in Gaza will remain unbearable for decades. Before 7 October 2023, Gaza was already an open-air prison, besieged by land, air and sea. Israel staged regular bombings and restricted construction materials, so rebuilding was impossible. Israel even calculated calories to allow in only enough food to keep people barely alive. The West Bank is broken up into isolated villages, fenced off and blocked to control Palestinian movement. Israeli settlers regularly seize land and commit atrocities. Now, conditions are even worse. Half a million Gazans face famine, disease is spreading, and all of the key infrastructure has been destroyed. In an 8 October Fox News interview, Trump claimed that he phoned Prime Minister Netanyahu and told him, “Israel cannot fight the world, Bibi, they cannot fight the world”. Who is this world he’s referring to? Not the Western and Arab governments, which have watched the genocide play out without lifting a finger. Even small gestures like statehood recognition were won only by the Palestine solidarity movement. Israel hasn’t been fighting rulers; it’s been fighting the masses. The movement for Palestine has opened the floodgates in country after country, unleashing workers and young people into the streets. Israel and the US now have reasons to end the genocide. Hamas is militarily defeated and Gaza’s population is decimated. But the movement seems to have played a role in Trump’s push for an end, against Netanyahu’s wishes, and created a political cost to continuing. In silence, Netanyahu might have kept destroying Gaza and seizing the West Bank. We can’t stop now. The Palestine movement worldwide must keep marching, striking, occupying and sailing for a complete end to genocide—not just what Israel started fast-tracking in 2023, but the longer-term genocide of Palestinians it’s been carrying out since 1948\. Gaza must be rebuilt on Palestinian terms with freely given food, medicine and building supplies. The blockade must end. The illegal settlement of the West Bank and the apartheid system must be dismantled. War criminals must be held accountable. But more is needed. An international working-class revolution must overthrow the capitalist system that produced this genocide. Every grave in Gaza is an indictment of the capitalist institutions that brought us here: from the market, which incentivises imperialist domination of oil-rich regions and rewards the creation and sale of weapons, to the capitalist governments built to put the flow of profits before every single human life. “Never again” means little in a system soaked in violence. Destruction of the oppressed has happened, again, before our eyes, and will again, unless socialists build a movement strong enough to finally replace capitalism with a system organised for collectivity and human liberation—a world where no-one wakes to the sound of bombing or the barrel of a gun. It’s time to step out of this hell and see the stars. ### On the campaign trail with WA Socialists URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/on-the-campaign-trail-with-wa-socialists/ Last updated: 2025-11-23T04:18:30.000Z On a sunny Saturday in September, more than two dozen volunteers gathered at a park in Samson, in Perth’s south. As on many afternoons and weekends before, they were meeting there to doorknock for the WA Socialists’ candidate in the City of Fremantle council election. Between them on that day, they managed to knock on more than 1,000 doors, talking to voters about local issues and making the case to vote to elect a socialist to the council. Victorian Socialists members voted in June to expand their electoral project across Australia, and the WA Socialists was launched in July. It immediately found an audience among those who were eager for a left-wing alternative to the parlous state of politics in Western Australia. Since then, more than 500 people have signed up, and many have gotten active in the council campaign—with good reason. WA is possibly the worst state in Australia in which to be a renter. According to a recent report from the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, the median weekly rent in WA has increased by 76 percent since 2020 and now sits at $740\. Anglicare WA’s 2025 Rental Affordability Snapshot found not one single room in the whole of the state, let alone a property, is affordable for people on Jobseeker, youth allowance or the disability support pension. Investment in public housing has been criminally low. As of May 2025, there were 21,480 current applications for social housing. If you’re one of those applicants, you can expect to wait on average 148 weeks, or just under three years. And in its recent budget, the Cook Labor government wound up several key cost-of-living relief measures, such as electricity credits. While workers and the poor are struggling, for those at the top it’s a boom time. According to the Department of Jobs, Tourism, Science and Innovation, WA’s iron ore sector generated $128 billion in sales in 2024, of which $36 billion was profit. And politicians themselves are among the winners. They were recently awarded a 4 percent pay rise, increasing a backbencher’s annual pay to $173,393\. For comparison, the starting salary for a WA state school teacher is $78,397\. It’s in the context of this one-sided class war being waged by the rich and their political servants that WA Socialists has embarked on its first serious campaign. Council elections are taking place across the state in October, in most places by postal ballot. With a total of ten candidates running across eight council areas in Perth, the party has presented voters with a genuine, fighting, anti-capitalist platform—proudly taking up issues like housing, the environment, workers’ rights and solidarity with global struggles like that for peace and justice for Palestine. Nick Everett, the WA Socialists’ candidate for East Ward in Fremantle, is a long-time socialist activist, former chair of Friends of Palestine WA and a union delegate. In Fremantle, wealth and poverty often rub shoulders. The median rent for a house has increased by nearly 60 percent in the last five years, and public housing levels have sharply declined, replaced with expensive new apartments. The state government plans to relocate Fremantle’s 100-year-old port, shedding hundreds of local jobs and destroying the heart of the community. Everett and the WA Socialists are firmly opposed to this, as well as to the plan to turn the nearby suburb of Cockburn into a base for US nuclear submarines as part of the AUKUS deal. Fremantle declared itself a nuclear-free zone in the 1980s. Everett wants to keep it that way. “Fremantle’s identity is being sold off to developers while working-class people are squeezed out”, Everett says. “We need a council that treasures Freo’s unique working-class history and prioritises housing and services for all, not just the rich.” In Canning in Perth’s east, the dilapidated Brownlie Towers site has sat empty for years despite its potential to provide much-needed public housing. Rachel Goldsbrough, a public hospital nurse and the WA Socialists’ candidate for Mason Ward in Canning, has made the redevelopment of the towers a key part of her platform. “We need 100 percent public housing at Brownlie Towers, and we need it yesterday”, she says. “The government has ignored this project for too long. It’s a disgrace.” Rents in Canning have skyrocketed by 84 percent in just five years, and council rates were raised by 6 percent this year—among the highest increase in the state. Among other measures to address the housing crisis, Goldsbrough is calling on the council to impose penalties on owners of properties left empty long-term. In Bayswater in Perth’s north, gentrification is setting in. The median house price in parts of the suburb has risen 70 percent, with many renters evicted to make way for short-term rentals and Airbnbs. Lewis Todman, a longtime socialist organiser and pre-service teacher, is running as the WA Socialists’ candidate. “If elected, I’ll be the only renter on the Bayswater council”, Todman says. “We need a local government that stands up for the rights of renters, not the rights of Airbnb owners looking to make a buck from the housing crisis.” Across all campaigns, the issue of Palestine resonates with voters, with many declaring that their vote will go to the WA Socialists on the basis of the party’s unwavering opposition to the war in Gaza. While doorknocking in Fremantle, a volunteer met Sally, who said she had been a communist in her younger years. At the end of their conversation, Sally went inside her home and returned, handing the volunteer a pin that said “No Conscription”—a relic from her husband’s days as a draft dodger during the Vietnam War. She explained that she had been uplifted and inspired by some of the young people leading the WA Socialists’ campaign and their anti-war stance. Whatever the results of this election, the WA Socialists project has significant momentum. It has already achieved the membership required to register as a party with the Western Australian Electoral Commission—a task to which it will turn in the coming months. By bringing issues like housing, public services, and global solidarity to letterboxes, doorsteps and community centres, WA Socialists offers a chance to seriously shake the rotten status quo of capitalism in WA and build a movement to win real change. ### Italy’s general strike shows the way forward URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/italys-general-strike-shows-the-way-forward/ Last updated: 2025-11-23T04:18:44.000Z Italy’s Autumn of mass protests and strikes for Palestine boiled over into four days of rebellion following Israel’s attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla. This culminated in a general strike and millions on the streets on 3-4 October. The explosion of popular struggle, with the working class and the strike now placed at its centre, accompanied by a mass, militant student movement, is a hugely significant development in the fight for Palestine, and the broader fight against the capitalist and imperialist system. A rising tide of struggle in Italy has been set in motion since 1 September, when 50,000 people marched in Genoa to accompany the launch of the Global Sumud Flotilla. Genoa hosts one of Europe’s most important ports, and the protest sent off the Flotilla with mass support and a warning: if the Flotilla were attacked, then dockworkers, along with other workers, and backed by a mass movement, would strike and “block everything”—*blocchiamo tutto*! The declaration was initially made by the dockworkers organised in the Autonomous Port Workers Collective (CALP). It was quickly taken up by the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), one of Italy’s many so-called base unions which have been set up in recent decades to organise rank-and-file workers into class struggle in opposition to Italy’s traditional trade union federations which, like Australian unions, are dominated by institutionalised, do-nothing bureaucrats. The base unions directly organise only a small minority of Italian workers, so their ability to implement serious industrial action without the main union federations is usually very limited. But now, the boldness of the slogan—*blocchiamo tutto*—combined with rising anger at the situation in Gaza and the Italian government’s complicity with Israel’s genocide, sparked a surge of energy, confidence and mobilisation. Along with the base unions and the growing calls for strike action, this has been fuelled by growing mass Palestine rallies, a youth radicalisation centred on high school and university blockades and occupations, and countless smaller actions, including rallies, local blockades, encampments and so on, often organised by Italy’s social centres. At the core of most of this upsurge in spontaneous activity are Italy’s various far-left and communist organisations. The date was set for a general strike, called by the base unions, on 22 September. To try to undermine this call, and to give itself some much-needed left cover in the face of growing pressure, Italy’s main union federation, the CGIL, called a last-minute strike for 19 September. A cynical manoeuvre, this strike was not intended to be widespread, and indeed it wasn’t, outside of some transport and education workers. Yet, contrary to the wishes of the CGIL leaders, it helped to legitimise the idea of a general strike for Palestine, and helped to lay the basis for the success of the 22 September general strike. This strike involved many more workers than 19 September and unleashed a confident mass movement prepared to defy the police and new anti-protest laws, to block ports, train stations, highways, schools and universities. Without the backing of the major union federations, many workers did not participate in the strike, or participated as individuals without much economic impact on their workplace. But the momentum was building. With the attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla on 1 October, a new peak of mobilisation was unleashed. Snap protests drew thousands into the squares of every major city late at night and with no notice. I eventually found the tail-end of the protest in Florence, where hundreds were still in the square at 1am. In some bigger cities, clashes with police and blockades of stations and roads were already beginning and raging through the night. Crucially, on the night of 1 October, the CGIL now backed the call for a general strike on 3 October. The momentum was such that there was no way they could avoid such a call at this point without losing all legitimacy in the eyes of the working class. Forcing the CGIL into such action was a major victory for the movement and ensured 3 October would be a historic day. The day before, still in Florence at this point, I headed at 8am towards what I’d been told was going to be a university blockade. On the way, I happened to run into something else—hundreds of high school students standing in the street outside their school in the centre of the CBD. The entrance was being blockaded by a combination of school and uni students. The high school students seemed very happy about this situation, with support for Palestine ubiquitous among their cohort, and any waverers won over by the fact that this was much more exciting than school. They could name at least three other high schools in Florence alone that were also being blockaded that morning. Half an hour later, and following people wearing keffiyehs, I found my way to the blockade of the University of Florence. The student activists had chosen the via Laura campus due to its ongoing ties with Israel. The entrance was blocked, and protesters chanted and made speeches outside. As more students arrived, many presumably expecting to go to class, they instead overwhelmingly joined the protest. When a critical mass was reached, the blockade became an occupation. Hundreds of students marched into classes to shut them down, chanting, singing and pulling the students out to join the protest. One of the songs was clearly a bit new and took a while to catch on, but soon hundreds were singing it on repeat. I was told it was an adaptation of a workers’ song associated with an important strike a few years earlier. Some of the lyrics translate as: “Forward together; united in the struggle; against imperialism; there will be victory!” A mass assembly was held to discuss the politics and organisation of the occupation, before the students then led a march into the city centre, stopping by every blockaded high school along the way, whose students joined the march. At the time of writing, the occupation at via Laura is ongoing. That night, I joined another mass demonstration in Florence. This time, thousands marched through the city centre before heading to Florence’s main train station, Santa Maria Novella. Everyone knew what was coming: the night before, stations had been stormed and blockaded in Milan and Turin. We faced a line of fully decked-out riot police. As the crowd swelled and surged, a series of explosions rang out—smaller fire crackers thrown by protesters, I think, followed by thunderously loud explosions from police flashbang grenades. But no one was deterred; the crowd grew, the chants grew louder, and soon the police retreated. Thousands stormed in, occupying the train platforms and tracks. These scenes were playing out across Italy. A 24-hour strike on the railways began at 9pm that night. The 3 October general strike is an incredible and perhaps unprecedented achievement. A purely political strike, and a general strike, carried out with massive, active participation, as a result of a surging movement from below, which was declared illegal by the Italian government, given no real support from any of the entire official opposition of the political establishment; and all for an international cause that does not seemingly directly affect Italian workers. And not just any international cause, but that of the Palestinians—a people systematically demonised and dehumanised as Islamic terrorists. The general strike and mass mobilisations were a big victory over the far-right Meloni government, which serves the interests of Italian capitalism, the third biggest exporter of arms to Israel after the US and Germany. Like governments around the world, Meloni wants to impose further austerity on the working class to fund obscene increases in military spending. She derided the strikers as people just seeking a “long weekend”, and her government declared the strike illegal, threatening unions and individuals with repercussions. She also recently passed laws to punish protesters who block important infrastructure. This all failed miserably. The CGIL reported the strike as a widespread success, with 60 percent participation. It was particularly strong in the education, transport and logistics industries, and among metalworkers. Mass demonstrations accompanied the strike, with perhaps 2 million people mobilising across the country, including 300,000 in Rome. Along with this went an enormous wave of blockades, often led by student activists who swarmed past police lines to block, occupy and shut down ports, train stations, major highways, even airports, warehouses and distribution centres, along with schools and universities. The blockades made the strike massively more disruptive. Long-distance trains, for example, were announced by the CGIL as not being affected by the strike. But occupations of the train tracks meant that everything was stopped—something I can attest to, as I was trying to get to Rome for the huge national demonstration the next day. I’ve never been so happy to wait several hours for a train! It’s incredible to think that after all this frenetic activity, the very next day, 4 October, 1 million people took to the streets of Rome for Italy’s biggest demonstration since the invasion of Iraq in 2003\. I made it into town the night before, and Palestinian flags and keffiyehs greeted me everywhere. The metro on the way to the protest’s starting point was packed with rally-goers—I remember thinking that there were more people on this single train, two hours before the march was even due to start, than I’ve been with at many Palestine protests over the decades. It felt like the whole world was protesting there in Rome; a never-ending sea of humanity which, despite walking up and down for hours, I never saw the start or the end of. Every side street of the official march route was jam-packed. It was so big you could easily go and line up for a pizza and beer, sit for two hours, rejoin the demonstration and still be nowhere near the end of the march. As we marched past the Colosseum, I couldn’t help but think of the petty attempt of NSW police and Premier Chris Minns to stop us in Sydney from marching to the Opera House on supposed “security” and “safety” grounds. What a joke. There are a few important points flowing from the events in Italy. First, the global complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza has encapsulated so much about the morally bankrupt world we live in. In the last two years, every institution of this system has utterly debased itself in the service of genocide, from the Labor Party to the ABC, and so many more. In Italy, this includes all the so-called opposition parties. I say “encapsulated” and not revealed, because for so many workers and students, this system has already been failing them year after year, while its politicians and ideologues become less and less credible. This partly explains the explosion of struggle in Italy. The banner of Palestine has become a symbol and a unifying rallying cry for everyone fed up with a system of shameless liars, hypocrites and murderers, who preside over an economic system of inequality which keeps us poor, locked out and with nothing to lose. Second, while socialists have been saying for some time that Israel’s barbarism is a product of an entire sick system of capitalism and imperialism, and that the road to Palestinian liberation was inseparable from a working-class struggle against that system, nothing makes the case quite like a general strike. Italian workers and students have planted the flag, and it’s now up to the rest of the world to emulate these efforts. Mass, militant class struggle is the way forward for Palestinian liberation, and the liberation of us all. Third, Italy shows that in circumstances of widespread discontent, a bold minority—in this case comprising relatively embryonic rank-and-file workers’ organisations and a radical student movement—with an orientation to mass action and class struggle, can galvanise millions into struggle and transform the situation, precisely because they called for militant, determined action. They didn’t do it by moderating their demands or sucking up to the likes of the Italian Democratic Party or the CGIL leaders, the rough equivalents of our Labor Party and ACTU. This should be a huge inspiration for us all, as it shows that a movement that is both mass and militant is not only what is needed, but is clearly possible. ### Technology makes work easier. Why is it used as a weapon against workers? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/technology-makes-work-easier-why-is-it-used-as-a-weapon-against-workers/ Last updated: 2025-10-23T04:07:13.000Z You’ve just got a great new job, or so you think. You sign on for work from home, log in and log out when you want and, over the day, you get call-ins for any number of ten-minute mini-tasks. Welcome to the gig economy—in this case, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Classed as independent contractors, workers who sign on to Mechanical Turk have no guaranteed wages or conditions or other workplace protections. They bid against thousands worldwide for each task, and often stay logged in all day, even into the night, to get a bare minimum wage. The boss can block them at will—in effect sack them—and the pay rate per job keeps falling. Amazon may well have created the most unregulated labour marketplace that has ever existed, what former ACTU Secretary Dave Oliver called a “liquid workforce” in which “workers bid for parcels of work where the lowest bid wins”. Another technological innovation has been the extensive use of robots in many industries. In warehouses, they’re increasingly used to lift heavy packages and speed up goods collection and distribution. A bonus for workers, you’d think. But as a recent dispute over wages and conditions at Woolworth’s NSW and Victorian distribution centres illustrates, it’s anything but a bonus. Workers are still needed—but fewer of them. And those who keep their jobs are treated as if they were robots too. Workers’ every action is measured by an algorithmic program; through individual headsets, they receive barking orders. Anyone who’s seconds behind scheduled performance goals is reminded immediately by the machine. Over the centuries, our society has been transformed for the better by new technologies. Millions more people are working in thousands of new areas, many with higher wages, higher-level skills and the possibility of shorter hours. Some of the massive and positive changes from technology include the thousands of new jobs involved in life-saving medical research, such as mRNA vaccines, 3-D printing, amazing possibilities in film and music and previously unimagined social connectivity through the internet. Robotics have saved workers from repetitive, dead-end jobs on production lines or dangerous mining jobs, such as in Australia’s Pilbara region, where driverless trucks and trains are controlled from a comfortable office command centre in Perth thousands of kilometres away. Yet, despite the new openings, thousands of jobs, such as those of car workers or truck and train drivers in the Pilbara, have disappeared, with many workers unable to find equivalent employment or facing long-term unemployment. And many of the new jobs are just as repetitive. Even if they might be physically less taxing, they can still be mind numbing, stressful and exhausting. Often, technology that enables easier work is used to police the workers. John Pane from Electronic Frontiers Australia compares the latest workplace digitisation to a panopticon: “You never know whether the boss is watching you, which is why it’s called bossware”. Social scientist David Graeber recalls an optimistic time in the twentieth century: “\[W\]hen people imagined the future, they imagined flying cars, teleportation devices and robots who would free them from the need to work”. But his exposé of today’s workplaces, *Bullshit Jobs: The rise of pointless work and what we can do about it*, shows that technology has often been marshalled to find ways to make us work more, not less, and often in roles that people experience as pointless “make-work” jobs. The transition process during major technological innovation can be brutal. Karl Marx pointed out nearly 200 years ago that the loss of jobs in one sector and the creation of jobs in another is no seamless process. In the *Grundrisse*, he wrote, “\[T\]he effect of machinery, which has been represented as a compensation for the working class, is, on the contrary, a most frightful scourge”. He added that during the transition period, those thrown out of work have few options, rarely having the skills necessary for the newer technology, except for “a few inferior and therefore oversupplied and underpaid” jobs. So why aren’t workers seeing the full benefits of new technologies? It’s all about our economic system, capitalism. From the game-changing industrial revolution of the 1800s with its mechanised factories, railways and electricity to today’s predicted equally transformative “fourth” artificial intelligence-led revolution, there’s been a debate over the pros and cons of each new technological change. More importantly, the question has been who controls their introduction and use and who benefits. It's not a question decided by what’s fair and reasonable. The economy is not simply a mechanical composite of individual parts such as labour, land, technology and machinery; it is fundamentally about the social relations between the people involved in producing, distributing and consuming things. Within capitalism, it’s about the competing interests of the two main classes in society: the ruling class, which owns and controls the productive processes to reap the profits and other benefits of each innovation, and the working class, which produces, but does not own or control, the goods and services. It’s an economic system that sets employers and workers at odds over the control of production (what we do on the job): whether profit or human need will determine its goals. As Marx explained, capitalism is focused on making profits in a system where each capitalist competes against others to be more profitable or go out of business. This dynamic encourages constant technological advances aimed at driving up productivity and delivering more profit. But each development of new machinery also intensifies exploitation and discipline of the workforce—increasing management control, deskilling labour, and increasing alienation for the majority. Crucial to capitalism’s wresting control of the work process from the earlier skilled guilds of feudal society was redesigning workplaces to be independent of the talents workers brought with them. In the 1800s, economist Frederick Taylor’s “time and motion” studies provided the underlying redesign template by splitting tasks into small, discrete steps to be repetitively operated by a single worker. As Taylor explained in *The Principles of Scientific Management*: “Our original objective was that of taking control of the machine shop out of the hands of the many workmen and placing it completely in the hands of management”. But in the end, the bosses can’t completely deskill or fire all workers. Initially, as each technological advance is introduced, employers can be even more reliant on workers’ skills or numbers. For example, Victoria is reportedly facing a shortage of 64,000 financial services and IT professionals, as well as blue-collar trades jobs. Workers are often portrayed as anti-technology in their battles with employers over the introduction of automated systems. But the 2023 US screenwriters dispute tells a different story. The screenwriters didn’t oppose the use of generative AI such as ChatGPT in script writing. Instead, they secured an [agreement](https://www.wgacontract2023.org/wgacontract/files/memorandum-of-agreement-for-the-2023-wga-theatrical-and-television-basic-agreement.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au)that such AI scripts can’t be recognised as producers of the text and that human writers get the credit and payment for any studio AI-produced drafts, along with other protections. In Australia, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance is fighting for similar conditions and protections on the use of AI. Under the first Trump administration, Google workers forced management to withdraw from the $10 billion Project Maven military project and agree not to take on other such work. Google’s boss dumped the agreement within days of the 2025 Trump ascendancy, and now the workers face another fight. Ultimately, workers retain enormous potential power because they produce the value that underpins company profits. There can never be a completely robotised, AI-driven society: human labour and ingenuity are foundational to human society. It’s just a question of who controls the labour and ingenuity and to what ends. Workers will have to continue their long tradition of organising against the encroachment of capitalist destruction and build the forces necessary to finally win society over to one in which human need, not profit, is the deciding factor. ### Two years into the genocide, Australia’s Palestine solidarity movement is a beacon of resistance URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/two-years-into-the-genocide-australias-palestine-solidarity-movement-is-a-beacon-of-resistance/ Last updated: 2025-10-23T04:07:29.000Z Over the last two years, Australia has become home to one of the most enduring movements for Palestine anywhere in the world. According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, Australia ranks second only to Yemen in the number of mass demonstrations (protests of more than 10,000 people) held in opposition to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Between 7 October 2023 and 5 September 2025, more than 40,000 Palestine solidarity events took place globally, more than 900 of which were in Australia. The figures tell a story of extraordinary resilience and mass political commitment. But the numbers alone can’t capture the depth of this movement, its organisation, its determination and the thousands of lives it has transformed. For nearly two years, tens of thousands of people have attended protests, fundraisers, teach-ins, film screenings and organising meetings. We’ve stood in the pouring rain, in blistering summer heat and under threats of repression, wrapped in keffiyehs, demanding an end to Israel’s genocide and a free Palestine from the river to the sea. We have marched through every capital city, and in regional towns from Wollongong to Albany. We’ve blockaded arms manufacturers, tried to shut down highways and ports, occupied university campuses and corporate headquarters. In the process, we’ve built a movement that refuses to back down. The explosion of support for the Palestinians since October 2023 has drawn thousands of people into political life, many for the first time. In suburbs and schools, on campuses and in workplaces, entire layers of society have begun to organise. New groups have sprung up everywhere: Students for Palestine, Healthcare Workers for Palestine, Academics for Palestine, Teachers for Palestine. Muslim and Arab community organisations have mobilised at a scale not seen in decades, while long-time socialists and anti-war activists have played critical roles in sustaining the momentum. There have even been strikes for Palestine in Victoria, taken by workers in the Australian Services Union. Some people have dedicated every spare moment of their lives to this campaign, organising rallies, making placards, fundraising for medical aid in Gaza, pushing for union motions or simply talking to friends and colleagues about why Palestine matters. People who never thought of themselves as political are waking up to the reality of the world. A few months ago, one of the educators at my daughter’s school revealed that she couldn’t sleep because she was so distressed at what was happening in Gaza. She said she had never been political before. She is one of many whose world view has been changed because of Israel’s genocide. Along the way, people have learned important lessons. They’ve learned about the brutal history of Zionism and the *Nakba*. They’ve learned about 75 years of colonisation, displacement and resistance. They’ve learned to challenge the media’s distortions and to see through the propaganda of Western regimes. But perhaps just as importantly, they’ve learned a lot about Australia—about the deep and bipartisan loyalty our rulers show to Israel and about the hollowness of their democratic pretensions. The genocide in Gaza has been enabled by Western governments, including our own. While Labor politicians offer mealy-mouthed statements about “peace” and “restraint”, they have continued to supply weapons components to Israel, to trade intelligence with its military and to lend diplomatic weight to its crimes. Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong want to present themselves as global humanitarians. The latest declaration of support for a Palestinian state is their attempt to pretend they care. The reality is they are complicit, actively and knowingly, in a campaign of mass slaughter. They have shown time and again that they are more interested in preserving Australia’s alliance with the United States and Israel than listening to the hundreds of thousands of people in this country demanding an end to the bloodshed. The movement has also learned that words are cheap. Politicians may express “concern”, but what matters is what they do—and what they have done is repress the movement and slander it at every turn. From the first weeks of protest, we have faced a campaign of lies and defamation. The media accused us of antisemitism, without evidence. A Sydney protest was falsely reported as chanting antisemitic slogans, a claim subsequently debunked by a police investigation. But our leaders have never let facts get in the way of a good story. In workplaces and cultural institutions, expressing support for Palestine has been treated as a disciplinary offence. People have lost jobs or funding simply for opposing genocide. When actors at the Sydney Theatre Company wore keffiyehs on stage, the company condemned them, and donors threatened to withdraw funding. The ABC fired journalist Antoinette Lattouf for sharing a Human Rights Watch post about Gaza. The cricket commentator Peter Lalor was axed by SEN Radio for criticising Israel’s war crimes. The State Library of Victoria terminated contracts with four writers—citing “child safety” as a cover for political censorship—after they expressed solidarity with Gaza. These attacks are not isolated. They are part of a broader ideological offensive aimed at delegitimising our movement and silencing dissent. And it doesn’t stop at smear campaigns. Across the country, legal restrictions on protests have increased. In New South Wales, the state government introduced harsh anti-protest laws, using them to threaten organisers with massive fines and arrest. Police have tried to shut down peaceful protests, including attempting to block a Palestine rally on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. University managements have also tried to repress student encampments, with threats of disciplinary action, police eviction and public vilification. In the wake of last year’s Palestine camps, universities have gotten away with the most egregious limits to freedom of expression. At the Australian National University, students are no longer allowed to put up posters. At the University of Western Australia, student lecture announcements have been banned—as has handing out leaflets outside of a very small prescribed area. At Melbourne University, the administration spied on students and staff who support Palestine. McCarthyite-style repression reigns supreme across our universities. But none of it has broken our movement. Despite everything—despite the lies, the job losses, the censorship, the police repression—we are still here. This resilience is not just a matter of determination, though we have plenty of that. It’s political. People are not marching week after week because it’s easy or fashionable. They are doing it because they are outraged, at the genocide, yes, but also at the complicity of our own government. They are doing it because they see through the hypocrisy of the “rules-based order”. And because they want to live in a world where justice isn’t defined by imperial interests. Our movement is one of the most powerful expressions of anti-imperialist politics in this country in decades. The genocide in Gaza continues. But so too does the resistance. What the raw numbers show is that we have built something enduring. We have refused to be silenced. We have stood with the Palestinian people in their darkest hour. And we will continue to do so until Palestine is free. This movement is not going away. And neither is our rage, our solidarity or our hope. ### Mass protests and ‘kleptospirosis’ in the Philippines URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/mass-protests-and-kleptospirosis-in-the-philippines/ Last updated: 2025-10-09T05:21:12.000Z Widespread government corruption in the Philippines meant that recent [mass protests in Indonesia](https://redflag.org.au/article/mass-protests-rock-indonesia) and [Nepal’s so-called Gen Z revolution](https://redflag.org.au/article/nepals-gen-z-revolution) resonated with Filipinos. Tens of thousands were expected at a nationwide protest on 21 September, coinciding with the anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos’ 1972 declaration of martial law, after corruption scandals related to flood control infrastructure projects took over the national spotlight. However, many more turned out. The most significant rallies were held in Metro Manila, the national capital region consisting of sixteen cities. At Luneta Park in Manila, a symbolic site of the independence struggle from Spain, the morning crowd reached close to 80,000, according to organisers. Across town in Quezon City, an afternoon protest along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, commonly referred to by its acronym EDSA—a major highway at the centre of protests that ultimately brought down the Marcos dictatorship in 1986—reportedly grew to 100,000 people, including those who started at Luneta Park. A smaller, younger crowd confronted police barricades along Mendiola Street and Recto Avenue, a road leading to the presidential palace, where police arrested more than 200\. Locals have referred to the confrontation as the “Mendiola riots”, harking back to the state violence of the 1987 Mendiola massacre, when protesters demanding land reform were gunned down by security forces under the new democratic government of Corazon Aquino. Protests began days before 21 September outside government offices and construction firms. University walkouts nationwide involving thousands of students, staff and service workers also occurred. For weeks, public hearings in the Senate and Congress investigating flood control projects saturated the media. Environmental NGO Greenpeace, using estimates from the hearings, calculated that 1 trillion Philippine pesos (around 26 billion Australian dollars) may have been lost to corruption since 2023\. More than half may have come in 2025 alone, through ghost projects, half-done construction and substandard work, resulting in dike breakdowns that leave residents stranded in floodwaters during major storms. Politicians and the companies to which they awarded flood control contracts are bound together as shareholders, campaign donors and/or family businesses. One illustration is the rise of the billionaire Discaya couple, dubbed the “King and Queen of flood control”, who own six construction companies—and 40 luxury cars worth around 465 million pesos (A$12 million). The crisis has been dubbed “[kleptospirosis](https://situationreport.net/commentary/kleptospirosis-when-corruption-becomes-a-public-health-crisis?ref=redflag.org.au)”. Combining “kleptomania” (the irresistible urge to steal) and “leptospirosis” (a bacterial disease), the term refers to a public health emergency caused by rampant corruption. The monsoon season and frequent exposure to flooding across the country this year led to thousands of cases and numerous deaths from the disease. The National Kidney and Transplant Institute’s gym even had to be converted into an extension ward to accommodate the extra patients. Leptospirosis thrives in conditions of poverty: inadequate housing, unsafe water and limited health care. It is a recurring danger in a city with failing sewerage systems that frequently expose residents to knee-deep floodwaters. Both the president and vice president voiced support for the protests, but they are hypocrites. With relatives in Congress and local government, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr (son of former dictator Ferdinand) and VP Sara Duterte (daughter of the last president, Rodrigo) hail from “fat dynasties”—families whose members hold several public offices simultaneously. Both received millions in contractor donations for their 2022 election campaign, despite provisions banning such graft. Their donors were rewarded handsomely. One Marcos sponsor, Quirante Construction, gained contracts worth a billion pesos (A$26 million) just a year after the election. The sole corporate donor of Sara Duterte’s campaign is linked to Genesis88, the top flood control contractor in Davao del Sur, a municipality on the southern island of Mindanao, with projects worth 2.9 billion pesos (A$75 million). It’s not just Marcos and Duterte. According to a study published by Manila University’s Ateneo School of Government, 80 percent of congressional representatives and more than 50 percent of local government officials hail from political dynasties. The overarching demand of the 21 September protests was to jail the corrupt. However, those in the highest levels of government will not be held accountable without significant escalation. High-profile corruption scandals in the Philippines follow a predictable script: hearings are sensationalised, but the biggest thieves eventually get away thanks to their powerful allies. For example, the broadcasts of President Joseph Estrada’s impeachment trials were one of the most watched programs on TV and led to mass protests along EDSA, triggering his ouster in January 2001\. The disgraced ex-president was convicted of plunder and sentenced to life in 2007, but was pardoned a month later by his successor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Accused politicians often book VIP escapes to private hospitals abroad due to sudden bouts of illness. Arroyo was charged with plunder, attempted to fly to Singapore and spent almost five years in hospital detention until being acquitted in 2016 by her Supreme Court appointees. Beforehand, then-President Duterte gave his blessing by offering a pardon. Congressman Zaldy Co, at the centre of today’s controversy, went “missing”—until the House confirmed he was in the United States for medical treatment. Mounting public pressure continues, however. In early September, the Senate president was removed; later, the speaker of the House resigned. The president announced that the government would not include new flood control projects in the 2026 national budget, redirecting funding to education and health. After 21 September, nearly 36 billion pesos (A$940 million) were reallocated to social programs. The Philippines is one of the fastest-growing economies in Southeast Asia. But the political dynasties have ensured that the growth primarily benefits private corporations at the expense of the vast majority. Regarding the share of wages in the national economy, the Philippines ranks as one of the lowest in the region, at 35 percent—even lower than the capitalist haven of Singapore (38.5 percent). Further entrenching inequality, big business recently defeated proposals to raise the minimum wage by 200 pesos a day (roughly A$5). It is no wonder that the three richest Filipinos increased their wealth by 563 percent over the last decade, reaching 1.8 trillion pesos (A$47 billion). As revealed by the flood control scandals, profit-making and state politics are irrevocably linked, the political dynasties being organised precisely for that end. The setup made the Marcos and Duterte dynasties, alongside eighteen others, even fatter—securing “obese” status by obtaining five or more seats in the May midterm elections. Profits and political power are the lifeblood of political dynasties. Mass disruption of cities, campuses and workplaces—like in the [“Block everything” movement](can%20tip%20the%20balance%20by%20demanding%20to%20alleviate%20the%20impacts%20of%20rampant%20theft%20and%20for%20the%20freedom%20to%20organise%20for%20such%20demands.%20Taxing%20the%20rich%20can%20address%20intense%20inequality%20and%20rising%20cost%20of%20living%20while%20universal%20social%20protection%20and%20improvements%20in%20public%20services%20and%20wages%20are%20indispensable%20measures%20for%20environmental%20hazards%20to%20come.) in France and Italy—is how profits and political legitimacy can be undermined. But the extensive influence and organisation of the political dynasties and their local machines remain key to their lasting electoral victories. An enduring challenge to dynastic rule in the Philippines requires an equally powerful anti-capitalist political organisation, wielding its power in elections, on campuses, in workplaces and on the streets. The continuing outburst of mass action since September needs to be harnessed to the end of building the organisation and confidence of working people as they fight to ensure that public wealth goes to public good: securing concrete improvements in public services, infrastructure, wages and universal social protections. These are not only indispensable measures to protect against the environmental hazards to come; they would strike at class inequality, the foundation of the political dynasties. ### Socialist professor targeted in US censorship campaign URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/socialist-professor-targeted-in-us-censorship-campaign/ Last updated: 2025-10-13T05:13:46.000Z A wave of censorship and political intimidation is sweeping the United States. Led by key figures in the Trump administration, including the president, the country’s vast far-right movement is pressuring employers to sack or silence left-wing workers and to purge outspoken political progressives from state and state-funded institutions. One of the latest casualties in this war on the left is a history professor in Texas, Tom Alter, who was fired last month for speaking, in his own time, at a socialist conference. A judge has since [ordered the university to reinstate Alter](https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/27/judge-rules-for-tom-alter-as-battle-against-university-continues?ref=redflag.org.au), but management has indicated that it will continue investigating him. The following is the original statement and call for solidarity released by his organisation, [Socialist Horizon](https://socialisthorizon.org/?ref=redflag.org.au). \-------------------- **Defend free speech! No to fascists! Reinstate Professor Tom Alter Now!** Beloved tenured history professor and Socialist Horizon member Tom Alter was summarily fired on 10 September by Texas State University President Kelly Damphousse for expressing his views in a virtual conference unrelated to the university. This action cannot stand. Socialist Horizon calls on people everywhere to join us and demand that Professor Alter be reinstated to his tenured position. President Damphousse fired Dr Tom Alter based solely on a video published online by an extreme right-wing provocateur who infiltrated and secretly video-recorded segments of a virtual socialist conference with the intention of publishing information to slander and attack conference participants. In videos posted on their website, this person declares that they are a proud fascist who tries to monetise exposure of the left as an “anti-communist cult leader”. This grifter publicly exhorts followers to embrace fascist ideology and take action, is an antisemite that states that Jewish people “chose to die in the Holocaust”, is a self-declared racist and xenophobe, a homophobe and a transphobe that spews hate speech throughout their platform that is solely designed to inflame and incite. After the fascist’s “exposure video” reached President Damphousse, he summarily fired Dr Alter, a tenured professor, without questioning or investigating the content, without considering its authenticity or validity, without any form of due process, and violating existing state law and campus policy, which requires a formal due process procedure. What did Alter talk about that triggered fascists, and that Damphousse considers so unacceptable? The statement issued by Damphousse to terminate Dr Alter unambiguously affirms that he fired Alter for what he said at that conference, stating no other reason, and accusing Alter of “inciting violence”. But his speech, a transcript of which can be viewed [here](https://universitystar.com/32736/news/texas-state-terminates-history-professor-over-comments-made-at-conference/?ref=redflag.org.au), in no way calls for violence. Alter spoke against this cruel and unjust system and argued in favour of replacing it with socialism, and he advocated organising politically to achieve this. Alter’s political views [reflect](https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx?ref=redflag.org.au) those of nearly half of the total US population. Almost half now oppose capitalism and 40 percet favour socialism over capitalism. Alter’s views are far from subversive; they reflect the mainstream. It is a just cause that more and more people are joining, one people believe to be worth fighting for, and represents a change in thinking that is scaring the bigots, fascists and capitalists. It is in fact the fascist infiltrator who incites violence against oppressed people, and in this case, directly against Alter. It is Alter’s employer, Texas State University, that inflicted violence: stripping Alter of his job, refusing him any due process, casting him and his family into the uncertainty of unemployment and making them a target for the extreme right, while slamming the door shut on his free speech and academic freedom. Alter’s First Amendment right to speak, guaranteed by the Constitution, has been violated, as has his academic freedom—a protected right developed by his national faculty union, the American Association of University Professors. The fact that a marginal fascist streamer with a dangerous and extremist ideology can pressure the president of a prestigious public university system to illegally fire a tenured professor for his opinions is alarming. Most concerning, if we do not stop this, it will set a precedent that will embolden the most dangerous bigots, right-wing extremists and fascists who will continue to target people across the country. If they can influence and direct the president of the Texas State University system so easily—who else will they go after? We call on President Damphousse to stop this flagrant attack on constitutionally-protected free speech, to undo this wrongful termination, and to immediately reinstate Dr Tom Alter to his teaching position. The termination of Dr Alter is a serious attack that upends his livelihood, his professional and academic career, and sets a very dangerous precedent. President Damphousse’s actions appear to be in accordance with the far-right politics of Texas politicians Greg Abbot and Ted Cruz, as well as being in line with that of Donald Trump, who has used the office of the presidency to wage war on his political opponents. Damphousse’s actions align with Trump and the far-right forces trying to impose and enforce an authoritarian regime that wants to silence critics, crush political dissent, and attack anyone they perceive to be oppositional to their project. Even more threatening, Damphousse’s actions strengthen the power and influence of fascists and enable the most violent and reactionary groups to also attack and take action against anyone they deem to be part of the left. It is Trump who inflicts violence against millions through his authoritarian political attacks that target people of Colour, women, transpeople, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, impoverished and unhoused people, and the working class as a whole. It is the far right and the fascists who are building movements to harm innocent and vulnerable people. It is this capitalist system that Alter spoke against that inflicts mass violence, condemning billions to hunger, poverty and war, while a handful accumulates ever-growing obscene amounts of wealth that is stolen from the rest of us. Alter is being attacked because he is telling a truth that many people in the United States believe today: that capitalism is ruining their lives and that socialism is a better system. If Dr Tom Alter can be fired for expressing his personal beliefs and principles, then people everywhere are in danger. If he can be fired for expressing a point of view at a conference, away from his work and in his daily private life, then none of us are safe. His case must draw support from people of all sectors of society: workers, teachers, nurses, students—anyone and everyone who upholds the value of free speech. As the great anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said, “The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only when there is power to make that law respected”. We call on everyone to join us in building the broadest possible solidarity campaign to win this decisive battle. The attacks on Dr Tom Alter and socialist politics will not intimidate Socialist Horizon. We will defend our comrade and we will continue fighting for the very cause he is being attacked for: justice, freedom and equality. We will also continue building the organisation that it will take to win it. Dr Tom Alter is not only a beloved faculty member at Texas State but also an advisor to several student organisations. He is the author of a celebrated history of socialism in the American South, *Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas* (University of Illinois Press). He is also the father of two children. Socialist Horizon demands that Texas State University immediately restore Tom Alter’s position as associate professor of history. Socialist Horizon also calls on all organisations and individuals that defend the basic democratic right to free speech and reject fascism and authoritarianism, and all socialists in particular, to join this fight. This is an attack on all of us. We need to confront it with the broadest unitary campaign for Alter’s immediate reinstatement, in defence of free speech and against fascism. *Follow the [Socialist Horizon website](https://socialisthorizon.org/?ref=redflag.org.au) for campaign updates.* ### The far-right threat inside the Liberal Party URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-far-right-threat-inside-the-liberal-party/ Last updated: 2025-10-01T23:08:24.000Z The most glorious moment of this year’s federal election was watching Peter Dutton not only lose his long-desired bid to be prime minister, but lose his own seat in parliament as well. It was almost as satisfying as watching former Prime Minister John Howard suffer the same fate in 2007. Dutton’s spectacular failure represented a thorough rejection of his right-wing agenda. Buoyed by Donald Trump’s US presidential victory last year, Dutton pivoted to include some soft-MAGA styling in his own campaign—attacking Welcome to Country ceremonies, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, work from home arrangements and, at times, immigration. Voters turned away in droves. The following leadership battle between Sussan Ley—the more moderate candidate—and Angus Taylor—on the harder right—resolved in Ley’s favour. The commentariat renewed the argument that followed the Coalition’s loss of government in 2022: that for the Liberal Party to regain government, it needed to shave down its harder right-wing edges. It also needed to calm the factional warfare and unite behind a leader. This is not what is happening. The party’s hard right is asserting itself very publicly to try to shape the party in its own image. First was Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who shot to the head of Australia’s far-right scene as the leader of Peter Dutton’s No campaign during the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. During this year’s election, she told a campaign rally that she wanted to “make Australia great again”. A few days later, a Christmas snap of Price and her husband in MAGA hats hit the media. Following the fascistic March for Australia demonstrations last month, Price fronted the media to share the rally-goers’ concerns about “mass migration”. She singled out Indian migrants, arguing that Labor allowed higher levels into the country to boost its vote. A week of bitter party infighting ensued, culminating in Price losing her spot in the shadow cabinet after she refused to declare confidence in Ley. Western Australian Liberal MP Andrew Hastie was the next to break ranks. He threatened to quit the shadow frontbench if the party recommitted to net zero emissions by 2050\. Hastie followed this up with a truly MAGA-esque series of posts across social media. In one, he shared a black-and-white picture of a bygone White Australia: mum and dad with their two young sons tending the lawn of a classic 1960s suburban brick home. In the caption, he wrote that the Liberal Party “might even die as a political party” if it doesn’t curb migration, questioning “What is the point of politics, if you’re not willing to fight for something?”. In a video titled “Australian First”, Hastie poses with a vintage red 1969 Ford Falcon sedan, bemoaning the loss of domestic manufacturing and “Aussie cars, made by Aussie workers, for the Australian people”. And, of course, there are references to the “evil” and “violent” “radical left”, Christian iconography and the need to fight the decline of the West. This is all widely understood as Hastie’s first moves in a bid for Liberal Party leadership, a campaign that has been publicly endorsed by Price, Liberal MPs Garth Hamilton and Henry Pike, and backed by a number of other Liberals speaking anonymously to the media. Bear in mind that Ley won the leadership by only four votes: 29 to Taylor’s 25. There’s some confusion about this posture. If Trump-style politics was so thoroughly rejected by the Australian electorate less than six months ago, why double down on it? Sometimes there’s more to politics than immediate electoral victory. These are ideological people with a vision for society—and that vision fits with a rising hard-right norm across the Western world. Even if that hasn’t yet filtered into Australia, people like Hastie and Price can still feel like this is their movement’s historical moment and their duty to propagate it. Politics isn’t just about tailing mass opinion—it’s about intervening to shape it. It’s worth comparing this to how the Labor Party responded to its loss of government in 2013 and subsequent near-decade in opposition. Party leaders concluded that public infighting had been electorally detrimental, so they needed to present a united front. In practice, this meant the more left-wing figures inside Labor shutting up and backing whatever the leader said. Think of MPs like Ged Kearney, who publicly supported refugee rights for years but, since entering parliament, has shut her mouth on the question. Or think of how the party treated WA Senator Fatima Payman who crossed the floor to support a Greens motion recognising Palestinian statehood. The far right has failed to enter the mainstream here for several reasons. Primarily, Australia has not experienced the same level of economic and political crisis and chaos as the northern hemisphere. The centre has held—albeit with declining support each election. But there is a base for harder right politics: in the most recent election, far-right outfits polled a combined 13.6 percent—almost 2 million votes. Recent polling indicates that support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has increased from 6 to 11 percent since the May election and is now at 16 percent in NSW. But the far right has failed to coalesce around a single party or leader, as with the AfD in Germany, National Rally in France or Trump in the US. This hampers its ability to build a movement. It’s impossible to predict how a more cohered far-right movement could emerge in Australia. But it’s possible that, rather than happening outside the Liberal Party, it could emerge within it, or as a split from it. As the Teal Independents continue to soak up the more moderate Liberal base, this becomes more likely. And people like Hastie are in many ways the more likely candidates. It’s rarely the street thugs who rise to the top. Hastie, with his SAS soldier background and elite Sydney private school education, is far more typical. Trump, after all, is a billionaire born into wealth. Again, this is not to predict anything. But it should be read as a warning. The far-right threat exists in Australia, not just on the streets but inside the traditional major party of Australian capitalism. ### Charlie Kirk’s legacy: a bosses’ war on free speech URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/charlie-kirks-legacy-a-bosses-war-on-free-speech/ Last updated: 2025-10-01T23:06:28.000Z Dissent and lose your job. That’s the principle of the campaign to turn Charlie Kirk into a MAGA martyr. The second Trump administration has always placed a heavy emphasis on the repression of dissent. Almost immediately after his inauguration, he made good on his promise to attack the Palestine solidarity movement, using everything from masked ICE goons to suspension of federal university funding grants. He has campaigned to erase anti-racist ideas from public life under the guise of attacking the hated “DEI”. Even before Kirk’s death, Trump’s second term was the high watermark of the US right’s long war on “cultural Marxism”, which dates back at least to the war on terror, when Kirk’s predecessors like Ann Coulter tried to officially rehabilitate McCarthyism. Kirk’s death opens a new phase, marked by one Louisiana Republican’s vow to “cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals”. (The phrase “cancel with extreme prejudice” originated during the Vietnam War in US military and spy organisations as a euphemism for murder.) Anyone who uttered a critical remark about Kirk would now be targeted by a campaign to sack them from their job, endorsed from the top by Vice President J.D. Vance: “Call them out. And hell, call their employer”. This was not just about people in public life—university professors like those Kirk had targeted with his “professor watch-list” or public figures like Jimmy Kimmel. Academics, journalists and entertainers are important scalps in creating a climate of repression: their downfalls can provide a model for bosses to follow, and a threat for workers. But the movement to “cancel” aimed at workers with no real public profile: teachers, airline employees and all kinds of white-collar and retail workers have been targeted and suspended or sacked. Dissent has been punished everywhere from the Nasdaq to Freddy’s Frozen Custard & Steakburgers in Quincy, Illinois, which sacked an employee for posting “another one bites the dust”. This is repression that goes beyond state power. Trump’s ICE agents rounded up Palestine solidarity protesters for deportation, and his National Guard has been sent on theatrical tours of major cities. But to repress dissent more thoroughly, the US right is turning to the fundamental form of oppression that defines capitalist society: bosses’ power over workers. That basic power relation of capitalism shapes the production and distribution of ideas. That’s most obvious in the case of massive, privately owned media conglomerates, like those that organised the disciplinary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and are currently lining up to purchase TikTok. But it’s about more than the media. Capitalism represses dissent by making it dangerous to speak your mind if you want to keep your job. Right-wing political activists know it, and they have always taken advantage of it to repress the left while claiming to be the champions of individual liberty. That’s why, immediately after Kirk’s death, the “Charlie Kirk Data Foundation” appeared to centralise the reporting and purging of anti-Kirk workers, and that’s why Vance pointed his MAGA followers to use the power of the capitalist class to control their opponents. The model is familiar. The USA was never a fascist dictatorship, but up to the 1960s, it was an extremely authoritarian society. Figureheads at the top—FBI directors, members of Congress or conservative activists—would send the signal for repression, set the talking points and issue public denunciations. Intellectuals, artists and journalists could serve as public examples, denounced and blacklisted from public life. But whether it was the Red Scare or segregation, the grunt work of authoritarianism in the USA was often carried out by private employers and property owners. For millions of anonymous workers, their livelihood depended on keeping their heads down, fitting in and staying out of trouble. What kind of authoritarianism is this? Former Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. Then, having lost the election, she just disappeared, unseen until she got a gig at a real estate agents’ conference on the Gold Coast. But the Democrats’ hysteria in the 2024 election, followed by their astonishing passivity, shouldn’t be a cause for complacency. The US state may not experience an overnight transformation into a one-party dictatorship after a Reichstag fire, but Trump’s presidency represents a genuine attempt to establish a less free society. This is more than a culture war. For socialists, movements like Black Lives Matter and the Palestine solidarity movement are still missing the key ingredients of working-class leadership and anti-capitalist politics that they need to challenge seriously the oppressions they aim to destroy. But for a conservative, they still look like a serious danger: a growing hostility to US foreign policy in elite institutions, mass hostility to the police in big cities. Trump and his allies are on a mission to wipe out basic ideas of social equality and anti-racism, to make them dangerous, to push them to the margins of society. The truly odious nature of Charlie Kirk helps in that cause. In the aftermath of his death, the slightest scepticism about his far-right ideas has become the litmus test for the right. In their new era of ascendancy, conservatives and bosses have gleefully adopted small-l liberal ideas. “Psychosocial safety” has become an excuse to attack trade union activists. “Anti-racism” is a major concern for right-wingers only when it comes to crushing Palestine solidarity. Now the Republicans have embraced “consequence culture”. Those liberal ideas mostly sidestepped the question of class. Now class must be absolutely central in the left’s response to clarify the repression that is unfolding. Trump’s war against “woke ideology” is an attack on the living standards and rights of workers. Those early days of Musk’s DOGE delegitimised the very idea that the state could ever regulate capitalists or redistribute wealth, and provided models for how to treat workers with cruelty, deliberately humiliating them before mass sackings. Now the sanctification of Kirk has provided pressure—or an excuse—to identify and purge any troublemaking employee. The response to Kirk’s death is a bosses’ war on free speech, and it’s part of a broader turn in the West towards the silencing of dissent. Bosses’ power to sack and control employees is becoming a central plank of new right-wing authoritarianism. Workers’ power will be central to resisting and overturning it. ### The new climate denialism: Labor’s Net Zero Plan URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-new-climate-denialism-labors-net-zero-plan/ Last updated: 2025-10-01T23:04:23.000Z The Albanese government has released its plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050, with a target of 62 to 70 percent reductions by 2035\. It is a hoax. There are two ways to obstruct climate action: denialism and deceit. The Liberals have given us plenty of experience with the former. Labor is trying its hand at the latter. Its “[Net Zero Plan](https://www.dcceew.gov.au/climate-change/emissions-reduction/net-zero?ref=redflag.org.au)” intends to neutralise the *political issue* of climate action (not the actual emissions) through a smokescreen of good vibes and creative accounting. When Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison was dragged kicking and screaming into presenting his net-zero plan in 2021, it was widely derided. Chris Bowen, now federal climate minister, at the time said it was a scam, not a plan. The same can be said for his, which differs very little in its essence. Like Morrison’s, it is imbued with techno-mysticism, praying that solutions like green hydrogen and carbon capture and storage become commercially viable, to prevent any real costs to capitalists. Like Morrison’s, it cooks the emissions books so long they’ve turned black—claiming that Australia has *already* reduced emissions 29 percent on 2005 levels (every year Labor and Liberal governments arbitrarily raise the amount of carbon they estimate the land is taking out of the air). Like Morrison’s, it lets companies continue to increase their emissions. All they have to do is pay for some carbon credits to “offset” them. Labor’s targets, despite what Albanese claims, are not “backed by the science”. In fact, the Climate Change Authority, which developed them, revised its numbers down after consultations with business. The Australian Academy of Science [supports a target of 74 percent by 2030](https://www.science.org.au/files/userfiles/support/submissions/2024/aas-submission-cca-2024-issues-paper.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) and net-zero by 2035 as the only path consistent with the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping well below 2 degrees warming. Yet even this would be insufficient, as either of these targets—as the Academy points out—covers only a fifth of Australia’s emissions: those produced within its borders, never mind all the coal and gas exported overseas! Yet to say that the target needs to be higher, or the plan more effective, misses the point. The point of the Net Zero Plan is to help us reconcile the irreconcilable—Labor claims to be reducing emissions while *expanding*fossil fuel exploitation. Since Labor formed government in 2022, it has approved 31 new coal, gas and oil projects. In an analysis released this month, “[The Albanese Government’s fossil fuel approvals](https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/albanese-governments-fossil-fuel-approvals/?ref=redflag.org.au)”, the Climate Council estimated that these projects’ total lifetime carbon emissions will be 6.5 billion tonnes, equivalent to fifteen years of Australia’s current emissions. The colossal North West Shelf “carbon bomb” is meant to run until 2070, twenty years after we ought to have entered Labor’s new utopia of “green jobs and growth”. In squaring this circle, the best thing Labor has got going for it is the Liberals themselves. Incapable of shedding its climate denialism, the Coalition has been the perfect foil, allowing Labor to present itself as a sensible climate pragmatist. It can pull off a feat the conservatives never could—cementing Australia’s climate-wrecking future under the mask of progressivism. The consequences are extreme, as the first [National Climate Risk Assessment](https://www.acs.gov.au/pages/national-climate-risk-assessment?ref=redflag.org.au) (NCRA) makes clear. After delaying it for almost a year, the federal government released this report just days before its Net Zero Plan, hoping to control the story. It’s no surprise why—the NCRA spares no detail about the destruction the climate crisis will wreak. There are plenty of the ever-reddening heat maps you might expect, but the report also considers the details on the ground, like how heat will warp railways and impede supply lines, and how harsher droughts will increase suicide rates. It’s as close as you get to a totalising view of the cataclysmic crisis we’re facing. Heatwaves are already the deadliest natural hazard in Australia, and will increase in intensity in the coming decades. At 3 degrees of warming, the NCRA predicts that heat-related mortality will more than triple in Melbourne and quintuple in Sydney and Darwin. Plant life will suffer greatly, swathes of our natural environment being destroyed and some of our most important carbon sinks being crippled. Between 40 and 70 percent of native plant species will be at risk. More than 1.5 million people in Australia will experience sea level rise and coastal flooding by 2050 (when the NCRA expects us to hit 2 degrees warming), doubling to 3 million by 2090 (at 3 degrees). Combined with the threat of bushfires and inland flooding, 1 million homes will be at “very high risk” by 2050, rendering them uninsurable. Indigenous Australians will be worse affected. The rate of sea rise in the Torres Strait is almost double the Australian average, and flooding will double by 2050\. Remote communities deprived of adequate telecommunications infrastructure, housing and health care will be isolated when disasters strike. At the same time, the poor city suburbs where Aboriginal people are overwhelmingly concentrated are already urban heat islands, barrios of concrete and asphalt (like Blacktown and Sydney’s outer west) where heatwaves will kill the greatest numbers of people. Labor is paving the way for this future. Its plans and targets are not half-measures but cover for expanding fossil fuels. We can’t allow them to obscure that fact. ### Fair Work Commission plans giant pay cut for community sector workers URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/fair-work-commission-plans-giant-pay-cut-for-community-sector-workers/ Last updated: 2025-10-01T05:06:58.000Z More than 100,000 workers in the community sector—three quarters of them women—face the prospect of their award pay rates being cut by up to 33 percent. The cuts are part of an interim decision made by the Fair Work Commission (FWC) in April this year and are proposed to be implemented following hearings in late October. The [Australian Services Union](https://www.instagram.com/p/DO5OdNOkw03/?hl=en&ref=redflag.org.au) has called a [national day of action](https://www.skilledrespectedequal.com.au/national-day-of-action?ref=redflag.org.au)for 23 October to oppose these attacks. It’s crucial for workers in the social and community services sector, and well beyond, to make this a major mobilisation in support of equal pay. There’s a lot of money at stake. A [submission](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-sub-prop-table-asu-150925.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) from the ASU to the FWC in mid-September includes a series of examples of workers currently in the sector, whose position would have the award rate of pay cut significantly: - A disability support worker with five years of experience and no formal qualifications currently has an award pay rate of $1,355 per week. The interim decision by the FWC cuts this rate by $107 to $1,248 per week—a reduction of 7.8 percent. - A residential youth support worker employed by an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander agency is currently paid $1,575 per week, if they have four years of experience and a Certificate IV qualification. This is cut by $155 per week—nearly 10 percent—by the FWC interim decision. - A caseworker in a community mental health, alcohol and other drug service with five years of experience and a Certificate IV qualification is currently on an award rate of $1,783 per week. This rate is cut by $364—20 percent—to $1,419 per week by the interim decision. - A team leader of a Targeted Care Packages program (designed to help prevent young people subject to a child protection order becoming institutionalised) at an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander service is currently paid $2,211 per week if they have eight years of experience and a social work diploma. Under the new structure, this role would suffer a $739 weekly pay cut—a massive 33 percent. The extent of the proposed pay cuts, as well as their size, is staggering. An [analysis](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-sub-asu-280525.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) of 1,816 workers in the community sector, conducted for the ASU by University of NSW Associate Professor Natasha Cortis, has found that 73 percent of all positions would lose pay if the rates in the FWC interim decision were implemented across the sector tomorrow. “Extrapolated to the industry, this amounts to direct wage reductions for over 138,000 positions”, according to Cortis. Three quarters of positions held by women would face a pay cut, compared with 62 percent of those held by men. Forty six percent of all surveyed positions stand to lose more than $200 per week, while one in nine (11 percent) would lose more than $500 per week. The FWC interim decision states that no existing employee should have their wages reduced in the transition to a new pay scale. However, “grandfathering” or “savings” provisions such as this only apply to existing employees in their current roles, not to staff entering the industry or changing jobs. Anyone changing jobs would face being classified at new, significantly lower, pay rates under the new structure. And the FWC proposal is even worse than this. FWC staff have produced a [discussion paper](https://web-prd.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-discussion-paper-fwc-060525.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) showing how existing employees would be applied to a new pay structure under the FWC interim decision. A detailed [examination](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-sub-asu-280525.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) of this paper by Natasha Cortis for the ASU shows that the FWC’s favoured transitional arrangement would still result in 28 percent of all current staff in the sector losing pay: 14 percent would lose more than $100 per week. And this proportion would rise in the months and years ahead, because workers entering the industry or changing roles would not get even get this level of protection from the effect of the new pay scale. Some social and community sector workers have their pay rates and classifications written in to enterprise agreements, which will preserve their pay even if the award rate is cut. However, these pay rates will come under pressure if the FWC confirms its interim decision. Enterprise agreements are required to pass a “Better Off Overall Test”, where the agreement is measured against the relevant award. So if the pay rate in the award falls, the benchmark for any new agreement is also lowered. And, of course, in a government funded sector, where contracts are often awarded via competitive tendering, organisations with lower pay rates will tend to pick up more work. Perversely, this interim decision to impose dramatic pay cuts on a female-dominated industry is the product of a FWC process which is supposed to address gender-based undervaluation of women’s work. Yes, you read that right. Unless the FWC decides to reverse course following hearings in late October, tens of thousands of women will be threatened with significant cuts to their pay—in the name of gender equity. The FWC is involved in a years-long process to address the sexist undervaluation of women’s work in a series of industrial awards, which set minimum wages and conditions in every industry. While the equal pay victories of the late 1960s and 1970s addressed different pay rates *within* particular awards, in the 2020s many awards still have lower pay rates *as a whole* because the industry covered by the award mainly employs women. The sexist reasoning which led to these outcomes was expressed in one typical ruling from the Conciliation and Arbitration Court in 1950, which asserted that “the productivity, efficiency and the needs and the responsibilities etc. of females were substantially less than that of males in this community”. According to the court, this meant the basic wage for female-dominated industries should be set at 75 percent of the rate for male-dominated industries. These lower pay rates, still embedded in many awards, have been largely unchallenged until very recent years. From 2009, a [campaign of mass protests](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/still-fighting-for-equal-pay/?ref=redflag.org.au)by social and community services (SACS) workers organised by the ASU challenged the entrenched low pay of the mainly women workforce in this sector. Thousands marched at regular days of action. This was the biggest union push for equal pay since the 1970s, when a long campaign by [left-wing unions](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/australian-unions-and-the-fight-for-equal-pay-for-women/?ref=redflag.org.au) culminated in radical actions such as [Zelda D’Aprano](https://redflag.org.au/article/node-6222) chaining herself to the Arbitration Commission doors, and a [series of strikes](https://redflag.org.au/node/7456) among the majority-women workforce in the insurance industry. After many twists and turns, in 2012 Fair Work granted an Equal Remuneration Order. Though the phase-in was outrageously slow (spread over nine years), the result was a pay rise of between 23 and 45 percent for each classification on the SACS pay schedule in the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services (SCHADS) award. In late 2020, the Health Services Union applied to the FWC to spread the sort of pay rises won by SACS workers through the Equal Remuneration Order to the grossly underpaid, mainly women workforce in aged care. The FWC’s final [decision](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/decisionssigned/pdf/2024fwcfb150.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) on the Aged Care Award in 2024 addressed some of these gross underpayments, lifting many aged care workers involved in “direct care” by up to 25 percent in several stages. Many other unions have now applied to FWC to spread these pay rises to other awards covering majority-women workforces. The recent FWC interim decision is part of this process. So what could go wrong? The FWC is known for good reason as a “bosses’ court”. The FWC “expert panel” overseeing the gender-based undervaluation review consists of three Deputy Presidents of the commission, each [paid](https://www.remtribunal.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-11/FTO%202024%20-%20Compilation%20No.%203.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) a total of $521,000 per year; one Vice President on $643,000; and FWC President Adam Hatcher who was [paid](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/reporting/fwc-annual-report-2023-24.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) $634,000 in 2023-24\. The whole [history](https://redflag.org.au/node/5702) of arbitration and “Fair” Work is one of limiting workers’ wages and conditions to a level that doesn’t encroach on business profitability. The FWC’s decision to [slash weekend penalty rates](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/23/sunday-penalty-rates-to-be-cut-by-25-to-50-fair-work-commission-rules?ref=redflag.org.au)for retail and hospitality workers in 2017 is one notable example. Workers are unlikely to win much of value at the commission unless we have an industrial and political campaign that can put pressure on bosses and governments. So it’s a problem that, though unions have put significant resources into their FWC cases on gender undervaluation, up until now there has been almost no attempt to mobilise the workers who will actually be affected by the decisions coming out of this process. This means the highly-paid “experts” who make up the FWC “expert panel” on gender undervaluation have had a relatively free hand to shape the pay of millions of workers, without any pressure from those workers themselves. This goes some way to explain the quite mixed results of the current review of awards to address gender-based undervaluation. Many aged care workers, especially those involved in “direct” care, received a 15 percent pay increase in 2023 and a series of smaller increases totalling around 10 percent by August 2026\. However other essential staff in aged care didn’t fare so well. Eighty one percent of food services assistants in aged care are women. So are 88 percent of cleaning staff and 88 percent of laundry staff. Yet aged care workers in these three occupational groups received pay rises totalling just 6.96 percent from the FWC gender undervaluation review in the aged care sector. A [pay guide](https://unitedworkers.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Aged-Care-Workers-Wages-Pay-Guide-2025-1.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) for 2025 produced by the United Workers Union demonstrates this point. Many “direct care” workers in aged care got a welcome pay bump of 30 percent between 2022 and 2025, bringing their hourly rate up from $24.76 to $32.14 at the start of this year. However, “support workers” in aged care only got a 17 percent increase, to $27.66 per hour. This is barely above inflation, which was 14.5 percent over the calendar years 2022-24\. And even those who get the maximum pay rise under the Aged Care Award will be left more than $5 per hour (around $200 per week) behind the current Australian [median wage](https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/employee-earnings/aug-2024?ref=redflag.org.au) of $40 per hour. Similarly, a [pay guide](https://www.anmf.org.au/media/f1fhscdz/aged-care-work-value-outcome-for-nurses-working-in-aged-care.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) produced by the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation early this year notes that the FWC ordered a 15 percent pay rise for all nurses in aged care as of July of 2023\. However, when it came to the final, “stage three” decision, the commission rejected the ANMF case for a further 15 percent increase for all grades. Instead, the FWC decided on a revised pay scale which dramatically reduced the number of increments or pay grades for nurses in aged care, which had the effect of cutting one of the top award rates by $459 per week. This was despite the ANMF pointing out in a [submission](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/work-value-aged-care/am202411-am202163-sub-anmf-081124.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) that “\[n\]o evidence has ever been led by any party with a view to demonstrating that those grades should be eliminated”. Most grades received a pay increase from the FWC decision—ranging from a few dollars for some nurses at the top of level three, to 4 or 5 percent for many other grades, to 21 percent for the small minority of nurses at level five, grade one. However, the highest rate of pay for level four nurses in aged care (the level for an assistant director of nursing in a facility) was reduced from $2,239 to $2,141 per week, and the highest rate for a level five (director of nursing) was cut from $2,871 to $2,412\. Existing staff on those grades were to have their pay preserved. The number of affected staff in this case would be very small. But the commissioners who make up the “expert panel” (on a pay rate, let’s remember, of $10,000 or more per week) demonstrated with this decision that they were quite prepared to cut some award pay rates, based on their own say-so and zero actual evidence, in a way that no one—even employers or governments—had actually asked for. Which brings us to the current extraordinary assault on wages in the SACS sector. As the name implies, the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services (SCHADS) award covers a mish mash of occupations and industries. It has five different pay schedules covering workers in the SACS sector: family day care; crisis assistance and supported housing; aged care in the home; and disability care in the home. The schedule setting the pay for in-home aged care assistance has already been increased in line with the aged care decision. It’s not rocket science that the pay schedule for disability work in people’s homes is also due for a similar pay increase. The ASU submission to the commission regarding SACS workers was quite minimal. The pay rises from the Equal Remuneration Order won in 2012 should be formally incorporated into the award rates for SACS staff, rather than sitting in a separate schedule. And in the medium term, the union advocated for a joint effort with employers and government to revise the classification schedule for SACS workers, to remove ambiguities that fuel an epidemic of under-classification in the sector (an extraordinary 66 percent of staff in the sector are under-classified, according to the [*Skilled, Respected, Equal*](https://www.skilledrespectedequal.com.au/report?ref=redflag.org.au)study conducted for the ASU). This approach was rejected by the $2.8 million worth of “experts” assembled on the FWC “expert panel”. Instead, the commission decided to abolish the separate pay scale for SACS workers, and put everyone on a slightly revised version of the pay schedule in-home aged care workers. This schedule largely relies on qualifications to set award wage rates, rather than experience, job responsibilities, or degree of supervision. Along with the elimination of multiple pay grades and the abolition of the Equal Remuneration Order, the result is an interim decision which, if implemented, will see swathes of workers in the SACS sector facing significant cuts to their wages—many immediately, and many more in the months and years to come as people change jobs. Within a week of the FWC interim decision in April, the ASU [wrote](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/wage-reviews/2024-25/c2025-1-submission-in-reply-asu-300425.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) to the FWC to point out that the decision would result in punitive wage cuts. The commission could have responded by retreating from their proposals—but they didn’t. Instead, FWC staff issued a further [discussion paper](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-discussion-paper-fwc-060525.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) in May, which emphasised that existing staff should be somewhat protected by the transitional arrangements. However, the actual figures in this document confirm that even many existing staff will face a pay cut, depending on what transitional arrangements are adopted. Nothing the FWC has said since April changes the fact that the interim decision represents a serious attack on the underlying award pay rates for many roles in the sector. Ahead of the FWC hearings scheduled for late October, multiple submissions from the ASU, various levels of government and employers in the sector have rejected the FWC proposal. The Australian Industry Group (AIG), which lobbies for big business, seems to be the only group not rejecting the changes outright—though even the AIG notes that the FWC interim decision doesn’t “capture the nuance and sophistication of work conducted in the social services sector” and fails to recognise “the diverse and complex nature of work undertaken” by workers in the sector. Nevertheless, the AIG proposes making the interim decision even worse, for instance by scrapping entirely the idea that existing employees shouldn’t have their wage cut. Whatever the content of the formal submissions, there are no grounds for complacency—given that the FWC “experts” have proposed massive historic pay cuts off their own bat, have form in cutting some award rates in previous decisions, and have shown little inclination to listen to the ASU. So the most crucial thing right now is to repeat the kind of actions that led to winning the Equal Remuneration Order in the first place: mobilisations of as many workers as possible in support of equal pay and in opposition to the pay cuts in the FWC interim decision. Clearly, an all-out effort is needed to mobilise for the ASU’s national day of action on 23 October ahead of FWC hearings the following week. Some union materials are available on the union’s “Skilled, Respected, Equal” [website](https://www.skilledrespectedequal.com.au/downloadcampaignmaterials?ref=redflag.org.au). The ASU is writing to employers in the sector requesting assistance in enabling workers to attend the rallies, repeating the union’s approach during the SACS equal pay campaign of 2009-2012. There are other steps that could be borrowed from this campaign. Committees of delegates played an important role, as did mass meetings of union members. Adam Bottomley and Cecilia Judge, two Socialist Alternative members who were prominent rank and file leaders in the campaign, noted the role of the mass meetings in a 2012 [article](https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/still-fighting-for-equal-pay/?ref=redflag.org.au) in *Marxist Left Review*. The mass meetings were held at least twice per year: “These were often basic workshops on how to recruit to the union or explain the campaign to other people. Later in the campaign they became strategising forums where important questions about the tactics of the campaign, its relationship to the ALP, and industrial action and EBAs were debated out by an increasingly informed and opinionated layer of active members.” These debates were important. Equal pay was opposed by employer bodies such as the Australian Industry Group, and the Murdoch press. In response to this pressure, in November 2010 the Gillard Labor government declared it wouldn’t support lifting SACS pay rates, preferring to balance the federal budget instead. A heated argument ensued, with some Labor-aligned figures in the union reluctant to embarrass Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Nevertheless, the protests went ahead, with Adam and Cecilia noting that “On the day of the protests Labor released a letter “clarifying” their support for equal pay and stating that their ability to balance the budget should not be a factor in the case”. Unfortunately, most of this infrastructure of delegates committees and regular, sector-wide mass meetings withered without the impetus of a mass campaign. Nevertheless, there were important [battles](https://redflag.org.au/article/equal-pay-decision-means-nothing-without-fight) in the aftermath of the Equal Remuneration Order as employers moved to “restructure” the award and re-classify many jobs down to a lower rate. Workers at the Tenants Union of Victoria and Mind Australia went on strike to stop management from pocketing much of the benefit of the order in this way. It’s important to remember that it’s not just gendered assumptions from decades ago that entrench low pay in SACS and many other sectors. Cut price competitive tendering of the crucial services that the community sector provides, and the constant squeeze on government spending, drive a race to the bottom which has often seen wages and services cut to the bone. Governments “partner” with the sector to bandage over the gaping wounds inflicted by decades of neoliberal assault—but then [fail to fund](https://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/At-the-Precipice%5FACSS-2023.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) services at anything like the rate that is needed. One current example is in Victoria, where the state Labor government’s current attacks on government services are accompanied by a continuing squeeze on the community sector as well. SACS workers turning out in their thousands on 23 October should be a first step in an ongoing fight to address the crisis in the community sector. Defeating the Fair Work Commission’s attack on pay in the SACS sector is the crucial priority—and should also be a springboard for further action. ### Free speech under attack in the US URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/free-speech-under-attack-in-the-us/ Last updated: 2025-09-27T01:17:06.000Z CHICAGO—Donald Trump and the MAGA right wasted little time in capitalising on the gruesome 10 September murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Before authorities in Utah, where Kirk was killed, had even located a suspect, Trump and the MAGAverse were blaming Kirk’s death on an amorphous “left”. Within days, leading right-wingers—not just MAGA “influencers” but Trump officials up to the vice president—were calling for repression against the left. Vice President Vance led the charge, encouraging right-wingers to monitor social media and to report to employers anyone who made light of Kirk’s killing. Because so few people really made light of Kirk’s murder, the dragnet changed to sweep in people who were insufficiently deferential to MAGA’s desire to turn Kirk into a martyr. The *Washington Post*fired award-winning journalist Karen Attiah when she simply criticised Kirk’s legacy *by quoting him in his own words.* The government-orchestrated attack on free speech reached a crescendo when Trumpite Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr suggested that the broadcast network ABC, a subsidiary of the Disney Co., could save itself from regulatory problems by removing late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air. ABC dutifully complied, announcing the “indefinite” suspension of Kimmel’s program on 18 September. Kimmel’s offence, according to Carr and the MAGA right, was to imply that Kirk’s killer was “one of theirs”. Subsequent information—revealed after Kimmel’s monologue—cast doubt on that assertion. But no matter. Carr had achieved his purpose. It put media corporations on notice that the government would be policing their speech—in direct violation [of the letter of the law that created the FCC in 1934](https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/what-the-constitution-says-about-free-speech-on-the-airwaves?ref=redflag.org.au). The ever oafish Trump then said he’d like other networks to fire their late-night comedians, for whom the president provides an endless supply of comedic material. What MAGA didn’t anticipate was the pushback the Kimmel cancellation received. Most Democrats and even a few Republicans criticised Carr’s move. Boycotts and cancellations of Disney streaming service subscriptions increased. The unions representing writers, actors and musicians who worked on Kimmel’s show mounted protests. More than 400 well-known actors and performers issued a statement condemning ABC, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani pulled out of an ABC-sponsored event in protest. Within a few days, Disney reversed itself and announced that Kimmel’s show would return to the air. Now, two networks of local ABC affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, have also backed down. But we shouldn’t think that the battle for free speech is won. First, the government pressuring private entities to censor speech it doesn’t like has been the Trump administration’s *modus operandi*since it returned to office in January. It has cut billions in research grants to universities, leading many to discipline students or faculty who had protested Israel’s war in Gaza, or to scrap university programs that met with administration disapproval. It announced it would deny security clearances to law firms considering representing clients suing the administration. Trump filed frivolous lawsuits against CBS’s and ABC’s news operations—which he certainly would have lost if they had gone to trial—leading their parent companies to make multimillion-dollar settlements. Second, the success of a wealthy, well-known and nonpolitical entertainer like Kimmel can obscure the larger attack on free speech and the left that MAGA will continue to prosecute. [More than 100 people have been fired or disciplined](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/18/charlie-kirk-comments-prompt-firings-across-us/86216872007/?ref=redflag.org.au) for comments made after the Kirk killing. That includes [Dr Tom Alter](https://cwa-tseu.org/free-speech/?ref=redflag.org.au), a tenured professor at Texas State University, fired after a troll with fascist and antisemitic sympathies reported to Alter’s employer that the professor [had spoken at a socialist conference](https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/09/13/defend-free-speech-no-to-fascists-reinstate-professor-dr-tom-alter-now/?ref=redflag.org.au). Trump issued an executive order declaring “antifa” (short for “antifascist”) a domestic terrorist organisation. Although no provision in US law permits Trump to do this, his action is a signal to federal law enforcement. Federal agencies like the FBI could conduct investigations, infiltration of organisations and arrests of people on the left—which, in Trump world, means just about anyone who opposes the administration’s policies. Given that “antifa” is not an organisation nor even a coherent ideology, the vagueness of the target is a weapon in the hands of law enforcement. Another way that the administration will attack liberal and activist organisations is by weaponising the tax code. US tax law provides educational, charitable, religious and social organisations an exemption from paying federal taxes if they do not engage in partisan politics or electioneering. The administration has also supported legislation that would allow the Treasury[secretary to designate any organisation as “terror-supporting”](https://www.nonprofitvote.org/whats-the-nonprofit-killer-bill/?ref=redflag.org.au) without any proof or due process. The feds can revoke tax-exempt status and compel organisations to pay millions in fines. Merely the threat of those penalties could lead organisations such as immigrant rights groups, which are mounting opposition to Trump’s deportation regime, to curtail their activities. One final, but by no means less important, aftershock of the Trump administration’s actions and rhetoric since Kirk’s murder is the licence it gives to right-wing elements to wreak violence on their opponents. Trump’s and Vance’s claims that “the left” is a uniquely violent force in US politics is the [exact opposite of the truth](https://www.cato.org/blog/politically-motivated-violence-rare-united-states?ref=redflag.org.au), according to the libertarian Cato Institute—hardly a friend to the left. The “permission structure” that Trump, Vance and others in the administration are creating will make right-wing violence like the 2017 murder of antifascist protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh or Kyle Rittenhouse’s 2020 vigilante murders of Black Lives Matter activists more likely, not less. Developments since Kirk’s death should clarify some points amid the noise and social media vitriol. They have exposed the lie that conservatives and the far right are somehow champions of “free speech” against a censorious left “cancel culture”. When billionaires like X’s Elon Musk and Fox’s Rupert Murdoch own massive communications platforms from which they spread conservative and far-right ideology into the body politic, it’s hard to take the claim seriously. With few exceptions, the right’s pretensions to “free speech” were always phoney and mostly raised when others used their free speech to criticise the right’s bigotry. But observing that the right’s free speech rhetoric is disingenuous shouldn’t let mainstream liberals off the hook. The attacks on university activists protesting the war in Gaza didn’t begin with Trump. They started under the Biden administration, with the support of the White House and most Democrats. And the liberal MSNBC network fired commentator Matthew Dowd for comments he made on live TV only a few minutes after Kirk’s killing. In contrast, championing free speech has always been central to the left. From the abolitionist press in the pre-Civil War era to the Industrial Workers of the World’s free speech fights in the early 1900s to opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964, the best part of the left and workers’ movement has always defended free speech. Free speech and freedom of organisation and assembly are crucial for defending and extending other rights. The first nine months of the Trump administration have demonstrated that elite institutions like universities and the corporate media are willing to “bend the knee” to an increasingly authoritarian government if they think their profits, endowments or investments will be served. On the other hand, ordinary people, organised to push back on the Trump administration’s predations, have shown a far greater willingness to defend our rights. The actions of thousands of ordinary people across the country have impeded the administration’s efforts to kidnap our immigrant neighbours off the street. And ordinary people sitting on grand juries in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, have refused federal prosecutors’ attempts to criminally indict people arrested for protesting immigration authorities or the administration’s military deployments. The real defenders of democracy in the US are much more likely to be found at street demonstrations or at “know your rights” trainings than in the halls of Congress, the courts or corporate boardrooms. ### Egypt’s workers stir again URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/egypts-workers-stir-again/ Last updated: 2025-09-27T01:10:50.000Z In the second week of September, a two-day strike and plant-gate sit-in at the Nile Linen Group in Alexandria forced management and officials from the Labour Ministry to concede to a [package of demands](https://manassa.news/en/news/27111?ref=redflag.org.au) after an infant died in her mother’s arms inside the factory. Workers said the mother—just ten days back from maternity leave—was blocked from leaving for emergency care because of punitive leave rules and a cost-of-living allowance clawback that effectively trapped her at work. Security forces ringed the free-zone compound, two workers were briefly detained, and management tried a “cool-off” lockout by sending everyone home. It backfired. Workers returned en masse to continue the strike, elected negotiators, and won commitments on an investigation, compensation and changes to pay and leave practices. By 15 September, production resumed following management’s written pledge to address demands. The same week, [a wave](https://revsoc.me/-50409?ref=redflag.org.au) of labour unrest across upper Egypt’s sugar industry—Edfu, Kom Ombo, Armant and Dishna—subsided after weeks of stoppages over pay, arrears, hazard allowances, overtime and the non-application of state-announced minimum wage measures. Envoys from the regime-run General Federation of Trade Unions and local officials descended on plants, [promising](https://www.madamasr.com/2025/09/14/news/u/%D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%B3%D9%83%D8%B1-%D8%A5%D8%AF%D9%81%D9%88-%D9%88%D9%83%D9%88%D9%85-%D8%A5%D9%85%D8%A8%D9%88-%D9%8A%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%82%D9%88%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%B6%D8%B1/?ref=redflag.org.au) October raises and a review “at the highest levels”. Some groups ended strikes under pressure, including threats of dismissal and state security referrals; others suspended action with explicit warnings they’ll down tools again in January at the start of the production season if promises aren’t honoured. Read together, these two episodes show how shopfloor bargaining in 2025 is actually happening in Egypt: a combustible mix of desperation-driven action, security containment and last-minute fixes that arrive only *after* escalation. Even under today’s repression, strikes still force the state–capital nexus to bargain—grudgingly, temporarily, and case-by-case. **A slow, stubborn uptick** Granular national strike statistics are deliberately hard to come by, but we have credible signals from 2024-25 that collective action is ticking up despite the climate of fear. The year 2024 saw a [broad rise](https://revsoc.me/workers-farmers/49598/?ref=redflag.org.au) in labour complaints and protest events, dominated by wage and minimum-wage issues amid currency collapse and runaway prices. Employers in both public and private sectors used exemptions and procedural loopholes to dodge mandated increases. Workers responded with petitions, stoppages, and plant-gate rallies that triggered targeted arrests, firings, and prosecutions. Throughout 2025, according to my labour sources, the country has witnessed more than 70 strikes and protests spanning textiles, ceramics, sugar mills, retail, petroleum, chemicals, utilities, and education. Workers’ demands have centred on overdue wages, annual bonuses, enforcement of the minimum wage, and improved conditions, with large-scale actions including a 4,000-strong strike at Ceramica Inova and coordinated stoppages across Upper Egypt’s sugar industry. Employers and authorities frequently responded with repression—including arrests of T&C and greenhouse workers, suspensions and investigations at El-Shorbagy, and dismissals of union leaders—while others sought to defuse unrest through Ministry of Labour-led mediation or emergency fund payouts. This isn’t a [2006-style explosion](https://merip.org/2007/05/strikes-in-egypt-spread-from-center-of-gravity/?ref=redflag.org.au). It’s an incremental curve—a rise in frequency and breadth from the post-2013 nadir, expressed as short, defensive, economic strikes that are extremely sensitive to local triggers (a fatal accident, unpaid arrears, a humiliating rule). Workers are calculating, not reckless: they end strikes when repression bites or when tangible wins are secured; they hold their fire until leverage peaks (e.g., the January sugar campaign season). Why is it happening? Inflation, repeated devaluation cycles, and a wage floor that is either eroded by prices or not applied at all. Put bluntly, the cost of living has crossed the threshold at which fear of the police competes with fear of hunger. That’s the inflexion point at which Egyptian workers historically move from complaint letters to stoppages. **What the strikes tell us about the regime’s playbook** Policing first, bargaining later: plants are surrounded, entrances controlled, and small numbers are picked up early to chill momentum. Only when production halts and workers hold their ground do mediators appear—labour directorates, federation officials, MPs and governors. Procedural fixes, not structural change: The “solutions” offered are narrowly tailored: suspend one manager, promise an investigation, pay a tranche of arrears, float a month-X raise. No change to the underlying enforcement vacuum on wages and safety, and no recognition of independent organising. Time-buying. The favourite tactic is to defer: “October”, “three months”, “after the presidency’s review”, “at budget time”. That punt only works if workers disband, and in the sugar case, they explicitly set January as a hard deadline. Free zones, not free unions: the Nile Linen case underlines how “export zones” pair hyper-discipline (leave rules, docked allowances, gate control) with weak inspection and security gatekeeping. It’s the quintessential model of privatised coercion under public cover. Under the surface, though, the state’s posture betrays anxiety. When local stoppages reverberate—through national supply chains (sugar) or foreign-currency exports (textiles)—the case files travel “up”. That upward escalation is the workers’ leverage. **Labour lit the fuse in 2011** Egypt’s modern labour insurgency didn’t begin in Tahrir. It was forged on the shop floors of [Mahalla](https://merip.org/2007/03/egyptian-textile-workers-confront-the-new-economic-order/?ref=redflag.org.au) and across transport, civil servants and public services in the mid-2000s. Those strikes disoriented the state’s forces, birthed strike committees and then independent unions—most famously the [real estate tax collectors’ union](https://flickr.com/photos/elhamalawy/albums/72157607027521066/?ref=redflag.org.au)—years before the revolution began on 25 January 2011. When the 2011 uprising peaked, wildcat strikes in transport, textiles, steel and the public sector on 8-10 February [were decisive](https://arabawy.org/24959/permanent-revolution/?ref=redflag.org.au). They took the revolution from square to system: from spectacle to shutdown. Within months, new federations and dozens of independent unions proliferated. For the first time in decades, Egyptian workers could credibly bargain outside the state’s official federation. The revolution’s [social soul](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bread-freedom-social-justice-9781780324333/?ref=redflag.org.au) was not a romantic abstraction; it was the organised power of workers to halt production. That force helped topple a president and briefly opened a window in which wages rose, corrupt managers were purged, and shopfloor dignity was renegotiated. **After the coup—how it was crushed** The 2013 military takeover set out to extinguish politics by decapitating the networks most capable of paralysing the state: political parties, youth groups, community organisations, and independent unions (including informal labour networks) inside workplaces. Legal crackdown: protest and public-order laws criminalised assembly; the 2017 trade-union framework forced re-registration under state terms, starved or dissolved independents and restored de facto monopoly to the official federation, now coupled with [draconian restrictions on the right to strike](https://eipr.org/sites/default/files/reports/pdf/a%5Flopsided%5Flaw%5F1.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au). Security filtration: factory union committees were either purged or co-opted. Activists were harassed; labour leaders faced case-by-case [prosecutions](https://revsoc.me/-50223?ref=redflag.org.au) for “obstructing production” or “inciting”. Managerial impunity: plant bosses learned that police would enforce internal discipline, from gate control to forced leave to lockouts dressed up as “maintenance”. Wage theater: headline “minimum-wage” decrees and presidential “allowances” became PR covers, unevenly applied, easily dodged through exemptions or hollow claims on “inability to comply”. The result was not a pacified labour force so much as a frozen one. From roughly 2014 to 2020, strikes became rare, brief and isolated. People still suffered; they just suffered silently. The state proved it could jail thousands, kill by example, and make union legalism a dead end. Then prices did what police could not: they melted the freeze. The pandemic’s aftershocks, global food and energy spikes, and repeated devaluations pulled the last nails from household budgets. By 2022-25, the “no strike” equilibrium had eroded, not because repression eased, but because survival left no slack. **Where the movement stands now** This is not 2006-11 redux. Today’s labour fights are defensive and economic—not overtly political—focused on arrears, allowances, safety, childcare, meal stipends, shifts, and even the right to reach a hospital when a child is dying. They are short-cycle and local, measured in days rather than months unless the state stonewalls. They are also networked yet atomised: WhatsApp groups, ex-unionists and NGO veterans still share tactics and draft demands, but no national coordination with real teeth exists. The risks are also clear: targeted arrests, mass firings, “disciplinary” dockings that erase the very raises you just won, and blacklist-style threats inside free zones. That’s why many stoppages end not in victory but with a warning and a date to resume if management backslides. Sceptics will say that a few concessions here and there change nothing. They’re wrong. In Egypt’s current political economy, every shopfloor win—whether restored hazard pay, scrapped punitive leave rules, back pay for overtime, or a posted safety notice—has cumulative effects. Each gain raises the reservation wage, as even modest improvements, once normalised, set baselines that other plants imitate. They also expand the repertoire: once a plant has struck and survived, the next stoppage is less daunting and better organised. Most importantly, such victories rebuild confidence, the rarest resource under repression, built incrementally not through manifestos. This is countercyclical politics from below. While elite pacts revolve around asset sales, debt service and foreign backing, workers are quietly renegotiating the daily reproduction of labour. It is not glamorous, but it is how movements survive long winters. **The state dilemma** Egypt’s rulers face a structural contradiction they cannot ideologically resolve. They need exports and domestic production to secure foreign currency and sustain patronage. They need docile labour to offer investors predictable costs and avoid disruptive headlines. At the same time, they need public credibility that “the state cares” even as real incomes collapse. They can’t have all three. When prices surge faster than wages, labour unrest becomes a cost of doing business. The regime compensates with selective coercion (to deter organisation) and transactional concessions (to keep assembly lines moving). That’s precisely what the September strikes showed. **The longer arc** Egypt’s labour movement ignited the 2011 revolution’s decisive phase by translating street protest into stoppage power. The counter-revolution understood this perfectly and built a system designed to defang workers: re-monopolise representation, criminalise assembly, make managers de facto police, and flood the airwaves with a cult of “order”. For a while, it worked. But no authoritarian model can repeal arithmetic. When the grocery bill doubles while allowances vanish, plants don’t stay quiet forever. What we’re witnessing now is not a return to the old days—there is no national wave, no open federation, no safe civic space. It is a learning process under extreme constraints. Workers are rediscovering what they already knew: if you don’t stop the machine, nothing changes. September’s strikes didn’t rewrite the system. They did something more important for the long haul: they showed thousands of workers, again, that the machine *still* stops when they decide it will. That’s the line that matters in 2025\. Not the fantasy that one grand strike will topple a militarised political economy, but the reality that incremental, repeatable, local wins—backed by credible threats to escalate when promises fail—are rebuilding the only power that ever made Egypt’s rulers blink. The question for 2026 is not whether Cairo will suddenly allow free unions. It won’t. The question is whether, plant by plant, shift by shift, workers continue converting unbearable living conditions into precision strikes that win real money, real safety, and real dignity, and whether those informal networks begin talking to one another again. If they do, the regime will face a familiar headache: a labour movement that doesn’t need permission to breathe. The Egyptian labor movement is alive, conservative in tactics, brutalized by context, and—because of the economy—becoming unavoidable again. The state can’t crush prices. That’s why it won’t crush strikes forever. Most importantly, such victories rebuild confidence, the rarest resource under repression, built incrementally rather than through manifestos. *First published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.* ### Council-hired security guards waging local war on poor URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/council-hired-security-guards-waging-local-war-on-poor/ Last updated: 2025-09-28T00:26:34.000Z On 1 September, the Maribyrnong City Council in Melbourne’s west initiated a six-month “security” program in central Footscray. The program involves two private security guards patrolling local streets for 24 hours a week at a total cost of $100,000. The program was initiated at a council meeting on 22 July, at which councillors (including Labor Party and Greens members and one independent) voted to hire the guards. In the lead-up to the meeting, twenty businesses in Footscray lobbied the council to have an ongoing security presence after they trialled hiring guards for themselves. [Maribyrnong Council argues](https://www.yourcityyourvoice.com.au/footscray-cbd?fbclid=IwY2xjawMrQDJleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFVSWExRlpKQ3FIWEUyWVhHAR6tsKtoj-fGc%5FiDIR2oDoimSVrtMvY6tbnHNGwp4uBpAB-73kZcgjXR0jT37Q%5Faem%5FFih4j4xF4FbOTk2cdzD-vA&ref=redflag.org.au) that having private guards in Footscray will “shape a CBD that is safe, welcoming and reflective of Footscray's growing community”. Recently, the council also declared that CCTV systems in the area have been upgraded so they link directly to Victoria Police for faster police responses. Maribyrnong isn’t the only council hiring its own security force. It took its lead from the City of Melbourne and its “Melbourne Model” of security. This was recently made permanent by Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece after an initial three-month trial. It involves eleven hired guards patrolling the streets of Melbourne’s CBD at a cost of $2 million a year. In June, Wyndham City Council in Melbourne’s outer west also hired guards for a 12-month trial at a cost of $372,000\. As in Footscray, these measures have been justified on the basis of protecting community safety. Why do local councils see it as necessary to build up their own private armies of security guards in a context where police funding in Victoria has [increased by 88 percent in the past ten years](https://www.budget.vic.gov.au/keeping-communities-safe?ref=redflag.org.au) (from $2.4 billion in 2014-15 to $4.5 billion in 2025-26)? If that increase of more than $2 billion (along with more restrictive bail laws and other boosts to police powers) hasn’t been enough to combat so-called “anti-social behaviour” and petty crime in places like Footscray, why would anyone think an extra $100,000 on security guards will make the crucial difference? It appears, in fact, that no-one much does. The police have used councils’ hiring of private security guards to push for yet more funding from the government. Police Association of Victoria chief executive Wayne Gatt recently told the *Age*, “\[A\]reas of high crime or where large groups of people commonly gather, were once areas of high police visibility via patrols, but due to capacity issues for Victoria Police, they’ve become areas where crime now flourishes”. The reality is that neither more private security nor more police will address crime and its underlying causes, the main ones in a place like Footscray are poverty and homelessness. Not only does the beefing up of the state’s punitive functions on a local level do nothing to address these issues, but by targeting the most vulnerable people in the community, they are likely to make things worse. Take the homeless. According to [Australian Bureau of Statistics data](https://chp.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/230614-Homelessness-in-your-area-2023-Footscray.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) from 2023, on any given night there are 694 people in Footscray without a home. These people will be among the first victims of the council’s security blitz. Council-hired guards will work with police to enforce local laws, including fining people for begging, “offensive behaviour”, having an open container of alcohol, drug use or sleeping rough in a way that interferes with local businesses or pedestrians. In the absence of measures focused on broader issues of social welfare, fining and harassing the homeless and other vulnerable people will only contribute to entrenching them as a permanent underclass. Councils may prefer this to the status quo to the extent that it could temporarily push the homeless away from high-traffic areas, but it’s dubious to claim this will have any real impact on crime. The most common type of crimes occurring in Footscray, according to [recent data](https://www.aucrimetracker.com/vic/footscray/?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=As%20of%20Year%202025%20Mar,2241), are theft and burglary. This isn’t something that a couple of security guards walking the streets handing out fines for begging or drinking alcohol are likely to do anything much about. To see where the logic of constantly pouring more money into policing and security leads, we need only look at the US. US police are among the best funded and well armed in the world, and it’s the world leader in locking people away in prison. Spending on private security is also [high and rapidly increasing](https://www.riotimesonline.com/the-rise-of-private-security-a-global-shift-in-law-enforcement/?ref=redflag.org.au). Despite that, signs of extreme poverty, homelessness, mental illness and addiction are visible almost everywhere in major US cities, along with the kinds of petty crime and “antisocial behaviour” that can go with that. And, of course, instead of thinking a change of course might be necessary, US politicians only ever use the scenes of destitution as an excuse to advocate *more*violent police repression and *more* prisons. The ever present threat of state-sponsored violence in the US only helps create a more violent society overall, and it’s Black Americans and other oppressed groups that are the main victims. To the extent we go down that path, it will be the same here. We’ll see more incidents like the murder of Somali Australian man Abdifatah Ahmed, who was shot by police in Footscray on 17 April. And—just as in the US—the knee-jerk response to such incidents by those in power will be racism and repression rather than policies that might help those in need. What places like Footscray need is investment in community spaces, more public housing, a rise in social welfare and wages, and caps on food prices. For a fraction of the extra $2 billion that’s been poured into the Victoria Police budget over the past ten years, the people experiencing homelessness in Footscray and across Melbourne’s west could have been given permanent shelter. That’s the kind of solution we need—not more police and prisons, or councils spending money hiring private guards. ### Community fights pro-developer housing plan for Sydney’s inner west URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/community-fights-pro-developer-housing-plan-for-sydneys-inner-west/ Last updated: 2025-09-27T01:01:22.000Z Community members in Sydney’s Inner West are furious at the local council’s proposed “Fairer Future Plan”. The plan is anything but fair. It is a massive handout to developers, aimed at building expensive high-density housing, which will only worsen the Inner West’s housing crisis. Hundreds have mobilised against the plan over the past few months, culminating in a 200-person protest at a council meeting on 22 September. Opposition to the plan is being driven by the Better Future Coalition, a group of community activists and organisations including NSW Socialists and Action for Public Housing. The Labor-dominated council dodged community anger on Monday night by refusing to allow hundreds of people in and stacking the start of the hours-long meeting with Labor Party stooges (including paid ALP staffers) and pro-developer “YIMBYs” (“yes” in my backyard). A few developers showed up to ask for the right to build even higher apartment complexes, and their concerns were immediately noted by council members. Mayor Darcy Byrne is pitching his plan as a solution to the housing crisis. His supporters repeated the argument in the council meeting. The housing crisis, they say, is caused by a lack of supply, so the only solution is to build. But this is a myth. There are roughly 8,000 empty homes in the Inner West, according to the 2021 census. The Australia Institute reported in March that the construction of new dwellings has outpaced population growth for the past ten years. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there are almost 1 million more residential properties in Australia than there are households. The housing crisis is a crisis of *affordability*, not a lack of houses. The Inner West Council’s plan will only exacerbate that crisis. Replacing lower-cost rentals with luxury apartments will affect all prices in the area, putting upward pressure on existing house and rental prices, and pricing many people out of the Inner West. This is a plan for gentrification, not a “fairer future”. In a slap in the face to the community, and despite thousands of submissions demanding more affordable housing, the council revised its original promise of 5 percent affordable housing down to just 2 percent. “Affordable housing” in this context is something of a misnomer, as it would be priced at 80 percent of the current market rent, which was [$700 as of December 2024](https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/dcj.statistics/viz/Rentandsales%5F16849924917120/Rent?publish=yes&ref=redflag.org.au). Tellingly, the plan will not build any public housing. Meanwhile, in Waterloo, Glebe and Banksia, the Chris Minns state Labor government is busy tearing down what little public housing does exist. The Fairer Future Plan contains no provision for new green and community spaces, despite promising to increase the population by upwards of 70,000 people. There is no thought put into the increased need for public transport and schools. The plan will create a developer bonanza in the Inner West, not deliver services to the community. Mayor Byrne has tried to dodge blame by pointing to the state housing targets set by the Minns government. But his council, a bastion of the ALP, is reaching for double the targets for the Inner West, from 15,000 to 31,000 new dwellings. Byrne, Minns and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese are all part of the same rotten party with the same neoliberal approach to housing. In fact, the council’s plan is a continuation of the Minns state government’s attempt to boost the profits of developers across the state. In the 2025 NSW budget, Treasurer Daniel Mookhey announced that the government would guarantee developers’ profits by buying apartments if they can’t pre-sell enough of them. As Martin Barker [put it in *Red Flag*](https://redflag.org.au/article/nsw-labor-builds-profits-not-housing) in July, “They can build overpriced apartments in developments so risky even the banks wouldn’t fund them, secure in the knowledge that the government will bail them out if they can’t find buyers at the price and profit margin that they want”. The details of what will be built and how will largely be left up to developers. Some fear that developers will drip-feed the release of dwellings onto the market to avoid a glut that could lower prices. This habit of “land banking”, getting development approval to increase the value of land without delivering new dwellings, is already widespread. The *Daily Telegraph*reported in February 2024 that “almost one billion dollars’ worth of housing in one of Sydney’s most affordable local government areas is yet to be built despite the DAs being approved up to five years ago”. There is nothing in Labor’s plan to prevent developers from playing these games to boost their profits. In fact, the plan encourages it. How convenient that Labor’s solution to the housing crisis doesn’t challenge developers, investors and banks but instead makes them richer. Real solutions would require a departure from decades of government policy and a fight against the wealthy elites who benefit from the commodification of housing. It would require that every level of government build public housing, end tax concessions to investors, requisition empty homes and cap rents. NSW Socialists and the Better Future Coalition will continue to fight this neoliberal development plan. The next big event will be a [protest](https://www.facebook.com/events/s/protest-inner-west-council-exp/1105656097935592/)against the council vote on the plan on 30 September. The Inner West doesn’t need a plan that is purpose-built for developers; we need one purpose-built for ordinary people. ### ‘Block everything with Palestine in our hearts’: Italy paralysed by Gaza actions URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/block-everything-with-palestine-in-our-hearts-italy-paralysed-by-gaza-actions/ Last updated: 2025-09-25T03:31:36.000Z On 22 September, half a million workers, students and solidarity activists mobilised in more than 80 cities across Italy under the slogan “*Blocchiamo Tutto*” (Let’s block everything). The *Unione Sindacale di Base* (USB), which initiated the action, has called for “the immediate break-off of relations with the terrorist state of Israel”. Major ports across the country were shut down from Genoa, Palermo, Livorno, Ancona, Trieste, Salerno, and Venice, where strikers braved police water cannons. Train stations were blockaded in Naples, Turin, Rome, and Milan, while strikes of railway staff paralysed transport networks. Protests took place on a truly national scale, including in regional centres with little living memory of struggle, demonstrating the depth of support for Palestine and indignation at the government’s inaction. At Rome’s La Sapienza University, students launched an occupation of the arts faculty, while campuses in Bologna and Torino were blockaded. Many schools were shut as students and staff walked out. Demonstrators also took to highways, shutting main roads in Pisa, Florence, Turin, Bologna and Rome. In doing so, they were defying the Meloni government’s Security Decree passed in June, which makes blocking traffic and major infrastructure a serious criminal offense. This will be an early test of strength between protesters and the government over the enforcement of these laws. The strike wave even reached the Vatican, where members of the Association of Vatican Lay Employees joined a march to parliament as part of the Priests Against Genocide network. Italy’s solidarity movement has been galvanised by the Global Sumud Flotilla currently sailing to Gaza, the largest-scale attempt to break Israel’s siege and deliver vital aid thus far. One of the Flotilla’s departure points was the northern Italian port city of Genoa, and it was there that the Block Everything movement began last August. As the convoy prepared to launch, a campaign to collect food aid for Gaza revived the city’s dormant but deeply-rooted activist traditions. Unions, neighbourhood committees and charities collected more than 300 tons of materials. On 30 August, 40,000 marched to see off the flotilla singing *Bella Ciao*, out of a population of 564,000\. The call to action was taken up early on by the Autonomous Port Workers Collective (CALP), a Genoan dock workers’ collective affiliated to the USB, one of the country’s many “grassroots” or “base” unions, which operate separately from the mainstream federations. In a widely shared video, CALP member Riccardo Rudino pledged at the demonstration: “If, even for 20 minutes, we lose contact with our comrades on the flotilla, we will block all of Europe: from Genoa’s docks, not a single nail will leave, it will be a global strike”. Under the slogan “Lets close the ports to war”, CALP has previously blocked arms shipments intended for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, and on 7 August refused to load arms onto a Saudi ship allegedly bound for Israel. Last Thursday, dockworkers in the port city of Ravenna also took action, blocking two trucks suspected of carrying weapons. Coming off the back of these actions, the impressive response to USB’s call for a strike on 22 September represents a significant leap forward for the movement. The call to block everything has been taken up in workplaces from ports to logistics centres, but also drawn huge sections of civil society behind it, from Trieste in the northeast to Sicily in the south. The main union federation, the CGIL, which represents the majority of organised labour, has dragged its feet in mobilising its membership for Gaza, and didn’t participate in 22 September. CGIL instead organised its own four-hour strike three days before, which was strongly observed in some workplaces. But the more significant action on 22 September emerged from below. The hope is that this mobilisation can put pressure on larger, more conservative federations like CGIL to organise serious strikes. The size of the demonstrations is an expression of a rising tide of struggle in Europe, fuelled by disgust at Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and a continent-wide turn to austerity and militarism. In France, hostility to the government’s proposed austerity budget generated the first “*Bloquons tout*” (“Let’s block everything”) movement on 10 September, forcing the resignation of one prime minister, and pressuring the unions to call mass strikes against his replacement. This provided a clear model for Italy to follow. In Spain last week, protesters forced the abrupt ending of the Vuelta, Spain’s Tour de France equivalent, in opposition to the inclusion of the Israeli team. Spain’s centre-left government, which has long traded on rhetorical opposition to Israel’s genocide, has been forced to cancel a €700 million deal to acquire Israeli-designed rocket launchers. While governments across Europe attempt to cover their complicity in genocide and placate the movement for Gaza with meaningless gestures, Italy’s governing far-right coalition has refused even this concession. Days before the strike, Infrastructure and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right Lega, went on Israeli channel [i24news](https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2025/09/19/salvini-intervista-israele-palestina-hamas-news/8132274/?ref=redflag.org.au) to denounce the Palestine movement, saying “I don’t think they know what they’re protesting about. Islamic terrorism is the main problem in the world today.” Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, of the fascist-rooted Brothers of Italy, seized on small clashes in Milan provoked by police to demonise what she characterises as the “violence and destruction” of “hooligans”. The government’s attacks are not limited to words. Palestine protests, including those of high school students, are routinely met with [brutal police repression](https://www.facebook.com/reel/910031973922530). Meloni’s highly authoritarian party is committed to ruling as the “party of order”, and to repressing any manifestation of left-wing opposition. It sees the militarised Israeli ethno-state as a model to be emulated. But the government’s opposition to the movement is about more than ideology. It’s also about defending the nexus between the Italian state, the US-led NATO military alliance, and Italy’s highly profitable weapons industry. Meloni has committed to raise defence spending to meet NATO targets of 5 percent of GDP in the next decade. This will mean a massive windfall for companies like Leonardo, currently valued at €29.45 billion, which rely heavily on contracts with Israel. The cost of this new arms race will be borne by workers already reeling after years of one-sided class war. In Italy, real wages have fallen 7.5 percent since 2021, precarity is rife and, on average, three people die at work every day. Against this world of austerity and war, 22 September is another flicker of hope. It shows the possibility of a political response based on working class power and solidarity. As the USB said in a statement on the day of the strike: “Workers have returned to centre stage and are calling on citizens, all citizens, to stand up. They are not doing so for a contract renewal but to demand justice for a distant and tormented people. In this age of selfishness and individualism, this seems unthinkable. But no, solidarity between peoples and brotherhood beyond borders are not dead and buried values; on the contrary, they are alive and kicking.” ### Australian imperialism in Papua New Guinea: past and present URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/australian-imperialism-in-papua-new-guinea-past-and-present/ Last updated: 2025-09-24T06:26:54.000Z The fiftieth anniversary of Papua New Guinea’s independence this month was marked by the announcement of a proposed major joint defence treaty between PNG and its former colonial power, Australia. “We’re talking about totally integrated forces,” PNG’s Defence Minister Billy Joseph told the ABC on 15 September, “Australian Defence Force and PNG Defence Force using the same equipment...fighting together, defending our sovereignties as an integrated force”. So much for independence. Albanese might [pontificate](https://www.pm.gov.au/media/visit-papua-new-guinea-golden-jubilee?ref=redflag.org.au) that Australia and PNG are “neighbours, partners and equals”, but this military agreement shows how things really are. It continues Australia’s 120-year domination and exploitation of PNG. From 1906 until 1975, PNG was a colonial possession of Australia. School history curricula in PNG acknowledges this, but for Australian students, this nearly 70-year long period of domination likely comes as a surprise. In their 2024 article “‘The Moat of Oblivion’: Australia and the Forgetting of Papua New Guinea” academics Helen Garner, Jonathan Ritchie and Brad Underhill suggest that that in the nineteenth century era of White Australia, politicians did not try to integrate PNG into the Australian national identity because most Papuans were, and are, non-white. The Australian state did not want to launch a genocidal frontier war akin to those waged against Indigenous peoples on Australia’s mainland and Tasmania, or to encourage migration of whites to PNG. Instead, PNG was shunted “somewhere else” in Australia’s nationalist and cultural mythology, as an island that belonged to Australia, but was not occupied by Australians. This political separation underpins the exploitative nature of Australia’s engagement with PNG. While ostensibly an Australian territory, from 1906 onwards Papuans were denied democratic rights, including the right to vote. Even after being incorporated as Australian citizens in 1948, Papuans required permits to travel south. Many Papuans who left the island were ensnared in “blackbirding”—a slave labour system where Pacific Islanders were forced to work on Queensland plantations. Sequestering Papua New Guinea also smashed up the migratory traditions of Pacific Islanders. As Gardner et al describe: “The six-kilometre stretch of water between the northernmost Queensland Island Saibai and the Shore of Papua was both a physical and conceptual barrier between continental Australia and the island of New Guinea in the minds of white Australians—but not those of the Torres Strait for whom it had always been a pathway rather than a boundary”. The Australian state imposed both English and Christianity on the people of PNG in its colonising drive, attempting to force national cohesion along Western capitalist lines on highly differentiated peoples. To this day, PNG is the most[ linguistically diverse](https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2017/07/20/papua-new-guineas-incredible-linguistic-diversity?ref=redflag.org.au) place on earth, with more than 800 recognised languages. Australia’s interest in PNG has always been imperial. Viewed through military eyes, the island is Australia’s gateway to (and from) the Asia Pacific. The theatre of imperial conflict expanded from Europe towards Asia in World War II, and with this shift, warfare came closer to Australia’s neighbourhood. In January 1942, Japan invaded Rabaol—a township on the PNG island of New Britain—with the intention of capturing the capital Port Moresby. Had this occurred, it would have represented an incursion upon the northernmost flank of Australian, and therefore US, influence. The ensuing Kokoda Track campaign, which repulsed the Japanese invasion, has been incorporated into nationalist myths as an epic chapter in Australian war history. Papuans—whose own homes were besieged—are remembered only as helpful sidekicks in this mythos, as “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” tending to wounded soldiers. Ironically, Australian politicians were motivated to abandon PNG as a colony in order to ensure their ongoing imperial influence. As World War II gave way to the Cold War, Australian politicians realised that holding formal colonies was no longer tenable, as major social struggles for national liberation took place in Asia and Africa. Australian politicians feared PNG might fall under Communist influence, like many other national independence struggles at the time, without a negotiated transition to independence. Jon Piccini argues this in his 2024 article “‘Time is Against Us’: Anti-Communism, Decolonisation, and Papua New Guinean Independence” in the journal *Australian Historical Studies.* Catholic organisations worked to foster anti-Communist attitudes among the small PNG elite—and leaders of the trade union movement—as part of their attempts to cultivate a future ruling class loyal to Western capitalism. Piccini quotes Richard Krygier explaining that his organisation, the Catholic anti-communist outfit Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, intervened in PNG to “pre-empt the field before the Communists and their friends emerge on the scene”. Whether and on what terms the people of PNG wanted independence was of marginal concern in these circles. Preparations for PNG’s independence began in the 1960s under a series of Liberal and Country Party federal governments. In 1964, Australia’s Department of Territories cut the pay of PNG’s public servants to that of 40 percent of Australians doing the same work—supposedly as a precursor for dealing with fewer resources in an independent state. Whitlam’s Labor government, elected in 1972, accelerated the move towards independence. In 1973, PNG transitioned to “self-government”, and on 16 September 1975, became fully independent. Gyngell describes that PNG’s first governor-general, Sir John Guise, noted during independence ceremonies that “Papua New Guineans were lowering the flag of their colonisers, not tearing it down”. Typical of paternalistic colonialism, these events have been remembered as examples of Australia’s benevolence towards PNG. But as even former Australian prime minister Paul Keating admitted in his memoirs, this “benevolence” brought limited benefits to the people of PNG. “As colonialists,” he wrote, “Australia’s army has been generally benign but I’m not sure we were much good at the task. Not least, we had bequeathed Papua New Guinea a public sector and a military force, modelled on our own, that were expensive and quite unsuited to the needs of a developing country”. Since independence, PNG has experienced endemic poverty. As of 2022, fewer than 20 percent of households had access to safe drinking water and fewer than 10 percent safely managed sanitation. Australia has never been motivated by humanitarian concern for Papuans. It is not concerned with poverty, the education of girls, corruption or rising sea levels, whatever its official statements on Pacific relations might say. Since independence, successive governments have worked to maintain Australia’s economic and military domination of the region. According to the Australia—Papua New Guinea Development Partnership Plan of 2024-2029, Australia is Papua New Guinea’s largest trading partner, allocating $637.4 million in loans and grants, and $2.56 billion in budget support loans. Australia has more or less taken for granted that PNG’s economic reliance on Australia will ensure their political affinity to Western capitalism and therefore pliancy to its military presence. As imperial tensions between the US and China have steadily heightened, Australia has worried about waning influence. A 2023 naval security agreement launched between China and the Solomon Islands—typically seen as safe in Australia’s sphere of influence—gave the Australian establishment a scare that China’s economic leverage might win them more military allies in the Pacific. Albanese’s Labor government has doubled down on their real ambition: reliable, no holds barred military access to PNG. In August, Defence Minister Richard Marles announced that $500 million would be spent on the long-expected expansion of PNG’s Lombrum naval base. Should the proposed mutual defence treaty between Australia and PNG materialise, it will represent a formalisation of the existing state of affairs, as well as a guarantee—from Australia’s perspective—that PNG will remain in the Western camp. From colonisation, to independence, and after, Australia has never cared about the rights and wishes of Papuans. Their intention has always been to dominate the region economically, to secure military acquiescence. ### Higher pay: a serious fight is still needed URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/pay-rises-need-to-make-a-comeback-and-theres-a-simple-way-to-win-them/ Last updated: 2025-10-07T06:29:50.000Z If someone took $20,000 from you, you’d probably want it back. In fact, you’d probably think it’s worth quite a bit of effort to get it back. That sort of money can mean a lot of extra security, comfort and dignity for most workers. And if you and every single one of your workmates had that kind of money taken out of your pay packets, with most of this missing cash flowing to the already filthy rich, it’s pretty likely you’d expect your union to try to organise to win it back. The reality, however, is that most unions in this country have done very little to organise a fight to reverse the massive hit to our incomes due to inflation over the past four years. Before looking at why this is the case, it’s worth exploring just how much we’ve gone backwards over that time. Writing in the *Guardian* in May, economist Greg Jericho [pointed out](https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2025/may/15/australia-wage-growth-remains-solid-but-now-the-recovery-needs-to-be-sustained?ref=redflag.org.au) that a worker on the average wage is 4.4 percent behind where they would be if wages had kept up with inflation over the past four years, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. This means that someone earning the average wage ($93,000 per year in 2021) is around $4,000 per year worse off, in 2021 dollars. Adjusted for inflation (CPI), that’s the equivalent of around $90 per week in today’s money, or $180 missing from each fortnightly pay packet. But even this is a significant understatement of the financial pain many wage earners are experiencing. Jericho points out that the CPI is designed to exclude changes in average mortgage costs, which have been a massive burden for many workers over the past four years. These mortgage costs *are* included in another measure of inflation compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics—the Employee Living Cost Index (ELCI). Using this measure, Jericho calculates that the average wage earner in Australia is not 4.4 percent behind inflation, but double that: on average each of us is a staggering 8.9 percent behind where we would be had wages kept up with inflation since 2021\. Put in dollar terms, this amounts to nearly $180 per week or $360 per fortnight. What if we add up all these weekly losses? How much have we lost *in total* during the inflationary surge since 2021? [Detailed statistical modelling](https://github.com/jimb0w/Inflation/blob/master/Inflation.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) carried out for *Red Flag* quantifies this loss: - Someone on the average wage ($93,898 in 2021) has lost a total of $23,374 since July 2021, compared to if they’d kept up with the Consumer Price Index. - This figure rises to a staggering $33,919 in wages lost to inflation since 2021 if we use the Employee Living Cost Index instead of CPI. - *Average* wages are skewed upwards by a minority of very highly paid wage earners like senior managers. The *median* wage is $20,000 lower, and is more representative of what most of us earn: half of us earn less than the median, and half earn more. Still, someone on the median female full-time wage ($71,666 in 2021) has lost $12,767 over four years compared to inflation measured by the CPI—or $20,815 if we use the ELCI. Wages set by enterprise agreements will vary from this average, but the big majority will give a similarly bleak picture. Of course, all of these are average figures. Many of us will have been impacted less than this, others more. But they give us a general picture of the staggering degree to which wages have gone backwards over the past four years. This money has not simply disappeared. Much of it has been redistributed from wage earners to corporations and the super-rich. A [study](https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/corporate-profits-increase-inflation-fact-sheet/?ref=redflag.org.au) by the Australia Institute in 2023 found that surging corporate profits accounted for more than half of the price increase since 2021. There’s no austerity for the corporate elite and their super-rich pals. Since 2021, while wages have fallen behind prices by 4.4 percent (CPI) or 8.9 percent (ELCI), the total value of companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange has jumped from $2,500 billion to $3,155 billion. This is an increase of 26 percent, well ahead of the inflation rate. And the combined wealth of the annual Rich 200 list published by the *Australian Financial Review* has soared from $480 billion in 2021 to $668 billion this year—a jump of 39 percent in just four years. Companies fattening their profits and their balance sheets while the rest of us go backwards isn’t some law of nature. It’s a policy choice by the rich, by the capitalists, and by the governments that serve them—both Liberal and (mainly) Labor over the past four years. In the face of this onslaught, our unions have been largely passive. So much so that it no longer goes without saying that it is actually possible to win pay rises: they can be achieved through industrial action, and unions are supposed to play a role in making this happen. A small number of unions showed this back when inflation was lifting off in late 2021, winning [a sprinkling of enterprise agreements](https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/thousands-of-workers-to-get-5pc-pay-rises-off-inflation-spike-20220320-p5a672?ref=redflag.org.au) that included CPI-linked pay clauses at major companies including Toll Global Express, Teys meatworks and STC trucking. These clauses ensured that workers at these companies at least didn’t go backwards relative to CPI. The *Australian Financial Review* spent plenty of words [sooking](https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/inflation-guarantees-in-union-deals-trigger-7pc-plus-wage-bumps-20230621-p5di8v?ref=redflag.org.au) about these results in the months and years that followed; anything that moves the burden of inflation from workers to employers is a scandal, according to them. But as inflation increased, the union movement actually retreated from pursuing claims along these lines. In 2022 and 2023, there were very few examples of pay rises being won that matched or exceeded inflation. Some of the few in the private sector were from the offshore gas industry in Western Australia. The Offshore Alliance (the MUA and AWU) demonstrated that going [straight for the jugular](https://awu.net.au/national/news/2022/09/17897/76-days-230-workers-and-15-billion-how-oa-members-won-a-landmark-ea-on-the-shell-prelude/?ref=redflag.org.au) of major corporations can still win [spectacular results](https://offshorealliance.org.au/news/phi-offshore-alliance-keeps-moving-up/?ref=redflag.org.au). The largest-scale recent example of a union winning an above-inflation wage result is the Victorian branch of the ANMF. Last May, a mass meeting of 3,000 union members employed in public hospitals unexpectedly rejected the government offer of 3 percent per year, along with the nebulous promise of a Fair Work Commission gender equity adjustment at some point. Faced with the plausible threat of an industrial campaign waged by a large and very popular group of workers willing to defy their own leadership, the government caved in, granting the nurses a pay rise of 28.4 percent over four years. Shortly after, Ambulance Victoria staff won [increases of 24-33 percent](https://vau.org.au/in-principal-agreement-reached/?ref=redflag.org.au) over four years, after a six-month industrial and political campaign. It’s important to note that the real increase in nurses’ base rate of pay between 2021 and 2028 will total only a little more than 3 percent above inflation, if Reserve Bank inflation forecasts are correct. If we include increased allowances, this figure rises to between 6 and 8 percent ahead of inflation, over seven years. Many senior grades have the largest pay increases concentrated in the last year of the agreement, meaning they will stay behind inflation for most of the period up to 2028\. And this is meant to include a historic fix for more than a century of gendered underpayment of nurses too. Despite these limitations, the nurses’ 28.4 percent result has understandably become a benchmark for public sector wage claims more broadly. But while Victoria’s Labor government may have crumbled at the plausible threat of a prolonged industrial campaign from rebellious nurses, it has refused to move far from its wages policy of 3 percent per year for other groups of workers, preferring to tough out prolonged but low-intensity industrial campaigns. Last month, public mental health workers voted to accept a union leadership recommendation to settle for a deal far short of the initial claims rather than escalating the industrial campaign. Thirty-eight percent voted against acceptance, but to win against a government digging in its heels will need a much more vigorous industrial campaign, one capable of creating a crisis for the government. Outside of Victoria, one of the few other high-profile examples of a successful fight for above-inflation pay rises is government teachers in NSW, who in late 2023 won [an immediate pay rise](https://www.nswtf.org.au/news/2023/09/20/government-puts-pen-to-paper-inking-pay-rises-for-teachers/?ref=redflag.org.au) of between 8 percent (for top of scale teachers) and 12 percent (for graduate teachers). This followed a lengthy [industrial campaign](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/apr/26/nsw-teachers-to-strike-next-week-over-pay-and-conditions?ref=redflag.org.au) under the previous Liberal government, and the teachers’ [rejection](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-03/nsw-teachers-wage-negotiations-stall-after-government-offer/102683528?ref=redflag.org.au) of a pathetic 2.5 percent offer from the incoming Minns government. This is a significant result, though the NSW teachers’ 2024 [pay deal](https://www.nswtf.org.au/news/2024/12/12/significant-gains-for-school-members/?ref=redflag.org.au) was only 3 percent per year over three years. The failure of most unions to pursue wage rises aggressively is painfully squeezing household finances. Added to this, many essential industries—including health care, education and community services—struggle to retain experienced workers because of punishing workloads and low wages, which jeopardises and threatens the many services working-class people rely on. Winning back the money lost to inflation matters: it can be the difference between thousands of experienced staff staying in a vital industry, or being forced to look elsewhere for a living wage, intensifying the spiralling crisis in many essential services. And whatever industry we’re in, the benchmark we set—by either accepting a massive hit to our pay or by fighting for a real pay rise—has the potential to demoralise or inspire others. Fighting is therefore not just about winning something for ourselves, but for every worker who deserves a pay rise. A determined fight over wages can also be an important step to rebuilding the sort of unionism we need: the sort of unionism that used industrial action to win breakthroughs in pay, shorter hours, life-saving health and safety—and which didn’t stop there. Historically strong unions like the Builders Labourers’ Federation, the metalworkers and the maritime unions all developed into powerful industrial units through fights over wages—and then used that industrial strength to fight for a better society, in dozens of different ways. So why are there so few unions following this path today? We know from ballooning corporate profits that the money is there. The precious few examples we have of workers fighting show that governments and corporations *can* be compelled to fund decent wages. We know from these same examples that to shake this money loose requires a serious industrial campaign, sometimes combined with the political pressure that strikes by groups like nurses, teachers and ambulance workers can create. So the reason this is not being pursued on a wider scale is not that it is impossible. Rather, it’s a political choice. To put it simply: the majority of the leadership of the unions in Australia have a decades-long track record of pursuing a policy of class collaboration rather than conflict. The most notorious example of this is the [Prices and Incomes Accord](https://redflag.org.au/node/7336) of the 1980s. Under this policy, union leaderships teamed up with a federal Labor government to impose industrial peace and wage restraint. Profit share rose while wages share declined—not by chance but as a matter of state policy, with the union leadership as active partners. With the active or passive assistance of almost all of the top union leaders, it was Labor that imposed the neoliberal agenda of privatisation, deregulation and booming corporate wealth that still plagues us today. This important fork in the road for the Australian union movement wasn’t just a matter of industrial strategy. It was a political choice, one of prioritising the supposed “national interest” rather than the uncompromising pursuit of workers’ interests. The politics of the union movement’s leadership hasn’t improved since that time. It’s notable that in countries where neoliberalism was imposed by conservative forces such as Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US, this produced a somewhat more combative and oppositional legacy in some unions. Both of those countries had a notably [higher level](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkstp.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) of [strikes](https://redflag.org.au/article/britains-historic-strike-wave) over the peak of the inflationary wave in 2022 and 2023—the UK [recording](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/timeseries/bbfw/lms?ref=redflag.org.au) ten times the decade-long average of strikes in those years—whereas the strikes over pay in Australia, while welcome, [barely moved](https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/industrial-disputes-australia/latest-release?ref=redflag.org.au) the statistical dial. The legacy of the class-collaborationist approach of the Accord is still entrenched in Australian unions. There’s an obvious consequence of this for those who want our unions to take a different course: building a more combative union movement is a *political* project, not simply an industrial one. Of course we should be pushing our unions to fight to win back those missing tens of thousands of dollars. At the same time, we need a political strategy: one that rejects the politics of class collaboration, and instead sets out to rebuild the politics of class struggle. Pushing for higher wages has to be one part of this wider project. ### The sad story of student unions in Australia today URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-sad-story-of-student-unions-in-australia-today/ Last updated: 2025-09-24T02:33:19.000Z Student union elections are taking place on university campuses across the country. Given that only a minority of students vote in the elections nowadays, it’s fair to say that most students probably don’t know this is happening—or even know the first thing about their campus union. This year, for example, in the RMIT University Student Union elections, about 6,000 students voted out of a student body of more than 60,000\. While that level of suffrage might have been standard for nineteenth-century Prussia, it’s a sign of the general decline of student unionism in Australia. Student unions used to be famous—even notorious—as political and activist bodies that organised and fought to improve students’ lives and the wider world around them. Today, most student unions don’t organise much more than some pretty sad free food events and occasional parties that are even sadder. It’s not as though there’s nothing to fight for. Financial precarity is increasingly common for university students. More and more students take on full-time work while they study to make ends meet. And the average student in their 20s leaves university with more than [$30,000 of debt](https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/the-crushing-cost-of-a-university-education-hungry-sleep-deprived-students-loaded-with-debt/?ref=redflag.org.au), compared to $12,600 in 2006\. Young people are also tuned in to the world around them: the genocide in Gaza has thousands of us outraged, horrified and wondering what on Earth we can do to stop it. The need for fighting student unions could hardly be more urgent. So why do our unions spend so much time on glorified sausage sizzles? **Student unions and radical politics** Students have always been involved in politics and activism, but it was in the 1960s with the anti-Vietnam War movement that Australian university students burst onto the stage of history. The campuses became a major front in the battle against brutal imperialist war. In 1971, a mass meeting of Melbourne University students declared their student union building a sanctuary for people evading conscription into the army—the so-called draft dodgers. The next year, Sydney University followed suit. Radicals at Monash University caused an uproar when they started to collect money for the “enemy” in Vietnam, the Communist-led National Liberation Front, in effect committing treason. In the political ferment, the notion that student unions should stay out of politics and focus instead on providing services seemed preposterous. After the US and Australia withdrew in defeat from Vietnam and the anti-war movement ended, students remained a force to be reckoned with. In 1973, the peak student union body, the Australian Union of Students (AUS, precursor to today’s National Union of Students), declared itself in favour of “the building of a socialist Australia”. The AUS Women’s Department, established in 1975, became an important national forum for the women’s liberation movement. In his essential book *It Can’t Happen Here*, author Graham Hastings writes: “The culture of vigorous theoretical debate inside the Women’s Department played a vital role in the development of Australian feminism in the second half of the seventies and papers produced by the Department were cited at international women’s conferences.” Back when university was still free, the Liberal Fraser government tried twice to introduce fees for higher education, first in 1976 and then again in 1981\. Both times it was defeated by national student union campaigns that brought thousands of students into the streets. In the end, it was the Hawke Labor government that got the better of free education in 1986, introducing a $250 “administrative fee” that paved the way for the system we have today. But Hawke met serious resistance, including a coordinated boycott of the new student fees. Thousands of students across the country refused to pay and risked being unenrolled. Their capacity to move students into militant action and beat back government attacks made the student unions major targets of conservative lawfare campaigns aimed at destroying them as a political force. Some of the Liberal Party’s most odious creatures—like Tony Abbott, who was president of the University of Sydney student union in 1979—cut their political teeth in these battles. Young Liberals aren’t highly active in student unions these days, probably in part because, whenever more than two Young Liberals are put together in a room, [misogyny happens](https://www.canberratimes.com.au/video/breaking/x98ehm0/liberal-students-rip-up-red-zone-rape-report-at-university-of-sydney/?ref=redflag.org.au). But in the 1970s and ’80s, Liberal students led major campaigns against unions taking left-wing political stances. Sometimes the Liberals formed an alliance with right-wing Labor students. Catholic crusader Tony Abbott complained in a student publication: “When AUS champions the women’s movement; homosexual liberation; the anti-Uranium campaign and anti-Kerr \[the governor-general who sacked Whitlam\] campaign, it is moving beyond the scope of unionism.” But among those who did support the existence of student unions—from small-l liberals to Labor students to revolutionary socialists—there were very different ideas about how unions should operate. Socialists and radicals thought the unions’ strength lay in their ability to mobilise students to fight to improve their lot and combat oppression and injustice. It was under radical control that the AUS took up its call for a socialist Australia. Moderates in the union argued that the focus should be on welfare provision and student services. This was considered the best way to keep university management on side. Polite advocacy on behalf of students behind closed doors was preferable to disruptive protest. For many of these moderates, the union was their gateway to a political career, especially to high office inside the Labor Party. Labor is and has long been the dominant force in student union politics. Anthony Albanese got his start at the University of Sydney. His defence minister, Richard Marles, was the general secretary of the National Union of Students in 1989\. The 1983 Australian Union of Students president was a Melbourne University student named Julia Gillard. **Student unions today** The decline of militant student unionism has tracked with the broader decline of radical politics and class struggle in Australia. The “service provision” model of student unionism has come to dominate—and with it, a generation of student union leaders for whom the unions are about beers, barbecues and building their careers. This dovetails with a vision of student unions as partners of the corporate executives who run our universities, even as they push through major cuts to jobs and courses. For example, the student-led [No Cuts at ANU campaign](https://redflag.org.au/article/fighting-course-cuts-at-anu) fighting against massive attacks at the Australian National University has received virtually no support from the ANU student union, ANUSA. The union accepted management’s dubious justifications for $250 million in cuts and, rather than fight, instead argued that the union should consult with management on how to minimise the impact of the cuts on students’ mental health. So it’s little wonder that most students today don’t vote in student union elections. Years of moderate and “apolitical” student unionism have lowered expectations so much that barely anyone expects much from their student representatives anyway. This situation ultimately benefits moderate student union groups, who are much more comfortable in elections fought out through social networks and backroom deals rather than open political debate. And while they often deliberately cultivate an “apolitical” image, student unions, like the ANUSA and many others, are still dominated by the Labor Party machine. Most unions are run by one faction or another of the ALP, particularly the right-wing Student Unity faction, which opposes free education and has an appalling record of reactionary political positions. The student unions are a perfect training ground for [aspiring ALP operators](https://redflag.org.au/node/7263) to learn the grimy arts of factional warfare and using people to gain power. It’s hardly the sort of environment that might attract young left-wing students who want to fight the system. Labor’s national dominance is also reflected in its control of the National Union of Students. This year, during the federal election, the NUS ran a barely concealed (and barely noticed) “vote Labor” campaign, telling students to “put the Liberals last”. The ALP machine’s control over the unions puts it well to the right of many students, a large proportion of whom vote for the Greens, a party that supports free education and other progressive policies, such as climate change and Palestine. The history of student unionism in Australia proves that this terrible state of affairs can be turned around. The state of the world today demands it. University students are a bigger chunk of the population than we ever have been—there are around 1.6 million of us in the country. We need student unions that can turn us into a force to be reckoned with and revive the best traditions of student activism: fighting against war, oppression and the corporatisation of our universities. ### Socialist Alternative’s approach to student unions URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/socialist-alternatives-approach-to-student-unions/ Last updated: 2025-09-24T02:33:29.000Z Take a stroll through the halls of a campus student union office and you’ll likely find it half empty. And you’re much more likely to see an elected student union representative handing out a free breakfast once a week than you are to see them organising a political campaign. It’s no surprise then that socialists are sometimes asked why we would bother with student unions at all. Despite their current state, student unions have the potential to foster campus activism, give important leadership to students on political questions and even sometimes to make an impact on Australian politics overall. The first reason for this is students themselves. They are a critical social group drawn together on campuses and encouraged to learn about the world, interrogate the ideas of the system, and develop their capacity for critical thought. While this doesn’t ordinarily result in students being politically active, in exceptional times a minority can explode into protest activity. Every significant social movement of the modern era has featured student activism—catalysing struggle in other social groups, leading youthful, militant and passionate demonstrations, and planting the flag for a different sort of society. In Australia, student unions are at the heart of student politics and can be key to effective student campaigns. Campus-based unions, and the National Union of Students (NUS), have the authority to call demonstrations, the bank accounts to finance the necessities of activism and the affiliate structures and communication networks that can reach and influence tens of thousands of students. They also draw together the different currents of student political thought and are often the centre of debates. Those student factions, some of which are intimately linked to Australia’s main political parties, have been the training ground for generations of political activists, both in the trade union movement and in federal and state politics. So any serious socialist organisation needs a foothold on campuses and a presence in the political institutions of campus life if it has any chance of being part of the “real world” of Australian political life. Over the last decade or so, the student unions, like the trade unions, have atrophied due to a declining activist culture, legal attacks and the approach taken by the mostly ALP-aligned representatives in the unions’ leadership positions. For the most part, the current student union leaders find various excuses to do little—citing the fact that many students are apathetic or that student unions rely on university administrations for continued access to funding. Campaigning against university management or encouraging student activism, it is said, would imperil the unions. So, under the leadership of these students, our unions mostly confine themselves to social events and food pantries dressed up as “mutual aid”. University administrators are currently on a national spree of course and staff cuts and a campaign to suppress campus Palestine solidarity activism. Limiting the actions of student unions to what these managers consider acceptable—as has happened at the University of Melbourne, where the student union has been reluctant to stand consistently for Palestine, or at Western Sydney University, where the student union is voluntarily cutting its activist positions in an effort to safeguard its funding—is a road to nowhere. The socialist approach is different. While we know we can’t simply wish a radical campus culture into being, we also know that if student unions took a lead on social justice issues, we could start to rebuild a more left-wing campus culture. Socialist students fight for their unions to take a stand on social issues, even if they are controversial, because doing so helps to win wider layers of students to a particular cause and gives them opportunities to become activists themselves. Student unionism is also important for building the ranks of the revolutionary left. Students have always played a substantial role in revolutionary socialist organisations. Student unions can organise campaigns that draw more people into political activity and provide opportunities for debate with other political forces. Student revolutionaries have to both debate and work alongside students from Labor’s left and right factions, the Greens and coalitions of independents. This means gaining experiences that are invaluable for members of a socialist organisation—like running election campaigns, learning when to compromise or hold firm and dealing with obstructionist bureaucracies. **Student politics** Socialist Alternative is the largest and most active left political group in Australian student politics. Our organisation has maintained a consistent presence in the student unions for more than twenty years. Currently, we have more than 30 elected student union representatives across the country. There are Socialist Alternative clubs at twenty campuses, which has allowed us to become the second most powerful faction in the National Union of Students, after the Labor right. Over the last five years we have polled 21-29 percent of the NUS delegate positions elected on campuses around the country. This year, our members hold the NUS Education, LGBTQI+ and Vocational Education office bearer positions. Socialist Alternative has a long history of pushing support for Palestine within the student unions. While student unionists from both Labor right and left have taken sponsored trips to Israel almost every year, our members have prevented the national union from adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and spent years arguing to the other student political factions that our default position should be a support for freedom of speech and democratic rights on campuses. This year, through the NUS Education Office, we have organised an inquiry into censorship of Palestine supporters on the campuses, and a national student referendum in which more than 5,000 students voted in support of Palestine. The latter engaged many students in the Palestine solidarity campaign for the first time, with some becoming ongoing campaign activists. For the last two years of the genocide, we have fought to drag our union into action. We have organised several student strikes for Palestine, in which thousands of university students have walked out of class for Gaza. In 2009, we established Students for Palestine, an activist campaign group. Last year, working with others in SFP, we organised student general meetings to vote on subjects like university ties to weapons companies and support for sanctions against Israel. These were the largest on-campus events for Palestine in Australia’s history, sometimes the largest meeting on any topic since the 1970s. In many places, the motions passed were required to become official student union policy. We faced significant opposition from others in the unions. At Melbourne University, student unionists from other factions attempted to prevent the meeting by calling in a law firm. The meeting went ahead only after socialists made it clear that it would happen with or without the union. At Adelaide University, the hard-right international student faction running the union attempted to prevent the meeting by refusing to convene the union council, where the forms to call an SGM must be approved. Socialist Alternative members scoured the constitution and found they could go over the heads of the union—as long as they found 300 students to support their efforts. They did, and held Adelaide University’s largest student meeting in years. In May 2024, with SFP, we brought the Gaza solidarity encampment movement to Australian campuses. After initiating the campaign at Sydney University, we organised solidarity encampments at Monash, RMIT, Latrobe, Deakin, Adelaide, Curtin, Wollongong and the University of Queensland. We refused to allow the inaction of our student union leaders to hold us back. We also know that one of the most basic functions of student unions ought to be a defence of their members. Ten years ago, when a Liberal government attempted to raise the cost of degrees, the student movement, led by a Socialist Alternative NUS education officer, used the infrastructure of the unions to roll out a national campaign of protest. While doing so was not appreciated by the government or university managements, the campaign contributed to the defeat of the planned fee hikes, drew many students into union politics and raised the profile of the student unions to a height not equalled since. We have led too many other campaigns to note in one article. But we do so because we know that activist, left-wing student unions can stop right-wing attacks, draw students into campaigns, build a culture of protest and inspire other social groups. However, this won’t happen if the careerism and conservatism currently dominant in the leadership of student unions go unchallenged. Someone needs to go in to bat for activism, social justice and a combative approach to the government and university managements that are more interested in making money and serving power than delivering a quality education. This is why socialists contest student elections, attend student union meetings, fight to win positions in the national union and organise against conservative union bureaucrats. ### Fighting the far right on campus: a small victory from the US in 1992 URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/fighting-the-far-right-on-campus-a-small-victory-from-the-us-in-1992/ Last updated: 2025-09-24T02:21:35.000Z The death of Charlie Kirk has made me think about the growth of the right-wing presence on US campuses during the last three decades. The student right during these years morphed from Ronald Reagan boosters into the neo-Fascist [Christian nationalists](https://threewayfight.org/what-charlie-kirks-life-and-death-can-tell-us-about-the-u-s-right-in-the-age-of-trump/?fbclid=IwY2xjawM4ESNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHu8PqzTEntFEztYxLQuEmyv4smjV33BW%5FJmQofQ3W6Q8P5lUO81PBwPWMsvq%5Faem%5Fl9157vR0G7XvFPGl73RotA&ref=redflag.org.au) of Turning Point USA. Yet one of the major reasons for the success of Charlie Kirk and his roadshow was the weakness of the campus left. Another was the financial and political backing from the [rich and powerful](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/turning-point-usa-donations-surged-pandemic-rcna37143?ref=redflag.org.au) from its very founding, despite its origin mythology of starting out in Kirk’s family’s garage. Scanning through many articles documenting the growth of Kirk’s “nonprofit” foundation during the past decade is like watching a well-capitalised media start-up with aspirations to become a global player. Turning Point’s [IRS tax return](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800835023/202501359349304810/full?ref=redflag.org.au) reported, for example, that it had revenues over $86 million in 2024\. Kirk received a salary of over $285,000 and another $99,000 in compensation. Not huge in corporate terms. But, for student politics, this was unprecedented. This [gushy video tour](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=WORO-OgThig&ref=redflag.org.au) of Turning Point’s headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2019 gives an idea of the burgeoning confidence of Kirk and his entourage. **The post-sixties campus** Whether you date the decline of the campus left in the waning years of the Vietnam War or in the decade that followed, when the New Left turned to the working class, it was pretty clear by the late 1970s and early 1980s that the right had begun to build a significant presence on college campuses. Not everywhere at once, of course, it was a herky-jerky process. The Republican Party, however, took building their campus operations far more seriously than the Democrats, who, from my perspective, appeared virtually non-existent, disorganised and had little political appeal. The Republicans drew many of their future leading cadres from battles within the College Republicans and against the student left, liberal faculty members, and administrators. Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, for example, future Republican presidential campaign managers and advisers, first cut their teeth in [College Republican politics](https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/05/us/man-in-the-news-fierce-ambition-karl-rove.html?ref=redflag.org.au) in the 1970s. On campuses previously known for their liberalism and radicalism, typical of the media coverage of the time was a *New York Times* article from 1984, “Students Leaning to the Right”: “In his freshman year at Princeton University, Peter Heinecke joined a campus organization so low key that hardly anyone knew it existed. It was the Princeton University College Republicans. ‘It was pretty much a dead thing’, Mr. Heinecke recalled. So much so, in fact, that nobody even bothered to renew the club’s registration with the Dean’s Office. That was last year. “This year, in the flush of President Reagan’s re-election victory, the College Republicans is very much alive. Membership has grown from a mere handful of students a year ago to 200, with double that on the mailing list. As unusual as the conservative trend might seem at Princeton—a traditionally liberal school—it is hardly an isolated example. On campuses across the nation, students are increasingly becoming aligned with the Republican Party.” The College Republicans were joined in their efforts by local initiatives that gained a national following, such as the [*Dartmouth Review*](https://dartreview.com/?ref=redflag.org.au), founded at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1980\. Anti-apartheid activists built [“shanty towns”](https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/journeys.dartmouth.edu/dist/3/834/files/2016/05/DivestmentProtests-MandelaHall-1985.jpg?ref=redflag.org.au) on the Dartmouth campus to highlight the racial oppression and poverty of the Black majority in South Africa in 1986\. Calling themselves the Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival*,* twelve Dartmouth students—ten of whom were on the staff of the *Dartmouth Review—*attacked and destroyed the shanties with sledgehammers on Martin Luther King Day. [According](https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/13/us/at-dartmouth-the-right-borrows-the-protest-mantle-of-the-left.html?ref=redflag.org.au) to an article in the *New York Times*: “But the shanty episode is only the latest part of a long campaign by *The Review* against most of the moves the college has made in the last decade to show sensitivity to women, nonwhites and homosexuals. ‘There is freedom of speech here as long as you’re firmly left of center’, said Roland Reynolds, the editor of *The Review*. ‘It’s the idea that you can’t criticize people who happen to be black, who happen to be women.’ He described the crew that attacked the shanties as ‘the Bernhard Goetz of Dartmouth’.” Bernhard Goetz was the infamous New York City [“Subway gunman”](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771433/fear-and-fury-by-heather-ann-thompson/?ref=redflag.org.au) who shot four Black teenagers—and paralysed one of them—claiming they tried to rob him and he was defending himself. That a *Dartmouth Review* editor would openly identify with a racist vigilante, while its staff eagerly participated in a sledgehammer attack on anti-apartheid activists, speaks volumes about their racism and embrace of political violence against their opponents on the campus by 1986\. The *Dartmouth Review* had rich and powerful friends, including [Ronald Reagan](https://socialistworker.org/2015/12/08/the-crusade-against-political-correctness?ref=redflag.org.au). This was long before Charlie Kirk was around. In the early 1990s, the campus far right received a boost from then-President George H.W. Bush with his infamous attack on [“political correctness”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01kX1WGdJWc&ref=redflag.org.au)—a forerunner of the current attack on “woke”—during his commencement speech at the University of Michigan in May 1991\. Bush was not known for his emotional displays, but he clearly enjoyed giving the speech, buoyed by the support of many students in the audience. Bush’s attack was enthusiastically taken up by the [mass media and intellectual pundits](https://socialistworker.org/2015/12/08/the-crusade-against-political-correctness?ref=redflag.org.au) with the broad support of the Republican establishment and a correspondingly weak response from the Democrats and most college and university administrators. I was a member of the [International Socialist Organization](https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/international-socialism-is-my-north-star-c3730df819ba?ref=redflag.org.au) at the time, and we were one of the few socialist organisations that tried to build on a handful of college campuses despite our small size. We immediately recognised the threat that Bush’s attack on “political correctness” posed to the small, very limited gains made by African-Americans and other minorities, women and working-class students, who had suffered major setbacks during the two terms of Reagan’s presidency. Bush’s election triumph in 1988 was viewed by many of us as Reagan’s third term. The ISO [published a pamphlet](https://archive.org/details/whats-behind-the-attck-on-politically-correct), *What’s Behind the Attack on Politically Correct?*, by Lance Selfa and Alan Mass. They wrote in the introduction: “No sooner had President Bush announced the end of the war against Iraq than he declared a new war at home. The battle wasn’t to be fought with weapons, but with idea. Its armies would be made up of right-wing ideologues, media pundits, university faculty, and students, not soldiers.” The ISO was much better prepared to deal with this new witch hunt than many groups in the US left that had little to no campus presence. Even though we had a tiny number of members nationally in early 1990 (possibly 200), we bolstered our presence during the buildup to and war against Iraq during the latter half of 1990 and early 1991\. We launched the National Network of Campuses Against the War, though short-lived, and we were able to project ourselves beyond a handful of campuses. **Under the perfect sun** In 1992, I was living in San Diego, California. An old friend and comrade, Phil, and I were trying to build a branch in a city that hadn’t had a previous branch of the ISO. I know that there were more than a few people who thought that our effort was more like a long vacation. I saw it as a fun adventure. San Diego had a reputation for being a [major tourist destination](https://archive.org/details/underperfectsuns00davi/page/n14/mode/1up?view=theater) and very conservative. Our small ISO branch was largely active at the University of California at San Diego campus located in La Jolla, a rich, scenic seaside enclave. The campus felt more like a resort. Our campus club was called the International Socialist Club. But San Diego had a radical tradition, despite being a Navy town with major Marine Corps bases nearby and having a large Christian evangelical presence. Socialist writer, novelist and historian Dan LaBotz [recalled](https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/the-intellectual-autobiography-of-an-american-leftist/?ref=redflag.org.au): “I finished high school in 1963, went to Southwestern Community College in Chula Vista, then to San Diego State, graduating in 1968, and a year later went to the University of California at San Diego where I studied literature with [Fredric Jameson](https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/fredric-r-jameson-1934-2024/?ref=redflag.org.au). I also sat in on [Herbert Marcuse’s](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/?ref=redflag.org.au) undergraduate lectures on Marx and, on one occasion, convinced him to lead a discussion of the Paris Commune for the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, of which I was a member. I helped to form a small IS chapter that engaged in strike support. Already a supporter of the United Farm Workers then organizing agricultural workers in California, we joined boycott picket lines at grocery stores, and also participated in strike support at a tomato ranch. We also supported a Greyhound Bus lines drivers’ strike.” UCSD did have some radical legacy, including the *New Indicator* newspaper and its “Disorientation Manual”, a radical introduction to the campus, and a weekly film series with a political discussion after. Within the city limits, San Diego was pretty much like any other big American city, but it was surrounded by suburbs that were a bastion of the Christian right, replete with a [Creation and Earth Science Museum](https://creationsd.org/?ref=redflag.org.au). I remember my first night in the city—I was out jogging and paused to take a breath when a car stopped in front of me with a bumper sticker that proclaimed, “Rocks prove creation!” In the early 1990s, historic changes were beginning to reshape San Diego. The post-Cold War and post-Gulf War reorganisation and downsizing of the defence industry, along with Bush’s recession that hit the city and county hard, especially housing construction, sent the economy into near depression. In 1992, however, it was the [rebellion in Los Angeles](https://socialistworker.org/2011/08/19/no-justice-no-peace?ref=redflag.org.au), following the acquittal of three of the four police officers in the assault on Rodney King in April, that was a lightning bolt that shook up campus politics at the very end of the Spring. President George H.W. Bush also faced a challenge from his right, first with fascist sympathiser Pat Buchanan in the Republican primaries, and then an independent presidential campaign with the strange character of Ross Perot. All of this took the swagger of the UCSD Republicans, who increasingly gave off the aura of a defeated army. But some of the others on the right saw an opportunity. Three weeks after the LA rebellion, hundreds of posters were plastered across campus, along with hundreds of invitations on cards placed at the cafeteria dining tables, inviting the campus community to a lecture sponsored by the Objectivist Study Group, the followers of [right-wing crackpot](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/garbage-and-gravitas/?ref=redflag.org.au) Ayn Rand. The speaker was George Reisman, an economics professor at Pepperdine University and a well-known figure among followers of Ayn Rand. The title of his lecture was “Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism”. Reisman wanted to target ethnic studies at UCSD, which he denigrated as “worshipping your savage ancestors”. He had a long involvement in far-right politics stretching back to the mid-1950s. At a banquet dinner honouring Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man and mentor to Donald Trump, who was forced to resign from his committee assignments because of the swing public opinion against McCarthy, *Time* magazine [reported](https://time.com/archive/6869342/opinion-one-enchanted-evening/?ref=redflag.org.au): “The noise rose several decibels when 17-year-old Columbia University Sophomore George Reisman of Students for America called Cohn the ‘American Dreyfus’ and barked: ‘Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy will be redeemed when the people have taken back their government from the criminal alliance of Communists, Socialists, New Dealers and the Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans.’” Four decades later, he was at UCSD to attack Black and Latino students, faculty and administrators. Reisman was one of the direct connections between the old and new McCarthyism. The UCSD Department of Ethnic Studies at that time was two years old. Walking across campus that day, I saw many people reading the posters but not knowing quite what to make of them. Was this some weird prank? The Objectivists were a campus club, but not known for such provocative behaviour; they were dismissed as a small group of marginal weirdos with little cache. This meeting had all the hallmarks of an outside and well-funded operation. Our small ISO kicked into high gear. We talked to everyone and every organisation on campus that we needed to picket the meeting and fill the hall to challenge whatever vile bigotries were going to be spewed out that night. Despite our hard work, we weren’t sure how many people were going to turn out. The night of 13 May, we began our picket with fifteen to twenty people outside the lecture hall. Phil made one of his class flyers, “Fight Racism. Defend Multiculturalism!” It appeared to us that most of the crowd going into the lecture hall was from off campus; they gave off the vibe of being rich weirdos from La Jolla. Reisman and his coterie were incensed that we were protesting. They came out of the hall to stare at us and shake their heads. The hatred in his eyes was incredible. He went back into the hall, and then we came in. Our numbers grew, but at the beginning of the lecture we were outnumbered about two to one. There were about 50 of us and a hundred of them. The chair of the meeting began by reminding us that this lecture was to be copyrighted and not to be quoted without permission. There was a burst of laughter from our section of the audience. Reisman was not pleased. Right away, he denounced us as “commissars” who stifled “free speech”. By the time Reisman’s lecture began, our supporters in the audience were about equal in number with the Objectivists. Reisman’s speech, with his repetitive drumbeat of the phrases “savage ancestors” and “western civilisation”, along with his sneering tone, enraged the audience. People exploded. “Don’t call my ancestors savages!”, Reisman snapped back, “Who the hell are you? Shut up!”, according to the *San Diego Union-Tribune*. A Gulf War veteran, who wore a gas mask and biochemical gear, rose every time Reisman said “western civilisation”, holding a poster of a slave ship over his head and turning to the audience. He later told me an older woman kept punching him in the back of the head the entire meeting. It was the only campus protest where I thought a fight would break out because people were so enraged by the provocative racism of the speaker. The meeting got so rowdy that the campus police were called, and slowly the meeting dispersed. The Objectivists were enraged but defeated. Darlene Price, the president of the OSG, told the *San Diego Union-Tribune*, “Everything we put into that meeting was destroyed. We received nothing”. Phil, who was also the faculty advisor to the International Socialist Club, told the disciplinary board: “When he \[Reisman\] mentioned savages, he was motioning toward the Black and Latino areas of the audience”. Despite their best efforts to get us kicked off campus and fine us, we prevailed in the disciplinary hearing. Looking back three decades at the events that night, I see that all of the vile politics of Charlie Kirk were present then, and what was needed was the financial backing and political hustle to turn into a nationwide threat to us all. I also look back on it and think it shows that we can beat them. Joe Allen is the author of [*Teamsterland: Reports on America’s Most Iconic Union*](https://authors.tertulia.com/allenojoe-draftv4iskv/books/teamsterland-reports-on-america-s-most-iconic-union-reports-allen-o-joe/B0FLDHKX48?ref=redflag.org.au) and [*The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS*](https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1441-the-package-king?ref=redflag.org.au). He lives in Chicago. ### No more job cuts, but the fight continues at ANU URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/no-more-job-cuts-but-the-fight-continues-at-anu/ Last updated: 2025-09-18T20:10:24.000Z The Interim vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, Rebekah Brown, has announced that there will be no more job cuts as part of sweeping restructures that began in 2024. This comes as a relief to the remaining 105 staff whose positions were slated to be cut under the proposal to “Renew ANU”. The announcement, made in an all-staff town hall meeting on Thursday, is a testament to the sustained pressure by members of the National Tertiary Education Union and students involved in the “No Cuts at ANU” campaign. It follows the resignation of the former vice-chancellor, Genevieve Bell, last week. The cuts have left no part of the university unscathed. Renew ANU aimed to slash $250 million in spending across the university, including $150 million on salaries. But five areas still face major overhauls, including the College of Arts and Social Sciences and the College of Science and Medicine. These include substantial cuts to the world-renowned School of Music, which would end the teaching of performance and composition. According to the latest figures from the union, nearly 1,100 staff have been forced out since last year. Academics who relocated to Canberra for their dream jobs have found themselves competing with their colleagues for a smaller number of positions in *Hunger Games*\-like spill and fill processes. In backing down from further job cuts, Rebekah Brown confirmed that they are no longer needed for the ANU to meet its “savings” target. This is partly due to the university’s voluntary redundancy scheme. Touted as a win by the union, the scheme allowed the university to cut jobs on the cheap. Those expressing interest in it have fewer entitlements than those who are made redundant and must have their application approved by senior management. If their position is deemed necessary, it will be rejected. The fact that 175 staff have taken a voluntary separation package rather than wait to be made redundant speaks to the depth of resentment towards the ANU and the desire by many to leave. The cuts have generated significant opposition from staff, students and the wider Canberra community. More than 2,000 people have signed a petition calling on the ANU Council to stop the cuts and terminate the employment of the chancellor, Julie Bishop (and the now departed Genevieve Bell). This follows staff resoundingly rejecting a proposal to forgo their scheduled pay rise in December last year, and more than 800 supporting a motion of no confidence in the chancellor and vice-chancellor earlier this year. Students involved in the No Cuts campaign have protested and organised forums against the cuts, including a Special General Meeting of the Australian National University Students’ Association earlier this week. The meeting voted to sack Julie Bishop, reverse Renew ANU, open the ANU’s financial books and fully fund free education. Although many are understandably celebrating the end of Bell’s reign and the wave of job cuts, there is no indication that the restructures will be completely scrapped. In fact, Brown was clear in her town hall address that she intends to “complete the Renew ANU strategy”, including the decision not to embed performance into the curriculum of the new Bachelor of Music. This comes as no surprise. As the former provost, Brown, like Bishop, is part of the same management team overseeing the cuts. For her part, Bishop remains chancellor despite allegations in a Senate enquiry that she bullied an academic on ANU Council to “near suicide”. Forcing a widely hated vice-chancellor to resign in disgrace and ending forced redundancies should give hope and confidence to those facing similar attacks at universities around the country. While it remains to be seen exactly how much of the original plan to disestablish, amalgamate and centralise various parts of the ANU will be implemented, the fight for a university that puts staff and students before profit continues. ### How ANU students sacked Genevieve Bell URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/how-anu-students-sacked-genevieve-bell/ Last updated: 2025-09-18T20:06:16.000Z Genevieve Bell has resigned as vice-chancellor of the Australian National University. The ex-Intel executive, who we now know wasn’t as “ex” as advertised, quietly remaining on Intel’s payroll while raking in a hefty $1.1 million salary, has been hailed in the *New York Times* as an “oracle with magical predictive powers”. But Bell didn’t predict the months-long revolt of students and staff that made her position untenable. She leaves behind a legacy of cuts and arrogance that ignited one of the biggest campus campaigns in ANU’s history. Under Bell’s “Renew ANU” restructure, courses were gutted, staff were sacked, and students’ education was trashed. At the School of Music, one-on-one lessons and performance subjects, the very core of the program, were axed. Across the university, workloads were piled higher, departments stripped back and core subjects binned. The justification? An alleged $250 million operating deficit. But ANU’s own 2025 financial report recorded a healthy surplus. In other words, it was a political choice: sacrifice staff jobs and student education for “financial sustainability”. Students and staff refused to accept it. In July, 500 rallied outside the Chancellery demanding Bell and Chancellor Julie Bishop be sacked, and the cuts reversed. Music students staged an extraordinary 24-hour protest performance. Staff held a historic no-confidence vote, with overwhelming majorities declaring they had no faith in Bell or Bishop’s leadership. At the centre of the fight has been No Cuts at ANU, a student campaign led by members of Socialist Alternative. From the start, No Cuts argued that management is not on our side, that compromise is a dead end and that only mass protest could win. This combative approach starkly contrasted with the ANU Student Association (ANUSA). Rather than calling for Bell’s head, ANUSA insisted that we treat her as a “worker” and explore “constructive” ways to manage the cuts. In practice, this meant bowing to management and refusing to harness student anger. This is precisely the approach that has let decades of attacks on universities go unchallenged. The Bell saga illuminates the transformation of universities. For decades, governments have slashed public funding, forcing universities to operate as corporate machines. Students are customers, workers are exploited, and executives are recruited straight from the boardrooms of business and politics, hence Bell and Bishop. These executives don’t share a common interest with us. They exist to make the university profitable, no matter what the cost to education. That’s why Bell could spend more than $1 million cracking down on Palestine solidarity activism while crying poor and sacking staff. The lesson is clear. We cannot appeal to the moral virtue of executives like Bell. Petitioning or pleading with them to “listen” is futile. Trying to meet them on “their level” with arguments about profitability and the university’s prestige only capitulates to their managerial logic. Some in ANUSA even argued that calling for Bell’s sacking might provoke the university to defund the student union. But if management tried that, it would only have opened a bigger fight—one we could have won with protests and the continued involvement of staff. The worst mistake would have been to preemptively surrender. Bell’s resignation is a victory for everyone who rallied, protested and refused to back down. But the cuts remain. The fight now is to stop Renew ANU in its tracks, reverse the existing course cuts, and drive Julie Bishop out alongside Bell. ANU students have shown the way: mass, uncompromising action works. If we keep building, if we refuse to compromise, we can win. And our struggle can inspire students elsewhere to take on the corporate executives who are gutting higher education. ### Countering the far-right threat: a fight on all fronts URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/countering-the-far-right-threat-a-fight-on-all-fronts/ Last updated: 2025-09-14T04:03:34.000Z Far-right and outright fascist politics are on the rise across the West. Australia isn’t immune. The recent spate of far-right protests here is a wake-up call. The numbers taking to the streets as part of the “March for Australia” and subsequent mobilisations have been relatively small. Nevertheless, the fact that tens of thousands of people were prepared to join open neo-Nazis in what, as Omar Hassan argued in [a recent article for *Red Flag*](https://redflag.org.au/article/when-fascists-march-the-left-must-get-organised), amounted to “a national day of racism and bigotry” is significant. These kinds of racist rallies need to be countered, wherever possible, by mass, united marches of anti-racists. Our effort to resist the rise of the far right can’t stop there, though. Just as concerning as the far-right street marches has been the high vote for far-right parties in Australian elections in recent years. Mick Armstrong analysed the far-right vote in this year’s federal election for *Red Flag* in June, finding that far-right outfits polled almost 2 million votes in the Senate nationwide. Voting for a more racist Australia isn’t as politically significant as demonstrating for it. However, these numbers indicate that the supply of potential recruits to movements and organisations on the far-right fringe is far from being exhausted. But viewing things only in terms of protest politics—of far-right mobilisations on the streets and counter-mobilisations by the left—fails to grasp the issue at its root. Racism and fascism are the deadly fruits of the poisonous social and economic conditions imposed on humanity by capitalism. And the fight against them must also, at its core, be a fight against the system as a whole. Alongside challenging the individual manifestations of far-right and fascist politics like the “March for Australia”, the left must also put forward a vision of a better and fairer society and of the means of fighting for and winning it. Not in the expectation that this will convince the kinds of hard-core racists who joined the marches on 31 August, but rather to give hope and purpose to the vastly bigger layer of working-class people who oppose racism and the far right (and any number of the other barbarisms of capitalism today, for example the genocide in Gaza), but who are in many cases so alienated from political life and from its mainstream representatives that they feel there’s no point in trying to do anything about it. It’s because of this widespread disengagement and political passivity that racists can expect, in many contexts, to spread their poison with little or no resistance. Historically, in times when a broader layer of working-class people was politically conscious and organised, it was very different: racists could expect to be challenged whenever they raised their heads, and this provided a degree of immunity to their ideas among the mass of more apolitical workers. How can today’s left get its message of anger, hope and resistance across to the currently sympathetic, but largely passive layer of workers required to recreate this scenario? How can we convince them that they have a part to play in heading off the threat from the far right and ensuring Australia doesn’t follow the same path as countries like the US, Britain and Germany, where fascists are, if not actually in power already, certainly knocking on the door? A revival of socialist politics and organisation is key. We can see from examples overseas: we can’t depend on so-called centre-left political parties like the British Labour Party or the US Democrats to push the far right back. It’s the same with the Labor Party here. Albanese and Co.’s commitment to the status quo of capitalism and propensity to adopt elements of far-right political agendas as their own (for example, the ongoing brutality of their treatment of refugees) only adds fuel to the fire. Some people who regard themselves as left wing complain about socialists supposedly “coopting” movements by selling newspapers and attempting to talk to and recruit people at rallies and other left-wing political events (never mind the fact that in many cases, the rallies and events have been organised in large part by the same socialists being accused of doing the coopting). But it’s precisely by building the ranks of organised socialists in Australia that we can counter the growth of the far right. We need *more* distribution of socialist publications, *more* meetings and political education and *more* recruitment to socialist organisations. We need to train new layers of hundreds, and ultimately thousands and tens of thousands, to go out into society and fight the far right and fascism on all fronts. In addition to countering them on the streets, we need to combat their ideas in our workplaces, schools, universities and local communities. And we need to ensure they don’t go unchallenged when they run in elections. The more effectively we can do this, the more it will encourage disengaged people to get involved, and the more powerful our movement will become. Socialist Alternative members are involved in this struggle on every front. Our work as part of Victorian Socialists, and more recently the new socialist parties being formed in every Australian state and territory, is an example. In the federal election earlier this year, our members collectively spent thousands of hours knocking on doors and talking to voters in outer suburban areas like Thomastown in Melbourne’s northern suburbs—areas where the combination of the cost-of-living crisis and the failure to fund the new infrastructure and services required for a growing population were expected to play into the hands of the right. The far right did, indeed, do well in these areas. In the electorate of Scullin (which incorporates suburbs like Thomastown, Lalor and Epping), the combined vote of parties to the right of the Liberals was 18.7 percent. At the same time, though, Victorian Socialists candidate Omar Hassan got 6.5 percent, a jump of 3.7 percent from the party’s 2022 Scullin result, despite the party only very recently establishing itself as a presence in the area. It might not seem like much, but every conversation we had that convinced someone to vote for and identify with the socialists rather than the parties of the status quo or the far-right fringe was a small win. These kinds of conversations—through which we’re able to point out that it’s not migrants but the capitalist class and their political servants who are responsible for high rents, shitty wages and working conditions, or the chronic underfunding of local infrastructure and services—are among the fundamental building blocks of a new, healthier, political context. Suburbs like Thomastown—the heartlands of Melbourne and Australia’s multi-ethnic working class—should be bastions of anti-fascist resistance. The more socialists can gain a foothold in these areas, not only in elections, but in the day-to-day life of the community, the more this latent potential could be realised. Imagine if every time the fascists raised their heads, workers from areas like this joined counter-protests, and if at election time the racist filth from parties like One Nation were treated with the anger and contempt they deserve. That’s the kind of all-encompassing movement against the far right and fascism that we aim to build: one that can not only push back and defeat the racists, but which can lay the basis for a struggle to overturn the entire poisonous system of capitalism that’s rapidly destroying our humanity and our world. ### The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-martyrdom-of-charlie-kirk/ Last updated: 2026-02-09T07:00:09.000Z Charlie Kirk, a Christian nationalist organiser assassinated last week at a university in the United States, was an accomplished practitioner of political intimidation. The primary strategy of his far-right group Turning Point USA, [in the estimation of the Southern Poverty Law Centre](https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/turning-point-usa-case-study-hard-right-2024?ref=redflag.org.au), is “to manufacture rage and mobilize support to revive and maintain a white-dominated, male supremacist, Christian social order”. Kirk called for a “soft civil war” to deport 10 million migrants from US cities as part of a broader plan for a far-right takeover of the country’s institutions. Two years ago, [he told followers of his eponymous show](https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-buy-weapons-buy-ammo-if-you-go-public-place-bring-gun-you?ref=redflag.org.au): “You have a government that hates you. You have a traitor as the president. Buy weapons—I keep on saying that. Buy weapons, buy ammo. If you go into a public place, bring a gun with you”. It is a testament to the contemporary political power of the far right and its billionaire backers—to its grip over sections of the media, and its increasing role in, or potential to form government across, the Western world—that this odious specimen has garnered thoughts and prayers from across the political spectrum while the children of Gaza, starved and murdered daily, get nothing but more death and destruction. Indeed, and unsurprisingly, the lamentations have come thick and fast from the establishment figures who have backed Israel’s genocide most forcefully. “We must all be free to debate openly and freely without fear”, British Prime Minister Kier Starmer wrote on X in the wake of Kirk’s murder. This from a man whose government is charging hundreds with terrorism offences for voicing support for Palestine solidarity activists. The ground game of Kirk’s organising operations was on the campuses. While the political right endlessly moaned about an epidemic of “cancel culture” making conservatives unsafe within the university system, Kirk astutely took advantage of the prevailing atmosphere of free expression to build hundreds of chapters of his far-right organisation at those very institutions. In doing so, he cultivated an image as a champion of free speech. But, like most on the political right, his advocacy in this area was deeply dishonest and cynical. While trading on his purported bona fides as a “free speech warrior”, [Kirk established public watchlists](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/us/professor-watchlist-is-seen-as-threat-to-academic-freedom.html?ref=redflag.org.au) targeting progressive academics and schoolteachers as part of his organisation’s broader project to intimidate and to drive the political left and progressive liberals from the country’s education system. As part of its attempted march through the institutions, Turning Point funded the Reverend John Amanchukwu, a Bible-bashing conspiracist, on a cross-country tour to intimidate school administrators into removing library books that don’t align with reactionary Christian fundamentalism. PEN America has documented nearly [16,000 book bans in public schools](https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025?ref=redflag.org.au) across the country since 2021, primarily because of right-wing harassment of school boards. So much for defending the free exchange of ideas. As the political establishment manufactured the fake “campus antisemitism crisis” in the aftermath of the 7 October attacks in Israel, throwing the entire weight of university and political institutions against the Palestine solidarity movement, scarcely a word was uttered against Kirk’s agitation. Yet, unlike the Palestine solidarity movement, Kirk’s politics were utterly antisemitic—so much so that even the conservative movement [was getting queasy about him](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/us/politics/charlie-kirk-rnc-antisemitism.html?ref=redflag.org.au). As *New York Times* columnists [Ashley Ahn and Maxine Joselow note](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/us/charlie-kirk-views-guns-gender-climate.html?ref=redflag.org.au): “Kirk ... accused Jewish philanthropists of fomenting anti-whiteness by supporting liberal antiracism causes like the Black Lives Matter movement. ‘The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country’, he said on his show in 2023\. Not long after, he accused Jews of controlling ‘not just the colleges—it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it’.” Yet, as with other bigots and conspiracy-mongers, the Zionist movement overlooked such crudities because of this protagonist’s fervent support for the Jewish ethnostate, its genocidal war and, presumably, the coming Armageddon—something that Kirk believed children *should* read all about. Open political intimidation has become part and parcel of government under the reign of President Trump and the MAGA movement, in which Kirk was a leading figure. So it should come as no surprise that Kirk’s followers’ response to his assassination at the hands of a lone gunman has been to preach all-out war against the left and to launch what could end up being the [largest doxing operation in modern history](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/charlie-kirks-allies-warn-americans-mourn-him-properly-or-else-2025-09-13/?ref=redflag.org.au) against anyone who disparages (or states the facts about) the Turning Point founder. Such political intolerance and intimidation are entirely in keeping with his and the broader far right’s program and history. That contemporary progressive politics is just as populated with petty snitches motivated by a self-righteous and self-pitying sense of moral superiority doesn’t negate this reality. Speaking in 2007 after the death of another professional bigot, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, British essayist Christopher Hitchens quipped: “I think it’s a pity that there isn’t a hell for him to go to”. Had Kirk gone the way of the pastor and keeled over from his own bodily breakdown, perhaps we could leave it at that. But Charlie Kirk has been martyred. In a way, this death is quintessentially American; he will now join the ranks of Lincoln and Martin Luther King, among others. The assassin, by inserting himself into history and cutting short Kirk’s life, has likely made him a more powerful and enduring figure. There is only speculation about motives. But it would be ironic if the killer were driven by anti-fascism: a lone man with a gun delivering vigilante justice is the epitome of the machismo that dominates the far-right imagination. If this individualised viciousness has been appropriated in the service of “progress”, it shows only how desolate the left field has become in America. In the real world, this sort of political violence does nothing to challenge the machinery of American capitalism or to weaken its most fascistic backers. On the contrary, it gives the state a pretext for further repression and the forces of reaction a martyr to rally around. At a moment when [his presidency was flailing in disapproval](https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker?ref=redflag.org.au), Trump and his movement will not likely let the opportunity pass. ### Setback for far-right Milei and advance for left in Argentina URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/setback-for-far-right-milei-and-advance-for-left-in-argentina/ Last updated: 2025-09-14T03:57:23.000Z Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, suffered a setback in the elections of the province of Buenos Aires on 7 September. Milei’s La Libertad Avanza (LLA) won in just two of the eight electoral areas in Argentina’s most populous province, home to more than 17 million people or 40 percent of the entire Argentine electorate. With the national mid-term elections due to be held in late October, this was an important test for the government. Milei came to power in 2023, and immediately implemented a series of draconian anti-protest and anti-strike laws, combined with mass cuts to public spending, large public sector lay-offs and privatisations. During the Buenos Aires provincial election campaign, he promised his supporters, “We’re going to put the final nail in their coffin”, referring to the centrist Peronist opposition. But even Milei could not spin the result into something positive. On election night he struck a very different chord, saying “Without a doubt, on the political front, today we have suffered a clear defeat”. The major beneficiaries of this defeat are the Peronists, a coalition of various parties from the centre left to centre right. Closely linked to the union bureaucracy, the Peronists have governed Argentina for the majority of the years since its return to democracy in the 1980s, introducing a range of neoliberal measures during that time. The Peronists won 47.3 percent of the vote in Buenos Aires, claiming victory in 100 of the 130 municipalities. LLA, by contrast, won just 33.7 percent. In the two most populous and working-class electoral areas, the Peronists beat Milei’s coalition by 25 and 10 percentage points respectively. The strong Peronist vote much more reflects a rejection of Milei’s program than enthusiastic support for the Peronists. In just two years, Milei’s austerity has savaged the living standards of the working class. Last year, the poverty rate reached a record high 54.8 percent. A full 70 percent of people run out of money for monthly expenses by the 20th of the month, according to economist Guillermo Oliveto. Milei dismissed this statistic, saying, “If it were true, you would have to walk down the street and it would be full of corpses”. On top of his clear indifference to mass poverty, Milei’s administration has been mired in corruption scandals, which have likely had an impact on some voters who bought into his self-described “anti-elitistism”. The other encouraging outcome of the election was the strong vote for the Workers’ Left Front (FIT-U), a coalition of far-left socialist parties. Across the province, the FIT-U won 4.3 percent of the total, or 350,000 votes. Electorally, the province is divided into eight areas. In the third and eighth areas, which have respective populations of more than 5 million and 600,000, the FIT-U consolidated itself as the third political force, winning just over 5.5 percent in each. In La Matanza, the largest municipality in the country with nearly 2 million people, the FIT-U won 7.5 percent. In other areas, its vote reached between 6 and 8 percent. The strong result means the FIT-U will hold on to its two lower house MPs. The party’s program includes massive expansions of public health and education, nationalisation of key sectors of the economy, putting politicians on a teachers’ wage, cutting regressive taxes and establishing a national jobs program. Its success shows that even a relatively small party, when it puts forward a decent left-wing program, can win a section of workers and students. Ana Paredes Landman, a teacher, will hold one of the seats for the Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST), one of the four parties that make up the FIT-U. In a statement she pointed to the resistance, led by the left, to Milei’s program as responsible for his defeat: “There were the workers of the Garrahan (hospital), the disability movements, retirees and so many popular sectors who, with the support of the Left Front, kept the resistance alive while other spaces linked to the union bureaucracy and Peronism chose passivity. The good electoral result of the Left Front marks a recognition of those of us who uphold a consistent proposal, who do not turn our backs and who always defend the rights of workers and youth in the legislatures and in the councils.” Another important part of the FIT-U’s approach is that it doesn’t just offer an electoral alternative but also actively builds resistance in the streets, university campuses and workplaces. The MST have been leading some of the most high-profile resistance to Milei’s austerity. One example is the Garrahan paediatrics hospital in Buenos Aires. Milei’s attacks on the free and public hospital, which treats 40 percent of Argentina’s paediatric cancer cases, have turned it into a symbol of resistance. The MST is the dominant political force in the Garrahan union. It has led a series of strikes at the hospital and marches on congress—one of which ended with healthcare workers surrounding the congress building. The union general secretary, Norma Lezana, an MST member, has tried to link the Garrahan struggle to the broader struggles of all workers, saying that while their action “is centred on the Garrahan, it includes all the demands of the population ... if the Garrahan wins, and we manage to keep it from closing, that will also be a victory for the entire population”. Ultimately, the election is an important setback for Milei and his ultra-conservative agenda. While two general strikes and other major industry strikes in the first year of his term stymied some of the most extreme elements of his program, the resistance has become more isolated since then. Only the best organised sections of the working class, often where the socialist left is strong, have kept up the pressure with consistent strikes and protests. Nonetheless, the Buenos Aires election shows that the far right’s advance can be checked, and that the centre can make gains electorally against it. While the Peronists and their partners in the union bureaucracy have largely given up the fight against Milei in the streets and workplaces, the presence of a sizeable far left with some weight in key sections of the working class has been crucial in building resistance. Unfortunately, the far left is still too small to challenge seriously the influence of the Peronist movement. But for a growing section of workers, it does provide a political alternative capable of leading at least some of them in action. Continuing to build and strengthen a genuinely anti-capitalist movement that reaches further into the working class is the key to challenging seriously both Milei and Peronism. ### Nepal’s “Gen-Z revolution” URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/nepals-gen-z-revolution/ Last updated: 2025-09-14T00:17:36.000Z In the last few days, mass youth protests, dubbed the “Gen-Z revolution”, exploded on the streets of Nepal, forcing a political crisis and the resignation of Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli. The protests began when anger at the wealth and corruption of the political class reached a breaking point. In recent weeks, #nepobaby went viral, exposing the lavish lifestyles of politicians’ children. In one post, a government minister’s son poses next to a Christmas tree made up of Louis Vuitton and Cartier boxes. With per capita income in Nepal at US$1,400 a year, and one in four people living below the poverty line, the boxes cost more money than most will see in a lifetime. On 4 September, Nepal’s ruling elite announced a ban on 26 social media sites, including WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. This was understood as a naked attempt to stifle criticism of political corruption and provoked protest organisers to call on Nepali youth to take to the streets on Monday, 8 September. “The whole area from Maithighar all the way to Baneshwor, almost two kilometres, was packed with protesters”, Kisan, a socialist student activist, told *Red Flag* over the phone a few days into the protests. Tens of thousands of protesters marched on the parliament building, where the police threw tear gas and blasted them with water cannons. When this failed to repel the protesters, they opened fire on the crowd. Social media videos show peaceful protesters being shot with live rounds at close range by police. By the end of the day, nineteen were killed and 400 injured—the bloodiest day of protest in Nepal’s history. A high school student was found dead in the street, still in his school uniform. Shock waves rippled across the country. Nepal’s political elite had laid bare the cruelty they were prepared to administer to defend their privileges. But the bloodshed did not stop the protests. In Kathmandu, Rupandehi, Biratnagar, Pokhara and Chitwan, protesters tore down police barricades and stormed government buildings, party offices and ministers’ homes. Curfews failed to clear the streets. Protesters chanted, *“KP Chore, Desh Chor”* (K.P. is a thief, leave the country). Videos capture the jubilation of the protests. In one, [money rains out of the sky](https://www.instagram.com/p/DOX0LvSEx1Y/?ref=redflag.org.au) as notes are tossed from the window of the energy minister’s home into cheering crowds below. In another, Nepal’s Finance Minister Bishnu Prasad Paudel is stripped to his underwear, chased out of his home and tossed into a nearby river. [The same branded shoes](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOblcg%5FAPSn/?ref=redflag.org.au) that were once boxed inside a nepo baby Christmas tree are now tossed from the balcony of his politician father’s home. There are many more stories. At the parliament building, police barricades were torn down, and protesters waltzed in. For a few hours, its opulent rooms belonged to youth in ripped jeans and flip-flops. Corrupt officials’ homes were set on fire; the flaming buildings were used as backdrops for [TikTok dances](https://www.instagram.com/p/DOYsN1BD7V8/?ref=redflag.org.au). The scenes are reminiscent of the palace-ransacking that Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa regime was subjected to by a mass movement three years ago. This connection is not lost on the Nepali protesters. Social media are awash with attempts to share the lessons from Sri Lanka in 2022, Bangladesh last year and the Arab Spring. The main emblem of the protest is “Straw Hat Jolly Roger” from the anime series *One Piece,* which has proliferated on the streets of Jakarta during the Indonesian protest movement of the past few weeks. On Monday evening, in a last-ditch effort to wind things back, the government agreed to lift the ban on social media. But it was too late, and protesters returned to the streets for a second day. By mid-morning, Tribuvan International Airport was clogged with private jets and helicopters as government ministers hastily resigned and tried to flee the country. Finally, just one day after the youth protest began, K.P. Oli stepped down as prime minister. Part of the reason the government was toppled so quickly was its already unstable position—there has been a whole series of short-lived governments since the monarchy was overthrown in 2006\. “People’s frustrations had been growing for a long time”, Kisan said. “For the last few decades, it’s basically been a game of musical chairs where three men, K.P. Sharma Oli (Communist Party of Nepal—United Marxist-Leninist), Sher Bahadur Deuba (Nepali Congress) and Prachanda (Communist Party of Nepal—Maoist Centre) have been in the premiership over and over again.” Inequality has accelerated under the successive leadership of these parties, exacerbated in recent years by growing unemployment. Nepal’s 20 percent youth unemployment rate has forced millions to seek construction or domestic work in the Gulf states, Malaysia and South Korea. According to Kisan, “There’s a whole age group of people who are completely missing in the villages because they’re forced to go overseas to be modern slaves in the Gulf. They earn about 30,000 rupees \[about US$210\] a month and send 15,000 back home as remittances. It’s poverty wages, but they don’t have a choice because the conditions in Nepal are just so bad”. Meanwhile, Nepal’s leaders—who drape themselves in “Communist” or “Maoist” colouring—have lined their pockets with taxes collected on these remittance payments, which make up around 30 percent of the country’s GDP. This is in addition to the open grift and corruption that goes on every day. According to the government itself, an estimated 15-50 percent of its total budget is embezzled by contractors, ministers and officers. K.P. Oli’s swift resignation surprised many who took part in the movement. He left behind a political vacuum that was soon filled by ex-Chief Justice Sushila Karki. Nepal’s small right-wing monarchist minority tried to seize the moment to argue the king should be reinstated, but this clearly didn’t fly with the youth protesters. According to Kisan, most of the leading “Gen-Z revolution” activists support Karki forming an interim government until fresh elections are held. But shifting the deckchairs of the establishment will hardly resolve the serious issues facing the majority of one of the world’s poorest countries. There are other dangers. The Nepali army quickly imposed itself as the “law and order” enforcer and the mediator in leadership negotiations with “Gen-Z” reps. The generals could try to use this moment to gain more power for themselves. Similarly, it’s possible that the more right-wing Nepali parties could receive a boost in future elections in the absence of a strong left-wing political alternative. Much remains up in the air, but Nepal’s youth are fed up with the system of poverty, oppression and inequality. One impassioned student protester made this clear when speaking to [Al Jazeera](https://www.aljazeera.com/video/2025/9/10/aje-onl-qt-safal-andolankari-100925?ref=redflag.org.au#flips-6378989817112:0) on Tuesday: “To our international friends we say—the prime minister’s resignation is not enough. Tomorrow they could easily form another coalition with all the national parties gathering around the same table again. But we are here to break all of that, to break the cycle. We are going to break that table.” ### What you need to know about Pine Gap URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/what-you-need-to-know-about-pine-gap/ Last updated: 2025-09-11T05:52:12.000Z It is now generally accepted that Pine Gap, a military/intelligence facility just outside of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, has played a crucial role in the Palestinian genocide and other US-supported wars in west Asia. In response to the targeting of Iran’s nuclear facilities and defences against Houthi drones and missiles, more and more people are becoming aware of and questioning the facility’s operations. Since it became operational in 1970, the stated purpose of Pine Gap has changed several times. Initially, the government said it was a space research facility. When its military use could no longer be hidden, the site was then said to be used for the verification of arms control treaties and to provide early warning of missiles launched from the Soviet Union and, subsequently, China. With every new revelation of the true nature of the facility, the Australian and US governments have changed their line as to precisely what Pine Gap’s purpose is. In 2013, CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden released a trove of classified documents covering covert US military activities. Some were directly related to Pine Gap; others were about broader programs that Pine Gap may be involved in. In a publicity campaign aimed at increasing transparency about Pine Gap, a former technician, David Rosenberg, wrote a book claiming to be an exposé. But the book, *Pine Gap: The Inside Story of the NSA in Australia*, was vetted and cleared by the US National Security Agency before it was released. As was the ABC mini-series *Pine Gap*. So although we now know a fair bit about what Pine Gap does, we still do not know the whole truth. As more and more of the US military’s operations are conducted by remote control through communications satellites, Pine Gap’s importance is growing. This is reflected in the physical growth of the base itself. New radomes (the dome-shaped structures housing and protecting sensitive antennas and radars) have been built in the last few years, and more personnel have been based there. Much of this new information comes from the excellent work of [*Declassified Australia*’s Peter Cronau](https://declassifiedaus.org/author/peter?ref=redflag.org.au). What we do know is that Pine Gap is the most important US communications base outside of the continental US. This is primarily due to its location. The shooting down of a US U2 spy plane during a reconnaissance flight over the Soviet Union in 1960, coupled with the launch of the first communications satellites in 1962, led to the development of a rudimentary satellite-based communications and spy system by the Ramo-Woolridge Corporation (which later merged with Thompson to become TRW, which has since been acquired by Northrop Grumman—the third largest aerospace and arms manufacturer in the world). At least three ground stations were needed to control geosynchronous satellites around the globe at an altitude of about 35,000 kilometres. (They are called geosynchronous because their movement is synchronised with the Earth’s rotation and they are therefore fixed above the same geographic point.) The first was to be in the US, and the second in Western Europe. The third would be equidistant from those and preferably in the Southern Hemisphere. Australia was, therefore, the obvious choice. In addition, the base needed to be far from the coast to avoid ship-based spying and in a remote location to keep it as secret as possible from the civilian population. While Pine Gap is just one of the three geographical points needed, the US and Western European bases have nearby alternatives should they go offline for any reason. Pine Gap has the distinction of being the only facility of its kind in the region: it is irreplaceable and therefore one of the most important pieces of real estate to US military interests, in Australia or anywhere. Without Pine Gap, the US cannot control the satellite operations that are now essential to the execution of war. To our knowledge, these operations include things like the early warning systems of the US Defense Support Program (which detects missile launches), a task previously performed by the Nurrungar base near Woomera, South Australia, until taken over by Pine Gap in 1999\. This forms a part of the US missile defence shield and that of US allies such as Japan and Israel. Satellites tracking heat signatures would have formed a part of the defences against Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. Pine Gap’s 45 satellite dishes control at least four geosynchronous satellites positioned above the Indian Ocean that monitor a vast range from the Pacific to Africa, their central focus being the area from China to West Asia. These satellites are the backbone of US signals intelligence (SIGINT) in the region. They intercept and download electronic signals across all bands, from radio to mobile phone and internet communications, which are then analysed at Pine Gap. They also control military communications between the US and its military in the dozens of bases and fleet deployments from Guam to Egypt. Modern communications satellites are not geosynchronous and constantly travel around the globe at a much closer altitude of about 400 kilometres. These are the ones we can often see in the sky and are generally used for commercial communications. So while most of the satellite dishes at Pine Gap communicate with geosynchronous satellites, in the last decade or so, a new type of satellite dish has appeared: torus dishes. These are designed to intercept and download communications from low-orbit satellites as they pass through the region, sucking up every bit of data for analysis by the US National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. In short, Pine Gap has the capacity to control US military satellites, track missile launches, control military communications—including those to and from autonomous drones—provide all battlefield communications and intercept all satellite communications in the region. In about one-fifth of a second, information gathered from the ground in West Asia can be transmitted up to a satellite and back down to Pine Gap, where all these communications can be analysed. US military and intelligence agencies can then use the information to obtain targets, among other things. Which brings us to Palestine. Palestine is not Pine Gap’s primary focus, which has always been about gathering intelligence to help the US maintain global supremacy. Nonetheless, the US is providing support to Israel, including providing signals intelligence. This is not a new development. For example, we know that signals intelligence gathered and analysed at Pine Gap was passed on to the Israeli military during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In 2013, NSA contractor Edward Snowden released classified documents showing that the agency has an agreement with the Israeli military’s signals intelligence, the notorious Unit 8200, to pass on all raw intelligence data collected, including data collected in third-party countries—like Australia. The agreement began in 1999, but earlier information-sharing arrangements have existed since 1968\. A top-secret memorandum advised that the intelligence sharing had been broadened from Unit 8200 and the NSA to include the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad. It is noteworthy that this specifically includes information gathered on Australians and citizens from other Five Eyes intelligence alliance countries: Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The Israeli military obviously does not rely entirely on the US for electronic communications surveillance; it has its own satellite and surveillance capabilities. It is therefore impossible to judge where and how any particular piece of targeting information was sourced. But it would be naive to believe that, over the last two years of relentless attacks, no information from the Australian facility was used. Pine Gap is classified as a Joint Defence Facility, but the US military, through the National Reconnaissance Office, fully funds and controls it. The Australian government’s policy is that Pine Gap operates with its “full knowledge and concurrence”, though there is no official definition of those terms. Along with Australia’s weapons sales, both directly and hidden as “transfers” through the US, the use of intelligence gathered by Pine Gap makes Australia complicit in Israel’s crimes in Gaza. *Jacob Grech is a member of Renegade Activists.* ### The trouble with Trump’s tariffs URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-trouble-with-trumps-tariffs/ Last updated: 2025-09-11T05:48:13.000Z In April, US President Donald Trump announced, on what he dubbed “Liberation Day”, a regime of tariffs on every country in the world, based on a sketchy formula that assigned higher tariffs to countries with which the US has trade deficits. Stock markets went into free fall, there was a huge sell-off of US bonds, and Wall Street and other business titans spoke out against the tariffs. Trump pulled back, said he would make multiple deals over the next 90 days, and the stock market returned to setting records. Wall Street coined a term for Trump’s move: “TACO” for “Trump Always Chickens Out”. In early August, with very few deals negotiated, the administration instituted broad-based tariffs. But unlike in April, the market took it in stride, even though they amount to the highest tariffs in a century: a 15-20 percent levy on all imports to the US. Trump carved out some countries for higher tariffs: Brazil at 50 percent, due to its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro for trying to lead a coup after he lost the 2023 election. Trump set tariffs on [India at 50 percent, reputedly to punish it for importing Russian oil](https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/8/27/trumps-india-tariffs-take-effect-which-sector-will-be-hit-whats-exempt?ref=redflag.org.au), but possibly also for refusing to [support his delusional bid for a Nobel Peace Prize.](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/has-trump-lost-india-punitive-tariffs-and-nobel-peace-prize-insults-erode-once-close-relations?ref=redflag.org.au) Then, on 29 August, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld an earlier decision declaring most of these tariffs illegal. Their fate will now be in the hands of the US Supreme Court. A tariff is a tax on imports paid to the US government. US importers pay it. In fact, many of them are unable to claim their products until they pay the tariff. Ultimately, the cost falls on consumers who pay higher prices on imported goods such as coffee, or who pay higher prices on products containing imported inputs. Think, for example, of cars or household appliances whose prices increase because tariffs have increased the prices of imported steel and aluminium. Prices may not have spiked much yet, but if the tariffs remain in place, we will likely see prices increase by the end of the year. The Yale Budget Project estimates [that tariffs will add about US$2,800 to the average household’s costs over the next year](https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-july-14-2025?ref=redflag.org.au). And some estimates suggest they could add $4,000-$5,000 to the cost of a new car. So much for Trump’s promise to lower prices on day one! Government statistics are [starting to show a pick-up in inflation on particular goods and sectors that rely on imports](https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/short-run-effects-2025-tariffs-so-far?ref=redflag.org.au). There are three main reasons why most people have not yet experienced big tariff-fuelled price increases. First, many companies, anticipating that Trump would impose tariffs, “front ran”—meaning that they built up their inventories before the tariffs went into effect. It’s likely that the decline in the first quarter gross domestic product, which most economic analysts attributed to an abnormal increase in imports, reflected front-running behaviour. Second, companies are eating the costs, eroding their profits, rather than passing them on to consumers. It’s possible that some companies were relying on the courts tossing out the tariffs, or a mercurial Trump deciding to lower them. [Both GM and Ford reported losses in the billions that they attributed to tariffs. They have yet to raise prices across the board.](https://moneymorning.com/2025/07/23/gm-and-stellantis-lose-billions-as-tariffs-reshape-u-s-auto-industry/?ref=redflag.org.au) Finally, other countries have yet to retaliate with tariffs of their own. But these strategies merely postpone the tariff shock to the future. Unless companies want to accept lower profits, or lay-offs or bankruptcy, they will be forced to raise prices. Much of the neoliberal commentariat treats Trump’s tariffs as an absurdity, akin to RFK Jr’s anti-vax demolition of science or the crackpot beliefs of flat earthers. But the left [Keynesian economist Yanis Varofakis, the former finance minister in the Syriza government in Greece,](https://youtu.be/f1CdbCsetpw?ref=redflag.org.au)says we must take Trump’s tariffs seriously. Trump has been ideologically committed to tariffs and an autarchic or nationalist view of the US’s role in the world economy for decades. In recent decades, economic nationalism has been rising across the entire US ruling class, as administrations of both major capitalist parties seek to compete with China and to prod the European Union to increase its military spending. Besides the fact that Trump seems to believe that tariffs will ignite a US “golden age”, he also views them as a way to wield his clout, both domestically and in foreign affairs. He has arguably been more successful on the domestic front, as his on-again, [off-again threats to levy tariffs on certain industries lead those industry CEOs to make concessions or donations to Trump.](https://www.npr.org/2025/03/07/nx-s1-5318785/tariff-dodging-companies-exemptions-engineering?ref=redflag.org.au) The opportunities for corruption are endless. On foreign policy, Trump has reset the US’s average tariffs on imports to somewhere between five and six times what they were in 2024, without yet experiencing widespread blowback from US trading partners. He and other tariff “hawks” in the administration calculate that other countries have more to lose from being locked out of the US than the US has to lose in trade with them. [Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, elected in an anti-Trump “Canada ](https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods?ref=redflag.org.au)[](https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods?ref=redflag.org.au)strong[” campaign earlier this year](https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods?ref=redflag.org.au), recently lifted retaliatory tariffs against the US, the destination of 75 percent of Canada’s exports. Canada is now attempting to negotiate a deal that will limit US tariffs on certain targeted Canadian exports, such as lumber, steel and aluminium. On the other hand, Trump’s impetuous decision to place a 50 percent tariff on imports from India threatens to undermine the decades-long US cultivation of India as a counterweight to China in Asia. The [symbolism of leaders of India, China and Russia meeting together in Beijing](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/india-alliance-jake-sullivan-kurt-campbell?ref=redflag.org.au)wasn’t lost on mainstream foreign policy hands. [Varoufakis thinks that tariffs may slow the US economy, but the US is still sucking in massive amounts of capital from the world](https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/02/04/on-channel-4-is-donald-trumps-tariff-war-about-to-totally-backfire/?ref=redflag.org.au). If that continues, Trump may get away with the tariffs, even if they don’t produce the things he promised: reshoring American industries or replacing income taxes, among some of the more far fetched. But if Trump succeeds in cutting the US trade deficit, other countries will have fewer dollars to reinvest in the US stock market and in other assets. To Marxists, tariffs are neither good nor bad. They are no better nor worse than “free trade.” They are just one mechanism capitalist states use to gain an advantage over other capitalist states in the international economy. “Free trade” is most often the policy of the global economic and military hegemon. Britain in the nineteenth century pushed for “free trade” as a way of expanding markets for its industrial economy. Similarly, since the 1930s, it has been a policy of the US government to expand free trade. The breakdown of free trade today is part of the breakdown of the unipolar US empire that existed in the decades following the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR-dominated Eastern bloc. Now that China is in a close competition with the US, the US government and its business leaders have embraced more protectionist measures against it. Here is where the politics of tariffs enters the discussion. For now, if most people associate tariffs with higher prices, [they are among the most unpopular parts of Trump’s already very unpopular agenda](https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/trump-is-underwater-on-trade-in-40?ref=redflag.org.au). But one place where they are not condemned—outside of MAGA world and a few favoured industries—is in the US labour movement. Unfortunately, leaders like [United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain](https://jacobin.com/2025/04/uaw-fain-trump-tariffs-nafta?ref=redflag.org.au), Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and the United Steelworkers of America have embraced the Trump tariffs. This isn’t anything new. “Buy American” has been part of the labour movement for decades. But for labour to buy into Trump’s tariffs now, when [Trump and his administration are waging an existential war against labour](https://internationalsocialism.net/the-parliamentary-cretinism-of-the-democrats-opposition-to-trump/?ref=redflag.org.au), is letting MAGA off the hook. Industrial union leaders support tariffs to prop up US industries where their dwindling ranks work. But support for tariffs targets the wrong enemy. The socialist labour scholar Kim Moody has shown that declining jobs, unionisation and living standards in the US owe more to automation and speed-up than to trade. Socialist labour activist Andy Sernatinger’s critique of the [UAW’s position, titled “Nationalism, workers’ power, and the myth of auto tariffs”](https://tempestmag.org/2025/04/nationalism-workers-power-and-the-myth-of-auto-tariffs/?ref=redflag.org.au), showed that there are as many autoworkers today in the US as there were in 1992 (before the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA). But far fewer of them are in unionised jobs. That’s because the unions have conceded control of the shop floor and have only weakly competed for non-union workers in plants in the southern states, where much of the job growth in recent decades has occurred. For labour to sign on with policies that are shot through with nationalism and anti-Chinese racism is extremely dangerous. Labour activists [should remember the 1980s case of Vincent Chin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing%5Fof%5FVincent%5FChin?ref=redflag.org.au), a Chinese American man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by an auto industry supervisor. Chin’s killing took place at a time when the UAW was leading an anti-Japanese car campaign that featured media events in which union members smashed up Japanese-made cars with bats and hammers. Chin’s killer shouted racial slurs at him while he beat him. Not only does this sort of politics sow divisions among workers, but it also contributes to the general racist and nationalist climate that the Trump administration is leading from the top. It lays the foundation for political support for further economic, political and military confrontation with China. Even if tariffs don’t have the catastrophic effects—like COVID-era empty store shelves and price gouging—that many predicted, they will still contribute to a slowing economy, higher prices and potentially mass lay-offs. The jobs economy [is already weak](https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/hiring-slowdown-spells-a-weakening-labor-market?ref=redflag.org.au)—the [number of job openings is around the level it was during the COVID recession](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/03/job-opening-data-falls-to-levels-rarely-seen-since-pandemic.html?ref=redflag.org.au). It’s not clear that Trump’s tariffs are the cause of all these problems. There is solid evidence that consumer spending was tapped out at the end of last year, before “Liberation Day”. But tariffs are not going to improve the situation. And in the current context, Trump’s tariffs are just another attack on the working class. *First published at the* [*International Socialism Project*](https://internationalsocialism.net/the-trouble-with-trumps-tariffs?ref=redflag.org.au)*. Lance Selfa is the author of* [The Democrats: A Critical History](https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920?ref=redflag.org.au)*(Haymarket, 2012) and editor of* [U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality](https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534?ref=redflag.org.au) *(Haymarket, 2017). He lives in Chicago.* ### ‘One way to challenge the law is to break it!’: Community sector workers strike for Palestine again URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/one-way-to-challenge-the-law-is-to-break-it-community-sector-workers-strike-for-palestine-again/ Last updated: 2025-09-12T03:04:20.000Z “Can I see with a show of hands—who here has walked out from work today?” A cheer ripples across the growing crowd outside the State Library of Victoria on 10 September as dozens of people, maybe a hundred, put up their hands. Somewhere around ten times that number have skipped work, used a day off, extended a lunch break or otherwise made time in our day to stand with these striking workers. Some strikers hold giant letters, spelling it out in red, green and black: ON STRIKE FOR GAZA. For the second time since Israel’s latest genocidal onslaught started on Gaza, community sector workers in Melbourne workplaces have done something that the whole union movement should be doing—used workers’ industrial muscle to disrupt business as usual, by going on strike and rallying in the streets. As one of the strike organisers, Louisa Bassini, told *Red Flag*: “We know we have the power as workers to do more to stop the genocide. This action has helped prove that we can use that power, and will hopefully encourage others do the same in other industries”. The rally is a sight for sore eyes. Tasnim Sammak, a member of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), addresses the crowd on behalf of the Free Palestine Coalition: “We can’t look at the images of the rubble and destruction and think it’s over. No. What we should think is: we need to act now, with urgency. And urgency needs to fuel us”. A series of striking workers take the microphone. A striking worker from Inner Melbourne Community Legal points out the hypocrisy of community sector employers and peak bodies: “Despite standing for so called justice and human rights, our peak bodies have refused to speak out—and have said ‘it’s not our core business’. Shame! That’s why we’re here today. It’s time to do the most powerful thing we can do as workers, and that’s to withdraw our labour.” “We’re a union shop—we’re all here!”, announces a speaker from Flat Out, an advocacy organisation for women in prison: “What’s the point of having civil society, a community sector, if it won’t stand up to the government. I know the government funds us, but at some point you’ve just got to say: stop the genocide, free Palestine!” “We’re sick of seeing parents holding dead children in their arms”, says another striker. “We’re sick of seeing plastic bags full of body parts. And we’re also sick of seeing children playing funerals because they see people on stretchers all the time. Israel bombs Qatar and our government and media are silent, because they’re part of a genocidal machine which is hungry for profit. But we’re not silent. We’re on strike today. We’re using our power as workers to shut things down, saying we’re not going to work as usual during a genocide, and calling on other workers to strike too.” Another striking worker puts it in the most straightforward way: “We have to strike because nothing else is working”. The rally features banners and flags from the NTEU, and from the Australian Services Union which covers most of the striking workers. Some at the rally are members of the Australian Education Union, others the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation. Many have been active in the various Unionists for Palestine groups over the past two years. It is living proof that despite the crushing consensus among politicians and media commentators, large numbers of workers recognise and oppose a genocide when they see one. One attendee, social worker Louie, tells *Red Flag*: “Today is a real demonstration of the fact that workers support Palestine and oppose genocide and they want to build forces so that their voices are heard”. Another social worker, Rachel, explains: “I’m here because I’m sick of seeing children starving, and seeing people blown up”. “I want to put pressure on the government to put sanctions on Israel”, says another. Easily the largest and most visible political group on the day is Victorian Socialists, which includes several strike leaders and rally organisers among its members. Veteran journalist Marty Hirst gives an impassioned speech about the importance of fighting for free speech on Palestine, announcing the launch of a [major campaign](https://redflag.org.au/article/media-workers-to-launch-free-speech-campaign-for-palestine) on the issue on 20 September. There are references to the current important fight to stop the Fair Work Commission from imposing massive pay cuts on community sector workers. Some recall the proud history of workers in this country acting in solidarity with workers worldwide, connecting that to an argument that [Palestine is union business](https://redflag.org.au/article/why-palestine-union-business). There are cheers for the dock workers of Genoa, Italy, who have [pledged](https://x.com/usbsindacato/status/1962085329575313604?ref=redflag.org.au) to blockade the port—and to call out other ports in solidarity—if Israel intercepts the Global Sumud Flotilla, which is currently sailing to Gaza. A pledge to rally (and if possible, strike) in support of the Genoa dock workers if and when they take action in defence of the solidarity flotilla is greeted by loud applause. But it’s rally co-chair Monica Campo who really brings the house down by talking about the importance of fighting for the right to strike—by striking. “The Fair Work Act deliberately limits our ability to organise, and to use the power that we have as workers, as a class”, Campo explains. “It limits our ability to continue that long tradition of standing in solidarity with international struggles. We should and must continue to fight these limitations in the Fair Work Act, and we’re pleased to hear that the ASU has committed to keep challenging these limitations on our right to strike. But one way to challenge the law is to break it!” The applause building through the crowd erupts into cheers. This is more than a propaganda point—it should be a call to action. Though it is right to emphasise the repressive and anti-democratic nature of Labor’s Fair Work Act, it is also the case that the sort of “demonstration strikes” that community sector workers have now taken twice against the genocide have rarely, if ever, resulted in sackings or even serious disciplinary action. Of course, the level of support in individual workplaces and within union structures, and a concrete assessment of how management are likely to respond are all important factors. But this form of industrial action can and should be much more widespread. Every unionist in the country owes a debt to the community sector Palestine strikers. They are showing us that we don’t have to resign ourselves to the unspeakable horror unfolding in Gaza today. And the strikers are continuing a living, breathing, organising, fighting current of solidarity—one that has played a crucial role in the history of the working-class movement. The official, Labor-aligned leadership of our movement have spent decades smothering the political radicalism and industrial militancy that kept this tradition of struggle and solidarity alive. But the strikers are reminding everyone of the obvious truths: that workers still have the power, that more of us need to use it, and that we still have a world to win. ### Media workers to launch free speech campaign for Palestine URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/media-workers-to-launch-free-speech-campaign-for-palestine/ Last updated: 2025-09-10T03:13:01.000Z The decision by Australian Services Union (ASU) members in the community sector to walk off the job for the second time in support of Palestine is an important moment in Australian labour history. In a country where industrial action is tightly policed and the right to protest under threat, taking strike action against genocide is an act of courage and principle. The workers’ defiance stands in stark contrast to the complicity of political leaders. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s appointment of Jillian Segal as “antisemitism envoy” is a smokescreen—her role is to suppress Palestine solidarity. Albanese also refuses to impose sanctions on Israel. NSW Premier Chris Minns has repeatedly tried to ban pro-Palestine marches in Sydney. These are not security measures—they are political censorship. In February 2025, the NSW parliament passed the Crimes Amendment (Places of Worship) Bill, criminalising protests near places of worship with penalties of up to $22,000 or two years’ imprisonment. The law expands police powers and exempts protests only if approved by police or part of industrial action—ironically, the very loophole ASU workers are now using to strike for Palestine. Across Australia, 49 anti-protest laws have been introduced in the past two decades, disproportionately targeting environmental and human rights activists. Repression is happening everywhere. In the UK, protesters have been arrested for holding signs supporting the activist group Palestine Action. US students have been expelled for standing in solidarity with Palestine. Journalists have been sacked and, like Mary Kostakidis here in Australia, dragged through the courts for the crime of criticising Israel. Google and Microsoft workers have been fired for protesting against the companies’ military contracts with Israel. But defiance matters. The case of Antoinette Lattouf, sacked by the ABC for reposting a Human Rights Watch statement, was a small but vital win. Her legal fight exposed institutional cowardice. More powerful still was the sight of tens of thousands of Australians taking to the streets in support of Palestine, despite official efforts to stop them. Free speech is a lofty notion, but the reality is that some voices are much louder than others. The rich speak through their control of media empires and lobbyists. The poor and the oppressed can only make themselves heard through protest, disruption, and refusal—actions they are all too often punished for. Defending free speech means defending the right to resist, to strike, and to organise. The ASU workers have shown us what that looks like. Our side needs to be organised to defend freedom to speak out about genocide and the apartheid state of Israel. This is why Victorian Socialists members in the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance have initiated a coalition to defend freedom of speech on Palestine. The first meeting of the coalition is on Saturday 20 September, 2pm at Brunswick Town Hall. Speakers include journalists Amy Remeikis, Antoun Issa, and Mary Kostakidis. [Tickets are $10 and available here](https://victoriansocialists.org.au/civicrm-event/1652?ref=redflag.org.au). ### Two-state solution is rubbish, what will it take to liberate Palestine? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/two-state-solution-is-rubbish-what-will-it-take-to-liberate-palestine/ Last updated: 2025-09-07T06:49:10.000Z After decades of hegemony, the two-state solution is no longer considered a viable or desirable solution to the decades-long oppression of the Palestinians among pro-Palestine activists in Australia. In Melbourne, where I am involved, the phrase “two-state solution” has been essentially banned from the platforms of the regular Gaza solidarity demonstrations. This is an extremely positive development. For decades, the two-state solution has served as a means to browbeat the more principled and radical supporters of the Palestinian people. Prior to the 1980s, the majority of Palestinian political parties supported the full liberation of historic Palestine, and the two-state solution was used by Labor Zionism to denounce them as extremists and coopt them into a more moderate position. The two-state solution reached its zenith in the 1990s during negotiations for the Oslo Accords between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel. During this period the Palestinian leadership under Fatah abandoned all sorts of rights and principles in exchange for the chimera of a Palestinian statelet in the West Bank and Gaza. While a minority of Palestinian capitalists and politicians have become fabulously wealthy as a result of this process, the Palestinian people have continued to go backwards, losing further rights and territory. So the clear rejection of the two-state solution by the majority of serious pro-Palestine activists is an important breakthrough. It provides a stronger basis from which to build a movement that can demand real justice. And importantly, it opens up space for discussion about what sort of scenario might actually succeed in achieving genuine liberation for the Palestinian people. For most people, the alternative to the perpetual apartheid and oppression entailed by the two-state solution is the creation of a democratic state for all inhabitants of the area. Far from “driving Jews into the sea”, the idea is for Arabs and Jews to live together peacefully, with equal rights in a liberal democratic set-up. In many ways this is a worthy goal, and when it was developed in the 1960s, it was a progressive position for the Palestinian liberation movement to adopt. But many of the same issues that make the two-state solution unworkable also apply to one state. Most importantly, the Israeli state will not accept equality between Jews and Palestinians. Its founding ideology is that of an ethno-state: a state that exists for a particular ethnic group, with others as second-class citizens. This means a single state based on equal rights will never be achieved through negotiation or brought into existence through UN mandates or diplomacy. It requires the overthrow of the Israeli state. The Western powers, to which Israel is an important strategic and economic ally, would of course never accept this. The only one-state outcome it’s possible to imagine is one in which Israel is in effect allowed to annex the entirety of the Palestinian territory and expel millions of refugees. Supporters of Palestine often refer to the defeat of apartheid in South Africa as proof that a transformation from a system of apartheid to democracy is possible. But mainstream accounts of this important history tend to downplay the crucial role played by the economically powerful, politically sophisticated and industrially militant black working class, which existed in South Africa but does not in Palestine. By repeatedly bringing the economy to a halt through strike action, these workers made it impossible for South African mines and ports to function reliably, and for capital to profit. This hit the rich where it hurts, and created enormous pressure for change. Only when it became clear that the old order was doomed did Western governments impose sanctions to try to expedite the transition so that the vital mines and ports of South Africa could remain functional and be relied on. Palestinians have no comparable economic power, excluded as they are from large parts of the Israeli economy, particularly its most strategic sectors. So traditional class struggle at a domestic level cannot create the economic disruption needed to break apartheid and end the occupation of all Palestinian lands. At a global level, Israel is a nuclear-armed imperial outpost in a central region of world politics and a long-term strategic ally of the US. Far from facing crippling sanctions for its many crimes, it is still being armed, funded and courted by the world’s elites. Indeed, its utility to US empire has been reinforced in the last two years, given the ease with which it has crushed Hezbollah and subdued Iran. This alliance is likely to continue as long as imperialist domination remains a central plank of US foreign policy. Even if the US is somehow dethroned, then China or any other rising power would have a strong interest in allying with such a well-armed and strategically important state. China is already the second largest importer of Israeli goods, and Israel imports more goods from China than any other country, $19 billion worth annually according to the United Nations Comtrade database. So while the apartheid system in South Africa could be ended without fundamentally disrupting the structures of global and regional imperialism, the same is not true in Palestine. In any case, the end of formal apartheid has not fundamentally changed the experience of the vast majority of working class and poor Black South Africans. Their living conditions are actually worse, meaning this is hardly a model to be aspiring to. The harsh reality is that while many former colonies have been able to achieve some measure of national independence within the capitalist system, there are a number of cases where it is just not possible. In the Middle East, the examples of the Palestinians and the Kurds stand out, where the maintenance of national oppression is absolutely essential to the functioning of capitalism as it has been established over the last century. So just as it is impossible to imagine a capitalist America without anti-Black racism, there will never be a capitalist Middle East without the whole suite of religious, national and caste hierarchies that have been deliberately entrenched in the region. It’s long been argued by revolutionaries in the Middle East and elsewhere that overthrowing the Arab regimes, which pose as champions of the Palestinians while simultaneously accommodating to Israel and repressing movements that challenge it, is a prerequisite for a liberated Palestine. But the experience of the Arab revolutions that erupted in 2011 shows that simply replacing one capitalist government with another in no way brings closer the goal of ending the injustices that face the workers and the oppressed of the region. It’s clear now that in a very direct sense the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and that of the masses in the region and beyond, will require a more radical goal. To be precise, only the successful overthrow of capitalism across the region, particularly in key states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, can make possible the liberation of Palestine. This doesn’t change the fact that the Palestinians will continue to have a central and leading role to play in organising popular resistance to Israel and capitalism, both inside occupied Palestine and in the neighbouring countries. But it does mean that the practice of seeking allies among the Arab regimes, which has been the long-term approach of the leading Palestinian factions, has to be opposed. Not only is it a betrayal of the Arab masses living under these regimes, but it is a dead end for the Palestinian struggle. Instead, efforts must be made to link up with the many economic, social and geopolitical grievances of workers and the poor across the region. This can most effectively be done by locating Palestinian oppression in a wider context of regional exploitation, oppression and imperialism, and Israel’s role in maintaining this unequal and oppressive status quo. This involves popularising a systemic critique of Arab capitalism and its role in propping up Western imperialism, and building a movement that can turn this critique into action. Those of us outside the Middle East also have an important role to play. Israel can survive and get away with its atrocities only due to endless Western support and funding. We have seen that a mass movement in Australia has been capable of shifting the terrain of discussion and politics, but not core aspects of government policy. It is similar elsewhere. To force Western governments even to begin to break ties with Israel would take immense struggle by workers, the kind of struggle that would make clear to the Albaneses of the world that the choice is between profits and social stability and continued support for genocide. Standing in the way of this is the existing leadership of the workers’ movement, which has no interest in mobilising workers to make Australia’s support for Israel unviable. Such action would threaten not only the interests of Australian capitalism, which the union leaders do not oppose, but also the electoral fortunes of the Labor Party, which most union leaders are aligned with, and the relatively privileged position of the leaders themselves within the system, not to mention their future career prospects. To make the kinds of strikes that could lead to real sanctions against Israel and the arms industry happen today would require a profoundly more radical and organised working-class movement than what currently exists. This in turn presupposes the existence of a serious left in the workers’ movement, both able to lead action and carrying weight ideologically. Socialist-led unions, backed by a militant rank and file, could organise black bans of weapons companies and Israeli shipping lines, and engage in targeted actions to enforce them. The places where this has happened in recent years, for instance the dock workers in Greece, have long traditions of communist influence in the union. So both in the Middle East and in the imperialist West, fighting for revolutionary socialist politics grounded in mass working-class organisations is a vital step on the road to Palestinian liberation. This means rejecting both the two-state farce that serves to validate the status quo, and also the sort of liberal utopianism that assumes a single Palestinian state in the framework of capitalism is possible and able to bring liberation. Instead, a revolutionary socialist approach means a relentless and uncompromising struggle against all of the institutions that have become so discredited by their response to Israel’s genocide, including every powerful nation state on earth. Only a struggle for a socialist Palestine that unites the revolutionary workers and peasants of the Middle East with an insurgent, anti-imperialist working class movement in the West can hope to achieve liberation. *Omar is a long-time pro-Palestine activist based in Melbourne* ### Why does OnlyFans have so few critics on the left? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-does-onlyfans-have-so-few-critics-on-the-left/ Last updated: 2025-09-07T06:46:42.000Z OnlyFans is the same as any other porn platform or brothel: it enables a small minority of mostly men to get rich from the exploitation of women. What’s remarkable, though, is not that another business is making money from sexism, but that so few progressives are interested in criticising it. The leftist magazine *Jacobin*, for example, ran an article in 2021 about the site, much of which reads like an OnlyFans infomercial. It argues against measures to ensure that people appearing in adult content videos are doing so consensually and makes no mention of OnlyFans’ role in manufacturing misogyny and sexism. An [article](https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/critique-of-the-swerf-on-feminism-and-sex-work?ref=redflag.org.au)written for *Queer Majority* magazine likewise defends sex work as providing “many with the means of caring for themselves and facilitating the freedom to make their own decisions”. But there is nothing to defend, and certainly nothing progressive about OnlyFans nor the industry it is part of. For the uninitiated, OnlyFans is a subscription-based DIY porn site which exploded into the mainstream during the COVID-19 pandemic. As people spent more time at home and on their phones on Instagram and TikTok, and men were no longer able to access brothels and strip clubs, OnlyFans became a convenient substitute. In 2020, it was estimated there were over a million content creators on the platform; now that number has swelled to [around 4 million](https://www.economist.com/business/2025/06/24/how-onlyfans-transformed-porn?ref=redflag.org.au). The company, which is currently owned by billionaire Leonid Radvinsky and is reportedly for sale, is estimated to be worth anything between $8 billion and $28 billion. The rise of OnlyFans is part of the wider normalisation of pornography and its increasing accessibility. Violent and degrading treatment of women in much of this material is widespread: one [landmark study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20980228/?ref=redflag.org.au) of 300 popular porn videos found that nearly 90 percent of them featured physical aggression towards women. This has real world implications. As Sophie Gilbert, author of *Girl on Girl*, argues, “inevitably, these kinds of behaviours \[filter\] out, leading to demonstrable changes in how people \[are\] having sex in their own lives. A 2019 study found that 38 percent of British women under 40 reported having experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during sex”. OnlyFans content is contributing to the normalisation and spread of harmful sexual practices, partly because in order to attract more “subs”, creators are pushed to create more shocking and sensational content. This content helps creators increase their market share and make more money, but also usually involves more misogynistic content. This is the logic of market competition, and, as in every other area, the market is willing to do anything for money. This includes the sexualisation of children or the promotion of paedophilic fantasies—many OnlyFans content creators act in “childlike” ways to attract viewers or dress in school uniforms or other children’s clothing. These practices are lucrative business opportunities for OnlyFans creators and bosses, which is much more important than the fact that the real-world sexualisation of children destroys untold numbers of lives. It seems like a no-brainer that progressives who oppose sexism should recognise the viciously sexist nature of sites like OnlyFans and the porn industry in general. So why is it that when you Google “OnlyFans sexism”, the majority of articles that are critical are from conservatives on the Christian right or radical feminists, who are mostly not associated with the radical left. There are myriad reasons why the left has been reluctant to take up the issue of porn and the sex industry. One is the hangover of the debates about pornography that took place in the 1970s and ’80s. Then, the debate was between the libertarians, who were for no intervention, censorship or restrictions, and those who, like the radical feminists, teamed up with conservatives to campaign for the state to intervene to restrict the import and availability of pornography. In response to this unholy alliance, much of the left sided with the former, seeing “censorship” and “prudishness” as the greater evil. This camp championed “choice” for women, and argued that people who were hostile to things such as BDSM, fetish, sex work and the porn industry as sexist were reactionaries who shamed women and men who were just acting out their sexual desires in consensual ways. These positions were more defensible at the time than they are now. Opposition to the state exercising more control over people’s lives, for example, was and continues to be a legitimate concern for the left. Another valid concern was that state repression and censorship would be used by reactionaries to target the LGBTI community, and that gay porn and erotica would end up banned rather than sexist and misogynistic content. Yet another was the assumption that the main issue facing women was their being siloed off into a domestic, motherly stereotype and having their sexuality denied in the process, which more repression would reinforce. The explosion of the sex industry since these debates several decades ago has shown these concerns to be largely erroneous, and that the intensification of sexism, not some sort of sexual liberation, has been the most important upshot and social negative of the normalisation of porn. The legacy of progressives having a one-sided approach to these questions historically is now reflected in a widespread acceptance of the sex industry and downplaying of the sexism inherent in it. Progressive-sounding justifications for the sex industry are now commonplace among much of the left. One of these is that porn, the sex industry and kink are OK if they take place between consenting adults. But the oppressed consenting to degrading and dehumanising practices doesn’t make them OK or any less oppressive; it just indicates an acceptance of aspects of oppression. A focus on consent and the subjective attitudes of participants also doesn’t address the wider social ramifications of the sex industry and its offshoots, or the question of how and why people come to find dynamics of power and violence sexually gratifying. These are important considerations for anyone interested in challenging sexism and uniting the working class to smash oppression and liberate the oppressed. Another justification is that it is prudish or “[busybody](https://partisanmagazine.org/2025/07/03/womans-worst-friend/?ref=redflag.org.au)”ish to interrogate the ways that women’s oppression is expressed and reinforced in the porn and sex industry. It has become taboo to address the issue, and doing so brings with it the risk of being labelled anti-sex. But there is nothing necessarily left wing, liberating or empowering about sex, and sex has and is used as a means of abuse in epidemic proportions. How sexuality is expressed is also closely linked to how women and men relate to each other, and navigate the systematic social inequality that invariably colours their relationships. So sex has to be understood in its social context, not just blindly championed. But it’s even worse than that. Many progressives now see sex work as not just a better alternative to prudery, but proactively empowering. They argue that it is the stigma that makes it a problem, not the inherent sexism, and that removing the stigma is desirable so that women can be better exploited without social disapproval. We shouldn’t critique the industry, in other words; we should promote and normalise it. Obviously, women in the industry should not be demonised, attacked or criminalised. But at the same time, an industry that relies on the eroticisation of non-consensual sex and dehumanised attitudes towards women should legitimately be stigmatised. Its existence has terrible consequences for women and men, and the dynamics between them. Porn and sex work creates a society that is increasingly sexist and tolerant of sexist attitudes and behaviour, which is a profoundly reactionary development. The sex industry bosses and promoters have done a lot of work to sanitise the image of porn and sex work. In her book *Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self,* Kajsa Ekis Ekman explores the way this happened over the last few decades. One of the things she points to is the way that the act of sex and the men who are buying sex are never mentioned in accounts of the sex industry written to portray it in a positive light. Discussing an article written by a defender of the sex industry, she writes, “If we didn’t know better, we might think prostitution was a strictly female affair. There is hardly a single word about men”. By not discussing the men, we don’t have to imagine the disgusting men who objectify women by masturbating to images of them, or purchase them for sex. One agency that manages OnlyFans accounts argued against stigmatising the agencies! “Part of the problem is not accepting sex work as work. This mainly affects the cis women and the LGBTQ+ community, who are often the target of nasty comments and vitriol from those who don’t understand the freedom gained from their sexual liberation.” This is a particularly galling example of a business using progressive language to defend their business model. Agencies, as well as the men who purchase sex, should experience social stigma. Not because sex is something that people should be ashamed of, but because these agencies and men are engaging in sexist, abusive and exploitative behaviours. The reality of sex work and platforms such as OnlyFans is that they have nothing to do with empowerment and everything to do with a pro-capitalist ideology, summed up by “hustle culture”. According to those on the “grindset”, if you’re not making money via your social media, your body, your house, your car or your ability to do jobs in your spare time, you are failing. For women, the rationale to sell sex online is that if they are going to have sex anyway, they may as well profit from it. Everything is a potential transaction. As it was put in the [Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/lily-phillips-outrage-porn-100-men/681032/?ref=redflag.org.au), “it’s considered better to monetize your objectification than endure it without compensation”. The sort of mentality this promotes is directly at odds with the ethos of the workers’ movement, which is that our work is collective and interdependent, as are our incomes and standard of life. This is the material reality that unites workers and many of the oppressed. Seeing ourselves as one-person small businesses runs directly counter to that. Some women may earn large amounts of money engaging in OnlyFans, but this is not empowerment. Empowerment would mean liberation. That does not mean men having the right to sex or to women’s bodies. We need to fight for a society where women are not systematically oppressed, where they’re not constantly objectified and treated as sex objects. It’s clear that OnlyFans is nothing but a reactionary capitalist industry—it should be a no-brainer for the left to grasp that and to be confident to argue to smash it. ### The French Impressionists: caught between revolution and counter-revolution URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-french-impressionists-caught-between-revolution-and-counter-revolution/ Last updated: 2025-09-07T06:35:21.000Z “The impressionists ... stand for revolution ... \[The paintings\] make us feel liberated just looking at them and they retain a sense of rebellion.” This eulogy to the French Impressionists—taken from the promotional material for the French Impressionists exhibition currently showing at the National Gallery of Victoria—follows in a long tradition of similar commentary. The reality however, is more complex. Most of the Impressionist artists were from comfortable, if not wealthy, families. This relative privilege coloured their attitudes to contemporary events. The salon system that organised exhibitions and patronage by some wealthy individual or institution—the main ways to achieve success—imposed stifling limits to artists’ creativity. Chafing against conservative opinion while experimenting with new ideas about the representation of reality made some of the artists somewhat open to radical ideas. But this was limited by their expectation of a respectable, comfortable life. As they began to identify as a new school of art, France was increasingly in turmoil, torn apart by war and revolution, to which they responded in different, even contradictory, ways. Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, dictator from 1852 until September 1870, went to war with Germany in July 1870, which ended with the siege of Paris from September by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The intolerable misery of war and Bismarck’s siege followed years of turmoil caused by Bonaparte’s “urban renewal” in Paris, designed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann. New, wide boulevards cut swathes through workers’ districts, displacing thousands from central Paris. The poverty, squalor and overcrowding in working-class districts of Montmartre and Belleville bred intense bitterness. On the other hand, the wealthy enjoyed glitzy cafes and elegant stores within walking distance of their magnificent residences. As the social historian John Merriman writes, “the bourgeoisie’s day had truly arrived”. To add insult to injury for the poor, the wealthy upper classes—able to escape to country estates—refused to support any defence of Paris during Bismarck’s siege while the mostly working-class National Guard remained in control of armaments in the capital. The head of the French government, Adolphe Thiers, also signed a pact with Bismarck to crush “Red Paris”. Edouard Manet joined the National Guard along with his two brothers and Edgar Degas to defend Paris. On 18 March 1871, Thiers sent in soldiers to seize the National Guard’s cannon, the only defence available to Paris. Workers in Montmartre and Belleville rose in rebellion. Rebellion became revolution, and they instituted the Paris Commune, which would organise life in Paris for three months. They established the most democratic governance ever seen before or since—officials elected by universal suffrage were recallable at any time and received an average worker’s wage. The atmosphere in Paris was one of joy, experimentation and flourishing creativity. Incredible flowerings of organisation, debate and social experimentation were the defining aspects of dozens of radical clubs. They implemented far-sighted reforms: equal pay and rights for women, universal education for both boys and girls free of church control and much more. The army was disarmed and replaced with the National Guard to defend the Commune from Bismarck’s bombardments and the impending government attack. The terrified wealthy classes saw that this demonstration of workers’ ability to organise an equal society threatened their privileges and power. In the last week of May, the government unleashed an orgy of violence to finally crush the Commune. At least 30,000 people were slaughtered in the streets of Paris and 50,000 jailed. In the following weeks, the executions continued and 4,000 were deported to Caledonia. The aim of *la semaine sanglante*, “the bloody week”, was to crush not just the physical presence of the social revolution, but also its spirit. Albert Boime, a Marxist art historian, studied the response of the Impressionists to the workers’ revolution. Most were not sympathetic to Communard rule. Their wealthy class background mitigated against it. If they had not escaped Bismarck’s siege, many now fled Paris for country estates or other countries. Auguste Renoir dismissed the Communards as fanatical and stupid. Perhaps his demeanour when painting in the street conveyed this contemptuous attitude. Some Communards, mistaking him for a government spy, hauled him in front of a firing squad. Fortuitously, Raoul Rigault, a respected militant and the attorney general of the Commune, remembered Renoir, who years before had hidden him from police persecution. Edgar Degas, unlike the Manet brothers—who showed considerable sympathy for the workers perhaps—remained totally aloof. He saw the Commune as an infringement on his class’s right to wealth and property. His much-admired painting *At the Races in the Country* expresses a smug celebration of this class privilege. Sketched during the Commune at the country estate of a wealthy friend and completed later, the tranquil, picturesque countryside emphasises the absence of the turmoil in Paris. More pointedly, his friend (sporting a top hat) is, as Boime says: “Located at the apex of the composition, casting a protective glance at mother, child and wet-nurse as if to represent symbolically the traditional hierarchy as constitutive of the surrounding order and stability”. Degas eventually went to New Orleans to escape the social upheavals. He shared the racist views of his family, who were involved in slavery and supported the Confederacy in the Civil War. Alfred Sisley stayed in Paris, and many of his paintings were destroyed by pillaging Prussian troops. It is said that the absence of any work by him during this year until 1872 reflects the trauma he experienced. Paul Cezanne despised Thiers and loathed the violence of *la semaine sanglante*. But he appears to have shared the contempt for the Communards expressed by his close friend, the famous writer Emile Zola. Nevertheless, the freedom-loving orientation of Commune leaders attracted many artists, writers and other intelligentsia who remained in Paris. The founder and president of the Artists Federation in the Commune was Gustave Courbet, the realist painter, precursor and friend of many of the Impressionists. Eugène Pottier, famous for his authorship of “The Internationale”*—*a song imbued with the internationalism and irreverence of the Commune—wrote the founding manifesto of the federation. The federation held debates about the role of art and the artist in society. They aimed to overcome the counter-position between beauty and utility and to integrate art into the everyday life of workers. The federation’s members refused to exhibit any artistic works that were not signed by their creator. This was a response to the practice of artists having to sell their works unsigned so that a dealer could pocket the profits. They set up art galleries where workers could visit for free, and they improved art education. Honoré Daumier, a skilled lithographer famous for his comical caricatures of political figures, was active in the federation. He is sometimes referred to as the first of the Impressionists, though he was not really part of their movement. The Metropolitan Museum of Art says of his lithograph *See,* *Mr. Réac, it is quite enough!* printed two days after the proclamation of the Commune: “It shows Daumier’s concern for the lives already lost in recent conflict and the bloodshed to come. An allegory of Paris points to a hillside filled with graves to tell the cowering reactionary that there are more than enough dead”. His works are remarkable for their close identification with key aspects of life in the Commune. The lithograph *Decree of the commune: General liquidation, from ‘Rent issues’* is typical. Edouard Manet signed the federation’s manifesto but was not an active participant. His inspirational *The Barricade* also references the struggle in a positive light. Boime says that in spite of little sympathy for the Commune, many of the Impressionists were sickened by the horror of the bloodshed that followed. Manet witnessed the carnage and “experienced creative paralysis and nervous exhaustion in the aftermath, leading to deep depression for several months”, according to Boime. His dark, confronting lithograph *Guerre Civile* and the realist Courbet’s sketch of children in a jail cell and his *Féderés*are exceptional in their explicit renderings of the suffering. You won’t see the art works that honestly depict the struggle or the ruling class’s violent vengeance on display very often. *Guerre Civile* was not exhibited until after Manet’s death. Manet was sickened by the violence used to suppress the Commune, but he stood aloof from everyone in the socialist left, even though he would have known some of them from the Commune. Cultural historian Philip Nord says he “painted canvasses with charged and explicit political content and lent critical support to politically motivated efforts to democratise the salon system”, which he boycotted. This puts him to the left of the Impressionists as a whole, but he was not a revolutionary. Manet’s brother Gustave, a Republican lawyer, participated in the Commune as a moderate. He and Edouard later campaigned for an amnesty for exiled Communards. Edouard’s beautiful *L’Evasion de Rochefort*depicts in oil exiles escaping from Caledonia. The tiny boat afloat the vast ocean evokes the dangers threatening those brave souls who suffered so much. Claude Monet, the creator of the much-loved paintings of water lilies and gardens, escaped to England. But he later wrote to Pisarro: “What shameful conduct, that of Versailles \[meaning the government\], it is frightful and makes me ill. I don’t have a heart for anything. It’s all heartbreaking”. The last quarter of the nineteenth century has been referred to as “a golden age of monument building” as part of the effort at “self-definition” following the trauma of 1870-71\. One of the most explicit was the Sacré-Coeur, built on Montmartre, where the revolution began. When laying the foundation stone, its architect Charles Rohault de Fleury declared that Sacré-Coeur reclaimed for the nation “the place chosen by Satan and where was accomplished the first act of that horrible Saturnalia”. But it was not just stone and mortar monuments that contributed to the campaign to erase the memory of the Commune and ruling class savagery. Revolutionary in technique the Impressionists might be. But most of their exquisite work contributed to this campaign, whether consciously or simply as a reflection of their class prejudice. With their radical techniques and new ways of depicting the world around them, they are some of the most well-known, striking contributors. But interpretation is not straightforward. Andrew Eschelbacher, in an article “Paris and Post-Commune Angst”, writes: “Vestiges of the Commune manifested themselves acutely in the city’s memorial spaces, and filled the urban sphere with competing understandings of the revolt. Accordingly, no universal memory developed”. Camille Pisarro is typical. He painted beautiful portrayals of middle-class domesticity, their windows overlooking the now peaceful streets so recently barricaded. It was art to reassert bourgeois ascendancy. But the memories elicited by the city street scenes and middle-class comfort carry conflicting meanings. Renoir’s *Pont Neuf* or Pisarro’s middle-class elegance can be read as searing reminders of the savagery their class used to crush the joyous experience of those in the Commune. They compete with a tradition in the working class of taking pride in the Commune and the courageous defiance of the children, women and men who made it. Burning the city to the ground and dying on the barricades rather than surrender was their last revolutionary act. Why does it matter whether we just admire the beauty or take note of their role in the class struggle? James Plested explained why in a recent *Red Flag* article titled “Why does history matter for socialists?”. If we do not study history, he argues, “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 is particularly the case for 1871 and the following years. Even as we might enjoy the Impressionists’ work, we should remember the part they played in the campaign to bury the precious memory of the Commune. Importantly, you will rarely see the works that celebrate the Commune, or indeed those which condemn the ruling-class barbarity. They are a reminder that the wars, the genocide, the suffering of refugees we are witnessing today are not an aberration. The rich, powerful and respectable may flinch at the horror, but in the end they will look away. They won’t join us in the fight to end this society that breeds it. The Impressionists, even those who were traumatised by *la semaine sanglante*, helped create a tradition that glorifies their luxury, beauty and comfort as the epitome of culture—a culture denied to the vast mass of humanity as long as capitalism survives. ### Aged care and disability: ‘opulence’ for the owners, at our expense URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/aged-care-and-disability-opulence-for-the-owners-at-our-expense/ Last updated: 2025-09-07T06:33:07.000Z In 2021, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Royal Commission shone a harsh light on the sickening and dangerous priorities of the business interests that control the aged-care sector. It exposed that billions of government dollars were flowing into an increasingly privatised industry, fuelling enormous wealth for the operators, while workers copped rock-bottom wages and old folks were locked in their rooms in squalor due to lack of staff. One of the aged-care companies at the centre of media attention in the years that followed was Heritage Care, which operated nine for-profit aged-care homes. Heritage Care and its owners became infamous in 2020, after 38 people died of COVID-19 after a major infection control breach at its Epping Gardens aged-care facility in Melbourne. In the wake of this disaster, family members talked of short staffing leaving residents unwashed, unfed and undressed. The *Age* revealed that another of the company’s facilities, in the Sydney suburb of Botany, had failed all eight minimum standards in an audit by the regulator in 2019\. Management of nutrition, hydration, skin injuries, falls and pain was inadequate, the food was bad, and staff numbers had been cut, leaving residents uncared for. Nonetheless, the regulator allowed the facility to keep operating. Much of the government money that was never spent on staffing or care was instead siphoned off to finance the luxury lifestyle of Peter Arvanitis, one of the two co-owners of Heritage Care, and wife Areti Arvanitis. In October last year, the *Australian Financial Review* [gushed](https://www.afr.com/property/residential/aged-care-mogul-asking-55m-for-toorak-temple-of-opulence-20241009-p5kh61?ref=redflag.org.au)over the Toorak residence of these two aged-care industry profiteers: “From a French chandelier sourced from Hollywood producer Aaron Spelling’s Los Angeles home, to the master bedroom’s plum-red silk carpet floors – the aesthetic on display throughout Estia Healthcare founder Peter Arvanitis and his wife Areti’s Toorak mansion is nothing short of unbridled opulence. “The entrance hall alone features brass doors, marble floors, eight-metre-high ceilings, a hand-blown glass dome with hand-painted roses and a sweeping curved staircase… “The five-bedroom home comprises 2000 square metres of sumptuous interiors across three levels. Along with six bathrooms, there’s a wellness room, a 10-car garage, cinema and a secretly accessed wood-panelled bar inspired by London’s private clubs.” Government money and pathetically weak regulation lead to low wages for the workers, unspeakable conditions for many of those who rely on the sector for care—and Toorak mansions for the owners. The National Disability Insurance Scheme is designed on similar lines to the profit-driven childcare and aged-care sectors. A funnel of government money flows to private operators, with light-touch neoliberal “regulation” putting no constraint on private enrichment. Unsurprisingly, the NDIS is starting to attract similar headlines to the well-documented capitalist-made disaster zones of child care and aged care. Even Murdoch’s tabloids [reported](https://mobile.x.com/Johnkehoe23/status/1804355727932428578/photo/1?ref=redflag.org.au)last year on the NDIS being transformed into “an ATM for the mega-rich”. Australian retail boss Brett Blundy seems typical of these new operators. Blundy is the 38th-richest person in the country, according the annual *Australian Financial Review* Rich List, with an estimated wealth of $3.95 billion. Having made his pile in retail, Blundy has recently bought into Independent Living Specialists, which supplies aids such as modified furniture and mobility scooters to NDIS customers. Sixty-three of the 67 ratings for Independent Living Specialists on the “[trustpilot](https://au.trustpilot.com/review/ilsau.com.au?page=2&ref=redflag.org.au)” website are one star, with feedback to match: “Negative star—absolute worst experience”; “Bad service, greed-driven, overpriced products”; “This company should be shut down”; “Shameful company. Dishonest. Should be banned from using NDIS logo”; “PREY ON SICK AND INJURED—AVOID”. While people needing mobility aids for family members put up with endless delays and poor products, Blundy buys and sells luxury super-yachts with [reported](https://www.commercialrealestate.com.au/news/billionaire-retails-big-ticket-items-1196789/?ref=redflag.org.au)price tags of around a quarter of a billion dollars. It’s business as usual in Australia’s grotesque, profit-driven care sector. ### Europe’s far-right surge; defining ‘right wing’, ‘conservative’, ‘fascist’, ‘Nazi’ URL: https://redflag.org.au/note-11-europes-far-right-surge-defining/ Last updated: 2026-01-20T02:42:58.000Z NO WAY YOU WILL NEVER SET FOOT IN AUSTRALIA The poster was glued to a wall or a column—I can’t quite remember—at Vavuniya train station in northern Sri Lanka. At the top, an outline of Australia crossed like a no-smoking sign. A small fishing vessel was pictured on perilous seas below it. Bold font was used for the type in the middle. Though the elements had drained the paper of its original hues and mellowed the once dramatic contrasts, the message was still clear, even if most people in the area couldn’t read English. It was 2017\. The Australian government had begun producing the posters a few years earlier for Operation Sovereign Borders, its militarised effort to prevent refugees claiming asylum. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/e3a9484f-a7cf-4418-ba70-2eb3f17e6b76_834x744.png) Operation Sovereign Borders material produced by the federal government. Vavuniya (pronounced Woh-niah) seemed apt, in its own grotesque way, for the poster’s placement: the district was the site of Manik Farm concentration camp, holding more than 200,000 internally displaced Tamils in a squalor of overflowing latrines, disease, malnutrition, harassment and worse. The camp had been decommissioned five years earlier. But the northern homelands of the Tamil people were still, as they remain, littered with barracks—one of the most intense military occupations in the world, following on from the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians in 2009. Australia was a leader among the “civilised West” in ferociously attacking people seeking safety on our shores. Before long, the far right across Europe [had adopted the government’s slogan as their own](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00113921231194093?ref=redflag.org.au). In the Netherlands, Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders appeared in a 2015 anti-immigrant video in which the material is unmistakably modelled on the Australian propaganda; the German History Museum in Berlin [displayed one of the versions altered by neo-Nazis in a 2016 exhibition](https://redflag.org.au/node/5253) titled “Antisemitic and racist stickers from 1880 to today”. I’m reminded of all this yet again as far-right Reform UK leader Nigel Farage cites the now mainstream, bipartisan Australian border regime as [a model to be emulated in Britain](https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/farage-cites-tony-abbott-to-declare-he-can-stop-the-boats-20250907-p5mszb.html?ref=redflag.org.au)—more than a decade after the political tussle over it ended here. This week, I think for the first time, far-right parties led national election polling in all four of Europe’s biggest economies: Germany, Britain, France and Italy. In the latter, Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) has increased in popularity since taking office in 2022 as the head of a coalition government. Wilders’ party, now part of the ruling Dutch coalition, has also surged in the polls. But it’s Farage’s organisation that has had the most spectacular rise. While much could be said about Europe, Australia’s “centre-right” and “centre-left” Liberal and Labor parties consistently fly under the radar in discussions about the appalling practices of contemporary far-right governments and the anti-migrant extremism of far-right parties. Again and again, the forces of the far right claim legitimacy by pointing to Australia, where social democracy today presides over the sort of “border protection” system European Nazis continue to advocate for. We’re told that this country’s biggest export is iron ore. But politically, it’s border fascism, albeit of the sort that was sold at home as a form of humanitarianism to save refugees from people smugglers and dangerous voyages. In the mediocrity of Australian political life, this one odious achievement stands out. In no other field have Canberra’s politicians wielded such global influence than in supplying tested “solutions” to the “problems” of human movement: boat turnbacks, (alleged) [federal police involvement in sabotage operations](https://www.scmp.com/article/392615/questions-asked-over-asylum-boat-sabotage-claims?ref=redflag.org.au), deportations to underdeveloped states, concentration camps (some, again, hosted in dependent third countries), military deployments against fishing vessels, “territory excising” to remove the entire continent from its own migration zone—not to mention the systematic psychological torture of tens of thousands of asylum seekers, and potentially watching on as [hundreds of people drowned in the Indian Ocean](https://www.safecom.org.au/tkevin-book1.htm?ref=redflag.org.au). Even Donald Trump [admitted to our “moderate” Liberal PM Malcolm Turnbull in 2017](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-04/donald-trump-told-malcolm-turnbull-refugee-deal-was-stupid/8773368?ref=redflag.org.au): “You are worse than I am”. On this, I think Trump was dead right. ### **The A-Z of Marxism** *Have you ever listened to a lawyer, a politician or an academic and thought, “Why don’t they just speak in plain English?” Left-wing activists also occasionally use terms that aren’t much understood outside of our own circles—or we use terms in ways that are different from how they are often understood. So we’re creating a short dictionary, “*[*The A-Z of Marxism*](https://redflag.org.au/the-a-z-of-marxism/)*”. Today’s entries are …* #### **Right wing** > Describes ideologies, organisations and people who support business owners’ interests and are generally hostile to the workers’ movement and progressive causes. The terms “left” and “right” were coined during the French Revolution, referring to the seating arrangements in the National Assembly. Those on the left supported the revolution, the creation of a democratic republic and the secularisation of society, while those on the right supported the monarchy. #### **Conservatism** > As a political movement or ideology, conservatism is notoriously tricky to define. Perhaps the neatest definition is that it is the defence of hierarchy—the belief that some people should rule over others, be it husbands over wives, bosses over workers, rich over poor, or perhaps whites over blacks (although this last notion has gone out of favour, at least publicly). Conservatives generally oppose movements and political ideas that undermine “traditional” institutions of authority, such as the nuclear family or the church, or strive for more egalitarian (therefore less hierarchical) societies. #### **Fascism** > A particularly authoritarian and nationalist political ideology and movement, which usually cloaks itself in radical-sounding rhetoric but ultimately serves the interests of business owners and views the political left and the workers’ movement as enemies to be eradicated. The term is derived from the Latin word “fasces”, a symbol of Ancient Roman authority consisting of a bundle of rods and an axe. It was first used in 1915 by Benito Mussolini, whose regime in Italy (1922–43) was the first fascist state. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany (1933–45) was fascist, and accompanied by virulent white supremacist racism, most notably antisemitism. > > Fascism emerged in response to the political and economic crises that followed World War One, when the European working class was politically organised and generally socialist in outlook. The fascist movement was based on and mobilised the middle classes’ fear of working-class revolution, but (despite some anti-capitalist rhetoric) was financed and supported by big business. The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote in 1944: “The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery”. Hence, fascist states attacked the working-class movement by arresting its Communist and Social Democrat leaders and banning trade unionism. > > While some individuals, political movements and states have openly identified themselves as fascist, most don’t. Individuals can consciously or unconsciously recreate fascist political conduct while sincerely believing themselves to detest fascism; right-wingers might stridently deny any association with fascism while knowingly collaborating with and making use of fascist allies as part of a political or governing coalition. Political parties with fascist-like properties have characterised themselves as mainstream conservatives, or even as social democrats. > > Parties very similar to traditional European fascism have formed governments without creating a one-party state that is often viewed as defining a fascist political order. On the other hand, nationalist dictatorships similar to Mussolini’s Italy can emerge without founding themselves on the kind of large-scale middle-class social movement often viewed as a defining feature of fascism. So whether an individual or party self-identifies as fascist doesn’t necessarily tell us much about their politics. (For more, see the *Red Flag* article “[Trotsky and the fight against fascism](https://redflag.org.au/article/trotsky-and-struggle-against-fascism)”.) #### **Nazi** > Historically, a member or supporter of Adolf Hitler’s fascist National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP, 1920–1945). The word is derived from the German *Nationalsozialismus* (National Socialism). (As the shortened version of *Ignatz*, it was also the standard name of a stock comic character: the Bavarian country bumpkin.) > > The Nazis used the term “socialist” even while they were part of a right-wing nationalist political coalition, attacking Marxist workers both verbally and physically, appealing to big business and ultimately trying to eradicate the entire German left. By using the term “socialist”, the Nazis appealed to millions of Germans who had lost faith in the capitalist system. But Nazis had their own idea of what “socialism” meant: to be a pro-war German patriot who put the military needs of the country before personal interest. > > Certain capitalists were attacked for being treacherous, and politicians for being “bourgeois” if they were too visibly corrupt. But at the same time, workers who fought for their own interests were also denounced as treacherous and misled by Jewish ideology. This “socialist” demagogy was played up in propaganda that targeted workers and disillusioned middle-class activists, but the volume was turned down when the Nazis were appealing to the ruling class. Nazi talk of a “social revolution” ultimately meant replacing worn-out, timid politicians with a new generation of aggressive, pro-war authoritarian activists who would have the guts to crush the left and launch a new war. #### **Neo-Nazi** > Contemporary Nazis who attempt to rebuild Hitler-style fascist movements embracing anti-communism, authoritarianism and deep racism (often white supremacy, but local variants may focus on other forms of ethnic or religious purity). For decades after World War Two, Nazis were mostly confined to marginal secret societies and subcultures, but the rise of so-called “right-wing populism” since the mid-2010s has enlarged their audience and recruiting pool. Neo-Nazi ideas such as Holocaust denial are increasingly common. More than other fascist currents, neo-Nazis tend to glorify violence; they consider street fighting and physically bashing perceived enemies as a key part of their political practice. ### ‘Legitimate concerns’? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/legitimate-concerns/ Last updated: 2025-09-04T13:18:04.000Z Watching the footage of the March for Australia rallies on 31 August, it was impossible not to conclude that they were gatherings of hard-core racists. When speakers chanted “Send them back! Send them back!” and “Heil Australia!” and the crowd enthusiastically joined in, or when demonstrators held placards stating “Mass migration = silent invasion”, or when t-shirts sporting the slogan popularised by the 2005 Cronulla riots “Fuck off, we’re full” were a common sight, you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that these were racist mobilisations demanding a return to White Australia. Curiously, though, politicians and newspaper editors are now trying to convince us that these were not far-right mobilisations by racist dogs who should be shunned by society. The open Nazis, whose presence at the rallies could not be denied, did cop some flak. Victorian Police Minister Anthony Carbines called them “unhinged grubs”, and Nazi leader Thomas Sewell was remanded in custody on charges of violent disorder, affray and assault following the attack on Camp Sovereignty. But self-declared Nazis aside, Labor and Liberal alike are now doing their best to convince us that the rest of the crowd were essentially decent folk duped by fascists. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the crowd as “good people turning up to demonstrate their views” but who should be cautious about giving neo-Nazis a platform. Multicultural Affairs minister Anne Aly agreed: many of those attending had been “conned” by the far right. When asked to comment on the appearance of Pauline Hanson and Bob Katter as guests of honour at the Canberra and Townsville rallies, Aly could not bring herself to denounce even these out-and-out racists. On the other side of the chamber, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley said that the rallies were “attended by people of goodwill but hijacked by violent neo-Nazis spouting hate and racism”. It hasn’t just been right-wing politicians who have downplayed the bigotry on display. The *Age*editors condemned the rally but said that “it must be acknowledged that many of those choosing to protest on Sunday were not racist”. ABC journalists chimed in along the same lines. What has been the defence put up for the bulk of the March for Australia demonstrators? That they were motivated by “legitimate concerns”, including about the housing crisis, inadequate infrastructure and the cost of living. These naïve folk should under no circumstances be called racist or called out on their disgusting actions, apparently. Oh no, that would be “polarising” and, according to Albanese, would “push them further down the rabbit-hole”. Accompanying this has been near unanimity across the political and media classes that there needs to be a “mature conversation” about immigration, thereby accepting the fascist claim that immigration is a cause for concern. Some on the left echoed these sentiments. Student members of socialist group Solidarity at Sydney University argued that the rally was “not a White Australia rally, but a housing crisis rally” and that the attendees were “impoverished” and “concerned about the housing crisis”. Solidarity’s online coverage of the event included quotes from racist trade unionists in an apparent attempt to play up a division between open Nazis and “softer racists”. They seem to believe that if racist workers march, their involvement somehow mitigates the fascistic character of these rallies and presents an opportunity to split their ranks. It doesn’t seem to bother those trying to play up the supposed “legitimate grievances” of the crowd or insisting there were “good people” on both sides that not one chant at these rallies called for any government action to ease the housing crisis other than an immediate halt to immigration. Nor that the only printed placard mentioning housing—“Stop mortgage rises—stop immigration!”—was produced by One Nation. Nor that Nazi speeches, according to an *Age* reporter, were met with “rousing cheers”, and the one attempt to take the microphone from a Nazi, at the Adelaide rally, was met with fierce opposition from the crowd who demanded that he be given the right to speak. Emphasising the “legitimate concerns” of organised racists only weakens the struggle against bigotry. It is imperative that anti-racists organise to resist the growth of a far-right movement; casting its adherents in the most positive conceivable light is an obstacle to that goal. It is hardly new that racism is dressed up as innocent “concerns”. Just look at the many excuses given for people voting against an Indigenous Voice to parliament. Indeed, scabs always claim to have “legitimate concerns”, including that they will face financial hardship if they go on strike. Police informers always have “legitimate concerns” that they face a tougher sentence if they don’t cooperate with the cops. But how do you build a strike, how do you protect people from harassment and how do you fight racism if your starting point is to make excuses for the people who do their best to defeat your efforts? The task of the left must be to solidarise with the millions repelled by displays of bigotry, not to apologise for the racists or to explain why they adhere to rancid ideas. We must call these demonstrations for what they are: not assemblies of innocents somehow hoodwinked into supporting unfortunate causes but collections of hard-core racists trying to cohere into a political force. They need to be crushed, not “understood”. Government ministers won’t do this. They recognise these pigs as potential voters they don’t want to alienate. And they understand that every grievance directed at a migrant is one less directed at them. Labor depends as much as the Liberals do on promoting flag-waving and rabid nationalism as part of the broader project of running Australian capitalism. Even if the government is not about to slash immigration (because Australian capitalists depend on it), it understands that right-wing nationalism certainly helps things along when you’ve got spending on public services to cut, a war to prepare for and hundreds of billions of dollars of extra military spending to justify. It’s the same reason Albanese refused to call the “No” campaign in the Voice referendum racist: to do so would require him to fight them, and fighting racism is simply not in Labor’s DNA. The ALP wants to run the capitalist state which requires it to pursue racist policies. The Greens, to their credit, condemned the racists. But they won’t mobilise to take them on. The trade union leaders have done nothing to push back. To take on racism, we need socialist politics grounded in class struggle and opposition to all forms of oppression. ### Community sector workers to walk out for Palestine again URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/community-sector-workers-to-walk-out-for-palestine-again/ Last updated: 2025-09-04T00:51:48.000Z On 10 September, workers from the social and community services sector will walk off the job to demand action on the genocide in Gaza. The action is being led by unionised workers in the Australian Services Union across several community legal services. The key demand is for the Federation of Community Legal Centres and the Victorian Council of Social Services—the industry peak bodies—to use their profiles to put pressure on the Australian government to sanction and cut ties with Israel. Many of the workers will be taking unprotected strike action, while others will find other ways to take time off in solidarity. At a union meeting at my workplace, which is part of the social and community sector, a motion was passed in support of the strike, and many of us will be taking leave to join the rally. This action is an example of the kind of action that can be taken by rank-and-file workers to increase the pressure on the government to go beyond gestures and end its material support for Israel. Almost two years into the genocide, with horrific images of starving Palestinians filling our newsfeeds and Israel openly planning the final stage of its ethnic cleansing, increasing numbers are finding it unbearable to go on with “business as usual” as if nothing is happening. This is particularly the case for those of us in the social and community services sector, whose work in these “values-based” organisations is purportedly about pursuing social justice and upholding human rights. There is increasingly a dissonance between what our CEOs and organisations proclaim about their values and their silence on a horrific genocide that the Australian government is providing ideological and material support for and that many in the communities we serve are affected by. As Louisa Bassini, a community lawyer and organiser of the walk-out, put it, “It’s absurd that we’re meant to dutifully work through a genocide when, as a class, we have the collective power to stop it. The strike reflects what so many of us want to do—get up, walk away from our desks and workplaces and disrupt everyday life—to stand against the horrors being committed by Israel. More than that, it shows that, with determination and organisation, it can be done”. This didn’t come out of nowhere—in fact it is the second unprotected strike organised in this sector in solidarity with Palestine. Workers in the community legal centres were well placed to take this action, having previously organised to fight for better pay and conditions in their enterprise agreement in 2022 and 2023\. When Israel’s offensive in Gaza started, activists and unionists were already in touch and better placed to organise to do something about it. These strikes, as well as the growth of rank-and-file union groupings such as ASU for Palestine, have shown that there are substantial numbers of workers in a range of sectors who want to put up a fight around this issue. And when given a lead, they are prepared to act. Michal Kedem, an ASU delegate and strike organiser, reflected on how the strike “got people talking about historical political strikes like the Dalfram dispute \[when, in 1938, unionised wharfies refused to load pig-iron headed for Japan, which had invaded China\]”, adding that “rank-and-file workers across workplaces and unions are giving everything they can to organise for Palestine”. In a positive development, the head office of the ASU has given its endorsement to the protest section of the walk-off. It needs to back these workers all the way. Social and community sector workers are showing what can and should be done in the union movement today. *For those in Melbourne—join workers on 10 September at 1pm at the State Library. For more information follow [clcworkersunited](https://www.instagram.com/clcworkersunited/?ref=redflag.org.au) and [asu4palestine\_vic ](https://www.instagram.com/asu4palestine%5Fvic/?ref=redflag.org.au)on Instagram.* ### What is social class? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/what-is-social-class/ Last updated: 2025-10-12T09:26:15.000Z The Australian Bureau of Statistics does not collect data on “class”. It collects data on income levels, household wealth and income by industry, all of which shines a useful light on the realities of working-class life. But class cannot be properly captured by statistics. That is because class is a relationship—between people and the productive process they depend on to survive. A shared relationship to production defines a social class. In capitalist society, a very small minority own and control the means of production. That is, whatever physical products—equipment, tools and technology—are required for any industry to operate. This minority is the ruling class, and includes those who own or control major corporations, senior bureaucrats, banking executives and media moguls, among others. The ruling class gets to choose what is made, the cost of products or services, who is employed and under what conditions. These economic decisions form the building blocks of society, and shape the conditions under which we all live. The working class, who are the vast majority of the global population, don’t own or control the productive apparatus. They don’t make the important decisions about what is produced or under what conditions. Instead, workers sell their ability to work—their labour power—to a boss, in exchange for a wage or salary. Workers can be white or blue collar, work primarily with their hands or their minds. They can be early childhood educators, IT assistants, train drivers, nurses, call centre operators or miners. What defines the working class is that they are denied control and decision-making power over the labour process, and they are exploited by their boss*.* Workers are the lifeblood of the economy. They produce every commodity you can think of and carry out myriad services—like maintaining roads and infrastructure, educating the population and caring for the sick—without which the economy could not operate. But workers perform all this indispensable labour not as free individuals but under rules and conditions imposed by bosses. You can’t show up to work whenever you please even under the most “flexible” arrangements. Construction workers employed to build a casino can’t decide to build a hospital instead. Workers are reduced to objects in the labour process, mere components of production with little or no agency or democratic right to make decisions about the work they do. Importantly for the bosses, workers are not only denied control over how they work, but also over the products of their labour. The value of what most workers produce in a day is far in excess of what they take home in the form of a wage or salary. The bosses keep the rest, a significant part of which ends up as profit. The expression “Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime” encapsulates this relationship, and the theft that is at the heart of it. Workers and bosses, then, are in an antagonistic relationship with each other. What’s good for one is bad for the other. The first page of any business textbook will tell you that minimising operating costs will bring in more revenue. Paying workers low wages, denying “benefits” like sick leave and skimping on workplace conditions including safety regulations can mean more in the bank for a company. For workers, high pay, job security, greater access to leave and safer working conditions mean a better life. And because workers are human beings, not actually cogs in a machine, they can organise to fight for these things. So the exploitative and antagonistic relationship between bosses and workers gives rise to a constant struggle, taking different forms at different times, but which shapes the capitalist economy. Not everyone is a capitalist or a worker. The middle classes form a substantial minority of society, comprising small business owners, general practitioners, senior academics, many freelance artists and writers, sole-trader solicitors and barristers, or mid-level managers and supervisors, for example. The middle classes may own and control sections of production—like a small shop—without being titans of industry. They may have significant control over their labour—the head of human resources doesn’t need to log their bathroom breaks—or might be responsible for exploiting a few workers themselves, despite also having a boss. The middle classes don’t have the economic influence of either workers or bosses, and tend to be pulled in the direction of one or the other politically. Capitalism pivots around the exploitation of workers by bosses, and the interests of a group— what is good or bad for them—and their ideas and attitudes, are shaped by their class position. The ruling class are driven by endless competition for profit. They benefit from the monetisation of everything, and collective rights for workers and the oppressed being trampled if they stand in the way of profit-making. Members of the ruling class are used to being in control, and treating other people as a means to an end, or a competitor for market share and profit. They can unite around limited demands, but ultimately they are pitted against each other, loyal only to their bottom lines. Working-class life, on the other hand, is characterised much of the time by alienation and powerlessness. Workers are taught that there are serious consequences for defying authority. Breaking the rules at work could cost you a job and an income, even if the rules are unsafe like working in hot weather, or humiliating like being expected to carry out errands for superiors. Workers are made to feel like a cog in a machine they have no control over, and face chronic insecurity in the competition for jobs, housing, and the fight to stay afloat as prices rise. But at the same time, working-class life is fundamentally collective. Workers have to cooperate with each other for production to function effectively and for the economy to keep ticking over. The injustices of exploitation that can make workers feel the most alone are shared by millions of others. Sharing grievances together, and being exploited by a boss together, time and again push workers to fight back as a class. Only through standing together as a group can workers exercise power, by collectively stopping production and the flow of profits to the bosses. Working-class resistance can push back against individualism and the powerlessness engendered by capitalism. It can bring to the fore a sense of solidarity and the collective good, ideas we are told by our superiors are contrary to human nature because they are contrary to the ethos of capitalism. By forcing billions together in exploited labour, capitalism plants the seeds of working-class rebellion that show the hope for a better world. ### When fascists march, the left must get organised URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/when-fascists-march-the-left-must-get-organised/ Last updated: 2025-09-03T01:38:18.000Z Last Sunday’s March for Australia was a significant moment for the far right across the country, as goons draped in Australian flags took to the streets in substantial numbers. In Melbourne and Sydney, they brought out close to 10,000 people, while in Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart and Newcastle their numbers were in the hundreds or thousands. While the marches didn’t reach the size and militancy of the anti-lockdown demonstrations in Melbourne during the COVID era, they are the biggest explicitly racist demonstrations for some decades. It was never made public who exactly organised the marches, which called for an end to mass immigration. But in many places, particularly in Melbourne, it was clear that the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network played an important role. Even where the NSN were less central, the strategy was the same: far right forces sought to build a relatively broader right-wing movement around anti-migrant racism. That is, this was an attempt by Nazis and their ilk to try and enter the mainstream of Australian political life. None of this would have been possible without the Murdoch press, which has clearly decided that becoming a Fox News tribute act is its best chance of staying relevant. Rupert’s local minions want to see Australia become more like the US and UK, where the far right is ascendant. So, they provided free advertising to boost the “March for Australia”, with the *Daily Telegraph* even publishing the official promotional leaflet. The Seven TV network, owned by billionaire Kerry Stokes, also publicised the rally, continuing its tradition of promoting filth like Pauline Hanson and Ben Roberts-Smith. The movement produced by this classic alliance of fascists and billionaires was a predictable orgy of racism, anti-leftism and conspiracy theories. In a few cities, speakers promoted the “great replacement theory”, which posits that Western governments are consciously replacing white people with migrants. (Yes, those same governments that are incarcerating, deporting and drowning record numbers of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers the world over.) In Melbourne and Sydney, well-known neo-Nazis received rapturous applause, while in Adelaide the crowd went ballistic after a member of the NSN had a microphone wrenched from his hands, insisting on his right to speak. The Melbourne rally transformed into a terrifying pogrom against migrants and people of colour, before culminating in a violent attack on Camp Sovereignty, a protest camp led by Indigenous activists since 2006. It's clear beyond doubt that the NSN played a key role in these demonstrations. But the despicable rhetoric was far from limited to the Nazis. Each and every speaker raged against migrants in their own deranged way, at times remembering to qualify their hate by insisting they were not against all migrants, before collapsing into calls to deport them all. Politicians Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts and Bob Katter addressed the crowds. The fact that the fascists can make what sounds like a coherent link between housing and migration is a result of much more mainstream racism. For years, we’ve been subjected to arguments about how migration is leading to higher house prices, led by the Coalition and encouraged by Labor. This is reinforced by the lies told by the housing industry about so-called housing shortages, which continue to be peddled by politicians, the mainstream media and the vast bulk of capitalist economists, despite being [systematically](https://redflag.org.au/article/housing-supply-not-problem) [debunked](https://redflag.org.au/article/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-the-housing-crisis). But the reality is that very, very few of those on the streets were mobilised by economic concerns. The typical attendee was a 55-year-old white man, the vast majority of whom would have owned their own homes and/or businesses. One of the main organisers in Melbourne is Hugo Lennon, heir to a property developer worth hundreds of millions. In any case, there were no signs on the day complaining about housing, rent prices, failing education or health systems, or any such issues. This was not a protest about living standards, but a national day of racism and bigotry. Anyone who pretends it had anything to do with the former is giving cover to the Nazis and their followers. Unfortunately, the media and political class have taken the bait hook line and sinker, earnestly discussing how the housing crisis and cost of living issues triggered these demonstrations. This is echoed by political leaders, shamefully including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who described the far-right hooligans as possessing “legitimate concerns”. The anti-fascist left should have no truck with this line of argument. These racist thugs need to be crushed, not empathised with. In Melbourne and Sydney, a coalition of anti-fascist activists argued that the weekly Palestine rallies should take on the issue politically, and the resulting mobilisations were the largest anti-fascist actions seen for many years. Elsewhere, the left was less organised and far less effective in responding. In any case, the far right had the element of surprise on the weekend. Knowing what we now know, it’s clear that the left needs to be better organised for the future, to take to the streets in a show of unity and strength only possible through united action. We have prevented the far right’s growth before, and we can do it again. Having said that, developing a serious anti-fascist approach means looking at the wider context for this resurgence in far-right sentiment. Unlike during the days of Reclaim Australia (a revival of the far right in the mid-2010s), which was a peculiarly Australian phenomenon, today the far right is surfing a wave of international success. In many European countries, fascists and the far right are playing substantial roles both in government and opposition. In the US—the most powerful country on the planet—Trump is in charge, leading the most aggressively reactionary and authoritarian administration in living memory. Alongside Putin’s Russia, Israel’s ethno-nationalism has become a model and an inspiration for fascists the world over, even as they continue to hold deeply antisemitic views. More broadly, the growth of the far right reflects the crisis in the old strategy of capitalist domination, sometimes known as neoliberalism. This model emphasised trust in the free market (except in its love of union busting) and was prepared to tolerate symbolic improvements around certain social issues. Now there’s been a hard shift back to economic nationalism as the ruling class respond to rising imperialist tensions. Inequality has risen dramatically alongside the drastic decline of trade unions, and the rich rely increasingly on authoritarianism and bigotry to keep workers repressed and distracted. But while it’s important to build anti-fascist coalitions and actions where possible, alone such work is inadequate. Capitalism creates the conditions where fascism can breed, and as long as it exists so too will the far right. Mainstream capitalist politicians, be they social democrats, centrists or conservatives, all promote “moderate” versions of the ideas that make up fascist ideology: bigotry, hierarchy, oppression and militarism. So aside from day-to-day battles, the urgent task remains to construct a powerful socialist movement with roots in the working class, with all its wonderful diversity. Only by developing such an instrument and then using it to overthrow the rich and make capitalism history, can we end the far right for good. ### Is it hypocritical for socialists to use iPhones and buy stuff on Temu? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/is-it-hypocritical-for-socialists-to-use-iphones-and-buy-stuff-on-temu/ Last updated: 2026-01-28T03:33:33.000Z Anti-capitalists are often accused of a double standard: you hate the system, but want to enjoy its benefits. The latest to employ this supposed gotcha is none other than Meg O’Neill, CEO of Woodside Petroleum. “It’s been a fascinating journey to watch the discussion, particularly amongst young people who have this very ideological, almost zealous view of, you know, ‘fossil fuel bad, renewables good’, that are happily plugging in their devices, ordering things from Shein and Temu”, she said, before lamenting “that human impact and the consumer’s role in driving energy demand and emissions absolutely is a missing space in the conversation”. That a fossil-fuel CEO on a $7.5 million salary can criticise the avarice of young people with mobile phones and who buy things online shows that “lifestylism”—a set of politics that starts from analysing individuals’ consumption choices—is all about letting the capitalist class off the hook. While O’Neill complains about young people charging their phones, Woodside is celebrating a 40-year extension of the North West Shelf gas project, which will release 4.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide over its lifetime. That’s more than 87 million tonnes a year, twice the annual emissions of Portugal. The consumption choices of individuals don’t even register when compared to the consequences of decisions made by big corporations. For a generation that grew up during the millennium drought of the early 2000s, water conservation was a way of life. Super-soakers were out, three-minute shower timers were in. Memories of these household standards were still fresh in young people’s minds when our government granted Adani an unlimited water licence for its Carmichael coal mine in 2017\. The mine uses at least 12.5 billion litres of water annually. While capitalists pocket massive profits from these destructive decisions, they want to force a sense of collective responsibility onto the rest of us. It’s why oil giant BP hired an advertising firm to popularise the term “carbon footprint” in the mid-2000s: in order to invoke a sense of individual responsibility for climate change. Corporations can now cash in on the spurious guilt they help generate—by giving you the opportunity to pay them to “carbon offset” your flight. Socialists reject the idea that individual consumers are to blame for environmental destruction. We argue that responsibility for the direction of society should be placed on those who control and run it. Capitalists, not consumers, are the ones who decide what is produced, how it is made and how it is distributed—with profit, not the wellbeing of the planet, as their overriding concern. It is their decisions that have the biggest impact on the world around us, and which determine the conditions under which the rest of us live and get what we need, and the choices available to us. Just think of how the world is clogged with trash because companies like Coca-Cola realised decades ago they could increase profits by replacing refillable bottles with single-use plastics. Or how millions of iPhones end up in landfill every year, leaking toxic chemicals into the soil, because they are designed to be difficult to repair and be made obsolete with the next release. While many people still attempt to live as ethically as possible within the confines of the system, the operations of capitalism restrict the majority from having the agency and resources to make real decisions about their lives. The layout of our cities and the demands of working life mean it’s impossible for most people to ditch their car. The average person spends $20 per day getting to work, and average commute times in Sydney and Melbourne are more than one hour. Thirty years ago, mobile phones were used only by high-powered business executives, but now a smartphone is a practical requirement for most work and study. Most people are busy focusing on how to keep up with mortgage payments and making sure their kids have regular meals. Only a minority of affluent and time-rich people have the resources to reverse-engineer the supply chains behind their Monday night spaghetti bolognaise. All the while, ordinary people are up against huge marketing machines dedicated to generating desire for products that we would be better off without. Large advertising firms hire professional psychologists who are experts in manipulative techniques to overcome what they refer to as “sales resistance”. And then they have the gall to blame the people impacted by these relentless marketing campaigns for the damage the business’s production and transport practices do to the planet. No similar resources are dedicated to raising awareness about the harmful impacts of capitalist production and distribution techniques, which might push behaviour in a different direction and generate resentment towards predatory companies. Worse still, fossil fuel companies have been burying research about the implications of climate change since the late 1970s. In the decades since the secret got out, they’ve dedicated vast resources to defending the unsustainable status quo, from fighting against emissions regulations to lobbying governments for harsher criminalisation of climate protesters. But they still criticise consumers for not acting on the information that they try to hide or discredit. The world needs to be transformed. But a focus on “voting with your dollar” and influencing the direction of capitalism by buying ethical products starts from where we are most powerless and frequently ends up appearing more like a marketing campaign for a different brand of harmful products than a strategy to change anything. Too often, the “ethical consumption” industry only helps give the status quo a progressive and socially aware image while taking attention away from the sort of actions that could bring real change. Tesla is a case in point. For years, owning a Tesla was the ultimate symbol of ethical capitalism, supposed to frame its buyer as a pioneer of a green capitalist future. Now owning a Tesla signifies something different. There’s a cottage industry of articles about rich people experiencing “buyer’s remorse” after shelling out $80,000 for a vehicle now labelled the “swasticar”. The problem isn’t just that Tesla buyers who thought they were funding the green revolution were really funding MAGA reaction. It’s also that Tesla’s business model relies on the same destructive and exploitative practices as all capitalist production. Tesla’s reported carbon emissions are 50 million tonnes a year and growing. That’s roughly equivalent to the combined emissions of Ghana and Sudan, home to 85 million people. Tesla cars require rare earth minerals: 520 grams are used in every Tesla Model Y motor. Seventy percent of rare earth minerals are mined at Bayan Obu in Inner Mongolia. Areas surrounding the mine and associated processing facilities are poisoned by lakes of toxic industrial by-product, leaking chemicals and radioactive elements into the soil. These places are now known as “[cancer villages](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-21545868?ref=redflag.org.au)”. Residents experience high rates of respiratory [diseases](https://miningtechnologyinsights.com/2025/04/26/chinas-bayan-obo-rare-earths-giant-with-a-pollution-price/?ref=redflag.org.au), cancer and other health issues, as well as impoverishment because pollution makes farming unsafe in the surrounding areas. There is a trail of brutal exploitation at every stage of the supply chain, from the use of child labour to mine cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to brutal conditions in the factories where cars are assembled. Tesla workers on average receive [$20 an hour less](https://www.businessinsider.com/uaw-strike-tesla-pay-gap-gm-ford-stellantis-labor-hourly-wages-2023-9?ref=redflag.org.au) in wages than Ford and GM workers. Workers complain of wage theft, constant safety hazards and injuries, and aggressive company union-busting. This is why ethical consumption is so difficult. Modern marketing constricts “ethical” options, which are so often revealed to be complete bullshit. So even if we’re all trying to make the right choices, the likelihood is we’re being scammed. Is it any wonder people give up and just buy stuff on Temu? As long as we live under capitalism, we can’t purchase our way out of injustice. The majority of us are forced through economic compulsion to participate in the system, by buying products necessary to reproduce life and engage with society, and by selling our labour to bosses. But it’s capitalists who dictate the terms and reap all of the benefits of exploitation, while the social costs are imposed on workers. This is why the Woodside CEO’s comments are so insulting. In her diatribe against anti-fossil fuel “zealots”’, O’Neill complained that “most people hit a switch and expect the lights to come on”, suggesting that, unlike her, ordinary people are unable to comprehend the complexities of energy production. It’s perfectly reasonable for people to expect the lights to come on when they hit a switch, and the technology to do this sustainably has existed for decades. That this still comes at the expense of planetary survival really exposes the irrationality of capitalism, not the hypocrisy of ordinary people who want to be able to see things when it gets dark. Under capitalism, it’s workers who have to face the consequences of irrational and destructive decisions made outside of our control. It’s the blue-collar suburbs of Melbourne’s west, blanketed in diesel emissions from trucking and smoke from factory fires, that face disproportionately high rates of respiratory illness, heart disease and asthma, not Toorak or South Yarra. Of course, the Woodside CEO isn’t truly concerned about the environmental and social impacts of fossil fuels. Her comments are entirely cynical, but there’s a real strain of “progressive” politics that says the world’s problems can be ameliorated by individual action. Lifestyle politics accepts that capitalism is the best that humanity is collectively capable of, and the best we can do is nudge the market in the right direction while leaving society in the hands of the bosses. Socialists, on the other hand, recognise that workers don’t just hit a switch; they are the ones who make the lights come on. It’s the collective labour of workers that powers everything, assembles the iPhones and ships the parcels. Socialists don’t want to reject this productive capacity. We want to democratically direct this vast knowledge and social wealth for the good of humanity, not just for the profit of a tiny minority. But achieving this change is made harder by lifestylist politics. To be able to use their collective power to transform social conditions, workers need to see themselves as a class with common interests against their bosses, not as consumers who identify with particular brands—whether they’re the ones like Temu that promise unlimited cheap crap, or the brands like Tesla that market the lie that they’re saving the world. When these companies are viewed as what they are—giant, exploitative workplaces—the need for change and the source of the problem become much clearer. Socialists have genuine solutions to the problems raised by lifestylist critiques of capitalism. A socialist society would organise a rapid transition to renewable energy sources. It would redirect research and development away from industries like marketing and weapons that thrive on human misery, toward improving transport, health and infrastructure. It would put an end to the production of endless disposable plastic products that poison the atmosphere and clog the oceans. That's what being a socialist is about. Pro-capitalist lifestylism is a pathetic attempt by the real criminals to make us feel like hypocrites for even suggesting this. Thankfully, much like Tesla’s latest Model Y, almost no-one’s buying it. ### QLD public sector strikes show potential, but more is needed URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/qld-public-sector-strikes-show-potential-but-more-is-needed/ Last updated: 2025-09-02T07:49:15.000Z Blue-collar public sector workers across Queensland took to the streets on Monday to demand a 36-hour work week from the state government. Construction workers from QBuild, QHealth and the Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR)—members of the Electrical Trades Union, the Plumbing and Pipe Trades Employees Union, the Australian Workers’ Union, the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union and the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union—walked off the job in Brisbane, Cairns, Townsville and Rockhampton. In Brisbane, they rallied in Queens Gardens before marching to 1 William Street, the corporate head office for much of the public service. Their demands include higher wages and increased overtime rates from time-and-a-half to double time. One construction worker told *Red Flag*: “The reason we have decent pay in this industry, compared to the rest of the world, is because we’ve stood up for it time and again”. Joining them were engineers, who are members of Professionals Australia, a white-collar union. They staged a two-hour work stoppage in solidarity, attending the rallies side by side with construction workers. [The engineers are in the midst of their own campaign](https://redflag.org.au/article/queensland-engineers-strike-for-the-first-time-in-decades): their enterprise agreement has expired, and they recently held a statewide stoppage of engineers and technicians—the first in decades. There has been a slight uptick in industrial action in Queensland in recent months. [Teachers staged their first strike in sixteen years](https://redflag.org.au/article/schools-out-thousands-of-queensland-teachers-strike-for-better-pay-and-conditions). Nurses have been applying work bans. Engineers have launched rolling stoppages. Monday’s strike added construction workers to the list. But while these actions are important, they are still isolated. They are not the kind of mass strike wave capable of forcing the government to retreat and give better pay and conditions to workers in Queensland. Premier David Crisafulli’s government is trying to impose an 8 percent deal across the public service. [Nurses are poised to accept 11 percent](https://www.qnmu.org.au/Web/Campaigns/Recruit%5FRetain%5FRespect/Web/Campaigns/Recruit%5FRetain%5FRespect.aspx?hkey=060df36f-f9b5-48ce-9158-f0d9de44d4b7&ref=redflag.org.au) over three years, which the union leaders claim as a nation-leading victory. They have promised that [there will be no further strike action](https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/queensland/qld-teachers-guarantee-no-strikes-in-current-term-as-nurses-accept-govt-s-offer-20250830-p5mr45.html?ref=redflag.org.au). Meanwhile, engineers at TMR—demanding 20 percent to bring their pay into line with colleagues at other state agencies—have been offered nothing serious. To call 11 percent a “win” is dubious. The last three-year contract also delivered 11 percent, but inflation peaked at more than 7 percent a year during that time. In real terms, the agreement delivered a pay cut. Nurses deserve much more to compensate them for the significant losses imposed by the last deal. The lesson from Monday is clear. Workers are willing to fight. But isolated actions, divided by sector, will not win what’s needed. The only way to beat Crisafulli and the state’s wages policy is with more strikes—bigger, longer, and united across the public sector. ### Capitalism is a horror show: we need socialism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/capitalism-is-a-horror-show-we-need-socialism/ Last updated: 2025-09-01T01:40:58.000Z Just when you thought society couldn’t get any more distressing, the horror show that is capitalism proves you wrong. Only days after Gaza was declared to be officially in “famine” (aka deliberate starvation) by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Famine Review Committee, news comes through that Israel has bombed the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis, killing at least 20 people, including five journalists. Israel initially hit the hospital with two missiles, prompting emergency workers and journalists to rush to the scene, after which Israel struck twice more. Days after that, we hear that Tony Blair, the man who launched the UK into the 2003 Iraq War, met with US President Donald Trump in Washington to plan Gaza’s future. Now, 60,000 reservists are being called up to invade and occupy Gaza City, with the Netanyahu government warning that mass expulsions are coming. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has put together a plan to force 600,000 people into southern Gaza, an area that even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has admitted is a concentration camp. In true 21st century Orwellian style, Katz calls it a “humanitarian city”. Here in Australia, the forces of darkness have been pushed back or held at bay to some extent. Two rounds of massive pro-Palestine marches, involving hundreds of thousands of people in cities and towns all over the country, have put the Albanese government under pressure on Gaza. And they have shown that the great majority of people see the concerted campaign by all the respectable institutions of society to smear supporters of Palestine as antisemites for what it is: a transparent attempt to intimidate people into remaining silent about the crimes of Western imperialism’s key ally in the Middle East. The far right has also not been able to make the sort of gains in Australia that it has in many other parts of the world. It remains relatively fringe, but this can’t be taken for granted. The substantial far-right rallies on 31 August, which mobilised people on an anti-immigration basis and were more or less openly backed by organised neo-Nazis, demonstrate there is a constituency open to those politics. Our side needs to continue to counter-protest these events to prevent them becoming a normal part of the political landscape. They must be pilloried and stigmatised and denounced for what they are. This is particularly the case because, internationally, the far right is having a moment. It has cemented its place in mainstream politics in Europe, the UK and much of Latin America. France’s government is on the brink of collapse, with the far-right National Rally a contender to replace it, and current polling indicates the far right could well form government at the next UK election. All this will only encourage the far right here. Stemming its growth will require confrontations in the streets through mass mobilisations. It will also require creating a real political alternative that explains the source of housing scarcity, poverty and a rising cost of living by pointing the finger at the bosses, rather than migrants. We need to combat the racism of the far right and the centre alike, and we need to defeat the capitalist system that gives rise to both. The atrocities and inequality that we’re witnessing now are capitalism laid bare. A competitive, profit-based system cannot guarantee a decent society that prioritises human need and protecting the planet on which we all depend. It prioritises building up ever more deadly military forces, justifying their use against innocent people in the pursuit of power and economic dominance and trashing the environment and human rights when they stand in the way of profit. But the future isn’t a straight, fixed road. Every act of solidarity, big or small, shows that another world is possible. There are many millions of people who want something other than a future of war, inequality and environmental destruction. The problem is that wanting it isn’t enough. We need to form ourselves into a social force that, when big enough and well-organised enough and clear enough about our end goal, can take on and defeat the enormous power of the capitalist class. The end goal can’t be a version of capitalism without these excesses because history indicates such a thing is a utopian dream. It has to be something fundamentally different: a socialist society based on the collective power workers have to take control and reorganise the enormous productive resources of society according to what people need, rather than what enriches the tech bosses, energy companies and other degenerate, amoral capitalists. Such a society won’t come about on its own. We need to fight for it now. ### Victorian Socialists launch Socialist Workers’ Caucus URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-socialists-launch-socialist-workers-caucus/ Last updated: 2025-09-01T01:32:53.000Z “Victorian Socialists aims to bring socialism from the fringes of the political landscape back into the mainstream”, Mick Clune, a member of the Victorian Socialists executive, told more than 200 people gathered at the Uniting Church Hall in Northcote on 30 August to launch the Socialist Workers’ Caucus. “Workers make the world run, but we think workers should run the world”, Mick continued. “And to do that, we need to get organised. The SWC aims to be that vehicle.” The three keynote speakers at the event—Jerome Small, Louisa Bassini and Madi Roof—all discussed the need for socialist politics and organisation to address workers’ problems. “We have lofty aims, but we need to start from where we are at”, Jerome Small, who has been a socialist and trade unionist since the 1980s, told the audience. He said there are two markers of where the trade union movement currently stands: the unwillingness of trade union leaders to mount a fight back against the cost-of-living crisis and the failure to lead any industrial action against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “This is in a country that set records for industrial militancy in the 1970s and was justly famous around the world for the international solidarity that it showed on a regular basis”, Jerome continued. “The slogan of the left wing of the anti-war movement in the Vietnam War was ‘Stop work to stop war’. And hundreds of thousands of workers over time actually did that. We were famous for the bans initiated as part of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.” How did we get from the highs of the 1970s to the current lows? Trade union officials and the ALP have imposed the politics of class collaborationism—the idea that workers and bosses have shared interests—on the workers’ movement since the 1980s. Louisa Bassini, an Australian Services Union rank-and-file member, helped lead a strike in support of Palestine in February 2024 (the only one that has taken place in Australia). Louisa and her workmates at a community legal centre in North Melbourne are now organising another strike on 10 September and are calling on all workers and unions across Melbourne to join them. Louisa told the audience: “This is a message to our union leaders: we want a fighting union movement, and we are prepared to build it”. Madi Roof, who has been central to organising call centre workers across Melbourne and was part of launching the SWC when it was first established by a group of VS members in 2024, spoke about the impact that small numbers of socialists can have in their workplaces and across their unions. “When Woolworths tried to introduce labour hire at distribution centres in 2015, it was socialists who helped coordinate a four-day walkout by 500 workers”, Madi said. “It was socialists who organised NTEU Fightback in 2020: the largest rank-and-file rebellion in the union movement in decades.” More recently, it was a Victorian Socialists member who organised and led the first industrial action taken by Grill’d workers earlier this year. “Socialist politics doesn’t just tell you who the enemy is—it gives you a blueprint for how to fight back”, Madi explained. Several Victorian Socialists members, including teachers and nurses, also spoke from the floor about their organising work and the need for socialist politics and organisation. “The union leaders and the ALP have their politics of class collaborationism”, Jerome told the audience. “We have our politics of class struggle and socialism. Those politics have had an incredible amount to contribute to the working-class movement. And we can do it again today.” ### Will a Communist be Chile’s next president? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/will-a-communist-be-chiles-next-president/ Last updated: 2025-09-01T01:31:46.000Z Since 2012, Chilean elections have involved voluntary primaries, in which parties or coalitions of parties can run regulated polls to elect presidential candidates, parliamentary deputies, senators and mayors. The left-of-centre Unity for Chile (Unidad por Chile) coalition, which currently forms President Gabriel Boric’s government in the National Congress, held primaries to select a presidential candidate on 29 June. The candidates included Jeannette Jara from the Communist Party (Partido Comunista de Chile, PCCh), Gonzalo Winter from the Broad Front (Frente Amplio), Jaime Mulet from the Social Green Regionalist Federation (Federación Regionalista Verde Social), and Carolina Tohá from the Party for Democracy (Partido por la Democracia, PPD) in partnership with the Socialist Party, the Radical Party and the Liberal Party. The 20 percent lower turnout for these primaries, compared to the 2021 primaries that led to the selection of Boric, is a clear indicator of the loss of enthusiasm for a government that watered down what progressive agenda it had after the 2022 defeat of its constitutional referendum. Clearer still was the primary vote for Gonzalo Winter, from Boric’s Frente Amplio, who managed only 9 percent. The PPD’s Tohá got 28 percent, based on a barely disguised scare campaign of anti-communism. The Communist Party’s Jeannette Jara won the primaries convincingly across the entire country, with more than 60 percent (825,835 votes). This is not surprising, as the few reforms the government has celebrated—in pensions, work week and minimum wage—were largely the work of the Communist Party, with Jeannette Jara leading the Ministry for Work and Social Provision. None of the reforms came for free. The 40-hour week and increased minimum wage both involved trade-offs in labour “flexibility”, and the pension reform was more a capitalist modernisation. The fact that the Communist Party will lead the centre-left’s parliamentary campaign in the upcoming national election signals an important change in the balance of forces and reflects the growing polarisation across the continent. The mainstay of Chile’s post-dictatorship capitalist stability has been the centre-left forces of the neoliberal Socialist Party and PPD, alongside the historically weakened Christian Democrats. The Frente Amplio was always a swamp without a clear social base or ideological commonality. The Chilean Communist Party is one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1912 as the Socialist Workers Party. It has a long history of supporting what it variously labelled progressive or nationalist bourgeois forces, participating in governments, and standing at the head of workers’ movements only to lead them into defeats, including the persecution of its own members. Most tragically, the Communist Party bears significant blame for attempting to demobilise the workers’ movement during the Allende government and weakening it at its most decisive historical moment, before General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government in a coup in 1973\. The Communists were the most conservative, conciliatory section of the Popular Unity coalition, leading attempts to hold back factory takeovers, strike deals with centrist parties and marginalise revolutionary forces. Throughout this history and to date, it has maintained significant levels of support among workers. The party has the third largest electorally registered membership and, in recent years, has been top of this list. Unlike most other parties, centre-left and right, the PCCh’s 45,000 or so membership is significantly more meaningful, with neighbourhood-level organisation still existent in many parts of the country. The PCCh youth organisation probably has more than 6,000 members, who are active at secondary school, university and neighbourhood levels. While this does not compare with the 100,000 organised militants it had in 1972, it is still a significant political force in a country where youth mobilisations have been centre stage for decades. Two of the key figures of the Boric government, Camila Vallejo (government spokesperson and head of education) and Karol Cariola (chair of the lower house), were important leaders of the Jota (as the Communist youth are known). The Chilean Communist Party has a long Stalinist history and, like many of its counterparts, evolved in a Eurocommunist direction from the late 1960s onwards. However, the defeat of 1973 and the persecution that followed somewhat immunised the party from the precipitous decline and right-wing trajectory of many similar organisations worldwide. By 1984, the PCCh had shifted its perspective, resolving that the most probable road to democracy was a national uprising. It joined with revolutionary forces and, for a period, helped lead the democracy movement. This included setting up armed militias through the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, famed for the attempted assassination of Pinochet. While relatively monolithic, the PCCh has its historically rooted tensions. The case of PCCh leader Daniel Jadue illustrates the continuation of these. Jadue, a Chilean of Palestinian origin, was mayor of the working-class Santiago district of Recoleta from 2012 to 2024\. He became very popular for opening public pharmacies, popular libraries and an open university and for establishing a public housing builder. He contested the primaries in 2021 against Boric, getting almost 700,000 votes, compared to Boric’s million. In 2024, Jadue was charged with crimes related to the funding of the public pharmacies, essentially for buying medicines with non-existent public funds. Since then, the entire political establishment has done everything possible to vilify Jadue and keep him off the political stage, including current efforts to prevent him from running in the coming parliamentary elections. In recent months, the PCCh president has engaged in public squabbles with their presidential candidate over whether Jadue would play a role in the election campaign. The case of Jadue complicates the support the Jara campaign seeks from the centre of Chilean politics. As in the past, the more the PCCh looks in that direction, the more it plays into the hands of the right. In waiting are presidential candidates Evelyn Matthei, supported by two of Chile’s main modern bourgeois parties, National Renewal (Renovación Nacional) and the Independent Democratic Union (Unión Demócrata Independiente), and Antonio Kast, from the more newly established darling of the far right, the Republican Party. \[*Red Flag* will report from Chile on the presidential elections in October-November.\] ### Migrants are not to blame for the housing crisis URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-the-housing-crisis/ Last updated: 2025-08-30T21:55:59.000Z The argument that migrants are responsible for the housing crisis in Australia has no basis in fact and is propaganda in the service of the economic elites, writes **Martin Barker**. \-------------------- The Nazis and far-right racists (including the son of one of Australia’s largest property developers) who called the reactionary March for Australia on 31 August are demanding an end to mass migration because “Aussies are sleeping on the streets”. It’s not just fascists linking migration to the housing crisis. Before the last election, both the Liberals and the ALP had migrants in their sights. “We’re going to cut immigration because Labor’s brought in a million people over two years and that has created the housing crisis”, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said at the time. Labor criticised Dutton but conveyed essentially the same message in more acceptable language. Treasurer Jim Chalmers said of a proposed cap on international students: “Enrolments have grown ... this puts pressure on prices and rents ... it makes finding a house harder for everyone”. Politics and the media blame migrants for the housing crisis, and it can seem to make sense. We’re told there aren’t enough houses to meet demand, so the more people there are, the more prices rise. But the argument doesn’t stack up. First, there is no shortage of houses in Australia. As the Australia Institute think tank [reported in March](https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-soaring-house-prices/?ref=redflag.org.au), the construction of new dwellings has outpaced population growth for the last ten years. Indeed, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the number of residential properties in Australia exceeds the number of households by almost 1 million. Second, there is no meaningful connection between immigration levels and rents. As TikTok user @acutallyadu has [pointed out](https://x.com/ArtistAffame/status/1958698381779579363?ref=redflag.org.au), the proportion of housing relative to the population in 2014 was roughly the same as today, but rent price growth in 2014 was 1.2 percent compared to 8.1 percent in 2023\. Similarly, the [Tenants Union of NSW](https://www.tenants.org.au/blog/rents-and-migration-what-does-data-tell-us?ref=redflag.org.au) has created a dashboard comparing rental price changes to population changes, which shows that there isn’t a strong link between the two. (One example: rent prices in the Sydney suburb of Ryde fell by 5 percent in 2019 and rose by more than 7 percent in 2022, but 33 percent more migrants moved into Ryde in 2019 compared to 2022.) It’s the same with house prices. At times, prices have fallen while immigration has increased, and prices have gone up when immigration has reduced. During the COVID-19 border closures, there was negative net migration, meaning more people left the country than came in; but house prices rose by [20 percent](https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-soaring-house-prices/?ref=redflag.org.au) in eighteen months. International students in particular have been blamed for high rents and low vacancy rates in the suburbs surrounding major universities. The [Reserve Bank of Australia](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-24/international-students-did-not-drive-rents-inflation-higher-rba/105562616?ref=redflag.org.au) found that the return of international students after lockdowns had a marginal effect on rents, contributing at most 0.5 percentage points to rent increases. The majority of rent increases occurred before the borders were reopened, jumping by 13.8 percent between 2021 and 2022\. So if migrants aren’t to blame, why are house prices and rents so unaffordable? House prices and rents are soaring because access to housing in Australia is dominated by a for-profit market that is rigged in the interests of billionaire developers and wealthy investors. Developers like Mirvac and Meriton (owned by Australia’s second-richest person, Harry Triguboff) are making a killing from high house prices. Meriton made $290 million in profits last year, and Mirvac more than $500 million. And that’s only two of the companies that dominate the housing market. Their only concern is profit, and they have a clear interest in higher house prices. In April, the Melbourne *Age* newspaper reported that [developers in Melbourne were letting 8,000 properties sit empty](https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/the-melbourne-suburbs-with-hundreds-of-cheap-brand-new-apartments-20250329-p5lni7.html?ref=redflag.org.au) because prices weren’t high enough, and selling them too quickly would bring down the cost to buyers. Developers receive tax and development concessions from the government and benefit from policies like the First Home Buyers scheme, which claims to make it easier for people to buy, but actually drives up prices. The tiny proportion of investors who own most investment properties (1 percent of taxpayers own more than 25 percent of them) also want to drive up prices. They receive massive handouts from the government that subsidise their speculation, which increases prices and allows them to out-compete first-home buyers for properties. Negative gearing (when a property costs more to maintain than it generates in income, even if it is increasing in value) allows them to claim losses as a tax deduction, and capital gains tax discounts mean they pocket more of the returns when they sell. The ABC [reported last year](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-17/one-million-australians-are-negatively-gearing/104737164?ref=redflag.org.au) that CGT discounts cost the public $23 billion, with 80 percent of the benefits going to the top 10 percent of taxpayers. These government handouts mean that investors and developers can sit on properties until the price is right. Some rent them out, others leave them empty, knowing they’ll get a tax concession when they sell. That’s why Prosper Australia, a research and advocacy group, estimates that there are [100,000 empty or “barely used” properties in Melbourne](https://www.prosper.org.au/2024/07/report-100000-vacant-homes-in-melbourne/?ref=redflag.org.au) while 30,000 Victorians are homeless. Blaming migrants for the housing crisis shifts the blame away from those who are actually responsible: big corporations and banks, the super-wealthy and Labor and Liberal governments. Migrant bashing is about dividing workers to make it harder for us to unite and fight against our common enemy. The super-rich would much rather have us blaming each other for unaffordable homes than aiming our sights on them. The argument that migrants are responsible for the housing crisis in Australia has no basis in fact and is propaganda in the service of the economic elites. Even if there were a housing shortage and migration was having a measurable impact on housing affordability, socialists would still oppose blaming immigrants and imposing migration controls. Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We have more than enough resources and productive capacity to comfortably house a significantly larger population. The problem is that the vast majority of that wealth is owned and controlled by a tiny minority of the population, whose sole concern is making profits. The housing crisis won’t be fixed by blaming migrants or limiting immigration. The solutions lie in challenging the market’s domination over access to housing, the power and wealth of developers and investors, and the Labor and Liberal governments that act in their interests. ### Thousands of students vote for Palestine URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/thousands-of-students-vote-for-palestine/ Last updated: 2025-09-01T01:20:39.000Z In the last two weeks of August, thousands of students across the country came together to condemn the Australian government’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and to call on universities to end their ties with Israel. At mass meetings on nineteen campuses, nearly 5,000 students (more, if those who participated online are included) voted in the national student referendum on Palestine, organised by Students for Palestine and the National Union of Students. The motions—to censure the government and to cut university ties with Israel—both passed with the support of more than 97 percent of voters. The University of Queensland will vote on 3 September. The meetings were the biggest ever Palestine solidarity events on many campuses. And they were an indication that the tide of public opinion, particularly among young people, has well and truly turned against Israel’s crimes and our own government’s continued support for them. At Macquarie University, where more than 200 students packed a lecture theatre, one speaker related that her grandparents had been displaced in the 1948 *Nakba*—the campaign of massacres and violent evictions of Palestinians leading to the establishment of Israel. She was moved, she said, because she had never expected to see such numbers out to support Palestine at her own university. This growth in the Palestine solidarity movement is a trend visible nationwide. Students for Palestine clubs are now springing up even on small campuses in regional towns. The votes were even more substantial on larger campuses with a history of Palestine solidarity activism. At the University of Melbourne, 640 students voted unanimously to condemn the Israeli government’s actions. Similarly, more than 600 attended at RMIT, and more than 500 at the University of Sydney. Hundreds of thousands across the world have now viewed footage of these referendums, some of which were broadcast from Sydney [on Al Jazeera](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVUYyNoiw3A&ref=redflag.org.au). In some places, handfuls of Zionist students and Liberal Party members attended meetings and spoke to justify Israel’s war on Gaza. Their arguments rested largely on the idea that pro-Palestine sentiment is making Jewish students on campus unsafe. Everywhere they spoke, they were confidently countered by students who are part of a genuinely anti-racist movement, which places the blame on Zionism and the Israeli state rather than Judaism, and which counts amongst its ranks increasing numbers of pro-Palestine Jewish students. Other speakers against the motions made the case for weapons companies, without which universities would lose funding. Most students, however, think their universities should conduct research to further humanity’s interests rather than to boost profit margins. For these students, the moral imperative to stand for justice far outweighs any concern about universities’ financial situations. The national referendum initiative is part of a growing movement that aims to hold the Australian government and institutions accountable. The ever increasing horrors in Gaza have pushed larger numbers of students to get involved in activism, but students have also taken inspiration from the broader pro-Palestine movement. The 300,000-strong march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the historic national day of protests that followed, have mobilised and galvanised our side. While the protests have clearly put pressure on the government, nothing has been done to end Australia’s weapons trade with Israel or apply sanctions on the Israeli government. In fact, as students pointed out, Defence Minister Richard Marles has proudly declared that Australia is an “F-35 country”—part of the supply chain for the fighter jets Israel is using to obliterate Gaza. Universities have similarly refused to sever their ties to genocide. Our institutions say that they are committed to free thought and critical inquiry. But when it comes to criticisms of their affiliations with entities that contribute to the perpetuation of violence and occupation in Palestine, their real commitments become clear. Whether through research funding, partnerships with Israeli institutions or other forms of indirect support, universities across the country are complicit. Students who have spoken out over the past two years have been suspended, Palestine solidarity events have been banned, and, on many campuses, university security is more repressive than the police. Events like the referendum are helping to create more space to speak out about the genocide. The referendum is not just about registering votes, but building momentum for sustained action on campuses and beyond. The votes in favour of the motions are an indication that, as in so many past movements against capitalism’s crimes, young people are on the right side of history. They demonstrate that we are not satisfied with promises about future Palestinian statehood while starvation ravages Gaza and the bombs continue to fall. They are a mandate for continued activism. ### Mass protests rock Indonesia URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/mass-protests-rock-indonesia/ Last updated: 2025-08-30T21:53:08.000Z Over the last week, protests have been organised across Indonesia in response to [politicians giving themselves a hefty pay rise](https://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/out-of-touch-why-an-increase-in-politicians-allowances-triggered-mass-protests/?ref=redflag.org.au). Days of demonstrations, mostly in the capital, Jakarta, faced severe police repression. But they continued to grow. On 28 August, after four days of mobilisations, 21-year-old ride-share driver Affan Kurniawan was hit by an armoured police car. He died in hospital soon after. The rage at this is evident among demonstrators and their sympathisers. The protests have grown and radicalised as a result, and many activists are calling for the prosecution of the police responsible, as well as the prosecution of all officers involved in human rights abuses. These new demands add to the existing demand for parliament to be dissolved in response to the politicians’ self-approved pay rise. The proposed pay rise would add an extra 50 million Indonesian rupiah (roughly A$4,600) to the monthly allowance of members of parliament, supposedly to help them with housing costs. The increase alone is around ten times the minimum wage in Jakarta, and it would be added on top of the base salary and other perks that politicians already receive. Such self-serving greed hit a nerve when it was announced, and it has become the focal point for broader working-class grievances that have been aired for months. Indonesia’s unemployment rate is currently the highest in South-East Asia. Indonesia’s Manpower Ministry reports a 32 percent increase in company lay-offs in the first six months of this year compared to the same period last year. This has only added to the trend of underemployment and low-quality jobs dominating the labour market. According to [a recent article by economists Kelvin Ramadhan and Wisnu Setiadi Nugroho](https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/07/17/indonesias-jobs-boom-is-a-story-of-quantity-not-quality/?ref=redflag.org.au), real wages have not increased since 2018\. All of this has created a sense of stagnation and instability for Indonesian workers, especially young workers, while Indonesia’s billionaires and politicians grow richer. Police repression has increased the anger driving these protests. Police have used water cannons, tear gas, batons and mass arrests. According to reports from socialist activists on the ground, [at least 200 people were arrested](https://www.instagram.com/p/DN56NUhD3Hu/?ref=redflag.org.au) in Jakarta and Bogor, 50km south of the capital, on the night of 28 August. Police are trying to disorganise and demoralise protesters, particularly students, whom the Indonesian ruling class often call “professional anarchists” to justify police beating and arresting them. Politically motivated police brutality has been a feature of Indonesian politics for decades, even more so as protests against corruption, militarism and neoliberalism have grown over the past six years. But there has been a particularly sinister normalisation of human rights abuses by the Indonesian state with the election of Prabowo Subianto last year. President Prabowo is a conservative military figure best known for leading the counter-insurgency campaigns against the independence movement in East Timor and for his role in kidnapping and torturing student democracy activists in the late 1990s. Since his ascension to the presidency, he has been promoting allies from the military into high-ranking government positions, despite their sordid past of human rights abuses and murders of democracy activists. For now, the police remain the main target of protesters’ rage. But the military has its own history of human rights abuses and is often relied on to quell protests when they reach destabilising proportions. Despite the attacks on this most recent round of protests, students held their ground on 25-27 August. After that, unions involved in the Labour Party (Partai Buruh) [organised their own demonstration](https://www.instagram.com/p/DN5OK4tj%5FWl/?ref=redflag.org.au) alongside the students on the 28th, demanding an increase to the minimum wage. This increased the numbers in the face of police violence, drawing workers and students into action in their thousands on the streets of Jakarta. Since Affan Kurniawan’s murder, the anger reached explosive proportions. [His funeral was held on the morning of 29 August](https://www.instagram.com/p/DN7tMJ6kd31/?ref=redflag.org.au). Thousands of ride-share drivers attended on their bikes and in uniform to pay respects to their colleague. Many more have joined the protests since hearing the news. On that afternoon, [a mass protest of students and workers](https://en.tempo.co/read/2044333/endless-police-brutality-sparks-massive-protest-at-jakarta-metro-police-headquarters?ref=redflag.org.au) formed around the police headquarters in South Jakarta. The *Jakarta Post* reported that by 4pm, they had entered the front gate and occupied the space in front of the building. Reports from socialists involved in the protests say that by 7pm, the police had [deployed tear gas again](https://www.instagram.com/p/DN8FjHbD-55/?img%5Findex=1&ref=redflag.org.au). Many other cities had their own protests that day as well. Reports in the [*Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/30/fire-kills-three-people-in-indonesia-after-protesters-storm-council-buildings-in-the-wake-of-taxi-drivers-death?CMP=Share%5FAndroidApp%5FOther&ref=redflag.org.au)and [CNN](https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/29/asia/indonesia-protests-police-latam-intl?ref=redflag.org.au)indicate that provincial government buildings and official guesthouses have been set ablaze in Makassar, South Sulawesi and Bandung, central Java. President Prabowo and the Jakarta police chief have issued condolences and apologies for Kurniawan’s murder and called for calm. An investigation into the officers responsible is under way, and there is enough public pressure that it may even result in consequences for the killers. But the whole system of repression continues to rain down tear gas and beatings on those demanding justice. Meanwhile, the inequality that sparked this movement only worsens day by day. For those reasons, it won’t be easy to appease the movement. But nor will it be so simple to repress it. As the ruling class grasps for a way to stabilise the system and return to the grinding normality of capitalism in Indonesia, the struggle continues. ### Democratic electoralism won’t defeat Trumpism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/democratic-electoralism-wont-defeat-trumpism/ Last updated: 2025-08-30T21:50:13.000Z CHICAGO—Two events that occurred within days of each other in early August speak to the state of the opposition to President Trump’s assaults on working people and democracy. On 1 August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (supposedly the most liberal circuit in the US) upheld Trump’s March executive order that used “national security” as a pretext to void union contracts in several federal government agencies. Within days, managers across the federal government—most significantly, the [Veterans Administration](https://federalnewsnetwork.com/veterans-affairs/2025/08/va-says-its-ended-most-collective-bargaining-agreements/?ref=redflag.org.au)—ripped up their union contracts. The second noteworthy event came a few days after the union-busting court decision. All Democrats in the Texas legislature left the state to deny Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his Republican legislative henchmen a legislative quorum to implement a Congressional gerrymander that would reduce the number of Democratic Congress members from the current thirteen to eight. That would leave the Texas Congressional delegation at almost 80 percent Republican in a state where Trump won 56 percent of the vote in 2024. Most liberals and Democrats viewed the court-sanctioned union-busting with a yawn, if they noticed it at all. But the threat of losing seats in Congress sent Democrats to battle stations. California Governor Gavin Newsom pledged a referendum to give the California legislature the power to gerrymander to net at least five and as many as nine new Democratic-friendly districts. Newsom electrified partisan Democrats who viewed him as a rare Democratic politician who would stand up to Trump. Even the ever cautious former President Barack Obama backed Newsom’s plan. Aside from the details of the redistricting battles that could unfold in multiple states before the 2026 midterm elections, we should ask why Democrats and many of their liberal supporters are so exercised about gerrymandering, but passive about most of the other depredations of the Trump regime. Perhaps it’s no surprise that politicians would be more concerned about *their* jobs than about the jobs and rights of their constituents and voting base. But it’s also an indication of the degree to which the logic of what Karl Marx called “parliamentary cretinism” has captured so much of the opposition to Trump. The liberal opposition to Trump can conceive of defeating him and Trumpism only at the ballot box. So, anything that might impede Democratic electoral gains is an existential question for them. To return to the labour example, it’s clear that, aside from heroic efforts by the still-small group of activists in the Federal Union Network, the labour movement has hardly responded to Trump’s union-busting. The lawsuits labour leaders have filed and supported have slowed down, but not stopped, Trump’s determination to de-unionise the federal workforce. In a labour movement that still counts 14-16 million members, including more than 1 million working for the federal government, the potential exists for mass protest action, including strikes, slowdowns, occupations, organising the unorganised, days of action and the like to galvanise a real opposition to Trump. But for most labour leaders, this is not even part of their thought process. As long-time labour activist and socialist [Chris Townsend put it in a recent interview](https://mronline.org/2025/07/16/hard-truths-about-the-us-labor-movement-an-interview-with-chris-townsend/?ref=redflag.org.au) with *Monthly Review*: “We have slid into a period in our labour movement where decline, decay, stagnation, and timid leadership have become formalized. The ‘leadership’ today in many unions is at best an administrative layer: functionaries carefully tending to the decline, keeping things on track as we are pushed towards oblivion. There are examples to the contrary, but not very many in my experience.” The atrophy of social movement organisation and reflexive fealty to the Democrats among most non-government organisation leaders have led us to this point. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, fears that the US Supreme Court would overturn legalised abortion led to protests in the hundreds of thousands in Washington. [This mobilisation stayed the hand of the Supreme Court majority—then, as now, ](https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-history-of-planned-parenthood-v-casey-and-pro-choice-activism-roe-v-wade/?ref=redflag.org.au)Republican-appointed. But when the Supreme Court overturned *Roe v Wade* in 2022, no major abortion rights group called a national demonstration, and protest organising fell to under-resourced groups of dedicated activists in different localities. The implicit (and often explicit) message from the national groups was for supporters of abortion rights to put faith in the electoral process of state-level referenda and the election of Democrats to Congress and the White House. This was during a time when even [pro-choice Democrats struggled to articulate simple promises of passing a national abortion rights law](https://www.glamour.com/story/why-doesnt-congress-just-make-roe-v-wade-federal-law?ref=redflag.org.au), especially if it required (as it almost certainly would) getting rid of the Senate filibuster. American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley’s response to the anti-union court decision showed how union leaders are also captive to the Democratic Party’s liberal proceduralism: “For sure, we are going to fight for our existence. It’s very unsettling and very disturbing that the Ninth Circuit issued the ruling that they issued. I don’t think that any president should have any unfettered authority that goes unchecked”, [Kelley told *The Hill*](https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/unions-battle-for-survival-hit-new-wave-with-trump-termination-of-bargaining-agreements?ref=redflag.org.au). “That’s a portion of the reason why unions exist, to make sure there’s checks and balances inside of the agencies.” Unconsciously, Kelley is echoing the rhetoric of Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who regularly appeals to Congress and the courts to honour the age-old constitutional system of “checks and balances” against the autocrat in the White House. In a *Boston Review* essay, “[The Dead End of Checks and Balances](https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-dead-end-of-checks-and-balances/?ref=redflag.org.au)”, political scientist Lisa L. Miller points out how much of Trump’s authoritarian power grab is following the US Constitution’s empowerment of a wealthy minority at the expense of the broad working-class majority. Miller argues that the “checks and balances” that figures like Schumer cite—federalism, the courts, division of the Congress into two houses—have historically served capitalists and the rich to veto popular initiatives like national health insurance, rather than helped ordinary people. Periods of popular reform have come only when mass movements have forced the political system to break free from the straitjacket of “checks and balances”. Some of the more activist sections of unions understand this. A recent article in *Convergence* magazine co-authored by three leaders of the Chicago and Los Angeles teachers’ unions [makes the case for reviving the general strike](https://convergencemag.com/articles/labors-strategy-must-lean-into-synergies/?ref=redflag.org.au) as part of labour’s strategy to defeat Trumpian authoritarianism. So far so good. But it’s clear that the authors view labour activism as a way also to resuscitate the Democratic Party in time for the 2026 and 2028 elections. So the article notes: “Strikes and electoral work reinforce each other”. This makes their call to militancy less a bold break with the current labour leadership than a refashioning of the standard “inside-outside” strategy to reform the Democratic Party. That is, organise “outside” the Democratic Party to pressure for reform “inside”. The long [history of these efforts to reform the Democratic Party](https://internationalsocialism.net/whatever-happened-to-political-independence/?ref=redflag.org.au) has mostly served to accommodate radicals and activists to the Democrats’ status quo rather than shift the Democrats to the left. We saw it last year when self-described democratic socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders went “all-in” for Kamala Harris, despite Harris’ corporate-friendly politics and support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. (By the way, it’s noteworthy that the article by the three teachers’ union leaders and a labour studies professor—all self-described radicals and socialists—doesn’t mention Gaza.) It’s clear that the left and the labour and social movements are in a very precarious state, and debates about how to fight back against Trumpian authoritarianism will be crucial. But elections and the courts won’t save us, as Townsend pointed out: “The New Jersey and Virginia elections this November may provide a Democratic Party boost, but Trump couldn’t care less. He obviously plans to expand his unilateral war on working people, and the courts are going to allow it. This guy is governing like any crazy boss that the unions see all the time. Bosses who ignore the contract and do illegal things. Because they know that it is unlikely that you will rise up. They know that time is on their side, not our side. They control most aspects of the situation. So just like when this happens in a union context, we need to reconsider our entire position, our response, our tactics. We need union leadership who will consider bold responses, militant responses, tactics that defy conventional wisdom.” ### The neo-Nazis behind the ‘March for Australia’ URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-neo-nazis-behind-the-march-for-australia/ Last updated: 2025-08-27T06:52:18.000Z You may have seen one of the hundreds of videos on social media (or more recently also [stories in the Murdoch press](https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=DTWEB%5FWRE170%5Fa%5FGGL&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailytelegraph.com.au%2Fnews%2Fnational%2Fprotesters-rally-troops-ahead-of-march-for-australia-rallies-on-august-31-heres-what-you-need-to-know%2Fnews-story%2F0c64229d1fca403dfcdc96a625feb637&memtype=anonymous&mode=premium&v21=GROUPA-Segment-2-NOSCORE&ref=redflag.org.au)) promoting the “March for Australia” protests against [“mass migration”](https://www.instagram.com/p/DN1vRmA3p8l/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink&igsh=dXF5eGM5ZHpjeTdn) that are set to take place in cities around the country this Sunday 31 August. The talking points in these videos and other promotional materials for the rallies track closely with those on the event [website](https://marchforaustralia.org/?ref=redflag.org.au). There, next to the claim that “80 percent of Australians want immigration reduced”, is the question, posed under the heading of “weakened identity”: “who are we as a nation, when one in three people were born overseas?” This, to anyone familiar with theories and narratives popular on the far right, could be taken as a pretty unsubtle reference to the “[great replacement theory](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1600910X.2025.2499827?ref=redflag.org.au#abstract)”, according to which mass migration is a conspiracy being carried out by Western elites to replace the white population with immigrants from the global south. In its contemporary iteration, this theory arose from the work of French far-right novelist and conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus, but its origins trace back to late 19th century European antisemitism and it has been passed down to contemporary far-right and neo-Nazi movements via the writings of Adolf Hitler and other 20th century fascists. When neo-Nazis held a mass march in the US city of Charlottesville in 2017, for instance, one of their favoured chants was [“Jews will not replace us!”](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/charlottesville-neo-nazis-vice-news-hbo?ref=redflag.org.au) The fact that an association with these kinds of theories is barely concealed beneath the veneer of respectability that March for Australia organisers have fostered is cause enough for concern. Perhaps though it’s all a coincidence? The more mainstream forces involved in the rallies certainly would like us to believe so. To get to the bottom of it, let’s dive a little deeper. On 3 August this year, a [video](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DM4gT4HBSHy/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink) by Sam Bamford calling for a rally against mass migration was posted to TikTok and Instagram. The post quickly gained traction, reaching hundreds of thousands of views in a few days. According to a subsequent public [X Spaces stream](https://x.com/i/spaces/1djxXVWlqNNGZ/peek?ref=redflag.org.au) with one of the nationwide organisers of the rally who goes by the name of “Bec Freedom”, the video’s virality prompted certain unnamed individuals to reach out to Sam and to put him in touch with her. Since then, Sam has relinquished any involvement in the rallies, and responsibility for organising them has passed to people described in the stream as “trusted individuals” within the far-right movement. There have been several developments that point to the involvement of neo-Nazis from the National Socialist Network (NSN). The “March for Australia” website was created on 8 August, the day before the NSN’s national conference, which took place in the Victorian town of Bacchus Marsh on the weekend of 9-10 August. Notably, the website uses the same content management system and fonts as the NSN’s “White Australia” website. Perhaps most damning though is the fact that among the revolving cast of [state organisers](https://x.com/tassiekaz/status/1958911146297368891?ref=redflag.org.au) named on the march’s Facebook events, those who have been identified (most are using aliases) have either been NSN members, or have worked closely and directly with the NSN in the past. This includes Matt Trihey (one of the on-again, off-again Victorian organisers), who is a founder of white supremacist organisation the [National Workers Alliance](https://voxpol.eu/nazis-at-the-salad-bar-the-national-workers-alliance-and-mixed-unclear-and-unstable-ideology/?ref=redflag.org.au) and former [Lads Society](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/12/australian-white-nationalists-reveal-plans-to-recruit-disgruntled-white-male-population?ref=redflag.org.au)member who was most recently in the news for getting [punched in the face](https://www.news.com.au/national/federal-election/white-supremacist-crashes-friends-of-abc-candidates-meeting-in-seat-of-kooyong/news-story/be9520dc5a6a55df4c4c411d98d9bb82?ref=redflag.org.au) by an elderly woman at an election event in Kooyong earlier this year. Once the march began to gain traction online, [notable Zionist organisers](https://x.com/purplepingers/status/1956547447750070659?ref=redflag.org.au) and far-right content creators from different cultural backgrounds expressed interest in attending and helping to promote the rallies. This prompted an angry tirade from none other than NSN leader Tom Sewell, who complained in an 11 August post on his telegram channel that “after only just arriving home from our summit today \[the NSN’s 9-10 August national conference\], I have been informed that foreign fifth columns are attempting to hijack our August 31st public rally for Australia. Australians must say NO to Israeli, Palestinian, Chinese and Indian foreign interference trying to hijack our common-sense patriotic spirit. White Australians must assemble on August 31st against the traitors and foreigners who are trying to destroy our great nation!” Even on the more outwardly “respectable”, public-facing level the veneer has sometimes slipped. In the X Spaces stream mentioned earlier, “Bec Freedom”—the main public face of the rallies on a national level—[stated that](https://x.com/tassiekaz/status/1955069467681231141?ref=redflag.org.au) the march is to “protect white culture, heritage and way of life”. In a previous X Spaces stream she also said that “we need to see violence” like what happened in the [2005 Cronulla Riots](https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/cronulla-race-riots?ref=redflag.org.au). This argument wasn’t met with disgust or apprehension, but by her co-hosts saying it didn’t go far enough. On available evidence then we can only come to one conclusion. The March for Australia isn’t some wishy washy far-right populist event patched together by suburban “mums and dads” with legitimate concerns. It has been initiated and built with direct neo-Nazi involvement every step of the way. And at its core isn’t limited to the demand for a reduction in rates of immigration, but the plan to build a movement that will violently target anyone deemed not to fit with the NSN’s vision of a racially “pure”, Nazi-led, white Australia. Wherever possible, these rallies should be actively countered by socialists, pro-Palestine activists, and all those concerned with standing in solidarity with migrants and against the far right and fascism (in Melbourne a [counter rally](https://www.instagram.com/p/DNka6mTRLIW/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink&igsh=Zng5OHI5N2c1NHp4) has been organised meeting at 11am Sunday at the State Library). Against their hatred and division, we must advance a vision centred on anti-racist solidarity, collective action and democracy to advance working-class interests against the dog-eat-dog ideologies of capitalism that Nazis aim to take to their most barbaric extremes. ### Fighting imperialism then and now URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/fighting-imperialism-then-and-now/ Last updated: 2025-09-01T01:21:39.000Z Today was a brilliant day of protests against Israeli atrocities in Palestine and our government’s complicity in them. I’ve been asked how it compares to the national rallies on the weekend of 14-16 February 2003, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets around the country in opposition to the US government’s imminent invasion of Iraq. Today was similar in that it was a series of nationwide protests from the biggest cities to the smallest towns (600 in Tathra!), all coming out against the government of the day. The energy was the same—the experience of turning what would otherwise have been a sleepy Sunday into mass political action that has become the key political issue around the country. But the differences are equally striking. Today was angrier, more hostile to the government, more oppositional. Consider the two situations. A whole section of international ruling class opinion was opposed to the US invasion of Iraq. The German and French governments came out against it. The ALP was against it because the UN did not sanction it. In 2003, Labor opposition leader Simon Crean spoke at the Brisbane rally, and the Labor lord mayor also spoke at rallies. The *Age*newspaper in Melbourne editorialised against the war. To be against the Iraq War didn’t require people to stand on principle against Western imperialism. The stance was in tune with widespread liberal opinion. To my knowledge, no-one lost their job for speaking out against it, no-one was suspended or expelled from university for doing so, and no-one was condemned as a racist for opposing war. The only accusation the right could dredge up—that you were an apologist for Saddam Hussein or for radical Islam—was regarded as laughable. The very premise of the war—Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction—was thoroughly debunked even before it started. Things had well and truly moved on from the US’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, when standing against war put you in a small minority. Today, we’ve got no friends in any lodge, chancellery, palace or ministry. Every Western government backs Israel. Government rhetoric in much of the West may have shifted a bit in the last couple of months, but this doesn’t disguise the fact that Israel can massacre the Palestinians without a single government doing anything to stop it. This is true of social democratic governments as much as conservative ones. It's not just that they’re not standing up to Israel. They are attacking opponents of the genocide. Standing up to Israel’s war takes guts. It requires a much stronger sense of purpose, because opposing Israel means opposing the entire establishment—the politicians, newspaper editors, managers and university vice chancellors who have disgracefully used the antisemitism slur to destroy careers, sack workers, withdraw funding and expel students. Our rulers have subjected opponents of the war to public ridicule and hatred. The “antisemitism” slur has been much more chilling than the ridiculous slurs of being a “Saddam stooge” in 2003\. The Israeli genocide, by highlighting the lines of division in our society, therefore exposes the workings of our system much more clearly than the Iraq war did. With the Iraq war, we knew what horrors it might (and did) unleash, but everyone attending rallies today has seen the barbarism that has been meted out to the civilians of Gaza, the emaciated bodies wracked by starvation, the bags of body parts being collected by grieving parents or children, the sheer horror of Israel bombing people queuing for food. The morning news bulletins tell us how many dozen civilians have been blown to pieces while we slept. This experience has burned itself into the minds of everyone who marched today. At least in the early stages of the Iraq war, the US was fighting a conventional army. Who is Israel fighting? It’s just massacring unarmed people. The Iraq war demonstrations were unprecedented in that hundreds of thousands came out before a shot was fired (although US sanctions had killed hundreds of thousands in the years preceding). That was incredible, and we hoped the antiwar movement would build as the war dragged on. But they were a rocket that lit up the night sky only to quickly fall to the earth. The US smashed Hussein’s army and quickly established control. The protests of hundreds of thousands quickly subsided. Today, we have been marching on the streets virtually every week for two years. And yet today was the biggest day of action yet. We’ve learned some lessons over these two years. None of us marching today has any illusions that any government will help us. All of us despise the complicity of our governments in this genocide. At the Brisbane rally against the Iraq war, a minority of us booed Simon Crean, but most gave him the benefit of the doubt. Today, we all despise the Labor politicians. Their hypocrisy, their token measures that do nothing to stop the killing are worse than Australian PM John Howard’s fawning over US President George Bush. And it’s been more than two decades since 2003\. Australia has escaped some of the worst economic crises since that time and our political system is still less polarised than elsewhere in the world. But our government’s complicity in Israel’s genocide is another reminder that we are part of a world system of barbarism—a world in which the far right is growing, the climate crisis is getting worse, social welfare is being further gutted and inequality is becoming more extreme. As well, the threat of a major war in our region looms as governments throw hundreds of billions of dollars at new weapons systems. Israel’s genocide is of a piece with this: a world in which the powerful can simply destroy the common people with impunity. The comparison between 2003 and 2025 reinforces in my mind the need for a socialist alternative to this rotten system. George Bush went. John Howard went. But things have gotten worse. They’re not going to get better. Today was a beautiful demonstration of the power of ordinary people when they decide “enough is enough”. We need many more of them. But we also need a clear vision of what we’re fighting against and what we’re fighting for. I think the movement today is angrier than in 2003, more determined, in it for the long haul. But that doesn’t mean it’s particularly politically sophisticated. Debates over how to defeat Israel are virtually non-existent; people in their desperation tend to grasp at straws. The Israeli genocide is like a distillation of the evils of capitalism. The Israeli government has been planning this offensive for years. Its backers in the West support it. Our side, that of the working class, needs to be conscious of our tasks if we are to defeat them. That’s why, 22 years on from Iraq, and 40 plus years since I first got involved, I’m still as dedicated as ever to building a socialist alternative to this rotten system. ### Australia rises for Palestine URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/australia-rises-for-palestine/ Last updated: 2025-08-25T00:21:10.000Z Sunday was the biggest nationally coordinated demonstration for Palestine in Australian history. From the centres of the major cities to the smallest of country towns, more than 300,000 people took to the streets to demand an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza—and to denounce the Australian government’s complicity. In Sydney and Melbourne, crowds nearly 100,000 strong surged through the streets in what can only be described as a national howl of opposition to Israel’s brutality. In Brisbane, 50,000 rallied. In Perth, 20,000\. Adelaide, 15,000\. A remarkable 4,000 marched in Hobart—one of the largest protests in the city in years. But just as striking was the response in regional Australia: 3,000 in Newcastle; 1,200 in Coffs Harbour; 600 in Tathra and Katoomba; 450 on the Central Coast; hundreds in Denmark, Devonport, Margaret River, Albany, Mackay, Geraldton and other towns across Western Australia. Even in Broome, Bridgetown, Mount Gambier and Karratha—dozens gathered to say: not in our name. In Devonport, Tasmania, the organisers—Patrick, Sally, Bill and Jennie—were thrilled by the turnout of more than 300 people. The event began with a “Honk for Palestine”, followed by speeches and a haunting lament on the Great Highland pipes, played by Dave. In Broome, organisers described a gathering led by both First Nations and non-Indigenous organisers as “the biggest Broome gathering in solidarity with Palestine” since November 2023\. “Elders attended alongside newborn babies and families, with people from all faiths, including Muslim and Jewish, in attendance”. More than 300,000 people demonstrated nationwide—a defiant mobilisation by a movement that refuses to be silenced. And it could not come at a more critical time. Just this week, the United Nations confirmed that famine is now a reality in parts of Gaza. The Israeli government is starving children to death. Meanwhile, the military has commenced its military assault on Gaza City—again. This, after nine months of relentless bombing, blockade, displacement and massacres. The Australian government’s response? Lip service. Weak statements. Continued arms exports. Continued security cooperation. Continued diplomatic cover. Amal Nasser, a leading Palestinian organiser in Sydney, spoke about this in a news interview in the lead-up to the national day of action: “Declarations by the Australian government for Palestinian recognition have achieved nothing. The week after the government said they would recognise Palestine, the Netanyahu government announced it would invade Gaza City.” People across the country have had enough. While people are gunned down at “aid” distribution sites, Labor refuses to impose sanctions, refuses to end the two-way arms trade and refuses to expel the Israeli ambassador. The Albanese government has been utterly hostile to the Palestinian struggle and the solidarity movement; it has worked with state Labor governments to repress the movement. We’ve had to weather attempts to criminalise us, to smear us as antisemites, to paint our grief and rage as a threat. But the movement will not go quietly. Voices of resistance, clarity and defiance came from today’s rallies. As veteran Aboriginal activist Gary Foley told the Melbourne crowd: “They may kill the resistance fighters, but they will never kill the resistance”. Palestinian organisers in Perth wept as they saw thousands pour into the streets. One said they felt like “the tide was turning”. Omar Hassan, chairing the Melbourne rally, captured the mood: “They have never seen a movement as persistent and sustained and determined as this one in Australia … When you read the news of the starving children, when you see the press conferences of the chattering classes that do nothing … you will know that you stand on the right side of history.” In towns and suburbs across the country, people organised demonstrations for the very first time. They printed flyers, booked halls, made placards, called friends. German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg once said you don’t notice your chains if you don’t move. Today, in many places, there was movement for the first time. And with it, the possibility of real, collective strength. Importantly, this was the first time that trade unions across Australia coordinated national support for Palestine on this scale. Motions were passed, email blasts were sent to members, social media tiles were shared—sometimes for the first time. But there needs to be more. The muscle of the labour movement must be flexed. It is one of the most serious ways governments can be held accountable. A movement that can stop arms shipments, freeze exports and put political pressure on the streets and in the workplaces is the kind of movement we urgently need. Members of Socialist Alternative and the Socialist Party played an important role in these protests across the country, continuing a long tradition of involvement in the Palestinian solidarity movement well before 2023\. Our contribution remains rooted in the belief that building working-class resistance here is essential to confronting imperialism abroad. This movement is a light in the darkness. Ordinary people—many of them young, migrant, Muslim, and working class—are standing against the genocidal project of one of the most heavily armed regimes on earth, and against the cowardly governments that enable it. Today was not the end. It was a turning point. A national cry, from the streets of Melbourne to the sands of Broome: End the genocide. Free Palestine. ### La Trobe staff and students speak out against university censorship URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/la-trobe-staff-and-students-speak-out-against-university-censorship/ Last updated: 2025-08-23T02:24:19.000Z “When bombs fall on Gaza it’s not just Netanyahu who is responsible. It’s also the companies who make the drones, the governments who fund them and the universities that silence dissent”: this was how Palestinian activist and La Trobe alumni Hajar Riad opened a pro-Palestine meeting on 20 August at Melbourne’s La Trobe University. The event was organised as a counter-panel to the Bendigo Writers Festival, which was supposed to take place the previous week at La Trobe’s Bendigo campus but which was effectively cancelled after more than 30 speakers pulled out citing concern over a code of conduct that prohibited discussion of the genocide in Gaza. The Bendigo Writers Festival was promoted as an event that “brings together diverse voices … sparking ideas, conversation and inspiration”. Instead, it’s highlighted the draconian attack on free speech by universities looking to stifle activism against and opposition to the genocide in Gaza. Two days before the festival, writers and presenters in the “La Trobe Presents” sessions were sent a code of conduct that required them to “avoid language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful”. They were also told they had to abide by La Trobe University’s “Anti-Racism Action Plan”, which defines criticism of Israel as antisemitism. The plan was implemented in May 2025 as a response to the 2024 Gaza solidarity encampment and the mass Student General Meeting for Palestine, where more than 250 students voted for La Trobe to cut ties with companies involved with the genocide. The purpose of the plan is to make it harder for students and staff to criticise Israel’s genocide, and the university’s complicity in it. Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian author and academic, wrote in her withdrawal letter: “At a time when journalists are being permanently silenced by Israel’s genocidal forces, it is incomprehensible that a writers’ festival should seek to silence Palestinian voices”. More than 240 journalists have been killed by Israeli military forces since October 2023\. This makes Israel’s war the deadliest for journalists in modern history. While those seeking to get the truth out about what’s happening in Palestine are being killed, those trying to talk about it in the West are being silenced, by institutions that supposedly stand for “free thought” no less. The counter-panel was a demonstration of opposition to university management and a show of solidarity with those standing up against oppression and injustice. It attracted more than 30 students and staff and involved discussions about how best to oppose genocide and censorship in our work and studies. La Trobe Student Union Education Officer Maeve Russack was the final speaker on the panel. She argued, “I think that there’s a key lesson to be learnt from the Bendigo Writers Festival and it’s that the university and their policy book are not an omnipotent being, but are something that can be resisted and something our side must continue to resist”. ### The profiteers plundering child care URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-profiteers-plundering-child-care/ Last updated: 2025-08-21T06:14:29.000Z Twenty years ago, Eddy Groves blazed a trail as the first of Australia’s childcare industry capitalists to make the annual Rich List. As Groves’ portfolio of childcare centres ballooned, so did his personal wealth—from a hundred childcare centres and $40 million in 2002, to a thousand childcare centres in Australia, a similar number overseas, and a fortune of $260 million in 2006\. By this stage, Groves owned a ranch in Nevada, a house in France and the Brisbane Bullets basketball team. Groves’ empire collapsed in 2008\. But he had proved in practice that it was possible for cashed-up operators to make a fortune in care industries governments were retreating from. So long as there is a steady flow of government money, rapid expansion of the corporate footprint, poorly enforced regulation and a ruthless, cost-cutting approach to staffing and conditions, there is money to be made. Just look at Pejman Okhovat, the CEO of G8 Education. His total remuneration was $3.3 million in 2024, up from $3 million the year before. G8 Education is the biggest childcare provider in Victoria, with 130 centres across the state. An [investigation](https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/victoria-s-largest-childcare-chain-repeatedly-failed-to-protect-children-20250805-p5mkg0.html?ref=redflag.org.au)by the *Age* following a major alleged child abuse scandal reveals a chronic shortage of trained staff in multiple centres and a failure to report incidents in which a child was harmed or at risk of serious harm: “One mother said she believed it was ‘painfully obvious’ the childcare giant prioritised its reputation over providing adequate care”. Child care today is highly profitable. The public financial advice website [Finexia](https://www.finexia.com.au/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-average-profit-of-daycare-centers-in-australia?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=Average%20Profit%20of%20Daycare%20Center,explore%20in%20the%20subsequent%20sections.)claims that a profit margin of 10 to 20 percent is typical—which is significantly more than Woolworths’ reported profit rate of around 6 percent of sales. But the big money comes from accumulating the centres themselves, which ensures larger streams of government cash. News.com [carried a story](https://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/revealed-the-cashed-up-players-making-millions-from-childcare-centres/news-story/5c5075f0aed1143a007795d20b399b09?ref=redflag.org.au) in March this year profiling just a few of the characters who have enriched themselves in this way. The list includes Brendan McAssey, who sold off his “Only About Children” childcare chain to private equity company Bain Capital in 2016 for $400 million. The deal set him up for a $22.5 million luxury home at Noosa and (according a [report](https://bigsteps.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/spitting-off-cash-uwu-report.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au)from the United Workers Union in 2018) a “44 metre superyacht, helicopter, private jet and $17 million mansion at Balmoral Beach on Sydney Harbour”. Vijay and Phyllis Narula sold their 14-centre Little People’s Places childcare business for $40 million in 2021\. This cash funds what news.com describes as their “opulent lifestyle played out online with pictures of their beachfront mansion, Lamborghinis, and first-class global travels, regularly updated on social media”. Adrian Fonseca already owned a $14 million mansion in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Selling his 12 childcare centres to Affinity in 2022 for around $40 million no doubt helped him find the $15.6 million needed for the mansion next door in 2023\. We could continue the list, but even this is all chickenfeed. The big players in the industry aren’t motivated by luxury lifestyles, though they no doubt enjoy them. The real game is capital accumulation, on a spectacular scale. This is enabled by steady government money and a regulator uninterested in creating barriers to private enrichment. In 2016, the model was attractive enough to entice private equity firm Anchorage to buy Affinity Education, one of Australia’s biggest childcare operators, for $210 million. Anchorage achieved an extraordinary return on this investment, tripling their money in just five years by selling Affinity off to Quadrant, another Sydney private equity company, for $650 million in 2021\. The executives at incoming owners Quadrant were then faced with the task of squeezing even more money out of Affinity Education. The [plan](https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/the-big-money-behind-childcare-operator-at-the-heart-of-alleged-sex-abuse-scandal-20250717-p5mft7.html?ref=redflag.org.au)seems to have been a simple one: load up on debt, crack down on costs, expand the corporate footprint by buying up more centres—and then cash in. The ABC’s reporting shows that breaches of mandated legal minimums on staffing—and intense pressure on staff to leave regulatory breaches unreported—are part and parcel of this business model.. Loretta Dodwell was one of the childcare workers who [spoke to the ABC](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-12/video-shows-childcare-worker-hitting-baby-at-affinity-education/105268298?ref=redflag.org.au) in May about what she’d seen while employed by Affinity Education. “The cost cutting and the lack of staff really caused serious incidents in the centre”, she said. “They were also putting on lots of trainees, like young trainees that were cheap to employ and that put a lot of pressure on the qualified staff ... They \[Affinity\] are just not suitable to be in the childcare industry because they are just so greedy ... They cut staff, they put the staff under so much pressure ... they’re just a big company that wants to make money out of children.” The head of this “big company that wants to make money out of children” is Chris Hadley, the executive chairman of Affinity Education’s current owner, the private equity firm Quadrant. Hadley is a legend in Sydney money circles. He’s probably a billionaire, although, as the *Australian Financial Review* [reported](https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/inside-the-dog-eat-dog-world-of-australia-s-most-successful-pe-firm-20230822-p5dyf6?ref=redflag.org.au)in 2023, Quadrant’s “labyrinthine corporate structure” makes it impossible to be certain. For the workers, it is a different story. “Food or rent. I can’t afford both.” This is how one member of the United Workers Union responded to a union [survey](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202423-sub-uwu-020625.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au)of early childhood educators last year. Others reported working a second job, not being able to afford essentials, or not being able to afford a holiday with their kids. This is the reality of caring being left to the market. Capitalism has always seen care as a high fixed cost that generates no direct profit, and that therefore should generally be cut to the minimum. This counts double for those too old to make a profit for a boss, or too young, or with a disability that makes someone less profitable to employ. So even before our current neoliberal age with its mania for privatisation, aged care, childcare and other community care facilities were often overcrowded institutions with underpaid and overworked staff. But it’s also true that all of these problems have become dramatically worse as the Chris Hadleys and their ilk moved in. Instead of local councils providing the bulk of aged care and child care, with some basic level of political and legal accountability, the profiteering wannabe billionaires (and actual billionaires) are interested only in making a buck. Tripling your corporation’s wealth, as Anchorage private equity did with Affinity child care in five years, and as Quadrant hope to do, is the highest mission for any capitalist. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx explored the desperation of capitalists to multiply their capital in volume one of *Capital*, quoting the British trade unionist Thomas Dunning: “With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain ten percent will ensure its employment anywhere; twenty percent certain will produce eagerness; fifty percent positive audacity; hundred percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; three hundred percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged”. The quote sums up the ethos of capital perfectly. The only difference today is that there’s no chance of any of the childcare profiteers being hanged for their crimes. In fact, it’s an absolute rarity for any of them even to be prosecuted, let alone convicted. Modern day neoliberal “regulators”, in child care and anywhere else, are generally no impediment at all to companies systematically breaching the regulations in pursuit of profit. So back in the day, Eddy Groves walked free despite leaving over $1 billion in bad debt. And 20 years later, Affinity look to be following in his footsteps. Adele Ferguson and Chris Gillet [reported](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-12/video-shows-childcare-worker-hitting-baby-at-affinity-education/105268298?ref=redflag.org.au)on the ABC in May this year that, despite constant pressure on staff not to report regulatory breaches, between 2021 and 2024 Affinity childcare centres “were hit with more than 1,700 regulatory breaches, averaging more than one a day” in New South Wales alone. “Despite this”, Jones and Gillet reported, “the NSW regulator issued just nine infringement notices, totalling less than $2,000 in penalties.” Labor’s reforms, at best, tinker at the edges of this grotesque system—a system that they’ve helped to create since the 1990s, and which they have no interest in transforming. In the wake of Eddie Groves’ spectacular implosion, academic and gender equity advocate Deborah Brennan outlined Labor’s track record on child care, writing in the *Sydney Morning Herald*: “How did we get into this mess? Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has blamed John Howard for ‘letting the market rip’, but it was the Hawke government, in 1991, that introduced market forces into the sector. It did this by extending child-care assistance to the users of for-profit care and then by changing the structure of Commonwealth funding to encourage private provision and marginalise the community sector ... The Howard government intensified Labor's market focus, ending operational subsidies to community-based care in 1997”. This whole architecture needs to be scrapped. ABC investigations are important, but far from sufficient to drive this level of change. In aged care, for instance, there have been incremental improvements to wages and staffing since the royal commission triggered by a shocking 2018 Four Corners investigation. However, the fundamental structure of the industry remains untouched and, with it, many of the problems. For more far-reaching reforms, the crisis in child care will have to be transformed into a political crisis for the government and the profiteers. The actions of workers in the sector—which we saw a glimpse of in the Big Steps campaign of walk-offs and protests organised by the UWU—can be crucial in this. We should be fighting for a society that puts human dignity first—in early childhood education, disability, aged care and far beyond—and relegates the profiteers, their Lamborghinis and their obscene, dog-eat-dog system to history. ### Freelance journalists in Australia vote for Palestine solidarity URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/freelance-journalists-in-australia-vote-for-palestine-solidarity/ Last updated: 2025-08-21T11:45:00.000Z A rank-and-file meeting of freelance journalists, perhaps the largest ever in the history of the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance, has voted overwhelmingly (without dissent) to stand up for Palestine. MEAA members from the Victorian Socialists drafted a series of motions to support journalists being slandered by Israel’s supporters in Australia and to honour more than 270 news workers killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. The meeting, held on Wednesday, also endorsed the nationwide March for Palestine on Sunday, 24 August. The meeting had been called to discuss an important MEAA campaign to raise freelancer rates and job conditions. Some good work has been done here. The union is trying to get individual employers to agree to a [Freelance Charter of Rights](https://freelancers.org.au/charter/?ref=redflag.org.au) with minimum pay rates for writers and photographers and clauses about intellectual copyright. A couple of media companies have signed on, but many more, including so-called progressive outlets, have not. It was an important step in the MEAA campaign to have a members’ meeting endorse the freelance campaign. However, the meeting was notable for two other reasons. First, its size. More than 300 people RSVP’d (the most ever for a freelancers’ meeting), and at least 162 people participated. Second, the timing of the meeting coincided with the historic collapse in Israel’s legitimacy in the eyes of millions of people and as public opinion has shifted firmly in favour of the Palestinians, as illustrated by the history-making March for Humanity on 3 August. Wednesday’s meeting was an opportunity too good to miss. But it wasn’t easy. There was a significant conservative “do nothing” pushback from the freelancers’ de facto delegate committee. Despite every member of the committee saying that they supported the Palestinians and were regular attendees of Palestine solidarity rallies, they argued that union members weren’t ready to take action, that the union’s “official channels” were working on their own campaign plan and that putting up motions for Palestine would be divisive. On the day of the meeting, I argued with the committee all day in our WhatsApp chat group. They didn’t like it. But we were confident that MEAA members were ready to take action. We were right. The MEAA leadership has already taken a public position on Gaza. Federal officials endorsed the March for Humanity on 3 August and the 24 August nationwide March for Palestine. And they had already [issued a media release condemning the murder of journalists by Israel](https://www.meaa.org/mediaroom/stop-killing-journalists-australian-media-figures-take-a-stand-as-death-toll-continues-to-rise/?ref=redflag.org.au) and calling on the killing to stop. That should have given committee members the confidence to support us, but it wasn’t enough. I argued to the committee that if they supported some formal motions—in line with their private opinions—the meeting could be handled simply with a couple of speakers for and against and then a vote. This is exactly what happened in the end. There was no fuss, no drama, no blowup. It was just a simple exercise in union democracy and letting the membership voice an opinion. We had three motions prepared for the meeting. First, we made a public statement that freelance members of the MEAA support our colleague Mary Kostakidis, who is fighting the Zionist Federation of Australia in the federal court after the pro-Israel group accused her of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act. The federation’s attack on Mary was made at a time when Israel’s supporters felt emboldened and were attacking journalists, artists and academics daily with false accusations of antisemitism. The MEAA head office has been sitting on Mary’s case and has refused to make any public statements for months. Mary told after the meeting that union officials were basically trawling through her social media feed to make their own determination about antisemitism. This is an appalling and stupid thing for MEAA officials to be doing. Now the union and the public know that Mary has the overwhelming support of her freelance colleagues. Second, we added our voices to the union’s public position of opposing the genocide and the murder of news workers in Gaza. By doing so, we want to signal that there is a ground swell of pro-Palestinian sentiment inside the union. Third, we endorsed the 24 August national Palestine solidarity demonstrations. By doing so, we’ve signalled that we don’t want to only talk about Palestine, but act. This was a great outcome. And, like everything related to Palestine solidarity, it required a fight to get the right result. ### Resisting militarism and capitalism in Indonesia URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/resisting-militarism-and-capitalism-in-indonesia/ Last updated: 2025-08-21T06:03:10.000Z Over the past six years, Indonesia has experienced repeated waves of mass protest in response to “democratic backsliding”—the erosion of post-1998 reforms and the increasingly visible role of the armed forces in politics. The persistence of these protests, mobilising students and workers, demonstrates a determination to defend democratic rights and economic gains won by the preceding *Reformasi* generation—those who forced a period of political and social reform after the ousting of the dictator Suharto. Success, however, will require confronting the Indonesian state’s combined military, economic and political power. Prabowo Subianto, a former commander of the Indonesian army’s special forces unit (Kopassus), secured the presidency in a remarkable political turnaround last year. Twenty-seven years ago, he was expelled from the military after allegations that his unit abducted and tortured pro-democracy student activists. Soon after, he entered exile in Jordan. At the time, Prabowo was married to a daughter of President Suharto, the army general who had seized power amid the mass killing of alleged communists in 1965-66\. Many expected Prabowo to succeed his father-in-law, but the pro-democracy *Reformasi*movement forced Suharto to resign in 1998, and the dictatorship was ended. *Reformasi*, spearheaded by university students in 1997, swelled into a nationwide uprising, drawing in workers and the urban poor. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, coupled with endemic corruption and nepotism, turned economic hardship into political rage. The movement’s demands included Suharto’s removal, the weeding out of corruption, free and fair elections, the abolition of the “dual function” that gave the military both security and political roles, and prosecutions for human rights abuses. Indonesia’s first post-*Reformasi* direct presidential election in 2004 resulted in the victory of another former general, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The army never vanished from politics, however. While *Reformasi*established civilian constitutional supremacy and direct presidential elections, the armed forces retained far-reaching influence. As Aldi, an Indonesian socialist activist, recently related during a conversation in Java, the country’s most populous island: “There was no trial for human rights perpetrators, and no seizure of military-owned businesses. The military remained central to state-controlled industries”. The election of Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”), a former furniture exporter and mayor of Solo, a city in central Java, in 2014 was seen abroad as a landmark civilian victory. Yet Jokowi reintegrated the military, appointing retired generals to ministerial posts. Simultaneously, the new president narrowed democratic space. In 2019, parliament diluted the independence of the Corruption Eradication Commission, created in 2002 as a signature *Reformasi* institution. The 2020 “Omnibus Law”—officially the Job Creation Law—savaged labour and environmental protections to woo investment, provoking large street protests. In the final months of his presidency, Jokowi pushed electoral law changes widely interpreted as paving the way for his sons’ political careers, including lowering the age requirement for vice-presidential candidates to permit his elder son’s nomination alongside Prabowo in the 2024 election. None of this happened without resistance. Each measure triggered mass protests. In 2019, “*Reformasi* corrupted” became the rallying cry; 2020 saw “Reject the Omnibus Law”; 2023-24 featured “State of Emergency Warning”. Mobilisations frequently occurred with less than 24 hours’ notice via social media, drawing tens of thousands. But, as Aldi notes, the protests lacked sustained leadership: “Because of the low level of political consciousness and the lack of an organisation that can lead the movement, it’s very easy for these protests to be beaten back by the regime”. Jokowi’s alignment with Prabowo was the final straw for liberals who had viewed him as a bulwark against authoritarian restoration. His endorsement, and his son’s vice-presidential slot on Prabowo’s ticket, symbolised the collapse of “lesser evil” logic in Indonesian electoral politics. Once in office, Prabowo moved to rewrite the *Reformasi*\-era military law, allowing more serving officers to take cabinet posts. Protests broke out in more than 60 cities. In Bandung, some clashes with riot police lasted overnight. Lacking central coordination, the movement ebbed once the law passed. Prabowo’s victory was underpinned by longstanding army-economic integration. “During the \[*Reformasi*\] period of political decentralisation, the military was still centrally involved in economic life, so it was easy for them to pick up business projects in local areas”, Aldi says. “The military has big stakes in timber, nickel, coal, palm oil and the wood industry. Because of this, their involvement in policy making has been embraced by civilian elites all this time: it’s not surprising that Prabowo won the 2024 election with their support. His supporters in the military also utilised what is called the ‘territorial command’. This is like a state within a state, where the military has administrative representation at the village, subdistrict, district and provincial levels.” Put simply, the military is the strongest section of the Indonesian ruling class. The civilian sections of the capitalist class rely on it to organise big economic infrastructure projects and manage the population. This means that any fight against militarism in Indonesia will inevitably be a fight against the entire structure of Indonesian capitalism. For protesters, the stakes are twofold. One is the fear of a return to New Order–era abuses: arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial killings and military-ordered massacres. The other is a defence of liberal-democratic norms: civil liberties, the rule of law and free elections. A small but growing bloc of leftist organisations and trade unions now advocates a break from both authoritarian nationalism and liberal capitalism. Those who are building that kind of organisation face difficult conditions. It remains illegal to build Marxist organisations in Indonesia. Police spies and criminal thugs have a history of infiltrating and intimidating successful leftist groups. The workers’ movement has stagnated for some time and is dominated by conservative union bureaucracies. Sections of the workers’ movement have even supported Prabowo rather than joining the protests against him. Still, there are hopeful signs. “Many young people are now attending our meetings”, Aldi says. Whether this politicisation can be transformed into a durable force capable of posing a political alternative remains an open question. There are undoubtedly more challenges to come. Every new showdown raises the stakes, as the military tries to suffocate democratic opposition to its khaki-clad capitalist empire. But every skirmish allows revolutionaries to test their arguments and build independent organisations. ### How can we stop the carnage? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/how-can-we-stop-the-carnage/ Last updated: 2025-08-17T05:21:35.000Z 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. ### Solid result for socialist candidates in local council by-elections URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/solid-result-for-socialist-candidates-in-local-council-by-elections/ Last updated: 2025-08-17T05:18:28.000Z On the back of strong grassroots campaigns that included many hours of doorknocking and letterboxing and thousands of conversations with voters, Victorian Socialists candidates achieved a solid result in recent by-elections in Darebin and Whittlesea councils in Melbourne’s north. The by-election for the North West Ward of Darebin City Council was called following [the death in April](https://www.darebin.vic.gov.au/About-council/News-and-Media/News/Darebin-City-Council-mourns-the-loss-of-Cr-Gaetano-Greco?ref=redflag.org.au) of left-wing independent councillor Gaetano Greco. Greco was first elected to council in 2008 and served as Darebin mayor in 2013-14\. He was a strong progressive voice who was a leader of the campaign to save Preston Market from its billionaire owner’s [profit-seeking redevelopment plan](https://redflag.org.au/article/speaking-billionaire-preston-market). Greco was a popular councillor. In the last state-wide council election in October 2024, he [won the North West Ward](https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/council-election-results/2024-council-election-results/darebin-city-council?ref=redflag.org.au#North%20West%20Ward) with a first preference vote of 57.8 percent, ahead of Labor’s Geraldine Wood on 20.1 percent, the Greens’ Patchouli Paterson on 12.3 percent and VS candidate Adam Slater on 9.8 percent. Seven candidates competed to fill his vacant spot, with all but one of those pitching themselves as (various shades of) progressive. VS candidate Cat Rose—a nurse and long-time community activist who has in recent years been part of the Save the Preston Market campaign along with local organising around Palestine—[received 14.5 percent of first preference votes](https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/voting/current-elections/darebin-city-council-north-west-ward-by-election/results?ref=redflag.org.au), coming in third, behind progressive independent Angela Villella on 27.4 percent and Labor’s Daniel Scoullar on 17.6 percent. After the distribution of preferences, however, Rose came out ahead of Labor, finishing second on 42.4 percent behind Villlella on 57.6 percent. Villella was one of two candidates whose pitch to voters centred on their connection with Greco and desire to continue in his footsteps (the other was George Kanjere, who received 7.6 percent of first preference votes). Rose’s first preference vote represents a swing of 4.7 percent from VS’s North West Ward result in 2024\. This is a good outcome in a crowded field of progressive candidates. For comparison, the Greens’ first preference vote was down 4.2 percent from 2024. The by-election for the Lalor Ward in Whittlesea City Council was called after the 2024 election for that ward was voided by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal due to suspected fraud. During the vote count, which was narrowly won by long-time Labor councillor Stevan Kozmevski, Victorian Electoral Commission staff found that there were a high number of “multiple returns”: numerous postal ballot papers being sent in by a single voter. Eleven candidates ran in the by-election. VS candidate Omar Hassan—a teacher and long-time Palestine solidarity campaigner who was the party’s candidate for Scullin in the recent federal election—came in second on first preferences with [15.5 percent of the vote](https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/voting/current-elections/whittlesea-city-council-lalor-ward-by-election/results?ref=redflag.org.au), behind Kozmevski on 22.3 percent. They were followed by a group of three candidates who received between 11 and 12 percent. After the distribution of preferences it was the fifth-placed candidate, Michael Labrador, who received just 11.2 percent of first preferences, who jumped ahead to win with 52.4 percent to Kozmevski’s 47.6 percent. It’s difficult to come to any firm political conclusions from this result. Labrador stood on the far-right of the field of candidates, foregrounding his Christian faith and family values and calling for more “fiscal responsibility” from council. As the third-placed candidate on the ballot, though, he benefited from what VS scrutineers said was a significant donkey vote—where voters, not knowing (or not caring) who they should vote for, simply number the boxes starting with “1” for the top-placed candidate and going down the ballot paper from there. The results for VS provide further evidence for the existence of a decent-sized audience for socialist politics in these areas. Both Lalor and Reservoir (which Darebin North West Ward covers) are heartlands of Melbourne’s multi-ethnic working class that have traditionally been Labor Party strongholds. In many parts of Australia, workers’ disillusionment with Labor is translating into increasing votes for parties on the far-right fringe. To the extent that VS can win a portion of these people to vote for and identify with socialists instead, that in itself will be a positive intervention into Australian political life. Our aim, however, should be to do much more than that. There’s no indication that we’re approaching a ceiling for the socialist vote in these areas. Socialist organising in places like Lalor and Reservoir is only just getting started. The biggest barrier we face is the pervasive disillusionment with and disengagement from politics, more than any entrenched commitment to Labor or far-right candidates and parties. If Victorian Socialists can further establish itself as a genuine, radical alternative to the utterly corrupt and pro-big business politics of both Labor and the Liberals, and to the progressive small ‘l’ liberal but ultimately pro-capitalist politics of the Greens and the Teals, there’s every reason to think that the current upward trajectory of its vote (and its membership) will continue and even accelerate. And with the party’s recent decision to expand across Australia, there’s no reason to think this success can’t be replicated in other states and territories too. *James Plested is the Victorian Socialists communications director.* ### Students to hold nationwide vote on Gaza URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/students-to-hold-nationwide-vote-on-gaza/ Last updated: 2025-08-17T05:17:30.000Z The National Union of Students has endorsed a call by Students for Palestine to hold a national student referendum on Palestine. Across the country, university campuses will hold mass meetings at which students will vote on the following motions: *1\. Students censure the Australian government for its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. We demand an end to all weapons sales to Israel by Australia and Australian companies, and call for sanctions on Israel.* *2\. Students call on all Australian universities to end their complicity with Israel’s genocide by ceasing all partnerships with weapons companies.* The votes on each campus will be reported as they come in and collated into a national result. The intention is to send a clear message to the government and Australian universities that students will not stay silent in the face of their complicity in the Gaza genocide. The Albanese government has all but admitted that Australia is arming Israel through the export of crucial weapons components. As the *Guardian* [recently reported](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/aug/15/is-australia-supplying-weapons-to-bomb-gaza-heres-what-we-know-about-fighter-jet-parts-in-the-f-35-program?ref=redflag.org.au), the company RUAG Australia is the only global supplier of a key part of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets used by Israel in Gaza. According to [an Australian defence industry website](https://asiapacificdefencereporter.com/ruag-australia-achieves-manufacturing-milestone-on-uplock-actuator-system-for-f-35-joint-strike-fighter-program/?ref=redflag.org.au), the “uplock actuator system” opens and closes bay doors “to enable the F-35 to drop its payload more quickly and maintain its stealth capability”. Australian universities enjoy research partnerships with and scholarship funding from major weapons companies, including Lockheed Martin, which manufactures the F-35\. This is what Defence Minister Richard Marles meant when he told David Speers on ABC’s *Insiders* that Australia is “[an F-35 country](https://youtu.be/uxUntSTXpGc?si=Yfo31D11IP3N1aK2&ref=redflag.org.au)”. The Labor government’s and universities’ complicity in the genocide is at odds with public sentiment, which continues to grow in favour of the besieged and starved Palestinians and for an end to Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza. A [recent poll](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/03/most-people-across-24-surveyed-countries-have-negative-views-of-israel-and-netanyahu/?ref=redflag.org.au) conducted by Pew Research found that about three-quarters of Australians now have an unfavourable view of Israel. And why wouldn’t they? Anyone with eyes and a heart should feel outrage and horror at the images of one-year-old children dying of hunger while food sits in trucks only kilometres away. Or footage of American and Israeli soldiers using breadlines in Gaza for [target practice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKpkZNAFwkc&ab%5Fchannel=SenatorBernieSanders&ref=redflag.org.au). That broader public sentiment is echoed on university campuses, which continue to be major sites of protest and dissent on Gaza. The referendum is an opportunity for students across the country to send a vote of no confidence to our universities and our government, a mass and defiant gesture of dissent in the face of their complicity. It is important that the National Union of Students, the peak union body for university students across the country, supports and promotes the referendum. Members of Socialist Alternative on the NUS national executive have largely done this, pushing for the union to publicly condemn the genocide and support student protests. Across the country, student unions are generally run by different factions of Young Labor, meaning that the NUS operates as little more than an anaemic cheer squad for the ALP and a career stepping stone for Labor students. Members of Socialist Alternative in the NUS and in student unions across the country have consistently argued that our unions should not limit their horizons to those of a right-wing neoliberal Labor government that has stood steadfastly by Israel [from the start](https://x.com/AlboMP/status/1710737658362876219?ref=redflag.org.au). It is not only our moral responsibility to stand against the crimes of our government and of Israel, but a vital question for the relevance and continued existence of student unionism in this country. The national student referendum is an example of precisely the sort of thing student unions should be throwing themselves into, giving a lead to students who are sickened by the live-streamed images of mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and outraged at the role the Labor government and our universities are playing in it. To join other students standing up and demanding to be counted, register at [palestinereferendum.org](https://palestinereferendum.org/?ref=redflag.org.au). ### Students campaign against Melbourne University’s ‘weapons campus’ URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/students-campaign-against-melbourne-universitys-weapons-campus/ Last updated: 2025-08-17T05:16:27.000Z The University of Melbourne has begun construction on a new $2 billion “defence” research campus at Fishermans Bend. The campus will allow the university to further its collaboration with international arms manufacturers to design new weapons. Last year, students demanded that the university divest from partnerships with more than thirteen weapons companies. But now, the university is angling for even closer connections with the defence sector. This is despite at least two of the companies, Boeing and BAE Systems, [being warned last year by the UN](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/06/states-and-companies-must-end-arms-transfers-israel-immediately-or-risk?ref=redflag.org.au) that their transfers to Israel could make them complicit in war crimes. Now, UoM students are demanding that the university halt the construction of this “weapons campus” and end its complicity in Israel’s genocide. The *Citizen*, a publication of the university’s Centre for Advancing Journalism, [reported in February](https://www.thecitizen.org.au/articles/at-fishermans-bend-university-of-melbourne-angling-for-defence-contracts-relationships?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=In%20an%20August,of%20Melbourne%E2%80%99s%20campus%E2%80%9D.) that the university previously petitioned the Department of Defence to “consider greater connectivity” between the proposed Fishermans Bend campus and the Defence Department’s specialist Defence Science and Technology Group, which is also located in the suburb. “The University claims to be on about the big social challenges and trying to make the world better”, Tilman Ruff, an honorary associate professor and a founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, [told news.com.au earlier this month](https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/the-university-of-melbournes-new-campus-has-students-and-academics-seething/news-story/ed698e07f91089b4defaa5bbcdba8fff?ref=redflag.org.au). “It’s hard to see how getting in bed with war profiteers and particularly makers of now illegal weapons of mass destruction fits with trying to do good in the world for the betterment of humanity.” Boeing manufactures and sells F-15 fighter jets and Apache AH-64 attack helicopters to the Israeli Air Force. BAE Systems, another of the world’s largest defence contractors, is a key supplier to the F-35 fighter jet program. Documents obtained from the university under Freedom of Information reveal that, after a student protest against a forum hosted by Boeing at the Parkville campus in 2024, the university reprimanded students speaking out against war crimes while reassuring the company of the university’s solid commitment to collaboration at Fishermans Bend. The “weapons campus” aligns with a broader Victorian government initiative to lure more arms manufacturers and military contractors to the area. Melbourne University will provide space and materials for companies to improve their weapons and hardware. It will also funnel engineering students into the war industries. The campus will serve as the brains behind the bombs. The university is open about its intent to develop “leading-edge defence technologies” and describes the campus as “a site for multinationals and SMEs to engage in the Defence ecosystem ... supported by our state-of-the-art materials fabrication laboratory, ocean simulation facilities and autonomous robotics testing sites”. The university is also gushing about the opportunities presented by the federal government’s proposed acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines. It is hard to miss the connection between its [positive statements about training nuclear scientists](https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/november/university-of-melbourne-welcomes-student-places-to-support-nuclear-powered-submarines-student-pathways?ref=redflag.org.au) and the Fishermans Bend campus’s intended defence research into “marine systems technologies” and “optimising the performance and security of submarine, ship and amphibious operations in the open ocean and coastal areas”. Students for Palestine Unimelb opposes collaboration between the university and the military. We have collected signatures from more than 1,000 students for a [special general meeting for Palestine](https://www.instagram.com/p/DMpBwh5zmEC/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==), organised by the student union. If four hundred students attend, the meeting’s decisions will be binding on the union. If a mass meeting votes in favour of all motions, the union will campaign against the construction of Fishermans Bend, against all university ties to weapons companies, against the [repression of student activism](https://redflag.org.au/article/melbourne-university-expels-palestine-solidarity-activists) and to organise a [fundraiser for the next Freedom Flotilla](https://freedomflotilla.org/?ref=redflag.org.au) sailing to break Israel’s blockade and bring aid to Gaza. ### Repression and resistance: the Palestine movement in Germany URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/repression-and-resistance-the-palestine-movement-in-germany/ Last updated: 2025-08-17T05:14:58.000Z During Berlin’s Internationalist Queer Pride on Saturday, 26 July, more than 15,000 people marched through the streets of the German capital under the slogan “None of us are free until all of us are free”. Our numbers grew as we marched through the working-class neighbourhood Neukölln, picking up many locals watching from the footpaths who were drawn in by the parade’s central demand: end the genocide in Gaza. It was not long before riot police, stalking us in massive numbers from the start, launched an unprovoked attack. Dozens of us were beaten and arrested, myself included, and the march was forcefully dispersed well short of its destination. In Germany, this sort of police response has come to be expected at Palestine rallies, especially in Berlin. As in most other countries, there has been a steep rise in support for the Palestinian cause, especially among young people, and the German state is resorting to desperate and draconian measures to stop the rising tide. Since October 2023, the German state has cracked down on Palestine activism by raiding homes, shutting down events, cancelling art exhibitions, cutting off funding to cultural institutions and issuing deportation orders to foreign nationals who dare to criticise Israel. More than 30 raids on activists have taken place since October 2023\. These raids—which usually happen at night and involve dozens of heavily armed police—serve one purpose: intimidation. In April 2024, the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace was raided by the Berlin police. A three-day conference they were hosting was shut down, and several organisers were arrested, including Udi Raz, a Jewish Israeli living in Berlin. Only months earlier, Raz had been fired by the state-funded Jewish Museum for describing Israel’s actions in the West Bank as apartheid. In another case in December 2023, the Berlin home of Salah Said, a German-born Palestinian activist, was raided by police, who confiscated personal items and electronic devices. He was raided two more times over the following eighteen months, despite never being accused of any crime. Since October 2023, several cultural organisations and exhibitions have been cancelled, and artists threatened with deportation. The Folkwang Museum in Essen cancelled a planned exhibition curated by Haitian artist Anaïs Duplan, citing his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In Berlin, the cultural centre Oyoun lost all public funding after hosting a Jewish-led pro-Palestine event. Several academics have been fired or had their professorships rescinded after voicing support for the BDS campaign, including Nancy Fraser, a Jewish American who was stood down by Cologne University for calling Israel an “ethno-supremacist state”. But possibly more disturbing than all of this has been the criminalisation of everyday acts of resistance by ordinary people, especially Arabs and Muslims, showing solidarity with the Palestinians. In February 2025, Berlin police implemented a racist ban on Arabic chants at demonstrations, citing “public order” concerns. Despite this ban, and despite arrests, protesters have defiantly continued to chant in Arabic. During the Pride march, “*Al-Hurriya li-Filastin*” (Freedom for Palestine) was chanted by thousands of Arabic and non-Arabic speakers alike. The phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” has been criminalised, and Palestinian flags and keffiyehs are banned in all schools across Berlin. However, none of this has stopped the movement from growing. At the start of Israel’s latest assault on Gaza in October 2023, pro-Palestine rallies were banned and several attempts to march were met with arrests, pepper spray and hundreds of riot police. In the days and weeks following Israel’s ground invasion, protesters continued to defy the ban. A candlelight vigil held by Jewish Voice for a Just Peace was a protest form that the authorities hesitated to crush, which created space for demonstrations immediately afterwards that managed to reclaim the streets. In Neukölln, “illegal” spontaneous gatherings in support of Palestine turned into organised demonstrations, and on the night of 18 October 2023, riot police cracked down on a large pro-Palestine gathering. This time, the protesters—mostly young, local residents of Middle Eastern background—fought back. Protesters used fireworks, stones and Molotov cocktails to fight the police, and built barricades in some places. Over the next three nights, police used water cannons, pepper spray and mass arrests to subdue the protests. The police were subsequently forced to soften somewhat their hardline stance, fearing further rioting. By 21 October, demonstrations were allowed, and about 5,000 attended a protest in Berlin. The right to protest had been won on the streets. In the following weeks, rallies were mostly limited to major cities like Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg, and usually numbered less than a few thousand. In the past twelve months, however, hundreds—sometimes thousands—have repeatedly protested in other major cities including Leipzig, Freiburg, Stuttgart, Münster and Cologne. In Berlin, the rallies have grown into the tens of thousands over time, reaching a peak on 21 June this year, when a demonstration called by two influencers on Instagram drew more than 50,000 people. These are numbers never before seen for Palestine protests in Germany. The growth of the protest movement mirrors a recent change in public opinion. Despite the rabidly pro-Israel German media, public opinion has shifted strongly in favour of the Palestinians. The newspaper *Die Zeit* found that support for Palestine among under-30s has risen from 53 percent in 2019 to 63 percent today. In the same poll, 43 percent of respondents said they would support a pro-Palestine demonstration, even if Hamas flags were present. A poll conducted by the *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*newspaper this year found that 57 percent of Germans now hold a negative view of Israel, up from 23 percent in 2022\. Another poll conducted by the public broadcaster ZDF in May found that only 13 percent of Germans support Israel’s actions in Gaza, and 80 percent think Israel’s actions are unjustified. It cannot be overstated how big a shift this represents in a place like Germany. Germany is arguably the staunchest supporter of Israel after the United States. The term *Staatsräson*, or “reason of state”, is used by politicians to argue that Germany can atone for the Holocaust only by making the survival, security and success of the Israeli nation a core reason for its own existence. Exactly why the Palestinians should have to pay the price for the Holocaust is never clarified. But unwavering support for Israel is much more about the priorities of German imperialism than about atoning for the Holocaust. As the post-World War Two geopolitical map shifted from rivalry between European colonial powers to the Cold War stand-off between the US and the USSR, Germany became America’s key European ally. Even after the fall of the USSR, the US maintained more troops and military bases in Germany than in any other European country—and still does. Germany is one of the most powerful countries in the world. It leads the European Union, the world’s largest economic bloc, and benefits immensely from the geopolitical status quo. Reining in Israel would mean reducing the West’s influence in the Middle East, which is unacceptable for Germany, America and its allies. The German state justifies its violent repression of pro-Palestinian protests by labelling participants as antisemitic. And if you label something antisemitic in Germany, you can do whatever you want to it. There has also been a long and steady campaign of Islamophobia and anti-migrant sentiment in Germany (particularly towards Middle Eastern migrants), led by mainstream parties. It’s a convenient scapegoat tactic when the economy is stagnating, housing is becoming unaffordable and public services are crumbling. When an entire religious and ethnic group is dehumanised, it becomes that much easier to meet its protests with outright violence. While most political parties, including the Social Democratic Party and the Greens, have backed this genocide, the left party Die Linke has moved in the right direction. Die Linke has at times acted shamefully by suppressing pro-Palestinian voices within the party, insisting that Israel has a “right to defend itself” and hesitating to use the word genocide. But there is a growing pro-Palestinian movement within Die Linke that has forced it to call rallies and field pro-Palestinian candidates for election. In this year’s federal election, Die Linke built a strong grassroots campaign in parts of Berlin, led by activists who had been involved in local struggles for Palestine, against police racism and against evictions and deportations. The Die Linke candidate for Neukölln (one of twelve Berlin boroughs), Ferat Kocak, won 30 percent of the candidate vote and was elected to parliament. This was a 17-point increase from the 2021 election, in which Die Linke won just 13 percent of the same candidate vote. Berlin-wide, Die Linke increased its vote by nearly 8 percent and won the overall party vote with 20 percent, easily beating all other parties. There was a surge of support in neighbourhoods with high Arab, Muslim and Turkish populations, as well as increased support from young people. In the mainstream media, a shift has taken place in the past few months towards accepting some criticism of Israel and allowing support for the Palestinian cause. News organisations that until recently parroted Israeli talking points have started to change, ever so slightly, their coverage of the war on Gaza. The horrifying images of starving children are difficult to spin and defend. But the Palestinians’ determination to live, along with the growing protest movements, have surely also played a part. In Germany and elsewhere, something is happening that is rare to see: the realisation by masses of people that the entire facade of Western democracy, freedom and human rights is nothing more than a bunch of lies that can be discarded at a moment’s notice. People will not soon forget how the entirety of the Western world’s political and media establishments aided and funded this live-streamed genocide. The Germans have a phrase regarding the Holocaust: “*nie wieder*”, or never again. Never again will we allow genocide to happen. More people in Germany are coming to realise that “*nie wieder ist jetzt*”. Never again is now. ### Right-wing media in meltdown after protesters win ‘Battle for the Bridge’ URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/right-wing-media-in-meltdown-after-protesters-win-battle-for-the-bridge/ Last updated: 2025-08-17T05:11:39.000Z Sunday, 3 August, will go down in history as the day that 300,000 people, in pouring rain, marched over the Sydney Harbour Bridge to demand an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and that the Australian government sanction Israel. The people have spoken. It is the day the whole political and media establishment and the pro-Israel lobby, which have spent nearly two years trying to convince us that Israel’s endless slaughter is justified, definitively lost the argument. They tried to stop this march from happening, because they understood its potential power. The New South Wales Labor government said it couldn’t happen. The police took us to court to try to stop it. The media ran with their scare campaign about “disruption”, “chaos” and a potential “crowd crush”. The media and government also tried to put the spotlight on me, hoping they could discredit and split the Palestine movement. They ran a good old-fashioned campaign of Cold War red-baiting, “outing” me as a Trotskyist, dismissing me as a “serial pest” and a “professional protester” and decrying that I had cost the state $10 million. The *Sydney Morning Herald*suggested that I would “jump behind a megaphone for the facile thrill of annoying the establishment”. This attempted character assassination had a transparent intent: to discredit the cause without engaging with the arguments being made, and to drive a wedge between Palestine activists and the growing numbers who agree with them. This strategy failed sensationally. In the wake of the campaign’s Supreme Court victory and the enormous numbers who mobilised on the bridge, it was the media’s campaign that looked out-of-touch and the genocide apologists the real serial pests. Not used to failure, the right went into meltdown. The *Australian* ran a series of hyperbolic pieces, in which they both doubled down on their attacks on me and turned on the Supreme Court for enabling me and revealing its supposedly communist sympathies. “The most powerful man in Sydney on Sunday leads his pro-Palestine supporters across the Harbour Bridge basking in the global spotlight—and revelling in a sweet victory handed to him by the NSW Supreme Court”, lamented the *Australian*. “Josh Lees, the 43-year-old Trotskyist who now calls the tune in the harbour city, has captured the nation’s most iconic landmark and plans to use the moment well into the future ... The keffiyeh-wearing Lees has led a string of causes in the last two decades, his exploits on behalf of refugees, LGBTQI rights and against capitalism all breathlessly recorded in the *Red Flag*, his Socialist Alternative news outlet. On Saturday night the *Red Flag* was hailing Lees’ court win as a triumph in the ‘test of wills between the forces of injustice and imperialism’ ... Lees walked away from the court waving the Palestinian flag. And making it very clear: this was just the beginning.” It may come as a surprise to readers of *Red Flag* that in fact I do not “call the tune in the harbour city”, nor that Trotskyism or socialism has yet triumphed. What the gigantic success of the March for Humanity does signify is a huge collective victory of people power over the capitalist establishment, which has backed the genocide in Gaza from the outset. The credit for this belongs to all those who argued, endorsed, organised and mobilised to make that day what it was, and especially to those in the Palestine Action Group Sydney who have stuck it out and kept this movement going for the past two years, most of whom don’t get the “glory” of mainstream media hit pieces. And above all it goes to the hundreds of thousands, who represent many hundreds of thousands more, who took a stand in the face of two years of pro-Israel propaganda, repression and slander from the government, the media, the universities, the arts establishment, but who can recognise a genocide when they see one and refuse to remain silent. The establishment is right to be worried, because we do now have a platform to build a much stronger Palestine solidarity movement, with much wider social backing, which is calling into question the entire rotten reality of imperialist deals like that by which Australia is still helping to arm Israel’s military machine. The dam has burst, and the federal government’s attempts to run for cover under Palestinian statehood recognition have already fallen apart. We are going to see a huge mobilisation all around the country on Sunday, 24 August, for the Nationwide March for Palestine, demanding sanctions and an end to the two-way arms trade with Israel. In this sense, our victory in the Battle of the Bridge is more than just a victory for the Palestine campaign. It is a powerful demonstration that decency and humanity can win out against this vicious capitalist system, that we can win against the governments, the media empires and the institutions that uphold the status quo regardless of the human cost. It is an inspiring example of what socialists always argue: that hope lies with the people, the working class and the oppressed, who can stand together in the spirit of solidarity and internationalism against their common enemies in the ruling establishment; and that those masses are far more fit to rule the world than the media barons, billionaires and their political lackeys who have justified, supported and profited from genocide. ### Corporations gorge as Gaza starves URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/corporations-gorge-as-gaza-starves/ Last updated: 2025-08-17T05:09:27.000Z On 30 June, Al Jazeera reported that the death toll of Palestinians killed at aid centres had reached 583\. Images of desperate, emaciated people crammed into cattle yards, and footage of soldiers shooting at pot-wielding civilians, were rightfully outraging the world. The same day, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied territories, Francesca Albanese, handed down a report outlining how, for some, this genocide has been the business opportunity of a lifetime. Since 7 October 2023, the Tel Aviv stock exchange has grown by a staggering 213 percent, totalling US$225.7 billion in market gains. Corporations from across the world have lined up to cash in on Israel’s genocidal offensive. Albanese’s report outlines this chain of profiteering, concluding, “The forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and big tech—providing boundless supply and demand, little oversight and zero accountability—while investors and private and public institutions profit freely”. It details profiteering in a range of sectors, including weapons production, technology, finance, construction, agribusiness, retail, education, transport, tourism and insurance. Weapons sales are a big part of it. At least 85,000 tonnes of bombs—equivalent to six times what was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—have been used in Gaza, according to the report. Every shell, tank, fighter jet and missile used against the Palestinians comes with a price tag attached. The report outlines: “For Israeli companies such as Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, the ongoing genocide has been a profitable venture. The 65 per cent surge in Israeli military spending from 2023 to 2024—amounting to $46.5 billion, one of the highest per capita worldwide—generated a sharp surge in their annual profits. Foreign arms companies, especially producers of munitions and ordnance, also profit.” In August 2024, Israel spent US$20 billion in a single purchase, and US aid has contributed handsomely to its war chest, amounting to US$19 billion in the year to October 2024 alone. According to research from the American Friends Service Committee, the onset of the war in Gaza brought bullish gains on the stock market for weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing and General Dynamics. Two years on, buoyed by international military spending, they remain elevated. But it isn’t just the arms dealers. According to the report, banks such as BNP Paribas and Barclays have stepped in to underwrite Israeli government bonds, ensuring Netanyahu’s ability to borrow more and double the genocide budget. Shipping lines profiteer from handling weapons and goods bound for use in Palestine. And so the links in the chain begin to take shape: the Israeli state borrows from banks, for a price, so that they can buy bombs, for a price, which are transported, for a price. Construction companies are just some of these beneficiaries, the report stating: “Israeli military operations rely heavily on equipment from leading global manufacturers to ‘unground’ Palestinians from their land, demolishing homes, public buildings, farmland, roads and other vital infrastructure. Since October 2023, this machinery has been integral to damaging and destroying 70 per cent of structures and 81 per cent of cropland in Gaza”. While Gazans line up with empty pots for meagre rations, suffering malnutrition and now contending with a deadly heatwave, a fountain of state spending cascades through the private sector. The purpose of this spending is to help shore up Western domination of the Middle East, but it has also provided critical stimulus to the Israeli economy and to many US companies. Occupation, apartheid and militarism have long acted as an economic spur in Israel and enabled its technology sector to become highly competitive by international standards and a core part of the economy—amounting to 64 percent of Israel’s exports during the genocide. Known to the world’s investors as the “start-up nation”, Albanese points out that “Israeli tech firms often grow out of military infrastructure and strategy” such as the NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware. Bankrolled by Israeli government spending and US aid, this has made Israel an attractive destination for tech firms like IBM, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft, which all maintain significant operations there. Genocide has turbocharged this, leading to a 143 percent growth in military technology start-ups in 2024, a key component of steeply rising stock prices for Israel’s corporate sector. In 2022, on the eve of this new boom, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade already described it as a “flourishing tech sector” and boasted that “Australian companies are making gains” there. In a right-wing diatribe against the Albanese report, *Reason* magazine’s J.D. Tuccille decries it as “a masterful mishmash of leftist gibberish” and complains of its “hostility to free markets”. Freedom, for capitalism’s apologists, is epitomised by profit-driven companies enjoying a feeding frenzy brought on by a genocide. And nor is this profiteering going on independently from the state, as the free marketeers champion. Rather, it is emblematic of a particular era of capitalism in which the wealth of industry is backed up by seemingly endless cash injections from the state—just as insolvent banks were bailed out to the tune of trillions during the Great Recession and mining companies are subsidised by billions every year. Many of these corporations rely on government spending, from huge military budgets to state investment in tech, construction and research. And so, the quest for profit not only destroys the lives of ordinary people through imperialist rivalry, housing crises and climate disaster, but also depends on large outlays of public money that might otherwise be used to fund essential, life-sustaining services like health, housing and education. It is symptomatic of the deep sickness in the system, both moral and structural, that resources are allocated in this way. If you are a child in Gaza, with the misfortune to have been born on a patch of earth that the biggest empire in world history seeks to dominate, then you will be starved, dehydrated, shelled and displaced. If you are a rich company helping the imperial powers expand their domination of territory and markets, there are endless reams of cash available. The human catastrophe in Gaza should already have been a rallying cry to tear down the capitalist system. That it is being used to gild the palaces of industrial barons should only strengthen our resolve. ### Recognising Palestinian statehood won’t stop Israeli terror URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/recognising-palestinian-statehood-wont-stop-israeli-terror/ Last updated: 2025-08-13T06:04:00.000Z Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has declared that Australia will vote to “recognise” Palestinian statehood at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly next month. This is a cynical response by his government to mounting public pressure and mass starvation in Gaza. The government’s cynicism is reflected in Albanese’s spurious claim that “this is about much more than drawing a line on a map—this is about delivering a lifeline to the people of Gaza”. If his government were serious about providing a lifeline, it could start by ending Australia’s ongoing export of weapons components to Israel, including armoured steel in Israeli armoured vehicles and F-35 aircraft components. The government could cancel deals with Israeli weapons companies (such as the $917 million contract signed last year with Elbit Systems) that facilitate the Israeli war machine. And the government could expel the ambassador, cut all diplomatic ties and impose sanctions on the Zionist state. When Defence Minister Richard Marles was asked, on the ABC’s *Insiders* program, about Australia’s ongoing military exports to Israel, he clarified the government’s position. Marles repeated the lie that Australia does not supply weapons to Israel (a statement premised on the claim that only fully assembled arms count as weapons), described Australia as an “F-35 nation” and said that the exports of parts and components would continue. As Amal Naser from the Palestine Action group [pointed out in an 11 August article for the *Sydney Morning Herald*](https://archive.is/eYz66?ref=redflag.org.au): “You cannot ‘recognise’ a state while you allow Australian-made components to help arm the regime destroying it. You cannot fight for the dead while helping make the weapons that kill them”. Less than a fortnight ago, Albanese declared that he would not recognise Palestine anytime soon. But after widespread anger over Labor’s complicity in the genocide was expressed on 3 August in the [massive march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge](https://redflag.org.au/article/making-history-on-sydney-harbour-bridge-massive-march-for-humanity), his government has been trying to contain those sentiments, following the lead of the other US-aligned imperial powers that had already made such moves. Australia now joins a chorus of Israel’s Western collaborators—the UK, France and Canada—that have announced plans to recognise a Palestinian state in September. All these countries continue to support and participate in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians through arms sales, intelligence sharing and the repression of pro-Palestinian protests. But the starvation of 2 million people by Israel in Gaza is now too politically embarrassing for many Western governments that have supported Israel’s slaughter from the outset. As Israel commits new atrocities every day—starvation, murder, annexation—its claims to uphold “humanitarianism” grow increasingly thin. Israel’s self-image has long been that of a liberal democracy. But the horrors of genocide mean increasing numbers of people are seeing through the West’s sham commitment to “humanitarianism”. The vote on recognition will do nothing to obstruct or halt Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, nor the extension of its ethnic-cleansing operation in the West Bank. This was bluntly asserted by Israeli Prime Minister and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, who declared that the recognition announcements are “not going to change our position”. Netanyahu’s proposed plan for the permanent occupation of Gaza City has made it clear that the only solution it will “recognise” is the conquering of the entire territory and the ethnic cleansing of its inhabitants. The move to recognise Palestinian statehood has taken place under the banner of the so-called two-state solution—the recognition of a Palestinian mini-state alongside that of Israel. Albanese argued that it “is humanity’s best hope to break the cycle of violence in the Middle East and bring an end to the conflict, suffering and starvation in Gaza”. But neither Albanese nor any of the other leaders calling for a “two-state solution” have any intention of forcing Israel to allow the Palestinians to have a genuine state of their own. That is because any sovereign Palestinian state—one in control of its own security, borders, trade and a host of other functions typically carried out by a state—is practically impossible as long as Israel exists as an apartheid ethno-state. Israel is an aggressively expansionist state that is intrinsically hostile to Palestinian national self-determination. Israel has been in a permanent state of war against the Palestinians since it was established through a project of mass ethnic cleansing and genocide in 1948\. It is the only state in the world that refuses to define its own borders—precisely because it is premised upon the permanent expansion into, and occupation of, Palestinian territory. According to its proponents, the territorial basis for a Palestinian state consists of the West Bank (the area to the west of the Jordan River), East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. But ever since Israel invaded the West Bank in 1967, Zionist settlers backed by the Israeli military have been relentlessly seizing land and expelling Palestinians from their homes. That process has accelerated under Netanyahu’s far-right government and during the genocidal war on Gaza. The two-state solution of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is unviable. Proponents of a “two-state solution” are fully aware that the trajectory on the ground is not towards the establishment of a Palestinian state, but towards the annihilation of the basis for one. Labor Foreign Minister Penny Wong herself noted as justification for fast-tracking the recognition process that “there is a risk that there will be no Palestine left to recognise”. The false promise of a Palestinian state existing alongside Israel has also been used to extract concessions from the Palestinians while Israel has continued their dispossession. This can be seen in the demand, issued by all the governments pushing for recognition of a Palestinian state, that such a state must have no weapons or army. Israel, of course, is not expected to disarm. Indeed, most of the world is engaged in an enormous, terrifying arms race. But the Palestinian people are expected to be satisfied with a so-called state that lacks the capacity for self-defence, and is entirely dependent on Israel for fiscal, energy, resource and trade access to the outside world. As well, the project of “recognising” Palestine is an attempt to rehabilitate the [Palestinian Authority](https://redflag.org.au/article/palestinian-authority-complicit-occupied-west-bank), which collaborates with Israel to repress any resistance to the occupation in the West Bank. It has little credibility left—just 19 percent of those in the West Bank approve of the authority’s performance, according to a May poll for the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research. For years, the PA has been a corrupt and pliant puppet of the US and Israel. But Albanese has indicated that the recognition discussions are being used to render it even more subservient. The PA has pledged to halt payments to the vulnerable families of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. The organisation has also committed to “demilitarise”. In the unlikely event that some token Palestinian state were created under these conditions, it would be a state of rubble in Gaza and a West Bank under Israeli control, with no armed forces and a puppet government hand-picked by Israel and its imperialist backers. Such a state would not deliver peace but only continued Israeli domination and terror. It would do nothing to challenge Israel’s position as a watchdog state for Western imperialism in the Middle East, armed to the teeth by the US. Until Israel is recognised for what it is—a genocidal, terror state—any talk of a Palestinian state existing in its shadow is simply cover for those complicit in ethnic cleansing and genocide. ### Why history matters for socialists URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-history-matters-for-socialists/ Last updated: 2026-01-28T03:34:06.000Z “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 [“On the Concept of History”](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm?ref=redflag.org.au). 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 [in *The German Ideology*](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/?ref=redflag.org.au): “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 *their*version 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 [“Questions From a Worker Who Reads” ](https://www.marxists.org/archive/brecht/works/1935/questions.htm?ref=redflag.org.au)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 [“The Rest is History”](https://www.youtube.com/@restishistorypod?ref=redflag.org.au) 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 [*History of the Russian Revolution*](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/?ref=redflag.org.au) 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, [some have claimed](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jul/08/humanities.internationaleducationnews?ref=redflag.org.au), Benjamin himself). The Stalinist economic model was that of [state capitalism](https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1955/statecap/index.htm?ref=redflag.org.au), 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 [“midnight of the century”](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/17/midnight-century-victor-serge-review?ref=redflag.org.au). 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[ “hardened by battle” ](https://sa.cfmeu.org/product/hardened-by-battle-long-sleeve-shirt-white/?ref=redflag.org.au)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. ### We can’t reform away this hellish system: we need revolution URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/we-cant-reform-away-this-hellish-system-we-need-revolution/ Last updated: 2025-08-13T05:40:58.000Z A generation is coming of age scrolling through footage of Palestinians starving to death in Gaza, skin clinging to protruding bones. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Penny Wong assures us that Australia sends only “non-lethal” parts of deadly F-35 fighter jets to Israel, billionaire media moguls tell us that it is pro-Palestine protesters who are the real problem, and police try to stop people standing up to genocide. Given all this, it’s understandable that progressives look with hopeful eyes to the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani in New York, and the new left political party initiated by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and ex-Labour MP Zara Sultana in Britain. Both of these developments have shown that there are hundreds of thousands of people who want to get behind politicians who support Palestine, stand up for workers’ rights and fight back against the racism of the insurgent far right. But to actually end the horrors of capitalism and win socialism, we will need more than electoral campaigns. The competition that drives capitalism, and the exploitation that is at its heart, cannot be abolished by parliaments. Only a mass movement of workers, taking democratic control of production, can bring about a society organised to meet human need rather than to generate profit for the few. Left-wing representatives can play a role encouraging such a movement, but they cannot bring about radical change on their own. The horrors being unleashed in Gaza are accelerating a political polarisation in the Western world. A new generation are turning against the system, and the question of exactly what socialism is and what it will take to get there is relevant once again. Socialism, as Marx described it, aims to clear the path to a classless, stateless society that operates on the principle of “from each according to ability, to all according to need”. To get to this form of society, productive resources like factories, mines, warehouses and supermarkets will need to be taken out of the sphere of private ownership by a few and placed under collective, democratic ownership. This is not the purpose of the capitalist state. The state is, at its core, a collection of violent institutions that exist to uphold and protect the power of the capitalist class. These institutions, like the military, the police forces and the jails, are structured to serve the ruling class and are run by people loyal to that class. These institutions cannot be simply taken over by socialists; they need to be overthrown. Parliamentary elections do not give workers actual power over the capitalists or the state. Elections do not determine who runs the *entire* state machine, but pockets of it. In Australia, for example, we elect the federal parliament, state governments and local councils. The generals who head our military and the officials who direct police forces are not elected. Nor are the vast bureaucracies that preside over the financial institutions, the energy sector, transport, industrial relations and every other central state-run aspect of society. If a socialist parliament were elected, these bureaucracies would resist any plans to democratise or push towards socialism. The ruling class have myriad methods for getting rid of governments they dislike. In 1975, for example, Gough Whitlam’s Labor government was sacked by the unelected governor general, Sir John Kerr. In the lead-up to the Kerr coup, the media unleashed a vicious campaign against Whitlam. Big businesses stopped investing, threatening the economy. Crises like these will plague any government that attempts to stand up to the capitalist class. Left-wing political parties or leaders that don’t have any plan to directly challenge the power of the capitalists frequently seek compromises with the ruling class in order to avoid being sabotaged by the existing bureaucracies or capital. This process is already beginning to play out for liberal Democrat Zohran Mamdani, who [initiated](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKL-DlDtI-I&ref=redflag.org.au) meetings with top business executives immediately after winning the primary race to become the Democrats’ New York mayoral candidate. He has also announced that he [does not plan](https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/31/politics/mamdani-defund-police-shooting?ref=redflag.org.au) to defund or reduce the head count of the New York Police Department. Before Mamdani, there was Brandon Johnson. Johnson, a former member of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, is the current mayor of Chicago. His electoral campaign was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, and left magazine *Jacobin* wrote excited articles about his candidacy. Johnson has increased police budgets and backed away from his team’s initial plan to [tax](https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2023/5/17/23727315/tax-play-action-center-peoples-unity-platform-brandon-johnson-transition-revenue?ref=redflag.org.au)the wealthy. Then there’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “s[quad](https://redflag.org.au/article/whatever-happened-to-the-squad)”[ ](https://redflag.org.au/article/whatever-happened-to-the-squad)of politicians who were elected alongside her to the excitement of American progressives. The squad became cheerleaders of the Biden administration while he helped Israel to slaughter the Palestinians. And electoral projects well to the left of those mentioned have dashed the hopes of millions repeatedly over the past decade. Corbyn’s leadership of British Labour gave left-wing coherence to a generation enraged by austerity. When his 2015 bid to be prime minister was thwarted by his own party, he refused to break away from Labour and lead those around him into something new. At the time, those enthused by him were left demoralised and aimless. It’s only after being smeared, suspended and finally expelled by the party that he has agreed to form something new. The Greek left party Syriza took government in 2015 in a context of mass strikes and demonstrations against austerity, creating a wave of excitement among the international left. The following year, under pressure from the international ruling class, Syriza signed a deal with the International Monetary Fund which would impose austerity on Greece until 2060\. Capitalists own and control all of the key industries and resources that make our world run. That gives them power over the economy, the lives of workers and the state. Our side can hope to defeat them only by taking away that power at the point of production. Workers must wrest their workplaces from the capitalists and bring the power that comes from controlling these industries into the hands of our class. Rebellions over the past 25 years have confirmed the radical potential of modern workers. Street demonstrations and mass strikes shook Spain and Greece after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. In 2019, street revolts hit Sudan, Algeria, Iran, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Haiti, Ecuador and Chile. As many as 26 million people are estimated to have participated in the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, which reached the scale of an urban rebellion in Minneapolis. These didn’t advance into revolutions led by the working class, in part because of the decline in class organisation and left traditions. But they show that in vastly different countries, workers can participate in mass struggle. Workers in Australia construct the buildings, drive the trains, staff the internet servers and procure the coal and gas that are central to energy production. Put together, those in these industries alone could crash the economy. But the working class needs to go beyond just crashing the economy and begin to organise society along socialist lines by creating new organs of worker democracy. Soviets, or district-wide workers’ councils, are bodies elected directly at the point of production to coordinate and lead struggles and general strikes, and to wage political arguments. They are democratic institutions that allow the working class itself to lead a revolution. Ultimately, for a revolution to depose the capitalist class, these workers’ councils would need to carry out an insurrection to overthrow the existing capitalist state. For the working class to build socialism, it needs to construct its own state to subordinate the capitalist class. A workers’ state is a formalisation of the democratic institutions that have been created through the course of revolution into a new government. Rather than a police force that exists to discipline workers, a workers’ state would require a workers’ militia to suppress the capitalists and enemies of the revolution through armed force. As well as that, a workers’ army would be required to prevent the invasion and suppression of the revolution by other capitalist armies. All of the bureaucracies who compose the state and govern things like water usage, energy and electricity welfare would be democratised, subordinated to the interests and the decision-making of the working class. Capitalism is propelling us deeper and deeper into hell, and compromisers won’t drag us out. Now is a moment to be bold, to throw ourselves into political organising for a totally new world. Resistance is happening and will continue to happen: the question is: Will it win? This will be determined, in part, by whether revolutionary socialists can build forces of the scale necessary to take on the power of those individuals and institutions committed to defending the status quo. We have to meet the challenge. The pressing task of socialists in Australia and around the world is to build revolutionary parties that can lead revolutionary struggles for socialism. ### The irrationality of capitalism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-irrationality-of-capitalism/ Last updated: 2025-08-13T05:39:58.000Z 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. ### ‘School’s out!’ Thousands of Queensland teachers strike for better pay and conditions URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/schools-out-thousands-of-queensland-teachers-strike-for-better-pay-and-conditions/ Last updated: 2025-08-14T01:07:42.000Z The Queensland Teachers’ Union, one of the largest public sector unions in Queensland, took strike action on 6 August for the first time in sixteen years. In the lead-up, the union gained 2,000 new members, and staffrooms were full of discussion and debate. Queensland Teachers Fightback, a rank-and-file network of union members, held a gathering before the strike meeting with dozens of teacher activists. We marched into the Brisbane Convention Centre together, picking up teachers on the way. The vibe inside was electric. Four thousand teachers filled the meeting hall; hundreds more spilled into the lobby. Another 5,000 packed out more than 30 regional locations to take part in the mass meeting. Unionists from the Electrical Trades Union greeted us on the steps of the Convention Centre along with a crowd featuring the flags of many other unions. After the meeting, we marched to the parliament. Students cheered from the sidelines, and it wasn’t hard to convince them to join us. Construction workers downed tools and cheered us on from their job sites as we marched past. This is the kind of action that socialists and Queensland Teachers Fightback activists have been advocating for years. Teachers walked away from the rally feeling a foot taller; the confidence we felt on the day will not soon be forgotten. Strike action tips the scales in favour of workers when it comes to improving our conditions. This strike should not be a one-off event; more will be needed to address our deteriorating conditions. The latest offer from the state government includes an 8 percent wage increase over three years. Regarding workload, we’ve been offered an insulting single student-free day for the last day of the year, a meaningless concession when most schools run alternative programs for that whole week. The government claims its Red Tape Reduction strategy will reduce workload for teachers, but it’s mostly targeted at school management red tape (not teachers) and includes more than twenty initiatives that begin with words like “investigate” and “consider”. We need money for public schools to raise wages and hire more teachers to facilitate smaller classes and more planning time. Instead, it’s being spent on subsidising the mining industry and private schools. Our campaign is up against an intransigent, anti-worker government, and needs to be escalated. Unfortunately, the union leaders have not proposed any escalation. The mass meeting did little to clarify where to from here, or to meaningfully involve rank-and-file teachers in the process. Four resolutions were put to the meeting, but union members were told there would be no debate and no space to move amendments. One resolved to conduct another 24-hour stoppage “on a date to be determined”. One of the union’s few explicit demands is for teachers and principals to be deemed “public officers” within the criminal code. This would mean that students who assault staff would face criminal penalties. The LNP may be willing to legislate for more punitive measures rather than create better learning environments. But this would hardly improve teachers’ conditions. The union’s demand will only lead to more funds going to police and prisons, while our schools continue to be underfunded by billions of dollars. We became teachers because we care about our students. We didn’t become teachers to become cops. Genuine improvements to educational environments—such as significantly reduced class sizes and more specialist teachers, social workers, guidance officers and psychologists—would go a long way to reducing behaviour incidents, protecting teachers and students, and improving workloads. Giving us more time would help with the administrative burden of dealing with antisocial behaviour and improve local decision-making regarding abusive behaviour. Having a more confident, combative union movement would be another big step towards addressing student behaviour. It’s claimed that “we are already in a teacher shortage”, so we cannot fight for these improvements. But taking this attitude will only mean the problems will never disappear, and it will remain difficult to recruit new teachers. Fundamentally, one day of strike action is not going to put the industrial pressure on the Crisafulli government that’s needed. They may budge on some things, but that won’t be enough to address the public education crisis created by successive governments, Labor and Liberal, for more than a decade. Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek met with the union the day after the strike and has discussed adjusting his paltry offer. Will the union leaders accept a few crumbs? Years of neglect can’t be turned around in 24 hours. We need much more than the government is offering. To win it, we need to escalate the campaign. ### Can Zohran Mamdani advance socialism in the United States? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/can-zohran-mamdani-advance-socialism-in-the-united-states/ Last updated: 2025-08-06T05:47:53.000Z 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. ### A warning from history: ‘This is what is going to happen to you’ URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/a-warning-from-history-this-is-what-is-going-to-happen-to-you/ Last updated: 2025-08-06T05:45:35.000Z Eighty years ago, the United States government exploded over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the only two nuclear bombs ever used in wartime against a civilian population. Never before in human history had a single weapon caused such widespread death and destruction. A report by engineers and scientists of the Manhattan Project (the US project that developed the bombs), based on a 1946 investigation in both cities, estimated that more than two-thirds of Hiroshima’s 90,000 buildings had been destroyed or badly damaged, including everything within one mile (1.6km) of ground zero, aside from a few structures made from reinforced concrete. In Nagasaki, buildings with reinforced concrete walls 25cm thick, more than 600 metres from ground zero, collapsed. In Hiroshima, the bomb destroyed 26 of 33 firefighting stations, killing or badly injuring three-fourths of their personnel. It killed or badly wounded more than 1,800 of 2,400 nurses and medical orderlies, and left only 30 of 298 registered doctors able to treat survivors. Many of those not killed immediately burned to death in the subsequent firestorm, or drowned trying to escape it in rivers, or died within hours or days of radiation sickness. The Manhattan Project report estimated that Hiroshima suffered 135,000 casualties—more than half its population—and Nagasaki 64,000 out of a population of 195,000\. Both figures were underestimates because they did not include prisoners of war and other foreigners, such as thousands of Korean forced labourers present in both cities. People who survived the immediate effects of the blasts were not necessarily safe. Two years after the bombings, there was a notable increase in the rate of leukaemia among initial survivors, which spiked four to six years later. The largest number of victims were children. But while the power of the bombs was unprecedented, the mass slaughter of civilians was anything but new. All of the major powers involved in the war carried out or assisted deliberate massive attacks on civilians: Japan’s 1937-38 Rape of Nanjing, which killed up to 300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers; the German Blitz of Britain, which killed around 43,000; the US-British firebombing of Dresden, which destroyed 90 percent of the city’s centre and killed at least 25,000 people, many of whom died of suffocation as all available oxygen was consumed by the conflagration; there are numerous other examples. If the ruling classes of the warring countries had a similar amoral sense (the belief that any slaughter they engaged in was justified), the course of the war and a technological lead gave the US rulers the opportunity and confidence that they could get away with the greatest atrocities. In the last year of the war, US air raids systematically destroyed Tokyo, taking advantage of the large number of highly combustible houses to create firestorms. Early on 10 March 1945, some 279 US bombers firebombed most of eastern Tokyo, killing 90,000 to 100,000 people and leaving a million homeless; the destruction was even greater than that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In part, the atomic bombs were more “efficient” than earlier air raids: in the 10 March raid on Tokyo, fourteen US aircraft were shot down. But strategic decisions directed against the Soviet Union were a more important consideration. This was summed up by South Africa’s Nelson Mandela in 2003: “Fifty-seven years ago, when Japan was retreating on all fronts, they \[the US\] decided to drop the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Killed a lot of innocent people, who are still suffering from the effects of those bombs. Those bombs were not aimed against the Japanese. They were aimed against the Soviet Union. To say, look, this is the power that we have. If you dare oppose what we do, this is what is going to happen to you.” Looking forward to the next war between the “allies” was also evident in a memo issued to British airmen on the night of the attack on Dresden: “The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.” When the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949, considerably earlier than the US expected, the US quickly recognised a need to “outcompete” its rivals, beginning serious steps toward developing a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb. An investigation of the desirability and possibility of building the new bomb, chaired by Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had headed the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos laboratory, concluded: “The extreme danger to mankind inherent in the proposal wholly outweighs any military advantage”. The extreme danger to the human race was less important than the military needs of imperialism. US President Harry Truman approved the development of the hydrogen bomb in January 1950\. The first thermonuclear bomb was tested on 1 November 1952\. It was more than 450 times as powerful as the Nagasaki bomb, with an explosive force of 15 megatons of TNT. The US thermonuclear monopoly lasted less than a year, the Soviet Union testing its first hydrogen bomb in the following August. And although 15 megatons was an already unimaginable force, the Soviet government in 1961 tested a bomb with a force of 50 megatons. Within the test zone, brick buildings 55km from ground zero were destroyed. The heat from the blast was capable of causing third-degree burns 100km away. That test was, in part, an experiment designed to discover whether there was any inherent limit to the potential explosive power of a nuclear bomb. There wasn’t; in a report for the US Atomic Energy Commission, physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Isaac Rabi concluded that hydrogen bombs potentially have “unlimited destructive power”. At the time, the 50-megaton thermonuclear bomb was too heavy to be carried by any existing missile or aeroplane. But technological “progress” has since created hydrogen bombs light enough for ten or more to be carried by a single missile. And yet, today, all of the nine nuclear-armed states—United States, Russia, France, United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea—are attempting to “modernise” their arsenals, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions”. SIPRI calculates the world nuclear arsenal at 12,241 warheads. “An estimated 3,912 of those warheads were deployed with missiles and aircraft ... Around 2,100 of the deployed warheads were kept in a state of high operational alert on ballistic missiles. Nearly all of these warheads belonged to Russia or the USA, but China may now keep some warheads on missiles during peacetime.” In 2010, the USA and Russia agreed to a treaty (New Start) to limit their nuclear stockpiles and the number of warheads deployed on strategic missiles. But that treaty expires next February, and neither side has shown any real interest in renewing it, so the number of warheads able to be fired in minutes if not seconds is expected to increase. Despite most nuclear arsenals being labelled “deterrents” by those who wield them, no government keeps nuclear bombs for peaceful purposes; they are intended for use when military and political conditions make that seem advisable. While the US and Russia have the biggest stockpiles, does anyone imagine that moral or humanitarian considerations would have more of a restraining influence on Benjamin Netanyahu than they have on Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin? At least one minister within the Israeli government has publicly advocated using an atomic bomb against Gaza—on which Israel has already inflicted destruction comparable to what was done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In short, the danger of capitalist governments letting loose nuclear weapons has not significantly decreased since 1945; in many respects, it is greater. ### Arab governments stand by as Israel carries out genocide URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/arab-governments-stand-by-as-israel-carries-out-genocide/ Last updated: 2025-08-06T05:42:43.000Z Close to two years of savage Israeli war on Gaza have created a humanitarian catastrophe. But while Israel and the US are responsible for the butchery, another force also shares the blame: the Arab leaders who have stood by and let Israel run amok. The problem is not that the Arab governments lack the power to hurt the US and Israel. After all, they sit atop the world’s biggest oil reserves and, in Egypt’s case, control the Suez Canal, one of the busiest maritime corridors. The Arab regimes don’t lack the power; they choose not to use it. It hasn’t always been this way. For several decades, many Arab governments positioned themselves as anti-colonial forces. At the end of World War One, European powers controlled the entire Arab world from the Atlantic to the Arabian Gulf. The colonialists were motivated by greed for oil, territory and other resources. In some cases, they ruled directly. In others, as in Egypt, they installed puppet monarchs to do their bidding. The oppressed grew angry at their servitude and the theft of their land. Inspired in part by the Russian Revolution, anti-colonial revolts broke out in Egypt and Iraq after the war and, later, in Syria and Palestine, but these were savagely put down. A fresh nationalist tide surged after World War Two. A new generation of fighters emerged to drive out the occupiers and their accomplices. They were led in many cases by middle-class intellectuals, professionals and army officers eager to take over from the colonial powers. Arab nationalism dominated these struggles. Its leading figures wanted to eliminate the shame of national subjugation and to modernise their countries, seize the oil wealth then in the hands of Western companies and diversify their economies. They tapped into popular grievances—anger over poverty, unemployment and landlessness—but their project was to leverage this anger in their bid for power. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser’s seizure of power in Egypt in 1952 at the head of the Free Officers Movement announced to the world Arab nationalism as a force. Nasser transformed Egypt and the broader Middle East and enraged the former colonial powers. In 1956, Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, which had been controlled by the British and French since its opening in 1869\. In a secret alliance with Israel, the two European powers attacked Egypt. Determined not to allow the restoration of colonial power, the population rose against them, fighting alongside the Egyptian army. Fearing that revived British and French colonialism in the Middle East might scotch its own imperialist ambitions, the US ordered them out, ensuring Nasser’s victory. Nasser’s victory over Suez made the president a hero in the Arab world. Enormous crowds would turn out to hear him speak. They saw in him someone who had led Egypt out of colonial slavery and into a new world of Arab pride and independence. Nasser joined independence leaders from across Asia, Africa and the Middle East at the 1955 Bandung conference to promote the anti-colonial movement. He was one of the most important figures in the Non-Aligned Movement of former colonies seeking a path independent of the big imperialists. Nasser ran a pragmatic foreign policy in a world of Cold War competition, initially seeking support from both the US and the Soviet Union. But when the US would not supply arms, the USSR stepped in and provided Nasser with weapons, aid and technicians. The tilt towards the USSR was matched by a shift in economic policy. Nasser sought to emulate Joseph Stalin’s program of economic reconstruction, setting up dozens of state enterprises to encourage industrialisation. Nasser described his project as “Arab socialism”, as did the other nationalist regimes, but there was nothing socialist about them. They presided over authoritarian one-party states that imprisoned, tortured and killed thousands of working-class activists. Standing in opposition to the Arab nationalist governments were the US-aligned governments, chiefly Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran and Morocco. Regardless of their differing political alignment, all the Arab governments proclaimed their support for Palestine. In 1964, Nasser set up the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and in the following years, other governments sponsored and armed factions of the liberation movement. Partly, they were motivated by domestic political considerations, given the popularity of the Palestinian cause at home. But more important was their calculation about how best to control the Palestinian movement, which in some countries threatened internal stability. **What happened to Arab nationalism?** Several things put paid to Arab nationalism, paving the way for the region’s embrace of the West. The first and most dramatic event was the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel routed the Arab armies and seized Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. The mighty Arab nation had been humbled. Nasser’s prestige tumbled, and the Arab nationalist project was irrevocably weakened. The US now fully embraced Israel as its main ally in the region, opening the spigot on billions of dollars in economic and military aid. In 1970, Jordan’s King Hussein attacked the PLO following a challenge for power by Palestinian nationalists and leftists, demonstrating again the illusion of Arab unity. Following his victory, Hussein drove the PLO into exile in Lebanon. Then in 1978, Egypt, now ruled by Nasser’s successor President Anwar Sadat, signed a peace deal with Israel and normalised diplomatic relations. This was a breakthrough for Israel, ending its isolation in the region and removing its main military threat. It also signalled Egypt’s abandonment of Arab nationalism, its betrayal of the Palestinian cause and its embrace of the United States, which it has adhered to since that day. The Arab League registered its displeasure at Sadat’s agreement with Israel by suspending Egypt’s membership. But Egypt was simply ahead of the pack. Informal links between Arab nations and Israel were growing, and in 1989, the Arab League readmitted Egypt. In 1993, the PLO itself signed a peace treaty with Israel and, in 1994, Jordan followed. Other nations—Syria, Iraq, South Yemen, Sudan and Libya—opposed normalisation with Israel. But they were no friends of the Palestinians. In 1970, they stood by and watched as King Hussein smashed the PLO, and in 1976, Syria’s President Hafez al-Assad invaded Lebanon to crush an insurgency by Palestinians and Lebanese leftists, killing thousands. The economic promise of Arab nationalism—state-led industrial development and self-reliance—also fractured in this period as economic growth stalled. In 1974, the Egyptian government opened up to Western capital, selling state enterprises, winding back price controls and reducing social programs. Soon, most governments in the region followed suit, seeking closer integration into the world economy. Arab nationalism also fell victim to national rivalries as the post-colonial states promoted their national interests in a world where the struggle against colonialism no longer united them. This was evident early on: Nasser spoke of pan-Arab solidarity, but his main goal was to project Egyptian power in the Middle East. The same was true of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. The collapse of the Soviet Union, which had provided Arab governments with weapons and finance, was another nail in the coffin of Arab nationalism. Many who had looked to Moscow now embraced US imperialism, taking loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, imposing savage austerity on the working class and poor and enriching themselves. Arab governments also became increasingly complicit in US wars in the Middle East. In 1990, the Arab League backed the US in the Gulf War against Iraq, with Egypt, Syria and Morocco all sending troops to support the Americans. Several Arab governments also supported the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, allowing the US to use their airspace and facilities. When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, the Arab League opposed it, but this did not stop many Arab governments from helping the US. Egypt gave free passage to the US navy through the Suez Canal; Saudi Arabia invited the US to fly cruise missiles over its territory; and Jordan provided the US with bases from which to mount special forces operations across the border into Iraq. Years of austerity and political repression, along with the betrayal of the Palestinian cause, created a pressure cooker in the Arab world. The pressure cooker blew in 2011, as popular uprisings from Tunisia to Bahrain challenged and, in some cases, overthrew, repressive governments. The US and Israel looked on aghast as the Arab leaders they had supported for decades fell or tottered under the impact of mass protest. They were alarmed as hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Cairo and Alexandria to demand liberation for Palestine. The revolution opened the door to freedom in the Arab world. But the counter-revolution that followed, fully backed by the US and Israel, slammed the door firmly shut. Political repression returned, even more ferocious than before. The US and Israel breathed a sigh of relief that the genie of revolution had been put back into the bottle. **Where are things today?** Most Arab countries have embraced the US-led world order, while others have oriented toward Russia. None can be described as anti-imperialist or anti-colonial. US bases can be found across the Middle East, the Gulf region in particular. Qatar hosts the US Central Command along with 10,000 US troops and 100 US aircraft. The Arab regimes are deeply embedded in Western markets. The Gulf states, responsible for much of the world’s oil trade, work with the US to stabilise world oil prices. They trade in US dollars, which helps maintain the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE committed hundreds of billions of dollars in orders for US military supplies, energy equipment, commercial aircraft, critical minerals and infrastructure investments during President Trump’s recent visit. Arab states aligned with Washington have close relations with Israel. Four more countries—the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco—established diplomatic relations with Israel as part of the US-led Abraham Accords in 2020\. The Arab League did nothing to censure them. Only mass domestic sentiment for Palestine holds back Saudi Arabia from joining their ranks. Egypt’s collaboration with Israel stands out. The Egyptian government reinforces the Israeli blockade of Gaza, tightly controlling supplies to the beleaguered strip. The regime refuses to allow international solidarity missions to cross the Sinai to reach the Rafah crossing to Gaza. The motivations of these governments are several. Because Israel is central to US power in the Middle East, these regimes will not help Palestine win its freedom because such a struggle must challenge the US, which is an important prop of their own power. Economic factors play a part. Israel is the region’s most advanced economy. For many years, Egypt supplied Israel with vital gas supplies and, now that Israel has gas supplies of its own, Egypt imports Israeli gas. As long as there is money to be made from collaboration with Israel, the Palestinians are discarded. Part of the explanation lies in understanding the military balance of forces. For a period, some of the Arab governments believed a united Arab offensive could defeat Israel. The 1967 disaster, followed by a stalemate in 1973, made clear that this was not on the cards. As national governments seeking their place in the region, they now recognise the reality of Israeli military supremacy, reinforced by Israel’s bloody victories since 7 October. Other Arab governments collaborate with Israel in their joint opposition to Iran, which rose as a regional power following US defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. In April last year, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all worked with Israel to shoot down Iranian missiles. Two months later, Saudi generals, along with those from Jordan, Bahrain, the UAE and Egypt, met the Israeli military’s chief of staff and the chief of the US Central Command in Bahrain to discuss “security cooperation”. It is not just those states closely aligned with the US that betray the Palestinian cause. Other countries in the region, Iran and Syria (until recently) most notably, have cleaved more closely to Russia. Syria hosts Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean. Iran and Russia worked closely with the former Assad regime to wreak terror in Syria. Russia supplies both with most of their military arsenals. The Hussein and Gaddafi regimes in Iraq and Libya were close to Russia at times. But close relations with Russia mean nothing for their attitude to Palestine. Russia, like the US, wants a strong Israel. Israel supplies Russia with drones for its war in Ukraine and backs it diplomatically in the UN. Israel and Russia work together in Syria. Whichever camp they back, none of the region’s governments will put itself out for Palestinian freedom. Like any other part of the global ruling classes, Arab leaders do not believe in ethnic or national solidarity. They are committed only to profit and power—especially their own. They mouth support for Palestine and condemn Israeli war crimes to maintain their credibility with their populations. But when activists mobilise in solidarity with Palestine, the regimes batter them off the streets. The Arab regimes understand that the demand for Palestinian freedom can easily bleed into demands for freedom at home. As far as the Egyptian leaders are concerned, the sooner Israel wipes out Hamas, the better. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which forms the main opposition to the Sisi regime in Egypt. The president’s predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, fought to prevent Hamas from taking power in Gaza following its win in Palestinian Authority elections in 2006, and Sisi is now working with the Arab League to exclude Hamas from any role in governing postwar Gaza. Israel has reciprocated by helping the Sisi regime entrench the Egyptian counter-revolution. Why would these leaders put themselves out to support an oppressed people when they deny their own people their basic rights? The connections between the Arab ruling classes, the US, Russia and Israel tell us that the fight for a free Palestine cannot be separated from the fight for a free Arab world. Revolts against the regimes by Arab workers, students and the poor for their own demands for bread and justice strengthen the fight for democracy at home but also loosen Israel and America’s choke hold on Palestine. If Israel gets away with its atrocities only because the Arab regimes let it, the fall of these regimes in popular revolutions is a precondition for the liberation of Palestine. ### Queensland public school teachers set to strike URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/queensland-public-school-teachers-set-to-strike/ Last updated: 2025-08-05T02:57:41.000Z Queensland teachers are gearing up for a 24-hour strike, and it’s about time! After a rally of 500 teachers and supporters in Brisbane, the action has been backed by an overwhelming majority of Queensland Teachers’ Union members. Teachers are overworked, underpaid and burnt out. This is hardly surprising when full-time teachers in Australia report working [50 hours a week](https://www.aitsl.edu.au/research/australian-teacher-workforce-data/atwd-reports/national-trends-teacher-workforce-jun2025?ref=redflag.org.au). Teachers also require a minimum of three years at university, yet on graduation are [paid less](https://www.nswtf.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/From-bad-to-worse-to-what-NSW-Teachers-Pay-2020-2022-and-beyond-Buchanan.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) than sales representatives, real-estate agents and police, none of whom require a degree. The strike was called after the state government’s insulting pay offer of 8 percent over three years, after real wages had been driven down in recent years. While the Liberal National Party government is spending $147.9 million on police equipment and $3.8 billion on venues for the Olympics, teachers can’t afford to live in the suburbs where they teach. The QTU’s strike action is an excellent step forward. Part of the demand is “nation-leading salaries”, but the union leaders have refused to put a figure on what they’re pursuing in negotiations. A seven-year teacher on the Gold Coast earns $20,000 less than a seven-year teacher 30 minutes away in New South Wales. With all teachers being underpaid across the country relative to other qualified professions, there’s much to fight for. This problem didn’t begin with the newly elected LNP state government. Under the previous Labor government, our wages fell 6.5 percent behind the Brisbane Consumer Price Index. Workloads have been a feature of every negotiation over the past decade, but they’ve only gotten worse. A key reason has been that the union leaders refused to call strikes against the Labor government despite majority votes of union members favouring action. Strikes demonstrate how critical workers are to the system. Withholding our labour is our most important weapon to fight bosses and governments. The Education Department is scrambling to pretend like it’s “business-as-usual” at schools this week. But with tens of thousands of union members set to strike, the government will be hard-pressed to keep schools open. Premier David Crisafulli is in for a serious showdown with public servants—many workplace agreements are due for renegotiation. Firefighters are balloting for strike action, while nurses are getting ready to [escalate to work stoppage](https://www.qnmu.org.au/Web/Media%5Fand%5FPublications/News/News%5Fitems/2025/Are%5Fyou%5Fready%5Fto%5Fstrike%5Ffor%5FEB12.aspx?ref=redflag.org.au) as well. Who’s going to treat the patients? Extinguish the fires? Teach the students? Not David Crisafulli. It will take more than one day to challenge the government, but this is a great start. ### Queensland engineers strike for the first time in decades URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/queensland-engineers-strike-for-the-first-time-in-decades/ Last updated: 2025-10-13T05:20:34.000Z Transport engineers and technical workers across Queensland at the Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) walked off the job in a statewide strike on Monday, the first in many decades. Up to 450 workers stopped work for twelve hours in Brisbane, Cairns, the Gold Coast, Mackay, Rockhampton, the Sunshine Coast, Townsville, Toowoomba and elsewhere. Significant growth in union membership made the strike possible. In just a few months, Professionals Australia membership at TMR has tripled to 450\. One engineer in Brisbane spoke of new pride that has developed: “Standing with my colleagues, I’m confident we can make a change through the power of being in a union.” The action was in defiance of the state Liberal government’s wages policy. Engineers rejected an offer of an 8 percent wage rise over three years—the same at- or below-inflation deal offered to nurses and teachers. At rallies across the state, engineers demanded 20 percent. Queensland is experiencing a record wave of infrastructure investment as the Brisbane Olympics approach. Major projects rely on public engineers, but low pay is leaving roles vacant. Many at TMR earn 20 to 30 percent less than their counterparts at Queensland Rail and Powerlink, even when working on the same projects. “This action isn't solely about salary”, one Cairns engineer later told *Red Flag* via WhatsApp. “It's about fair compensation and preserving the knowledge base within TMR. We used to lead infrastructure design; now we’re becoming a contractor management department.” That transformation away from in-house expertise and toward privatisation was a recurring theme on the day. “Our jobs are being contracted out at higher rates, and our conditions are well behind those in the industry performing the same work”, said another engineer in Rockhampton to *Red Flag* via WhatsApp. Tensions escalated last week when TMR sent hundreds of engineers home without pay for implementing minor work bans—including bans on working more than 36.25 hours per week, completing introductory training, and submitting or approving timesheets. The retaliation only pushed more workers towards strike action. Engineers also linked their fight to those of others across the public sector. As one Brisbane engineer put it in a speech: “Teachers are striking on Wednesday, and nurses have been taking action too. The bosses are watching us. If we settle for less, it tells others they’re worth less — and tells the bosses they can get away with it. But if we fight and win, it shows what union power can achieve.” These are mostly older, white-collar, relatively well-paid professionals — the kinds of workers many assume would never strike. But with political leadership and ambitious demands, engineers are proving that, like all workers, they can fight back. ### Making history on Sydney Harbour Bridge: massive March for Humanity URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/making-history-on-sydney-harbour-bridge-massive-march-for-humanity/ Last updated: 2025-08-05T00:29:26.000Z History often happens without warning and, even more often, against all our wishes and best efforts. Sunday, 3 August, was different. Hundreds of thousands woke up ready and determined to make history themselves on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The March for Humanity, a protest against 22 months of genocide and starvation in Gaza, was historic, not least for its sheer size. Sydney has not seen a protest so big since the march against the Iraq war more than twenty years ago. “Massive, unprecedented and huge”, Jewish anti-Zionist journalist Antony Loewenstein announced from the speakers’ platform in Lang Park. There’s no question the march exceeded 100,000 participants, protest organisers predicting the final tally could be triple that. Half of Sydney’s CBD became a protest-only zone. Helicopters buzzed overhead, drowned out as the day went on by cowbells, drums, whistles and the banging of pots and pans to signify the starvation gripping Gaza. “Hello passengers”, said a prerecorded voice on the Wynyard train station loudspeaker. “If you’re here for the protest ...”. I waited at the top of the station escalators to meet up with members of my union. One wrote in our group chat that her train from Glenfield, two hours before the protest, was composed of just two groups: “One: Palestine protesters. Two: Footy fans”. Another chimed in: “We just came through Lidcombe and more and more passengers are getting on ... All walks of life. We stand together, it’s brilliant”. They weren’t wrong. Up the escalators, in progressively larger instalments, came what looked like all of society. Every conceivable age and background; from choirs, unions, religious groups and political parties; from every suburb of Sydney, every corner of NSW and interstate. The crowd exited the station and stepped out into truly appalling weather. The rain came in angry fits, and vain hopes raised by fleeting rays of sunshine were repeatedly dashed. Yet this was a day that masses of people wouldn’t have missed for the world. A very dapper man walked past me in Lang Park, hardly giving his beautiful shoes a second glance as they sank into mud. When children are dying of human-made hunger, or shot dead for sadistic target practice, would anyone let a bit of rain hold them back? I tried to observe what I could by weaving through the crowd. The fastest way to move was by sloshing along the kerb of York Street, where a small river was flowing. Yet the people just kept coming. Homemade placards (“Penny Wong is a ‘non-lethal’ murderer”), keffiyehs galore, shirts with every conceivable slogan. Umbrellas, umbrellas, umbrellas. Each time I returned somewhere—Wynyard Station, Lang Park, or the woefully under-prepared Domino’s Pizza—the crowd was impossibly huger than before, as if I were returning on a different day. The march was also historic because it was opposed by both major political parties and police. Two other great protest marches across the bridge—the 2000 March for Reconciliation and the 2023 World Pride march—were endorsed and even led by most of official society. The March for Humanity, however, was fought tooth and nail by NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns and the state’s police force. Minns lied that the rally would plunge the city into “chaos”. Federal Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi (recently sanctioned by Anthony Albanese’s parliament for silently holding a sign protesting the starvation of children) explained from the platform: “It was never about traffic, it was never about logistics, it was always about protecting Israel and the Labor government from accountability”. Minns made it clear that he opposed the bridge march regardless of how much notice was given. The NSW police took protest organisers to court to try stop it from going ahead. The outcry and overwhelming support from more than 300 organisations tipped the court ruling in our favour. “We’re here today because people power won”, Amnesty International representative Mohamed Duar told the crowd. Duar’s father still has the key to his house in Palestine that was stolen from his family by Israel in 1967\. “I promised my father that one day he would be able to return, and I intend to keep my promise”. Sporting legend Craig Foster also spoke, and anti-war hero Julian Assange marched at the front with the lead banner. In an encouraging sign, more trade unions than ever endorsed the protest and its pro-Palestinian demands. Flags and banners represented the National Tertiary Education Union, the Nurses and Midwives’ Association and the Electrical Trades Union, among others. As Maritime Union of Australia state secretary Paul Keating told the crowd, organised workers have played an essential role in struggles against war and racism throughout Australian history, from Vietnam to South African apartheid. “I say to my fellow trade unions, if ever there was a time to come together and be a force for good, now is the time”. As part of my transport job, I drive over this bridge almost every week, and it’s still beautiful every time I do. But that did not leave me any better prepared for approaching the bridge on foot in the middle of the road. The slow but dogged pace, the onwards push of the crowd, the sprawling out as the road widened and the surging mosh when it narrowed again. The bridge loomed ahead like something to conquer, and the crowd moved inexorably to take it. Just as I had this thought, we began to chant: “Whose bridge? Our bridge!” Cheers erupted as our contingent finally passed under the iconic steel structure. Beneath its magnificent arches, flanked by those gigantic hangers and moving cheek by jowl for a righteous cause—I have never seen the Harbour Bridge from a more beautiful vantage point. Even the bridge climbers above us, who would have seen the march in its full glory, missed something by being so far away from the action (though many raised their fists in solidarity). Exactly halfway across the bridge, I felt something almost dreamlike. There were a hundred thousand people on this bridge. For a moment, this most famous Australian landmark belonged to Palestine. A brief pause in the chanting. The crowd was enveloped in silence and the sky in fog. I turned to the activist next to me. Did he feel it too? He nodded. “It’s like being in the eye of a storm”. The crowd’s spirits were not dampened by the endlessly renewed bouts of rain, nor by the police’s sudden decision to block the end of the bridge and make everyone march back the other way. A protester, who on any other day looked like she worked in the quietest part of the library, fumed past: “It’s just a fucking power trip. Absolutely pathetic fuckers cannot hack that we beat them in court”. But perhaps for once in their life, police were telling the truth: at up to six times the anticipated size, the rally might have been simply too big to take the planned route into North Sydney. Not a bad problem to have. Turning back did not mean giving up. The crowd left the bridge in perfect safety and order, proceeding all the way back to Wynyard Station, and then spilling out onto George Street until reaching Town Hall. “Show me what democracy looks like!” called the megaphoners; “This is what democracy looks like!”, we replied. After the march, leading Palestine Action Group organiser and socialist activist Josh Lees wrote on social media that it was “an absolutely incredible day. Minns predicted chaos. Instead, we had what we knew we would: a beautiful outpouring of humanity, marching side by side to end a genocide and demand our government sanction Israel. We’ve sent an enormous message to the world. Today the people spoke, and they said stop the genocide! Free Palestine!” Each of those individuals amongst the people made a choice to give up their Sunday, catch overflowing trains into pouring rain, stand for hours and march for hours more, and rail against a genocide that Australia’s entire political, media and university establishment has covered up, excused and enabled. And by the sounds of it, most of those who came had been willing to do so even if all the powers that be succeeded in their uncompromising efforts to ban the march. “I was coming either way”, my GP’s receptionist told me the day before, when the court ruling came in. Facing the horror of this modern-day Holocaust, the spirit that captured Sydney on Sunday is exactly what gives socialists hope in the possibility of a better world—one run by ordinary people and not our genocidal masters. There’s one more reason that Sunday made history. For the first time ever, the Shit-Eater of the Year Award has been called five months early. Judges say they’ve never seen any nominee, let alone a sitting premier, eat so much shit over a single weekend. Give us a big grin, Chris Minns. With a movement this determined to end the unbearable slaughter of Gaza, there’ll be plenty more for you to come. ### How do holocausts happen? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/how-do-holocausts-happen/ Last updated: 2026-03-16T02:00:37.000Z The 15 July 1939 edition of the *Mirror*, a Perth weekly broadsheet, hit newsstands about six years and four months after the Nazi dictatorship was formally established in faraway Germany, and a month and a half before the beginning of World War Two. This seemingly obscure bit of information is relevant only because the edition [carried a report about a mid-week address](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/75869223?ref=redflag.org.au) by Prime Minister Robert Menzies at Anzac House in the city’s CBD. Inside, the prime minister declared: > “History will label Hitler as one of the really great men of the century. As far as the German people are concerned, Hitler has proved himself a great man and a tireless worker. He dragged his nation from bankruptcy and revolution.” The first thing that strikes a reader today is not that Menzies found something to like in Nazism, even if he wasn’t himself a fascist. His sympathies are well known, at least by people familiar with the history of the Liberal Party. It’s that his *Führer* fawning was so gratuitous, and so public, so close to the outbreak of the war. If you’ve grown up believing that WWII was about defeating Nazism—that the conflagration ought to be read as the twentieth century’s great parable of good vs. evil, favourably resolved by democratic virtue mobilised as a military arsenal—Menzies’ words would be difficult to reconcile. The inconvenient truth, however, is that much of the establishment, in what today is broadly called “the West”, admired the Italian and German governments of the time. Among conservative politicians, Britain’s royal family, industrialists and the “respectable” middle classes, fascism was fashionable. This is illustrated, in part, by the *Mirror*’s report, which described the PM’s pro-Hitler comments as “perfectly sound reasoning”. It is also shown by another article in the same edition of the paper, describing a reception at the Palace Hotel attended by “most of Perth’s business executives and industrial chiefs”. The event occurred several days after Menzies’ Anzac House address, and there is no indication that his Nazi nuzzling was cause for consternation. Indeed, it seems to have passed without comment by Western Australia’s luminaries. The prime minister, readers are informed, “Showed fine command of words and never hesitated, mixing subtle humour with politics in a pleasing manner”. Bear in mind, again, that this was July 1939: six years after the establishment of the Dachau concentration camp; four years after the Nuremberg Laws, which, to protect the “purity of German blood”, outlawed marriage or sex between Jews and “German nationals”; sixteen months after the annexation of Austria; eight months after *Kristallnacht*, the grotesque nationwide anti-Jewish pogrom carried out by Nazi paramilitaries; and five months after Hitler’s [well-publicised 30 January speech to Reichstag delegates at Berlin’s Kroll Opera House](https://www.yadvashem.org/docs/extract-from-hitler-speech.html?ref=redflag.org.au), in which he warned that, if another world war were declared, the result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. To be fair to the capitalist establishment of the time, it wasn’t the Nazis’ virulent antisemitism that was the main attraction. They were sympathetic primarily because Hitler’s government had waged war on the left, banning the Social Democratic Party, the Communist Party and the trade unions. While Dachau is today known primarily for being part of the Nazi network of Jewish extermination centres, it was established in Munich to house political prisoners. Heinrich Himmler, then the city’s chief of police, was open about this, [telling the *Münchner Neueste Nachrichten*](https://web.archive.org/web/20150906190330/http:/www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/images/photo02.jpg) (Munich Latest News) in March 1933 ahead of the camp’s opening: > “All Communists and—where necessary—Reichsbanner \[a returned soldiers’ organisation associated with the Social Democrats\] and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here ... \[T\]hese people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organise as soon as they are released.” This was widely known. As early as July 1933, the *Argus* in Melbourne was [repeating German secret police claims](https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/4752129?ref=redflag.org.au) that they were fighting off daily communist plots to overthrow the Nazi regime. The leftists were described as “terror groups”. “The police allege that hardly a day passes without their unearthing new Communist ‘cells’, notably in the Ruhr Valley, where storm troops at Bochen discovered an organisation of between 4,000 and 5,000 members”, one report noted. The correspondent said that there had been arrests around the country before mentioning, almost in passing, “18,000 Communist prisoners in Prussia”. The Nazis’ war on the left, [in which up to 1 million civilians were murdered](https://jacobin.com/2022/01/nazism-political-communist-socialist-victims-world-war-two-history?ref=redflag.org.au), was a war on a common enemy of the Western ruling classes, which were trying to combat socialist and left-wing movements in their own societies. Capitalists and establishment politicians had a natural ideological affinity with fascism, which led them to ignore, downplay, tolerate or even celebrate Hitler’s crimes against democracy and against Jewish people, who were disproportionately represented in the communist movement. Indeed, Hitler painted his antisemitism in anti-communist colours: Bolshevism was Jewish, and Jews were Bolsheviks. The people who run the world today try to bury the fact that their old brethren and political heroes were ideologically aligned with fascism. Moreover, they bury the fact that the systematic eradication of left-wing political opposition to Nazism, which they supported, opened the terrain for the extermination of 6 million Jews. Instead, they make out that the antisemitic fascist-sympathising statesmen of the time were responsible for snuffing out Nazism. We are now told that it is illegitimate to draw parallels with the Holocaust because it was uniquely evil. Yet it is arguable that drawing parallels is precisely the way to honour the call “never again”—because as soon as one does, it invites an investigation of who exactly was complicit, of what the preconditions were for such shocking barbarity, and of how such conditions might again materialise. What about Palestine today? To be sure, there are obvious differences. Western politicians do not generally hold up Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as an example of how to run a country; few state leaders appear to want to emulate his domestic policies. And, as Israel’s supporters frequently point out, the project in Gaza does not involve gas chambers. If Netanyahu’s goal was to exterminate all Palestinians in the territories Israel controls, he could have carried it out. That he hasn’t is considered enough proof that there is no genocide, let alone another Holocaust. Yet there are clear echoes today of some of the political dynamics of the 1930s. As noted above, the Nazis did not entirely distinguish between their barbarity against the left and Jews—hence they were fighting “Judaeo-Bolshevism”. Similarly, Israel’s war against “Palestinian terrorism” cannot be separated from the country’s broader role as Western imperialism’s regional enforcer. The ruling classes of the 1930s watched on, often with admiration, as the Nazis smashed their common enemy: the political left, in which Jews were the vanguard. The Western establishment today does more than watch on—it supplies Israel as it smashes all vestiges of resistance to Western domination of the Middle East. And like European Jewry in the early twentieth century, the Palestinians have been the vanguard in, and their cause has often been a catalyst for, the anti-imperialist struggle in the region. That is precisely why the carnage in Gaza has been allowed to go on for so long: there is a coincidence of interests between the ethno-nationalist Israeli regime and Western ruling classes. It is why there is no end to the declarations that there can be no peace unless Hamas is eradicated—by which they mean not simply that particular organisation, but any organisation that refuses to accept and make peace with the Zionist state and Western imperialism. It is why German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in June said of Israel’s criminal attack on Iran: “This is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us”. It is why Israel’s earlier terrorist attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon made Netanyahu such a celebrated figure: overnight, in Western eyes, he went from being a man without a plan to the guy who might have the final solution to the niggling problem of regional anti-imperialism. As in the 1930s, the rhetoric today among sections of establishment opinion is increasingly fascistic. That’s true in Israel, the government of which is propped up by fascists, and in the heartlands of Western imperialism, where the far right either leads or has a genuine chance of leading governments in France, Italy, Germany, the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Insofar as the far right is making ground, the left is again often labelled the primary enemy within—even if “communism” now includes the cosmopolitan capitalism of such radical organisations as the Democratic Party in the US. There are no concentration camps (although the US is skating close). Still, the repression brought to bear on left-wing activism and Palestine solidarity activism is now significant. It began to ramp up during the war on terror, when there was endless talk of an “Islamo-leftist” alliance against Western civilisation, which sounded much like the old Judeo-Bolshevism canard. Another political echo: just as Nazi sympathisers in the West were broadly hostile to Jews and Jewish immigration, so too are many of Israel’s friends in the West hostile to Arab/Muslim/Palestinian immigration. Take then Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s comment last year that welcoming refugees fleeing Gaza was “very bad for cohesion and harmony”. He sounded eerily similar to Australia’s representative to the 1938 Evian Conference, Colonel Thomas W. White, who said: “As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration”. (The Evian Conference was an international summit to discuss the growing number of Jewish refugees fleeing Germany.) The Australian press did carry critical commentary about the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, particularly after *Kristallnacht* in November 1938\. Some politicians spoke out, too. But prevailing establishment attitudes can be divined from press responses to Hitler’s odious and ominous diatribe the following year, threatening “the annihilation of the Jewish race”. A front-page headline in Melbourne’s *Argus* on 1 February read “reassuring on the whole”. The associated article reported: > “The \[London\] *Daily Telegraph* says that it is not too optimistic to read into the speech a promise of better things to come, while the *Daily Express* points out that the speech shows that the Fuhrer does not intend to embark upon any adventures at the moment.” Again, this optimism stemmed from the fact that the Jewish question hardly figured in Western calculations. The key concern was the possibility of Germany going too far and upsetting the existing imperialist applecart. So when the war came, it was not about a clash of ideologies, let alone about saving European Jewry; German expansionism—regrettably, in the view of the establishment—threatened the interests of the other European imperialists. Viewed from the top of society, the war was just another power struggle among the ruling classes. Returning to the 1939 *Mirror* article, we find another notable thing: unlike the Palace Hotel reception attended by the upper classes, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Menzies at Anzac House. The correspondent noted that some in the audience reacted badly to the PM’s pro-Hitler talk: > “In the back of the hall a good-looking young woman jumped up waving aloft a placard. Another let fly at Mr. Menzies a battery of words that were finally drowned in cat-calls and cheers ... Then a voice close to the microphone whispered to the speaker: ‘Would you like her thrown out?’ Mr. Menzies hesitated, then decided that, if he was going to finish his speech, the interjectors would have to be given their walking orders. > “So the police had a busy few minutes, and the ranks of the interjectors were lessened by a dozen or so. But Mr. Menzies saw the humorous side of it before the meeting closed. ‘I would like’, he said, ‘to thank all those present—and those who are no longer present’. And even the opposition gave him a good hand for that.” An uncivilised “hullabaloo” disrupted proceedings. But all officialdom united—even “the opposition”—to have the cops take care of them. Again, we find echoes in today’s political atmosphere and the treatment of anti-fascist and anti-genocide activists. How, then, do holocausts and genocides happen? With the complicity of the capitalist establishment and the maligning, marginalising and worse, of the left. ### People’s Inquiry exposes university censorship on Palestine URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/peoples-inquiry-exposes-university-censorship-on-palestine/ Last updated: 2025-08-06T05:43:22.000Z **Dean**: “We have received an anonymous complaint about your teaching related to Palestine.” **Teacher**: “What specifically about my teaching?” **Dean**: “I can’t say specifically, because that could breach the student’s anonymity.” **Teacher**: “How can I respond to the accusation unless I know what it was I said that was the problem?” **Dean**: “I can say only in general terms that there were several examples. That you were not presenting all sides of the debate.” **Teacher**: “Can I know whether it was one of my students who complained?” **Dean**: “No. And you cannot tell anyone of the existence or nature of this complaint.” This conversation occurred at an Australian university. We know about it only because it was described in a confidential submission to the People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine. In all likelihood, similar conversations have been happening behind closed doors in deans’ offices at campuses all over the country. University staff and students are being subjected to spurious complaints and opaque disciplinary procedures for expressing support for Palestine. They are being accused of prejudice—or worse, of antisemitism—for speaking against a genocide. In many cases, those students and staff aren’t even allowed to speak publicly about their experience. The widespread censorship of pro-Palestine speech on Australian university campuses was what motivated a group of students in Students for Palestine to establish a People’s Inquiry. Inspired by the Russell Tribunal of the 1960s, which assembled prominent figures to investigate US war crimes in Vietnam, the People’s Inquiry brought together members and representatives of the National Union of Students, the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, the Jewish Council of Australia, as well as Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi and human rights activists and academics. The aim was to shine a light on the alarming situation unfolding on university campuses. After the People’s Inquiry was launched, we received more than 150 submissions from twenty universities across Australia, an indication of the systematic nature of censorship when it comes to Palestine. The submissions detailed instances of repression, intimidation, silencing and punishment of university staff and students expressing support for Palestine and opposition to Israel’s genocide. A small selection of the submissions formed the basis for the inquiry’s preliminary report, “Don’t talk about Palestine: it’s a career killer”. The title was taken from one of those submissions. In it, the submitter said they had received that advice from the director of a political research centre based at the University of Queensland. Following the preliminary report’s publication, the People’s Inquiry held two days of public hearings, one at the University of Sydney and one at the University of Melbourne, inviting university students and staff to share their stories. Before they were allowed to proceed, People’s Inquiry organisers at the University of Sydney were required by management to read out a statement assuring the audience that the university was committed to “freedom of speech and academic freedom as foundations to a vibrant democracy and our pursuit of knowledge”. The university was trying to cover its backside. But platitudes about free speech and “vibrant” democracies rang hollow in a room full of people who had come to listen to and share stories of censorship and arbitrary discipline. The irony appears lost on Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott, who didn’t accept an invitation to appear at the hearing. At the University of Melbourne, a photographer with the Australian Associated Press was initially prevented by security from entering the room where the hearing was taking place, but he was eventually let in. Maybe it was the act of an overzealous guard, but “Journalist denied access to free speech inquiry” would not have been a good headline for the university in any case. The public hearings shed further light on the regime of censorship on university campuses. The panel heard from National Tertiary Education Union branch committee members who revealed that two staff members had been sacked from the University of Melbourne for speaking about Palestine. A medical student related that he was refused permission to organise an information stall on the situation in Gaza at the annual medical students’ conference. There are high-profile cases of university repression of pro-Palestine speech, such as the [tracking of pro-Palestine students](https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/the-university-vowed-not-to-spy-on-students-now-it-s-using-tracking-data-to-punish-them-20240704-p5jr3y.html?ref=redflag.org.au) through the wi-fi at the University of Melbourne. There’s the case of the international student at the University of Sydney who faced the [potential cancellation of her student visa and deportation](https://honisoit.com/2025/03/usyd-threatens-transgender-student-with-deportation-after-violating-the-cap/?ref=redflag.org.au) for writing pro-Palestine messages on a whiteboard. Then there are the cases of repression and censorship that don’t make the headlines: the private meetings with management and the veiled threats couched in the language of “safety” or “wellbeing”. Many instances have been reported to the People’s Inquiry, but there are likely many more. While we should not encourage university management to take a more active role in policing speech and political opinions on campuses, it is remarkable that supporters of Israel seem to have faced no consequences for cheering on a genocidal regime that is using starvation to decimate Gaza’s civilian population. At Monash University, Israel supporters [repeatedly harassed and assaulted](https://redflag.org.au/article/universities-crack-down-on-palestine-solidarity) pro-Palestine students at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and faced no consequences. Students and staff speaking and protesting in support of Palestine are often accused by supporters of Israel of spreading hatred and division. Yet when Mark Leibler, a member of the University of Melbourne’s University Council, [in a social media post](https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/02/jaccuse-the-jew-who-accuses-his-fellow-jews-of-being-antisemites/?ref=redflag.org.au) described anti-Zionist Jews as “repulsive and revolting human beings” whose family members murdered by the Nazis would “undoubtedly be turning in their graves”, the university defended him on the grounds that the remark was made “in his personal capacity” and not as a university representative. Perhaps if students clarify that we oppose genocide in our “personal capacity” rather than as university students, we might be let off the hook? Somehow, I doubt it. **Why is this happening?** Universities often cultivate a self-image as institutions of free inquiry where challenging and controversial ideas are debated on their merits. In reality, universities serve power. Where it does exist, space for genuine political dissent has been carved out on the campuses despite university managers rather than because of them. The higher education sector caters to modern capitalist economies’ ideological and technical needs. Universities are enormous workplaces: highly paid executives sit at the top and determine the day-to-day life of thousands of professional and academic staff. Each university competes with its peers in a global education market, vying for lucrative international student enrolments. Reflective of their deep integration with and dependence on governments, universities frame their purpose in terms of the “national interest”. A [statement published by Universities Australia](https://universitiesaustralia.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2025-federal-election-statement-Universities-matter-to-Australias-future.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) in the lead-up to the 2025 federal election described universities as “vital national assets” that “underpin our nation’s prosperity” and strengthen our “international competitiveness”. Let’s remind ourselves what “national interest” really means. It means shielding Australia’s allies from attack or criticism, even (or especially) when that ally is committing crimes against humanity. The national interest means spending upwards of $368 billion to acquire a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines—a sum that could build more than a million new public housing units. In a media release from November 2023, Universities Australia again spelled it out: “The planning, construction, operation and maintenance of our nuclear-powered submarines will not be possible without the skilled workers our unis educate or the research they undertake”. As great-power conflict returns to the centre of world politics, Australian universities are giddy about the research and funding opportunities being presented. The University of Melbourne, for example, is spending $2 billion on a new campus at Fishermans Bend that will host partnerships with major weapons manufacturers. Little wonder that the universities react with hostility to the pro-Palestine movement. Our movement wants to disrupt business as usual. We call out the crimes of a key Western ally in the Middle East and our own government’s complicity. We oppose the booming military-industrial complex. The problem for university managers is that students have been at the forefront of this movement. Students, many staff and thousands of others have refused to be silenced and browbeaten. We have rejected the lies of the people in power. We have camped, petitioned, occupied, rallied, assembled and protested for Palestine. In response, campuses have become the centre of attacks on free speech and political organising. Labor-appointed Special Envoy Jillian Segal paid particular attention to the universities in her “Plan to Combat Antisemitism”, which is, in reality, a plan to silence criticism of Israel. She wants universities to crack down even harder on pro-Palestine action and thought, and her plan proposes cutting funding from universities that don’t. The repression playing out on campuses is serious. But it is possible to push back. Universities are susceptible to pressure. Defending the indefensible crimes of the Israeli state demands an authoritarian logic, but universities are also under pressure at least to appear to support open academic inquiry. Resistance from students and staff can beat back the attacks. The People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine aims to give a voice to those who have been silenced and to expose the universities’ chilling attacks against those who stand for justice in Palestine. *James McVicar is a panellist on the People’s Inquiry and the education officer for the National Union of Students.* ### The mirage of a Palestinian state URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-mirage-of-a-palestinian-state/ Last updated: 2025-08-06T05:43:11.000Z More countries recognising a hypothetical entity called “State of Palestine” is positive in terms of its symbolic impact in recognising the Palestinian people’s right to a state, a right denied by most components of the Zionist establishment, especially the far-right Zionist spectrum that currently governs Israel. However, the meanings and implications of this recognition greatly vary with time. The countries that recognised the State of Palestine following its declaration by the Palestinian National Council, held in Algiers in 1988, against the backdrop of the great popular *Intifada* in the 1967-occupied territories, supported what was seen at the time as a major episode in the history of Palestinian struggle. This was how it appeared, even though the declaration was, in fact, a diversion of the *Intifada* from its original course. Yasser Arafat and his aides in the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization sought to pursue the illusion of an “independent Palestinian state” by harnessing popular energy for a diplomatic negotiation process sponsored by the United States. Thus, the 1988 declaration was immediately followed by Arafat’s shameful acquiescence to the condition Washington had imposed on him for negotiations: his resounding public statement that “We totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism” (reiterated at a press conference in Geneva on 14 December 1988). The declaration of statehood at the time nevertheless had the character of a defiant gesture. It was backed by the countries that effectively supported the right of the Palestinian people in the 1967 territories to free themselves from Zionist occupation. A total of 88 countries recognised the newly proclaimed State of Palestine, including almost all Arab countries (except for the Syrian Assad regime, which was a bitter opponent of the Palestinian leadership), most countries in Africa and Asia (with some natural exceptions, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa, a long-standing ally of the Zionist state), and the countries of the Eastern bloc dominated by the Soviet Union. In a notable global split, no country of the Western bloc, led by the United States, recognised the State of Palestine at the time, except Turkey. Nor did any Latin American country, except Cuba and Nicaragua, the two rebels against Washington’s hegemony. Recognitions continued after 1988, gradually encompassing the remaining countries in Asia, Africa—with a few exceptions (Cameroon and Eritrea, for opposite reasons)—and Latin America. The first NATO member states to recognise the State of Palestine—in addition to Turkey and the Eastern European countries formerly within the Soviet Union’s orbit, which had therefore recognised it before joining the alliance—were Iceland in 2011 and Sweden in 2014\. Other NATO member states did not follow suit until the full scope of Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip became obvious. Norway, Spain, and Slovenia recognised the State of Palestine in 2024, followed by the remaining Latin American countries (the most recent being Mexico this year). Until the French president announced his intention to formally recognise the State of Palestine next September, when the UN General Assembly convenes, all the powers of the geopolitical West—particularly the United States, Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan, and Australia—had refused to do so and still refuse to this day, citing various pretexts, particularly the highly hypocritical argument that recognition could hinder peace efforts. \[This article was written before Keir Starmer’s conditional announcement that the UK too would recognise the State of Palestine in September unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire and an improvement of the situation in Gaza.\] Public pressure is mounting in these same countries over the ongoing genocide in Gaza, at a time when the deliberate nature of the crime has reached its peak with the current organised starvation of the people of Gaza. This could lead to new recognitions and has already led to increased pressure on Israel to allow food aid into the Strip. The truth is that those who waited for Israel to commit the ongoing atrocities in plain sight of the entire world before recognising the State of Palestine are primarily trying to cover up their tacit complicity in the Zionist occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip for nearly sixty years. The last-minute awakening of the British prime minister and the German chancellor, and their decision to participate in Jordan’s and the United Arab Emirates’ airdrop of aid to the Gaza Strip—a move condemned by humanitarian relief organisations as a useless symbolic act—deserve nothing but contempt, especially since the two mentioned NATO countries are among the most important military collaborators of the Zionist state after the United States. What should be obvious is that current efforts to establish a Palestinian state, such as the conference held in New York under French and Saudi sponsorship, bear now a very different meaning than recognition in 1988\. That year witnessed the best political conditions the Palestinian people have ever known since the 1948 Nakba. The *Intifada* garnered international popular sympathy and caused a severe morale crisis within Israel’s society and military. It created the conditions for the Zionist Labour Party’s return to power and its conclusion of the Oslo Accords with the Arafat leadership, something unimaginable before that time, although the agreement included deeply unfair conditions that Yasser Arafat accepted out of sheer delusion. However, what seemed like a hypothetical but achievable State in 1988, and even in 1993 (despite the Oslo process being doomed to failure), is now less realistic than a mirage in the desert. Perhaps a tenth or more of the Gaza Strip’s population has been slayed, and at least 70 percent of the Strip’s buildings have been destroyed, including 84 percent of buildings in the northern part and 89 percent of the buildings in Rafah (according to a recent geographic survey conducted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem). So what kind of Palestinian state are they talking about? The most generous of them see it as governed by the Oslo framework, which resulted in a Palestinian Authority under Israeli tutelage, whose nominal “sovereignty” is limited to less than a fifth of the West Bank, in addition to Gaza. Others envision an even more limited entity, following Israel’s reconquest of most of the Gaza Strip and the expansion of Zionist settlements in the West Bank. The conditions set by the Palestinian National Consensus in 2006 (the Prisoners’ Document) as minimum requirements for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state—namely, the withdrawal of the Israeli army and settlers from all Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; the release of all Palestinian prisoners held by Israel; and recognition of the right of Palestinian refugees to return and reparations—have been consigned to oblivion as “extremist” demands, whereas they were originally conceived as minimum conditions, expressing a willingness to compromise. The truth is that any Palestinian entity that ignores these basic conditions will be nothing more than a renewed version of the vast open-air prison in which the Zionist state confines the Palestinian people within the 1967 territories, with an ever-shrinking geographic area and a population that continues to dwindle as a result of genocide and ethnic cleansing. *Translated from the Arabic original published in* [*Al-Quds al-Arabi*](https://www.alquds.co.uk/?p=3513911&ref=redflag.org.au)*.* ### ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here’: the Australian establishment and Gaza URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/hell-is-empty-and-all-the-devils-are-here-the-australian-establishment-and-gaza/ Last updated: 2025-08-03T06:43:50.000Z After almost two years of horror, two prominent Israeli human rights organisations have finally spoken the truth about the situation in Gaza. B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel have released reports arguing that Israel has been conducting a “genocidal” policy against Palestinians. “Based on a careful legal analysis of the facts, we state with a heavy heart this is a genocide”, Guy Shalev, executive director of the physicians’ group, told reporters in Jerusalem. “The systematic destruction of the health care system, the denial of access to food, the blocking of medical evacuations and using humanitarian aid to advance military objectives—all indicate a clear pattern of conduct, a pattern that reveals intent.” Following the release of these reports, 31 high-profile Israelis—including Academy award recipient Yuval Abraham, former Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair, and former speaker of Israel’s parliament and former head of the Jewish Agency Avraham Burg—accused the Israeli government of “starving the people of Gaza to death and contemplating the forced removal of millions of Palestinians from the strip”. They also urged states to “impose crippling sanctions on Israel until it ends this brutal campaign and implements a permanent ceasefire”. Gaza is being starved, with forethought and deliberation, by the Israeli state. This is genocidal state policy. It is denied, of course. Israel’s deputy chief of mission in Canberra, Amir Meron, argues: “We don’t recognise any famine or any starvation in the Gaza Strip. Israel has never acted in a policy of starvation. There is no such policy. There is no starvation in the Gaza Strip and there is no willingness of Israel that such a thing will happen in the Gaza Strip”. But just as there could be no more credible denials of the American use of napalm in Vietnam after the publication of the image of 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc naked, burnt and sobbing on a smoky road, there today is no credible denial of Israel’s genocide. Even the *New York Times*, one of Israel’s staunchest public defenders, has been forced to shift its tone, last month publishing [a piece by Israeli-American holocaust historian Omer Bartov](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html?ref=redflag.org.au) titled “I’m a genocide scholar. I know it when I see it”. While a few Israelis are defying the fascism of their own government and calling for serious action against the state in which they live, the most Australia’s political leaders can do is deny and deflect. Anthony Albanese claims Israel’s actions are now “indefensible”. But he refuses to sanction the country. Albanese can’t even muster the willpower to engage in the weak symbolism of recognising a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Penny Wong maintains that selling Israel key components to its F-35 fighter jets is morally justifiable because they are purportedly the “non-lethal” parts. The Australian establishment is committed to the global military order of the Trumpian United States and its fascist compatriots in Israel. There is no red line for these slaves to the capitalist order. No number of dead children will be enough for them to break with the Western imperialist order of which they are a part. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here”, wrote William Shakespeare in *The Tempest*. The aphorism is appropriate for today’s political landscape. The devils sit in Israeli cabinet meetings, the Australian parliament, the US Congress and elsewhere. ### What sort of society lets Gaza starve? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/what-sort-of-society-lets-gaza-starve/ Last updated: 2025-08-02T03:15:40.000Z The whole world knew this was coming. And yet here we are. The mass starvation unfolding in Gaza is a horror beyond comprehension. On our phones and in the mainstream media, we are seeing images from Gaza that no human being should ever have to see, much less endure. Babies so malnourished that their bones protrude through their skin as they gasp their dying breaths. Children begging their parents for bread when there is none to be found. Women crawling in the dust, looking for specks of flour. Human beings forced to choose between starvation or being massacred in aid lines by the IDF—already the fate of more than one thousand people. Kilometres away, aid trucks are lined up on the Israeli border. A few more kilometres from that are fully stocked supermarkets. Yet in Gaza, people are starving to death. Starvation is “a very cruel, slow death” according to Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, a paediatrician and neurologist who has volunteered in Gaza and spoke to Al Jazeera. “You basically just waste away”, he said. First, the body uses up glycogen storage, then fats. At the acute stage, the body begins to consume itself, breaking down protein and shrinking muscles to provide energy to the heart and brain. Wounds cannot heal: the body simply doesn’t have the building blocks. Eventually the heart stops, or the body is overcome with infection, too weak to fight. Murder by starvation was the fate of 86 people in Gaza in July alone, according to hospital reports made to the Gaza Ministry of Health, including at least 24 children under 5\. One in five children under 5 are now classified by the UN as “acutely malnourished” in Gaza City. The situation is so dire that those who are attempting to help and document the atrocities are becoming too weak to go on. Citizen journalists are unable to tell their stories. Medical workers are passing out from hunger. Aid workers are too hungry to distribute the aid. As more than 100 humanitarian and aid organisations have pointed out, this is an entirely preventable catastrophe. For almost two years doctors, aid organisations and the Palestine movement have warned that Israel’s blockade of Gaza, explicitly designed to prevent food and baby formula from entering, was pushing the strip’s 2 million inhabitants to the brink of starvation. Yet across the world, from Israel to the West, those in power made a decision to allow it to happen, and continue to support it materially. Israel obviously bears the greatest responsibility. Israeli spokespeople are coming across as increasingly deranged and genocidal in the face of this crisis. Their attempts to deny the reality of mass starvation in Gaza are routinely contradicted by their own statements and actions: statements like “There is no nation that feeds its enemies”, made by Israeli heritage minister Amihai Eliyahu last week. Foreign doctors entering Gaza say they are screened specifically for baby formula and prevented from taking it in. The starvation of Gaza is the logical conclusion of Israel’s never-ending war to destroy the Palestinian people. Not far behind are the Western governments that have given Israel unlimited military, ideological and material support and have enabled the starvation everyone knew was coming. The current “aid” system is a joint initiative of US president Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, run by the recently founded US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. As humanitarian organisations predicted, the system is about using aid as a weapon by helping Israel displace and control the Palestinian population. US mercenaries herd desperate people who wait all day for the hope of a package to feed their starving families. Massacres at these aid sites have quickly become part of normal life in Gaza. In Australia, the Labor government has changed its tone and some of its rhetoric in relation to Gaza. But it continues to support Israel. It continues to allow shipments of military supplies to Israel, and it will not sanction Israel’s actions. And it continues to treat pro-Palestine activists—the very people who have been warning about the starvation for months—as criminals. The media are no better. For years they have parroted every lie the Israeli government has used to justify its genocide. Now they seem to have clocked on to the fact that starvation and collective punishment might be a bad thing. “At some point there has to be a reckoning of, does a child starving need to be the victim because Hamas is not behaving as they should?”, asks one Australian journalist on our national broadcaster’s podcast. It seems this is the first time she has considered the question. Or maybe it’s the first time she’s considered the answer isn’t yes. But it is too late to be asking. Millions of people around the world are now asking, what sort of society is it that could let Gaza starve? There are two answers to this question. The first answer is: a capitalist one. Capitalism is a system of violence, exploitation and domination, in which people are of value only in so far as they help to enrich the already wealthy or help them extend their power and control around the world. The consequence of this inhumanity is evident in the images of starving Gazans: it should be seared into our minds. That capitalist class, and the governments that serve it, are unfit to rule for a second longer. The second answer is that it is a society that is screaming out for radical change, in which all our rulers are driven from power and nothing like this is ever allowed to happen again. That world is a socialist society, in which human life is valued, and production is harnessed to provide for people, not to enrich the few. It’s our only hope. ### Thousands will march across the Harbour Bridge for Gaza URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/thousands-will-march-across-the-harbour-bridge-for-gaza/ Last updated: 2025-08-05T00:30:29.000Z The Sydney Harbour Bridge is one of the world's iconic landmarks. The Palestine Action Group has organised for tens of thousands to march across it on Sunday 3 August to oppose the genocide in Gaza. We’ve just won a significant victory in the NSW Supreme Court: the NSW Police application to overturn the right to march has been struck down. The right to protest this Sunday is a serious win. As Josh Lees, Palestine Action Group organiser, told media during the court proceedings, “Humanity in Gaza is at stake, and our humanity here is at stake”. The entire population of Gaza is starving. The Israeli aid blockade and constant bombardment have killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of Palestinians already. The situation is acute, and it calls for urgent action. The outpouring of public support for this protest has been immense. The original Instagram post advertising the event has been viewed nearly a million times. More than 300 organisations have endorsed the rally. At least eleven trade unions, including the Maritime Union, the United Workers Union, the Nurses and Midwives’ Association and the Electrical Trades Union, have pledged their support. Political organisations, NGOs, religious groups, and cultural institutions are on board, and the list of endorsements includes celebrities such as Stella Donnelly and Craig Foster. It’s been enough to pressure Sydney mayor Clover Moore to lend her approval to the rally, and fifteen NSW Parliamentarians, including five Labor members, signed a statement declaring their support for the protest. Even Sydney’s most popular meme page “monkeyboy.sydney” has shared the protest details. Despite this, Labor Premier Chris Minns and the NSW Police have done everything in their power to prevent the rally from going ahead. On Thursday, Minns told the media that "the last thing we want, and the last thing police want, is chaos in Sydney streets". On Friday, the police took Lees to court on behalf of the organisers, claiming the protest on the bridge would be a threat to public safety. But it's not impossible to close the Harbour Bridge, and “public safety” was a cheap excuse to deny us the right to protest. The bridge has been closed plenty of times: twice in 2023 for a Ryan Gosling film and the World Pride march, in 2000 for the Walk for Reconciliation and in 2009 for a picnic. It’s also regularly shut for marathons, including one coming up in four weeks. None of these events have caused threats to the public, and in most cases they are far less urgent than taking a stand against genocide. In response to the argument made by the police that it would create disturbance to the public to allow the protest to go ahead, the Supreme Court judge was right to find that, “if matters such as this were to be determinative, no assembly which would cause disruption would be permitted”. Chris Minns and the police did everything in their power to suggest that the protest was already or could be banned. This was a lie. We have the right to demonstrate in NSW. But the fact that they threw everything at preventing us tells you something important about how society works, and why socialists think mass politics matters. The late Marxist cultural critic John Berger once wrote of mass demonstrations that they pose to the state a challenge—either the capitalist class and the state repress them, and in so doing show their true, unjust motivations; or they're forced in the face of mass numbers and determination of ordinary people to let them go ahead, and in so doing reveal that there's a greater power than theirs below the surface. Our rally is not a revolutionary rehearsal. But it's important that we won this small test of wills between the forces of injustice and imperialism, and the humanity of ordinary Sydneysiders standing up to a genocide. The world is watching Gaza, and the world will be watching us. ### Albanese’s ‘strongly worded’ statements shouldn’t fool anyone URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/albaneses-strongly-worded-statements-shouldnt-fool-anyone/ Last updated: 2025-07-28T06:32:51.000Z Anthony Albanese has made his strongest declarations to date on the genocide in Gaza, calling on Israel “to comply immediately with its obligations under international law”. The prime minister’s [official statement](https://www.pm.gov.au/media/statement-situation-gaza?ref=redflag.org.au), released on Friday, was [followed by comments](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-27/albanese-says-israel-clearly-breaching-international-law/100020874?ref=redflag.org.au) on the ABC’s *Insiders* program on Sunday that Israel’s behaviour is not only “quite clearly” a breach of the law, but also “a breach of decent humanity and of morality”. That these are Albanese’s most strongly worded statements to date only shows what an absolute monster he is. His remarks on Sunday alternated between banal (“International law says that you can’t hold innocent people responsible for what is a conflict”) and insulting (“A one-year-old boy is not a Hamas fighter”). The press is reporting all of this as though it’s *news*; as though hundreds of thousands of people have not been crying out, demanding an end to the genocide and warning of worse to come for months and months and months. In his statement on Friday, Albanese said the situation in Gaza has gone “beyond the world’s worst fears”. But his government has been demonising the people expressing those fears from the very beginning: the people who have protested week in, week out for nearly two years; people like Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, who Albanese’s party sanctioned this week for holding a sign in parliament calling for sanctions on Israel. Criminally, his government has been [approving weapons exports to Israel](https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/07/despite-denials-australia-has-exported-f-35-parts-to-israel/?ref=redflag.org.au) and then lying about it. The federal government is complicit in the genocide. The one-year-old boy the prime minister referred to ​​is Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, whose [photo has appeared in media outlets](https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2025/07/world/photos-starvation-in-gaza-intl-cnnphotos/?ref=redflag.org.au) around the world. Muhammad is so severely starved, down to his tiny, frail skeleton, that he is barely recognisable as a human child. The Gaza Health Ministry estimates that 900,000 children are going hungry. The United Nations and aid agencies have repeatedly warned of the likelihood of mass starvation being the result of Israel’s calculated barbarity. So Anthony Albanese, 21 months into the genocide, offers us a “strongly worded” statement of the bleeding obvious: that this acutely malnourished child is not a Hamas fighter. What the hell is that even supposed to mean? Every time Albanese mentions Hamas, he is recycling the excuse Israel has used for every shot fired, every bomb dropped, every ounce of food denied in Gaza. French President Emmanuel Macron has announced France will recognise a Palestinian state. That was one empty gesture too far for the Australian prime minister. Albanese maintained that a Palestinian state could not be recognised until it is certain that Hamas will not be a part of it and that it poses no threat to Israel. Imagine the same standard being applied to the state of Israel: that it could exist only if it posed no threat to the Palestinians. It would be necessary to dissolve almost every political party in the Knesset. There wouldn’t be much point in having a Knesset either, because the majority of Israelis, who [support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza](https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jewish-israelis-support-expelling-gazans?ref=redflag.org.au), presumably would have to be denied the vote. At any rate, while the “international community” debates whether to recognise a Palestinian state, Israel is preparing to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and annex more and more land in the West Bank. The territorial basis for a Palestinian state is being annihilated before our eyes. The sign that got Mehreen Faruqi censured in parliament read: “Gaza is starving. Words won’t feed them.” She is dead right. Albanese’s empty words—21 months into the crime of the century—won’t do anything. But his government has done worse than issue a few belated words. As long as Albanese’s government continues to arm Israel and vilify Palestine solidarity protesters, his words are worse than useless. ### When the workers’ movement took on sexual objectification URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/when-the-workers-movement-took-on-sexual-objectification/ Last updated: 2025-07-28T02:03:44.000Z These days, the usual refrain when it comes to women working topless in bars, in the sex industry or otherwise being sexually objectified at work, is that it’s about a woman’s right to choose this treatment and that it can even be a sign of empowerment. The increasingly extreme objectification of women and the normalisation of violent sexual practices, far from being condemned, are increasingly apologised for, even by supposed anti-sexists, as women “[taking ownership](https://www.theage.com.au/culture/music/sabrina-carpenter-s-new-album-cover-has-sparked-uproar-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-20250612-p5m6up.html?ref=redflag.org.au)” and being “active agents” in their sexual life, or savvy entrepreneurs. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was a different story. Many young adults had had some experience of fighting to win women’s rights against hostile authorities, or of confronting other social injustices. They were also much more likely to be members of a union—the rate of union membership was much higher than today, and more workers had some experience of industrial action. This demonstrated in practice to many the importance of unity and solidarity, and gave workers a sense of their own power to shape and change the society around them. There was an understanding that something practical could be done about social or economic injustices, and that they weren’t simply moral concerns. This applied to the discriminatory treatment faced by women and included the sexualisation they were subject to in the workplace. A particular battleground was the hospitality industry. Denis Evans was a militant and organiser in the industry and recently spoke to *Red Flag* about this campaign. After doing a variety of jobs, Evans became a shop steward at a winery, after which, around 1969, he went to work at the Carlton and United Brewery in Melbourne. It was there that he “soon learned the benefits of militant union action”. Between 1975 and 1982, Denis worked as an organiser with the Liquor Trades Union (now United Workers Union). In 1979, the union faced a new scourge—a management push to have more women bar workers and wait staff working topless. As soon as it was notified of this development by some of the bar workers, the union took up the fight. The union’s women and men organisers had worked in the hotels before becoming organisers and knew immediately what this would mean for working conditions and occupational health and safety. Denis recalls that the feeling was “someone had to stop it”, or the exploitative practice would only spread. Women who refused to comply with management’s demand to work topless and who objected to working alongside topless co-workers were sacked and quickly replaced by women brought in by the criminal-run employment agencies. It was going to take a serious union campaign to defeat the power of the hotel industry, known at the time for its strong criminal links. As Denis explains: “Organisers \[including Denis\] visiting these shonky premises were routinely threatened with violence, knives held to their throats, or in two incidents two organisers taken out the back of the premises and guns drawn and held to their heads, women organisers threatened with rape or worse”. Despite the threats, the organisers went around the pubs telling hotel bosses to stop their discriminatory practices, which were not only demeaning to the women involved, but made their work more dangerous. A problem the union faced was that sexism was so profitable that the bosses were willing to pay women well over the going rate to work topless, “up to five times the rate”, according to Denis. But for the union, it was a matter of principle—higher wages should be won based on industrial power, not by individuals unilaterally giving up important conditions and dignity at work. This, Denis argues, left “other hard-working women to survive on the hard-won wages and conditions fought for by them, and the union”, and undermined solidarity. Stepping up the campaign, the union went to the brewery workers who supplied the hotels, calling for support. At stop-work meetings in every brewery, the workers passed resolutions of support for the bar workers, promising to take their own industrial action. After a negotiation between the union and management at the Tarmac Hotel in Melbourne’s west, the publican refused to stop using topless bar staff and to stop showing pornographic movies in the bar, deriding Denis as a prude. This didn’t worry Denis: “I couldn’t wait to let our members at the brewery know about my failed talks with management at the Tarmac Hotel. The instant reaction was one of solidarity with the female workers, and the passing of a resolution confirming the planned industrial action”. The union’s motto became, “No porn, no top, no beer!”, Denis says. “All the Sunday papers were on to it, five topless women turned up in the union office the next day organised by the criminal element in the hotel industry and the sensationalist media in tandem. Fronting up at the front desk, I was summoned to face the women with cameras flashing and videos whirring; they were hoping my face would be flushed with embarrassment.” But Denis didn’t react in quite the way they were hoping. “Well, you could have knocked me over with a wet tram ticket; they continued the theme in the headlines of the newspapers that I was a 40-year-old prude, with photo, mind you. The shame, the ignominy! How was I going to hold my head up in the trade union movement for attempting to wipe out this insidious practice?” Denis exposed the hypocrisy of the bosses’ justifications of the practice by asking them whether they would employ their wives or girlfriends as topless bar staff, or do such work themselves. He described their response: “How dare you even suggest that we would subject our loved ones to such a display of semi nudity in public? Well then, \[Denis countered\] how about you publicans doing a few hours with your penis hanging out, just make sure it goes nowhere near the drip tray. The reaction was apoplexy!” The first target of the industrial campaign was the Tarmac Hotel. “I told them to consider filling the cellars with coal, because the brewery workers were not going to supply any beer sourced by their labour from that point, and a cellar full of coal might help them survive the coming winter”, remembers Denis. After that, “The victories came fast and furious. Every hotel employing topless bar attendants or waiters was now on a final warning to cease this practice or answer to union members employed at the brewery. It’s called cap in hand. The cellars were soon running low on the amber liquid, and bosses who previously had refused to take down their pornographic movies or sack the women prepared to break down hard-won union conditions for a price, soon mellowed.” The result was that a conga line of publicans “beat a path to the union office to offer their sincere condolences for putting profit before people in an already lucrative business”. Denis gives most credit to the tremendous work of the rank-and-file women and men in the industry for shutting down the practice at the time. He also points out that it was a warning shot across the bow to other employers who were thinking of employing topless sandwich makers, hardware assistants, hairdressers and the like, that their businesses would get the same treatment. He quipped “Thankfully we were able to cease the practice before seeing topless parliamentarians or, worse still, half-naked bosses”. It is, however, an ongoing battle. The action taken by the brewery workers, thanks to former Prime Minister Bob Hawke and the ACTU-ALP Accord of the 1980s, is now illegal. Known as secondary boycotts, such solidarity action today incurs huge fines, which are a significant deterrent. The battle against sexualisation at work likewise is ongoing. In 1991, liquor trades and retail workers, along with bodies such as women’s refuges and legal groups, set up Women Against Sexual Exploitation in Training. It was followed by the inclusion of a statement of condemnation in the ACTU’s Working Women’s policy. Today, the normalisation of the sex industry and associated practices has broken down consciousness of sexism and the need to take it on industrially as well as in broader society. Now in his 70s, Denis still believes it should be a priority of the union movement to stand up for women’s rights and end sexualisation at work. Using occupational health and safety provisions is an obvious basis to object to such practices, but, Denis insists, this has to be combined with industrial action to actually shut down this demeaning, unsafe and exploitative practice, which must be understood as a blatant profit grab. The rhetoric of “empowerment” to justify appalling sexism, along with a weakening of the unions and with them class consciousness, means sexual exploitation at work is rife today. It is therefore more important than ever that we remember the history of the workers’ movement fighting back against this, and, in this case, winning. ### Why do revolutions always seem to end in bloodshed and tyranny? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/why-do-revolutions-always-seem-to-end-in-bloodshed-and-tyranny/ Last updated: 2025-07-28T02:01:15.000Z War and genocide, catastrophic climate change, poverty and hunger, oppression and preventable diseases: the case for a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalist barbarity has never been stronger. Yet most revolutions seem to end badly: bloodshed, civil war, dislocation and the replacement of one form of tyranny with another. Why? The historical record shows that most of the bloodshed results from the violent suppression and defeat of revolutions, rather than the revolutions themselves. Time and again, largely peaceful revolutions have been drowned in blood as the ruling class take a terrible revenge on those who challenge their power. Just one example: from 2011, Bashar al-Assad slaughtered an estimated 650,000 Syrians who dared to revolt, even using chemical weapons against them. When socialists talk about revolution, we mean the wholesale reordering of society: billionaires and capitalists having their wealth taken from them, and the state, which exists to enforce their rule, being replaced by democratic structures that genuinely reflect the interests and collective will of the majority. A socialist revolution would equitably redistribute the world’s wealth and use it to solve the problems that plague humanity. The people who currently rule the world fear this kind of revolution and will do whatever it takes to prevent it. The only successful socialist revolution to date occurred in Russia in October 1917\. Yet it ended in Joseph Stalin presiding over a hideous dictatorship, a police state that mercilessly repressed any breath of opposition. But this outcome was not inevitable. For a few brief years, and under the most adverse conditions, the workers’ state carried out reforms that were light years ahead of what the most liberal democracy at the time could offer: universal suffrage, equal pay, independence for oppressed nationalities, religious and sexual freedom, to name just a few. The Russian Revolution took everyone by surprise, including socialists. As the First World War raged in 1915, Russian Marxist leader Vladimir Lenin—who would soon lead the victorious uprising—wrote despondently that he did not expect to see a revolution in his lifetime. Most expected that it would be a country like Germany—with its large, well-organised working class and a mass socialist party—that would have the first socialist revolution. So there was a problem from the outset. Russia had a much smaller working class and was far less developed than the other imperialist powers, and years of war had shattered its economy. Lenin repeatedly warned that the workers’ state could not hold on for long without economic assistance from a victorious revolution in one or more developed countries. The world’s ruling classes were equally aware of this, and organised to strangle the revolution at its source. Armies from fourteen countries (including Australia) were dispatched to Russia to assist the counter-revolutionary White Russian forces to “restore order”. Against enormous odds, and with incredible courage and sacrifice, Russia’s workers and peasants defended their revolution and won the civil war. But the country was left in an even more dire and impoverished state, and the working class that had led the revolution was decimated and exhausted. It was even more imperative that the revolution spread. And indeed, the October Revolution galvanised workers around the world. In late 1918, German sailors mutinied and German workers toppled the government, ending the carnage of World War One and saving who knows how many lives. A period of intense class conflict followed, with revolutionary uprisings in Finland, Hungary, Italy and Spain, nearly revolutionary situations in Britain, France and elsewhere; even a short-lived Socialist Soviet Republic in Persia. But in no other country did the working class succeed in taking power. Russia was left isolated, and this was to have terrible consequences—not just Stalin’s rise to power, but also the triumph of fascism in Italy, Spain and Germany. There are two main reasons why revolutions fail. The first is that they don’t go far enough. This is above all a failure to come to grips with the nature of capitalist rule, in particular the role of the state. The state is not neutral; it exists to protect the property and rule of the capitalists. They will not hesitate to use their armies, police, courts and prisons to crush opposition. The state cannot be reformed; it has to be smashed. Within the workers’ movement, some always deny this reality and try to mislead workers into some form of accommodation with the system short of completely overthrowing it. In Chile in 1973 and Egypt in 2011, for example, workers were encouraged to believe that the army would respect democracy. In both instances, the armed forces led the counter-revolution and established dictatorships. As the French revolutionary Louis de Saint Just put it: “Those who make half a revolution dig their own grave”. The second reason is related to the first. Success in Russia was predicated on the existence and leadership of a mass revolutionary party, the means by which workers can most effectively organise their power , take on the state and be prepared to withstand counter-revolution. The party’s role is to lead the revolutionary movement and win the battle of ideas against political currents that try to hold back the fight for a new society. The party embodies and transmits the lessons learnt in previous revolutions so that workers can avoid the pitfalls that have derailed them in the past. Revolutionary parties grow rapidly during a revolution, but that’s way too late. Millions of people need to be won to a clear revolutionary perspective. To do this, we need organisations that argue for revolution, train their members in revolutionary politics, history and strategy, and build experience and credibility over time. The party needs, in Lenin’s words, to “patiently explain” why and how the working class can and must defeat the power of the capitalists and their state. This is a lengthy process that cannot occur in the heat of battle. So to have any chance of success, parties need to be built well before revolution breaks out. By 1917, the Bolsheviks (Lenin’s group) were a mass party, with thousands of worker members in key sectors of the economy. The party had proved its ability to lead the struggle against the Russian monarchy as well as the capitalists. It had earned the trust and confidence of the most politically advanced sections of the working class, who were in turn able to influence and lead those around them. Bolsheviks led strikes, but also seized every opportunity to argue for socialism, whether in the tsar’s fake parliament, the Duma, or through publications such as their newspaper *Pravda* (Truth), which workers widely read. During the earlier 1905 revolution, a new kind of organisation had sprung up: the soviets, democratic councils of workplace delegates. Similarly, in 1917, a network of soviets emerged, comprising worker representatives, soldiers and peasants. These delegates had no special privileges and were recallable at any time. As the American journalist John Reed noted: “No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented”. As such, the soviets would form the basis of a workers’ state. Between February and October, a period of “dual power” existed between the soviets and the provisional government, which wanted to keep Russia in the war and establish a limited form of capitalist democracy. But such an unstable situation could not last: either workers would go forward and take power, or capitalist counter-revolution would triumph. The Bolsheviks had to wage a political struggle, not just against the provisional government, but also against reformists such as the Mensheviks, who argued that Russia was not ready for socialism, so workers should moderate their demands. The Bolsheviks counterposed the demand of “All power to the soviets”, and their slogan “Peace, bread and land” encapsulated the hopes of millions of workers and peasants. The Bolsheviks’ leading role in defeating a right-wing coup in August was crucial in helping them defeat the reformists and win a majority in the Petrograd soviet. The depth and breadth of working-class support meant that the insurrection in Petrograd was almost bloodless. As the leading Menshevik, Julius Martov, admitted: “Almost the entire working class supports Lenin and expects its social liberation from the uprising”. The Russian workers’ victory inspired a wave of revolutions. But nowhere was there a party like the Bolsheviks. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had long since abandoned the goal of revolution, and in 1914 had betrayed the working class and supported the war. A clearly revolutionary Communist party wasn’t established until December 1918, with only a few thousand members. Lacking both experience and roots in the working class, it launched a premature insurrection, and the SPD, now in government, demonstrated its loyalty to capitalism by ordering the murder of its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and unleashed the reactionary *Freikorps*to terrorise the working class. In Italy, a powerful workers’ movement waged heroic struggles during the *Biennio Rosso* of 1919–20—striking, occupying their factories and defending them with arms, setting up councils like the soviets. But again, there was no clearly revolutionary party that could unite all the struggles into a movement to challenge the state. The reformists and trade union leaders maintained control, which ultimately allowed the fascist Benito Mussolini to take power in 1922\. With Stalin’s rise to power, another deadly factor came into play. The Communist International (Comintern) was set up in 1918 to help spread the revolution by providing advice and assistance to the new Communist parties that were springing up everywhere. But by the late 1920s, Stalin’s new regime abandoned the international working-class revolution, and the Communist parties became agents of Russian foreign policy instead. This too was a product of the failure to build revolutionary parties: Russia’s prestige and authority as the first workers’ state meant that the young and inexperienced parties were incapable of standing up to all the bad advice they received. Stalinism strangled revolutionary possibilities in China, Spain, France and Germany. And Stalinist politics have continued to play a counter-revolutionary role. They are responsible for derailing anti-colonial movements and for the failure of the momentous working-class revolts in France and Italy in the late 1960s and ’70s, among other tragedies. Revolutions have failed or been defeated, often at a terrible cost. But that has never stopped people fighting for a better world. In fact, revolutions are inevitable. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”, wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in *The* *Communist Manifesto*, and this is particularly true of capitalism. Rarely has a decade gone by without revolution breaking out somewhere, and at times spreading across entire continents, most recently in the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring of 2011\. Whether our rulers like it or not, revolutions will continue to occur. The real question is, how can we win? The capitalists and their supporters are a minority, but they are well organised and command a powerful state. Our side is far more numerous, but to win, we must be as well organised as our enemies. That means building revolutionary parties today, wherever we are. ### Life in the cardboard tower: the university experience today URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/life-in-the-cardboard-tower-the-university-experience-today/ Last updated: 2025-07-28T01:59:24.000Z Even before vice-chancellors started [savagely limiting](https://www.abc.net.au/religion/australian-universities-free-speech-right-to-protest/105164636?utm%5Fcampaign=abc%5Freligion%5Ffbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR5PnBd0b7%5FRLoBzYiWAwBHbdJrEtIP-aAfolH8RTWzk3qFht8aDmd3KU1C6TA%5Faem%5FdhGiVX7WxtZwQWBgpTDeww&ref=redflag.org.au) what students and staff could say, studying or working at a university was nothing like the romantic notion of life in the “ivory tower”. There are myths that universities are places to pursue knowledge for the joy of it, where students can learn how to help others and make the world a better place, while on the path to great jobs. The reality is quite different. Unfortunately, students have minimal say about the content of inflexible courses. Progress through units and degrees depends on jumping through assessment hoops, as universities continue the “hidden curriculum” of the school system, which is at least as important as the overt curriculum. The hidden curriculum teaches students that success, measured in marks (a proxy for dollars), depends on doing what you’re told and not challenging what teachers say—excellent training for dictatorial workplaces. Universities have increasingly geared their offerings to the needs of business and governments, and their own profitability. That does not include learning how the wellbeing of most of the world’s population requires radical social changes, let alone how to make revolution. Courses—and even whole departments—have been [axed](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-05/university-of-wollongong-cuts-academic-jobs-international-cap/104560250?ref=redflag.org.au)because they don’t satisfy those needs or bring in sufficient money. The jobs that most university graduates go into are overwhelmingly white-collar, working-class positions, in which employees, like other workers, have very limited or no control over what they do. Such jobs are subject to the vagaries of the labour market, capitalism’s boom-bust cycles and governments’ whims. Unis are increasingly just glorified high schools. Students are sausages in its digestive tract, chewed up, dissolved in acid and shat out at the end with a degree, while the funding they bring is sucked out into the universities’ profits. Outside the ranks of management, the situation of the roughly two-thirds of [university employees](https://www.education.gov.au/higher-education-statistics/staff-data/selected-higher-education-statistics-2024-staff-data/key-findings-2024-higher-education-staff-statistics?ref=redflag.org.au) who are not academics is equally gloomy. They are blue- and white-collar workers subjected to inadequate pay, attacks on their working conditions and frequent restructures. What about academics? Such jobs appear to offer scope to read and write about things you’re interested in, to tell others about those things, and lots of autonomy. The jobs are rewards for having a big brain and a way to get a public profile (for your big brain). And the jobs have “tenure”—they are secure—and you get to work in your own office. The academic life is very different. The workloads of most academics today are punishing. Time to conduct and write up research is restricted. Career progress, and even keeping your job, depends on publishing in prestigious—that is conservative—journals. There’s pressure to do research that is “outside funded”, overwhelmingly by businesses or governments and according to their priorities. Over the past twenty years, university bosses have dramatically tightened their control over academics’ research and teaching. Courses must go through time-consuming bureaucratic procedures, through which managers shape content and assessment methods and can even veto them. Anyone involved in teaching can tell you that marking is a horrible aspect of the job, humiliating for the marker and the markee. Teachers and students alike are subject to stressful time pressures. Most students are inadequately prepared for university. A teacher reading an essay whose first two sentences are clear and grammatical will think, “Wow! This should be much better than most of the others”. To get an academic job, you must jump through many educational hoops and therefore go through a very sustained hidden curriculum: at school and in undergraduate and postgraduate study. Then, you must anticipate what the people who interview you want. Interview panels are dominated by universities’ most senior members, who are managers. This promotes the “big brain syndrome”: the idea that your own unique talents are the key to your wellbeing at work and career advancement. That’s why academics tend to be poor unionists, compared with other university employees. They are even more prone than most workers to the illusion that their individual merit rather than collective action is the most important route to improve pay and conditions. The “big brain syndrome” also affects some academic unionists who think of themselves as left wing, leading them to believe that sophisticated tactics in dealing with university bosses (and top union officials) can substitute for the unglamorous effort of detailed workplace organising or the crudity of strike action. A public profile for you and your research? Only if the mainstream media are interested. As for job security, most academic jobs are now casual, low paid and not paid for all hours actually worked. As a casual, you don’t even get the cubbyhole individual office that is increasingly standard for other academics. Even continuing academic jobs are no more secure than continuing jobs anywhere else. Tenure is ancient history. Initially, thanks to a disastrous policy of the National Tertiary Education Union, universities created “teaching-focussed” jobs, which allow no or laughably little time for research. Yet career progression is very difficult without an extensive publishing record. There are more and more of these jobs. Academics who don’t supervise anyone or for whom that is a very small part of their duties (the majority) are just workers, gut flora in universities’ digestive tracts. Why is there such a gap between the myths and realities of university life? Universities have always been institutions that help to maintain, defend and develop systems of class rule. Initially, they provided administrators, clergy and lawyers who maintained the feudal order. Those graduates justified the hierarchy of feudalism as divinely ordained or in accord with “natural law” or assisted its smooth operation by overseeing its legal system and state. With the rise of capitalism, through to the Second World War, universities remained elite institutions, whose graduates generally went on to be managers in business and government, increasingly with scientific and engineering expertise, as well as middle class professionals, especially lawyers and doctors. Universities became mass institutions after the war. Today, most people who get degrees become skilled workers who can generally be relied on to do what they’re told. The spread and production of ideas that serve capitalist interests are still significant university functions. Thomas Müntzer was a priest in the sixteenth century who took the side of peasants and artisans in the massive uprising against the old feudal order in Germany, known as the “Peasants’ War”. His observation in July 1524 is still a pretty good description of an aspect of universities’ ideological roles today: “\[In biblical times\] clever soothsayers and interpreters of dreams ... said only what the lords wanted to hear, just as our academic scribblers do nowadays, for they have a taste for the choicest morsels at court.” Contemporary lords of capital don’t want to hear only tried and trusted apologies for the way things are, but also more up-to-date variations and even innovations around that fundamental theme. When an academic or journalist hits the right note, they can count on politicians, spokesthings for the state or business and the mass media to amplify it and boost their career. Think of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who promotes far-right ideas, including racism and sexism. University research generates genuine insights into how people behave, societies function and the nature of the material world: science. These can improve our lives and understanding of reality. But the lens of class politics tends to affect all aspects of the production of ideas, including sciences. It shapes universities as workplaces and biases research priorities. Scientific advances can often be used by corporations and state institutions to improve their control and manipulations of consumers, workers and citizens. They can help businesses develop new products or production processes that improve profitability, [from](https://www.techtransfer.org.au/news-item/17346/finalists-announced-for-the-2024-kca-awards?ref=redflag.org.au)controlling fires to lithium refining, disinfection technologies to “[quantum sensing](https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/03/31/sydney-spinout-deteqt-secures-backing-for-diamond-on-silicon-sen.html?ref=redflag.org.au)”. The creation of new ideas depends on academics having some autonomy, not just parroting dogmas. The degree of this autonomy can vary dramatically. In some cases, it has even allowed Marxists to get jobs in social sciences or arts. But the structures of universities and career paths in them mean that academics often produce ideas and analyses without attention to the contexts of the phenomena they are trying to grasp. There is a wonderful word in German for this: *Fachidiotismus*. Literally it means the idiocy of academic disciplines: knowing more and more about less and less. Universities are bureaucratic organisations like corporations or public service agencies. As capitalist enterprises, universities are there to make profits for themselves and their [top managers](https://www.smh.com.au/national/highest-university-executive-pay-packets-revealed-as-crackdown-looms-20250101-p5l1i1.html?ref=redflag.org.au). They make profits by producing workers and developing ideas that are useful for the state and other capitalists, and are fundamentally committed to the maintenance of capitalism. Although universities make profits through educating workers and developing ideas that are useful to the state and other capitals, and are fundamentally committed to the maintenance of capitalism, their senior managers can act in ways that contradict interests of the capitalist class as a whole. The dumbing down of courses over recent decades, and the consequent decline in the average abilities of graduates, is an example. But such conflicts, in which universities pursue their own sectoral interests, do not make them different from any other section of capital. In some places, the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s led to some reforms that included students and non-professorial staff in the decision-making processes of the whole university, faculties, schools and departments, to a limited extent. Since then, managers, encouraged by politicians and businesspeople, have either eliminated this representation or rendered it purely tokenistic. Appointed managers have replaced elected heads of departments or schools and deans of faculties. The powers of appointed top managers have increased. Most members of university councils or senates—their boards of directors—are appointed by governments or existing members and are thoroughly reliable servants of capitalist interests. Although there are profound myths about the nature of universities, they can be sites of resistance against capitalism. That’s true of all workplaces but there’s an additional element that leads to this possibility in universities. The main raw material that goes into its production process is students. They come to universities with an optimism about the world that hasn’t been worn down by years of wage labour, and they generally have more free time to engage in political activity than people with full-time jobs and families. They have more scope to explore ideas and engage in political activity, if they want to. While socialists regard the working class as the only force that can bring down capitalism and create a new society, winning more people to active socialist politics is important, especially workers but also workers-in-the-making at schools and universities. *Rick Kuhn worked in academic jobs for 28 years and is a life member of the National Tertiary Education Union.* ### The 48th Australian parliament is a monsters’ caucus URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-48th-australian-parliament-is-a-monsters-caucus/ Last updated: 2025-07-24T02:20:18.000Z The 48th Australian parliament commenced on Tuesday, the day that 13-year-old Abdulhamid al-Ghalban starved to death in Gaza. Fifteen others perished the same way, including a six-week-old whose uncle, Adham al-Safadi, told Reuters that the family couldn’t find baby formula to feed him. As Australian politicians took their seats in Canberra, thousands of mothers in Palestine searched desperately for sustenance for babies they had spent months carrying and nurturing. As proceedings began, Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi held up a small sign: “Gaza is starving. Words won’t feed them. Sanction Israel”. Liberal and Labor senators teamed up to condemn Faruqi for the silent protest. But neither party will countenance sanctioning Israel for its genocide. Faruqi’s sign referred to a statement, signed by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, condemning Israel’s starvation tactics in the Strip. The hypocrisy of Wong signing the statement is sickening. [An investigation this month](https://declassifiedaus.org/2025/07/11/revealed-australia-has-exported-f-35-fighter-jet-parts-directly-to-israel/?ref=redflag.org.au) revealed that Australia is still sending weapons parts to Israel. On 4 July, a package labelled “Aircraft parts” was loaded onto a flight leaving Sydney International Airport. Two days later, the parts arrived in Tel Aviv. They belonged to Lockheed Martin, which supplies Israel’s F-35 fighter jets. According to independent outlet Declassified Australia, the Australian Air Force provided the parts. By the end of the first sitting day of parliament, at least 85 Palestinians had been killed in airstrikes and shootings. [Overnight on Tuesday](https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/159502?ref=redflag.org.au), Israel bombed a residential apartment in Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood, southwest of Gaza City. Is it possible that the jets carrying out the deadly airstrikes relied on parts delivered by Australia? On Wednesday, not a single Labor politician raised the prospect of sanctioning Israel for the strikes or the ongoing mass starvation. None of them even questioned whether we should be sending Israel parts for their fighter jets. Instead, Wong moved against Faruqi. A motion passed by the Senate bans the Greens senator from any overseas parliamentary delegations for the length of the current parliament. Wong then slandered Faruqi as “attention seeking”, implying that she was acting out of self-interest—something Wong has built her career on. The pile-on against Faruqi is precisely the type of move encouraged by Special Envoy into Antisemitism Jillian Segal’s recent [report](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-antisemitism-report-is-another-pro-genocide-stunt-from-labor), which calls for a severe crackdown on free speech and the hounding of Palestine solidarity activism. When the report was released, human rights and civil society organisations criticised its likely chilling effect on freedom of speech. Albanese responded by insisting that it would not limit criticism of Israel because “you can put forward those views respectfully.” The sanctioning of Faruqi suggests otherwise. Faruqi did not shout or swear—she didn’t even speak. She was in no one’s way. She sat silently in her chair and held a small sign with a simple political message. If this was not a respectful, acceptable act of protest, then what is? The answer is clear: nothing. In the eyes of Israel’s defenders, protest damages the reputations of those who aid the genocide. So every act of protest is a potential target for repression. But Faruqi’s small act, and the thousands who protested outside of parliament as its doors opened, show the path forward for those who stand with Palestine. No matter the pushback, we need to keep speaking out. As the genocide continues, so must the resistance. ### The deadly cost of privatising health care URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-deadly-cost-of-privatising-health-care/ Last updated: 2025-07-22T00:56:59.000Z Healthscope—Australia’s second largest private hospital operator—has entered receivership after accruing more than $1.5 billion in debt. The private corporation’s abject failure to provide quality care to patients mirrors horror stories coming out of the childcare, aged care and disability services sectors. Healthscope has insisted that business will be maintained “as usual” in the hospitals that it runs. Business “as usual” in a Healthscope hospital—as evidenced by the inquest into the preventable death of toddler Joe Massa at Sydney’s Northern Beaches Hospital late last year—is a frightening prospect. Joe Massa and his mother spent nearly three hours in the emergency department waiting room while Joe’s condition deteriorated. In a bed with no staff present and no monitoring in place, Joe suffered a cardiac arrest. He died two days later. The hospital, along with 36 others run by Healthscope across the country, operates to extract profit for its parent company, Brookfield Asset Management, a North American private equity firm. Healthscope was contracted by the NSW government to operate the Northern Beaches Hospital, which opened in 2018, as a public-private partnership [at a cost of more than $2 billion to taxpayers](https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/revealed-the-real-2-billion-cost-of-privatised-northern-beaches-hospital-20150501-1mxgqd.html?ref=redflag.org.au). Healthscope’s inability to turn a profit in part stems from the reorientation of health resources during the COVID pandemic, when elective surgeries were cancelled. Without this source of income, the company demanded more money from private health insurers—[tearing up the contracts of insurers that refused to pay](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-22/healthscope-ahsa-bupa-private-insurance-contracts/104633886?ref=redflag.org.au)—and lobbied the federal government for a bailout. The operator fell behind in its rent payments, owed to the landlords of 22 hospitals it had acquired and subsequently sold to real estate and investment firms in order to rent the facilities back. Even before the pandemic upended its business model, Healthscope’s mismanagement of the Northern Beaches Hospital attracted serious scrutiny. A Legislative Council report published in February 2020 found an extensive suite of issues, including junior medical staff working up to 110 hours a week to fill staffing gaps, late payment of staff salaries and a dearth of policies and guidelines to facilitate clinical decision making. The report also found that many supplies, including essential life-saving medications, were delivered and stocked using a just-in-time model, leaving staff incapable of accommodating any increase in demand. This is not ideal for the standard model of private facilities that operates around planned, elective admissions—but for a major hospital with an emergency department, it’s an absurd disregard for patient safety in order to save on costs. It is not difficult to imagine how all of this could result in preventable tragedies, as with the case of Joe Massa. So obvious is the dysfunction that in recent weeks the NSW Labor government has moved to prevent the future establishment of similar private-public hospital arrangements and is seeking to terminate Healthscope’s Northern Beaches Hospital contract, which runs until 2038\. It has not, however, committed to placing the hospital in public hands and will likely offer Healthscope a hefty payout for terminating its contract. Privately owned health infrastructure should not be bought back, forcing the public to cop the cost of a capitalist’s failed business venture. It should be taken over without compensation and utilised to provide the essential, high-quality care that the victims of the for-profit system were cruelly denied. A scenario in which Northern Beaches Hospital is placed entirely under public control would be a welcome one. Profiteering in health care should be totally abolished. But the public system in NSW, run by successive Labor and Liberal governments with cost-cutting and anti-union policies, is in a crisis of its own. As has been extensively documented*,* the public system has suffered an exodus of nurses, midwives and junior doctors due to the pay discrepancy that makes us the lowest paid in the nation (while many live in the most expensive city), culminating in days of historic strikes and the mass resignation of many of the state’s psychiatrists. A healthcare system that genuinely operates according to just and universalist principles cannot palm off much of its infrastructure to profiteering capitalists while subjecting its public arm to cuts and austerity. ### NSW Labor builds profits, not housing URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/nsw-labor-builds-profits-not-housing/ Last updated: 2025-07-22T00:53:29.000Z What do you think is a good use of $1 billion of public money? You might say building more schools and hospitals, raising public sector wages or making transport, groceries and housing more affordable. The correct answer, according to the NSW Labor government, is none of the above—it’s to give the money to billionaire property developers. The $1 billion “Pre-Sale Finance Guarantee Scheme” is the centrepiece of NSW Labor’s housing affordability policies announced in its 2025 budget. Under the scheme, the government will guarantee to buy apartments from property developers if the developers can’t pre-sell enough to secure finance, no strings attached. They can build overpriced apartments in developments so risky even the banks wouldn’t fund them, secure in the knowledge that the government will bail them out if they can’t find buyers at the price and profit margin that they want. The government says this will result in an additional 15,000 homes on the market, because developers will be able to get loans they otherwise couldn’t. That is rubbish. The government is guaranteeing to buy properties that developers can’t sell, so it’s just paying for properties that people either don’t want or, more likely, can’t afford. Even if the government ends up owning some properties and uses them for public housing—a big if—it will have paid a market price that includes the developer’s profits, instead of the fraction it would cost to build the properties itself. The scheme is a handout to multibillion-dollar corporations and the billionaires who own them. Instead of corporate welfare, the government should spend that money on building desperately needed public housing. In addition to the scheme, NSW Labor Treasurer Daniel Mookhey announced two other policies that he said would help “build, build and build our way out of the housing crisis”. The first is to make the 50 percent land tax exemption for build-to-rent properties, due to expire in 2039, permanent. Build-to-rent developments already get significant [planning concessions](https://www.planning.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-04/build-to-rent-flexible-design-fact-sheet.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au), including “flexibility” on things like whether apartments should have sunlight or storage space. The apartments are rented out at market rates, and this additional tax handout to property developers just props up their profits without doing anything to make rents more affordable. The second measure allows developers themselves to build the civic infrastructure associated with new housing developments. Currently, developers contribute to a government fund that is used to build the roads, schools and other infrastructure needed for new developments. Under Labor’s “work in kind” scheme, developers will be able to avoid the contribution by building a road or handing over a plot of land for a school. The government says this will fast-track new developments by completing essential infrastructure more quickly. But the residents of Wilton in south-western Sydney know what happens when developers are responsible for building infrastructure. As the [*Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/feb/26/it-will-be-a-disaster-mayors-dire-warning-over-developer-led-housing-outside-sydney?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=Anne%20Davies,interchanges%20to%20the%20existing%20network.)reported, developers were approved to construct what was touted as a flourishing new residential hub and permitted to take responsibility for building key infrastructure under a “voluntary planning agreement”, very similar to what Labor is proposing with its “work-in-kind” policy. But after six years of construction, “developer-led” infrastructure resulted in a town centre that has only a single skydiving business, land being sold without sewerage pipes and the nearest supermarket a 14km drive away. One developer provided a road to connect the development to the main arterial, but because traffic lights were more expensive, it proposed that cars would only be able to turn left into and out of the estate, meaning a 4km detour if residents needed to turn right. This is the logical result of giving big corporations control over building essential services; they care only about their profits and will literally cut corners to increase their bottom line. Labor’s policies in the 2025 state budget are a cash splash to big corporations that will only make housing more unaffordable. Rather than see escalating house prices and rents as a crisis, the NSW Labor government sees an opportunity: an opportunity to give public money to multibillion-dollar corporations, to reduce already threadbare planning controls to allow developers to build lower quality homes and to boost profits for billionaires in a housing market that is already the second most expensive in the world. ### Europe’s imperial power play URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/europes-imperial-power-play/ Last updated: 2025-07-21T00:17:49.000Z Leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Western imperialism’s key military alliance, describe recently announced increases in European arms spending as a collective effort to “safeguard our freedom and democracy”. Some commentators have been even more emphatic in advocating stepped-up European armament. Writing in the [*Financial Times*](https://www.ft.com/content/e0bd86f9-fd4a-4802-8199-44daaa97d13a?ref=redflag.org.au) earlier this year, Bronwen Maddox, director of the London-based think tank Chatham House, called military spending “the essential public benefit above all”, placing it above expenditures on hospitals, pensions, education and other social services. While such “public good” narratives dominate official chatter, another motive lies behind the rhetoric: consolidating Europe as the 21st century’s third global power alongside the United States and China. Three developments illustrate the scale and nature of the economic and military shift now under way. First is the sharp increase in arms spending over the last decade. In 2024, European NATO members collectively spent nearly US$500 billion on “defence”—a 72 percent increase since 2014, adjusted for inflation. Over the past decade, military budgets more than tripled in Poland, Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania, and more than doubled in twelve other European NATO members. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, nearly doubled its military spending in real terms. Second is the ReArm Europe Plan (as though Europe is currently disarmed), announced by the European Council in March. ReArm authorises European Union member states to increase borrowing to boost military spending by €800 billion over the next five years. It marks a significant policy shift, overriding the debt and deficit limits set by the 2012 European Fiscal Compact—a treaty requiring governments to keep deficits below 3 percent of GDP—and directing the European Investment Bank to prioritise lending to arms manufacturers. Third is [the Hague Declaration](https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official%5Ftexts%5F236705.htm?ref=redflag.org.au) coming out of last month’s NATO summit, which goes further again. NATO is the closest thing Europe has to a unified continental military command. On average, its members spend just over 2 percent of GDP on defence. While the March ReArm Europe Plan allowed for extra spending of up to 1.5 percent of GDP, the NATO summit in June committed members to allocating 5 percent of GDP annually to the military, including security-related infrastructure. It also requires annual progress reports demonstrating “a credible, incremental path” towards this goal. The aim is to increase Europe’s economic and military power through substantial investments in military-industrial capacity and weapons production. As Andrius Kubilius, European commissioner for defence and space, stated in a media release accompanying the announcement, “This is not just about military strength—it is about our readiness, strategic autonomy, and the future of Europe as a global player”. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for increased European military spending. In 2018, he suggested that it should rise to 4 percent of GDP. At the time, [according to Reuters reporters in Brussels](https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-tells-nato-leaders-to-increase-defense-spend-to-4-percent-idUSKBN1K12BW/?ref=redflag.org.au), NATO allies “shrugged off the demand”. However, the astonishing surge of China’s industrial, technological and military capacities has left US strategists increasingly rattled about Washington’s declining relative power in the western Pacific. European leaders now appear to have recognised an opportunity as the US threatens to reduce its military commitments on the continent. In May, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared his ambition for the Bundeswehr to become the “strongest conventional army in Europe”. French President Emmanuel Macron, a long-time advocate of “strategic autonomy”—that is, less reliance on the US military—affirmed that the EU must become “a space power once again”. *New York Times* correspondents [Michael Shear and Jim Tankersley now report](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/world/europe/macron-starmer-merz-trump-eu.html?ref=redflag.org.au) that Britain, France and Germany, “are building parallel diplomatic and defense institutions for a future without the United States as the primary guarantor of economic and military security” in the region. The three countries, which have long been the dominant imperialist states in Western Europe, look to be entering an era of military coordination that is perhaps unprecedented. The claims that current tensions signal a historic rift between the US and Europe is not particularly convincing, however. Those old enough to remember transatlantic discord over the Iraq invasion in 2002-03, which in part was a US attack on European interests, might recall a State Department spokesperson ridiculing Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg as “chocolate makers” after they held “a little bitty summit” to moot plans for an alternative military command to NATO. Or the time US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed Paris and Berlin as irrelevant “old Europe” has-beens. There was even a directive to congressional cafes to rename “French fries” and “French toast” to “Freedom fries” and “Freedom toast”. (Childish, petty politics predate Trump.) Today, the European powers will likely uphold and reinforce the broader Western imperial bloc by augmenting their own capacities and allowing Washington to refocus its energies. “The ‘triangle alliance’, as Britain, France and Germany are sometimes now called, are already partners through NATO and the Group of 7—forums that include the United States”, Shear and Tankersley note. “Officials for the three European countries are careful to say that the institutions they are building are meant to supplement those alliances, not replace them.” Of course, there are no guarantees in this shifting geopolitical landscape. And the leaders of imperialist states rarely say publicly what they are thinking and saying privately. So time will tell how things pan out. Yet some outcomes seem certain—most notably, who will ultimately bear the cost of this military build-up. The exemption of military spending from the European Fiscal Compact is particularly significant. Along with the deficit limit, the agreement requires EU members to maintain public debt below 60 percent of GDP. Though only loosely enforced, the compact has long been cited to justify cuts to working-class payments, pensions and public services. Fiscal restraint, long demanded of governments, has now been relaxed—but exclusively for funds directed to arms manufacturers and related contractors. For everyone else, ever more “restraint” is on the cards. Maddox quoted an unnamed senior European minister speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February: “For 30 years, we have been taking money out of defence budgets and putting it into health and welfare. Now, we will have to reverse that”. In a [*Financial Times* column](https://www.ft.com/content/37053b2b-ccda-4ce3-a25d-f1d0f82e7989?ref=redflag.org.au) the following month, Janan Ganesh, a prominent British conservative commentator, asserted that, compared to rearmament, “all other priorities are secondary” and argued for Europe to become “a more militarised, less welfarist continent”. He added, “\[T\]he welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt”. With European military outlays expected to more than double in the next decade, some governments are relying on increased borrowing or creative accounting to meet their targets. However, borrowing will be only a stopgap if the 5 percent mark is to be met. Many governments hold debt-to-GDP ratios [well above the average](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w/2-22042025-bp?ref=redflag.org.au) (80 percent), and well above the level demanded by the Fiscal Compact. Greece (154 percent), Italy (135 percent), France (113 percent), Belgium (105 percent) and the UK (95 percent, albeit no longer part of the union) have already come under pressure to reduce spending to pay creditors. So even with fiscal rules being relaxed, the spectre of significant cuts to living standards looms. Berlin has one of the more “balanced” budgets and therefore more fiscal room than most governments. It is embarking on a €400 billion borrowing binge to increase military spending from €95 billion in 2025 to €162 billion in 2029\. Yet this month, the government announced that it will cut unemployment entitlements by between one and two billion euros, alongside reductions in rent support payments. “It should be called basic security and no longer citizens’ money”, [Chancellor Merz told Markus Preiss](https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/german-government-announces-unemployment-benefit-cuts?ref=redflag.org.au), a presenter on one of the country’s public broadcasters, last week. In France, Prime Minister François Bayrou has announced sweeping spending cuts—including public sector lay-offs, eliminating public holidays and freezing tax brackets and welfare payments next year—to reduce the budget by nearly €44 billion. He described the country’s debt as a “mortal danger” that threatens to “crush” France. Yet he insists that military spending is “sacrosanct”. Last Sunday, President Macron announced a €6.5 billion increase to the defence budget. While a few countries may have little interest in meeting a 5 percent military spending target—Spain has flatly refused to entertain the idea—the major European powers are moving decisively toward rearming and retooling their economies for geopolitical competition. If they succeed, the continent will increasingly come to resemble the United States: a society in which the military-industrial complex becomes economically overweight and increasingly politically influential. That makes European rearmament a global problem. So too the attacks on European welfare. If some of the wealthiest countries in the world begin treating social welfare as secondary—to be sacrificed in favour of militarisation—it could signal a global shift. Workers worldwide have often pointed to Europe as evidence that governments have the resources to provide for citizens. If the message coming from European capitals is that this can no longer be the case, ruling classes everywhere will point to the new European model as the future, and paint social welfare as the legacy of a bygone era. Workers and the poor will face the prospect not only of being left to fend for themselves in an increasingly dog-eat-dog world, but of being enlisted to kill each other in a 21st-century-style imperialist Hunger Games. ### Trump is creating ‘one big beautiful’ gulag state URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/trump-is-creating-one-big-beautiful-gulag-state/ Last updated: 2025-07-21T00:09:01.000Z The anti-migrant onslaught in the United States is being significantly expanded with a US$170 billion injection into the border and immigration regime. Even before this injection of funds, militarised raids have laid siege to Latino communities. Teams of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs have descended on farms. And it has become routine for heavily armed, masked goons to [abduct people](https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/07/10/what-goes-on-in-americas-immigration-courts?ref=redflag.org.au) from immigration hearings, leaving undocumented people deciding whether to risk arrest by showing up or risk becoming more of a “criminal” by missing their court date. President Donald Trump [had been stymied](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/us/politics/trump-immigration-deportations-arrests.html?ref=redflag.org.au) in his administration’s first months in his attempt to reach unprecedented levels of deportations. But the massive assault that started in Los Angeles in June began to turn the situation around, [breaking the record](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trumps-immigration-record-far-high-arrests-low-deportations-rcna217752?ref=redflag.org.au) for the most immigration arrests ever. Now, it looks like all systems go for the president’s fascistic agenda. **The program is real, not rhetoric** In April, [ICE Director Todd Lyons pledged](https://azmirror.com/2025/04/08/ice-director-envisions-amazon-like-mass-deportation-system-prime-but-with-human-beings/?ref=redflag.org.au) to make the deportation process “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings”. The administration has a target of 3,000 arrests per day, a tenfold increase on last year’s number. Trump’s “border tsar,” Tom Homan, in early July called for at least 7,000 arrests per day, which would amount to 2.5 million per year. Migration cops exhibit exceptional cruelty as they attempt to reach these massive government targets. Agents recently camped outside of a hospital for a week to re-apprehend a woman who suffered a health crisis caused by the initial raid, which left her “handcuffed and covered in vomit” for more than eight hours, [according to a report in the Los Angeles Public Press](https://lapublicpress.org/2025/07/ice-agents-glendale-hospital-waiting-to-arrest-a-patient/?ref=redflag.org.au). ICE leaders now [openly encourage](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/04/immigration-officials-increased-detentions-collateral-arrests?ref=redflag.org.au) agents to target as many migrants as possible—without warrants or even evidence of criminality. These “collateral” arrests of random people boost deportation numbers as much as any other. Since January, there has been a thirteen-fold increase in arrests of migrants with [no criminal history](https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/55654-people-now-detained-by-ice), and now almost two-thirds of all people in ICE custody reportedly have no criminal conviction. When a journalist pointed out these statistics, Homan got openly racist enough to suggest that a person’s “[physical appearance](https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/white-house-border-czar-suggests-ice-can-detain-people-based-physical-rcna218285?ref=redflag.org.au)” was a good enough reason for ICE to target them. And shamelessly, raids have expanded to workplaces and community hubs where they expect to find vulnerable undocumented people. There is a discrepancy between the number of arrests and the number of deportations because not all arrestees are legally allowed to be deported immediately. But the administration is trying to lower the bar by expanding classifications for expedited removal and [expediting the removal](https://www.nycbar.org/reports/the-trump-administrations-early-2025-changes-to-immigration-law/?ref=redflag.org.au) of those already in proceedings. It has increased the pool of officially targeted immigrants by [removing legal protections for more than 1](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-deportations-million-more-undocumented-legal-status-b2773394.html?ref=redflag.org.au) million people. It is also seeking more deals with underdeveloped countries to take payments in exchange for deportees who can’t be sent back to their countries of origin. With the massive cash injection to support these attacks, Trump’s stated goals of a million deportations per year start to seem more frighteningly possible than ever. **Immigrant prisons are reaching new depths of horror** The federal government has allocated an extra $45 billion to expand the country’s detention facilities. The prisons are packed with hundreds more people than they have beds for, sometimes at [triple their capacity](https://ig.ft.com/us-immigration-detention/?ref=redflag.org.au), and brutal new tent cities are being built. Among them is the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, where cages inside tents were thrown up in eight days to hold hundreds of migrants on a remote airstrip in the sweltering Florida Everglades. This effort has fuelled a boom in the for-profit immigrant prison system. Most of these for-profit prisons are incentivised to hold as many people for as long as they can, so they overcrowd facilities, deny medical care and keep sick people detained for as long as possible. The leading prison profiteers involved, Geo Group and Core Civic, have been raking in record profits from human misery and speculating on even better years to come. They also use part of their profits to lobby for policies that strengthen their position. Detained migrants accused of crossing the US-Mexico border illegally [will not be able to seek bond](https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/new-ice-policy-blocks-detained-migrants-from-seeking-bond-f557402a?ref=redflag.org.au) to be released while their case is processed through the courts. So now, in the months or years in which they are awaiting a decision on their status, they will be trapped in these immigration gulags while prison capitalists will rake in greater profits each day. **ICE is becoming more powerful** ICE is the primary agency responsible for the arrest, detention and deportation of immigrants within the US. The agency aims to hire 10,000 new agents, nearly tripling its force of arresting officers, and creating the potential for the spate of raids unleashed on Los Angeles to be repeated elsewhere at an even greater scale. This already brutal machine has been forged into a [ghoulish army](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/ice-secret-police-horrifying-team-trump-laughing-1235384250/?ref=redflag.org.au) of masked people snatchers under the Trump administration. They’ve become even more explicitly politically reactionary, using [Zionist hate groups](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/11/canary-mission-how-us-uses-a-hate-group-to-target-palestine-advocates?ref=redflag.org.au) to find lists of anti-genocide activists to brutalise. This injection of resources will make ICE the [best-funded](https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/09/politics/ice-cbp-police-los-angeles-immigration?ref=redflag.org.au)police agency in the US—more well resourced [than the vast majority](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-funding-world-militaries-b2790466.html?ref=redflag.org.au) of the world’s militaries. **The immigration machine is becoming embedded** One of the other morbid innovations of the Trump administration has been to coopt virtually [all federal policing agencies](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/ice-operation-trump-focus-immigration-reshape-federal-law-enforcement-rcna193494?ref=redflag.org.au) into the immigrant oppression machine. This builds on the legacy of cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and ICE that was established through the Bush and Obama eras in the 287(g) program. When agencies sign onto these programs, local police are deputised as immigration agents and act as a force multiplier for ICE. Since Trump came to office, these agreements have [increased more than sixfold](https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/immigration-challenges-implementing-the-one-big-beautiful-bill/?ref=redflag.org.au). More than 6,200 local cops are already deputised as immigration agents. The targeting of people for [minor infractions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfdA9nIDUfk&ref=redflag.org.au) in the hopes that they will be deportable has been an increasingly common pastime for local police, and more migrants are running out of space to breathe. Trump’s budget will [further entrench](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/07/12/trump-budget-bill-police-immigration-criminal-justice?ref=redflag.org.au) this cooperation: US$15 billion has been earmarked for local and state collaboration with immigration enforcement. This triples federal expenditure for these agencies. **People are still fighting** It’s not all bad news, however. Even before the explosion of immigration protests in June, there had been more immigrant rights protests in the [first five months](https://acleddata.com/2025/06/12/us-expert-comment-la-demonstrations-the-most-explosive-escalation-of-tensions-between-demonstrators-and-police-since-blm/?ref=redflag.org.au) of 2025 than in the previous five years. And despite the brutal crackdown that followed the Los Angeles protests, people are still confronting ICE outside [immigration courts](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/us/ice-immigration-protest-san-francisco.html?ref=redflag.org.au) and demonstrating against [proposed jails](https://www.wuft.org/politics/2025-07-14/protesters-rally-against-proposed-ice-detention-facility-in-clay-county?ref=redflag.org.au). In one instance, doctors and nurses [tried to protect](https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/ontario-medical-office-immigration-enforcement-arrest/?ref=redflag.org.au) vulnerable workers when they took shelter in a California medical clinic. An Economist/YouGov poll in July found that 52 percent of Americans think that Trump’s immigration policies are too harsh, up from 40 percent six months ago. A Gallup poll also found that the share of people wanting immigration reduced dropped from 55 percent last year to 30 percent today. So while only a minority of people are fighting against the government, the number of people hostile to Trump’s policies is growing. The administration has unleashed a brutal attack, and the future is frightening, but the situation remains volatile. What we witnessed last month in Los Angeles shows the potential for a fightback. Let’s hope the next fight is even bigger. ### The billionaires’ Mamdani freak-out and opportunities for the US left URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-billionaires-mamdani-freak-out-and-opportunities-for-the-us-left/ Last updated: 2025-07-21T00:04:30.000Z NEW YORK—There is justifiable delight across the US left over the super-rich’s panicked response to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City’s Democratic Party mayoral primary last month. Whatever the outcome of the general election in November, the result is good news for all those seeking to build an activist response to the hard right turn in US politics under Donald Trump, including socialists who reject voting for Democrats on principle. Activists have long focused on the issues that drove Mamdani’s win: a rent freeze, affordable housing, free buses, free child care for kids up to age 5, a higher minimum wage and progressive taxes. But Mamdani’s candidacy, driven by thousands of volunteers, highlights such efforts and their popular appeal in a city where the [richest 1 percent controls 44 percent of all wealth](https://www.gothamgazette.com/49-topics/economy/683-as-incomes-gap-widens-new-york-grows-apart?ref=redflag.org.au), a fourfold increase in three decades. Mamdani appealed to the [one in four people who live in poverty](https://robinhood.org/news/robin-hood-annual-poverty-tracker-report-shows-25-overall-poverty-rate-in-new-york-city-climbing-beyond-record-highs-observed-in-2022/?ref=redflag.org.au). He won big in immigrant communities and left-leaning neighbourhoods populated by young intellectuals and white-collar workers. This is partly because 52 percent of renters spend more than [30 percent of their income on housing](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys-rental-housing-market/?ref=redflag.org.au). Housing costs that hammer even the middle class mean minimal options for the poor: some [278,000 are on waiting lists](https://citylimits.org/wait-times-for-nycha-apartments-doubled-last-year-as-number-of-vacant-units-climb/?ref=redflag.org.au) for public housing. These are just some of the long lists of statistics that explain how Mamdani stunned the establishment by trouncing the scandal-ridden former governor, Andrew Cuomo. Hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb sounded the alarm to his cohort, [declaring on social media](https://x.com/DanielSLoeb1/status/1937800092255183096?ref=redflag.org.au), “It’s officially hot commie summer”. The Mamdani spectre haunting Loeb came even as President Donald Trump tried to drop the hammer on US urban politics by sending the Marines into Los Angeles to crack down on immigrant rights protesters. Mamdani and his supporters have imposed themselves on the Democratic establishment, including union leaders, who mostly endorsed Cuomo. But the New York state legislator, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, faces the same constraints as any Democratic politician. One need not look too far back in history to see how the party is a shock absorber for left-wing electoral efforts within its structures. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist who campaigned for president as a Democrat, became the Senate Finance Committee chair during the Biden administration, carrying the president’s agenda rather than pushing for the reforms he’d advocated on the campaign trail. Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another DSA candidate who burst onto the scene with a Democratic primary win over a New York powerbroker, has staked out mainstream Democratic positions and disappointed her socialist backers with her stance on Palestine, union rights and much else. Barack Obama, who crafted a progressive brand as a candidate in the 2008 presidential elections, made corporate handouts his top priority once in office, while workers suffered through the financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn. The disappointment of Obama’s successive administrations created the opening for Trump to be elected as a “populist” eight years later. Mamdani’s success on a more left-wing program and his real shot at becoming mayor of New York won’t make him immune from these pressures, which are especially acute for anyone aiming to run the headquarters of world capitalism. Nor will his success transform the character of the Democratic Party. What’s different is that Mamdani’s success defies the Democratic pattern of retreat. Most Democratic legislators have done nothing to challenge Trump’s power grab and the [passage of federal legislation](https://redflag.org.au/article/us-republicans-pass-the-most-damaging-laws-in-generations) that will strip health care from millions, increase the immigration crackdown to monstrous proportions, boost military spending and cut taxes for the wealthy. What’s even more remarkable is that the message of resistance to Trump is being carried by a youthful figure with a Muslim background who’s stood up for Palestine amid a witch-hunt across US politics and academia against anyone criticising Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Mamdani’s success has led to two approaches among New York’s financial oligarchs: discredit and destroy, or contain and coopt. It is hard to tell if those pursuing the first strategy are more outraged by Mamdani’s plan to raise their taxes or his support for Palestinian rights. As journalist [Hanif Abdurraqib noted](https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/zohran-mamdani-and-mahmoud-khalil-are-in-on-the-joke?utm%5Fcampaign=cm&utm%5Fsource=crm&utm%5Fbrand=tny&utm%5Fmailing=TNY%5FSubPersRec%5F020520&utm%5Fmedium=email&bxid=604695f06ea59138606fc186&cndid=64050397&hasha=8ecae643b2ebaec30f78f91ab7d16dce&hashb=30047e3e6b001e088c14e7e66134985210e5549f&hashc=4a0480735e1f1439ba1de333abd360ce5706083ba1ba8dc795f297bbf98757e7&utm%5Fterm=NYR%5FCYGNUS%5FPERSRECS), “far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer posted on X that Mamdani wanted to bring both Sharia law *and* communism to New York City”. But what matters to the bosses most is the threat to their money. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the dean of Wall Street bankers, said that Mamdani is “[more a Marxist than a socialist](https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/jamie-dimon-criticizes-zohran-mamdani-marxist-blasts-democrats-dei-push-big-hearts-little-brain?ref=redflag.org.au)”. Kathryn Wylde, head of a business council, the Partnership for New York City, [summed up the mood of her peers](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/business/dealbook/new-york-mayor-mamdani-cuomo-business.html?ref=redflag.org.au): “Terror is the feeling”. The Wall Street oligarchs aiming to discredit and destroy Mamdani assumed they had succeeded in permanently rewiring New York City politics in their interest. One of their own, Michael Bloomberg, boss of the media and technology empire that bears his name, served as mayor in the 2000s. During his tenure, the Democrat-controlled city council rewrote local laws to allow him to run for a third term as he focused on real estate development in the city, symbolised by multiple super-tall residential skyscrapers as homes for the world’s wealthiest. Bloomberg’s successor, liberal Democrat Bill de Blasio, served the following two terms, ushering in some reforms such as extended public preschool. But he failed to reverse Bloomberg’s reductions in public sector pay and benefits and tended to his own real estate allies as his popularity waned. De Blasio’s successor, Eric Adams, a Black former police captain who first gained a public profile by calling out police racism, took office in 2022 on a program prioritising law and order. He was backed by Bloomberg and other wealthy residents. Multiple scandals led to Adams’ indictment on federal charges. But Trump’s Justice Department dropped the case—an obvious exchange for the mayor’s support for Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown. Adams, who had no chance of winning the Democratic mayoral nomination, skipped the primary and created his own party from scratch. This created an opportunity for Cuomo to make a political comeback. Cuomo, who’d been forced to resign as governor following a series of sexual harassment allegations and a cover-up of COVID deaths in elder care facilities, immediately attracted tens of millions in campaign contributions. Bloomberg was again at the centre of the fundraising action. Now, money is again flowing to him for the general election—Cuomo created his own party in case he came up short in the primary. (Democratic politicians who denounce the left for attempting to build third parties have no hesitation in doing so when it serves their interests, as was the case in the [mayor’s race in the city of Buffalo](https://jacobin.com/2021/11/buffalo-new-york-india-walton-mayoral-election-byron-brown?ref=redflag.org.au) a few years ago.) If the wealthy Mamdani-haters can’t stop him from being elected, they will resort to Wall Street’s playbook from New York City’s fiscal crisis of 1975\. At that time, the federal government refused to provide financial aid, and the state governor and legislature put the city under the effective control of an unelected commission dominated by Wall Street bankers. The result: tens of thousands of layoffs of municipal workers and cuts to social services. The Trump-era version of such measures would be harsher still. The White House has already promised to punish New York if voters elect Mamdani. A Mamdani victory is a very real possibility. Cuomo’s failure in the primary and his uncertain-at-best prospects in the general election have led to a contain-and-coopt effort by some prominent business leaders, who scoff at the notion that Mamdani’s victory would drive the ultra-rich and Wall Street banks to move to Miami en masse. Dubbed [“Mamdani millionaires”](https://www.wsj.com/us-news/the-mamdani-millionaires-supporting-the-socialist-for-nyc-mayor-13c1636b?gaa%5Fat=eafs&gaa%5Fn=ASWzDAimg6O7LLbl5--Y6CUVLT5e2rL93grwVR3HHy04OvwKJx4B7LbQvMUVPjgAN%5F4%3D&gaa%5Fts=6879e38f&gaa%5Fsig=tZXMvFOJewE-nvDSGWa-lxCShixNREM4taLNlXB3RYB1oRRQDzYuHgj77KX3dgYihF6Uk6rZP76CX1mMD5tGkQ%3D%3D&ref=redflag.org.au) by the *Wall Street Journal,* this group has a broad range. It includes younger well-off professionals who nevertheless find New York intolerably expensive, are aghast at the intensifying social inequality and would prefer moderate forms. Others seeking to engage Mamdani include pragmatic deal makers who realise that blindly carrying out the program of the billionaires is courting a mass resistance far more threatening to their interests than Mamdani’s program. These liberal elites view Mamdani’s campaign promises as a milder version of the municipal program of the 1930s and 1940s under liberal Republican Fiorello La Guardia, who won elections by making concessions to a powerful labour movement and a big left dominated by the Communist Party. The result was a New York City-specific enhancement of the mid-twentieth-century welfare state. Mamdani’s program seeks to revive such programs—but in the context of a far weaker labour movement and dramatically smaller left. Given this balance of class forces, the business liberals calculate that a Mayor Mamdani could be curbed. Their plan is modelled on their approach to the 1989 election of David Dinkins, a DSA member and the first Black person elected mayor. Dinkins defeated a Democratic incumbent and Republican Rudolph Giuliani in large part because of widespread outrage over a series of racist murders. The corporations quietly strangled Dinkins’ agenda and funded a successful Giuliani comeback on a law-and-order, pro-business program. If victorious, Mamdani should expect similar treatment. If he does not accommodate these liberal ruling-class elements, they’ll join the hardliners in backing an opponent. And most business elites who pragmatically support or tolerate Mamdani today would back his opponents in a future election anyway, even if Mamdani were to make big concessions to them. With some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet on one side and a democratic socialist with many thousands of grassroots volunteers on the other, the left is under a lot of pressure to get involved in the electoral campaign. Yet it is not necessary to join Mamdani’s campaign and vote Democrat in order to take initiatives around the issues raised in this campaign. Rent freezes and housing costs are just one example: the nearly century-old tradition of rent control and stabilisation in New York will have to be revived as an activist movement for tenants’ rights, as will the struggle for a higher local minimum wage. Such fights can now be stepped up in New York and beyond, along with the ongoing struggles for Palestine and immigrant rights. Whatever the outcome of the New York mayoral race, a mass, activist left independent of the Democratic Party will be needed to win the social gains Mamdani’s supporters seek. *G. Stewart is a socialist and journalist in the US.* ### Rent freeze? No. Rent, freeze: Australia’s winter housing nightmare URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/rent-freeze-no-rent-freeze-australias-winter-housing-nightmare/ Last updated: 2025-07-20T23:55:22.000Z If you were to try to distinguish a house from a cave, you might ask: “Is it cold? Is it damp? Do fungi grow there?”. By this metric, some caves around the world would pass as houses, but many of our houses would pass as caves. *Cold homes in Australia: Questioning our assumptions about prevalence*, a [study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629623001846?ref=redflag.org.au)by the Australian Centre for Housing Research, monitored homes through the winter in 2022\. It found that during that time, 81 percent averaged below 18 degrees Celsius, the minimum “healthy” standard of indoor temperature set by the World Health Organization. The effects of cold on the human body can be deadly. Colder temperatures cause blood vessels to constrict to reduce heat loss, increasing blood pressure and raising your risk of heart disease and strokes. Likewise, cold, dry air can narrow your airways, making chronic bronchitis, emphysema and asthma attacks more likely. A report by the University of Melbourne Professor Rebecca Bentley, published in 2024 with the headline “Your cold house is bad for your mental health” also found that those who cannot afford to keep their homes warm are 49 percent more likely to report depression or anxiety. The cold is more deadly in Australia than it is in Arctic-straddling Sweden. Research published in the *Lancet* in 2015, “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”, found that 6.5 percent of all deaths in Australia are at least partly attributable to cold weather, almost twice Sweden’s 3.7 percent. Thousands are dying from the cold, and the danger doesn’t end there. Asthma Australia surveyed 5,041 people in 2022, finding in its report [*Homes, Health and Asthma in Australia*](https://asthma.org.au/about-us/advocacy/housing/?ref=redflag.org.au) that one in three people have mould in their homes, while one in two have problems with either mould or dampness (water damage, condensation, water leaks or flooding). Black mould spores can cause asthma attacks, allergic reactions and immune system disorders. One couple recently interview by the *Sydney Morning Herald* explained that the mould in their flat made them sick for months with [vertigo and cyclical vomiting](https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-toxic-blooms-hiding-in-many-of-our-homes-and-a-new-way-to-find-them-20250526-p5m29i.html?ref=redflag.org.au). This isn’t just a problem in old, poorly ventilated homes. The 2015 Nationwide Condensation Survey found that more than 40 percent of new buildings had problems with condensation and mould. So why are our houses so crap? It certainly isn’t because we don’t know better. Building shelters is something human beings have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. The cumulative effort of countless generations struggling against the elements has taken us from animal skins to adobe bricks to heaters and fibreglass insulation. The wind catchers used in Iran today—ingenious chimneys that use basic physics to displace hot air inside a home and replace it with cool air—date back thousands of years, while ancient Roman villas commonly used [hypocausts](https://www.britannica.com/technology/hypocaust?ref=redflag.org.au) that acted as a system of underfloor central heating. The gap between the kind of housing we’re forced to endure and what science makes possible is immense. Australia’s Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) rates houses out of ten stars. A 10-star home is one that remains comfortable all year with little or no heating or cooling, while a 0-star home provides almost no protection from the outside climate at all. In a 2022 [piece in the *Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/13/freezing-indoors-thats-because-australian-homes-are-closer-to-tents-than-insulated-eco-buildings?ref=redflag.org.au), “Freezing indoors? That’s because Australian homes are closer to tents than insulated eco-buildings”, the head of the University of New South Wales School of the Built Environment, Phillip Oldfield, calculated the amount of power that differently rated homes would require to be kept at a comfortable temperature. “If \[a house\] received a 2-star NatHERS rating”, he wrote, “it would need 27,349kWh’s of electricity. If we assume $0.20/kWh, the cost would be $5,470 per year. A 6-star home would require 8,249kWh and cost $1,650, while a 10-star home would need only 100 kWh, costing a mere $20 a year.” The average Australian home has a NatHERS rating of just 1.8 stars. Although new buildings and major renovations are now required to meet a 7-star rating (and most do not go above this minimum), 70 percent of all homes were built *before* national energy efficiency standards were introduced in 2003\. There is no national standard for that 70 percent, which includes most of the properties leased out by landlords today. The only state requirements are in Victoria and the ACT—which now require landlords to install ceiling insulation (i.e. the absolute bare minimum). Paying for proper insulation and double-glazed windows would eat into the profits made by property hoarders and developers. So it doesn’t happen. Instead they pass on the costs to those who end up living in their houses, who face the terrible choice: pay thousands each year to warm their homes, or suffer through the winter cold and the damaging consequences for their health. For most people, this isn’t a real choice. They can’t afford to stay warm. Finder’s [August 2024](https://www.finder.com.au/news/heating-hardship-winter-2024?ref=redflag.org.au) *Consumer Sentiment Tracker* found, based on a survey of 1,049 respondents, that one in two Australians had gone cold to avoid a high energy bill, with 36 percent avoiding using heating as often as possible, and 13 percent going cold all the time. It doesn’t have to be this way. Double-glazed windows are the norm throughout much of Europe, where triple-glazed windows are becoming common. We could raise the minimum NatHERS rating to 9 or 10 stars, reducing the need for heating and air conditioning to a bare minimum. All houses could be required to meet this standard before being leased or sold, and we could tax property hoarders and developers to subsidise those who own only a home or two to do so. We could mandate new building designs to feature cross-ventilation, so that we can cool our houses at night when it’s hot and avoid the build-up of condensation. We could mandate mechanical ventilation for old homes. With high standards of insulation, we could create houses that stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer, something that will be increasingly important as the climate crisis worsens. Houses where we can live with dignity are not beyond the reach of science, or our resources. They are only beyond the reach of our for-profit housing system. ### Australia’s history with slavery URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/australias-history-with-slavery/ Last updated: 2025-07-20T23:54:07.000Z A recent *Red Flag* article (“[Labor’s PALM scheme is modern slavery](https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-palm-scheme-is-modern-slavery)”, by Priya De) outlines the PALM scheme, a policy facilitating agricultural production based on nearly slave conditions for many immigrant labourers. This is far from the only instance of unfree labour in Australian history. The use of highly exploited, unfree labour in Queensland is as old as the state and former colony itself. From the mid-1860s until 1906, the indentured labour trade, also known as “blackbirding”, was one of many foundational crimes in the history of early White Australia. In his 2006 doctoral thesis, [*The making of White Australia*](https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/items/0d27c6fe-7a8c-4b84-b84e-8a306366e82e?ref=redflag.org.au), historian Phil Griffiths writes that colonial planners and agriculturalists “were convinced of the racist myth that ‘white men’ could not safely do manual labour in tropical climates”. The high instances of disease and exhaustion, owing to the arduous work of plantation production, would be too high a barrier for white farmhands, they believed. A better acclimatised labour force appeared as the logical alternative: Pacific Islanders. There was an economic logic to this racist idea. Islander labour, especially if indentured, was far cheaper than hiring whites. Workers from Vanuatu, Kanaky (New Caledonia) and Papua New Guinea, as well as some from Indonesia, Malaysia and south Asia, were brought to Queensland in the tens of thousands. The Queensland government estimates that, of the approximately 65,000 brought to Australia, one-third died on plantations, not including those killed during “recruitment” and transport. Three-year, locked-in contracts with an employer bound Islander workers. They were to be paid at the end of their contract, and only then were they allowed to find employment elsewhere. Workers performed a range of tasks, predominantly on sugar plantations. They cultivated fields, planted sugarcane, cut and harvested, refined and milled. The workers also maintained the plantations and performed laborious tasks such as fencing and tree felling. Domestic tasks were often undertaken by women workers, who were responsible for sustaining the workforce as well as the landlords and plantation owners. Living conditions were squalid: cramped living quarters, minimal leisure time and little access to the world beyond the plantation. Workers faced harsh restrictions, often being confined socially and financially to the plantations and beaten if “out of line”. In her book *Workers in Bondage*, Kay Saunders writes about two Islanders, nicknamed Tom and Dick, who received rations of maize meal and pollard, which is usually fed to animals, instead of flour. “When we spoke to Captain Whish about it he said ‘maize meal is good enough for blackfellows, flour for white men”, one of the Islanders is quoted as saying. In his 1993 book *Cane and Labour*, Adrian Graves notes that resistance was not uncommon, often by feigning sickness, working extra slowly and, occasionally, going on strike. However, when bosses triumphed, workers faced the lash. Indentured labour was chosen because it enabled the Queensland sugar industry, and the colonial economy more broadly, to remain profitable and competitive with its rivals in southern Asia and elsewhere within the British Empire. While economic competition initially led to the demand for cheap labour, it later drove technical changes in the industry, which, from the 1880s, ultimately contributed to the abolition of indentured contracts. For instance, advances in milling resulted in the rise of small-farm production and reduced the demand for labour as the industry became more capital intensive. Importantly, there were also political factors behind the abolition. Indenture had always been controversial within liberal ruling class circles. And the mistreatment of Islander workers sometimes sparked outrage. In 1885, the *Brisbane Courier* deemed the trade a “scandal to the Empire ... The labour trade must cease”. Beyond moral objections, liberal opposition was also motivated by a desire for social stability and economic development. By the 1890s, with federation around the corner, the existence of a large, “backward” tropical plantation economy in the north of the continent was a sore point for leading parliamentarians and businesspeople who wanted Australia to develop a modern, industrialised economy. Brisbane’s *The Week*, a business journal, accused supporters of indenture of trying “to build up an aristocracy on a basis of cheap labour”. A racially homogeneous society was considered essential to establishing a new federal government and a united Australia. A nationalism founded on Anglo-identification was created to instil fears of racial disloyalty from Asian and Islander populations, and to unite the white population. By 1901, indentured labourers, brought to Australia by racist employers for exploitation, were being deported under the White Australia policy. Between Federation and 1906, roughly 7,500 workers were shipped back to the Pacific, many to islands they or their families had not come from. As Labor continues to promote the exploitation of Islander workers today, we must not forget how the PALM scheme echoes one of Australia’s founding colonial crimes. ### Historic strikes at Brisbane’s Star Casino URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/historic-strikes-at-brisbanes-star-casino/ Last updated: 2025-07-14T00:57:45.000Z Workers at the Star Brisbane made history on 4 July, striking for the first time in the casino’s history and for the first time in an Australian casino in sixteen years. Star employees are the worst-paid casino workers in the country. They walked out after the company offered a new contract that would leave them even worse off and cut their Sunday penalty rates. During the strike, workers voted to strike again during the State of Origin decider on 9 July and again during a poker tournament later that week. The State of Origin strike was a huge success, and the tournament was subsequently cancelled, a big win for the workers. Workers walked off the job at 6pm on 4 July and were met by hundreds of cheering supporters. “This is a company that always manages to find millions and millions of dollars in bonuses for the executives, but when it comes to paying us, they’re suddenly going broke. Well, I think they’re full of it”, said Kaine Kennedy, a delegate with the United Workers Union, addressing the assembled workers and supporters. A group of women who have been with the company for many years as cleaners and cashiers were the angriest, waving their union flags and breaking out into chants: “Sunday rates! Sunday rates!” One made a speech: “I’ve been here for 30 years, and this is the worst agreement that we’ve ever had. We need to keep our Sunday rates due to the cost of living and for our wellbeing and mental health. We work twice as hard on the weekends”. Another told *Red Flag*: “All the tables and pits are closed! They’re going to lose so much!” Workers say the cleaners have to do the work of two or three people and are denied a sewage allowance after cleaning up shit. Apparently, it’s too hard for the Star to pay fair wages to the workers—but the CEO of Star Entertainment gets a $10 million salary package. It’s not just Star workers getting a crap deal. It’s a similar story all across Australia. Bosses have unchecked power at work and do whatever they think they can get away with, all to make more money. But when workers strike, that begins to change. As Kaine put it: “Everywhere you look in Australia, there’s a boss trying to save a couple bucks by screwing over their workers. That’s why we need more of this. We need more workers standing together, fighting back and saying we’re not going to take it. We’re not going to let you make another cent until you pay us what we deserve.” ### The antisemitism report is another pro-genocide stunt from Labor URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-antisemitism-report-is-another-pro-genocide-stunt-from-labor/ Last updated: 2025-07-13T02:40:48.000Z Nobody is surprised that Jillian Segal’s blueprint for “combating antisemitism” is a blueprint for authoritarianism [based on a pack of lies](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-great-antisemitism-con-job). We’ve seen this time and time again. People who are themselves deeply, passionately racist—like the US right-wingers who dreamed about opening fire on Black Lives Matter protesters, or the European post-fascists whose parties were founded by SS officers and Holocaust deniers—often claim to be outraged by antisemitism. Not so outraged that they will ever try to build coalitions against fascism, support anti-racist politics, or consider the deeper forces that give rise to racist ideas and conspiracy theories. But just outraged enough to outlaw dissent against Western foreign policy, ban protests and deport oppositionists. Segal, the federal government’s special envoy to combat antisemitism (and reportedly one of [the most significant financial contributors](https://theklaxon.com.au/jillian-segal-and-husband-funding-far-right-group-advance/?ref=redflag.org.au) to the right-wing racist lobby group Advance Australia) is no different from Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or indeed the quasi-fascist government of Israel itself: hardcore defenders and perpetrators of racist oppression who will stoop to any low, and tell any lie, to crush dissent. But this isn’t just about the extreme right. Segal herself might have the politics of Peter Dutton. But the centre-left are the true masters of using authoritarian methods backed by slanderous lies to silence dissent. In Britain, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has banned the nonviolent group Palestine Action and made it a criminal offence to express sympathy for them. European liberal governments—such as the purportedly enlightened centre-liberals around French President Emmanuel Macron and the various German governments who purport to have learned the lessons of the Holocaust—have long equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, banned pro-Palestine protests and slogans, and established new norms of repression in dealing with supporters of Palestine. And here in Australia, it’s Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party who gave Segal the most august title of “envoy”, empowered her to issue her deranged report, and who now will execute whatever repressive measures he chooses to draw from her recommendations. While the centre-left parties around the world focus their fire on dissent, they do nothing serious to challenge the real sources of antisemitic ideas: the fascist-friendly ultra-nationalist movements and figures of the radicalising global right. Trump, Musk, and their co-thinkers can posture as the saviours of Western civilisation; Albanese can grandstand as the champion of social cohesion and multiculturalism. All agree that the genocide of the Palestinians can go unchecked, that the complicity of the West should be covered up, and that those who resist should be persecuted with extreme prejudice. While Segal—who considers wearing a *keffiyeh* to be an act of anti-Jewish racism—demands a crackdown on dissent, let’s not forget the Palestinians themselves: starving and dispossessed; maimed, bombed and shot as they queue for food and medicine; incinerated in their hospitals; mocked by their murderers. By facilitating the crushing of dissent, Albanese and his colleagues have once more made themselves complicit in this ongoing genocide. No matter how much it claims to abhor racism, Labor—like centre-left parties throughout the imperialist West—has few limits when it comes defending the crimes of Australia’s military allies and business partners, no matter how racist the politics of those partners, no matter how genocidal the acts of those allies. For the Western alliance, authoritarianism and mass murder are business as usual. Segal’s report is just part of the cover-up. ### Residents battle dust pollution in Adelaide’s south URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/residents-battle-dust-pollution-in-adelaides-south/ Last updated: 2025-07-06T03:07:20.000Z Homes blanketed with dust. People cannot open windows and enjoy fresh air or sit outside during summer. They wake up and taste dust in their mouth. Pavers, roofs, gutters, cars and gardens must be constantly cleaned. This is life for many residents in Sellicks Beach, 45 minutes’ drive south of Adelaide. For much of the year, locals live under a cloud of dust from the Sellicks Hill Quarry. The quarry is owned by Adbri, Australia’s second-largest cement producer. Dust emissions have been a source of complaints for more than a decade, but residents say that the problem has become worse following a recent expansion. “They’ve increased the volume of business exponentially, and the volume of dust is now totally unbearable”, Mike von Berg, a local resident, told *A Current Affair*. The nuisance of daily cleaning is bad enough. But health concerns are also evident. Many residents report chronic coughing and respiratory issues. Hazel, an anti-dust campaigner, has developed blepharitis, an eye condition, which she attributes to quarry dust. “My family has moved away from Sellicks because they believed the dust was causing health problems”, she told *Red Flag.* Residents also say that they have found silica particles in the dust. When inhaled, silica can cause lung disease and cancer. “We live in a beautiful location”, said Helen, another local. “And the thought that it could be toxic is horrifying.” In March, 150 residents attended an angry meeting and called on health authorities to conduct comprehensive and targeted research to prove that the dust contains no respirable levels of silica. Premier Peter Malinauskas has claimed that Adbri is subject to “severe” environmental regulations. Since 2016, the company has been required to develop a dust management plan and reduce emissions. Despite government reassurances, not enough is being done. For years, locals have documented the quarry violating regulations. In 2018, Adbri was fined for failing to comply with dust mitigation measures. In February, shortly after it approved a revised dust management plan, the Environmental Protection Authority issued a notice for excessive dust production. For Helen, more than “a little slap on the wrist” is needed to counter company negligence. Following community pressure, Adbri has committed to a potentially stricter dust management plan. It remains unclear whether this will lead to ongoing improvements. Among political leaders, concerns have fallen on deaf ears. The state Labor government hopes to construct 1,700 homes on land just 500 metres from the quarry. “We are not wanting the quarry to close down; we just want them to control the dust that they blow down over us”, Helen told *Red Flag*. “It is a basic human right to live in a clean environment and breathe clean air.” ### US Republicans pass the most damaging laws in generations URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/us-republicans-pass-the-most-damaging-laws-in-generations/ Last updated: 2025-07-06T03:06:37.000Z Donald Trump ruined everyone’s Fourth of July holiday by signing what he so fatuously called the “One Big Beautiful Bill”. It may be the single most damaging piece of legislation signed into law since: who knows? Ronald Reagan’s first budget in 1981, which marked a major conservative turn in US social and economic policy, seems moderate by comparison. Comparisons to other historically racist, repressive and anti-immigrant laws of the past—the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, the 1924 Immigration Act or even the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—are not out of the question. For such a radical change in social and economic policy, it barely squeaked by. Vice President J.D. Vance had to break a 50-50 tie in the Senate to pass it. And it received 218 votes in the House of Representatives, a four-vote majority in the 435-member chamber. Many horrible things have been shoehorned into its nearly 1,000 pages, as Republicans who voted for it without reading it will discover. And while the GOP members might be pleasantly surprised by what they find, everyone else will be horrified. Three major impacts of this big, ugly mess are clearly discernible from the details. **The rich are made richer.** The bill permanently extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that were tilted toward the rich. According to [an estimate from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School](https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/7/1/senate-reconciliation-bill-budget-economic-and-distributional-effects?ref=redflag.org.au), the richest 0.1 percent of households will, on average, be more than $300,000 better off in 2027. While the tax part of this bill preserves the status quo, it also exempts larger fortunes from estate taxes and increases the deductability from federal taxation of the amount of money taxpayers pay in state and local taxes. The “pro-working class” tax reforms that Trump and the Republicans will tout—no taxes on tips, added tax deductions for seniors 65 and over, and no taxes on overtime earnings—[are heavily circumscribed and temporary](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/03/temporary-tax-breaks-in-trumps-big-beautiful-bill.html?ref=redflag.org.au). All of them will disappear by 2028. Even if one accepted the standard “trickle-down” argument that cutting taxes on the rich leads to a boom in investment and growth, it’s hard to see how largely preserving the status quo will provide “rocket fuel” for the economy, [as Illinois Republican Representative Darren LaHood put it](https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/06/02/rep-darin-lahood-on-reconciliation-bill-this-is-going-to-be-rocket-fuel-for-the-economy.html?ref=redflag.org.au). Even more fanciful is the notion that the unleashed economic growth will lower the government’s budget deficit and allow the tax cut to “pay for itself”. This has become an article of Republican faith approaching almost religious status, [despite 50 years of empirical evidence to the contrary](https://www.crfb.org/papers/tax-cuts-dont-pay-themselves?ref=redflag.org.au). But Republicans have sustained their strategic goal of starving the government of funds and putting the onus on a future Democratic administration to raise taxes to cover government spending. **The poor are made poorer.** To get the funds to make the 2017 tax rates permanent, to increase the military budget to more than $1 trillion for the first time and to establish a vast deportation machine, Trump and the Republicans are stealing from the poor. The University of Pennsylvania analysis suggests that the poorest 20 percent of households will endure a 7.4 percent decline in income by 2033. Over the next decade, the bill cuts almost $1 trillion from Medicaid (medical insurance for low-income people) and about $500 billion each from Medicare (medical insurance for the elderly) and food assistance. This is the single largest cut ever to the already thin social safety net. [As Sasha Abramsky, writing in ](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/conservative-lawbreakers-bigger-problem/?ref=redflag.org.au)the[*Nation*, put it:](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/conservative-lawbreakers-bigger-problem/?ref=redflag.org.au) “If you thought the safety net systems fought for, and secured, during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, were a mainstay of modern society, think again. If you thought that after a decade-plus of sparring, the increased healthcare coverage generated by the Affordable Care Act was now a generally accepted part of the social fabric, you were, it appears, sorely mistaken.” Cuts to Medicaid will cost 12-17 million people their health insurance, depending on which estimate is more accurate. About 3 million will lose access to food assistance. But the effects go far beyond those cuts. Safety net hospitals, especially those in rural areas, will cut services and jobs, if not close altogether. Cuts to subsidies for Affordable Care Act insurance will drive up out-of-pocket expenses. Soon, everyone’s health insurance will cost more and cover less. This has nothing to do with rooting out “waste and fraud” or securing these programs for the future, as Republicans claim. Many of them have lied through their teeth, saying that the act doesn’t cut Medicaid, even though the black-and-white of the bill said so. The key point is that this represents, in crystallised view, the political right’s full agenda: tax cuts for the rich, entitlement cuts for the poor and the showering of money on the military and other repressive apparatuses of the state. “They pushed right up to the limit of what their budget could do and still hold enough votes to win a majority”,[ the liberal writer Paul Waldman explains](https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/why-they-did-it). “And with every immigrant parent torn from their children’s arms, every family that loses their health coverage, every young person who decides to forego college, every rural health clinic that shuts down, every research grant that gets revoked, every solar energy project that gets dismantled, they can sit back, smile, and say, ‘This is why we came to Washington. No matter what happens tomorrow, it was worth it’.” **Anti-immigrant repression will be turbocharged.** One of this package’s biggest “winners” is the immigration enforcement apparatus, which will receive more than $170 billion over the next four years. To put it in perspective, the current budget for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency—whose masked agents are kidnapping people off street corners and from workplaces—is just under $10 billion. The amount of money devoted to this arrest/detention/deportation operation will be more [than is allocated to other federal agencies like the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons—even the US Marine Corps](https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/congress-throws-more-money-at-removing-immigrants-than-most-countries-spend-on-their-armies?ref=redflag.org.au). The sort of operation that ICE conducted in Los Angeles earlier this year will be expanded in every major city in the country simultaneously. And with an unaccountable, militarised police force operating nationwide, no-one—including US citizens—will be safe. The federal government has been authorised to spend more than $45 billion to build a network of detention facilities like Florida’s [Alligator Alcatraz](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/07/03/where-is-alligator-alcatraz-detainees-escaped-immigration-facility-nj/84457477007/?ref=redflag.org.au), which will mostly house people who are not charged with a crime, but who are slated for deportation. The assault on the social fabric and civil liberties that is coming will be unprecedented since the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Because most of these facilities will be privately operated and crash-built, the opportunities for corruption will be limitless. Talk about “waste, fraud and abuse”! They could even be a source of [forced labour for industries such as farming and construction](https://sentientmedia.org/people-in-ice-detention-forced-to-work/?ref=redflag.org.au) that depend on immigrant workers. With states and localities losing Medicaid, one of the largest federal sources of local and state budgets, they will be hard pressed to resist the one source of federal money where the spigot is fully open—that is, the billions that will be available to sign up local law enforcement as a “force multiplier” for ICE. And if rural hospitals close down, the GOP is hoping that ICE prisons will provide substitute [jobs that will entrench them in local political economies for the foreseeable future](https://boltsmag.org/how-the-gop-megabill-would-turbocharge-local-immigration-enforcement/?ref=redflag.org.au). For now, the “big beautiful bill” is, by most reliable measures of public opinion, extremely unpopular. In fact, it is the second most unpopular bill considered in Congress since the 1990s (second to Trump’s 2017 attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act), [according to data journalist G. Elliott Morris](https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/one-big-unpopular-bill?ref=redflag.org.au). The party-line vote, in which no Democrats in either the House of Representatives or the Senate voted for it, means that the GOP owns it and its consequences. The Democrats expect its unpopularity and adverse effects will help them win one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. But November 2026 is a long way off. Moreover, Democrats don’t have clean hands. Their messaging on the bill focused on how it would slash Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Fair enough. But in 2023 and 2024, in an effort to restore “normalcy” after the COVID pandemic, the Biden administration ended the expansion of Medicaid, tossing [16 million people from the program](https://www.kff.org/report-section/medicaid-enrollment-and-unwinding-tracker-enrollment-data/?ref=redflag.org.au). This was one of the contributing factors to [Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump in the 2024 election](https://www.crisesnotes.com/one-election-takeaway-voters-hate-temporary-safety-nets/?ref=redflag.org.au). Democrats were also reluctant to condemn the expansion of ICE and its gulag. Again, that’s to be expected from a party that has spent the last few years running away from any pro-immigration stance. Forty-eight House Democrats and 12 Democratic senators voted with the Republicans for the Laken Riley Act, which is helping ICE to round people up, and 75 of them [supported a resolution expressing “gratitude” to ICE](https://www.newsweek.com/75-democrats-house-antisemitism-resolution-ice-gratitude-2083177?ref=redflag.org.au). All of this means that the Democrats, the courts, and other institutions are not coming to save us. In fact, many of them are being coerced or corrupted into accepting Trump’s austere authoritarianism as the new normal. The labour and social movements can only depend on ourselves to prevent the US’s further slide into the abyss. \---------- Lance Selfa is the author of [*The Democrats: A Critical History*](https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920?ref=redflag.org.au) (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of [*US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality*](https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534?ref=redflag.org.au) (Haymarket, 2017). He lives in Chicago. ### Won’t somebody think of poor Israel? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/wont-somebody-think-of-poor-israel/ Last updated: 2025-07-06T03:05:00.000Z Israel has spent the past two years on a relentless, extremely violent, calculated rampage of slaughter and destruction throughout the Middle East. And yet, we are still told, it is the real victim. The supposedly ever-present existential threat faced by Israel has been a core part of the ideological justification for every Israeli atrocity since the creation of the state in 1948\. Supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, [from President Isaac Herzog down](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/27/israel-gaza-propaganda?ref=redflag.org.au), claim that every Palestinian, including children, is a legitimate target to be expelled or killed, because every Gazan is either a current or future “terrorist”. Recently, Israeli Prime Minister and wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Iran was imminently going to acquire nuclear weapons and use them on Israel in a “nuclear holocaust”—the same claim he has been making for more than 30 years. Of course, the only nuclear-armed states that actually bombed anyone were Israel and the US, which killed nearly 1,000 Iranians in 12 days of strikes. The mainstream media and politicians’ constant attempts to spin the story that Israel is the victim, the underdog, the state “defending itself”, are so out of touch with reality that they are becoming increasingly desperate and farcical. The UK Labour government is perhaps leading the Western world into this Orwellian abyss by its charging of the band Kneecap with terrorism offences due to their support for the Palestinian people, its attempts to censor artists at the Glastonbury music festival and now its proscription of non-violent protest group Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation, all while the UK continues to arm and support Israel’s genocidal terror in Gaza. But if you were to listen to the UK political establishment, you’d think it was the IDF that was the victim. Welcome to the upside-down world of 2025, where the daily mass murder and starvation of children is fine and normal, but speaking against that is extremism, violence and hate speech. Israel is the dominant military power in the Middle East, a position considerably strengthened in recent years. It is the only nuclear-armed power in the region, and is thought to have as many as 400 nuclear warheads. It is backed to the hilt, armed and given favourable intelligence-sharing and economic deals by all the Western imperialist powers, while also enjoying friendly relations and trade deals with other major powers like China, Russia and India. The US State Department boasts: “Since its founding in 1948, the United States has provided Israel with over $130 billion in bilateral assistance ...This assistance has helped transform the Israel Defense Forces into one of the world’s most capable, effective militaries and turned the Israeli military industry and technology sector into one of the largest exporters of military capabilities worldwide”. Israel has, since October 2023, laid waste to Gaza, dropping the equivalent of six nuclear weapons’ worth of explosives on the tiny enclave, while also bombing Yemen, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter two which it also invaded and continues to occupy. Much of this carnage has been bankrolled by the US, with more than US$30 billion delivered in aid and other financial and military assistance packages in the past two years. Since its creation, Israel has begun wars with every one of its neighbours, some on multiple occasions. Israel has turned Gaza into a killing field, where soldiers are [ordered to shoot](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-soldiers-ordered-to-shoot-deliberately-at-unarmed-gazans-waiting-for-humanitarian-aid/00000197-ad8e-de01-a39f-ffbe33780000?ref=redflag.org.au) starving civilians seeking aid. Many Israeli soldiers don’t need orders; they understand their mission is genocide, and they [shoot and torture](https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-12-23/ty-article-opinion/.premium/when-you-enter-gaza-you-are-god-inside-the-minds-of-idf-soldiers-who-commit-war-crimes/00000193-f2a4-dc18-a3db-fee62b540000?ref=redflag.org.au) Palestinians for fun, while taking selfies, singing and dancing, in line with their extreme ethno-nationalist ideology, in which they are god’s chosen people and the Palestinians are not even human beings. Within the rest of the historic land of Palestine, Israel has constructed a suffocating apparatus of military occupation and control, built on the principles of apartheid, exclusion, constant surveillance, checkpoints, mass incarceration, torture, terror, impoverishment and humiliation of the Palestinian population. All this is conducted with cutting-edge technology and in conjunction with the collaborationist Palestinian Authority. Israel’s ambition for the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank, or within what is now called Israel, is ultimately similar to Gaza: expulsion, death and the complete destruction of any Palestinian identity. The state of Israel is manifestly not under any current existential threat. It is Israel that *is* the existential threat: to Palestinians and millions of others in the region. Despite the absurdity of the claim, it persists because the powerful repeat it over and over again, without regard for evidence. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently explained why: “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us”. He doesn’t mean the billions of people, including the majority of Germans, who oppose Israel’s rampage, but the billionaires, bureaucrats and military chiefs who run the system. For them, seeing their Middle East proxy wage death and destruction is satisfying proof of a good investment. ### Class struggle unionism in the USA: an interview with Joe Burns URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/class-struggle-unionism-in-the-usa-an-interview-with-joe-burns/ Last updated: 2025-07-06T03:03:02.000Z Donald Trump is on a rampage against workers in the United States. According to the 2025 Global Rights Index, published by the International Trade Union Confederation, the world’s largest trade union federation, the new administration has “taken a wrecking ball to the collective labour rights of workers”. Trump has stripped protections and bargaining rights for tens of thousands of public sector workers and paralysed the National Labor Relations Board, which protects employees’ rights to organise and join unions. And he’s just getting started. The US union movement is historically weak. Strike rates remain at decades-long lows. Union density has steadily declined from a peak of 35 percent in 1954, recording a new low in every decade since then. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 10 percent of all workers are now in unions. This obviously poses challenges for the workers’ movement, particularly for workers who want to organise against Trump’s reactionary agenda. *Red Flag*’s Ryan Stanton spoke to Joe Burns—a labour lawyer, union activist and bargaining negotiator since the 1990s—about where the US union movement has gone wrong and what needs to change. Burns recently completed negotiations for 27,000 United Airlines employees and Association of Flight Attendants members. He has written three books on labour organising: [*Strike Back*](https://www.igpub.com/strike-back/?ref=redflag.org.au), [*Reviving the Strike*](https://www.amazon.com.au/Reviving-Strike-Working-Transform-America/dp/1935439243?ref=redflag.org.au)*,* and [*Class Struggle Unionism*](https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/class-struggle-unionism?ref=redflag.org.au). \-------------------- **What is the state of the American labour movement in the era of Donald Trump?** It’s obviously a difficult period with Trump in office. He has unleashed attacks on immigrant workers and workers in the federal government. But the problem is much bigger than just Trump. The United States has seen a decline in the percentage of workers who belong to trade unions. Only six out of 100 private sector workers now belong to unions. While there are flashes of success here and there, the reality is that the labour movement has been stuck for decades. This is in large part because we’ve abandoned the principles of class struggle unionism. We put a lot of money into organising, but we’ve been unable to convince workers to join our weak and ineffective unions. We were told that when Democrats like Biden got in and we had a new NLRB \[National Labor Relations Board\], things would be different. But the similarities between presidential administrations over the last few decades outweigh the differences. The decline in union membership has continued at an equal rate under both Republicans and Democrats. All the Democrats have done is change some rules around the margins. We’re not going to revive the labour movement this way. The union reform movement and the left within the labour movement are the weakest that I’ve seen in decades. Certain sectors of the economy and certain states are better organised, but I think the crisis is pretty much throughout the labour movement in the entire country. There are a lot of fuzzy ideas about teaching organising approaches, as if that’s our problem. We really need a complete revamp of approach. Labour’s decline is not fundamentally a product of one party or another—they are both capitalist parties. It reflects a deeper problem with the labour movement. What we really lack are the principles of class struggle unionism and how we fight both inside and outside of our unions to take on the capitalist class. And I think it starts with the left of the labour movement coming to grips with the crisis that we face and what it’s going to take to move forward. That’s the fundamental problem. My first two books focused on reviving the strike in both the public and private sectors. My most recent book, *Class Struggle Unionism*, focuses on the internal problems within the labour movement, including our inability to confront the shifting regimes of labour law, the legal restrictions on the right to strike, worker self-activity and so on. Although my knowledge of the Australian union movement is somewhat limited, I do try to follow things over there and it seems that both union movements face similar problems. **How have the unions approached the Trump administration?** Well, obviously Trump is doing this sort of right-wing populism thing. He’s certainly won over a base with his tariffs and protectionism, which have an appeal to auto workers and steelworkers, who have been decimated by decades of neoliberal attacks and the elimination of protections for workers. Many liberal labour leaders are aghast that Sean Fain from the UAW \[United Auto Workers\] and others support the tariffs. However, we spent a lot of the 1990s fighting against the North American Free Trade Agreement and other free trade agreements that were geared towards allowing corporations to shift manufacturing jobs overseas without regard for workers. These agreements allow capitalists to exploit workers around the world, while eroding manufacturing unionism. So, it’s not surprising to me that some of these unions support tariffs. It’s economic nationalism, but it’s also rooted in material reality in which workers have faced job losses. They’ve felt the effects of an era of neoliberalism that was spearheaded in many ways by the Democratic establishment. However, the tariffs are not going to fix things. To the extent you support them and take a narrow, sectional point of view, you cut yourself off from your natural allies and move away from class struggle unionism. In the worst case, you end up like the Teamsters \[one of the largest unions in the US\], who have been cosying up to Trump. This is an abandonment of working-class principles. **Has there been much opposition to the Trump administration from the union movement?** For the most part, the union leaders oppose Trump—at least rhetorically. To be fair, while the UAW came out with qualified support for Trump’s tariffs, they have fought him on other issues. Although we’ve seen some protests, there hasn’t yet been the same kind of opposition we saw during his first term. I think he came on so ferociously that it put people on the back foot. While the union movement is participating in smaller, localised protests, I wouldn’t say they are doing much to seriously oppose Trump. **What is the relationship between the US union movement and the Democratic Party?** The union movement allied itself with the Democratic Party through the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. The unions deluded themselves into thinking they had an important role in business and government. They have the trappings of power, but not real power. Over the years, the labour movement has allowed itself to be incorporated into the Democrats and become increasingly dependent on the state for its existence. In doing so, we’ve accepted of a lot of restrictions on unions and the right to strike. However, despite what we are commonly told, the Democratic Party is no ally of the labour movement. We have to keep in mind that Trump is not the first president to attack migrants or attempt to gut the federal workforce. Democratic governors called out the National Guard in the 1980s to break the Hormel meatpackers’ strike in Minnesota, where I’m originally from. Democratic President Bill Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, got rid of 400,000 federal worker jobs in the 1990s, probably more than they’ve cut so far with Elon Musk and DOGE. The problem isn’t just that the labour movement spends a tonne of money supporting Democrats, money that could go into organising. And the problem isn’t just that this offers a false path and defrays the real issues affecting workers. The real problem is that it reflects the entry of capitalist ideology into the labour movement. As Tony Mazzocchi, the leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, who tried to start a labour party in the 1990s, used to say: the bosses have two parties, it’s time for workers to have one. The Democrats are a wholly corporate-funded and controlled political party. It was the Democrats’ anti-working-class policies that provided the basis for Trump’s rise to power. **In your book *Class Struggle Unionism*, you loosely define three approaches to modern trade unionism: business unionism, liberal unionism and class struggle unionism. What do you mean by these terms?** For the first 100 or so years of trade unionism, the fundamental divide was between what I call business unionism and class struggle unionism. Business unionism tended to be a narrower trade unionism, often focused on representing a group of workers under a particular employer or industry. Business unionists didn’t see themselves as having a broader role in society, and certainly not a role of transforming the relationship between workers and employers. Their slogan can be famously summed up by the slogan, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”. In contrast, we have a long, rich history of class struggle unionism, which takes a fundamentally different point of view. It recognises that the source of power and privilege in society is exploitation in the workplace. Whether you’re at Starbucks, Amazon or Ford, your labour creates value during your shift. You get paid a portion of that value in wages, and the rest flows upwards to a handful of people. That’s how we get billionaires in society; that’s the source of power and privilege. So, if you truly want to take on the billionaire class, you have to start in the workplace by challenging exploitation. When I talk about class struggle unionists in the United States, I think of the Industrial Workers of the World, or the Wobblies as they are better known, in the early 1900s. I think of the folks around the Communist Party in the Trade Union Unity League of the 1920s. I think of Farrell Dobbs and the Trotskyists who led the Teamsters rebellion of the 1930s. I think of the powerful, left-led international unions that came out of the 1930s, who were then decimated in the red scares of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the 1970s, thousands of anti-war and student activists joined the new communist movement. Many of those people then joined the labour movement with a conscious viewpoint of class struggle unionism. They went into the labour movement to transform it and put it on a fighting class struggle basis. They saw the working class as critical to a broader transformation of society. A lot of those leftists who went into the labour movement in the 1970s engaged in a lot of good struggles. They were probably a bit ultra-left and spent too much time fighting each other, but I think a lot of good struggles came out of their efforts. However, in the 1980s, we faced a withering attack on trade unionism. We saw a wave of legal restrictions on the right to strike and on solidarity action, and the permanent replacement of striking workers. Great Britain, Australia and the United States shifted to restrain the sort of worker self-activity that had built a powerful labour movement, especially solidarity, cross-class and class-wide trade unionism. We were getting pummelled. This was one of the factors that led to the implosion of the socialist left in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States. A lot of these people drifted away into labour education, and some of them entered the mid-levels of the labour movement. This is when we saw the rise of the “third way” of labour liberalism in the 1980s. It was somewhat rooted in this grouping of people who were ideologically progressive or even socialist, but who began to turn away from class struggle unionism. They hoped to straddle the two worlds of business unionism and class struggle unionism. They focused on things like the “corporate campaign” and the “organising approach”. A lot of this is rooted in the technical expertise of these sorts of mid-level staffers in the labour movement. Their politics flips from idea to idea. One minute we need social unionism, then we need broad community campaigns, then we need more trained organisers and so on. Unions have developed all sorts of alternatives to the strike, and they’ve begun to look more like NGOs than actual fighting organs of the class. In many ways, they have just walked away from the fundamental root of the crisis. A good example is the Service Employees International Union, which has led well-promoted campaigns to organise fast food workers. But this was all bullshit. They would lead “industrial action” that would have like 50 staffers and a handful of fired workers pretending that the workers were on strike. Some of the recent Amazon strikes were like that, too. There’s a real proliferation of these types of actions—what I call publicity strikes. Even groups such as Labor Notes talk less about the reform and how fucked up the labour movement is, and a lot more about the “secrets of the successful organisers” and “what are the techniques that organisers need?” Well, the problem isn’t the techniques. What we need is class struggle unionism. We need more fights with the bureaucracy that doesn’t want to engage in the sort of militant struggle that’s necessary to revive the labour movement. These bureaucrats don’t want to break with the Democratic Party or the state apparatus by violating injunctions and doing all the things that we would need to do to win and to attract workers to our movement. ### Fairytale of New York? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/fairytale-of-new-york/ Last updated: 2025-07-05T07:51:50.000Z Sometimes, there is good news. In the era of Trump 2.0, it might come only in small doses, but we ought to grab it with both hands when it presents itself. New York’s political earthquake is one such piece of news. In the nerve centre of global finance and the fortress of US liberal Zionism, a self-declared socialist who opposes Israeli apartheid and calls out its genocide has won the Democratic Party’s nomination for mayor. Zohran Mamdani overcame a campaign of slander—and a river of Wall Street money flowing to his chief opponent—by pulling together an army of volunteers and what appears to be an unprecedented mobilisation of young voters. The immediate backdrop to the victory was millions of people protesting across the US, through April, May and June, against the Trump administration and its reactionary agenda, including militant protests in Los Angeles against deportations. New York ought to be viewed as part of the broader resistance to Trump and a repudiation of the Democratic Party’s failure to challenge the administration. While this was an electoral mobilisation, and therefore inherently limited compared to a social movement, it proved to be more transformative of the political situation than any of the street protests. They showed that masses of people are prepared to stand up to Trump in some way or another, but none significantly shifted the political dial. The difference is primarily due to Mamdani defeating the combined efforts of the New York establishment. And that’s what people see: a precious victory on the terrain most favourable to the rich and powerful—capitalist elections that mostly go the way of those with the most money and connections. It’s a tremendous feel-good story for the left to break through at the very moment that people are most worried about a fascist takeover of US politics, and as Trump and the billionaires seem to have everything going their way. Mamdani’s campaign demonstrated that there is a significant base of young people who want a left alternative to both Trumpism and the sclerotic, right-wing Democratic Party status quo. While his campaign focused on class questions—New York is the most expensive and unequal city in America—surely it is no coincidence that this earthquake followed last year’s major political tremor: [the Palestine solidarity encampment movement](https://redflag.org.au/article/what-weve-learned-in-new-york-city), which precipitated a crisis in liberal Zionism and among the Democratic base, and politicised campuses across the city. The Democratic establishment that now stands humiliated at the hands of a mass bloc of 18–35-year-old voters is the same establishment that relentlessly smeared and violently smashed the city’s encampments—and which declared that this election was primarily about Mamdani’s opposition to genocide. Yet this is not only a New York story. The November mayoral election is shaping up to be one of national significance. Trump, the Republicans and a section of the Democratic establishment want to make Mamdani an avatar for everything they are against. Millions of people inspired by his program—doubling the minimum wage, making child care free, resisting the deportation agenda, making housing affordable and taxing the rich—likewise see in New York a vision of the sort of political alternative they want nationally. This is not just an American tale, either. The US leads the world culturally and politically; often, that influence is malign. So when Trump wins, right-wingers on every continent import and adapt his toxic brand of politics to local conditions. When trash liberal social theories—often some variant of the self-absorbed, moralistic identity politics that dominate universities—become fashionable in the US, they permeate progressive circles around the world, stifling the development of a genuine left. But the US also has a history of exporting hope. And right now, left-wing and progressive people around the world are cheering. Finally, it’s not another headline about another fascist advance somewhere in the world. Finally, the news coming out of America is not only about the latest horror inflicted by the White House on workers and the oppressed. Finally, there is a sense of victory—a feeling that the political establishment everywhere could be rocked, even defeated, by a political alternative organised around a simple message: less for the rich and more for the poor, regardless of race, gender or legal status. Mamdani is not only on everyone’s lips. His coalition is the future of the left and potentially of big-city political culture and sensibilities: young, socialist-leaning, pro-Palestinian and open to anti-imperialism. That the Democratic establishment—Wall Street billionaires and liberal imperialists—have been totally embarrassed and are now seemingly engulfed in crisis is the cherry on top. Recognising these positives doesn’t mean drinking the Kool-Aid of municipal socialism, however. So to be clear: the good news is not that Mamdani could become mayor of the biggest city in the United States. The mayor’s office is not akin to a seat in a legislature from which a socialist could consistently organise resistance and build a socialist party. The New York mayoral office is one of America’s most powerful executive positions—running the country’s largest police force, enforcing all local and state laws in its biggest city and ultimately ensuring that Wall Street finance functions smoothly. Without the backing of a mass socialist party and an insurgent working-class movement, even the most principled of revolutionary Marxists would be incapable of withstanding the institutional and ruling-class pressures that are brought to bear on the chief executive of capitalism’s most important city. Given the current balance of class forces, a moderate like Mamdani has no chance. His organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America, would be no counterweight to the social and economic power of New York’s ruling class and upper-middle classes. The party can’t even hold to account elected representatives with zero formal responsibilities—the list of DSA members or DSA-endorsed legislators who have gone on to make peace with the Democratic Party establishment is hardly a secret. Indeed, if Mamdani were to win, many DSA members would likely be brought into government jobs to help administer New York capitalism. Mamdani is already working hand-in-glove with sections of the Democratic Party. That ought to come as no surprise—he ran as a Democrat, after all. He may go further trying to prove himself a “competent” safe pair of hands for the New York business class. If he were to compromise enough, he could even be welcomed into the fold before the November election. Stranger things have happened. If such things transpire and Mamdani’s supporters aren’t prepared, they could easily become demoralised or cynical, or politically drift to the right as they justify the capitulations as just being realistic. That’s why Marxists emphasise the building of politicised social movements and the organised power of the working class. Our side can certainly have victories in which people play a more or less passive role. However, lifting political consciousness and building political resilience require much more than electoral campaigning. Genuine “realism” begins with understanding that capitalist institutions—such as the Democratic Party and the state—are obstacles to social change that need to be smashed rather than embraced. Nevertheless, another scenario could be that the New York establishment coalesces around an alternative candidate who seems likely to win easily. In that case, Mamdani could double down on the most left-wing aspects of his program and inspire even more people to look to socialist politics for solutions to the obvious problems of capitalist society. These “ifs”, “buts”, “maybes” and “probablys” will be the subject of more coverage and conversations in the coming weeks and months as the campaign unfolds. The script isn’t entirely written in advance—time, as always, will tell. But for now, the good news is in: a socialist message has politically galvanised masses of young people in the heart of global capitalism; and that message has echoed from the five boroughs of New York, inspiring people across oceans. True, the good news could be short-lived. But it ought to be a shot in the arm for everyone trying to build a socialist party. ### Suspended for confronting Peter Khalil URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/suspended-for-standing-up-for-palestine/ Last updated: 2025-07-12T02:00:49.000Z I have been suspended from my high school for challenging a federal minister about his continued support for Israel and the genocide in Palestine. I am a year 11 student at Coburg High in Melbourne, and Assistant Minister for Defence Peter Khalil visited our school this week. When I saw him on my way to class, I asked him about the government’s continued support for the Israeli government as it carries out genocide. As I did so, staff members told me that “there is a time and a place” for such questions. Khalil nevertheless stopped for a moment to defend himself. He went on about how much he cares for the Palestinians. His evidence for this was that his father was in the Egyptian army, he is an immigrant, has been to Palestine and has “spoken with Penny Wong on many occasions”. How is any of that relevant? As I continued asking questions, Khalil began to walk away. A year-12 student joined me, and we chanted as Kahlil entered the school building: “Free Palestine, Peter!” Another student then joined us in this short protest. My classmates and I have a history of protesting for Palestine. A contingent of us left school to join the School Strikes for Palestine and the demonstration against the Land Forces arms expo in Melbourne. While we were discouraged from attending, we were not disciplined for doing so. On this occasion, our vice principal stopped us and told us not to yell at Khalil, who was the school’s guest. But we wanted to make it abundantly clear that we didn’t view him as a “guest”. Kahlil walked past us again, so we continued to chant “Free Palestine!” I also shouted: “Fucking scum!” After this, I was barred from returning to class. I spent an hour with the vice principal, who told me what I had done was wrong and that I should have had “a civilised conversation” rather than shouting abuse. But if what my classmates and I did was “uncivilised”, what do you call the genocide in Gaza that Khalil and Labor have supported? Two days later, I was told I could do “community service” to avoid multiple days of suspension. But I believe that protesting for Gaza and holding politicians to account are the best services I can perform for my community. Maybe Peter Khalil should be doing some global community service by ending Australia’s ties with apartheid Israel. Khalil later posted on his social media: “On Monday I answered questions from some really politically passionate year 10 students ... We discussed youth health issues ...” Actually, he completely avoided talking about the health of Gaza’s children, who have been systematically bombed and starved. I have been told that my suspension is due to my yelling at a school guest. But that guest is a federal government minister who has sat by and done nothing as Israel has destroyed every school and university in Gaza. I felt obliged to stand up and shout when he decided to parade himself through our school grounds. Many students and staff have since expressed support for my actions. Although I have been suspended for doing what was right and being on the right side of history, this will not stop our fight for a free Palestine—because none of us is free until Palestine is free. \---------- *Editor’s note: This article was resubmitted with amendments on 12 July. The original version did not include a reference to the author publicly calling Peter Khalil “fucking scum”. The editors regret that this information was not contained in the original piece and acknowledge that it is relevant context to the disciplinary case against Callum.* *However, we also congratulate Callum for forcefully confronting Peter Khalil and think his actions are politically defensible—indeed, justifiable. The political atmosphere in 2025 has been defined by a total failure on the part of the “adults in the room”—particularly politicians and journalists with national platforms—to adequately respond to what is arguably the moral question of our time: the wholesale destruction of Gaza and the mass murder and starvation of its population by a key international ally of the Australian government.* *Instead, we have witnessed sickening displays of obsequiousness and deference by Australian politicians to US President Donald Trump and Israeli war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. The world would be a better place if there were fewer Peter Khalils and more Callum Bells—people prepared to throw caution to the wind and just fight for what’s right.* ### Queensland teachers fight back against insulting pay offer URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/queensland-teachers-fight-back-against-insulting-pay-offer/ Last updated: 2025-07-05T05:35:48.000Z Hundreds of teacher unionists rallied outside the Queensland parliament on 24 June to demand a decent pay rise from the state government. Teachers’ real wages have gone backwards by more than 6 percent in the last three years, but the government is offering an insulting 8 percent pay increase over the next three years, while annual inflation sits at 2.4 percent. The teachers also want workloads to be reduced. High school teachers’ planning time has not increased since the 1970s, but there has been a dramatic increase in the required work—assessing, marking and writing new unit plans. All of this work is unpaid and unacknowledged by the government. “I don’t feel like there’s much time to get everything done”, Danielle, a secondary school teacher, told *Red Flag* at the rally. Mina, a primary public school teacher, said she thinks teachers deserve a 30 percent pay rise—the rate that rank-and-file network Queensland Teachers Fightback [is arguing for](https://qldteachersfightback.org/our-wages-vs-inflation-vs-state-gov-wages-policy.html?ref=redflag.org.au). Mina told *Red Flag* that she supports taking strike action next term, “to get the point across that change is needed, a pay rise is needed, and we need to be acknowledged for the role we play in young kids’ lives”. Queensland public school teachers haven’t taken statewide industrial action in sixteen years. If teachers struck, they’d receive support. Construction workers from different job sites rallied alongside the teachers outside parliament. They agreed that teachers deserve the solidarity of other trade unions as they fight for their pay and conditions. One construction union member said attending the rally was important “to show the QTU \[Queensland Teachers’ Union\] is not alone. It’s a symbiotic relationship we have with all trade unions”. The QTU voted last year to support construction workers, whose union has been put into administration by the federal Labor government. Rank-and-file activists in both unions believe that, when one section of the workforce stands up to the bosses, they show all workers the power they have. Public sector workers are being left behind. Queensland teachers, nurses and firefighters are due to negotiate new contracts this year. But the Crisafulli state government has made it clear that, while there’s money for Olympic stadiums and cops, there’s little to nothing for the working class. Teachers will have to fight, and take industrial action, to win what they and their students deserve. ### Culture shift: pro-Palestine rappers say what everyone is thinking URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/culture-shift-pro-palestine-rappers-say-what-everyone-is-thinking/ Last updated: 2025-10-12T08:34:43.000Z Mo Chara, aka Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, is facing terrorism charges in the UK for the supposed crime of supporting Palestine. Part of the rap trio Kneecap, Mo Chara is one of a new wave of musicians and artists who are using their work to protest the genocide in Gaza, risking their careers in the process. Speaking to the *Guardian*, Mo Chara said of his stand: “Maybe visas get revoked, you’re not allowed in America again, it’s not ideal—but Jesus Christ, there’s people being bombed from the fucking skies, and people being starved to death”. This defiant attitude has captured the attention of young people everywhere. Thirty thousand flocked to Kneecap’s set at the Glastonbury festival, waving Palestinian and Irish flags and chanting “Free Palestine” and “Free Mo Chara”. When the BBC refused to stream the set online, “Helen from Wales” stepped in, streaming the entire thing via TikTok. [Explaining](https://www.thejournal.ie/woman-who-live-streamed-kneecaps-glastonbury-performance-to-millions-says-fans-had-a-right-to-see-it-6748037-Jun2025/?ref=redflag.org.au)why she did it, Helen said, “Anyone who was in that field for that Kneecap gig knows that there was something very special happening there, that people outside of Glastonbury festival have a right to see”. In a twist of fate, the BBC instead streamed Bob Vylan’s set. The punk rap duo was not the safest bet. Tens of thousands of people watching were treated to chants of “Free Palestine” and “Death, death to the IDF”, led enthusiastically by Bobby Vylan. The response of governments and the media has been hysterical. A torrent of denunciations has followed, along with calls for Bob Vylan’s shows to be cancelled, accusations that they’re inciting hate and violence and calls for sanctions against them. Their US visas have also been revoked. “Foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country”, wrote Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau. Unless, of course, you’re a violent, hateful foreigner from Israel, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Kneecap has been attacked as “not appropriate” by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, while the leader of the right-wing Democratic Unionist Party in Ireland, Gavin Robinson, said, “These gentlemen don't need to be on a stage; they need to be in a courtroom because it is a hate crime what they are doing”. Artists like Kneecap and Bob Vylan who are speaking up for Palestine are a bright spot in a dark two years of Israeli genocide carried out under the approving eye of the Western establishment. They’ve linked up with a protest movement that has persisted despite appalling repression and slander, and a broader mood of disgust with a society in which this could happen. Fuelling this has been Western governments’ determination to justify the unjustifiable, treating anyone who demurs as a bigot, terrorist or worse. Here in Australia, simply posting a report from a reputable human rights organisation on social media was enough to get journalist Antoinette Latouff fired from the ABC, the broadcaster aggressively defending its actions in court. Media outlets everywhere refuse to use words like “genocide” that Israel objects to, while Palestinians are dehumanised routinely. Students have been disciplined by universities for protesting for Palestine. Pianist Jayson Gillham had his performance cancelled by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra after dedicating a piece to journalists killed in Gaza. Celebrities, musicians and actors have the ability to give expression to what masses of other people are feeling. This challenges the consensus pro-Israel governments are trying to establish that it is legitimate to do nothing in the face of a genocide. Posting on social media, lead singer of Amyl and the Sniffers, Amy Taylor, pointed out that the repression of Kneecap and Bob Vylan is about “trying to make it look like a couple of isolated incidents and a couple of ‘bad bands’ so that it appears the public isn’t as anti-genocide as it is, and trying to make it look like Bob and Kneecap are one offs, instead of that the status quo has shifted majorly and that people are concerned and desperate for our gov\[ernment\]s to listen”. Artists played a similar role in the movement against the war in Vietnam, as they have in most anti-war and civil rights movements. In the 1960s, actors such as Jane Fonda and Don Sutherland organised anti-war speaking tours across the US and Canada, and even went to Vietnam to speak to US troops. Fonda was targeted by the FBI and arrested on trumped-up drug charges, an order that reportedly came directly from the Nixon White House. Their treatment was similar to that of pro-Palestine activists today. Fonda’s phone was tapped, American politicians called her activism treasonous, her films were banned, and William Burkhead, a Democrat, [said](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/09/18/how-jane-fondas-1972-trip-to-north-vietnam-earned-her-the-nickname-hanoi-jane/?ref=redflag.org.au),“I wouldn’t want to kill her, but I wouldn’t mind if you cut her tongue off”. This all mirrors the outrage directed towards modern pro-Palestinian artists. Young people today are again at the forefront of challenging the inhuman policies and practices of their rulers, most prominently through the university encampments in solidarity with Palestine. And they are increasingly making connections between forms of oppression, and demanding a different type of society altogether, one in which innocent people aren’t murdered by powerful militaries and, closer to home, billionaires aren’t prioritised over the rest of us. Kneecap reflect this: when they visited Melbourne, they made connections with Aretha Brown, an Indigenous artist whose father was in the left-wing rock band Painters and Dockers. Brown painted a mural for the band to take on stage in her striking black and white style reading “Blak and Irish solidarity”. Another expression of this is the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York Democratic primary race for mayor. Young people voted in the primary in record numbers, helping to deliver Mamdani a resounding victory. It wasn’t lost on many of these people that Mamdani spoke up for Palestine and pledged, if elected mayor, to arrest Netanyahu if he came to New York. While it’s not enough to stop the genocide in Gaza or other injustices of capitalism, the fact that young people are increasingly challenging the ideological hegemony of the ruling class is a hopeful sign for the future, and clearly of concern to the authorities. It highlights why taking a stand and attempting to cohere opposition are important, even if you are in a minority. The alternative is resignation to a morally intolerable status quo. As Mo Chara has put it, “we knew that the Israeli lobbyists and the American government weren’t going to stand by idly while we spoke to thousands of young Americans who agree with us. They don’t want us coming to the American festivals, because they don’t want videos of young Americans chanting ‘free Palestine’ \[even though\] that is the actual belief in America. They just want to suppress it”. ### Grill’d workers turn heat on boss URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/grilld-workers-turn-heat-on-boss/ Last updated: 2025-07-01T04:10:47.000Z “We are here today because we are fighting for what is right!” Striking Grill’d workers and their supporters protested in front of the burger chain’s Rundle Street store in Adelaide on 28 June, handing out flyers explaining why they were taking action against the company. They argued to people who tried to enter the store that they should boycott Grill’d while workers struck. Would-be customers were cheered when they walked away from the restaurant’s entrance. After a few hours of protesting, the picketers took to the streets of Adelaide. “Support Grill’d workers—don’t eat the burgers!” they chanted as they spread the word throughout the city. Many of the workers have never taken industrial action before, and were buoyed by the experience. “Look, it’s our street—Union Street”!, one quipped while marching back to the store. The founder and CEO of Grill’d, Simon Crowe, wants [to double the company’s size by 2029](https://thewest.com.au/business/retail/grilld-chief-executive-simon-crowe-says-the-burger-group-can-more-than-double-its-size-in-the-next-five-years-c-13698323?ref=redflag.org.au). Crowe, with a reported net worth of more than [$450 million](https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/they-slowly-strangled-me-grill-d-store-owner-lost-shop-days-before-christmas-20191206-p53hir.html?ref=redflag.org.au), has grown rich off the backs of his workers. Meanwhile, Grill’d workers struggle to make ends meet. The current agreement increases wages by just 1 percent per year. Once inflation is factored in, staff have gone backwards at a rate of knots. An analysis from the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA, the union covering the workers) has found that those on the current enterprise agreement are up to [37 percent worse off than if they had been on the award wage](https://grilldworkersunited.org/terminate2020?ref=redflag.org.au) instead. So, across South Australia, Victoria and Queensland, Grill’d workers were out for better pay and conditions. Some of their demands include wage increases that account for inflation, appropriate pay for staff with more responsibilities, and guaranteed hours for permanent contracts. Many of the workers reported to *Red Flag* that they are overworked and understaffed, and often unable to call in sick or take breaks. Outside the Rundle Steet Grill’d, a supporter remarked: “See how ridiculously priced \[the\] burgers are? Surely, they can spare a few extra dollars for the workers here ... We all deserve fair living wages, so why not?” One young worker said she was earning $600 working 50 hours a week, having just turned 18\. “I didn’t know any better. This was my first job, and I took it because I was desperate”, she said, adding that while working at Grill’d and studying at university, she collects bottles to help pay for groceries and does DoorDash on the side. At a time when strike rates are at a historic low and wealth inequality is soaring, these workers are showing what needs to happen. As one said defiantly, “Our efforts today will help the higher-ups see we are not to be taken advantage of, and we deserve to have an agreement where we are actually better off!” ### Queensland government considers reintroducing public drunkenness laws URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/queensland-government-considers-reintroducing-public-drunkenness-laws/ Last updated: 2025-07-01T03:58:51.000Z The Queensland Liberal National state government is considering reintroducing public drunkenness laws that disproportionately target Indigenous people. The move comes only a year after public drunkenness laws were abolished, and after a 2022 parliamentary report found that 47 percent of people charged with public intoxication were Indigenous, despite the Indigenous population being just 4.6 of the state’s residents. The abolition of drunkenness laws was one of the recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody—the rationale being that intoxicated people should be presented to non-custodial facilities to divert Aboriginal people from police custody. Townsville Liberal MP Peter Baillie criticised the decriminalisation, carried out by the previous Labor government, saying that the decision made it hard for the police to do their jobs and was “significantly impacting liveability in our beautiful part of the world”. Speaking at a protest against the laws, Mununjali man and Indigenous activist William Sim said: “These laws make our people less safe but make it easier for the police to racially profile us, lock us up and brutalise us”. The laws certainly aren’t applied with the same enthusiasm on the Gold Coast or in Brisbane’s nightclubbing precinct, Fortitude Valley. The LNP’s campaigning would have you think that crime rates are skyrocketing. In fact, they’re trending downwards. [Speaking to ABC News](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/criminologists-debunk-youth-crime-crisis-claims/104445432?ref=redflag.org.au) last year, University of Queensland criminologist Renee Zahnow said there is an “absolutely unanimous” academic consensus that Queensland is not in the grips of a crime crisis, and that the myths are being driven by political opportunism and sensationalist media reporting. The Australian Bureau of Statistics found that youth crime hit its lowest point ever in 2022 and has remained steady ever since. Despite this, the government passed “Adult Time, Adult Crime” laws (formally the Making Queensland Safer (Adult Crime, Adult Time) Amendment Bill 2025), which will introduce mandatory jail sentences for children as young as ten years old. The government conceded that the laws would disproportionately affect Indigenous children. Yet, shamefully, all 35 Labor MPs in the Queensland parliament supported the legislation. Inconvenient truths have never stopped the Liberals from running a campaign to scapegoat Indigenous people. Whipping up racism and law-and-order panics are part of the party’s DNA. The government just handed down a budget allocating $2.7 billion to new prisons and [$4.7 billion to the Olympics](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-24/queensland-state-budget-2025-winners-and-losers/105427568?ref=redflag.org.au). But for workers, there is little. The Liberal plan to allocate funding for 2,000 new community homes falls short of providing for the record 53,000 people on the social housing waitlist. No wonder that the government wants to scapegoat Indigenous people—it takes the attention off its failure to deal with the cost-of-living crisis. The attacks on Indigenous rights haven’t just come from conservative governments, though. The previous Palaszczuk Labor government overrode the Human Rights Act twice in eighteen months to lock up kids who violated bail conditions, and to keep children detained in adult watchhouses. [In 2022, Labor MPs voted](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/aug/17/first-nations-campaigner-accuses-queensland-government-of-hypocrisy-for-voting-down-raise-the-age-bill?ref=redflag.org.au) to keep the age of criminal responsibility at ten. Labor’s attacks on Indigenous rights have opened the door to further racist cruelty from the Liberals. Neither party wants to invest the billions of dollars in housing, healthcare and education that it would require to begin to address the serious levels of poverty and disadvantage in the Indigenous community and among increasing numbers of non-Indigenous workers. Fighting against these latest attacks from the Liberals will be an important part of the continuing fight for Indigenous rights and for a more equal state. ### At last! 50,000 march for Palestine in Berlin URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/at-last-50-000-march-for-palestine-in-berlin/ Last updated: 2025-07-01T00:42:02.000Z Robert Dale, writing at [Counterfire](https://www.counterfire.org/article/at-last-50000-march-for-palestine-in-berlin/?ref=redflag.org.au), a socialist website in Britain, reports that a Palestinian solidarity protest in Berlin on 21 June was a breakthrough for Germany's Gaza solidarity movement. \-------------------- The centre of Berlin was a sea of Palestinian flags and keffiyehs on Saturday 21 June. Banned slogans were held aloft and chanted loud. At least 50,000 turned out to show solidarity with Gaza. The mobilisation was national, the crowd largely young. They chanted slogans that would have had them arrested only weeks ago. The police were powerless to stop them. Unusually, the protest was not called by an organisation or coalition, nor were organisations visibly present. It was initiated by two German-Palestinian online influencers, whose appeal spread by word of mouth. They expected 5,000\. At least 50,000 came from all across Germany. **Ferocious repression** The German authorities have stamped on Gaza protests harder than any other government in Europe. In October 2023, demonstrations for Gaza were initially banned altogether. So the right to protest at all literally had to be won on the streets. An early candlelit vigil by Jewish Voice for Peace created a protest form that the authorities hesitated to crush. By 21 October 2023, it was possible to hold a proper demonstration, with about 5,000 attending in Berlin. Ever since, there have been regular marches across the country, but attendance has rarely exceeded a couple of thousand. Rallies often begin with the organiser reading a long list of statements that the police have banned. No “From the River to the Sea”, no expression of support for Hamas or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, no comparisons with the German Holocaust. Brutal physical force has been used to arrest protesters for repeating them. Participants at a protest camp at the Reichstag \[parliament\] were forbidden to speak Hebrew, Arabic or Irish Gaelic, for fear that they might speak or sing illegal words without the police knowing. The authorities have tightly policed public discussion altogether. Until very recently, essentially any form of solidarity has been beyond the pale. Prominent Jewish artists have had exhibitions cancelled for speaking out. A conference in Berlin in April 2024 was closed down by the police just as it began. People have been sacked for statements of support, including at least one civil servant. There has been a lot of discussion about withdrawing residency status or requiring applicants for citizenship to declare their support for Israel. One indication of the severity of the suppression is that the authorities even targeted Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. When she came to Berlin, the city government ensured that her meeting at a university was cancelled and alternative venues were denied. She eventually spoke in a small room provided by the left-wing *Junge Welt* newspaper, where she said she was utterly shocked by the level of repression here. All this naturally has had an absolutely chilling effect. **Why the clampdown?** Germany’s political leaders had the same reaction as their Western colleagues: support Israel come what may. And they were certainly not alone in wanting to suppress any dissent. The legacy of the Holocaust gave them an additional—and heavy—cudgel to swing. Anyone who criticises Israel is an antisemite. But what allowed them to get away with it was the weakness of the German hard left and the complicity of the parliamentary parties. The German Social Democrats and Greens back Israel to the hilt. The Greens have been particularly vicious; apparently, it’s fine to deport people for saying the wrong thing about Gaza. The Left Party has seen debate over the issue, but its leaders at all levels have ensured that it does not get tarred with solidarity or anything like that. The few individuals and a couple of branches that put their heads above the parapet took a lot of flak, and at least one prominent activist was expelled from the party. In recent weeks, the party’s tone has softened a little, though, mirroring the slight shift in the rhetoric of major Western leaders. The Left Party officially supported Saturday’s demonstration. This was, I believe, the first time it has done so since October 2023\. They were visibly present too, though only with a dozen flags. The trade unions have been completely absent from the solidarity movement. Given the general atmosphere, that is not entirely surprising. The nearest comparison I can think of would be support for Irish Republicanism in England in the 1980s. However, the immigrants’ caucus at the public service union Verdi put its name to a demo call recently and turned up with union flags. Apparently, the national leadership was not amused. If public discussion is *verboten* \[forbidden\] and no organisation or coalition has the strength to push back, it can quickly become a vicious circle. Speaking out is felt to be a real personal risk, making it hard to organise protests. And the lack of protests discourages speaking out. That is what makes 21 June such a breakthrough. Not only was the demonstration too large for the police to crush or harass. It also broke through the speech bans. Participants chanted the banned slogans, sometimes directly towards the police, keenly aware that this was their victory. *First published at [Counterfire](https://www.counterfire.org/article/at-last-50000-march-for-palestine-in-berlin/?ref=redflag.org.au).* ### The everyday horror of modern sexism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-everyday-horror-of-modern-sexism/ Last updated: 2025-06-29T00:34:25.000Z Cherry is a British nurse who has experienced a lifetime of sexualisation and objectification. Working in a hospital hasn’t offered an escape, but new worries. Cherry has large breasts, and reports that a lot of her mental energy is spent thinking about them. “It’s a bit pornographic” is how she [described](https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/journal%5Fcontribution/%5FThat%5Fs%5Fjust%5Fpar%5Ffor%5Fthe%5Fcourse%5Fsocial%5Fclass%5Fobjectification%5Fand%5Fbody%5Fimage%5Famong%5Fwhite%5Fworking-class%5Fwomen%5Fin%5Fthe%5FUnited%5FKingdom/26356876?file=48809890&ref=redflag.org.au) it to Jamie Chen, a researcher at the University of Sussex studying the impacts of sexualisation on working-class women. Her work uniform made her feel particularly self-conscious: it was so tight she worried people would think she was trying to look like a “saucy nurse”. Cherry told researchers that because of this sexualisation, she decided against breastfeeding her child. “I didn’t really like breastfeeding because I felt, because they were so big, it looks inappropriate in my mind, that these massive, you know, boobs sticking out in public”. Compare this with the sales pitch for Kim Kardashian’s new [push-up bra](https://skims.com/en-au/products/skims-ultimate-pierced-nipple-push-up-bra-clay?ref=redflag.org.au): “Made to be seen. Our viral Ultimate bra is back, reinvented with a built-in raised nipple detail and removable nylon-coated nipple piercing for an unforgettable statement”. Women can now buy a bra that not only gives them “sexy, natural-looking lift and support”, but also the appearance of pierced nipples under their baby-crop tees. While Cherry feels unable to carry out the natural function of her breasts, Kardashian is cashing in on the business opportunity that sexual objectification represents—her fashion company Skims is currently valued at US$4 billion. It is no exaggeration to say that sexual objectification is ruining women’s lives. From childhood, women are made to understand that their appearance is all-important, regardless of any and all other achievements. Their faces and bodies are treated like things, objects primarily for the use and pleasure of others, overwhelmingly men. The unrelenting portrayal of women as sex objects has been shown, in multiple [studies](https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2016.1142496?ref=redflag.org.au), to lead to a “diminished view of women’s competence, morality and humanity”. New York University professor and author of *Anxious Generation*, Jonathan Haidt, has detailed how predatory tech companies turn this oppression into a business opportunity. When women delete selfies on social media, he says, algorithms are programmed to detect the behaviour and treat the assumed negative self-image as a marketing opportunity, bombarding the woman with beauty product advertisements. This is contributing to a mental health epidemic among young girls, around [57 percent](https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic?ref=redflag.org.au) currently reporting a persistent sadness or helplessness, up from 36 percent in 2011. Objectification is the reality for women, day in day out, their entire lives. From childhood to old age, the measure of a woman’s worth is their ability to remain young and attractive to men. Margaret Atwood, echoing art critic John Berger’s description of the male gaze, described the effect: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur”. Sociologists describe this as self-objectification—when women wake up in the morning and plug in the epilator, they are listening to the voice inside their head put there by the advertising executives who decided making women feel like shit was a good way to make money. To add insult to injury, at the same time as women are being sexualised to an absurd degree, ironically, they are getting as little pleasure from sex as ever. Heterosexual sex is most unequal—[one study](https://theconversation.com/the-orgasm-gap-and-why-women-climax-less-than-men-208614?ref=redflag.org.au) found that only 65 percent of heterosexual women usually orgasm during sex, compared with 95 percent of men. So while women are pressured to worry about being “sexy”, their own sexual desire and agency are suppressed. Women are taught not to be sexual, but sexy. They have to control what they eat in order to fit the ideal body type, they have to wax and pluck and shave every part of their body below their hairline. Women internalise that as normal, and failure to conform, at least to some degree, has consequences. Their conditioning is always to alter themselves to meet others, mostly men’s, expectations and desires, to the point where they often can’t even define what their own are in relation to sex and relationships. This is particularly the case for younger women. Most young women’s first experience of sex is likely to be at a party when they’re drunk or because they feel pressured into it. In the words of one of the many teenagers Deborah Tolman spoke to when writing *Dilemmas of Desire*, which documents the experience of young women and sex, sex was something that “just happened” to them. In her book *Consent Laid Bare*, Chanel Contos describes the way that, when men’s desires are the centre of sex, women lose out. “This puts an unspoken sense of control in \[men’s\] hands about whether *they* want *you*or not, and leaves the woman in the heterosexual relationship with no agency.” Women are socialised to see their feelings as less important than those of their male partner. From film, TV and seeing their parents interact, women learn the role they are meant to play. They are trained to notice a shift in someone’s emotional state, to push down their own feelings in order not to upset the men around them. It’s no surprise, then, that relationships are frequently unequal and sites of abuse. [One in five](https://www.casahouse.com.au/resources/statistics-about-sexual-assault-in-australia?ref=redflag.org.au) Australian women over the age of 15 has experienced sexual violence, according to the Centre Against Sexual Assault. A recent [study](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/03/one-in-three-australian-men-say-they-have-committed-intimate-partner-violence-world-first-research-finds?ref=redflag.org.au)undertaken by the Australian Institute of Family Studies found that one in three men has committed intimate partner violence. One ABS report from 2022 showed that 23 percent of women experienced emotional abuse in relationships. This is likely an understatement given the normalisation of emotional manipulation in relationships, but it is a form of intimate partner violence. Men can create a climate of fear for women in situations where they make their partners feel like they are required to “walk on eggshells” in order not to provoke them, which can be just as damaging as physical violence. Making matters worse, men are entering relationships with attitudes and expectations shaped by the same extreme sexism that women are. They are encouraged to see themselves as domineering, aggressive and unconcerned about feelings—their own or those of others. They learn the lesson that women are there to provide for them. They also learn to objectify and dehumanise women. [One study](https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2016.1142496?ref=redflag.org.au) found that men’s frequent exposure to sexually objectifying media was associated with greater objectification of their romantic partners. The consumption of porn is an important part of this. Young men are more likely to consume porn than young women, and this is often the major factor shaping both men’s and women’s understanding of sex and sexuality. Jess Hill, in her recent *Quarterly Essay*, describes the impact of this consumption of porn—which is more readily available today and often extremely violent towards women—as part of understanding the increasing rates of sexual violence among young people. “On average, young people are thirteen when they get their first lessons in sex and intimacy from free online porn ... In much of this porn, degrading and painful sex acts are unremarkable ... In the majority of these clips, women not only go along with degrading treatment but are almost always grateful for it.” An outcome of this is that there has been a mainstreaming of violent sex acts, particularly [strangulation during sex](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-02/choking-strangulation-sexual-partners-young-people/104043900?ref=redflag.org.au). According to a new study, 61 percent of women have reported being choked during sex. Maree Crabb, a sexual violence prevention educator, told the ABC, “Young women have talked about \[how\] they have felt like they're genuinely being murdered ... they’re really uncomfortable and feeling very, very unsafe”. Women *are* being murdered by their male partners. These men then claim it was a “sex game gone wrong”. [According](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/10/rough-sex-excuse-in-womens-deaths-is-variation-of-of-passion-study?ref=redflag.org.au) to the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This, there has been a tenfold increase of the rough sex defence between 1996 and 2016 in the United Kingdom. All of this leads us to ask: Who is responsible for this sexist state of affairs, and is there any hope that it could change? The sexism that surrounds us and that is constantly being reinforced by social media, pop culture, mainstream media, the entertainment industry, the beauty and fashion industries among others, destroys the humanity and empathy of men, and belittles and endangers women. But it is not ordinary men, and certainly not women, who benefit. Rather, it is ideologically useful and extremely profitable to the capitalist system. Advertising companies, the fashion and cosmetic industries directly profit from women’s insecurities—and create them where they don’t already exist as a way to open up new markets. Every part of a woman’s body is now subject to fashion trends and must look “perfect”, and every one represents an opportunity to sell something to help achieve this “perfection”. Exploitative images of women are used to sell anything and everything, and the pornography and sex industry—which could not exist without the oppression of women—are worth hundreds of billions. Added to that, bosses in every industry maximise their profits by paying women on average less than men, and rely on sexist socialisation to normalise this inequality. And the whole system benefits from forcing women to do unpaid labour in the home, which maintains the stability and productivity of the workforce capitalism needs. The resulting division between the lives, experience and social standing of working-class men and women has a further benefit—it undermines the likelihood of united working-class resistance to the system. Despite all this, it is possible for working-class men and women to see themselves as allies rather than sex objects or potential dominators/sexist creeps and to fight back. Fortunately, this possibility doesn’t rest on every sexist individual being convinced not to be a sexist prick, though this definitely can happen and should. It’s because the conditions of capitalism bring people together as relative equals in the workplace, and give them a common interest that can manifest in collective resistance and struggle. This sort of activity, and the consciousness it gives rise to among those involved, pushes against the degrading and dehumanising way we are usually socialised to see others. Women are conditioned to accept sexism, but they are also able to rebel against it in the right circumstances. That which drags people down at one time can fuel resistance at another. The conservative conformism of the 1950s eventually gave rise to the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s—discontent was brewing below the surface and exploded when the general atmosphere of society shifted to one of rebellion rather than resignation. This has happened before and can happen again. When people go on strike against a bastard boss, or join an anti-war protest, when they stand on picket lines to defend public housing—they become more keenly aware of their joint interests and the benefit of unity. Places that were previously sites of exploitation and oppression, such as the workplace, now become sites of strength and resistance. Both men and women can see each other in a new light—as fighters for their class and equals in struggle. Actions like this start to transform mass attitudes. But ultimately, we need a society built on equality to have a world where we are not perennially fighting sexism, but are free from it. This means collective, democratic control over every aspect of social and economic life: a world in which working-class women and men could have real say over the conditions they live in, rather than being dominated by the capitalist class and the institutions and ideology that maintain its power and privilege; a world in which hierarchies of class wouldn’t be justified by hierarchies of gender. We need to get rid of this system that denies women their sexuality and treats them as nothing more than little pieces of fat and muscle for the sexual gratification of men. We need women to fight back against the voice inside their head that tells them they aren’t good enough. We need working-class men to join the struggle against women’s oppression and to learn genuine empathy and care. We need women rebels to build the power of our side and smash this sexist system. ### Keeping up with the CEOs: capitalism’s reality show URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/keeping-up-with-the-ceos-capitalisms-reality-show/ Last updated: 2025-06-27T03:54:54.000Z If more evidence were needed that workers’ losses are capitalists’ gains, then look no further than the latest Australian Council of Superannuation Investors report on CEO salaries. It finds that the CEOs of Australia’s top 100 companies last year “earned”, on average, 55 times the average salary of an Australian worker. That’s up from 50 times the year before. At the top is the CEO of News Corp, who received $42 million for managing Rupert Murdoch’s far-right propaganda machine—Sky News Australia, the*Australian* and dozens of other rags masquerading as journalism. Not far behind are the bosses of Macquarie and Commonwealth banks, who earned a combined $38.7 million for squeezing billions of dollars out of working-class families. Rounding out the list are the bosses of two of the planet’s most destructive corporations—Rio Tinto and BHP. They pocketed a cool $19 million each. Such eye-watering salaries at the top end of town might have you thinking that at least some of the wealth would trickle down. You would be wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. The cost-of-living crisis has resulted in a transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. Analysis by the Australia Institute in November last year found that a full-time worker is, on average, $8,000 worse off compared to just three years ago. A big part of the decline is due to housing. Whether someone is a mortgage holder or a renter, a bigger chunk of their pay packet is going to either the bank or the landlord. The situation is particularly bad for workers on the bottom end of the wage scale. Just over 900,000 low-income workers on award wages have seen their real wages fall by 14.4 percent over the last four years. These workers are disproportionately young and in less stable forms of employment, like casual work. And yet, the lobbyists of Australian businesses vehemently oppose any notion that wages should rise by even the slightest amount above inflation. The Australian Industry Group considered the Fair Work Commission’s recent 3.5 percent increase in award wages “higher than necessary” and “well beyond what current economic conditions can safely sustain”. The growing gap between rich and poor is not an unfortunate accident; it’s capitalism working as intended. CEOs live lives of luxury while workers must be grateful for their crumbs. Only a serious fightback of the working class can start to change this. ### When apartheids of the world united: South Africa and Israel’s secret embrace URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/when-apartheids-of-the-world-united-south-africa-and-israels-secret-embrace/ Last updated: 2025-06-27T04:08:52.000Z “John Vorster Square ... four or five men and then hood and then electric shock, everything. I don’t know ... Angry Hood and torture, breasts, everything. Why? I don’t understand. Why torture? Anyway, it’s sad ... And then me angry so no talk. Why torture? So I don’t talk. So angry. Rape or what. I don’t care. I don’t talk.” These are the words of South African anti-apartheid activist Joyce Dipale about her detention, torture and rape at the hands of South Africa’s notorious Special Branch in 1976\. The torture centre was named after Prime Minister John Vorster, who held office from 1966 to 1978\. It was an appropriate name for a violent and blood-soaked building and reflected the political history of the person it was named after. Vorster not only oversaw more than a decade of apartheid, including the crushing of the Soweto uprising; he had also been a member of the fascist Afrikaner group Ossewabrandwag during World War Two. Vorster admired the supremacist politics of Hitler’s Germany and, when he became PM, sought to emulate elements of the Nazi program. A white supremacist who believed that blacks and whites could not live together, Vorster dressed up his racism as a kind of progressive generosity of spirit. He jokingly welcomed foreign dignitaries to “the happiest police state in the world” while overseeing the implementation of the Bantustan system of segregation, which attempted to quarantine South Africa’s black population into poor, desperate and underfunded zones of control. It was also under Vorster that the South African military participated in a bloody war against the newly decolonised Angola. In the year that Joyce Dipale was raped and tortured, Vorster was welcomed to Israel. His Nazi past and his crimes against the black and coloured population of South Africa were irrelevant to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The fascist Vorster was given a special tour of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, before being honoured at a state dinner. There, Rabin and other Israeli dignitaries toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”. Today, amid Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians such history might not seem so surprising. But it is important to note that Israel has not suddenly changed as a result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s belligerence and political alliance with his country’s fascist forces. The country was part of a global archipelago of reaction well before the latest atrocities. Indeed, despite its declared commitment to equality, Israel was a key backer of the apartheid regime in South Africa—and vice versa. Both countries shared a common predicament: they were minority colonial regimes that had achieved their rule through violence and bloodshed. In 1976, the South African government’s yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples”. In South Africa, these “dark peoples” vastly outnumbered the white Boer and British colonial populations; in Israel, the Zionist population ruled (and rules) over an ethno-supremacist Jewish state that expelled much of the Arab population at its founding. **Atomic love** The year after Vorster’s Tel Aviv love-in, the UN voted for a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa, calling for an end to the sale and shipment of arms, ammunition and military vehicles to the country. Israel quietly defied this prohibition. From the mid-1970s, Tel Aviv helped, [in the words of Alon Liel](https://jacobin.com/2024/12/israel-south-africa-apartheid-weapons?ref=redflag.org.au), a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, to create “the South African arms industry”: “They \[South Africa\] assisted us \[Israel\] to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together, we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies. We were involved in Angola \[South Africa never recognized the country’s 1975 independence from Portugal\] as consultants to the \[South African\] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate.” The love affair became nuclear in the late 1970s. Both countries wanted to strengthen their military capacities and become the most significant powers in their own regions. Nuclear weapons were key. South Africa had the uranium, and Israel had the scientists. Israeli newspaper *Haaretz* reported that, during this period, Israel purchased 550 tons of uranium from South Africa for its nuclear plant in Dimona. In exchange, Israel supplied South Africa with weapons design information and materials to increase the power of nuclear warheads. Israeli arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe maintained that South Africa helped Israel to test nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean in 1979\. The Israeli government later denied this. Both countries also required a brutal military infrastructure to police their oppressed populations. By the mid- to late-1970s, a Palestinian resistance movement was gathering strength. Israeli officials travelled to South Africa to learn from the apartheid regime’s counterinsurgency techniques. A Kibbutz called [Beit Alfa sold anti-riot vehicles](https://www.972mag.com/the-kibbutz-that-sells-riot-control-weapons-to-war-criminals/?ref=redflag.org.au) to South Africa and other brutal governments. The vehicles were used against the anti-apartheid movement in the black townships. In 1999, [a former South African soldier recounted](https://www.icrc.org/sites/default/files/external/doc/en/assets/files/other/southafrica.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au), for the International Committee of the Red Cross, the force used against the popular uprising against apartheid: “I know for myself, each guy was carrying at least three hand grenades and 16 magazines, so you had more than enough firepower and then you’ll have two Caspers \[armoured vehicles\] rocking up with 500 Brownings on the top. So even if there were 10,000 coming at you, you had enough firepower and there was no way they were going to stampede you and they knew that as well.” Some of the most notorious and violent figures of the Israeli state spent significant time in South Africa. Ariel Sharon, the defence minister in the 1980s, directed the massacres of Palestinian civilians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the Lebanon war. For these and other crimes, he was known as the Butcher of Beirut. In 1981, Sharon secretly visited South Africa and spoke to troops along the border of Angola. Former Israeli Ambassador Avi Primor was part of the Israeli delegation and recalled how impressed Sharon was with the repressive apparatus of the apartheid regime and with the developing Bantustan program. Former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema told *Haaretz*in 2003 that Sharon had expounded on the merits of the Bantustan model for Palestine. The Israeli state has perfected and developed many of the repressive and violent aspects of South African apartheid. The current genocide—the massacres, the starvation, the bombing—has brought levels of brutality that the monsters who ran South African apartheid could only dream of. Indeed, when South African Communist and anti-apartheid fighter Ronnie Kasrils visited Palestine in 2004, he said: “This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.” ### West recycles old lies to justify attack on Iran URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/west-recycles-old-lies-to-justify-attack-on-iran/ Last updated: 2025-06-23T09:05:17.000Z The line peddled by Western politicians and media outlets is that the US and Israel had to go to war because Iran was just weeks or months from developing nuclear weapons. [The White House claimed](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iran-produce-nuclear-weapon-couple-weeks-white-house/story?id=123016638&ref=redflag.org.au) that Iran could have produced a nuclear weapon “[in a couple of weeks](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iran-produce-nuclear-weapon-couple-weeks-white-house/story?id=123016638&ref=redflag.org.au)”. *Financial Times* correspondents [John Paul Rathbone and Charles Clover warned](https://www.ft.com/content/46c60c82-7e5c-4013-a789-459e785d33fd?ref=redflag.org.au) of “the nuclear mountain that haunts Israel”. And Australian Defence Minister [Richard Marles asserted](https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/defence-minister-richard-marles-stumbles-over-policy-gap-between-australiaus-in-iranisrael-conflict/news-story/5bf8bf19b4005ac6f1afc989a814dd9a?ref=redflag.org.au): [“T](https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/defence-minister-richard-marles-stumbles-over-policy-gap-between-australiaus-in-iranisrael-conflict/news-story/5bf8bf19b4005ac6f1afc989a814dd9a?ref=redflag.org.au)he Iranian nuclear ballistic missile program is most definitely a threat to the peace and stability of not only the Middle East”. The problem is that there is no evidence to support these claims, which have been repeated for more than 40 years by war hawks. As early as 1984, shortly after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, British defence journal *[Jane’s Defence Weekly reported](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/iran-has-been-two-years-away-from-a-nuclear-bomb-since-the-1980s/389333/?ref=redflag.org.au)*: “Iran is engaged in the production of an atomic bomb, likely to be ready within two years”. Timelines have varied since then, but the claim has stayed the same. In 1992, [Benjamin Netanyahu asserted](https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-netanyahus-rhetoric-on-irans-nuclear-ambitions?ref=redflag.org.au) that Iran was three to five years away from a nuclear weapon, a claim he repeated three years later, and again in 2002\. In 2012, [Netanyahu displayed a cartoon picture of a bomb](https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-netanyahus-rhetoric-on-irans-nuclear-ambitions?ref=redflag.org.au) in front of the United Nations general assembly while claiming that Iran would be in the final stage of weapons development “at most by next summer”. Somehow, Iran has managed to bend the rules of time, being just a few months or years away from going nuclear for almost half a century. Intelligence agencies themselves have reached different positions. [A 2007 US national intelligence estimate](https://archive.md/kbqyy?ref=redflag.org.au#selection-355.0-361.59), touted by the director of national intelligence as the “most authoritative written judgments on national security issues”, concluded with “high confidence” that Iran had been trying to develop nuclear weapons, but ceased its program in 2003\. It went on to admit: “Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005”. Just three months ago, current US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, [in her opening remarks](https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/congressional-testimonies/congressional-testimonies-2025/4061-ata-hpsci-opening-statement-as-delivered?ref=redflag.org.au) at a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, included the evaluation: “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003”. This isn’t an intelligence failure. The Western ruling classes are manufacturing consent for a major war against a rival state in the Middle East by lying. In some ways, it’s a repeat of the Bush administration’s strategy in the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq, according to Western politicians and journalists at the time, had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). [US President George W. Bush](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbP8HGxrgo8&ref=redflag.org.au), [British PM Tony Blair](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/mar/18/foreignpolicy.iraq1?ref=redflag.org.au)and [Australian PM John Howard](https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/what-led-john-howard-to-invade-iraq-the-question-remains-shrouded-in-mystery/3p4hsqleo?ref=redflag.org.au) peddled claims that Iraq had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. There was no evidence to support these claims. In the months before the US invaded in March 2003, UN inspectors in Iraq found nothing. [The Arms Control Association later noted](https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/disarming-saddam-chronology-iraq-and-un-weapons-inspections-2002-2003?ref=redflag.org.au): “UN weapons inspectors worked in Iraq from November 27, 2002 until March 18, 2003\. During that time, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspections Commission conducted more than 900 inspections at more than 500 sites. The inspectors did not find that Iraq possessed chemical or biological weapons or that it had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.” This didn’t matter to Bush and his allies, who were determined to invade and overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. [A July 2002 memo from the British Prime Minister’s office](https://web.archive.org/web/20050629021102/http:/downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html), leaked to the press three years later, showed that a great hoax was being perpetrated: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC \[the US National Security Council\] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record.” Over the next decade, up to [half a million Iraqis](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24547256?ref=redflag.org.au)were killed either directly or indirectly, as a result of the invasion, occupation and destruction of the country. Two powers operating in the Middle East are known to have weapons of mass destruction and the willingness to use them: Israel and the United States. Although Tel Aviv doesn’t publicly acknowledge its existence, [Israel’s nuclear weapons program is an open secret](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/truth-israels-secret-nuclear-arsenal?ref=redflag.org.au). The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons estimates that Israel has between [90 and 200 warheads](https://www.icanw.org/nuclear%5Farsenals?ref=redflag.org.au). Israel is one of four nuclear powers that are not signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (the others being India, Pakistan and North Korea), which means that there is no monitoring of its nuclear program. Israel is also believed to have extensive [chemical and biological weapons](https://www.nti.org/countries/israel/?ref=redflag.org.au)programs. [Amnesty International reported](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/lebanon-evidence-of-israels-unlawful-use-of-white-phosphorus-in-southern-lebanon-as-cross-border-hostilities-escalate/?ref=redflag.org.au) on the military’s use of white phosphorus, a horrific chemical that burns flesh down to the bone, on civilian areas of Lebanon in October 2023\. The group called for Israel to be investigated for war crimes. But this wasn’t the first time Israel had used chemical weapons—[it did so in the 2008-09 war on Gaza](https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/white-phosphorus-in-urban-environments?ref=redflag.org.au). The United States has waged brutal wars to dominate the people of Asia, Latin America and the Middle East for the better part of a century, often involving the most heinous weapons ever produced. America was the first state to develop the atomic bomb, and later the even more deadly hydrogen bomb. It remains the only state to have used the weapon against civilian populations. [The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists estimates](https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/?ref=redflag.org.au) that up to 210,000 people were killed in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the US dropped atomic bombs on them in 1945\. Hundreds of thousands of people lived, stripped of limbs or suffering from radiation poisoning, for decades afterwards. The United States has also murdered thousands of people with chemical weapons. The US military dropped napalm by the ton on the people of Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, burning men, women and children alive. In Iraq, having denounced the regime for its non-existent WMDs, [America admitted to using](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/nov/15/usa.iraq?ref=redflag.org.au) napalm and white phosphorus. If the US and Israel truly want to rid the world of WMDs, they should start by destroying their own nuclear and chemical weapons. And if they are worried about threats to peace and security, they ought to stop invading other countries. ### Capitalism’s ruthless new order URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/capitalisms-ruthless-new-order/ Last updated: 2025-06-22T23:40:51.000Z As long as capitalism survives, there will be no reckoning for the Gaza genocide or the naked aggression of Western imperialism in the Middle East. Every day, Israeli soldiers murder dozens of defenceless and starving Palestinians queuing for rations among the rubble of their now almost uninhabitable homeland. That no government in the world will do anything about it should be evidence enough of the impunity. Now, Tel Aviv and Washington are exporting even more violence to yet another country, Iran. How many deaths in this region are they responsible for over the last 25 years? Up to 4.7 million, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Yet these murderers receive sinecures rather than sanctions. This perennial spectacle of mass murder, and the spectre of more of it, have not elicited a rethinking of priorities among those who rule the world, let alone contrition or reparations. Instead, they are launching more wars and preparing for others—everywhere. Twenty-seven million active-duty military personnel are spread across the globe. But even this is insufficient. “If you have weapons, don’t abandon them; if you have the ability to produce weapons, produce them. Weapons of all kinds”, Lithuanian Defence Minister Dovilė Šakalienė last week told Yaroslav Trofimov, the *Wall Street Journal*’s chief foreign affairs correspondent. “Saying let’s disarm, let’s be peaceful pigeons—that’s suicidal.” This exhortation is but a reflection of what’s already happening. Global military spending is rapidly expanding, increasing by nearly 40 percent in real terms over the last decade to US$2.7 trillion (A$4.2 trillion) and accounting for approximately 7 percent of government expenditures worldwide. All indications suggest that this is only the beginning, as an increase in the means of violence in one country begets a commensurate increase in its neighbours’ and competitors’ capacities. The US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel together already possess more than 12,000 nuclear weapons. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2,100 are “kept in a state of high operational alert on ballistic missiles”—more than enough destructive capability to eradicate all human life several times over. Yet more countries are reportedly considering joining this nuclear club—a death cult by any reasonable definition. “The era of nuclear weapons reductions appears to have ended”, notes the *SIPRI Yearbook 2025*, released this month. “The signs are that a new qualitative nuclear arms race is gearing up and, compared with the last one, the risks are likely to be more diverse and more serious.” It is too generous to say that the great challenges of the 21st century—the climate catastrophe and decimation of the planet’s ecosystems, the 700 million people undernourished and living in extreme poverty, the 2.2 billion without drinking water, the 3.5 billion lacking safe sanitation services, and more—are afterthoughts to the imperialist states and their capitalist ruling classes. Increasingly, the primary feature of their system is destruction: destruction of living standards, destruction of life-support systems, destruction of cities and countries and peoples and spirit. The more it destroys, the wealthier the class of billionaires at the top becomes. The arms dealers, the fossil fuel barons, the tech oligarchs, the financiers—all of them profiting, and profiting all the more, as the destitution and destruction increase. This is capitalism’s logic: unchecked, unending rapaciousness. Last century, at least 180 million people were killed because of war; not a single year passed without cannons being fired or bombs being dropped. But every part of the world is now linked to the rest by some means. As long as this system grinds on, there will be no respite, let alone a reckoning, and no escaping the calamities resulting from so many natural resources and so much human energy being devoted to the military-industrial complex. With the world entering a potentially even more destructive phase, there is an urgent need to tear down the existing imperialist order and replace it with a socialist order: a society run according to the maxim “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”, and in which cooperation, rather than competition, is the guiding principle. ### AUKUS deal should be scrapped URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/aukus-deal-should-be-scrapped/ Last updated: 2025-06-22T03:57:57.000Z The Trump administration’s decision to hold a 30-day review of the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal has sparked concern across the Australian political and military establishment. Many are worried Australia will never get the submarines. Far from lamenting this possibility, we should welcome it. The nuclear submarines have one purpose only—to make war in the Asia-Pacific region more likely and more catastrophic. The Pentagon review is the result of growing worry in the US defence establishment that its shipyards are way behind schedule and incapable of delivering sufficient submarines to equip both the US navy and Australia’s on the timetable set out in the 2021 AUKUS pact. There is a push on now, cloaked in Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, for the US to keep every submarine for itself and talk of a “Plan B”, in which Australia would provide bases for US submarines but not have any of its own. This is what is causing the most apprehension in Canberra. The first thing to say about this is that the submarines have nothing to do with self-defence, of either the US or Australia. The media and politicians want us to think that China’s increasingly frequent navy and air force exercises indicate that an attack on Australia is a possibility in the not-too-distant future, and that submarines provide an effective deterrent against such an attack. But hard-headed military analysts have consistently dismissed the notion that an attack on Australia is imminent, and a series of defence white papers have all concluded that the likelihood of any nation invading Australia is extremely low. The only nation that has the capacity to do so is, ironically, the United States. Insofar as China does pose a threat, it is not primarily to civilian lives but to the interests of Australian big business. For decades, the US has dominated the naval approaches to Australia through which pass hundreds of billions of dollars of cargo every year, including weapons from the US, oil from the Middle East and manufactured goods from Europe and Asia, along with Australian mineral exports to Asia. US dominance protects Australian trade, and by extension Australian capitalism, since building a navy big enough to patrol the extensive region from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific is far beyond Australia’s capability. Australia’s alliance with the US enables Australian capitalism to benefit from US power, and saves it having to foot the bill for its own naval force. In return for US military protection in the Asia-Pacific, successive Australian governments have provided the US with a safe base from which to operate intelligence gathering in Pine Gap in central Australia and a submarine listening station at Exmouth, along with friendly ports for the US navy. When the US goes to war, usually far from Australian shores, Australian governments, both Labor and Liberal, send troops, aircraft and ships to back it up—Australia has supported the US in every one of its wars since 1945\. Often these are only token deployments, but they are politically advantageous for the US in its efforts to rally military backing from other powers. The US alliance—the imperialist pact that enjoys unwavering bipartisan support despite contributing to millions of deaths in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific since World War II—is therefore mutually beneficial. Australian governments do not support the US because they are weak or lapdogs, but because they understand that having the backing of a superpower allows Australia to punch above its weight in its region. When Australia intervenes in Asia, foreign leaders know it speaks as the US’s deputy sheriff, as former leader John Howard once described Australia’s role. With the US protecting the broader region in the interests of the US-led imperialist bloc, Australia can get on and use its military—the most powerful in South-East Asia and the South Pacific—to dominate its immediate region, in particular what politicians and diplomats often refer to disparagingly as “our backyard”. That means treating Papua New Guinea and smaller island nations like colonies, extracting minerals, capturing markets and taking over their security forces for the benefit of Australian capitalism. The “threat from China”, which we hear so much about from politicians and the media, is really about the threat it poses to US and Australian capitalism. They are worried that China’s increasingly powerful armed forces may at some stage be capable of pushing the US navy out of its traditional hunting grounds, overturning more than a century of Western domination in the Asia-Pacific. This explains the rapid expansion of US military forces and those of its allies in the region, including Australia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. The nuclear submarines are therefore not so much about preventing China from invading Sydney, but about equipping Australia with the capacity to carry out long-range missions to attack Chinese ships and Chinese bases close to China’s shores. They are designed to work alongside the growing US presence in northern Australia, ranging from port visits in Perth to air force and marine bases and fuel depots in and near Darwin, to increasingly ambitious military exercises and a troop presence in Queensland. The current mad dash for rearmament comes at a tremendous cost. In 2022, the Albanese government estimated the submarines on their own will cost $368 billion over 30 years. The final figure will be far higher. Military spending is projected in this year’s budget to rise from $63 billion to $100 billion by 2034, a rise from 2.0 percent to 2.4 percent of GDP. With the Trump administration demanding that US allies boost military spending to 3.5 percent, the bill will only keep climbing. Money spent on the military is money taken from public housing and health care, education and social assistance. Instead of these important social services, we are getting a military juggernaut, the only purpose of which is death and destruction. In the event of war breaking out between China and the US, with Australia riding shotgun, the consequences will be catastrophic. This insanity must be stopped. ### Green shoots of resistance in the United States URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/green-shoots-of-resistance-in-the-united-states/ Last updated: 2025-06-22T03:52:27.000Z President Donald Trump’s attacks on migrants have dramatically stepped up in recent weeks. But he has been met with protests and civil disobedience, including a national day of mobilisations involving several million people across the country. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have dropped the pretext of targeting “the most dangerous criminals” and shifted their focus to immigrant workers. The ICE repression machine has been so brazen as to violently and publicly arrest four prominent Democratic politicians, most recently [a senator from California](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-alex-padilla-forcibly-removed-dhs-sec-kristi-noems-press-conferenc-rcna212688?ref=redflag.org.au) and a high-profile [New York City mayoral candidate](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/nyregion/brad-lander-immigration-ice.html?ref=redflag.org.au), who have been critical of the raids. With the number of border crossings from Mexico now at historic lows, the easy deportation numbers racked up by the Democratic administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden—by simply turning people around as they entered the US—have been out of reach for Trump’s racist machine. Top White House aide Stephen Miller therefore [instructed ICE](https://www.wsj.com/us-news/protests-los-angeles-immigrants-trump-f5089877?ref=redflag.org.au) to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens”. Miller, [the hard-right architect](https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/stephen-miller/?ref=redflag.org.au) of Trump’s anti-migrant policies, specifically directed agents to target workplaces. The point is not only to terrorise and deport people, but to galvanise the MAGA political base by testing the limits of the federal government’s powers against non-citizens, protesters and Democratic-controlled states and cities. Trump wants to [bulldoze](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-doubles-expanding-deportations-americas-biggest-cities/story?id=122894265&ref=redflag.org.au)the existing meagre “sanctuary” policies and wage war on their defenders. He wants ICE to be an unrestricted force of [labour discipline](https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/05/20/united-farm-workers-union-protests-ice-arrests-of-farm-laborers-involved-in-union-drive/?ref=redflag.org.au) and [political repression](https://time.com/7272060/international-students-targeted-trump-ice-detention-deport-campus-palestinian-activism/?ref=redflag.org.au). And he wants to establish that no-one—judges, mayors, governors, senators or protesters—can get in his way. As an example of the atmosphere, the chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism has [sent letters to organisations involved in protests against ICE](https://x.com/HawleyMO/status/1932936510967251155?ref=redflag.org.au), accusing them of “bankrolling civil unrest” and threatening criminal investigations. **A glimmer of hope** In Los Angeles, home to a million undocumented people and millions of other migrants and their descendents, the ICE onslaught sparked the most significant resistance we’ve seen since Trump returned to office. Heroic protesters in Los Angeles have documented and disrupted ICE raids. They started a [“No Sleep for ICE”](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/demonstrators-are-trying-to-make-sure-ice-agents-cant-sleep/?ref=redflag.org.au) campaign—locating the hotels housing federal agents and making sure they can’t rest after spending their days attacking migrants. They organised mass mobilisations, shutting down traffic and putting resistance at the centre of political discourse. And, unlike many previous waves of immigrant rights struggles, they have maintained a militant edge in opposing the police and the state. Although the “No Kings” marches—the millions-strong mobilisations held on 14 June across the country—were organised by groups much closer to the Democratic Party establishment, the spark from Los Angeles helped make them younger and more diverse than the last national mobilisations on 5 April. We have been shown glimpses of what is possible when determined activists give a concerted lead. And we have seen that some of the most marginalised and oppressed in US society can be a leading edge in a fight against Trump. Despite the massive wave of protests that peaked on 14 June, however, the attacks on migrants have continued. And on top of migrant arrests, [journalists documenting the brutality](https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/spanish-language-journalist-documents-immigration-raids-detained-ice-122944707?ref=redflag.org.au) have frequently been targeted. Yet protests are still rippling through the country, and the dynamics of this powder keg could yet shift. Much will depend on how far Trump keeps pushing in his war on Democratic-controlled cities—particularly if the federal government goes all out against Chicago and/or New York. **Capitalist contradictions** Trump and his cronies want a campaign of federal terror and community division. They know that Trump’s stocks rise when racism, nationalism and a domestic war on “the enemy of the people” (meaning opponents of Trump) are the political currency of the day. However, US capitalists were doing fine with the pre-Trump levels of anti-migrant brutality. Poverty and fear already kept undocumented workers’ heads down and resulted in most accepting far less—lower wages, fewer rights—than they deserve. Hungry bellies and fears of family separation across dangerous borders force people to accept horrible conditions in the de facto apartheid US labour system. The wealthiest in US society have benefited greatly from exploiting the millions of undocumented workers—cheap housekeepers and nannies, cheap labour for businesses, an even more exploitable labour force across the border, more tax dollars for the state without a range of welfare obligations, downward pressure on the wages of other workers and so on. Many capitalists, therefore, have opposed the more aggressive ICE raids for disrupting the labour supply and for generating bad press and disruptive protests. That’s why the face of the Democratic Party’s “resistance”, California Governor Gavin Newsom, talked from both sides of his mouth when the protests escalated in Los Angeles. Newsom rode the wave of sympathy for migrant communities while bragging about his government’s [longstanding cooperation](https://www.kcra.com/article/newsom-california-prison-system-ice/63789927?ref=redflag.org.au) with ICE. He said that protests are necessary in the face of tyranny, while [restricting access](https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/06/immigrant-legal-aid-budget/?ref=redflag.org.au) to immigrant legal support. It was a cynical political calculation from the Democratic establishment’s presidential frontrunner; a nod to the wealthy that he can carry through the regular politics of divide and rule without being a wrecker. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a stalwart of the left of the party, was arguably worse than Newsom. In the wake of the rebellion against the raids, Sanders [misrepresented](https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1932148252800905415?ref=redflag.org.au)Martin Luther King Jr’s statements on riots to condemn the heroic Los Angeles protesters. Diverting attention from the need for protests, he [emphasised](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al7wpZL-QCI&ref=redflag.org.au) the importance of governors, not the federal government, having the power to deploy the National Guard. The Democrats want to prevent the federal government from undermining their local and regional authority. But they don’t want to spark resistance that could threaten the profits or interests of their capitalist friends and donors. **Where to now?** The protests have been an inspiration and a breath of fresh air. They point in the direction of popular resistance, rather than resignation, and in the direction of direct action, rather than reliance on the capitalist courts and politicians. The more working-class people take to the streets in defiance of the government and its agents, the more they expose the bankrupt Democratic strategy of largely hunkering down until the midterm elections. Democrats don’t want mass democracy and the genuine involvement of the people—they just want Trump’s project to implode so that they can become politically relevant on the back of extremely low expectations, as they did in 2020 with Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. It’s still early, but we haven’t yet seen the [scale of disruption](https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/immigrant-protests-peak/?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=On%20April%2010%2C%202006%2C%20the,but%20failed%20in%20the%20Senate.&text=Hundreds%20of%20newspapers%20covered%20the%20protests.) or economic impact that defined the wave of immigrant rights protests in 2006, when there were mass workplace walkouts. That was the peak of the first big wave of immigrant activism, which beat back the anti-immigrant [Sensenbrenner Bill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border%5FProtection,%5FAnti-terrorism%5Fand%5FIllegal%5FImmigration%5FControl%5FAct%5Fof%5F2005?ref=redflag.org.au) and [shaped a generation of activists](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0306-engler-immigration-protests-2006-20160306-story.html?ref=redflag.org.au), this author included. While there seems to have been a greater degree of militancy in this new wave of protests, the depth of the crisis and the appetite for months of disruptive street demonstrations fall well short of the 2020 Black Lives Matter rebellion. Those protests [pushed the state back](https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/12/31/2020-the-year-black-lives-matter-shook-the-world?ref=redflag.org.au) for a brief moment, and sparked a [global movement](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/george-floyd-black-lives-matter-impact/?ref=redflag.org.au) against racism and police brutality. Nevertheless, the protesters should be celebrated, even if they haven’t yet become the type of mass movement that could stop this authoritarian regime in its tracks. Activists discussing the need for a [general strike](https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/what-would-general-strike-in-the-us-look-like/?ref=redflag.org.au) and orienting their efforts towards the power of the labour movement are important. But organising independently of the forces that would undermine these efforts is crucial. Real power lies in the working class, and a big fight from organised workers could shake this regime. Yet the strong links of the NGO and trade union wing of the immigrant rights movement with the Democratic Party lead far too many down the dead-end road of supporting a “lesser evil” that is perfectly happy to [target and scapegoat](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/-border-broken-democrats-solidify-shift-tougher-migration-stance-conve-rcna167638?ref=redflag.org.au) migrants when it is politically expedient. In Texas, I was part of nearly a dozen different immigrant justice organisations. More than half of them no longer exist because key organisers burned out or moved on. The other half have either limped on independently or have fallen further into the Democratic Party sphere of influence and moderated their actions. The question for the left now is how much it can organise and build from this moment. The crucial task is to build an independent socialist left that sharpens its politics for this and the next fight. ### Labor’s latest non-solution to the housing crisis URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-latest-non-solution-to-the-housing-crisis/ Last updated: 2025-06-22T03:29:53.000Z You might think that Australia’s housing crisis is the fault of greedy developers, wealthy investors and a market that puts profit before people’s need for a home. Not so, according to Labor Minister for Housing Claire O’Neill. The problem is planning laws that allow selfish, “anti-development residents” to put their interests before those who need affordable homes. “Planning laws at the state level are being used much too much to protect existing residents, and not enough to address the fact that we’ve got millions of people who are in housing distress”, O’Neill said in a recent interview in the *Age*. Apparently, this bureaucratic red tape is to blame for Labor likely falling at least 220,000 homes short of its target of 1.2 million built by 2029\. Harry Triguboff, owner of mega-developer Meriton and Australia’s second richest person, agrees. In [a press release](https://www.meriton.com.au/news/harry-triguboff-on-the-major-housing/?ref=redflag.org.au) titled “We’re in a major housing crisis. So why do I find myself talking to brick walls rather than building them?”, Triguboff urged all levels of government to “work together to address the red tape” and stop sabotaging the housing industry. Things are so bad that “there is no profit” in building, leading Triguboff to ask, “Why would anyone choose to do it?”. The *Australian Financial Review*’s 2025 Rich List provides a clue: Triguboff’s wealth is up 12 percent and now stands at a staggering $29.65 billion. O’Neill’s ire at “anti-development residents” is not aimed at the rich. Labor’s planning proposals target “middle ring” suburbs, particularly those close to transport corridors, which means predominantly middle-income working-class communities. Despite what Labor and billionaires like Triguboff might say, the planning system is already heavily geared towards developer interests and has little or no impact on either the supply of housing or its price. Current rules allow developers to build boxed-in housing in western Sydney with black roofs, contributing to soaring temperatures that experts say could make the region [unlivable by 2050](https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-01-24/heatwaves-sydney-uninhabitable-climate-change-urban-planning/12993580?ref=redflag.org.au)—no red tape getting in the way there. The Opal Towers in Sydney’s Olympic Park were approved as a major building project by the NSW government in 2015, but serious defects caused [cracking in the building](https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/opal-tower-residents-evacuated-after-concerns-building-may-collapse-20181224-p50o4b.html?ref=redflag.org.au) and the evacuation of more than 3,000 residents in 2018\. In a [2020 paper](https://osf.io/preprints/osf/r925z%5Fv1?ref=redflag.org.au), economist Cameron Murphy showed that planning approvals for new properties far outstripped the number of houses built, with more than 100,000 surplus approvals since 2012\. In Sydney and Melbourne, 94 percent of planning applications are approved, most within three to four months. As Murphy wrote in the *Conversation* in 2021, “planning regulations permit development, but it is the market price that determines if and where development occurs ... developers select their sites, build, and sell in strong markets and wait or avoid selling when markets are weak”. In other words, developers have no problems getting planning approvals, but they use the approvals only if building and selling will make enough profit. Labor’s attack on planning “red tape” is part of its broader argument that lack of supply is responsible for housing unaffordability. But this is a myth, as economists like Murphy have [demonstrated](https://osf.io/preprints/osf/r925z%5Fv1?ref=redflag.org.au). Between 1996 and 2018, Murphy estimates that new supply exceeded demand by 458,000 dwellings, but house prices and rents went up, not down. If more supply might reduce prices, developers don’t build. In March 2025, the[*Age*](https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/the-melbourne-suburbs-with-hundreds-of-cheap-brand-new-apartments-20250329-p5lni7.html?ref=redflag.org.au) reported that developers in Melbourne were holding back 8,000 apartments because they couldn’t sell them at a high enough profit. It’s the market and profits that have made housing in Australia unaffordable, not a lack of homes. Labor and big developers like Triguboff want to blame anyone but themselves for Australia’s escalating housing crisis. Whether it’s international students, migrants, local residents or young people eating avocado on toast, anyone is a target as long as it’s not profit-gouging developers or the government. Labor’s plans to address the housing crisis by making it easier for developers to build low-quality unaffordable homes is like contracting employers to protect workers from wage theft. If Labor was serious about ending the housing crisis, it would be taking on the developers, not giving them more handouts. The developers should be forced to build high-quality properties at affordable prices, and if that means they won’t build, then the government can and should do it instead by constructing the hundreds of thousands of public housing properties we need and building affordable homes for people to buy. It’s measures like those—in addition to controlling rents and mortgages, ending the massive tax concessions to wealthy investors and seizing empty homes—that would start to fix the crisis. But Labor doesn’t intend to do any of that; instead it is committed to lining the pockets of the rich while pouring fuel on to the bonfire of Australia’s housing crisis. ### Mental health workers versus Victorian Labor URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/mental-health-workers-versus-victorian-labor/ Last updated: 2025-06-22T03:28:53.000Z The public mental health system in Victoria is a disaster. Mental health workers across the state are demanding that the state government fix it. In the past week, allied health and nurse members of the Health and Community Services Union (HACSU) struck and rallied outside state parliament during a statewide day of action, to insist that the ALP address the sector’s underfunding. Successive ALP governments have created a severely understaffed, degrading and dangerous mental health system. Low wages, disgusting conditions and burnout are the daily reality for workers. People seeking care and treatment confront an exhausting and too often traumatic battle to receive grossly inadequate support that is overly medicalised and demeaning. The 2019 Royal Commission into Mental Health in Victoria confirmed as much and recommended broad reforms. In response, the ALP in 2022 promised an additional 800 full-time positions in the public mental health sector. In reality, at least 2,000 additional workers are needed. The government has since backflipped. The latest offer proposes cuts to pay for allied health workers and no increase to overall staffing. It is attempting to divide the workforce by giving a long-overdue pay rise to mental health nurses, while cutting paid entitlements and offering a pathetic pay rise of 3 percent to long underpaid, overwhelmingly women workers. The offer proposes to cut a yearly retention payment and slash some penalty rates, which, taken together, would result in an overall pay cut for allied health workers. General nurses in Victoria won a 28.4 percent pay rise last year, after union members rejected a government offer of a 3 percent annual pay rise. When mental health nurses, who have the same qualifications and training as general nurses, but are employed under different enterprise agreements, demanded the pay rise awarded to general nurses, the ALP initially suggested it would not extend pay parity. It has since backed down and agreed. The catch is that allied health workers are being thrown under the bus. Either nurses or allied health workers can staff many roles in the public mental health system. The offer from the ALP would result in nurses, in some instances, being paid $40,000 more than allied health workers *for doing exactly the same job*. In a recent poll conducted by HACSU, 97 percent of respondents said they would leave the public mental health sector if the government did not pay them more, and fairly. There is enormous and cumulative anger and disillusionment among mental health workers across Victoria. Decades ago, workers, including senior clinicians, regularly talked about “a crisis in mental health”. The ALP has been in government for more than a decade and turned the crisis into a full-blown disaster. The Allan government would have us believe there is no money and that hospitals have to cut budgets. The lie that Australian governments have no money to provide high-quality public health services is becoming an increasingly enraging and hollow cliché. Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Healthcare workers are getting angrier and more determined to take on the Labor government’s destruction of our public services. The more it refuses to fix them, the harder we should fight. HACSU members want genuine pay increases for allied health members, pay parity with nursing colleagues and no cuts to current entitlements. The enterprise bargaining campaign continues and should accept no less. The ALP, meanwhile, should deliver much more. ### Queensland CFMEU members fight back URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/queensland-cfmeu-members-fight-back/ Last updated: 2025-06-22T03:28:08.000Z Roughly two dozen construction union (CFMEU) members, crane operators and riggers, are on indefinite strike at the Port of Brisbane. They’ve been out for nearly a month now and don’t show any sign of giving in. One delegate told *Red Flag* that they are “committed to being here as long as we need”. Workers have set up a television, cooking equipment and decorations, as well as a couch—important comforts for a long fight. Their employer is Qube, Australia’s largest logistics company. Qube owns part of Patrick Corporation, an infamously anti-worker outfit. In 1998, in an attempt to cripple the Maritime Union of Australia, Patrick fired its entire wharfie workforce. This kicked off the famous [war on the waterfront](https://redflag.org.au/article/waterfront-war-shook-australia) dispute. True to form, the Brisbane strike kicked off after Qube sacked workers, including a union delegate, who took part in an initial two-day strike in early May. They were laid off using a dodgy “restructuring”: boss language for union busting. One of the workers quit in protest but is still down at the picket line each day: “These boys are in for a fight; I’ve got to stand alongside them”, he told *Red Flag.* Along with the right to strike, the workers are fighting for better pay and conditions. They say their enterprise bargaining agreement was “substandard” even when it was signed in 2019*.* Their wage currently sits $4 an hour below the industry standard, which they are fighting to meet. They’re also demanding proper redundancy pay, income protection and travel pay. The small amount of travel pay they are owed is often unpaid; one worker is still waiting on a claim he made a year ago. Another demand is for a meal allowance, which is standard in the industry but not paid here. Not everyone experiences this poor treatment at Qube. “They look after their corporate people very well”, said one of the workers. Qube’s managing director, Paul Digney, made $4.14 million in the 2023-24 financial year. Digney recently complained in an interview with the *Australian* that when his workers “don’t turn up for work, the economy stops”. Too right. According to the workers, their frustrated managers often drive past the picket, occasionally giving them the middle finger. Taking these arrogant fat cats down a peg won’t go in a log of claims, but it is a worthy reason to keep fighting. The CFMEU members aren’t up against only their own bosses, but also a [government-appointed administrator](https://redflag.org.au/article/labor-set-to-impose-dictatorial-powers-over-construction-union). The administrator has [sacked officials](https://redflag.org.au/article/attack-on-democracy-in-the-act-cfmeu) and destroyed democracy in the union. In response to a High Court ruling that gave the go-ahead to this undemocratic disgrace, hundreds of CFMEU workers walked off the job last week. Queensland Socialists secretary and teacher unionist Bec Barrigos spoke at their rally, arguing for more strike action to take on the administration. She also pointed out the connection between the fights of workers in every industry. The workers at Qube are similarly keen to point out this connection. “If we just leave it and they get away with screwing us over, other workers will have to deal with it”, one of the delegates said. But “if we win here, it's a win for the next worker”. Touch one, touch all, as the old union saying goes. Another saying is well worn among these workers: “If you don’t fight, you lose”. Amid a generational cost-of-living crisis, attacks on unions, growing inequality and stagnant wages, theirs is a message worth remembering. **Contribute to the Qube workers’ strike fund:** QUBE financial hardship fund BSB: 064 000 ACC: 165 702 38 ### Posing as a dog ‘for the girls’: what in god’s name is going on with pop culture? URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/posing-as-a-dog-for-the-girls-what-in-gods-name-is-going-on-with-pop-culture/ Last updated: 2025-06-20T00:05:20.000Z In her 1996 hit song “Ironic”, Alanis Morissette takes us through scenarios ranging from irritating (a black fly in your chardonnay) to downright devastating (a man’s long-awaited flight turning fatal). Ironically though, none of these situations are actually ironic. Much like Morissette, defenders of US singer Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album cover, titled *Man’s Best Friend* and featuring Carpenter’s hair being pulled like a dog on a lead by a faceless man while on her hands and knees, also seem to have a little trouble understanding the concept. For most people, the image of a young woman posing as a dog and being dragged along by her hair by a man would be understood as yet another sexist and demeaning image. It is not even a particularly exaggerated version of the degrading presentation of women that advertising, pop culture and the entertainment industry surround us with every day. Some fans of Carpenter, however, say that the cover, and other promotional material like her cover for *Rolling Stone* featuring her nude but for a pair of knee-length white stockings, are an ironic nod and wink to the “male gaze”. What seems like garden variety sexism is, in fact, according to Carpenter’s defenders, the clever use of sexist imagery to gain attention, “reclaim” her sexuality and sell records. She doesn’t perform sexism for men, she performs it for her own gain. Profiting from your own degradation is therefore not a sad reflection of the state of sexual politics, but boundary-pushing social commentary— subversive entrepreneurism. Dr Emma Phillips, an academic at the University of Canberra, author of a PhD on the topic of sexualisation, [argued](https://www.theage.com.au/culture/music/sabrina-carpenter-s-new-album-cover-has-sparked-uproar-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-20250612-p5m6up.html?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwK3tdNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHp25cnhRbPv1xMqfTPMQocEhy6hSFX-ONMfm57Qa-MxOtitk2t5d8Fhjdxiy%5Faem%5FQghJ%5FBRP4bBTWcdf0PPyDQ&utm%5Fmedium=Social&utm%5Fsource=Facebook%23Echobox=1749704706) in the *Age* that “we see Carpenter being an active agent in her sexual life, and immediately she’s derided for that”. But Carpenter isn’t being derided for having agency in her sex life. She is being criticised for an album cover that glamorises the abuse of women, with nothing to suggest subversive intent. This is not sexual agency. It is what it looks like: a transparent attempt to sell records through ever-more-extreme sexist imagery. Women are supposed to aspire to look and be like her, and men to have sex with her, and both desires are harnessed to make money. Another Carpenter defender, Markiel Magsalin, writing in *Vogue*, argued that the cover is “a masterclass in satire” but one that the “audience \[isn’t\] equipped to recognise”. It is hard to see this as anything other than the collective gaslighting of women. What seems to be a sexist image that adds to the mountain of sexist and demeaning images women have to endure through every single day of their lives is not what it seems—it is a fellow woman making an ironic statement that you have failed to understand. Your reactions are not a healthy awareness of the sexist rubbish around you and an effort to resist the effect it has, but a reflection of your own stupidity. This trash album cover is powerful social commentary, not the tired cliché millions of women perceive it to be. We are told that Sabrina is doing all of this in the name of empowerment, or “[for the girls](https://stellar.ie/trending/sabrina-carpenter-the-power-of-the-female-gaze/137825?ref=redflag.org.au)”. In reality, Carpenter is just a reheated version of what the music industry, among others, has been selling for decades. That it is women who are now doing it and making some of the money only makes it more contemptible. Carpenter has form cashing in on reactionary tropes. Before the dog thing it was paedophilia. She wears bejewelled “baby doll” lingerie on stage in her *Short n’ Sweet* tour, harking back to an outfit worn by actress Carroll Baker in the 1956 film *Baby Doll*, where the adult female lead literally sleeps in a crib. In one less-than-subtle photo shoot with[ ](https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/sabrina-carpenter-cover-interview-2024?ref=redflag.org.au)[*W*](https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/sabrina-carpenter-cover-interview-2024?ref=redflag.org.au)[ magazine,](https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/sabrina-carpenter-cover-interview-2024?ref=redflag.org.au) she made visual reference to the film *Lolita,* where a grown man pursues a child. Sabrina is presented as childlike, and as Jade Hurley, a feminist writer on [Substack](https://jadehurley.substack.com/p/your-fave-is-selling-a-pedophilic) points out, she more than alludes to this in her “Nonsense” outro: “I’m full grown but I look like a niña/ Come put something big in my casita/ Mexico, I think you are bonita!” So just as the official line of society is that sexism is wrong, but there is sexism everywhere because it is profitable, we are told the sexualisation of children is wrong, except when it turns men on and sells records. In an interview with *Vogue*, talking about the corseted sparkly lingerie she wears on stage, Carpenter described how “there’s a stiffness to the corset, so it’s a little harder to dance in. But my waist is non-existent, so we love her”. Girls, don’t move, don’t breathe—but remember it’s worth it to be thin and sexy. No-one said empowerment would be comfortable after all. Just think of the money someone is making—one [estimate](https://touringdata.wordpress.com/2025/04/07/sabrina-carpenter-short-n-sweet-tour/?ref=redflag.org.au) puts the total likely revenue from Carpenter’s latest tour at $50 million. All this is nothing new—women have had to be sex objects first and foremost and artists second for decades. Some have eventually spoken out against it, most notably Britney Spears, who describes being uncomfortable about being sexualised and infantilised in the 1990s but being too under-confident to object. But the normalisation of the violent porn and the sexual exploitation of women in the sex industry have only made this more prevalent, and criticism of it more marginal. Marie Solis, a writer for the *New York Times*, [remarked](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/style/sabrina-carpenter-album-art-feminism.html?ref=redflag.org.au) that, despite Carpenter’s latest album cover being so overtly sexy, it is a remarkably “sexless” photograph. Unlike actual satire or irony, it doesn’t make you question received wisdom or the status quo. It just makes you wonder why an adult woman would want to present herself as a sexualised dog. Carpenter is not reclaiming anything. Instead, she is presenting a Hollywood glam version of female sexuality that still puts men firmly at the centre. With this latest cover and like much of Carpenter’s recent work, we are being force-fed sexist imagery in order to make industry producers, men and “empowered” women, big bucks. ### The human cost of Israel’s war on Iran URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-human-cost-of-israels-war-on-iran/ Last updated: 2025-06-18T01:00:09.000Z “I saw it with my own eyes. My father was blasted out of the house. His face was burned, and his ears were torn off.” Amin Ahmad, [speaking to Al Jazeera’s Saeedeh Fathi](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/16/athlete-pilates-instructor-teacher-human-toll-of-israels-attack-on-iran?ref=redflag.org.au), recounted his father’s death in eastern Tehran, Iran’s capital, on Sunday afternoon. An Israeli airstrike on the family home left him and his mother trapped inside. “I had to force the window bars open and call out for help. Someone brought a ladder, and my mother and I escaped”, he said. Amin’s father was a teacher. He worked all his life with the hope that he would one day retire in peace. “Now he’s dead, and the house is destroyed.” Amin’s story is one of hundreds. Israel has so far [killed more than 450 people](https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-iran-conflict-news/card/iran-s-death-toll-surpasses-450-rights-group-says-Y8tyR2w2VwItM2BII2Ae?ref=redflag.org.au), according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a nongovernmental organisation that monitors the country. The Western political establishment calls this Israel’s right to self-defence. But like in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Israel’s war on Iran is an act of naked aggression. The wounded come in waves to Tehran’s major hospitals. One doctor described it as a bloodbath. He told [the *Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/16/doctors-describe-carnage-iran-hospitals-israel-strikes?ref=redflag.org.au), “We were overwhelmed by chaos and the screams of grieving family members”. Many of the wounded had been struck by deadly shrapnel from Israeli airstrikes. Patients were found with metal lodged in femur bones and the soft tissues of the hip joints. Iranian petrochemical workers on Karkov Island, their workplace having been deemed a high-risk target, were left by their bosses to fend for themselves. In a statement on their Telegram channel, they said: “\[The managers\] have not even put a plan in place for the possibility of an attack. There is no shelter or equipment. There is no catalog \[sic\] of instructions on what to do in the event of an attack, where to go, or how to protect our lives”. It’s impossible to know the real toll of Israel’s air war. [Hospital staff have reported](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/16/doctors-describe-carnage-iran-hospitals-israel-strikes?ref=redflag.org.au) being told not to post online about the number of wounded or dead. But we do know that Israel’s attacks are widespread. A Children’s Hospital in southern Tehran. An assistant professor of neonatal medicine and her three-year-old child. A student sitting in her home with her family. They were destroyed in a flash of fire as bombs rained down. Israel says that they’re all “legitimate targets”—just like the hospitals in Gaza; just like the residential buildings in Lebanon. “\[They have\] directly targeted the country’s infrastructure, such as oil and gas resources, automotive industries, water, airports, the Iranian Broadcasting Corporation and even Farabi Hospital in Kermanshah”, a student in central Iran told *Red Flag* via Telegram. “Israel keeps saying that it’s only targeting military sites, which is not true at all.” The Middle East Monitor [reported two days ago](https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250616-report-israel-threatens-dahiya-style-assault-on-tehran-in-bid-to-destabilise-iran/?ref=redflag.org.au) that Israel is preparing for a massive, “Dahiya-style” attack on the capital: “The plan, disclosed by Israeli broadcaster *Channel 14*, reportedly seeks to destabilise Iran’s government through systematic bombing of strategic sites while coercing mass evacuation from densely populated areas. “The operation, said to have been greenlit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz, draws directly from Israel’s controversial military doctrine first employed during its 2006 war on Lebanon. “That assault saw the wholesale destruction of the Dahiya district in southern Beirut—a stronghold of Hezbollah—marking the beginning of what military officials would later describe as a deliberate strategy of ‘disproportionate force’ and the targeting of civilian infrastructure to achieve political objectives.” Indeed, Defence Minister Israel Katz warned: “Tehran will be treated like Beirut”. The Israelis are trying to exploit the deep unpopularity of the Iranian regime to gain support for their war. In a[televised address](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO8WlACdCB8&ref=redflag.org.au) to the Iranian public, Netanyahu smugly asserted: “We are clearing the path for you to achieve your objective, which is freedom”. This narrative—that bombing people while they sleep will facilitate their freedom from the forces of political oppression—has been repeated time and again over the last twenty months of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza. And it continues. Western media outlets [such as the British Broadcasting Corporation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLqP7SAlrYg&ref=redflag.org.au) have given a platform to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the disgraced former dictator of Iran, who says that Israeli strikes will help “liberate” the country. As if 90 million Iranians are hoping for the return of a US-backed monarchy. As if freedom rises out of the rubble of an Israeli bomb. “Most people still oppose the government”, the student in central Iran said. “The rulers of Iran, like many other countries, are dictators ... but they believe the invasion \[by Israel\] is wrong.” World leaders speak of “restraint” and “de-escalation” while arming Israel with advanced heavy weaponry. Netanyahu’s war on Iran is made in America, where the Congress approves billions for “bunker-busting” bombs, where politicians and the media manufacture consent for war crimes. President Trump is now [calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender”](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/17/world/israel-iran-trump?ref=redflag.org.au#trump-iran), declaring: “We \[Israel and the US\] now have complete control of the skies over Iran”. Israel is unleashing hell across the Middle East with the backing of the world’s most powerful state and with the support of most of the “civilised” world. They speak of the “Iran-Israel conflict” when it’s an invasion. The Western media and politicians have tried to desensitise the world to such horror over the past twenty months of genocide in Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians and thousands of Lebanese have been slaughtered with impunity. The calculation now is that hundreds or thousands of Iranians added to the toll will not be of any international consequence. But each death is more than a number. It’s a child who will never become an adult; it’s a family torn apart forever. Parnia Abassi was one of these lives: a student killed, along with three of her family members, as they slept in their home in Sattarkhan, Tehran. Parnia’s friends described her as funny and full of life. In interviews and [online](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://hammihanonline.ir/%25D8%25A8%25D8%25AE%25D8%25B4-%25D8%25AC%25D8%25A7%25D9%2585%25D8%25B9%25D9%2587-23/40566-%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B5%25D9%2588%25DB%258C%25D8%25B1-%25D9%2585%25D9%2588%25D9%2587%25D8%25A7%25DB%258C-%25D8%25B1%25D9%2588%25DB%258C-%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B4%25DA%25A9-%25D8%25B5%25D9%2588%25D8%25B1%25D8%25AA%25DB%258C-%25D9%2585%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B9%25D9%2584%25D9%2582-%25D8%25A8%25D9%2587-%25D9%25BE%25D8%25B1%25D9%2586%25DB%258C%25D8%25A7-%25D8%25A7%25D8%25B3%25D8%25AA&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1750205171857941&usg=AOvVaw2c8RZUFj86VcTYEMPKZiN3), they recounted their favourite memories. How she took them camping outdoors for the first time, how she gave them gifts, how her sense of humour often took a moment to sink in and then bowled them over with laughter. All of that, gone, in a second. Parnia was an aspiring poet. One of her last compositions reads: *I burn* *I fade,* *I become a silent star,* *That turns into smoke* *In your sky* ### Victorian Socialists conference resolves to expand party organisation URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-socialists-conference-resolves-to-expand-party-organisation/ Last updated: 2025-06-17T07:45:17.000Z Victorian Socialists hosted a members’ conference over the weekend of 14-15 June. After garnering impressive votes and national attention in the May federal election, the executive moved to establish socialist parties Australia-wide. More than 2,200 financial members have since joined outside Victoria, including more than 900 in NSW, 480 in Queensland, 270 in South Australia and 330 in WA. The momentum and excitement of this project were reflected in conference attendance—360 people participated over the weekend, making it the biggest gathering of party members to date. This is an important step at a time of overlapping capitalist atrocities that highlight the need for a radical left challenge to the status quo. This was acknowledged in the first motion moved at the conference, a [statement of solidarity with Palestine](https://victoriansocialists.org.au/news/palestine-statement?ref=redflag.org.au). “In the past week, a small boat carrying twelve international activists set out to the ocean to deliver a tiny quantum of food, baby formula and medicine to Palestinians being genocided in Gaza”, Palestine solidarity activist and Socialist Alternative member Simone White said, introducing the motion. “They are amplifying one clear message, one statement of fact ... And it’s a statement of fact written into this motion. They asserted that governments and politicians around the world, particularly in the Western world, were complicit in the genocide in Gaza, and where they were complicit, where they betrayed and failed the Palestinians, we needed to fight.” VS Secretary Corey Oakley introduced the first session by talking about the overlapping crises of the capitalist system—from far-right authoritarianism to escalating imperialist violence. “What underpins all of this is a savage class war taking place all around the world”, he said. The conference overwhelmingly endorsed motions to enlarge the scope and scale of Victorian Socialists’ activity. The executive’s decision to expand the party federally was supported, as was a proposal for an ambitious strategy to contest all 88 lower house seats in the 2026 state election. Victorian Socialists members also voted to expand the democratic structures of the party, organising members into groups based on electoral districts and enshrining democratic processes at a local level. On Saturday afternoon, members broke into groups to discuss organising in their local areas. Reports from these groups give a sense of the work VS members are doing to promote socialist politics locally and in workplaces. In Melbourne’s West, party members are organising an anti-racist demonstration to respond to police discrimination and violence. In Brunswick, the group is supporting a union rally to defend Merri-Bek council’s library social worker program, which has recently been cut. In the south-east, where Victorian Socialists have a newly established presence, the focus is on setting up the first local meetings to organise volunteers. In the Whittlesea and Darebin council areas, members are preparing to run candidates in upcoming by-elections. Many conference participants were new to Victorian Socialists, from unionists sick of Labor’s sellouts, to Palestine activists brought into the socialist movement through interaction with the party. There was a series of debates at the conference, reflecting the party’s democratic internal life. The Communist Caucus, a minority faction, intervened with proposals to significantly alter the party’s structures and strategic orientation. They proposed a program for Victorian Socialists modelled on the politics and structure of early-twentieth-century European social democracy. The faction also nominated an alternative leadership and was provided ample time to explain their positions. They garnered only a small minority of votes for any of their motions or candidates. Conference elected a new executive, and re-elected the incumbent secretary, treasurer, campaign director and communications officer based on their records of orienting the party through an impressive period of growth. The conference closed with remarks from Rebecca Barrigos, a teacher unionist and state secretary of the new Queensland Socialists. Bec described the success of the new party in attracting support from blue-collar trade unionists disgusted by the federal Labor Party’s support for union-busting, including the takeover of the Queensland branch of the construction union (the CFMEU). “It’s a question that’s been posed to them very concretely because they have had ... Labor governments that have actively attacked them”, Barrigos explained. “They can’t have a meeting in their union offices without a bloody government spy sitting in their office listening to what every union member says.” Bec read from a statement by unionist Dan Jones, explaining to other CFMEU members why he has joined Queensland Socialists: “The political class is out of touch with the working class, because it’s not made up of ordinary people. Part of it is made up of lawyers, lobbyists and career politicians—people who’ve never clocked on, have never packed a lunch, and have never fought for a pay rise ... Militant unionism, the kind that refuses to beg, that organises and takes collective action, needs political representation that represents its values. Queensland Socialists don’t just talk about supporting unions. They hit the streets, and they do it.” The project of building a nationwide alternative to the political parties that prop up capitalism in Australia is still in its early stages. However, if this conference is any indication, there is a great deal of willingness to build a new socialist alternative. ### Tonsley needs trees, not Teslas URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/tonsley-needs-trees-not-teslas/ Last updated: 2025-06-17T03:41:33.000Z “People before profits”; “Trees not Teslas”; “Elon Musk can get \[Redacted\]”; these were some of the placards at a recent protest outside the City of Marion Council chambers in Adelaide, where a proposal to build a Tesla battery servicing centre and showroom in Tonsley have been met with widespread community opposition. The council reported that 95 percent of the nearly 1,000 responses to its community consultation opposed the proposal. Submissions cited opposition to Elon Musk’s far-right politics, Tesla’s terrible environmental record, and support for alternative uses for the site, such as public green spaces and public housing. Despite this widespread opposition, the council is ploughing ahead with the proposal. It engaged in community consultation only because it is legislatively required to do so if it is to sell a local park that is part of the proposed site. But adhering to or even acknowledging the community opposition was not mandatory. Balancing its farcical consultation with recommendations from private developers, the council’s business unit decided that the will of the latter should come before the overwhelming disapproval of residents. The council agreed and voted to go ahead with the proposal. This is nothing new for people in Tonsley. The proposed site sits next to the old Chrysler-Mitsubishi Automotive plant, which closed in 2008\. The land once contained a publicly accessible park and public housing lots. In 2016, it was discovered that the groundwater had been contaminated by industrial pollution from the plant—the land was no longer safe for residential or recreational use. One would think that the company responsible for the pollution should be made to pay the cost of cleaning it all up. Instead, the housing trust residents were forced to move, and the park was closed. The land has remained unused since then. The council says the Tesla plant is an excellent opportunity to put the land to use for industrial purposes. They say that the developer will be responsible for the cleanup, but locals are understandably sceptical. Given Tesla’s record of environmental mismanagement at some of its other industrial sites, it is not hard to see why. According to [a report last year in the *Wall Street Journal*](https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/elon-musk-tesla-environment-1263cd60?ref=redflag.org.au), former employees have spoken out about a culture of regulatory avoidance at the company. Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, has been accused of illegally dumping toxic run-off into the city sewerage system. After the door on the casting furnace broke, management reportedly continued production, releasing toxic fumes, so as not to fall behind on Model Y production quotas. In Freemont, California Tesla’s factory has repeatedly breached air pollution regulations. And at the company’s main factory in Europe, in the German state of Brandenburg, a years-long protest campaign over the company’s theft of water is ongoing. Speaking to *Red Flag* at the Marion protest, Rebecca, a local resident, said that she was “tired of business and elected councils, supposedly bodies that are meant to represent the people, just running roughshod over community and over humanity. I’m really tired of profits being put above the people at all costs”. The proposal still requires state government approval. The activists behind the Trees Not Teslas campaign have vowed to keep fighting. ### Mutual aid is nice, but it doesn’t challenge capitalism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/mutual-aid-is-nice-but-it-doesnt-challenge-capitalism/ Last updated: 2025-06-17T01:16:05.000Z Review: *Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next)* By Dean Spade, Verso Academic, 2021, 128 pages. \-------------------- The world is getting bleaker by the day: money is being poured into weapons of war, poverty is on the rise, genocide continues in Gaza, and the prospect of climate catastrophe looms ever larger. While for some this is a reason to switch off and retreat into personal life, others are looking for solutions. Yet not all solutions, even apparently radical ones, can win a better world. Dean Spade makes the case for one in his 2020 book *Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next).* His overarching argument goes like this: “Government policies actively produce and exacerbate harm, inadequately respond to crises, and ensure that certain populations bear the brunt of pollution, poverty, disease, and violence. In the face of this, more and more ordinary people are feeling called to respond in their communities, creating bold and innovative ways to share resources and support vulnerable neighbours. This survival work, when done in conjunction with social movements demanding transformative change, is called mutual aid.” While social movements are a *component* of fighting for change, mutual aid is decisive: “our ability to build mutual aid will *determine*\[my emphasis\] whether we win the world we long for or dive further into crisis”. Spade draws on several examples to elaborate what he means by mutual aid. In the 1960s and ’70s, sections of the women’s and gay liberation movements in the US set up health clinics, abortion providers and childcare collectives. One of the activities of the Black Panther Party was their free breakfast programs. As Spade points out, many strikes throughout history have involved the establishment of strike kitchens and the collection of donations for strike funds. There have also been countless examples of natural disasters, which are becoming more destructive thanks to global warming, being met with community efforts to help people escape and access relief. So, what is it that makes mutual aid the key to winning a better world, according to Spade? He lays out three main reasons. First, “mutual aid projects work to meet survival needs and build shared understanding about why people do not have what they need”. When people must rely on one another to “pool their resources”, it highlights the lack of support provided by governments and the rich. This, he argues, is what makes it ideal compared to charity and government social services, which only give progressive cover to those who are responsible for inequality and legitimise their control over society’s resources. Second, “mutual aid projects mobilise people, expand solidarity, and build movements”. The fact that they bring people together from different backgrounds in a shared project makes it possible for people to learn from one another’s experiences of oppression and see how they are connected. Lastly, “mutual aid projects are participatory, solving problems through collective action rather than waiting for saviours”. When ordinary people actively participate in changing society, they can gain confidence in their own political capacities. One example Spade provides is a group of people helping each other through housing court proceedings so they can learn about disadvantage in the courts and how to fight it, as well as how to facilitate meetings and retain volunteers. Local sustainability efforts are another example, Spade arguing these can help us “imagine getting rid of the undemocratic infrastructure of our lives—the extractive and unjust energy, food, health care, and transportation systems—and replacing it with people’s infrastructure”. Spade is right to point out that the rich and the governments that serve them are responsible for the many injustices that we see in the world. He is also right to look to ordinary people acting collectively as the solution. But there are nevertheless serious flaws in his argument. While Spade is at pains to argue that mutual aid is not charity, a lot of the examples he provides are hard to see as anything but. The difference is that the charity is being provided to the poor by the poor, rather than to the poor by the rich. As he puts it, mutual aid is when ordinary people “pool their resources”. This is certainly necessary at times, such as during strikes, as he mentions. Frequently, campaigns and unions rely on donations from supporters because, while they need money, they don’t want to be compromised by taking money from the rich and powerful. But these are almost always temporary measures to tide people over in a crisis or to win a particular demand or reform. Even if all the resources of the poor were to be pooled, this would not be sufficient to meet the collective needs of workers and the poor. This is due to the simple fact that workers and the poor do not have access to the wealth and products necessary to maintain their existence—this is a defining feature of their social position. For the majority of humanity to have access to what they need to live healthy lives, the ruling class must be expropriated, which requires a society-wide political struggle. Elevating the poor providing for the poor to a strategic principle not only takes the focus off this struggle but also lets the rich and powerful off the hook. Governments have been slashing funding to social services for decades. While some of the gap has been replaced with privatisation, the rest of the burden has been put onto the shoulders of working-class people, especially women. According to Spade’s logic, the ideal response to these cuts is to make up for them with community-run services. But what difference does this make from the perspective of the ruling class? While we pick up the slack, they can use the extra cash where they prefer to use it—subsidising business, tax cuts and other measures to maximise the profits of the few. When this sort of service provision has become a focus of social movements, it has failed to take them forward. In the US women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU) was one of the most influential feminist groups. Considering themselves radicals, they organised feminist education programs and set up community-run women’s services, which they called “counter-institutions”. While some CWLU members spoke of the need to make coinciding demands on the state that would challenge the power of the ruling class, their political campaigns were stifled by debate over which demands would be reasonable, “manageable targets”. In this context, the CWLU’s community-run services became the predominant focus of most of their members, given it seemed to be a much easier way to achieve “tangible” change. Despite the radical gloss that was given to these services, in practice they became an avenue leading away from revolutionary ambitions and politics. Spade does admit that this is a potential overhead to these sorts of activities. According to Spade, then, to achieve a total transformation in the way that society is organised so that human need is prioritised, mutual aid projects need to grow: “We need mutual aid groups and networks capable of bringing millions of new people into work that deepens their understanding of the root causes of the crises and inequalities they are fired up about and that builds their capacity for bold collective action. We need groups and networks that do not disappear after the peak of the crisis, but instead become part of an ongoing, sustained mobilization with the capacity to support people and keep building pressure for bigger wins.” How to draw more participants into fighting for a better world is certainly an important question. It must be said that the main reason most people aren’t fighting most of the time is that they feel powerless—and that is a reasonable perception. As individuals we have very little control over how society is run. We vote for a change of government and then barely anything seems to change, and at work it’s our boss who makes all the important decisions. Even if we invest our time into the sorts of community-run services that Spade talks about—like free breakfast programs or legal aid for housing tenants—as supportable as they are, the reality is that they barely make a dent in the big picture of wealth inequality. It’s no wonder, then, that most of the time they do not draw in large numbers of people. The sorts of actions that have involved large numbers are those that draw on the collective power workers and the poor have to challenge their rulers when they stand together and disrupt the normal functioning of society. We’ve seen this happen many times in history, from the radicalisation of the 1960s and ’70s to the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011\. When masses of people feel compelled to hit the streets and protest in their thousands and their millions, when they start to organise in mass meetings in the streets, on university campuses and in workplaces, that is when people have really felt their power. Now, Spade does argue that it is when mutual aid is tied to mass movements that it really has the capacity to fundamentally transform society. According to Spade, it is by focusing on and extending this aspect of mass movements that they can grow and win. But this is the biggest problem with Spade’s argument. Every time people are drawn into a fight against the people who rule our society, the challenge that they are confronted with is the fact that these people have significant power. Their power comes from their ownership of society’s resources, and from their ability to defend that ownership with all the institutions of the state—the courts, the police, the military and so on. The reason that mass movements have failed in the past—something that Spade barely discusses—is that they have failed to overcome the power of the capitalist class. While it is true that people can feel inspired to join movements when they see people sharing with one another and creating spaces based on dignity and care, this alone is not a pathway to victory. In fact, when you look at many of the movements that have taken place in the last decade, this has been their biggest weakness. During the Egyptian revolution of 2011, millions were drawn into a permanent occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where people set up their own health clinics, schooling and food kitchens. But this could not stop the military from stepping in to take over as the new rulers of Egypt, nor could it expropriate the wealth of the millionaires and billionaires at the head of Egypt’s industries. The only group that could have done so is the working class. It is indicative that the overthrow of Egypt’s previous dictator, Hosni Mubarak, came after a strike wave spread across the country. As inspiring and important as protests and occupations are as a way to draw people into fighting for change—to give people a sense of power in numbers, provide an avenue for organisation and sometimes to give people hope that a world based on care for one another is possible—if workers’ power at the point of production does not become centre stage, then these movements will eventually be defeated or coopted. When people set up community-run kitchens, health care and schooling, and when they coordinate projects that care for the environment, this does nothing to challenge the control that capitalists have over the hospitals, the education system and the production of food and energy. There have been revolutionary moments in the past—the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the Chilean revolution in 1973 to name a few—where workers of multiple industries have taken over and coordinated production in a way that prioritises human need. This is when we have seen change go the furthest. And the key lessons out of these revolutions have been the need for the working class to overthrow the capitalist state that rules for the rich, and the need for revolutionary leadership. Spade is right to situate the hope for a better world within the ordinary people who are trodden on every day by a profit-driven system. But to win a world where the trodden-on are the ones making the decisions, we need a strategy that can get us there. The pathway to victory is not more mutual aid projects—it can come only from workers’ revolution. ### Revolutionaries against capitalism and colonialism: a history of the Vietnamese Trotskyists URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/revolutionaries-against-capitalism-and-colonialism-a-history-of-the-vietnamese-trotskyists/ Last updated: 2025-06-17T01:17:05.000Z *The following is a summary of the new introduction written by *Nick Reich* for a reprint of* [Revolutionaries They Could Not Break](https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/revolutionaries-they-could-not-break?ref=redflag.org.au) *by Ngo Van, published by Red Flag Books.* \-------------------- 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. ### When the first freedom flotilla broke the siege of Gaza URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/when-the-first-freedom-flotilla-broke-the-siege-of-gaza/ Last updated: 2025-06-17T01:58:54.000Z For nearly two decades, Israel has enforced a devastating land, air and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip. Since March, almost all supplies have been blocked from entering the territory, [resulting in mass starvation](https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/east-mediterranean-mena/israelpalestine/gaza-starvation-experiment?ref=redflag.org.au). In early June, the *Madleen* Freedom Flotilla set sail from Catania, Italy, towards Gaza. On board were twelve activists, including Greta Thunberg and French politician Rima Hassan. Their goal was to deliver humanitarian aid—rice, baby formula and medical kits—and to defy Israel’s criminal siege. Before reaching its destination, and while in international waters, the *Madleen* was intercepted by Israeli forces. Soldiers boarded the vessel, took the activists on board and held them in Israeli prisons for days. This wasn’t the first time Israel has used force to stop activists from breaking the siege. In 2010, Israeli commandos boarded the *Mavi Marmara*, a ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza from Turkey, and killed nine activists aboard. But two years earlier, in 2008, the siege had been broken. Two small wooden boats, the *Free Gaza* and the *Liberty*, sailed to Gaza from Cyprus, carrying 44 international solidarity activists and medical supplies. Aviv Shiron from the Israeli foreign ministry [said at the time](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle%5Feast/7578880.stm?ref=redflag.org.au) that the government wanted to avoid a PR disaster: “They wanted a provocation at sea, but they won’t get it”. So, Israel let them through. When the boats arrived in Gaza, they were greeted by crowds of Palestinians. One participant described the scene: “Dozens jumped into the water and climbed aboard our boats, cheering and waving and hugging everybody”. The idea to break the siege and deliver humanitarian aid had come from **Michael Shaik**, an organiser for Free Palestine Melbourne and a founder of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition in 2008\. He spoke to *Red Flag*’s **Renee Nayef** about the origins of the flotilla campaign. \-------------------- **What led to the formation of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition in 2006, and what was your role?** There were a lot of experienced activists who had been deported from Palestine, and we were discussing what we could do. The purpose of international activists is to use their privilege to shine a light on the invisible aspects of the occupation. We’d had some success in working with Palestinian communities resisting the construction of the Separation Barrier through the West Bank and drawing attention to house demolitions in the Gaza Strip. The big hidden story in 2006 was that Israel was claiming that it no longer occupied the Gaza Strip because it had withdrawn its settlers, even though it was blockading imports and exports, forcing the population to rely on aid handouts to survive. That was the hidden violence we needed to shine a light on. So I proposed that we charter a boat to “break the siege of Gaza!” The plan was to place Israel in a lose-lose situation. If they let us through, we break the siege. If they don’t, then we highlight the fact that they have intercepted us—not in Israeli waters, but in Gaza’s waters—and that there was a real blockade. None of us had a boat, none of us could sail a boat, and we didn’t have any money. So we did a lot of fundraising around the world. Some people raised donations, some did cake stalls and other grassroots fundraising until we got together the money to purchase a couple of wooden boats. When, in 2008, we first broke the siege, it seemed that the whole population of Gaza came out to the docks to welcome us—just a couple of fishing boats. In 2008, the Kadima Party, led by Ehud Olmert, was in power in Israel. Their calculation was that it was best to let the boats through, rather than embarrass themselves with the spectacle of intercepting unarmed activists bringing humanitarian supplies to Gaza. We got three boats through before the end of the year, when [Operation Cast Lead](https://www.amnesty.org/fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/mde150212009eng.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) commenced. After that, Israel became much more aggressive and we couldn’t get any boats through, so we decided to ramp it up to a flotilla of boats. In 2010, when the Likud Party, led by Netanyahu, had taken power, Israeli commandos attacked the *Mavi Marmara* flotilla and shot dead nine activists. For the next four or five days it was headline news around the world. **A flotilla carrying high-profile activists, including Greta Thunberg, was recently raided and its passengers taken by Israeli forces. What do you think is different this time?** I’ve been repeatedly shocked over the last twenty months at what Israel has done and gotten away with. They’re doing insanely vicious things in the Gaza Strip—cruel things that don’t seem to have any military logic. International solidarity is based on the premise that Israel will be less inclined to use lethal force against Westerners because it will be sanctioned by Western governments. Yet Israel got away with [killing Rachel Corrie](https://rachelcorriefoundation.org/rachel?ref=redflag.org.au). It got away with the [murder of Zomi Frankum](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/apr/02/australian-aid-worker-zomi-frankcom-killed-idf-strike-gaza-world-central-kitchen?ref=redflag.org.au) and her colleagues from the World Central Kitchen. Every time they kill an international activist and \[Australian Foreign Minister\] Penny Wong expresses her regret and then refuses to demand an independent investigation and exonerates the Israeli military by abetting the cover-up, it normalises violence against international activists. We’ve known Palestinian life was cheap for a long time, but even internationals in the line of fire can’t count on their governments protecting them anymore. The thing you learn when you’ve been doing this for a long time is that Israel’s supporters are active everywhere. They’re active in the mainstream media, they mobilise professional trolls and bots to obscure the facts of the genocide on social media, they are active in all the major parties except the Greens, and I think we have to be the same. The only antidote we’ve got to their big money is big organising—this applies to all movements, Palestine and the climate. Rallies are good, but we need to move beyond them. People want to do something to stop the genocide. The activists on the flotilla showed the world that there is something you can do. It’s great what they’re doing. Future generations will remember that when Gaza was on its knees, they, like so many others, stood up for justice and against genocide. **Why is international solidarity important in the struggle for Palestinian liberation?** When I was in Gaza, I noticed that, apart from the physical violence of having their relatives murdered and their homes destroyed, one of the things that most oppressed the people was the feeling that they were being strangled in the dark. They can’t leave, the media isn’t allowed in, the walls keep closing in on them, and nobody seems to see them. I think that’s why, when the boats came in in 2008, two pitiful little wooden boats, it was like, “Woah! These people from around the world have come to help, and we’re not invisible”. If nothing else, international solidarity is a morale boost for the people in Palestine—otherwise it’s like they’re fighting the empire on their own. Last month, Angela Davis said that Palestine is now the centre of the world. I think she was spot on. The struggle for Palestine, like the struggle for South Africa last century, is bigger than Palestine. Before 2023, I often felt like I was shouting into a void, like no-one was listening. I’d always dreamed that one day there would be an anti-apartheid mass movement in Melbourne, but I never really believed it would happen. Now, people in Melbourne and around the world understand that Palestine stands at the centre of the ancient and global struggle between racism and justice. They also know that Penny Wong and Donald Trump aren’t going to free Palestine, and we have to get up and do it for ourselves. I’m not saying that we will win. Or that we won’t suffer defeats and make mistakes—but I don’t think this movement is going to fall away. It radicalised a generation. Palestine is part of young people’s identity now. I think they understand the enormously powerful forces that are supporting Israel, that there will be no easy victories and that we need to be in it for the long term. ### Rogue empire URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/rogue-empire/ Last updated: 2025-06-14T21:12:02.000Z Israel’s military strikes against Iran are the latest evidence, if any more were needed, that the US and its proxies are rogue states. Despite the US government’s earlier attempts to distance itself from Israel’s aggression, it is clear that Washington was in on it from the start. President Trump told the *Wall Street Journal* on Friday, US time, that he had spoken to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and knew “what’s going on”. The *Financial Times* on Saturday quoted “a person familiar with the situation” who indicated that the US had been informed of Israeli plans as early as Monday, “was in the know all along” and “raised no objection”. And so came another attack on another country and another people. Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran. The Zionist state is off the leash, again, promising to continue indefinitely its assault, all the while stocked with weapons and backed by a US carrier group in the Mediterranean and B-2 bombers in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Netanyahu insists that Israel faces an existential threat from Tehran’s nuclear program. This flimsy pretext of “existential threats” has been trotted out again and again over the last twenty months to justify everything from the starvation of Gazan children to the flattening of hospitals and schools to terrorist attacks on Hezbollah members to the bombings of Lebanon and Syria to the ever-greater annexation of West Bank territory. Like its cousin charge of “antisemitism”, which is casually levelled against even the mildest critics of apartheid, anything in the Middle East capable of sneezing in the direction of Tel Aviv is labelled an “existential threat” to the nuclear-armed, US-backed Israeli state. Whatever Netanyahu might claim, Tehran is considered enemy number one not because of its military capacities, but because of its recalcitrance. Iran is perpetually in the crosshairs of the US and Israel because no other country in the Middle East bends less to Washington’s will. Iran has been demonised, harassed and sanctioned ever since the Western-backed torture state of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1979\. Washington and London more than tolerated the horrors of Pahlavi’s regime. The two Western governments had conspired, in 1953’s “Operation Ajax”, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, which had nationalised the oil industry two years earlier. “Since Venezuela and the Middle East are the only sources from which the free world’s import requirements for petroleum can be supplied, these sources are necessary to continue the present economic and military efforts of the free world”, noted [a joint departmental report](https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v01p2/d159?ref=redflag.org.au) to the US National Security Council eight months before the coup. “It therefore follows that nothing can be allowed to interfere substantially with the availability of oil from those sources to the free world.” Torture states are acceptable if they serve Western interests. So Pahlavi was installed to prevent popular aspirations from being realised and to ensure that Western companies could again exploit the country’s oil wealth. That is, he was brought in to rule with an iron fist. It went swimmingly for the oil companies and for US Middle Eastern strategy until the Iranian population rose from the dungeons to reclaim their country. But miraculously, after 1979, the West suddenly became deeply concerned about the human rights record of the Iranian government. Washington and Israel have repeatedly declared it a rogue state and a threat to peace ever since. The US was so concerned with regional peace that it funded Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, supplying President Saddam Hussein’s regime with weapons and intelligence. Several hundred thousand Iranians were killed during the war. The US also helped the Iraqis launch chemical weapons attacks. “\[S\]enior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks \[in 1988\]”, Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid wrote in [an exclusive investigation](https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/?ref=redflag.org.au) for *Foreign Policy* journal in 2013\. “They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.” Unlike Israel, Iraq was no solid ally of the US. After he had done the work against Iran, Hussein fell out of favour with Washington. The US invaded in the first Gulf War (1990-91) before imposing sanctions that were responsible for killing an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. Questioned about this horror in 1996, [US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright responded](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1T5JRVR53Eo?ref=redflag.org.au): “We think the price is worth it”. Then the US invaded again in 2003 after lying about Hussein’s regime, which, the Americans said, possessed weapons of mass destruction, was sponsoring terrorism and was an imminent threat to regional and even world peace. To keep the peace, US destroyed the country, left [hundreds of thousands dead](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html?ref=redflag.org.au) in the first few years of the occupation, and created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State. This criminal history isn’t deemed relevant to contemporary reporting of Israel’s attack on Iran. It’s scandalous, but of little surprise, that the media today is parroting the US and Israeli line when both countries have, in recent history, persistently lied, persistently invaded other countries, persistently supported dictatorial regimes, and persistently killed masses of people throughout the region. No doubt, the Iranian regime is despotic. It will be a welcome day when Iranian workers overthrow it. But any honest accounting of the last several decades in the Middle East shows the US and Israel to be partners in a criminality that throws shade on Tehran’s record. It should go without saying that Israel’s aggression, backed again by the US, should be opposed. With its Gaza genocide, assaults in the West Bank, occupation of Syrian and Lebanese territory and the latest attack on Iran, the Zionist state is attempting to redraw the map of the Middle East—a redrawing most favourable to fascists and dictators aligned with one of the greatest purveyors of violence in history. ### Her critics may sneer, but standing in solidarity is what makes Greta a hero URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/her-critics-may-sneer-but-standing-in-solidarity-is-what-makes-greta-a-hero/ Last updated: 2025-06-14T10:01:08.000Z It tells you a lot about the system we live under that twelve activists on a small yacht called *Madleen* have done more to try to halt the famine being suffered by 2 million people in Gaza than all the rich and powerful governments of the world. The attempts by Israel’s defenders to attack and discredit Greta Thunberg and her crew mates—Suayb, Sergio, Baptiste, Rima, Yasemin, Thiago, Reva, Marco, Omar, Yanis and Pascal—only speak to the power of their brave protest against the most profound moral crime of this century. When Greta was abducted by the IDF on Monday, the Israeli foreign ministry was quick to deride as a mere joyride on a “selfie yacht” her and her eleven mates’ heroic attempt at delivering aid to the Gazans the Israeli state is systematically starving. Switched-on observers might wonder how this tallies with Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz’ previous attempts to paint Greta as a menacing antisemite and “Hamas propagandist”. The Israeli government wants to have it both ways: the *Madleen* crew are dangerous terrorists while they’re trying to deliver baby formula to the infants of Gaza, then foolish Instagram activists whom it’s best not to pay too much attention to once the IDF has forcibly prevented them from doing so. The contradiction hasn’t bothered the centrist commentariat, who have swiftly latched on to the “selfie yacht” line to dismiss the *Madleen* crew’s stand against the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Perhaps the most nauseating of these was Suzanne Moore’s [article](https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/activists-like-greta-thunberg-care-more-about-fame-than-facts-20250610-p5m674.html?ref=redflag.org.au) “Activists like Greta Thunberg care more about fame than facts”, initially published by the London *Telegraph* and subsequently reprinted by the *Sydney Morning Herald* As far as Moore is concerned, Greta is a light-minded attention seeker, hopping from cause to cause in search of exposure. Never mind that Greta’s principled stance in support of Palestine has cost her support from the liberal establishment, caused[ her to be](https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/10/16/greta-thunberg-became-a-danger-when-she-began-to-speak-up-for-palestine/?ref=redflag.org.au)[](https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/10/16/greta-thunberg-became-a-danger-when-she-began-to-speak-up-for-palestine/?ref=redflag.org.au)[ ](https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/10/16/greta-thunberg-became-a-danger-when-she-began-to-speak-up-for-palestine/?ref=redflag.org.au)classified as a “danger” and banned from pro-Palestine events by police in Germany, and now moved her to risk life and limb in the name of breaking Gaza’s deadly siege. Some of the attacks in Moore’s article are rehashes of familiar old arguments any Palestine activist would be familiar with—for instance, sneering that Greta’s progressive politics “would not be tolerated by Hamas”. What would Moore prefer? We all stay silent about the shooting, bombing and starvation of Palestinians? Some are examples of the stock sexist belittlement that Greta is no stranger to, like Moore’s description of her as a “cute eco-warrior in shorts”. (Moore [once celebrated Greta for unapologetically rebuking](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/01/greta-thunbergs-defiance-upsets-the-patriarchy-and-its-wonderful?ref=redflag.org.au) the very same sexist belittlement in a 2019 *Guardian* article.) And some are facile accusations of hypocrisy of the hackneyed “you criticise capitalism, yet use an iPhone” variety. But the worst is Moore’s assault on the very concept of solidarity between struggles. The problem with Greta and the left today, Moore argues, is that we campaign around too many “disparate causes”, like “eco stuff, trans rights and Free Palestine”. Ignoring the supposed “contradictions” between them, these different issues become “bundled together as an omnicause ... a moronic vacuum where analysis goes to die”. It’s a view that denigrates the instinct towards solidarity and collective resistance as crude “tribal loyalty”. Precisely what makes Greta such a hero is that she has embodied the principled politics of solidarity, even when it has meant risking her popularity, her career prospects, or her personal safety. It’s not true, as Moore claims, that there is no strategy or internal logic to showing solidarity. One of the great strengths of socialist politics is that it allows us to identify the through line between the fights for a liberated Palestine, for climate action, against oppression and for workers’ rights. The common thread is that an advance on any of these fronts strengthens the collective fight of workers and the oppressed against whose who rule over and profit from our sick social order. It’s the ruling class whose control over trade routes and valuable commodities in the Middle East is being guaranteed through their no-holds-barred support for the genocidal Israeli state. It’s the ruling class who profit from steadily expanding the fossil fuel industry, even as the evidence mounts that the climate crisis is already destroying the lives of thousands of ordinary people. It’s the ruling class whose unjust and unequal social order is propped up by structures of brutal violence and oppression. And it’s our side of the class divide who pay the price as we are collectively dehumanised every time they’re allowed to get away with these crimes. Greta has never let the bastards get away with it. That is what makes her, as has been remarked previously in *Red Flag*, [cooler than almost all of us](https://redflag.org.au/article/why-greta-thunberg-cooler-you). Whether it’s the climate criminals copping a glorious Greta serve at their greenwashing conferences, or the world’s pro-Israel governments copping an excoriating moral reckoning at her hands, her refusal to shut up and let the ruling class get on with business as usual has reliably produced fist-pumping moments of political vindication and inspiration for lefties around the world for years. Moore isn’t the first to criticise or question her pro-Palestine stance. Why not just keep quiet and stay in the pigeonhole of everyone’s favourite teen eco-warrior? Greta put it best herself: “It’s so weird to me that people are separating caring about the environment with caring about humans. I care about the environment and the climate because I care about human and planetary wellbeing. Those are the same thing in my view”. Greta also said it best when explaining the vitriolic campaign marshalled against her by Israel and its supporters in politics and the media. Asked why so many governments are ignoring Gaza, fresh off her deportation flight from Israel, her argument was clear: they are “desperately trying to defend a destructive deadly system that puts short-term economic profit and maximis\[ing\] geopolitical power over the wellbeing of humans and the planet ... right now it’s very, very difficult to morally defend that, it is impossible, but still they are desperately trying”. Of course, Greta and the *Madleen* crew were not naive. Of course they knew that one small boat’s worth of supplies could not on its own end Israel’s starvation of Gaza. Of course they knew that they were likely to be attacked by the IDF before they made it to Gaza—like the crew of the *Mavi Marmara* before them, ten of whom were murdered by the IDF in 2010 while en route to Gaza. As Greta has endlessly reiterated, their action was not just a humanitarian mission, but a protest against the complicity of the world’s governments in the Gaza genocide, and a call to action against it. And the world’s Palestine supporters, following our own strong commitment to solidarity, answered the call. Tens of thousands of us were once again inspired by Greta Thunberg to hit the streets, demanding freedom for the crew of the *Madleen* and an end to the horror in Gaza. If we’re serious about the fight for a liberated world, it’s acts of mass solidarity like that—and many more of them—that are going to pave the way. ### Victorian teachers demand dignity, but won’t get it without a fight URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-teachers-demand-dignity-but-wont-get-it-without-a-fight/ Last updated: 2025-06-14T04:35:27.000Z Public school staff in the Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union (AEU) have been gathering at regional log of claims meetings across the state to discuss the changes we want to see in the Victorian Government Schools Agreement (VGSA), which determines our pay and conditions over the next few years. We desperately need a better VGSA. Our last agreement, which was [narrowly voted up](https://redflag.org.au/article/big-no-vote-step-forward-school-staff) despite considerable pushback from members, has left us worse off. Our real wages [have fallen by 11 percent](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1%5FO83eLz-imC8uYDBNB%5FhzvXyK9Z4BB2kRMV3bBE8GQ0/edit?usp=drivesdk&ref=redflag.org.au), which means graduate teachers are paid $8,489 less per year ($162 per week) than if our pay had kept up with inflation. Starting teacher salaries in Victoria are now the lowest in Australia, and almost $10,000 behind those in New South Wales. Our current agreement’s modest reduction in face-to-face teaching hours has failed to put a serious dent in our unmanageable workloads. According to a Monash University report, staff are still working a staggering 12.5 unpaid hours each week on average. Union members are sick and tired of our profession being undervalued. That’s why, in log of claims meetings, we’re voting for ambitious claims that put forward a positive vision for what our jobs and our schools could be. A top priority for members is a big pay rise to win back the value we’ve lost under the current agreement, and then future pay rises that bring our wages into line with similar professions. Some regions are pushing for an immediate 30 percent boost followed by 5 percent every six months, for a total of around 60 percent over the life of the agreement. We also want retention payments that help keep our most experienced teachers in the job. Many of the other claims are about addressing our crushing workloads. These include requiring at least one education support (ES) staff in every classroom, additional staff to assist with teachers’ administrative tasks, a limit on meetings to one hour per week, a hard limit on class sizes at 18 students, a reduction in face-to-face teaching hours to 17 in the first year and 16 in the second, and nine professional practice days each year (two for report writing, two at the start of the year for set-up, four for whole school professional learning and one to complete compulsory online units). For ES staff, there is the claim (left out of the last agreement) for paid lunch breaks, one hour of self-directed preparation time each day for classroom support ES and four professional practice days each year. There are also claims to clarify the different ES roles and to make progression more streamlined, as it is for teachers. These claims, if won, would completely transform our jobs and our schools. Staff would get the support and time we need to do our jobs and meet the complex needs of our students. We’d be paid at a rate that means we are better able to cope with the rising cost of living. And this would help ensure vacancies are filled, particularly in working-class, outer-suburban schools, which currently struggle to attract staff. Claims approved by regional union meetings now go to the union’s state conference in early August for discussion and approval, ahead of the expiry of the current agreement at the end of this year. We know from experience that these changes will not come easily. Our last log of claims in 2021 included a series of [commendable claims](https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-school-staff-need-fight-workloads-and-wages), but there was no strike action to pressure the government into accepting them. The result was an agreement that has left us significantly worse off on pay and did very little on workload, and which because of this has failed to solve the crisis of teacher retention. We can expect the Victorian government to resist our demands again. Recent revelations in the *Age* show that the government is [withholding almost $3 billion](https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/teachers-on-collision-course-with-state-government-over-school-funding-20250512-p5lyhn.html?ref=redflag.org.au) in funding that it previously promised our schools. It will likely use supposed budgetary constraints to claim that “the money isn’t there” for our demands. But the money is there. Around $1.6 billion of it is going to “back in Victoria’s new bail laws” with new and expanded prisons, presumably to deal with those falling through the cracks in our decaying education system. The new $1.19 billion prison in Lara, the Western Correctional Facility, will [offer sign-on bonuses of $8,000](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-13/prison-victoria-state-budget-bail-reform/105284224?ref=redflag.org.au) to draw in new staff. The money is there, but what’s in poor supply is the political will to use it to fund schools. That means union members need to take matters into our own hands. We need meetings at all our schools to establish our minimum expectations or “red lines”, and if those claims are not included in any proposed offer, we will vote “no” and fight for something better. Victorian nurses received their 28.4 percent pay rise only by voting “no” to an initial offer of 12 percent. Though their industrial campaign was brief, the fact that nurses had already shut down hospital beds and surgeries, coupled with their high-profile rejection of the proposed settlement, created a plausible threat of a major, politically damaging industrial dispute for the state government. This was enough to eventually win an improved offer. Teachers in New South Wales went on a series of strikes in 2021-22, eventually winning an immediate pay rise of almost $10,000\. Where workers have refused to be pressured into accepting sub-par offers and have struck for something better, they have been successful. To win anything close to our ambitious demands, it’s highly likely we will need to do the same. *The AEU has called a protest outside Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll’s electorate office in Keilor at 4:15pm on Thursday 19 June. Join us in demanding the state government keep their promise to fund our schools.* ### SafeWork NSW’s report on antisemitism at Sydney University is fake news URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/safework-nsws-report-on-antisemitism-at-sydney-university-is-fake-news/ Last updated: 2025-06-13T20:47:56.000Z The internet adage “pics or it didn’t happen” refers to the fact that, since about 2010, almost nothing important has happened in a public space without someone pulling out their phone and taking a photo or video of it. And yet, if we are to believe a SafeWork NSW report, details of which were published by the *Australian*, pro-Palestine activists at Sydney University managed to burst into lecture halls chanting antisemitic slogans and carrying banners that read “Jews not allowed”, without a single photo or video of these alleged incidents in existence. Similarly, no-one thought to snap a pic and post about the time when, according to the report, Sydney University student activists “put up a billboard with all the names of Hamas terrorists on it” at a protest. The report also claims that the eight-week Gaza solidarity encampment, which began last May, created “a workplace of fear, anxiousness and a fear of retribution towards Jewish workers and students because they were Jewish people”. Multiple reports and investigations into the encampment, including this one, have failed to provide any evidence of this. But if you repeat something often enough, it can start to seem true. The SafeWork NSW report is the result of an investigation instigated by a complaint from 23 staff and students claiming that Sydney University had breached its responsibility to provide a safe working environment for Jewish employees. SafeWork, the government agency tasked with regulating workplace health and safety, concluded based on interviews with the complainants and two site visits that the university “failed to take reasonable actions to manage, reduce, and eliminate active antisemitic conduct on campus”. But the report contains no credible evidence of antisemitic activism linked to the Palestine solidarity campaign. The main examples from the report, which the media have used to try to slander pro-Palestine activists at Sydney University, fail to provide this. Some are clearly fabricated, as in the above examples, which have not been corroborated with any evidence. Others are stock standard features of the campaign to support Palestine: posters and flyers advertising rallies and campus meetings, “Gaza will be free” tagged in the campus graffiti tunnel and the slogan “Palestine will be free” being chanted at a campus protest. There is not a shred of antisemitism in any of this. That these gestures of staff and student support for the Palestinians form the basis for “psychosocial harm” to employees at Sydney University is a politically charged false assertion. In putting together this report, SafeWork makes a mockery of the idea of workplace health and safety. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that the agency is known for taking a soft touch approach to bosses who endanger their employees’ lives at work. In 2022, SafeWork NSW was [investigated](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/workplace-safety-scandal-auditor-general-launches-six-month-investigation-into-failings-20221013-p5bphh.html?ref=redflag.org.au) over allegations that workers had experienced injury and even death on sites where inspectors failed to follow up complaints adequately due to political interference. While serious infringements of workplace health and safety have gone unpunished, and the number of workers fatally injured at work continues to [rise](https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/media-centre/news/key-work-health-and-safety-statistics-2024?ref=redflag.org.au), the government agency tasked with regulating this is instead being misused as a weapon to come after pro-Palestine activism on university campuses. On this front, SafeWork is only following the lead of many other institutions that have tried to stifle Palestine solidarity under the guise of combating antisemitism. State Labor Premier Chris Minns spent months linking a “[great tsunami of high-profile antisemitic attacks](https://redflag.org.au/article/the-great-antisemitism-con-job)“ to weekly pro-Palestine street marches in Sydney, passing repressive anti-protest laws on the back of these claims. The NSW Police later revealed that these incidents had been almost entirely the work of petty criminals, linked to the same common source as the Dural caravan hoax. Universities have also used “concern for antisemitism” as justification to introduce anti-protest policies and procedures. Indeed, despite what the SafeWork report alleges, Sydney University has been leading the charge on quashing pro-Palestine activism. Over the last year, Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott has pushed through multiple policies designed to crack down on student and staff rights to protest and express political dissent. The new [Campus Access Policy](https://redflag.org.au/article/free-speech-under-attack-at-sydney-university) bans forms of protest that have been part of university life since the campaign against the Vietnam War, while policies introduced just this month impose punitive rules regarding posters on campus and total bans on students making lecture announcements before their classes. As Israel intensifies the genocide in Gaza and the war crimes pile up, the pro-Israel camp continues to find new ways to slander and silence the activists standing up for justice. But we won’t stop campaigning for Palestine. *Shovan Bhattarai is the vice-president of the University of Sydney Students’ Representative Council and a coordinator of the campus Students for Palestine collective* ### Leaked: Victorian Labor’s planned anti-protest laws URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/leaked-victorian-labors-planned-anti-protest-laws/ Last updated: 2025-10-13T05:22:34.000Z Victoria’s Labor government is considering a suite of new anti-protest laws, according to a discussion document being circulated by the Department of Justice and Community Safety. The consultation paper, “Reforms to Victoria’s Protest Laws”, outlines potential new offences, including mask wearing and using “lock-on” devices. The right to protest is a fundamental aspect of a democratic society. Governments and corporations across the world are trying to bomb and starve the Palestinians into oblivion—and they want to do it without public opposition. They pillage our natural environment, support police violence and drive up the cost of living. The only real power that working-class people have is our ability to strike, protest and disrupt business as usual. Proposals that restrict the rights of people attending demonstrations must be rejected out of hand. **Masks** The paper suggests an all-out ban on “face coverings” at demonstrations, with potential exceptions for those who can be proven to be wearing them for religious or health reasons. The proposed punishment is a fine of up to ten penalty units—nearly $2,000\. The document points out that this would be a first: “no jurisdiction in Australia has passed laws to create an express prohibition against the wearing of face coverings during a protest”. It would create a different law for people exercising their democratic right to protest compared to people out shopping or partying, for example. People’s right to wear masks ought to be defended—whether it be to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases, to protect themselves from capsicum spray or tear gas, or to hide their identity from the state. Capsicum spray is an excruciating [chemical weapon](https://theconversation.com/tear-gas-and-pepper-spray-are-chemical-weapons-so-why-can-police-use-them-140364?ref=redflag.org.au) that causes temporary blindness, and Victoria Police use it widely and with impunity. Last year, the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission found that [Victoria Police have repeatedly deployed it](https://www.ibac.vic.gov.au/OC-spray-use-by-Victoria-Police?ref=redflag.org.au) beyond its legally defined use. We need to be able to protect ourselves from such police assaults. People should also be able to protest without having to reveal their identities. It is important for individuals involved in campaigns and movements to associate with their cause publicly. But this shouldn’t be a *legal requirement*. If it were, the right to protest against the government would exist only if the state knew who you were. With modern surveillance technology, this is akin to making it mandatory for protesters to hand in their driver’s licences before attending a rally. **Lock-on devices** The proposal to ban attachment devices like pipes and chains used as part of lock-on protests is also objectionable. These tools are classic symbols of non-violent protest. Today, they are mainly used in the environmental movement by activists risking their own safety to defend our planet from destruction. The tactic was important in the 2014 campaign that saved the Manning Valley from fracking. Under the proposed laws, a person could face a fine of 120 penalty units or up to one year of imprisonment if they use the device in a public space and intend to “hinder, obstruct or interfere with a public place or the conduct of a business”. The proposal would also give police the right to search for an attachment device without a warrant. Just two years ago, former Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard attended the unveiling of a bronze statue of Communist Party member Zelda D’Aprano at the Victorian Trades Hall. The statue is complete with a bronze chain, which D’Aprano used to lock herself to the doors of the Commonwealth Building in 1969 to demand equal pay for women. If these proposals are adopted, her celebrated non-violent act would be a punishable offence. **Terrorist symbols** Another proposal is to outlaw the display of “terrorist symbols”. But again, the state decides which organisations, and therefore which symbols, are to be designated “terrorist”. This is almost always a political decision, and often based on the government’s international alliances, rather than genuine consideration of the group or symbol in question. For example, along with many other legitimate national liberation organisations, the US Department of Defense [designated the African National Congress as a terrorist group](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Terrorist%5FGroup%5FProfiles.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) in the 1980s. [It wasn’t until 2008](https://time.com/5338569/nelson-mandela-terror-list/?ref=redflag.org.au) that the United States removed ANC leader and South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, from its terrorism watch-lists—well after he had retired from public life. The point here is that governments and states have overt political biases, which should, in most cases, disqualify them from being the arbiters of whether people can identify publicly with a political tendency or group. **Anti-democratic attacks on the right to demonstrate** Over the last decade, the prevailing government framework has been that protests ought to be treated as a form of violent crime. Victorian governments have invested billions into heavily arming and expanding the police force. The cops now have pepper-ball rounds, flash bang grenades, pepper spray and special armoured divisions that are used against protesters. In 2017, Labor extended police stop and search powers to users of public spaces and required people to remove face coverings in areas declared “designated zones”. It introduced new offences aimed at those who commit violence in public areas. These laws have been used to target and punish protesters. The charge of “affray” has been brought against both those accused of participating in a machete-wielding brawl in a Melbourne shopping centre and protesters opposing a weapons convention last year. While they have been used against demonstrators in all sorts of situations, those laws claimed to target violence and were not specifically about protests. The new proposals would directly target protesters. This conflation of “protester” with “criminal”, already implicit but made almost explicit with these new proposals, should be rejected by all those who support the democratic right to demonstrate. It’s a highly concerning development that laws are being drafted to punish certain aspects of non-violent protesting. Make no mistake: these proposals are intended to target those who protest against war, racism and the climate crisis. They must be opposed. ### Workers’ revolution in Portugal, 1974-5 URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/workers-revolution-in-portugal-1974-5/ Last updated: 2025-06-13T20:40:56.000Z “The noise ... is still ringing in my ears. The horns tooting in joy, the shouting, the slogans, the singing and dancing. The doors of revolution seem open again, after forty-eight years of repression ... How can words describe 600,000 people demonstrating in a city of a million? Or the effect of carnations everywhere, in the barrels of rifles, on every tank and every ear, in the hands of troops and demonstrators alike? ... Working people have left an indelible mark on the situation. The call is for socialism and masses of ordinary people have been involved in making it.” So writes Phil Mailer in *Portugal: The Impossible Revolution?* of May Day 1974 in Portugal. Six days earlier, in the early hours of the morning, disaffected army officers carried out a coup against the country’s ailing fascist regime. The officers called themselves the Armed Forces Movement, or MFA by its Portuguese initials. As British socialist Peter Robinson writes in *Revolutionary Rehearsals*: “The coup itself succeeded with remarkable ease. With only a dozen military units mobilised, the radio and TV stations, the airport and the general military headquarters were taken with little resistance. Only four people were killed, shot by terrified secret police agents (the PIDE). A regime that had lasted nearly 50 years crumbled totally in less than a day.” Hours later, people flooded the streets of Lisbon, Portugal’s capital. This marked the start of nineteen months of revolution and a deep working-class radicalisation. “What started as a military coup is assuming new dimensions ... it is the people who have called the tune, in particular the working class”, Mailer noted. **The road to April** The country’s ruling class had operated for centuries by pillaging its colonies while neglecting to build much industry at home. Portugal was the least developed country in Western Europe; 37 percent of the population couldn’t read or write. As the editorialist in the Lisbon magazine *Visão*wrote on the 30th anniversary of the revolution, it was a place where: “\[T\]he arts were censored, where social communication was muzzled, where many children walked around shoeless, where the majority of the population did not have a refrigerator, telephone or bathtub ... where agriculture was operated by medieval ploughs and animal traction ... where the political police used torture in prisons, where there were no highways nor elections.” The regime attempted to liberalise in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it quickly pulled back. It had no strategy for modernising capitalism or extricating itself from colonial wars. Portugal had been the first to colonise Africa and was the last to leave. In an important sense, the revolution started there: Angola’s national liberation movement began in 1961 and was joined within a few years by Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. Putting down these movements required brutal force and massive resources. Half of the government budget went to these wars. It also caused social turmoil as the Portuguese army expanded from 10,000 to 220,000 soldiers. Many were conscripts, and more than 200,000 fled the country to avoid the draft (the population was just 9 million). Rank-and-file soldiers were mostly former workers or peasants paid a pittance and treated like dirt. Many of the new officers were recent university graduates, some influenced by 1960s radicalism. Into this heady mix stepped the MFA. Formed in September 1973, it was a secret movement of a few hundred mid-ranking officers, including some who had been conscripted. Its first program called for “Democracy, Development and Decolonialisation”. The MFA and the army more broadly were to be key players in the Portuguese revolution. **Workers take action** Hundreds of political prisoners were released on the first day of the revolution and were replaced by 100 of the hated secret police. Thousands of people massed in the streets in celebration. Workers sang “The Internationale”, which had previously been banned by the dictatorship. Days later, hundreds of political exiles arrived in Lisbon from Paris on the “freedom train”, greeted by thousands. In these early days, there were marches every day. Newspapers, for decades heavily censored, became full of political manifestos. Posters were up everywhere. Street and bridge names were changed. Salazar Bridge, for example, named after a previous dictator, became known alternatively as Red Bridge, or 25 April Bridge. The overthrow of the dictatorship spurred political activism. Political slogans were not only spray-painted on walls but also appeared on bus tickets. Even children could recite the names of the myriad left-wing groups, what they stood for and who they supported. The European revolutionary left hired charter planes to view the revolution for themselves; some came from further afield, like Australia. The late Tom O’Lincoln recounted that the tourist information office in Lisbon gave him a complete list of left and revolutionary organisations and their contact details. A wave of strikes took off. In May alone, dockers, miners, canteen workers, textile workers, oil refinery workers, metalworkers, taxi drivers, merchant seamen, fishermen, workers in the tourist industry and many more took action. Train conductors had a strike on the line from Lisbon to a beach resort called Cascais. The trains were running, but a sign at the train station read: “You don’t have to pay. Go anywhere you like. Have a nice trip. Have a nice day”. Workers raised both economic demands—for large wage increases and improved conditions—and political ones. Key was the demand for *saneomento*—the purging (or more literally, cleansing) of fascist managers. This was extended to managers seen as particularly vicious and anti-worker. The newspaper *Diario de Lisboa*, for example, reported that workers in suburban Lisbon demanded that their company “eliminate all the dictators who always restricted the aspirations of workers in their professional development, imposed unjust punishments ... protected snitches”. Most of these purges were decided by mass meetings. *Saneomento* occurred in more than half of the companies employing 500 workers or more. By February 1975, “12,000 people had been removed or suspended from their previous positions by legal or illegal means despite calls for moderation by both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party”, writes social historian Raquel Varela in *A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution*. Varela cites an example from the textile sector: “The women had voted that all supervisors—who were men—would have to retrain to get proper management qualifications. In the meantime they would run the factory themselves. I remember them laughing about how easy it was—the sudden realisation you don’t need bosses.” At another company, two American managers were kidnapped by the workers and kept prisoner until a ransom was paid. “The parent company paid up and lodged a formal protest with the government”, Mailer writes. “The Ministry of Labour replied that, in view of recent wage increases, the amount \[demanded by the workers\] was due in back pay anyway. The managers fled.” Workers’ action brought significant and immediate gains. Only a month after 25 April, wages rose an average of 30 percent. Across Portugal, assemblies were convened in which all workers in a workplace would gather to formulate their demands. These assemblies elected factory committees, known as workers’ commissions or *Comissao de Trabalhadores* (CTs). CTs were core to the exercise of workers’ power. They rapidly burst onto the political scene. By the end of the revolution’s first month, almost all workplaces in the Lisbon region boasted CTs. Workers elected to the CTs were paid a workers’ wage, and were subject to immediate recall. They were usually full-time representatives. Liberation was not confined to the factory. Thousands of hectares of unused land were simply taken over from landlords. There were also takeovers of houses and apartments in the cities. Robinson describes: “Unemployed workers helped in the countryside. Children taught adults to read. Popular clinics and cultural centres flourished. People’s tribunals were established. A golf course in the Algarve declared that it was now open to all—except the members”. Varela characterises the “broadest and most visible change of the revolution” as “those affecting women’s lives”. Women won the right to vote. Previously barred career paths were now opened to them. They were granted legal equality. Divorce was liberalised, and the concept of illegitimate children was abolished. Women’s rights activists demonstrated outside the military junta’s headquarters, demanding to be given an old fascist building to organise in, as other political groups had been. The movement for women’s rights and the class struggle were deeply intertwined. Gays and lesbians had suffered horrendous repression under the old regime. Now they released a manifesto of “The Movement of Revolutionary Homosexuals”, which was published. Education was transformed. Revolutionary groups took over the universities, abolished exams and sacked all the deans, vice-chancellors and fascist collaborators. Students purged their high schools of fascists. They demanded the right to take part in demonstrations, held general assemblies and formed committees made up of students, teachers and other school workers. **Government and political forces** Governmental power was in effect shared between the military and various provisional governments throughout the revolution. These governments were notoriously unstable—there were six in nineteen months. The two main left-wing parties—the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and the Socialist Party (SP)—held ministries in various governments. The PCP was by far the larger of the two. It was the only large and well-organised political party at the outbreak of the revolution, when it counted 5,000 members and a substantial working-class base. The Communists had organised underground. Their bravery and sacrifice, enduring jail and torture to stand up to the dictatorship, brought them prestige. But the party—a hardline, pro-Moscow Stalinist outfit—used this to stymie working-class radicalism. As US revolutionary Joel Geier, who visited Portugal at this time, writes in the *Marxist Left Review*: “Its sole consistency was to oppose every revolt from below, including strikes, factory occupations, housing takeovers and workers’ control”. Indeed, it took very little time for the party to disgrace itself. Having taken two ministries in the first provisional government in May 1974, within a fortnight it was organising demonstrations against strikes and slandering strikers as “lackeys of the bosses”. The party disparaged the CTs, describing them as primitive, divisive and ultra-left. Instead, it promoted the trade union federation, the Intersindical, which it could better control. The theoretical underpinning of all this was the PCP’s argument that Portugal was too underdeveloped for a socialist revolution. Instead, workers should ally with other social classes, including the “progressive” section of the capitalist class. Socialism needed to be introduced in stages, which meant that workers had to subordinate their own interests in the name of a broader democratic unity. The Socialist Party was a different beast. At the outbreak of the revolution, it had only 200 members and virtually no base among workers. The party had formed only two years earlier and was reformist in orientation and linked to similar organisations in Germany and France. But, during the revolution, the SP grew rapidly. It rhetorically outflanked the PCP to the left—calling, at times, for the destruction of capitalism—thus benefiting from workers’ disillusionment with the Stalinists. The SP became the favoured party of the capitalist class—its best option for preserving and running capitalism. It was given ministries in all six provisional governments. The SP was also feted by the European and international ruling classes, including getting funding from the CIA. To the left of the PCP and SP were dozens of small revolutionary groups. The best of these was the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat (PRP). Geier describes it as “an organisation that stood uncompromisingly for revolutionary communist ideals; for a proletarian socialist revolution, for a state based on workers’ councils, for workers’ democracy, for workers’ control of production and the state, for opposition to all imperialism, and for an armed insurrection for the seizure of state power”. Having started the revolution with 80 underground activists, the PRP grew to 3,000 members. Yet the organisation downplayed work within the trade unions, leaving the field open for the PCP and the SP to exert their influence. The PRP also capitulated to the non-partyism that became popular during the revolution, downplaying the importance of revolutionary socialist organisation. It also overemphasised armed struggle. Another key political force was the army, which had won huge popularity due to the officers’ overthrowing of the old regime. Class divisions ran through the heart of the military. For the first period of the revolution, a junta of high-ranking generals held ultimate power. It clashed frequently with the MFA. A new body known as the Operational Command of the Continent (COPCON) was set up to repress strikes. But, reflecting the weakness of Portugal’s capitalist class and the strength of the working-class movement, COPCON often refused to do its job and ultimately went over to the left. One example was the 12 September protest of Lisnave shipyard workers demanding the purging of fascist managers and scrapping of the ant-strike law (a law supported by both the PCP and the SP). The demonstration had been banned by the government and attacked by the PCP. Between 5,000 and 7,000 demonstrators marched to the Ministry of Labour. One banner read simply: “Death to capitalism”. A COPCON soldier who was supposed to attack the marchers recounted: “The demonstration began and a human torrent advanced with shouts of ‘The soldiers are the sons of the workers!’, ‘Tomorrow the soldiers will be workers!’. The commander soon saw that we were not going to follow his orders, so he shut up. Our arms hung by our side, and some comrades were crying.” **The revolution deepens** By September 1974, many in the capitalist class had had enough. As well as strikes, workers’ commissions and the general unreliability of the state’s repressive apparatus, there was also a mutiny of Portuguese troops in Guinea-Bissau. General Spinola, a fascist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, was brought in to head up the new government and attempted a right-wing coup on 28 September. Echoing Mussolini’s March on Rome, he called for the “silent majority” to march on Lisbon. Spinola’s forces, including the far right, took over army bases and the media, and arrested left-wing army officers. Yet, as Geier writes: “The working class sprang into action to prevent the coup from succeeding. The Communist Party and the trade unions finally took action, calling on railroad workers and bus drivers to halt all transport into Lisbon. Workers, along with the PRP and other armed revolutionaries, built barricades around Lisbon, and COPCON troops joined them to prevent right-wingers from entering the city.” Workers had defeated the coup attempt. The junta was disbanded. The MFA-dominated Council of the Revolution took its place, indicative of the growing power of the workers’ movement. The failure of the coup opened a second, more radical, phase of the revolution. This involved more class struggle, but also a political shift to the left. Geier again: “The working class, having broken out of the prison of fascism, now broke with the prison of capitalist politics as well. All the neofascist parties, which comprised the bulk of the capitalist parties, were now banned. Well-dressed people, luxury cars, exclusive shops, and expensive restaurants disappeared from the streets and public view.” There were factory occupations and the beginnings of workers’ control of production. Capitalists sabotaged production and transferred money out of Portugal. Workers moved from strikes over pay and conditions to the right to work and demanding that company books be opened. *Inter-Empresas* were formed—democratic bodies covering workers in several workplaces. These comprised representatives from dozens of workers’ commissions. A young woman assembly worker quoted by Robinson explained their logic: “Why should we be on our own if other people across the road had the same problems. Then we decided to join, and discuss things in general ... They were a place, a way, for people to meet and discuss. The main purpose of these meetings was to defend the revolution.” Linking up the organs of workers’ power from different workplaces strengthened workers’ unity. The bodies could offer support for strikes and occupations and call rallies. They provided something of a rival centre of power to the Intersindical trade union federation, which grouped together 200 unions dominated by the Communists. The PRP was central to initiating the *Inter-Empresas*. In February 1975, the *Inter-Empresas* called a demonstration against unemployment and NATO. In a clear threat, NATO had been conducting military exercises off the coast of Lisbon. COPCON and the MFA supported the demonstration. That is, they had broken with the PCP and SP to support the popular movement. Thirty thousand people came out despite a government ban and condemnation from the PCP. Vacant houses, mansions and luxury hotels began to be turned into medical clinics, childcare centres, libraries, workers’ clubs and the like. Another botched right-wing coup took place on 11 March. As in the previous September, workers responded magnificently and saved their revolution. Geier writes: “On the day of the coup, militant bank workers and their unions occupied the banks, arrested the managers and prevented all attempts to withdraw money or transfer it abroad. They opened the books and exposed how the banks, owned by the six great monopolies, had been subsidising the right wing, organising economic sabotage and stealing from the people and the government ... The bank workers declared they would occupy the banks until they were nationalised under workers’ control. The next day, the government nationalised all of the nation’s domestic banks and insurance companies.” This put 60 percent of the economy in public hands. Moreover, these were nationalised without compensation. Domestic and international capital, including the European Union’s predecessor organisation, united to crush the revolution, aiming to create hunger and chaos. Hundreds of factories were placed under workers’ control, with workers’ commissions supervising the administration. In hundreds more, workers took over ownership and ran them as cooperatives. In the large and politically advanced factories, workers and workers’ commissions organised production, including deciding the speed of the line, setting hours of work and pay and managing safety. In some workplaces they reduced pay differentials by increasing wages for the lowest paid and freezing those of the higher, as well as moving towards equal pay for women. Workers at *Republica*, an SP newspaper, took over their workplace in May and controlled the editorial line of the newspaper. They declared: “We struggle to ensure working-class control over information ...We are only 150 workers but in a sense we are representatives of our class, of millions like us. What is at stake is political power and knowing in whose hands it is”. The editorial line of *Republica* shifted overnight to the left of the SP. The government tried to get COPCON to return the paper to its owner, but the soldiers refused to cooperate and gave the keys back to the workers! Workers also took over the Catholic radio station Radio Renascensa. They hung a radio outside of the station, in one of Lisbon’s main streets, so that whenever demonstrations were going past the station, they would be broadcast live. Geier writes: “It was an inspiration for every visiting socialist to experience workers’ control—the hallmark of every great proletarian revolution—alive in 400 factories in Portugal. Now working for themselves, the workers humanised working conditions, and simultaneously raised productivity by drawing upon the organising genius that exists in the working class. Workers understood the productive process better than foremen and administrators; they knew how to increase production if the ends would benefit them, not the bosses.” Yet kicking out the bosses also raised difficulties, such as distribution. Where a factory produced consumer goods, workers could sell them directly to other workers easily enough. Workers at a watch factory, for example, sold the watches they made in the street. But what if your factory didn’t? Or, if, as was the case in many larger firms, you produced only a small component of the final product. So, in many large and militant workplaces, the workers decided not to take over completely. The capitalist market still regulated the factories under workers’ control. Many factory commissions did not want to be in the position of exploiting themselves, seeing the need instead for state planning under workers’ control. This was an inherently unstable situation, which had to be resolved one way or the other. The question of state power was put on the revolution’s agenda. Who was going to run the state—the workers or the bosses? The question was avidly studied and debated in Portugal. Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin’s *The* *State and Revolution* was number two or three on the bestseller list during the revolution. Ultimately, however, no political bodies were strong enough or broad enough to pose an alternative to the capitalist state. Workers’ commissions in the small city of Marinha Grande—which had set up a soviet republic in the fight against fascism in 1934—issued a call for a state based on revolutionary councils of workers, soldiers and sailors. This pointed the way forward but was not taken up nationally. **From hot summer to fizzle** The revolution reached a crescendo in the “hot summer” of 1975\. The MFA split into three political tendencies. The SP’s line was for parliamentary (capitalist) democracy, the PCP was for a Cuban-style state, while COPCON and the revolutionary left agitated for popular power. Over the hot summer, these three tendencies battled it out. Soldiers United for Victory was formed by the far left, the “largest rank-and-file solders’ organisation since the Russian Revolution”, according to Geier. Soon, it was organising nationally, addressing the bread-and-butter demands of the soldiers. That is, it carried out the class struggle within the army. Robinson writes that “the struggle of rank-and-file soldiers was interlinked with, and conditioned by, the general class struggle”. The military is an instrument of class rule. Ultimately, therefore, “the development of the class struggle in the army depended on whether the workers’ movement could offer an alternative authority to that of the capitalist state, a potential workers’ state”. Even the best of the Portuguese revolutionaries did not understand this, according to Robinson. Yet opportunities existed very late in the piece. Building workers, who hadn’t played much of a role to that point, called a national strike for 12 November, held a mass demonstration, armed themselves and held the parliamentarians hostage until their demands were met! A coalition of far-left groups formed a United Revolutionary Front. While this was a step forward and could play something of a coordinating role, it was no substitute for a revolutionary party. And, crucially, without workers’ councils or soviets on a national scale, the revolution could go only so far. When the working class and the capitalists are facing off, as in the Portuguese revolution, one must eventually win out. At the end of November 1975, the right in the army moved against the left, sacking a left-wing commander. The government declared a state of emergency and sent in hand-picked commandos. None of the left groups called for strikes and occupations to defeat the right. It was all over. The same month as the Whitlam social democratic government in Australia was overthrown in a constitutional coup, Portugal’s workers’ revolution was defeated by a social democratic coup. Far from the socialist society—a world without bosses or bureaucrats—that many workers were fighting for, capitalist liberal democracy was brought to Portugal. **Legacy** Portugal’s revolution left a lasting legacy. Democracy was brought back—albeit in its limited, parliamentary form under capitalism—after 48 years of dictatorship. Portugal’s welfare state was established, with gains lasting for generations. For instance, the nationalised health care service, with hospitals taken over from the Catholic Church, became one of the best in world. Education was made free and run by democratically elected boards rather than principals, which continued until 2008\. Yet perhaps the most important legacy is the example of workers’ ability to run society. As one strike bulletin said: “Our struggles are just and if we strike we shall be heard. This is why we must organise not only against this or that boss, in this or that factory, but against the capitalist system as a whole. Comrades often ask: ‘If there were no bosses, who would give us work?’ We all know that to work we need a factory, machines, and raw materials. We also know that the factory and machines were made by other workers, just as it was other workers who sowed the cotton, worked the wool, or dug up the iron ore. It therefore isn’t the boss who gives us work, but the miner, the metalworker, the farmer ... Since it is workers like us who run the factory, why are bosses needed?” ### Council workers battle to bargain together URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/council-workers-battle-to-bargain-together/ Last updated: 2025-06-12T08:41:18.000Z Thousands of local government workers in Melbourne have signed on to bargain collectively, across 10 councils, for better pay and conditions. This is an early test of recent changes to the Fair Work Act by the federal government that should enable unions to more easily bargain—and take legally protected industrial action—across multiple employers. According to Tash Wark, secretary of the Australian Services Union (ASU), “this is the largest worker-initiated multi-employer agreement proposed in Australia”. The ASU intends to use an industrial and political campaign across multiple councils to put pressure on the state Labor government to modify or scrap the neoliberal “rate capping” policy that limits council budgets. In response, local government employers have [gone on the offensive](https://www.asuvictas.com.au/VICTAS/News/ASU%5Fmulti-employer%5Fbargaining%5Fupdate.aspx?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=This%20has%20the%20practical%20effect,by%20the%20Fair%20Work%20Commission.). From Brimbank to Darebin to Yarra to Port Phillip, employers are launching sham (non-union) single enterprise “negotiations”. These are designed to pave the way for non-union ballots to keep bargaining at a council level, thus avoiding multi-employer bargaining. Employers are also mounting legal challenges against the ASU, despite similar challenges [losing at the Federal Court](https://www.heraldsun.com.au/leader%2Fballarat%2Ffederal-court-rejects-central-goldfields-shires-appeal-of-multicouncil-bargaining-with-ararat%2Fnews-story%2F66f6c2c1b3797b2c670c6ffa3cf6fdb7?amp&nk=95c7c698a7cc5f92b3b45e378f1ce6d3-1749453407&ref=redflag.org.au) earlier this year. Local government workers provide a wide range of essential services that keep our communities running. From removing waste, cleaning streets and beaches, maintaining parks and roads, to running libraries, immunising and educating children, and providing in-home care for elderly and disabled community members. But over the past few years, these essential workers have been falling behind—their wages consistently failing to keep up with inflation. Since 2021, council workers across Melbourne have lost anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of the real value of their wages. The vast majority of us are now hundreds of dollars a fortnight (thousands of dollars a year) worse off than we were in 2020. There’s one exception to this: senior council executives. Council CEOs across Melbourne [typically earn more than $400,000 a year](https://www.councilwatch.com.au/general-5?ref=redflag.org.au). That’s on par with federal government ministers ($403,000) and the Prime Minister of the UK (£172,153 or $360,335). Last year, it was revealed that Alison Leighton, CEO of the City of Melbourne, pockets a whopping $534,000 annually—almost as much as the prime minister. These are the same people crying poor and threatening job cuts in response to workers’ demanding a liveable wage. In the face of real wage declines, increasing numbers of local government workers have been [going on strike](https://www.heraldsun.com.au/leader%2Fnorth%2Fdarebin-council-workers-begin-strike-taking-protest-to-the-streets%2Fnews-story%2F3c6d0399f41489f72f46ce32377890e5?amp&nk=95c7c698a7cc5f92b3b45e378f1ce6d3-1749443789&ref=redflag.org.au). Despite heroic efforts from workers, [gains have been minimal](https://brunswickvoice.com.au/council-industrial-dispute-ends-as-staff-vote-yes-to-pay-offer/?ref=redflag.org.au). This is partly because a few hundred workers in a single local government area have limited industrial power. The Victorian government’s rate cap also provides an excuse for management to cry poor. And previous bargaining strategies of the ASU have failed to challenge these limitations. Multi-employer bargaining represents, at least potentially, a means to change all that. There’s certainly sentiment for a fight. At a packed meeting of council workers from across Melbourne recently, one worker put it this way: “We are the ones who run this city. If we stop work, the city stops: bins overflow, services disappear, streets and beaches get trashed, parks and sporting fields become overgrown. Imagine what we could achieve if council revenue begins to dry up, if small businesses start to suffer, and if state infrastructure projects grind to a halt.” Council workers are coming together to [demand](https://www.asuvictas.com.au/VICTAS/News/MEB%5Fupdate%5FHave%5Fyour%5Fsay%5Fon%5Four%5Fdraft%5FLog%5Fof%5FClaims.aspx?ref=redflag.org.au) a 22 percent pay rise over four years—consisting of a 10 percent “recovery payment” in the first year and 4 percent in the following years. This will go some way to redressing the decade-long decline in council workers’ real wages. Most of us haven’t seen a pay rise of more than 2 or 3 percent for 10 years—since the re-introduction of rate caps in 2016\. That’s why, as part of this round of bargaining, we’re gearing up to rally against the Victorian state government’s neo-liberal rate capping policy. The rate cap dates back to the Kennett government of the 1990s. Liberal premier Jeff Kennett directly copied this neoliberal measure from former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who used it to coerce local councils into implementing local austerity, regardless of the wishes of the people who elected them. Compulsory competitive tendering of all council services, with councils legally obliged to accept the lowest bid, was used by both Thatcher in the UK and Kennett in Victoria as a way of cutting workers’ wages and essential services to the bone. Though rate capping was abolished when Kennett was thrown out of office in 1999, it was reintroduced by Daniel Andrews’ Labor government in 2016\. The current system limits councils’ ability to raise revenue, including through measures such as charging higher rates for major corporations and property developers that are making millions in our communities. The consequences? As the [Australia Institute reported](https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Putting-a-Cap-on-Community-WEB.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au), less than half of Victorian local government workers now have permanent, full-time jobs, as councils respond to the cap by outsourcing and casualising work. For too long, the rate cap has functioned as a wage cap for local council workers—and it’s about time it was seriously challenged. Multi-enterprise bargaining is the means workers are hoping to use to mount this challenge. Australia’s top CEOs are [hostile](https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/top-ceos-lash-multi-employer-bargaining-20221218-p5c79c?ref=redflag.org.au) to it for a reason. If paired with a militant union strategy, they know multi-enterprise bargaining has the potential to put money and power back into the hands of ordinary workers. They say they’re worried about [“a return to the 1970s”](https://redflag.org.au/article/70s-werent-bad)—a time when wages in Australia consistently outpaced inflation and workers enjoyed a much higher share of national income. No wonder council employers are [doing everything in their power to divide us](https://www.asuvictas.com.au/VICTAS/News/Fair%5FWork%5Fupdate%5FMetropolitan%5FMelbourne%5Fmultiemployer%5Fbargaining.aspx?ref=redflag.org.au). They know multi-employer bargaining could help shift the goal posts by giving workers in our sector greater industrial power. Last Friday, Brimbank council won a fierce campaign to get a non-union single enterprise “agreement” voted up before their employees’ multi-enterprise bargaining application could be authorised by the Fair Work Commission. Workers at Brimbank reported intimidation and standover tactics from management, with managers going as far as [calling the police](https://www.asuvictas.com.au/VICTAS/News/Brimbank%5Fliterally%5Fcalled%5Fthe%5Fcops%5Fto%5Fprevent%5Fyou%5Fhearing%5Fabout%5Fyour%5Frights.aspx?ref=redflag.org.au) on union officials, censoring communications, and [sacking employees](https://www.theservicesunion.com.au/VICTAS/News/Brimbank%5FAquatic%5FCentre%5Femployee%5Ftargeted%5Ffor%5Fspeaking%5Fup%5Fabout%5FNo%5FVote.aspx?ref=redflag.org.au) for communicating with their co-workers about management’s offer. Thanks to Brimbank council’s [dirty tactics](https://www.asuvictas.com.au/VICTAS/News/Vote%5FNo%5Fto%5FBrimbanks%5Fsingle%5FEA%5FFight%5Ffor%5Fa%5Fbetter%5Fdeal%5Fthrough%5FMEB.aspx?ref=redflag.org.au), 1400 workers there are likely to fall further behind the cost of living and their colleagues in local government for years to come. While it’s a disappointing outcome, Brimbank workers never would have received a 4 percent pay rise this year (their highest in 13 years!) if it weren’t for the threat of large-scale industrial action via multi-enterprise bargaining. “I have no doubt in my mind,” said a Brimbank worker, “that once a multi-employer agreement gets up in local government, everyone will want in. We know that taking large-scale industrial action is the only way for us to claw back wages. We just need an opportunity to demonstrate that we can win. It’s up to workers in the nine other councils now to lead the way.” Like Brimbank, employers at City of Darebin, Yarra, and Port Phillip are currently preparing to put non-union single enterprise offers out to vote in the coming weeks and lock their employees out of multi-enterprise bargaining. Workers at all of these councils need to mobilise members and non-members to vote no to any employer ballot aimed at dividing council workers. In good news, at Maribyrnong council, a non-binding ballot organised by the employer saw a thumping majority of workers vote for multi-enterprise bargaining, rejecting the employer’s attempt to split the workforce away. And just a week later, on 12 June, news came in that 74 percent of eligible City of Melbourne employees had voted in a non-binding ballot organised by the employer. Management was hoping for a rejection of multi-employer bargaining. Instead, an amazing 80 percent of those who voted wanted to stick with the union campaign. This puts the lie to the managers’ claims that workers are being “tricked” into supporting multi-enterprise bargaining. A majority of workers at Maribyrnong and Melbourne have now voted for it twice! If Brimbank teaches us anything, it’s that our side needs to be better organised. We need to mobilise our members, we need to be more proactive in countering management’s bribes, scare tactics and misinformation, and we need to patiently explain to our co-workers what’s at stake. This is not just about cutting better deals in our individual work areas for the next three years. Knocking back employer efforts to keep us divided in our individual councils is an act of solidarity. It’s saying that we’re prepared to use our industrial power to win a solid pay rise for childcare and day care workers, for clerical staff and librarians, for parking officers and garbos all over Melbourne. Over the coming weeks, the employers will aim to wear us down and convince us that what they’ve got to offer is the best we can hope for. But we know better. Ten thousand local government workers, acting together, have significant industrial and political power. A multi-enterprise bargaining campaign, paired with an industrial strategy that uses mass action to pressure the state government to loosen its hold on council purse strings, could potentially win a very different outcome. This will not be an easy fight. But we owe it to ourselves, our colleagues and our communities to pursue this course. After all, if we don’t fight, we lose. ### Cost-of-living crisis abating?; remembering NYC’s Day of Rage; Thomas Friedman is unbearable URL: https://redflag.org.au/note-10-cost-of-living-crisis-abating/ Last updated: 2026-01-20T02:43:12.000Z Is the cost-of-living crisis finally abating? According to some headline figures, yes: (One thing about the above chart: it does NOT show that household disposable incomes in the OECD are, on average, now higher than those in Australia. It shows income growth, not income magnitude.) A “headline figure” usually refers to some average or aggregate number—that is, a number composed of other numbers. The unemployment rate, for example, can be broken down into components, including youth and adult unemployment rates, urban and regional unemployment rates and so on. So while the NSW unemployment rate was 3.9 percent in the last three months of 2024, [electorate unemployment rates ranged](https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/researchpapers/Pages/Unemployment-and-JobSeeker-estimates.aspx?ref=redflag.org.au) from 1.5 percent in Terrigal on the central coast to 11.4 percent in western Sydney’s Fairfield. Headline figures are definitely useful as broad gauges, but as this example shows, they can hide considerable variations. That applies to the headline figures charted above. For example, the household income figure could be disaggregated to show outcomes based on existing wealth or income levels. If we did that, we might find that the recent growth is concentrated in the top 20 percent of households, while some sections of the working class have continued to go backwards. Or maybe we’d find that, for some reason, poor people are having a ripping economic rebound and rich people are all losing their jobs. Or maybe that everyone is just working more hours. For now, I’ll leave it at the two headline trends, which, taken together, indicate that economic conditions are broadly shifting. Just how much they need to shift for the hardest hit sections of the workforce to recover lost real wages was disclosed last week. There was some staggering information in last week’s [annual wage review decision](https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/resources/2025fwcfb3500.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au). I’m going to lean on some correspondence from Socialist Alternative members Jerome Small and Tom Bramble, who looked through the document. Jerome noted: > *Many workers on award wages, earning just a few dollars an hour more than the minimum wage, have suffered *an overall loss of 14.4% in what their earnings can buy* over the past four years. This appalling fact is hidden in the fine print of yesterday’s Fair Work Commission decision on the minimum wage.* Tom added some more information: > *Those on the national minimum wage, who are not covered by any award or EBA, are a tiny section of the workforce: just 0.25 percent of all employees. Award reliant employees are 21% of all employees, but just over one-third of these are classified as low-paid … So the 14.4% drop applies to about 7.5% of all employees (926,000 workers), disproportionately young, part time, casual and employed in one of four sectors: accommodation and food; health care and social assistance; retail trade; and administration and support services; and also disproportionately small business (surprise).* Close to 1 million workers, then, were pushed into a massive economic hole in recent years. It’s unclear whether other cohorts of workers performed worse than this, but most have done poorly, particularly those with bank loans. Even with real wages growing again, there’s a long way to go to restore lost living standards. ### The unbearable racism of Thomas Friedman Thomas Friedman wrote a *New York Times* op-ed this week titled, “[This Israeli Government Is a Danger to Jews Everywhere](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/opinion/israel-gaza-anti-semitism.html?ref=redflag.org.au)”. Possibly it will be followed by, “The KKK’s Biggest Crime Was Giving White People a Bad Rap”. Friedman’s concern isn’t for those suffering genocide, but for the oppressor nation carrying it out. These lines, among many others in this odious piece, stuck out: > *Israel, instead of being seen by Jews as a safe haven from antisemitism, will be seen as a new engine generating it; sane Israelis will line up to immigrate to Australia and America rather than beckon their fellow Jews to come Israel’s way. That dystopian future is not here yet…* For Friedman, the systematic starvation of 2 million people is not the dystopia. It’s the prospect of *some* members of the oppressor nation voluntarily emigrating from their fascistic ethnostate to settle in wealthy Western countries where they are not oppressed and where they thrive socially and economically. While we’re at it, let’s have a minute’s silence for the Dutch exodus from Java. After independence, they couldn’t bear the cruelty of sharing Indonesia with the Indonesians. Thousands made their way to that epitome of a Dutch dystopia: New Zealand, a whole country named after a province of the Netherlands. Then there’s this: > *\[O\]ne day, foreign photographers and reporters will be allowed to go into Gaza unescorted by the Israeli Army. And when they do, and the full horror of the destruction there becomes clear to all, the backlash against Israel and Jews everywhere could be profound.* It almost sounds sympathetic. It’s not. But beyond his focus on the terrible ramifications of the genocide *for Israel*, this is an utter dismissal, relegation, erasure of Palestinians who have meticulously documented the crimes in Gaza. Friedman doesn’t count as reliable testimony their photos, their videos, their writings. For him, reliable witnesses will emerge only when “*foreign*” photographers and reporters confirm what has already been televised and pictured and written and spoken tens of thousands of times. Palestinians count as journalists for Friedman as much as they count as humans for Israel. Never mind that [a cursory search of APAimages](https://www.apaimages.info/search?%5FbqO=1000&ppg=500&%5FbqH=eJxdj09LxDAQxT%5FN9iaktREs5JAm2RLdJJo%5FZXMayqLrYRehepB.epNSNDqH4b3fzBuYm2uvYamfzxfrFnRavvbsdW6m27l.75q2xfcdRqirUapOAneMnKdlqiQ4Tr3Y4V6pHeYE1QXiPKOSxFSZNajBCYu%5F2bsCbVlUoH9hJn0k.bZP4yyYCdrbCNKZbI2VQqeZNDpb6cCKg6BO8M0.ld4Z64ml.rFavwOqOflMOjhhQXIS8uf.OA4tig9qVGk0SusDPQAdhGYxL1XAepDpcIpuMvxIu%5F.VKkvKPPl4mebTWzWu6WHtLPdvnYpv4Q--&ref=redflag.org.au), an independent photojournalism agency, yields close to *25,000 photos*—taken this year alone—from inside Gaza. Never mind that [the Palestine Chronicle](https://www.palestinechronicle.com/?ref=redflag.org.au) has had a constant stream of first-hand accounts—that is, by Palestinians on the ground—of the devastation from pretty much day one of the genocide. Ignore the endless reports at Al Jazeera and [Drop Site News](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/nakba-gaza-displaced-jabaliya?ref=redflag.org.au), which both have people in Gaza. [Doctors’ testimonies don’t seem to count either](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt1KPVwhHcQ&ref=redflag.org.au). No. We will know the truth of the matter only when the *New York Times* can gain access to Gaza and make a profit reporting on the crimes it has helped build support for from the beginning. Then, no doubt, Friedman, surveying the killing fields, will bemoan the lasting damage—to Israel’s reputation. You could almost go paragraph by paragraph through his garbage. But why bother? This man is proof that in capitalist society, as in nature, scum rises to the top: ### When students humiliated the cops in New York City’s Upper East Side I’ve never much used video for reporting (it’s primarily been notes, photos and audio recordings of interviews), but decided to try out some short live commentaries while in the United States last year to cover the student encampment movement. The results weren’t particularly spectacular, and we didn’t end up using much. You live and learn… At any rate, sifting through old notes and photos in the last couple of weeks, I stumbled on an almost complete set of these short commentaries from what was one of the highlights of New York City: a blistering demonstration that began at Hunter College on the Upper East Side and for several hours controlled the streets. We’d been shoehorned by cops from the start at the college, but our numbers grew and grew. It became impossible for the cops to contain the protest to the campus and the footpaths. Then it grew some more, in both size and energy, and the cops couldn’t contain it anywhere. It was such a great rally—pure defiance for several hours as the cops degenerated into a rabble. In the previous days, all but one of the city’s encampments had been broken up, and the police mobilisations were immense, particularly at City College in West Harlem and Columbia University a few blocks south. I’m not sure I’ve seen police mobilisations of that size before. Maybe Hong Kong at the siege of the Polytechnic in 2019, but I can’t be sure. (The Fashion Institute of Technology was the last standing encampment in the city, but its last hurrah came the following evening, 7 May, in another major police clearing operation.) But that’s what made this day special—a small victory among scores of defeats across the city. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/e4015dd4-43ed-467f-a937-291797458d44_3024x4032-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/480b4f93-62a8-419d-8c53-aa06a05a2abe_3024x4032-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/39371ea0-2e37-4217-ad6a-63f96a50ad3d_1422x1665-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/34f61d6d-4f4a-4efd-9a5c-e4135b65bf65_2136x2518-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/d0544508-e34a-42e4-922c-739c1fd47fae_2308x3140-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/d712129c-2de3-4957-af96-764afeeca29a_3024x4032-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/a2701db4-26d7-4ab5-ab64-f8b1ae40e5cc_3703x2316-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/124759b2-7ff6-418a-83c7-8898af1ef6dc_3024x4032-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/43343679-ea06-487c-8de1-2d2ba23a15e2_4032x3024-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/8e142154-a1f1-4a8c-adda-5c85beab6d07_4032x3024-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/9945b810-4702-44ff-b4d2-7b15daf72329_3024x4032-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/7708c10c-f831-46f3-802e-a8ca41649c86_3024x2415-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/b63fa546-a841-45f9-9570-9539d0313b93_2987x2179-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/6b8e7feb-acd2-41cd-8b28-8f12eeee7bbf_4032x3024-jpeg.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/e0cca122-a9b9-4d40-a217-e07c12f06edd_2408x3459-jpeg.jpg) ### The battle of Los Angeles URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-battle-of-los-angeles/ Last updated: 2025-10-13T05:23:52.000Z *As the mass ICE raids began on Friday in Los Angeles, members of the socialist group Tempest participated in rapid response and other protest efforts with mass organisations into the weekend. The Community Self-Defence Coalition, in which Tempest members participate, is a key formation that coordinates LA’s rapid response efforts. Tempest’s LA branch members were actively involved in defence efforts during skirmishes across downtown LA, the pitched battle in the city of Paramount and rapid response efforts to repel ICE in the city of Pasadena. They compiled and recorded their experiences throughout the weekend, covering the first days of mobilisation. All photos are by the Tempest LA branch and friends.* *This piece was first published at [Tempest magazine](https://tempestmag.org/?ref=redflag.org.au).* \-------------------- **FRIDAY 6 JUNE** The first day involved nearly a dozen raids near downtown Los Angeles, Sun Valley and North Hollywood neighbourhoods, and LA County suburbs, including Pomona. Emergency rallies were called and converged around the downtown Metropolitan Detention Center. After dispersing protesters there, different law enforcement officers went over to the adjacent district of Chinatown to stage late night around 9pm. There was a lot of contradictory and confusing information spread across different protest chats throughout the night. At first, we were told that they were setting up for a night raid; later, word on the block was that they were setting up for Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan’s press conference at 7am the next morning. Dozens of FBI agents stationed in a parking lot in Chinatown on Hill St., later joined by Border Patrol, LAPD, and Homeland Security. Protesters quickly gathered to monitor and heckle them, soon outnumbering law enforcement, which also reinforced their numbers. Know Your Rights information was blasted on megaphones in English, Spanish, and Cantonese, as protesters informed local residents of their rights. Things became more intense as armoured personnel carriers and additional law enforcement personnel poured in, although it was still unclear why they were staging in Chinatown. Some protesters, including bikers, tried to block vehicles from entering the lot. Some identified undercover officers and their vehicles on the protesters’ side and successfully heckled them to leave. Others followed various vehicles exiting the lot to figure out where they were going. Soon, law enforcement occupied the whole street beyond the lot to pressure the protesters out. Loud popping sounds started, with some claiming that they were sound cannons being blasted by the police. The pressure from protesters continued into midnight, after which all law enforcement retreated without explanation. There were no further reports of mass raids and Homan’s press conference the next day. (Homan later appeared on television the next afternoon to announce the deployment of the National Guard.) ![]({asset:74815:url||https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-1.jpg}) **SATURDAY 7 JUNE** On the second day, rapid responders rushed to the city of Paramount in the morning, located about a half hour drive south of LA, upon reports of an ICE raid at a Home Depot. Paramount developed into a war zone throughout the day. Paramount is a majority low-income and Latinx area, and one of LA’s key industrial regions. The organised left has little presence in this area, but the militancy seen on 7 June demonstrates the spontaneous power of Brown working-class youth in defending their communities. ICE cars were seen burning. Hundreds of law enforcement officers were deployed throughout Paramount, throwing tear gas and flash bombs as protesters fought back and the Home Depot barricaded itself for safety. As the Paramount battle stretched on, supporters continued to respond to different reports of ICE raids across LA, as some continued to support detainees at the downtown detention centre. More people began gathering back at the detention centre early in the evening. Around 100-150 protesters were there around 7pm. LAPD gathered en masse to use tear gas and shoot pellets at protesters in this area between 8 and 10pm. Most of the street around the detention centre was cleared out and occupied by hundreds of LAPD officers. In the meantime, Homan confirms on national television that he’ll be federalising the California National Guard for deployment in LA, against Governor Gavin Newsom’s dissent. It was unclear that night what this meant or when exactly the Guard would arrive. The day-long battles in Paramount stretched west into the city of Compton, which was one of the last sites where militant mobilisation continued that day. There were reported ICE sightings at probably six other locations throughout southern California but the majority of protest and state activity occurred primarily in the vicinity of the Home Depot in Paramount and Compton that went into the early morning Sunday, and again at the Downtown LA Metropolitan Detention Center where protesters had been gathered the entire day. ![]({asset:74816:url||https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-2.jpg}) **SUNDAY 8 JUNE** **LOS ANGELES** On 8 June, Angelenos woke to the news that over 2,000 National Guard had been deployed. A protest in the predominantly Latinx working-class Boyle Heights neighbourhood was planned by Centro CSO and other immigrant rights and local groups for the morning. Crowds had also already begun to gather back at the detention centre downtown. ![]({asset:74814:url||https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-3.jpg}) Activists gathered at Mariachi Plaza to protest the ICE raids of the previous two days. Speakers included labour movement icon Dolores Huerta. Speakers generally emphasised not only the rights of immigrants but also applauded the courage and rapid response of the activists gathered, as well as the importance of showing the Trump administration that people will continue to fight back against his draconian methods. The gathering mobilised to march down 1st Street for 1.5 miles to the Federal Metropolitan Detention Center on Alameda Street where they met a larger crowd of activists that had been gathering from the previous two days. Within minutes of arrival, the authorities fired upon the crowd of protesters, presumably with only tear gas, and the front of the crowd began to disperse. There did not appear to be any serious injuries, though many seemed unprepared for tear gas, and some were adversely affected. The Centro CSO organisers, worried about crowd safety, encouraged those remaining from the Mariachi Plaza rally to return to Boyle Heights. Many of us stayed to record the events, in particular the fully militarised presence of local, state, and federal authorities, including the National Guard. I left soon afterward when the tear gas became too overwhelming. The crowd at the detention centre remained at about 100-300 people for the next two hours and had not yet encountered further violence. Protesters stood off with the \~20 California National Guard members stationed at the rear of the building. Eventually, a squadron of \~15 LAPD cars arrived further down the road, pre-positioned to block one exit along the walled-in road. A large portion of the crowd then moved around the guarded door and went around the corner, escaping a potential kettle. The police formed a line around their vehicles and appeared to fully surround a portion of the protesters, but did not make arrests. ![]({asset:74818:url||https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-4.jpg}) Around this time, a rally called by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) at the city hall nearby began to march toward the detention centre. It was unclear whether the march was part of the original rally plan or if the crowd spontaneously decided to march. This mass contingent arrived just in time to reinforce the surrounded protesters near the detention centre. As they arrived, the police were forced to retreat promptly. Thousands of protesters continued to flood the streets outside the detention centre throughout the afternoon and occupied the nearby intersection at Alameda and Temple. Some remained around the intersection while others continued to march. This contingent went through Little Tokyo back to the Federal Building. At this point, the crowd was too large to be effectively organised. Some remained at the detention centre, others continued to march, while a smaller group occupied the freeway. A formation of LAPD officers opposed the crowd of \~200 protesters, who kept a close distance from the line. The police continued to shoot volleys of less-lethal weapons into these different sites, though protesters remained steadfast for hours. Pro-Palestine slogans and clothing were not only ubiquitous, but many of those furthest in the front defending the protests from the police were wearing keffiyehs. We witnessed multiple people around us injured. Street medics helped many protesters tend to their injuries. The police soon declared unlawful assembly but were unable to fully sweep the intersection for hours. At one point, the police declared that they would begin arrests in a minute, but were halted by a protester’s car that slowly rolled through the intersection with a child sitting at the window, raising a Mexican flag with his fist up. The crowd protected them, and the sweeps were delayed for another half an hour. After another stand-off, the protesters crossed over the median of the freeway, stopping the flow of traffic in the opposite direction. As soon as this happened, the police widened their line and began shooting flash bangs in the sky above the protesters on the freeway. Peaceful protesters were met with disproportionate state violence that increased with time, including being fired on with less-lethal guns from rooftops. Several Waymo automated cars were burned. Significant numbers of protesters remained in the streets at various points around downtown LA into the evening and after nightfall. They were forced off the freeway but continued to march to other locations. As the protesters’ numbers grew thinner, police aggression increased. By sunset, the remaining protesters were forced to construct makeshift barricades using benches and signs. ![]({asset:74819:url||https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-5.jpg}) **PASADENA** In Pasadena, word got out early in the morning across rapid response chats that ICE and DHS agents were staying at three local hotels: the Westin, Dena Hotel, and the new AC Hotel. There were reports of ICE agents questioning hotel workers who were servicing the rooms. By noon, Unite Here and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network brought out more than one hundred people from Pasadena and Altadena to inquire about and protest ICE’s presence. Faith leaders, community organisations and politicians, including Mayor Victor Gordo, showed up afterwards, and the crowd swelled to several hundred. Speakers at the rally denounced the intimidation and the hotel’s collaboration with ICE as they profit from family separation. Throughout the day, protesters marched and circled the block, vowing to stay until ICE left. Some of the ICE vehicles’ tires were damaged. The protest served as a rallying point for the community. Community organisations like AUSIIME and the pro-immigrant band Los Jornaleros del Norte kept spirits high throughout the day with chants, cumbia, and anti-ICE songs. After several hours of protests, local politicians who had been intermediating with management announced that ICE had been asked to leave the hotel, and the crowd erupted in jubilation. Still, protesters did not leave until the agents had checked out and continued waiting, anticipating any movement. Since the morning, workers had been informing the rally of potential ICE movements, and everyone anticipated the humiliating exit from the hotel. After fixing their popped tires under the hot sun, ICE agents began to exit swiftly from the parking structure where protesters waited for them at all exits. As vehicles swerved through the parking structure, they were chased out by triumphant protesters who celebrated their victory, chanting “Si se pudo!” (We did it!) ![]({asset:74820:url||https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-6.jpg}) **MONDAY 9 JUNE** Early in the morning, families of several workers (mostly women and youth) who were detained in Friday’s mass raid at Ambiance garment factory gathered for a press conference, assisted by the Garment Workers Center and other community organisations. A Tempest member assisted with security. The detained workers were the main providers in their families, and the families shared that they have not been able to hear from them yet. They called on ICE to free them, and to leave our communities. A group of over 100 people gathered to support them, including Palestinian and Palestine solidarity organisations, Indigenous organisations, progressive clergy, and other community nonprofits. The families also shared that Ambiance has still not released the workers’ owed wages to them, and a delegation of them went to the company offices after the press conference to demand these wages. There was no visible police presence or counter-protests, but many of us were informed throughout the event that ICE activity was beginning again in other parts of LA, including in Huntington Park, and the Fashion District again just a mile away from us. Many attendees went directly to the Grand Park rally to support David Huerta and SEIU right after. ![]({asset:74821:url||https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-7.jpg}) Later that morning at 11am, there was a rally at Grand Park in downtown led by SEIU in support of SEIU California President David Huerta, who was detained for participating in the protest against the mass raids at the detention centre on Friday. There was a curiously light police presence at first, despite the clashes over the weekend. In addition to SEIU International and various locals, many other major unions were present, including AFSCME, UHW, LULAC, Teamsters, UNITE HERE!, ILWU, LIUNA, IBEW and IATSE. There were also representatives of various civic and community organisations, like Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), LAUSD, CARECEN, UCLA Labor Studies and LA County. The DSA-endorsed City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado was also present and spoke. The general theme was that David Huerta’s arrest is also an injury to all of us. It was a demonstration of around 2,000 to 3,000 people that affirmed courage in the face of the federal presence sent by Trump. A band, Las Cafeteras, performed some songs like “La Bamba”, “If I Was President”, “Stand By Me”, which also asked the audience what they would change if they were president for a day. Prominent labour leaders spoke and affirmed labour’s role in the fight against fascism, including SEIU president April Verrett, Dolores Huerta, NAACP president David Johnson (who connected workers’ and civil rights, drawing on the Black struggle). Johnson powerfully declared that the Black struggle has taught him that saying nothing about the oppression of the most vulnerable would be an invitation for more abuses against everyone. Representatives from Justice for Janitors USWW, like Luis Fuentes, spoke about David Huerta’s labour bona fides. But there was little emphasis on the need to build a resistance outside of the Democratic Party. Dolores Huerta emphasised nonviolence and the need for electoral strategies during the midterms, which was reaffirmed by the SEIU political policy director. Another policy representative spoke about the importance of forming coalitions with allies in other movements, emphasising the need for strength in numbers and solidarity. Police presence and pressure began to ramp up toward the end of the rally, as a student walkout that morning converged at the nearby Federal Building. Hundreds of students and other community members began to join, and police vehicles from other cities, such as Vernon, Torrance and San Marino, appeared. The Trump administration announced the deployment of Marines into LA around this time, as mass raids ramped up targeting many cities across Orange County, south of LA. The situation remains highly fluid, and more protests are sure to occur in the coming days and weeks. There have already been reports of heightened ICE activity for the next 30 days. Tempest LA branch members will continue to participate and report on any resistance activities. *This piece was first published at [Tempest magazine](https://tempestmag.org/?ref=redflag.org.au).* ![]({asset:74822:url||https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-8.jpg}) ### The people vs. ICE: an uprising against state terror URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-people-vs-ice-an-uprising-against-state-terror/ Last updated: 2025-10-13T05:25:09.000Z The following article is from the [Puntorojo magazine](https://www.puntorojomag.org/?ref=redflag.org.au) editorial collective in North America. \------------------- The scenes of fleeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles being pelted with rocks, bricks, and any other makeshift projectiles by lines of people taking aim at the despised *migra* agents inflicting so much harm and terror in their communities. A burning ICE vehicle in the middle of an intersection, with people setting off fireworks, taking selfies, and even dancing on the burned-out car. Throngs of people on a highway bridge overpass dropping objects onto police in their cars, smashing windshields, and forcing the cops to quickly retreat from the scene with their shields up. Rows of heavily armed cops shooting rubber bullets and tear gas cannisters into crowds of anti-ICE protesters with complete disregard, intending to harm and provoke, while people make shields out of durable objects, trash can lids, and metal chairs. Thousands of people coming out to join the uprising, waving Mexican, Central American, and Palestinian flags, even as the Trump regime has called out National Guard troops to take up positions around the city. These are some of the scenes from the anti-ICE uprising in Los Angeles in June 2025, emerging street battles and clashes between the most oppressed and exploited sectors of the working class and heavily armed ICE agents—the American Gestapo. **ICE unleashed in the shadows of imperialist war** ICE was created in 2003 in a period of massive state investment and buildup in military and state repressive capacities in the period after the attacks of 9/11\. Then US president, George W. Bush— with broad support from the Democratic Party—launched the invasion (and 20-year occupation) of Afghanistan in October of 2001 known as “Operation Enduring Freedom”. This was followed in early 2002 with Bush declaring at his State of the Union address that the US state was initiating a generational and global “War on Terror”, beginning with intention to attack the “Axis of Evil” nations of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The US invaded and occupied Iraq on March 20, 2003, under the name “Operation: Iraqi Freedom.” Analysts have since documented that the US has conducted and spread military action—invasion, occupation, airstrikes, drone attacks, special ops, assassinations, and advisory and training roles— into 78 countries that has led to the [killing](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures?ref=redflag.org.au) of nearly 5 million people. While the attacks of 9/11 gave a pretext, the US state had already been in the process of preparing for a new phase of an imperial war to re-assert US military hegemony in the Middle East, Asia, and other parts of the world. This was expressed most directly through the influence of a right-wing ruling class think tank known as “The Project for a New American Century” (PNAC), which since 1997 had advocated for a more assertive and interventionist US internationally. PNAC promoted the idea of preemptive war, regime change, and neocolonial occupation to reassert “American primacy” against its rising imperialist rivals and enemies. Since 2001 military spending has increased dramatically, with the Pentagon [spending](https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic/budget/pentagon?ref=redflag.org.au) over $14 trillion dollars to fund expanding war and occupation. This is the context in which the US state simultaneously opened a domestic front in its generational war, with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In 2003, the bipartisan US state developed and merged 22 federal armed enforcement agencies into the Department of Homeland Security as an all-encompassing domestic state-repressive apparatus. ICE was created to repress so-called “national security threats” within US territorial boundaries, with agents given broad license and individual discretion to execute the charge of surveilling, pursuing, detaining, and deporting those deemed by ICE to be “*Individuals believed to pose a threat to public safety or national security*.” From the outset, ICE became a distinctive and exceptional type of policing agency, given broad license to act without oversight, accountability, and to conduct its operations with impunity and without fear of repercussion or recrimination. The extralegal nature of ICE has enabled the agency to become deeply politicised, to attract and recruit agents with far right, racist, and violent dispositions; and to be weaponised, operationalised, and unleashed by a reactionary and white supremacist regime for explicitly political purposes. **ICE as a weapon of class war and political repression** ICE was initially deployed through the “National Fugitive Operations Program” to surveil, target, arrest, and deport undocumented Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern people from over 20 targeted nations who were residing in the US. The focus then shifted towards targeting undocumented workers from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean after the mass immigrant worker mobilisations of 2006, where over 3 million people participated in strikes, marches, boycotts, and walkouts demanding legalisation. Between 2006 and 2007, ICE agents orchestrated hundreds of invasive raids across the country in over 100 cities and towns nationwide that targeted factories, farms, homes, and public community spaces. ICE was deployed to arrest workers organising union drives, conducting workplace protests, or otherwise participating in class struggle activities in different locations across the country. Numerous undocumented activists were identified and targeted for their political activism and advocacy. Through these fugitive recovery operations and workplace and community raids, over 80,000 people were targeted, arrested, and deported in 2006-7 alone. The state attack using ICE was to “neutralise” the mass immigrant workers’ movement by mass arresting and deporting its most militant, organised, and resistant sectors. The state-led attack on the migrant and transnational working class has persisted ever since in a bipartisan manner to use the threat of ICE arrest, detention, and deportation to further segregate, terrorise, and render millions of immigrant workers more vulnerable and precarious. Under these conditions, they are made less able to organise and resist, and more susceptible to higher levels of exploitation, and to enable the extraction from their labor of greater amounts of wealth for the capitalist class. The imperative to contain, control, and instill the permanence of fear in the migrant and transnational working class as a function of the US capitalist system can explain why both the Republicans and Democratic Parties have worked together to build up ICE and detention and deportation capacities through successive administrations. The DHS has since become a massively expanding state repressive apparatus that has seen its size and scale growing exponentially, with an initial [budget](https://www.dhs.gov/publication/securing-homeland-strengthening-nation?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=The%20President's%20Budget%20for%202003,from%20%2419.5%20billion%20in%202002.) of $38 billion in 2003 and rising to a [bloated](https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-03/DHS%20FY%202024%20BUDGET%20IN%20BRIEF%20%28BIB%29%5FRemediated.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) $103 billion by 2024. Trump’s currently proposed 2025 budget proposal (his so-called “big beautiful bill”) that recently passed the House of Representatives [includes](https://www.epi.org/blog/house-republican-budget-bill-gives-trump-185-billion-to-carry-out-his-mass-deportation-agenda-while-doing-nothing-for-workers-immigration-enforcement-would-have-80-times-more-funding-than-la/?ref=redflag.org.au#:~:text=The%20bill%20provides%20$155%20billion,funding%20for%20labor%20standards%20enforcement.) $185 billion in new funding for immigration and border law enforcement. If passed, this will dramatically expand the Department of Homeland Security by nearly doubling its current budget. Specifically for ICE, the bill will allocate $45 billion for immigrant detention and $14 billion for deportation operations. Since the creation of the ICE, the targeting and systematic deportation of “removals” of sections of the undocumented working class has become a permanent feature of the landscape (removals from the interior of the US, not including “expulsions” from within the border region). Under George W. Bush (2000-2008), more than 2 million undocumented workers were arrested and deported; under Barack Obama (2009-2016) over 3 million people were deported, despite him getting elected to president alongside a supermajority of Democrats in Congress on a promise to legalise all undocumented workers; under Trump I (2017-2020), 1.2 million were deported; and under Biden (2021-2025) over 400,000 were deported with millions more expelled from the border region, although he was also elected on a campaign promising to suspend deportations and to pass a general legalisation of the undocumented. The foundational characteristic of ICE as a state-repressive instrument deployed against labor unionism and political dissidence was recently displayed with ICE agents [targeting](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/26/us-universities-students-israel-palestine-protests?ref=redflag.org.au) and arresting pro-Palestinian activists and sympathisers. High-profile arrests and abductions of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, both of whom are legal permanent residents in the process of attaining citizenship, show how the state is now expanding the purview of repression of political opponents to go beyond those who are undocumented. Furthermore, more than 1,000 people have had their visas [revoked](https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/17/us/university-international-student-visas-revoked?ref=redflag.org.au) or statuses terminated for alleged Pro-Palestinian activism. The use of ICE as a state weapon against the working class, while simultaneously used against the political opponents of US imperialism, Zionism, and Palestinian genocide—reveal the scale of the political crisis of legitimacy in the US state. It also reveals the scale of violence to which the state is willing to deploy against broad segments of the population to quell dissent and opposition to the economic and imperialist objectives of the US capitalist class. **Towards mass resistance—and the abolition of ICE** Increased ICE activities targeting migrant workers and political activists has been increasing over the last decade. Since the Obama Administration, ICE has become increasingly [integrated](https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/major-city-police-leaders-join-ice-discuss-partnership?ref=redflag.org.au) into national policing efforts to participate in a wide array of enforcement activities, including efforts to repress political protest and social unrest. For instance, DHS and ICE agents were also deployed in cities across the country to surveil, disrupt, and repress the [Black Lives Matters](https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/government-watching-blacklivesmatter-and-its-not-okay?ref=redflag.org.au) protest movements of 2014 to 2021\. In some cases, like that in Portland, Oregon, DHS agents used unmarked vehicles to track, [abduct](https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland?ref=redflag.org.au), and incarcerate protest participants over the course of the protests. Rising anger and active opposition to ICE has taken shape in recent years. In 2017-18, a nationwide movement called “[Occupy ICE](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/03/occupy-ice-protests-immigration-families?ref=redflag.org.au)” was organised to block and disrupt operations at ICE facilities across of the country. This movement advanced the demand of “abolish ICE” in very practical terms: disrupt their activities and make it impossible for them to operate. This impact and popularity of the movement, under Trump’s first administration, even compelled some [Democratic Party](https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/02/politics/abolish-ice-democrats-list?ref=redflag.org.au) candidates to mouth support. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, and others stepped forward and feigned support for the abolition of ICE—only to quickly walk it back and reverse course after the election cycle. During the election cycle of 2024, both Democrats and Republicans ramped up their support for an immigration crackdown and the unleashing of ICE. Having no alternative to offer amid the recurring crises of capitalism and imperial decline, both capitalist parties [converged](https://www.npr.org/2024/07/30/nx-s1-5055670/harris-trump-border-immigration-georgia?ref=redflag.org.au) in a full-throated attack on immigrants, refugees, and transnational workers. The complicity of Democrats in [shifting](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/-border-broken-democrats-solidify-shift-tougher-migration-stance-conve-rcna167638?ref=redflag.org.au) the political terrain against immigrants enabled the racist and reactionary Trump to scale up his fascist rhetoric, mobilise his base of support (including in [ICE](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/immigration-customs-enforcement-union-endorses-trump-228664?ref=redflag.org.au) and the [Border Patrol](https://thehill.com/latino/4932425-trump-border-patrol-union-endorsement/?ref=redflag.org.au)), and declare a war on immigrants as the main onslaught of his second term—with the Democratic Party in complicity or silence. The last few weeks and days show the potential for a movement of militant mass resistance to ICE, the Trump regime, and the whole state-repressive apparatus that underpins the US capitalist system. There have been several community-based confrontations against ICE raids in [Worcester](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE3VYMkb-Po&ref=redflag.org.au), Massachusetts, [San Diego](https://www.puntorojomag.org/2025/06/10/the-people-vs-ice-an-uprising-against-state-terror/in%20defense%20of%20migrant%20workers?ref=redflag.org.au), California, [Minneapolis](https://youtu.be/fx9GAblcGtU?ref=redflag.org.au), Minnesota, and in several other [parts](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/52yVGaNZ63M?ref=redflag.org.au) of the country. The current [uprising](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mgdny2YW3Y&ref=redflag.org.au) in Los Angeles shows that we have the numbers, power, and capacity to disrupt and defeat ICE operations and drive these invaders out of our communities. For the struggle against ICE to grow, advance, and inflict more setbacks and defeats on ICE, there will need to be more coordinated acts of confrontation and disruption across more cities with the militancy now being witnessed in Los Angeles. This will necessitate higher levels of organisation, planning, and involvement. To build a mass movement capable of defeating ICE, it is also necessary to understand, strategize, and organise for the complete abolition of the agency. Acts of mass disruption can weaken ICE operations, and with radical organisation and orientation, can potentially inspire more sectors to join in the resistance. Most importantly, a mass movement against ICE can spread into the workplaces with strikes that can disrupt the capitalist economy and thereby its very capacity to function. Working-class power to shut down capitalist production is its greatest potential power. A [threatened](https://inthesetimes.com/article/flight-attendant-union-labor-trump-shutdown-sara-nelson-strike?ref=redflag.org.au) general strike in the airline industry in 2019 forced Trump to back down and cave during a federal government shutdown to force congressional funding for the expansion of the border wall. As an instrumentalised weapon of class war used openly against the working class, the very existence and ongoing terror operations of ICE are directly connected to the needs of the capitalist class to subjugate the most resistant segments of the working class and make them vulnerable to super-exploitation to enrich the capitalists. ICE is also a weapon that is increasingly used to repress political dissidents and outspoken critics of the sitting regime, so it can continue in its imperialist war efforts and to conduct the genocide in Gaza. If we can unite and build movements of mass resistance to ICE, we will not only realise our potential to disrupt and stop ICE but can also become aware of our potential and ability to defeat and overturn the capitalist system itself—that which has spawned the monstrosities of ICE terror, Trump, US imperialism, endless war, and genocide. ### Melbourne University expels Palestine solidarity activists URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/melbourne-university-expels-palestine-solidarity-activists/ Last updated: 2025-06-10T02:13:43.000Z The University of Melbourne has expelled two student activists and indefinitely suspended two more for a 2024 occupation of the office of university academic and pro-Israel campaigner Steven Prawer. The expulsions follow a pattern of management attacks on Palestine solidarity activism. Since 3 March, the administration has banned indoor protests, those at building entrances and any that are “unreasonably disruptive”. The university previously tried to intimidate nineteen students by issuing misconduct notices after the Gaza Solidarity Encampment last year. When students camped out in the Arts West building to demand divestment from Israel and arms manufacturers, the university secretly spied on their movements via the Wi-Fi system. Management also threatened to defund the student union if it paid Palestinian speakers at a forum raising awareness about conditions in the West Bank. As well, in 2022, the university condemned the union for adopting a pro-Palestine and Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions position. To legitimise its crackdown on campus free speech and activism, the administration has cynically weaponised the issue of antisemitism. In 2023, the university adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism. The definition is hotly contested because it includes, as an example of antisemitism, “criticism of the state of Israel”. Like the government and media, the university deliberately conflates support for Palestine and an end to the war in Gaza with hatred of Jewish people. There are several anti-Zionist Jewish organisations, such as Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States, that vocally oppose Israel’s war in Gaza. Indeed, JVP’s slogan at demonstrations is “not in our name”; a pointed rejection of the idea that Israel acts in the interests of Jewish people when it starves and massacres Palestinians. Recently, the university published an “Anti-Racism Action Plan”, supposedly to combat antisemitism on campus. Twelve complaints of antisemitism were lodged with the university, it says, “concentrated in Semester 1 2024 ... during the period of the encampment and occupation \[and\] largely related to posters, slogans and stickers which could not be attributed to a specific person”. The only evidence provided of antisemitism is pro-Palestine slogans and protests calling for an end to the war in Gaza. Under the guise of fighting racism, the university has punitively targeted anti-war and anti-genocide student campaigners. Universities are attacking freedom of speech and anti-war protesters in part because they are a key pillar of defence research in Australia. The University of Melbourne alone collaborates with thirteen weapons companies, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and BAE Systems. It aims to cement its place in weapons research by establishing a [weapons research hub at the new Fisherman’s Bend campu](https://www.thecitizen.org.au/articles/at-fishermans-bend-university-of-melbourne-angling-for-defence-contracts-relationships?ref=redflag.org.au)s, currently under construction in Port Melbourne. The university will partner with Boeing, Siemens, and the Australian Department of Defence. The administration has already spent $2 billion on the project and is attempting to establish more contracts with other weapons companies. The decision to discipline students coincides with the devastating escalation in Israel’s war. Israel is systematically starving Gazans. In the past week, a US “aid” organisation, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has repeatedly gunned down Palestinians desperately seeking food at distribution sites. Israeli politicians boast openly of making the Gaza Strip so unliveable that Palestinians will “voluntarily” leave. It’s open ethnic cleansing. And at this moment, the university administration has come out stridently on Israel’s side. The expulsions set a dangerous precedent for free speech and the right to protest on campus. But they can be challenged. Last year, [a Deakin student was suspended](https://redflag.org.au/article/how-deakin-university-tried-to-trample-on-students-rights-and-failed) for her involvement in the Deakin Gaza Encampment, but was reinstated on appeal. Similarly, [an ANU student won their expulsion appeal](https://honisoit.com/2024/09/pro-palestinian-anu-student-wins-expulsion-appeal/?ref=redflag.org.au) after being disciplined. Those cases show that it’s possible to challenge university discipline and win civil liberties on campuses. The movement won’t be cowed or intimidated by those trying to silence us. ### Labor’s PALM scheme is modern slavery URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-palm-scheme-is-modern-slavery/ Last updated: 2025-06-09T22:59:21.000Z The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme between Australia and nine participating Pacific island nations is supposedly mutually beneficial. Australian industry fills labour gaps by bringing in Pacific islanders on temporary working visas. Struggling Pacific economies get a boost from the money workers send home. The only catch is that tens of thousands of temporary visa workers are denied basic labour rights, and that it is Australian bosses who are reaping all the benefits. The more than 30,000 PALM workers currently in Australia are assigned to specific employers, primarily in rural and regional areas. Seventy percent work in the meat industry. Taufa, a PALM participant in an abattoir freezer room, described his working life to [researchers](https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/bhright/exploitation-of-palm-scheme-workers-in-aus-meat-industry?ref=redflag.org.au)from RMIT: “Each day is a race against time to meet our quotas ... if the order says packing/palletising for 500, we need to complete that 500 by day’s end. It’s a tough job ... we lift entire boxes onto pallets, sometimes stacking the equivalent of three or four cows on a single pallet. Despite the cold, you end up feeling the heat, sweating through the workload”. Few would undertake this sort of work if they had other options. The PALM scheme trades on poverty to find people who have no choice but to endure it. PALM workers who arrive in Australia and find that they hate the work, or the employer isn’t paying the expected wages, are not allowed to quit. Instead, they need permission from their boss or the government department that oversees the scheme to find another job. Bosses also often control where PALM workers live, especially in remote areas. Rent can be deducted from workers’ wages for often substandard and overcrowded accommodation provided by employers, with paternalistic rules banning alcohol and drugs. A May [report](https://devpolicy.org/publications/reports/kanan-reproductive-justice-palm-scheme.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au)from the Development Policy Centre exposed that women workers in the PALM scheme are required to undergo pregnancy tests before departing their home country and have resorted to covert abortions while working in Australia. They fear deportation for getting pregnant. In Wagga Wagga, a women’s health clinic estimates that a quarter of women seeking abortions are migrant workers, many on the PALM scheme. Trudi Beck, who runs the clinic, [told the ABC](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-02/migrant-workers-face-pregnancy-discrimination-barriers-abortion/105337020?ref=redflag.org.au) on 2 June, “While I support a woman’s right to choose, I have a moral issue with visa structures that mean a woman has to choose between a pregnancy and supporting her family at home”. The extreme control bosses hold over PALM workers has drawn rightful comparisons to [slavery](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-23/palm-visa-scheme-exploitation-modern-slavery/104382194?ref=redflag.org.au). No wonder more than 7,000 PALM workers have [run away from the job](https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/palm-scheme-workers-at-risk-of-exploitation/61ytu2mt0?ref=redflag.org.au) over the last five years, ending up “undocumented” and even more vulnerable. These conditions are no secret. The PALM scheme has had numerous iterations stretching back to 2008, and each one has been criticised for enabling rampant exploitation. [Farms](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-04/supermarkets-food-outlets-exploit-black-market-migrant-workers/6441496?ref=redflag.org.au)and [abattoirs](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-17/foreign-workers-exploited-at-baiada-plant-investigation-reveals/6554570?ref=redflag.org.au)have repeatedly been the subject of exposés revealing abhorrent working conditions for mostly migrant workers. As the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union pointed out in their February submission to the NSW inquiry into modern slavery, “The attraction to employers of a system of temporary visas for unskilled or semi-skilled foreign workers is precisely because such schemes produce the opportunity to exploit workers and circumvent labour standards”. Australian bosses make money from underpaying migrant workers and skimping on entitlements citizens would expect. RMIT researchers found that PALM workers comprise almost a quarter of Australia’s meat industry, which had a turnover in the 2021-2022 financial year of $75.4 billion. The Australia Institute estimated in 2024 that PALM workers spend close to $1 billion per year on living expenses and taxes, compared to sending home only around $468 million. [As the report says](https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/palm-visas-superannuation-and-tax/?ref=redflag.org.au), “In other words, Australia benefits twice as much from the scheme as the Pacific countries providing it with cheap labour”. Successive Australian governments have had a particular interest in temporary worker schemes targeting the Pacific islands. These economic arrangements are part of Australia leveraging influence in what it sees as its backyard. The Pacific islands rely on foreign aid more than any other region on earth, and Australia is its largest donor. Pacific island governments, then, sometimes willingly, sometimes begrudgingly, acquiesce to Australian demands. Under Albanese, the PALM scheme has been expanded into aged care and child care, sectors populated by notoriously abusive employers. Instead of heeding recommendations of the [Royal Commission into Aged Care](https://redflag.org.au/article/deaths-and-profits-pile-aged-care) to improve working conditions and end privatisation, Labor has chosen to add slave labour to the noxious mix. In 2024, Albanese mandated that PALM workers must be paid at least 30 hours per week and has piloted allowing 200 workers to bring family to Australia and access Medicare. But PALM workers remain bonded to a particular employer and are denied full access to government entitlements. Bosses will continue to exploit this vulnerability. Even less useful has been Labor’s 2024 appointment of the country's first ever anti-slavery commissioner, a political response to media revelations and outrage regarding migrant working conditions. The commissioner’s [website](https://redflag.org.au/article/deaths-and-profits-pile-aged-care)explains that “The Commissioner cannot investigate, or resolve, complaints concerning instances or suspected instances of modern slavery”. The commissioner can, however, “make observations regarding systemic issues based on his engagement with victims and survivors and the broader community”. The anti-slavery commissioner’s office has not issued a single press statement about the PALM scheme, despite complaints about the scheme being an important catalyst for the NSW modern slavery inquiry. Labor is helping bosses treat Pacific workers like slaves. ### The far right continues to make gains in Australia URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-far-right-continues-to-make-gains-in-australia/ Last updated: 2025-06-09T22:56:06.000Z Labor’s trouncing of the Liberals in the federal election represented a clear popular rejection of former Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s partial embrace of Trumpian politics. Nonetheless, the extreme right, both within the Liberals and Nationals and outside of them, is far from disappearing from the political scene. It remains a threat to workers and all the oppressed and needs to be confronted. The far right outside the Coalition parties, despite its fragmentation into about ten separate groups, maintained the significant gains from the 2022 elections on the back of the reactionary anti-vax and anti-lockdown protests. In the Senate, far-right outfits polled a combined 13.6 percent (almost 2 million votes)—up slightly from 13.3 percent in 2022. The menagerie of extreme-right and semi-fascist parties—including One Nation, Trumpet of Patriots, Family First, People First, Libertarian Party, Citizens Party, the Christians and other fragments—is stridently pro-business, “free enterprise” and hostile to anything vaguely smacking of “progressiveness”. They all champion an array of racist, extreme nationalist, climate denialist, pro-nuke, anti-vax, anti-immigrant, anti-abortion and “anti-woke” policies. The reactionary emphasis varied a bit. In some rural areas, vile Aboriginal bashing was at the fore (notably the Libertarian candidate who achieved sizeable votes in the area around Goondiwindi in Queensland). In others, the emphasis was on denouncing multiculturalism or wind farms or hostility to Labor’s “creeping communism” (if only!) or calls for a royal commission into COVID health measures. The sadly resurrected Family First, running again after missing the last couple of elections, unsurprisingly emphasised policies to “encourage and incentivise monogamous, heterosexual marriage” and opposition to “LGBTIQA+ gender fluid ideology”. Its top candidate in NSW, Lyle Shelton, was the leader of the failed campaign against marriage equality. But Family First also embraced a long list of other standard far-right policies: cutting government spending, opposing multiculturalism, raising military spending to 3 percent of GDP, exiting the Paris climate accords, supporting nuclear power, cutting immigration, encouraging small and family businesses, banning Muslim migrants and an emphasis on “reading, writing and arithmetic” in schools. As a bonus, the party also encouraged shooting sports. Who and what to shoot was left unspecified. A newcomer to the far-right gang is Gerard Rennick’s People First party. Aided by his profile as a sitting senator, and running on a joint ticket with Katter’s Australian Party, Rennick gained 4.7 percent of the Queensland Senate vote, challenging One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts on 7.1 percent for the final seat. Like numerous other far-right leaders, including Pauline Hanson, Bernie Finn (Family First’s Victorian Senate candidate) and Craig Kelly (heading the joint Libertarian/HEART/People First NSW ticket), Rennick is a product of the Liberal Party, forming People First only after losing his Liberal National endorsement last year. Rennick almost makes Hanson seem moderate. When still a Liberal, he advocated closer ties with Putin’s Russia because “they’re part of the West; they drink, they’re Christians, they play soccer, they’re Caucasian”. In 2020 on Sky News, Rennick denounced the supposed “communist takeover of the classroom and the bedroom”, which he argued was an even bigger threat than the Chinese government. He also claimed Labor’s proposed free child care for three-year-olds was a conspiracy “to strengthen the role of the state”. Rennick is a fanatical climate change denier, claiming that the Bureau of Meteorology tampered with data to “perpetuate global warming hysteria”. One of People First’s core policies is to remove all government references to climate change and abolish the Climate Change Department, along with the Multicultural Department. People First also calls for denying entry to people from “radical nations”—they don’t mean Trump’s America—expelling all “illegal” immigrants, forcing foreign-born citizens to wait ten years to access Centrelink , embracing nuclear power and ending funding for Welcome to Country. Nonetheless, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation remains the largest reactionary outfit with just over 40 percent of the total far-right Senate vote. It benefited from the demise of Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party and the Liberal Democrats to improve its first preference vote by 1.3 percent to 5.7 percent nationally. Hanson also benefited from the decision of the Liberals and Nationals to preference One Nation, something that even the crusty old conservative John Howard refused to do. This was a clear message from Dutton that Hanson’s vile racist rantings were an acceptable part of mainstream politics. As a consequence of the preference deal, the NSW electorate of Hunter was turned into a runoff between One Nation and Labor. Thanks to the Nationals’ preferences and those of far-right fragments, One Nation candidate Stuart Bonds went from a primary vote of 16 percent to 41 percent in the two-party preferred count. The Hansonites gained two new senators—one in NSW and the other in Western Australia—for a total of four. They were aided by a more favourable preference flow this election and in NSW gained most of the Legalise Cannabis voters’ preferences. One of the new senators for this party that supposedly stands up for hard-done-by battlers is Tyron Whitten, the boss of a Western Australian construction company employing 1,000 workers. The other is Warwick Stacey, who, in true Trumpian fashion, called to “make Australia strong again”. After being “educated” at exclusive Sydney Grammar and Britain’s Royal Military College Sandhurst, Stacey became a troop commander in the British 22 SAS regiment. On leaving the army, he worked as a military consultant in the Middle East. Despite these years serving *British*imperialism, Stacey demands migrants “respect Australian values” and “the country’s way of life”. The far-right racist and fascist-style vote is disproportionately concentrated in rural areas, various regional centres and on the periphery of some major cities. In the Senate, it was strongest in Queensland (18.2 percent), followed by WA (13.5 percent), SA (12.4), NSW (12.3), Victoria (11.9), Tasmania (11.5) and lowest in the ACT (1.2 percent), where One Nation did not even bother to run. In the Northern Territory, the combined far-right vote fell from 15.2 percent to 10.2 percent in part because Trump lover and darling of the racists, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who headed the Country Liberal ticket, gobbled up some of the reactionary vote. In regional Queensland, the far right obtained more than 25 percent in at least five House of Representatives seats, including 29 percent in Wright (Lockyer Valley, Beaudesert and Gold Coast hinterland), 27 percent in Flynn (Biloela, Blackwater, Emerald, Gladstone) and 25.6 percent in Maranoa (Chinchilla, Dalby, Goondiwindi, Kingaroy, Warwick). In many individual booths, the reactionaries obtained extremely high votes: 40 percent in Hatton Vale, 39.5 percent at the Blackwater pre-poll, 39 percent in Laidley, 36.6 percent in Miles, 35.3 percent in Grandchester, 34.5 percent at the Sarina pre-poll, and many more. But it was not just Queensland. The far-right vote reached 28.8 percent in the western NSW seat of Parkes (with 38.8 at the Cobar pre-poll and 46.1 on the day), followed by 24.5 percent in Hunter (Hunter Valley) and 20.2 percent in Riverina plus another 4.8 percent for a right-wing independent. In rural Victoria, the top far-right vote was in 21.7 percent in Nicholls (centred on Shepparton, including 35.4 percent at the Puckapunyal army base and 28.2 percent in polarised Broadford, just outside Melbourne, where the Greens got 12.6 percent and Labor 34.6 percent), 18.2 percent in Mallee and 17.7 percent in Gippsland. Both the Liberals and the far right failed to break into outer-suburban working-class suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney. Indeed, in most of these areas, their votes fell. An exception was the northern Melbourne seat of Scullin, where the far right polled 18.7 percent, up 1.3 percentage points. The far right also got a sizeable vote of 16.6 percent in the Sydney seat of Lindsay (Penrith and St Marys) where six far-right candidates ran, including old time Nazi Jim Saleam (1.1 percent), plus 14.4 percent in both Macarthur (Campbelltown) and Labor’s Ed Husic’s seat of Chifley (Mt Druitt and Quakers Hill). So what are we to conclude from all this? First, that while the far right did not have a breakthrough this election, it is not going away. Moreover, the far right’s Senate vote of almost 2 million understates the support for many of its appalling policies. There is only a smidgen of difference between the likes of Hanson and Rennick and the hard right of the Liberals and Nationals. As well, the strong flow of preferences in NSW from Legalise Cannabis to One Nation indicates that many voters for protest parties are far from rejecting obnoxious racist politics. This is all in a context in which Labor’s priorities are very clear. It is ruling for the big end of town, not workers. With the union movement in a very weak state and tied to Labor’s coat-tails, rising discontent and disillusionment could provide a fertile breeding ground for the far right. We can’t be complacent. So far in Australia, the far right has not been able to form one strong united party like the National Rally in France or develop one authoritative popular leader like Donald Trump. Pauline Hanson has been incapable of playing that role and has failed to build an active base in the major cities or among young people. Moreover, the street-fighting fascist movement remains weak and mainly confined to the small openly Nazi National Socialist Network. But we can’t assume that the far right will never get its act together. The experience of country after country in Europe, even in liberal Scandinavia, is that fascist-style politics can quickly make inroads. We need to rebuild a fighting union movement to stand up for the interests of workers and the oppressed. We need to be prepared to confront far-right groups when they mobilise on the streets. Most importantly, we need to build a socialist political alternative to the far right. A socialist movement that takes on the rich and powerful, that defends the rights of the mass of people and offers hope of a better world for humanity, not a bleak Trumpian dystopia. ### Resistance grows to Victorian Labor’s demolition of public housing URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/resistance-grows-to-victorian-labors-demolition-of-public-housing/ Last updated: 2025-06-09T22:53:05.000Z The call went out at 10pm on Sunday, 1 June—workers in hazmat suits would enter a public housing tower in North Melbourne the following morning to begin work. It’s the first step in demolishing the homes of the 50 families still living inside. Ten hours later, 50 people gathered outside the 33 Alfred Street tower, ready to block any work. We didn’t have to be there long. Within fifteen minutes, three workers in high vis walked out of the precinct, telling community members they had been told not to begin work and citing “hygiene issues”. The next morning, Tuesday, we were back at 7am with a crowd twice as big. The workers respected the picket, and Homes Victoria, the government department in charge of public housing, soon updated residents that the planned works had been delayed for the week. It’s a small victory. And it’s a sign that we can build a campaign to resist Labor’s destruction of public housing. Along with two towers in Flemington, 33 Alfred Street is part of the first tranche of public housing up for demolition as part of the Victorian government’s “urban renewal project”. Ultimately, the project will destroy all 44 of Melbourne’s public housing towers. The plan was one of the final policy announcements of Labor Premier Daniel Andrews in 2023, and is now being carried out by Jacinta Allan’s government. The government claims an increase in social and affordable housing will offset the units lost in the towers. But behind the spin, the plan is really about the privatisation of Victoria’s public housing stock. It was announced after extensive talks between the government and developers, who will take over the sites to build private apartments. Only a small portion of all the housing built on the sites across the city will be reserved for privately owned “community and social housing”—in which tenants have fewer rights and more expensive rents than in public housing. Some of it will be touted as “affordable” housing—to be rented privately slightly below the market rate. The government has admitted that there will be no public housing rebuilt at the Flemington and North Melbourne sites, where the first demolitions are scheduled to occur. The sites will be handed over entirely to private developers. Resisting these demolitions then, as we did last week, is an important first battle. In many ways, the towers are reminders of the past. Their construction was a product of decades of campaigning by communities and reformers from the 1930s. Today, their 1950s facades have become an iconic part of the inner city skyline, but inside, maintenance has been neglected thanks to restrictions on spending by successive governments. The idea they represent—that the government ought to provide housing at least to society’s most vulnerable—has long been abandoned by the major parties. Being up close to the towers puts Labor’s spin in perspective. As we stood in the rain and prevented work from beginning, kids from the building were heading out the front door, off to the school up the road. Real families live here, a real community full of migrants and workers and disabled people, who all deserve public housing and a whole lot more. For the government and developers, they are simply in the way: poor people taking up prime inner-city land that could be used to make some cash. What’s to be done with these people? As soon as the plan was announced, Homes Victoria began knocking on residents’ doors, pushing them to sign contracts agreeing to move out of the buildings. Many residents are migrants who weren’t provided with translations of what they were signing. Those who have moved out already have found themselves in privately owned community housing, with reports of mould and faulty heating. Many who remain in the towers are holding out for a better deal—relocation to public housing, or the right to return once the redevelopment is complete. Others simply want to continue living in the towers and don’t want to be displaced from their communities and support services. “They want to put us in private housing. But we only know commission housing”, one resident told the rally on Tuesday. Opposition to Labor’s demolitions has been building since the first announcement. A central feature has been the class action lawsuit brought against the government by residents of the Flemington towers and progressive lawyers. Over months of hearings, Homes Victoria argued that it had no obligation to consult residents about the demolitions and admitted that, even if it did, it wouldn’t have listened to their concerns, because the residents had no legal rights that were affected by the decision to demolish their homes! The department also made clear that it was acting completely under the orders of the Labor government. The court found that the demolitions would have a significant impact on residents’ human rights, but concluded that the government was under no obligation to do anything about this. After the case was dismissed, the government pushed ahead with the demolitions. The loss in court was a setback, and the residents are considering an appeal. However, we were never going to defeat the government’s plans solely in the courts. The case has held up the government, delayed the demolition and, importantly, sent a signal that people are standing up and fighting back. Residents in the second tranche of towers marked for demolition—in Richmond and South Yarra—have begun organising to resist pressure from Homes Victoria to vacate. Organising by residents will be key. Defending the towers will require a big campaign on the ground. Last weeks’ mobilisations, bringing together the Greens, Victorian Socialists, renting and housing activists and other community campaigners, were a good start. Building links with unions will be another important factor: the demolition contract has been handed to construction company John Holland, whose workforce is represented by the construction union. Ultimately, it will be workers who are sent in to destroy this housing. Building a big campaign can help make a case to them that they shouldn’t. Labor’s drastic plan to knock down all 44 towers presents us with a big challenge. Every step of the way we will have to fight it—from preventing testing and surveying, to building confidence among residents to resist Homes Victoria, to mobilising to stop the actual demolition. But as last week shows, each of these steps presents an opportunity to mobilise, grow our support and put pressure on Labor. ### Opposition to super tax only defends the rich URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/opposition-to-super-tax-only-defends-the-rich/ Last updated: 2025-06-09T22:51:36.000Z Treasurer Jim Chalmers is set to lift the tax rate on superannuation account balances above $3 million from 15 percent to 30 percent. Despite the modesty of the proposal, there has been a broad conservative backlash arguing that it’s an unjust money grab. The reaction is nothing but fearmongering and deceit to defend privilege. Today, only the top 0.5 percent of superannuation accounts have more than $3 million. The average superannuation account balance upon retirement for men is about $450,000 and for women $400,000\. Based on current trends, we’ll have to wait until the next century for the average super balance to reach the nominal $3 million mark. Considering the extensive tax concessions for superannuation, the proposal is merely a slight reduction in existing government generosity to the wealthiest people. Indeed, superannuation provides tax breaks worth more than $50 billion per year. The richest people stuff their assets into self-managed super accounts to take advantage of the concessions. There exist some superannuation accounts worth more than $100 million. Chalmers’ tax, controversially, applies to “unrealised gains”, meaning it applies to assets not yet sold. But it’s laughable to think that very wealthy people don’t have the means to pay the extra tax. And if they don’t want to pay, they can simply limit their super balances to a healthy $3 million. The Teals have opposed the policy, in part because of this unrealised gains tax. Allegra Spender has argued that Chalmers’ proposal is unfair because it doesn’t have a provision for refunding tax paid if asset values fall. The Teals think we should compensate people who avoid tax if the scheme doesn’t work out perfectly. Besides being an expression of their overall right-wing alignment, this move by the Teals is a defence of the interests of their constituencies, their seats being some of the wealthiest in the country. It’s no surprise that they’re against taxing the rich. The Greens have proposed reducing the tax threshold to $2 million, while also indexing it—so that the threshold would increase over time. With indexation, the measure would ever affect only the wealthiest—perhaps the top 1 percent. But why should we give generous tax concessions to the top 10 percent? Why should we provide tax concessions to wealth accumulation at all? The Greens have accepted the ideological premise of the debate: that people’s retirement income should be determined by their capacity to accumulate assets. Since the 1980s, the surge in asset prices, primarily stocks and real estate, has been a significant driver of growing wealth inequality, asset holdings being concentrated among the top 10 percent of the population. Superannuation has been part of this. It’s a means of wealth accumulation through investment, rather than an equitable provision of retirement incomes. Instead of focusing on wealth accumulation, the economy should be restructured to raise working-class incomes, including those of working-class retirees. This would mean raising wages, Jobseeker, the pension and other support payments. Avenues to hoard wealth should be closed off, starting with the housing market. Labor has no intention of taking substantive action in this direction, and historically championed the economic restructuring which led to our current situation. ### Trump-Musk shit show displays how much US politics stinks URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/trump-musk-shit-show-displays-how-much-us-politics-stinks/ Last updated: 2025-06-08T01:47:48.000Z The end of the Trump-Musk “bromance” was as predictable as the sun rising in the east. But the speed of the collapse and the vitriol unleashed were something to behold. The world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man—both billionaire narcissists and egomaniacs—attacking each other like scorpions in a bottle. In the early days of online flame wars, “Godwin’s Law” tracked the toxicity of exchanges by how soon one flamer called the other “Hitler” or compared them to a Nazi. Among the MAGA set, those insults don’t carry the same weight. Some might even consider them compliments. So Musk went in a different direction, accusing Trump of covering up his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex trafficker to the rich and famous. Throughout the day on 5 June, official Washington watched in various states of amazement as the [online fight escalated](https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-tax-bill-6e7845081259c34db785182c51569c0c?ref=redflag.org.au), and Tesla’s stock crashed. By the end of the day, [Tesla had lost $150 billion in market capitalisation](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/06/tesla-already-had-big-problems-then-musk-went-to-battle-with-trump.html?ref=redflag.org.au) and Musk had lost about one-tenth of his net worth. For opponents of Trump and Musk, it’s satisfying to watch the two chief clowns in the MAGA circus savage each other. But we need to step back and ask what this may mean. The first question is whether the Trump-Musk break-up is real or just another episode in the reality TV White House. There’s always a possibility that this cage match will end, and Musk will return to the fold. If erstwhile opponents of Trump are willing to grovel and debase themselves, Trump can welcome them back to the team. Ask “Little Marco” Rubio, who called Trump a “con artist”, or J.D. Vance, who once called Trump “America’s Hitler”. As secretary of state and vice president, Rubio and Vance are now chief enablers in the Trump regime. Whether that’s Musk’s future or not, just how and why the current situation developed is a key question. From the Trump side, Musk was “wearing thin” his welcome, [as the president put it in one of his Truth Social posts](https://www.npr.org/2025/06/05/nx-s1-5424686/donald-trump-elon-musk-bromance-breakup?ref=redflag.org.au). In the early days of the regime, when Musk and his crew of twenty-something acolytes were rampaging through federal agencies, Musk appeared as co-president. This caused friction with Trump and with cabinet officials like Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. [There was no love lost between Trump’s appointees and Musk.](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/us/politics/trump-musk-doge-power.html?ref=redflag.org.au) Musk came into Trump’s orbit promising his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) would root out $2 trillion in government “waste, fraud and abuse”. Instead, after DOGE marauded through one department after another, stealing their data, ordering the liquidation of whole agencies and the firings of thousands of government workers, it could only document, at most, [$160 billion in “savings”](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-cuts-cost-135-billion-analysis-elon-musk-department-of-government-efficiency/?ref=redflag.org.au). Most of those will vanish as DOGE’s errors turn out to cost the government more to fix. DOGE was therefore a failure in its own terms, but is serving Trump’s interests in other ways: illegally terminating programs and terrorising thousands of workers. And putting the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the “woodchipper” (Musk’s words) was both a sop to the xenophobic MAGA base and an end to the agency’s investigation of [Musk’s corruption in seeking deals for his Starlink satellite firm](https://www.epi.org/blog/corruption-in-plain-sight-how-elon-musk-has-benefited-from-the-first-100-days-of-the-trump-administration/?ref=redflag.org.au). There is plenty to criticise about [USAID’s service to US imperialism](https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/26/with-aid-agencies-like-this-who-needs-enemies/?ref=redflag.org.au), but Musk and Trump aren’t concerned about that. Meanwhile, the destruction of its food aid and vaccination programs will cost the lives of thousands. [As Musk’s fellow billionaire Bill Gates](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2025/05/08/bill-gates-will-close-gates-foundation-in-2045-after-donating-99-of-his-fortune/?ref=redflag.org.au) put it, “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one”. In a very short time—and due largely to the grassroots [“Tesla takedown” protests](https://internationalsocialism.net/the-grassroots-opposition-to-trump-can-and-must-grow/?ref=redflag.org.au) that started in February—Musk became a political liability to Trump. Musk’s “chainsawing” of the federal workforce and essential services, along with his embrace of far-right politics, transformed him into one of the most hated figures in global politics. Moreover, Musk’s association with Trump and his predations under DOGE had immolated the Tesla brand with its main customer base: affluent liberals. When Tesla Takedown protests regularly took to the streets of affluent suburbs like Walnut Creek, California, and Golden Valley, Minnesota, the Tesla board took notice. Tesla’s declining sales throughout Europe and the US even led the company’s board to consider replacing Musk. All of these, and more, reasons could explain why Trump and Musk were going to part ways. But the amiable 30 May retirement press conference, when Trump presented Musk with a golden key, gave way to threats and insults after Musk took to X to denounce Trump’s “[big beautiful bill](https://internationalsocialism.net/the-big-beautiful-bill/?ref=redflag.org.au)” moving through Congress as “[disgusting” and a “pork-filled” “abomination](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-slams-trump-one-big-beautiful-bill-as-disgusting-abomination/?ref=redflag.org.au)”. Of course, Musk did not object to the multi-trillion-dollar package of tax cuts because it threatens to throw tens of millions from health insurance or food assistance. He claims, along with other right-wingers in Congress, to be concerned with the bill’s addition of more than US$2 trillion to the long-term national debt. But Musk’s concern for the deficit may be cover for more prosaic—and nakedly self-interested—objections to Trump’s (and the Republican Party’s) only domestic policy agenda. Trump withdrew the nomination of a Musk ally as National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) administrator. Musk had expected his buddy at NASA to favour his SpaceX and Starlink companies. Trump sidelined Musk when other tech oligarchs accompanied him on his recent trip to the Gulf monarchies. And the “big beautiful bill” [cuts tax subsidies to electric vehicle manufacturers that helped to prop up Tesla when its sales slumped](https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-oddest-man-out-among-our-hundred). One of Musk’s social media posts recounted that he spent more than $250 million to aid Trump’s election and that Trump was showing “ingratitude”. It’s doubtful that Musk’s money was the key element that swung the election for Trump. But the naked *quid pro quo* he implied shows how open is the corruption of government in the Trump era. It’s as if Musk was telling Trump, “Hey, bro, I spent a quarter of a billion dollars on you, and I expect the return on my investment”. Musk got plenty from his West Wing sojourn, including the neutering of federal investigations into his corruption, and even the State Department’s [open strongarming of foreign governments](https://newrepublic.com/post/195297/elon-musk-state-department-force-country-starlink?ref=redflag.org.au) to sign contracts with him. But as a huge federal contractor, Musk could find himself in a similar position as Harvard and Columbia universities if Trump decides to cut billions in contracts with Starlink or SpaceX. Musk certainly has his own cards to play. He threatened to decommission one of his SpaceX rockets, which could impede the US government’s ability to launch satellites and other payloads into space. But when evaluating threats like this, we should remember two of Karl Marx’s insights: first, that the capitalist class is a band of “hostile brothers” and second, that the “executive of the capitalist state” is merely a “committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie”. This means that Musk may not have the running room he thinks he has. First, his tech brethren like Amazon’s/Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos and Open AI’s Sam Altman or Palantir’s Peter Thiel will be happy to screw Elon if Trump decides to invest in Blue Origin as an alternative to SpaceX or Open AI or Palantir as an alternative to Musk’s Grok or xAI. Second, the state (especially under a vindictive boss like Trump) still has many levers of power to bring Musk to heel. The Trump-Musk alliance was the most public manifestation of the “[shotgun marriage](https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/maga-feeding-frenzy-has-caused-a)” that is the Trump regime: an alliance of “America First” MAGA nativists, Christian nationalist reactionaries and tech oligarchs who don’t always see eye-to-eye. [Recall that Trumpworld erupted in controversy even before Trump took office](https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/who-got-duped-maga-activists-worry-that-nativism-and-tech-oligarchy-may-not-go-hand-in-hand?ref=redflag.org.au). Then, the tech faction, including Musk and his then-DOGE sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy, fought with MAGA nativists over restrictions on H1B visas for highly skilled immigrants. Against the MAGA racists who want to keep brown people out of the US, the Silicon Valley oligarchs are happy to encourage temporary visas for software engineers from Asia binding them to their employers. There are many crosscutting interests among the main factions of the Trump regime. For example, the Wall Street and Silicon Valley oligarchs hate Trump’s tariffs, but these are gospel to the America Firsters. For now, though, these factions remain mostly united. And that’s mostly because they hate the same people: trans people, pro-Palestine activists, government workers, “woke” liberals and the like. And while they are, in the argot of Silicon Valley, “moving fast and breaking things”, they seem to be a juggernaut. If there is to be a reverberation of the Trump-Musk fight in the broader Trump project, the bill moving its way through Congress could feel it. It’s a monstrous bill in terms of its impacts on ordinary people, but it’s a Frankenstein’s monster assembled to keep all of Trump’s legislative enablers on board. The Christian reactionaries get Medicaid bans on gender-affirming care. The tech oligarchs get bans on state-level regulation of artificial intelligence. And the MAGA nativists get a huge expansion in the deportation industrial complex. But the congressional majorities Trump needs to pass it are paper-thin, so any defection of any part of his base could sink it. Recognising this, Trump and his lackeys in Congress have jammed their entire agenda into this one bill. They want to make support for it a single up-or-down vote on the full Trump agenda. For that reason, it’s still likely to pass with most of its worst provisions preserved. But could Musk and his money cause Republicans heartburn as they try to pass the mega bill? Possibly, if he chose to mount a campaign. But if he’s true to what he says, Musk might approve of the bill if it became even more of a handout to the rich and a punishment to the poor. That’s why it’s beyond pathetic that at [least one leading Democrat](https://www.semafor.com/article/06/06/2025/khanna-steps-up-his-work-to-pull-musk-toward-democrats?ref=redflag.org.au) (and a prominent past Bernie Sanders supporter) is trying to move Musk and his chequebook over to the Democratic side. Now, that’s the way to revive the Democratic “brand”: ally with the most hated oligarch in the world! The Trump-Musk feud is exhibit #1 of the rottenness at the core of US politics. ### Ray Peckham, a working-class Aboriginal hero URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/ray-peckham-a-working-class-aboriginal-hero/ Last updated: 2025-06-08T01:41:59.000Z The legendary Aboriginal activist and Wiradjuri man Ray Peckham, sadly, died on 6 June, aged 96\. For decades, Peckham was a leading fighter for the rights of his people and someone who sought to bring the struggle for Aboriginal rights together with the workers’ movement and the socialist left. He started this fight at a time when support for Aboriginal rights was much more marginalised and maligned than it is today. Peckham was born in Bunyip, Victoria, in 1929, one of the thirteen children of Tom and Linda Peckham. Issues of racism and working-class oppression were deeply intertwined for him from an early age. His father Tom got involved in the Dubbo branch of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement, which was initiated by Communist Party activists in 1931, and convinced them to take up issues of anti-Aboriginal discrimination. In Dubbo, Tom found a community of working-class Aboriginal activists around William Ferguson and his Aborigines’ Progressive Association. This was the community in which Peckham grew up. In 1950, Peckham moved to Sydney, where he was introduced to the hurly-burly world of strikes, pickets and protests by the veteran activist Pearl Gibbs. Peckham recalled in an interview that Gibbs told him “the first thing we’ve got to do is take you down and introduce you to the Trade and Labour Council in Sussex Street”. Peckham attracted national attention in 1951 when he was elected as a delegate to the Berlin World Youth Festival along with fellow activist Faith Bandler. Complications arose when Peckham was frustrated in his attempts to get a passport in preparation for the trip. In response, the maritime and seamen’s unions threatened to “tie up every ship that’s important around the shores of Australia”. A few hours later, the government reluctantly released the passport. Unbeknownst to them, as Peckham and Bandler boarded the ship to Europe, agents from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation were covertly filming them. Thus began the extensive security surveillance of Peckham that would ultimately result in one of the largest ASIO files in Australian history. On his return from Europe, Peckham became more involved in activism. He became a builders’ labourer and joined the Newtown branch of the Communist Party. He enjoyed selling *Tribune*, the party’s newspaper, and attending the party educational school in Minto. Peckham started visiting Aboriginal communities across New South Wales, trying to connect the different campaigns they were involved in and publicise their efforts within trade union and left-wing circles. This was helped by the Builders’ Labourers Federation which, at various points, raised money for Peckham to leave work temporarily. At the start of 1961, the New South Wales Labor government took court action to have Horace Saunders, an Aboriginal man, evicted from Purfleet Mission Station in Taree. A campaign was launched to defend Saunders, Peckham playing a leading role. He toured the South Coast speaking at workplace meetings of coal miners, steelworkers and wharfies to spread news of the court action. “At every meeting, I was given a very enthusiastic reception”, he recalled in *Tribune*. “The white workers’ moral and financial support for the struggles of Aboriginal people are becoming a source of strength and courage.” Reflecting on the tour later for *Tribune*, Peckham concluded that the “strength of the working people can help us Aborigines crack through the curse of the colour bar in Australia”. And Peckham wasn’t deluding himself. In May 1961, the courts ruled in favour of Saunders, humiliating the Aborigines Welfare Board and greatly undermining its authority. Peckham said that it “was probably the first time in New South Wales that the Aboriginal people had taken on the Aboriginal Protection Board and won”. This perspective drove Peckham to campaign throughout rural New South Wales in the early 1960s. He protested alongside the Top Camp Aboriginal community in Moree against their exclusion from the local hospital, raised a fuss when fourteen new homes for the Aboriginal community in Armidale were built next to a rubbish dump, joined a team to investigate the conditions of Aboriginal pea pickers on the South Coast and collected thousands of signatures from unionised workers to help ensure that Aboriginal housing was built in Coonamble and Nambucca Heads in the face of racist opposition. During the 1967 referendum, Peckham again played a prominent role in enlisting support for the Aboriginal cause. This is just a small sample of the struggles Peckham was involved in during these years. Everywhere he went, he sought to build up local, statewide and national organisations involving Aboriginal people themselves in fighting for their rights, while also building links of these campaigns and groups with the wider workers’ movement and the socialist left to ensure they could bring as much pressure as possible to bear on racist governments and bosses. “In that mounting tide of progressive struggle, the working-class movement”, Peckham reflected in *Tribune*, “lies the future for the Aboriginal people”. Peckham also saw the struggles of Aboriginal people as part of the global fight against injustice. In the 1960s, he spoke at protests against the war in Vietnam, the attacks on democratic rights in the dictatorships of Spain and Greece, the apartheid regime in South Africa and segregation in the United States. Peckham was nothing short of a working-class Aboriginal hero. The groundbreaking activism he engaged in laid the basis for the land rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and the decades of anti-racist activism since. In 1983, he returned to Dubbo, where he lived for the rest of his long life, working with community organisations. During the last years of his life, he helped organise for a statue of his father’s old friend and activist William Ferguson to be placed in Dubbo’s town centre—a reminder of the struggles of the past and the need to keep fighting into the future. Rest in power, Ray Peckham. ### When Palestine solidarity protesters defied police at the ANU URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/when-palestine-solidarity-protesters-defied-police-at-the-anu/ Last updated: 2025-06-12T04:33:56.000Z Reconciliation Day in Canberra last year was ice cold, the air thick with fog. For 232 days, Israel had been indiscriminately bombing the people of Gaza. For 28 days, hundreds of students and staff had maintained a protest encampment on Kambri lawns, the heart of the Australian National University campus, demanding that the administration cut ties with Israel and condemn the genocide. ANU managers had spent the month slandering the protest and [suspending student activists](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-16/act-palestine-anu-gaza-encampment-members-ordered-to-vacate/103858184?ref=redflag.org.au) involved in the encampment. It was Monday morning, 27 May; the university bosses finally decided that they could no longer tolerate the encampment in such a prominent position. Their official justification was that we were blocking a fire evacuation point, and the backup evacuation point just would not do. In truth, they wanted the protest out of sight. Dozens of security guards and a handful of police officers arrived to serve the students with an evacuation notice. Those awakened by this order initially complied. Ambushed and outnumbered at 7am, they began dismantling the tents. The media soon arrived to witness the supervised self-destruction. Yet, as the morning fog cleared and the sun came out, a handful of students sat down in defiance and began chanting: “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest!” More spontaneously joined, sitting around the camping gear, which had now been packed down, linking arms and chanting. The circle of hi-vis security guards retreated as supporters surged closer to the first movers and joined in the chanting. More police arrived. Blue and white chequered vans, cars and motorbikes pulled up across the creek to establish a “command centre” about a hundred metres away. Security was no longer fit for the task, so ANU had called in the cavalry. Meanwhile, the students had now convened a meeting. Did we want to stare down the police, risking arrest, to defend the camp? After a brief discussion, we took a vote. The decision was close to unanimous—we would not move. Some volunteers sifted through the crowd to write the phone number of a supportive lawyer on the arms of everyone willing to get arrested. Those who preferred not to face arrest stepped off the grass and formed a human chain around the camp. About a hundred sat ready to be dragged off in a divvy van, and a few hundred more stood with their arms linked in an unbroken chain around the perimeter. People with megaphones were stationed throughout the picket line, leading songs and chants to keep spirits high. *We shall not, we shall not be moved* *We shall not, we shall not be moved* *Just like a tree that’s planted by the water* *We shall not be moved.* But after several hours, the ultimatum finally came. Two of us were given the job of police liaisons. We walked to their “command centre” next to the creek and were told that the university was prepared to offer a second location for the camp, a few hundred metres up the path. If we refused to move there by 3pm, we would be arrested. We went back to the camp and relayed what the officer had said. We took another vote. “Knowing what we just told you, who is committed to staying?” Everyone cheered. I passed their message back to the officer. The deadline came and went. We kept checking our watches. Eventually, at 4pm or so, an officer marched to a spot across from the camp and placed a small speaker on the ground to announce an official directive: that everyone must vacate Kambri lawns by 11am Tuesday or face arrest. We had forced the police to back down—for now. Every cop van, car and bike left the campus, and we were left to debrief. We fought the law and, for a moment, we won. Later, we heard that the university had issued a directive to all students to avoid the Kambri precinct the following day, and that businesses in the precinct were instructed to shut down in preparation for a major police operation. But we also heard from some unionists that workers on ANU construction sites were organising to walk off the job in solidarity with us. We put a call out to every community group we could think of to mobilise the next day and support us against mass arrests. The university managers were preparing to escalate the situation—but we had won once, and the mood was that we could win again. Yet, after hours of debate, several votes and a thinning out of people in the camp, the scared and tired few who remained at around midnight finally voted to accept the university’s directive. The anticipated showdown never came. Construction workers still walked off the job. Students, community members and reporters still showed up the next day in expectation. But the police didn’t need to return—they scored their victory through intimidation. This wasn’t the end, however. The camp continued in its new location for 83 more days. By the end of the year, there had been several general meetings, countless rallies, a referendum and one of the longest campus protest encampments in the country—all demanding divestment from Israel and weapons companies supplying the Israeli military. Under pressure, the university reversed the suspensions and expulsions of student activists and [promised to divest](https://www.woroni.com.au/news/anu-to-divest-from-controversial-weapons-manufacturers-but-questions-remain/?ref=redflag.org.au) from “controversial weapons companies”. Exactly which companies were “controversial” was never clarified, and no updates have been provided since that promise was made. They have not yet condemned the genocide in Gaza or cut ties with Israel. The fight for a free Palestine continues, but the strength of our side is nourished by small acts of defiance and partial victories like the one we scored last year on Kambri lawns. ### The patterns of censorship across Australian universities URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-patterns-of-censorship-across-australian-universities/ Last updated: 2025-06-07T00:42:01.000Z To stifle growing pro-Palestinian activities on Australian campuses, university authorities are developing and applying disparate techniques of control. Consequently, the university as a place of free speech, political activism and the right to protest is under attack. The universities of[ Sydney](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jan/21/university-of-sydney-criticised-for-plan-to-ban-protest-banners-being-displayed-without-prior-permission?ref=redflag.org.au),[ Melbourne](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jun/03/university-of-melbourne-two-students-expelled-pro-palestine-protest-ntwnfb?utm%5Fterm=683e574093202591af7057f2c5ad560f&utm%5Fcampaign=GuardianTodayAUS&utm%5Fsource=esp&utm%5Fmedium=Email&CMP=GTAU%5Femail) and[ Western Australia](https://redflag.org.au/article/university-of-wa-bans-statements-that-cause-harm-disciplines-student-for-defending-free-speech) are particularly punitive. The intricate intrusiveness and hyper-vigilance of their techniques of control are well known and widely criticised. All these techniques have been identified by members of Educational Researchers for Palestine—a group I belong to. Such patterns are evident in the views and material we have gathered from universities and from our own experiences, observations and communications with other staff and students. While the following techniques are not equally evident in all universities, various combinations are evident in many. **1\. Control through double-speak** Universities claim to uphold free speech and academic freedom. But on matters related to Israel/Palestine they shut both down. They also claim to balance free speech with their anti-racism agendas. But these agendas are selective. Antisemitism is their focus. Anti-Palestinian racism, including their own, is not. Anti-[Palestinian](https://apan.org.au/media%5Frelease/apan-aman-report/?ref=redflag.org.au) racism involves “actions that silence, exclude, erase, stereotype, defame, or dehumanise Palestinians and their narratives”. They say they balance free speech with ensuring a *safe* environment. But their main concern is the political backlash associated with purported complaints about the safety of Jewish students and staff. In contrast, the university itself creates an unsafe environment for Palestinian staff, students and their allies including their Jewish allies. **2\. Control through distraction** By focusing on antisemitism, universities distract attention from anti-Palestinian racism on campus and from Israel’s dreadful treatment of the Palestinian people. This distraction involves endless debates about what constitutes antisemitism. And universities’ ambiguous definitions of antisemitism allow them flexibility in classifying hateful and threatening speech. In February 2025, Universities Australia released its highly ambiguous “working definition of[ antisemitism](https://universitiesaustralia.edu.au/media-item/statement-on-racism/?ref=redflag.org.au)”. This was endorsed by all 39 members. How individual universities will embed their endorsement is not yet clear but further distraction is guaranteed. **3\. Spatial control** Restrictions are placed on the spaces where Palestinian supporters might gather to prepare banners and posters, distribute materials and hold events. Students are not allowed to announce events in classrooms or lecture theatres, to leave fliers on desks or posters on walls. These who don’t “belong” to the university are prohibited from involvement in protests on university grounds and threatened with trespass. **4\. Language and image control** The campus is to be cleansed of posters, fliers, flags, chalked messages. Almost any image, phrase or slogan may be deemed antisemitic. Hence, all images of Palestine or messages of Palestine advocacy or solidarity can be defined as contravening university rules. **5\. Political control** Student and staff activities relating to Palestine are strongly discouraged—clubs, film screenings, speakers’ forums, petitioning, distributing leaflets, chalking—even fundraising. University approval can be sought but such approval is largely a delaying and censorship ploy involving microscopic bureaucratic hurdles. Some academic staff are expected to become agents of the university’s political control in their classrooms. They must ensure that nothing is said or seen that is unrelated to their immediate teaching topic. When linked to Palestine/Israel, certain research, teaching and learning are considered dangerous—justice and ethics, human rights, international law, settler colonialism, apartheid, imperialism and the history and geopolitics of the Middle East. Those pursuing such “dangerous knowledge” may feel the need to water down their curriculum and research. **6\. Technological surveillance** In some cases, if they are to use a university account, staff and students must agree to being monitored. Whether they agree or not, technology is used to monitor pro-Palestinian activities, to identify “ring leaders” and participants. Pro-Palestinian activists may also have their technology use restricted, thus making it difficult to share information. Certainly, over time, universities have increased their surveillance of all staff and students—usually with little or no follow-up. However, their surveillance and follow-up have intensified in response to pro-Palestinian activism. **7\. Discipline and punishment** Students and staff are subjected to various forms*.* Their self-defence is time-consuming, costly and emotionally draining. Peaceful events are often redefined as potentially threatening and violent. Hence security staff and police are used to “keep the peace” and to identify and report “leaders” and “troublemakers”. They have been used to shut down encampments and protests. At encampments, they have not protected students from violent attacks by extreme right-wing groups. Their presence is implicitly threatening, and their behaviour is sometimes physically violent. Undergraduate and graduate students have been “spoken to”, warned, suspended, fined and expelled. Staff have also been “spoken to” and warned, had their teaching and other activities monitored and reported by pro-Israeli/Zionist students and other staff. They have had their research questioned and some have had their grants suspended. **8\. Climate control** A climate of fear and distrust is created. It has a chilling effect on everyday university activities and relationships. Fear causes self-censorship. Events are relocated or re-badged. Staff feel their opportunities for jobs, tenure, promotion and academic leave are at risk. Students feel at risk of suspension and expulsion. They often don’t know if their peers, lecturers or supervisors will support or report them. Palestinian, Muslim and Arab staff feel extra visible and vulnerable. The result: universities of bad faith and ethical emptiness. They have allowed themselves to be intimidated by politicians and special interest groups. They have tried to bury the discussion of an inexcusable tragedy involving genocide. They have sacrificed the notion that knowledge must be free and fearless—corrupting truth and undermining trust and collegiality. Timid and small-minded, they implicitly encourage staff and students to be the same. Were they not so ethically empty, universities could have practised an ethic of care, courage and compassion in response to the ongoing horrors visited by Israel on Gaza and the West Bank. They could have developed this into a sector-wide ethos. They could have responded to the desperate [calls](https://www.gazauniversities.org/?ref=redflag.org.au) for help from universities in Gaza. They could have explored, with staff and students, ways to help Gaza recover from the educational obliteration of [scholasticide](https://euppublishingblog.com/2025/05/27/scholasticide-memory-power-of-pedagogy/?ref=redflag.org.au). They could have mobilised their knowledge and expertise to contribute to an understanding of the issues and to consider how university members might help alleviate the Palestinian people’s terrible suffering. Could have? Should have. *First published by the [Australian Association for Research in Education](https://blog.aare.edu.au/these-are-deeply-disturbing-patterns-of-censorship-across-australian-universities/?jetpack%5Fskip%5Fsubscription%5Fpopup&ref=redflag.org.au). *Jane Kenway* is an elected fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Australia, emeritus professor at Monash University and professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne.* ### Elon Musk’s big Mars lie URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/elon-musks-big-mars-lie/ Last updated: 2025-06-07T00:40:11.000Z “I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact.” Thus spoke Elon Musk in a keynote session at the 2013 South by Southwest Conference. It’s a provocative statement, and not just because it conjures imagery of the world’s richest man being consumed in a fiery explosion in a place no-one would be able to hear him scream. It’s provocative because it is attached to what Musk says is the most important task facing humanity: to establish permanent human presence on a planet other than Earth. This lofty goal is a cornerstone of the cult of personality Musk has built around himself, populated mostly by tech bros, MAGA sycophants, and those predisposed to falling victim to cryptocurrency scams. If you buy into the vision, Musk becomes a sort of messiah leading humanity to some kind of immortality. This, of course, is fantasy. Musk is no messiah. The narrative he’s constructed around Mars, like everything else he does, serves one main purpose: making himself more wealthy and more powerful. What Musk is proposing is not to go to Mars only for the sake of it, but to guard against the existential threat of the collapse of human society. As he put it in a [post](https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1050812486226599936?ref=redflag.org.au) on X in 2018, “About half my money is intended to help problems on Earth & half to help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars to ensure continuation of life (of all species) in case Earth gets hit by a meteor like the dinosaurs or WW3 happens & we destroy ourselves”. Let’s let it go that he seems to have forgotten the first bit about helping solve problems on Earth. The second part about building a city on Mars hasn’t slipped his mind at all. According to[a piece in the *New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/technology/elon-musk-spacex-mars.html?ref=redflag.org.au) based on private interviews and internal documents from insiders at SpaceX, in April 2024 Musk told SpaceX employees that he expects to have a million people living on Mars within two decades. This is such a ludicrous idea it shouldn’t be worth wasting ink or pixels on. But, unfortunately, Musk is seen by many as an engineering genius, and too often his grand statements are insufficiently scrutinised. He also doubled down on it publicly on US Republican Senator [Ted Cruz’s podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKxgaxAVDfM&ref=redflag.org.au) in March of this year. So, let’s quickly think through what it would take to get a million people to Mars in 20 years. SpaceX is working on Starship, a spaceship with a maximum capacity of 100 passengers, to take people to Mars on journeys that take a minimum of nine months. To get a million people there by 2045 they would need to build and launch a fully loaded Starship *every day* starting… in 2017\. Better get a move on. They might have a way to cut down on the number of people needing to be transported from Earth—Musk allegedly volunteered his own sperm to help boost the numbers in the new colony, according to the *New York Times*. Somehow finding takers on that offer seems even less likely than filling out 10,000 Starships. It’s certainly possible that a crewed mission to Mars with a small number of people could happen within the next decade or so. But a functioning society on another planet is certainly not yet on the horizon. If Musk actually believes it’s possible to have a million people living on Mars in less than two decades, he’s an idiot. More likely is that he knows it’s not. He’s a businessman who has a commercial interest in SpaceX appearing very important and very productive. So he’ll claim a Martian metropolis is within reach and that his company is going to be the one to make it happen to build that image. In reality, the main purpose of SpaceX isn’t saving humanity from extinction; it’s making money. And on that metric, it’s been very successful. Through launching billionaires on space tourism flights, filling low Earth orbit with an ever-denser web of Starlink satellites and contracting out rockets to NASA and the US military to take their payloads into space, SpaceX has become the biggest company in the space industry. SpaceX is not publicly traded and doesn’t publish its financial numbers. [Bloomberg recently reported](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-10/spacex-share-sale-is-said-to-value-company-at-about-350-billion?ref=redflag.org.au) an insider deal putting its total value at US$350 billion. Profit margins are a well-guarded secret, but [industry analyst estimates](https://payloadspace.com/estimating-spacexs-2024-revenue/?ref=redflag.org.au) of its 2024 revenue are at about US$13 billion, up from US$8.7 billion in 2023\. There is one well-known metric we can use to measure SpaceX’s dominance in the sector: last year, it launched more rockets into orbit than the rest of the world combined, including both private companies and state agencies. Starlink is one of SpaceX’s most important projects. It’s an artificial satellite constellation made up of more than 8,000 satellites in orbit, with thousands more planned. For a premium price, it provides internet access practically anywhere on Earth, no matter how remote. [*Reuters*reported](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-air-force-nominee-arranged-satellite-contract-manner-that-favored-musks-2025-02-07/?ref=redflag.org.au) in February it also acts as communications infrastructure for a parallel constellation of US military surveillance satellites. The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency that runs the US’s secret spy satellite network, has launched more than 100 of them since last year on SpaceX’s rockets through the company’s Starshield unit. The NRO’s satellites are not scientific instruments but intelligence-gathering devices that are an integral part of the US imperial machine. Far from preserving humanity, SpaceX is part of the US military industrial complex, the key aim of which is to kill and destroy more effectively. Being the biggest stakeholder in a private company so central to the world’s biggest military’s surveillance operations certainly puts Musk in a powerful position. It’s no wonder he has had (until recently) a VIP pass to the White House. Musk is enjoying the spoils of SpaceX’s revenue streams and position of power, but it was not his own work that made him the richest person in human history. It’s the workers employed by his companies who are really to thank for that. Workers are the ones who design, build, test, develop and launch SpaceX’s rockets. They’re also a key audience for Musk’s Mars fairytale. A 2023 [investigation](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-musk-safety/?ref=redflag.org.au)by *Reuters* revealed how the Mars fantasy is explicitly used within SpaceX to justify unsafe workplaces. More than 600 injuries of SpaceX workers since 2014 were documented, many of them swept under the rug, including amputations, eye and head injuries, and one death. Tom Moline, a former SpaceX employee, told Reuters: “Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company. The company justifies casting aside anything that could stand in the way of accomplishing that goal, including worker safety”. Moline was one of nine workers fired in 2022 after writing an open letter criticising a culture among SpaceX managers of dismissing employee concerns and unfairly enforcing discipline, and speaking up against Musk’s flippant public responses to sexual harassment allegations. He was told by SpaceX’s chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, that he was distracting from the goal: “Please focus on your job and the mission of SpaceX—to get humanity to Mars as quickly as possible.” This is perhaps the most insidious effect of the “colonise Mars to save humanity” narrative. Entrenching such a cultish vision in the company acts as both a carrot and a stick for its workers: work hard and you can be part of something important; step out of line and you’re disrupting the mission. This doubtlessly puts pressure on workers to put up with unsafe workplaces, notoriously long hours, and intense deadlines. The biggest winners from this are Musk and the other SpaceX executives. Less money and time spent on workplace safety means more productivity and more profit. That SpaceX now has its own company town, the newly established Starbase, Texas, signals a further tipping of the scales away from SpaceX workers towards their bosses. It is undeniable that SpaceX’s workers have made impressive technical feats. That Starlink is capable of enabling global internet access is testament to that. That Musk gets to take the credit and the profit simply because he owns the company is one of the injustices of capitalism. If SpaceX proves anything, it’s that workers are capable and willing to take on difficult problems and find solutions to them. But because of capitalism, currently their efforts go only towards enriching a select few at the top. Instead of it being free, publicly owned infrastructure, Starlink’s main functions are to generate more wealth for Musk and facilitate US imperial domination. It is understandable that SpaceX workers would want to make a contribution to landing humans on another planet, which would genuinely be a monumental scientific achievement. But such a project exists only because one incredibly wealthy and powerful man decided that’s what he wanted to spend his money on, and only because he stood to gain from it. Reaching Mars is possible, but so is distributing food to the world’s hungry and giving every homeless person a safe place to live. The climate crisis is presenting humanity with an immediate existential threat, and yet capitalism is incapable of addressing it. A rational society would hit pause on any plans to explore the solar system until we’ve found solutions to the problems on Earth, as Musk will never do. Such a society would immediately reallocate the immense resources poured into building rockets, bombs and oil rigs into removing our reliance on fossil fuels and reversing the effects of climate change where we can. It would redistribute the immense wealth that already exists and make it so that no-one on Earth ever has to go hungry again. To get to such a society, capitalism must be destroyed. The Elon Musks of the world must be overthrown and their power taken from them. A new world will need to be built based on meeting human needs instead of profit for the few. Overthrowing capitalism, not moving to Mars, is the most urgent step in making sure humanity does not extinguish itself through climate collapse or nuclear war. Once we have done that, then we can begin to direct the immense creative wellsprings of the working class towards scientific advancement for the genuine benefit of humanity. Then, and only then, should we set out into the stars to see what’s out there. ### Western collaborators in genocide now scramble for alibis URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/western-collaborators-in-genocide-now-scramble-for-alibis/ Last updated: 2025-06-05T03:38:35.000Z Starving Palestinians forced to walk kilometres under scorching heat in a desperate search for food are crowded into metal cages. Drone broadcasts direct civilians to aid distribution points, where Israeli forces open fire on them. The situation is so desperate that many decide to brave the gunfire and attempt to gather food for their families. “People fought over five pallets. They told us to take food—then they fired from every direction”, Mansour Sami Abdi, a father of four, [told Doctors without Borders](https://msf.org.au/article/project-news/gaza-dozens-massacred-us-israel-backed-food-distribution-sites?ref=redflag.org.au), a humanitarian organisation, earlier this week. “I ran 200 metres before realising I’d been shot. This isn’t aid, it’s a lie.” Massacres occur almost daily. On 1 June, at least 30 Palestinians were murdered like this. On 3 June, there were another 27\. Who can now deny that Israel is waging a war of extermination? As the horrific results of the Zionist state’s project are laid bare, the collaborators—politicians, media organisations and “respectable” capitalist institutions—are searching for alibis. Last month, the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada for the first time [issued a joint statement](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-from-the-leaders-of-the-united-kingdom-france-and-canada-on-the-situation-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank?ref=redflag.org.au) criticising Israel’s “disproportionate” escalation in Gaza. The asymmetry has been discovered just 600 days into a “war” between one of the world’s best-equipped militaries and a starved civilian population. They should not be allowed to feign ignorance. The architects of these crimes could hardly have been clearer in their intentions. At the invasion’s outset, Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi [wrote on X](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cze5w2wd4x0o?ref=redflag.org.au): “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”. Two days after 7 October, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “[fighting human animals](https://www.palestinechronicle.com/we-are-fighting-human-animals-dehumanization-of-palestinians/?ref=redflag.org.au)” as he announced a complete siege of the territory. “It’s time to kiss doomsday”, Israeli MP Revital Gotliv wrote, also on X. “Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighbourhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza ... with penetrating bombs. Without mercy! Without mercy!” Ariel Kallner, another member of parliament, wrote: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48\. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suddenly finds distasteful the use of starvation as a weapon of war. On 26 May, he told a press conference: “It is outrageous that there be a blockade of food and supplies to people who are in need”. But UNICEF began warning that all children under five were at risk of death from starvation in December 2023\. And Israel has blockaded Gaza for almost twenty months. Albanese knew exactly what Israel’s endgame was when he refused to criticise US President Donald Trump’s plan for forced relocation back in February. “I’m not going to have a running commentary on statements by the president of the United States”, is all he had to say. Foreign Minister Penny Wong knew that access to food and water in Gaza had been cut off when she said on 10 October 2023: “I think it’s always very difficult from over here to make judgements about what security approach other countries take”. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s recent statement that he “no longer understands” what Israel is doing has been [hyped in some quarters](https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/27/no-longer-comprehensible-german-chancellor-slams-israels-gaza-strikes/?ref=redflag.org.au) as an “unprecedented criticism of Israel’s Gaza operations”. But, like the rest of the world, Merz does understand. He understood it in February when he invited Netanyahu to Berlin, promising to find a way around the prime minister’s [International Criminal Court arrest warrant](https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu?ref=redflag.org.au) for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He understood it last year, when his party approved €161 million (A$284 million) of arms shipments to Israel. The entire German establishment understood it as they closed ranks to have opponents of the genocide [fired](https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250304-german-ministry-dismisses-lawyer-for-supporting-gaza-rejecting-genocide/?ref=redflag.org.au), [raided, arrested](https://hyphenonline.com/2024/10/04/ava-moayeri-germany-pro-palestine-protest-free-speech-police-arrest-violence/?ref=redflag.org.au) and [deported](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/germany-palestine-activists-deportation-state-repression?ref=redflag.org.au). UK Foreign Minister David Lammy recently labelled Israel’s actions “abominable”. But he’s comfortable with UK-manufactured drones being used by the Israeli army. According to testimony from a [retired British surgeon](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7893vpy2gqo?ref=redflag.org.au), those drones target and shoot children who survive air strikes. Palestine solidarity activists who attempted to disrupt drone production have been [arrested](https://thebristolcable.org/2025/02/filton-18-palestine-action-activists-treated-like-terrorists-elbit-israeli-arms-factory-action/?ref=redflag.org.au) by “counter-terrorism” police and are imprisoned awaiting prosecution by Lammy’s government. Politicians in the West have united to defend their states’ economic and political relationships with Israel, a vital ally for projecting their power and influence in the Middle East. This has been more important to them than the 2 million people whose lives have been devastated in the Gaza Strip. Now that they have proven their loyalty, now that the job is nearly done, now that nobody is standing in Israel’s way, these politicians want to wash their hands of the inevitable results. For the same reason, a slight shift is occurring in media coverage. The Jeff Bezos-owned *Washington Post* publishes [opinion pieces](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/22/israel-gaza-ethnic-cleansing-genocide-2/?ref=redflag.org.au) decrying genocide. The BBC runs humanising stories on families decimated by Israeli airstrikes. Everyone, it seems, is starting to get the memo that a bit of equivocation and “balance” might be in order, if for no other reason than to begin scrubbing the stains from their reputations. But it doesn’t change the fact that corporate and state media outlets have spent 600 days acting as loyal agents for the Israeli military. They’ve treated Israeli accounts of events as facts, silenced dissenting voices and embedded their journalists with Israeli units to be taken on North Korea-style propaganda tours. One of the most notorious examples occurred at the beginning of the war, when CNN international diplomatic editor Nic Robertson accompanied the Israeli army to Gaza’s bombed-out al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. The network broadcast “evidence” that Hamas was using the hospital to hide Israeli captives. Military spokesperson Daniel Hagari showed CNN a document on the wall written in Arabic, which he said was a roster of Hamas guards. “Every terrorist has his own shift”, Hagari told Robertson. The problem was that it wasn’t a Hamas roster—it was just an Arabic calendar. Despite the footage already being debunked by Arabic speakers and a protest being lodged by a Palestinian producer at the network, the lie was broadcast, giving the Israeli state cover for war crimes it may have committed at the hospital. The systematic bias against Palestinians and their supporters has been so overwhelming that many normally apolitical journalists at major news outlets—from American CNN to the BBC in Britain—have felt compelled to [blow the whistle](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/5/failing-gaza-pro-israel-bias-uncovered-behind-the-lens-of-western-media?ref=redflag.org.au). In Australia, [journalists have complained](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/26/australias-abc-staffs-concerns-over-gaza-bias-revealed?ref=redflag.org.au) that editors have effectively banned the use of the word “Palestine” in reports. It’s not until the damage is done that the rewriting of history begins. Wars that can no longer be defended are re-framed by their perpetrators as unforeseeable and unfortunate mishaps. During the US invasion of Vietnam, opponents of the war faced a solid wall of capitalist institutions committed to its prosecution. Intellectuals overwhelmingly supported the war as a defence of freedom against communist tyranny. University heads called the police on protesters targeting their defence ties. American journalists identified with the objectives of “their side”, repeated government justifications for war crimes and assisted in their cover-up. Anybody who stood against this consensus was slandered as a “communist sympathiser”. When as many as 3 million Vietnamese were dead, the occupation collapsed and opponents of the war were proved right. Then the war was rewritten self-servingly as a “tragedy of good intentions”, a noble mission gone awry. It was similar with Iraq. Sponsors of the war falsified evidence to justify the invasion, and suppressed, monitored and smeared opponents. Then, when it all fell apart, they shrugged it off as an intelligence failure. Hillary Clinton brushed aside her support for the war during her first presidential bid, saying: “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have voted that way”. As in Vietnam and Iraq, so now in Gaza. From the beginning, the left and the Palestine solidarity movement have argued that Israel’s aims are clear: an extension of their decades-long project of ethnic cleansing and expansion. From the beginning, we argued that if Israel wasn’t forced to stop, the war would end with the brutal forced depopulation of Gaza. For telling the truth, we were sacked, suspended, slandered and put on trial. Israel’s backers now admit the reality of this war, yet they continue to persecute those who oppose it. Now that our leaders mouth rhetorical criticisms, we should demand real action. All political prisoners who have been demonised as “terrorist sympathisers” and threats to “social cohesion” should be released. All bogus charges of antisemitism against anti-war and anti-racist activists should be withdrawn. States should impose real sanctions on Israel. The “sanctions” announced by the UK government are nothing of the sort, consisting of the pausing of free trade talks and travel bans on [a handful of West Bank “settlers”](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/22/violent-israeli-settlers-under-uk-sanctions-join-west-bank-outpost?ref=redflag.org.au). The government will continue to send weapons and share intelligence from surveillance flights over Gaza, assisting Israel in its targeting of civilians. As world leaders try to distance themselves from Israel’s crimes, we must continue to hold them accountable. They’ve been accomplices in this atrocity and implacable enemies of those who have tried to stop it. They must never be forgiven. ### Israel is replicating Nazi starvation tactics in Gaza URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/israel-is-replicating-nazi-starvation-tactics-in-gaza/ Last updated: 2025-06-04T00:08:15.000Z The weaponisation of food echoes the horrors of the Jewish ghettos, as Palestinians are pushed beyond the limits of human endurance, writes **Soumaya Ghannoushi**. This article was first published at [Middle East Eye](https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/war-gaza-how-israel-replicating-nazi-starvation-tactics?ref=redflag.org.au). \-------------------- A woman [kneels](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKUjoFXMjiV/?igsh=aDRhcnAxM3hrZTEw&ref=redflag.org.au) in the dust. She is thin, trembling—not old, but famine has aged her. Her bones protrude through a threadbare dress. Her face is ash. Her fingers claw at the ground. Around her, others bend too—not in prayer, but in desperation, scraping at the dirt for flour. Not even full grains. Just remnants. Scraps. Whatever the wind and boots and bombs have not yet claimed. Then she breaks. She sinks fully to the earth, as if the weight of hunger is too heavy to carry. And she cries, not softly, but with a violence that cuts through the silence of the ruined street: “My kids will eat flour scraped from the floor”. She weeps into the gravel. This is not just starvation. It is the calculated breaking of a people, pushing them beyond the limits of human endurance. This is what Gaza’s “aid” looks like. Not distribution, but oppression. Not relief, but ritual debasement. **Rations of suffering** The flour had been withheld for weeks—stockpiled, blocked, used as bait. Exhausted families walked for miles, past corpses and craters, to reach the drop sites—only to find cages, soldiers and drones. When they ran towards the food, [they were shot](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-kills-32-starving-palestinians-latest-us-aid-point-massacre?ref=redflag.org.au). More than 30 [Palestinians](https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine?ref=redflag.org.au)were massacred on Sunday, and more than [170 were wounded](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/06/01/israel-gaza-aid-rafah-shooting/?ref=redflag.org.au) near an aid distribution site in Rafah, as [Israeli](https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel?ref=redflag.org.au)forces opened fire on starving civilians trying to collect food. The drop was coordinated by the [US](https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/us?ref=redflag.org.au)\-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Aid has become a trap. And hunger, a pretext for slaughter. They have built a bureaucracy of starvation, calling it a “humanitarian foundation”. But let’s call it what it is: the GHF doesn’t deliver aid, but control. It rations not food, but suffering. Even the food they promise, [1,750 calories per person](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/the-u-s-backed-gaza-aid-plan-has-started-operating-why-are-so-many-humanitarian-groups-opposed-to-it?ref=redflag.org.au), is not enough to stave off malnutrition. The World Health Organisation sets the emergency minimum at 2,100 calories. But most Palestinians in Gaza receive far less than that because the food never comes. In April 2024, people in northern Gaza were surviving on an average of[ 245 calories a day](https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/people-northern-gaza-forced-survive-245-calories-day-less-can-beans-oxfam?ref=redflag.org.au), less than a can of fava beans, according to Oxfam. Grandparents chew flour laced with sand. Toddlers are fed leaves. The body begins to consume itself: the mind flickers, the breath slows. Death comes not with a bomb, but with a whisper in the stomach: empty, empty, empty. And all of this is not accidental. It is replication. **No one spared** In the weeks leading to [Germany](https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/germany?ref=redflag.org.au)’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Reich Minister of Food Richard Darre and his state secretary, Herbert Backe, developed the [Hunger Plan](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34907689/?ref=redflag.org.au), a strategy of deliberate starvation to exterminate Soviet civilians and Jews while feeding German troops. It killed at least 7 million people, not as collateral, but by design. The Nazi regime’s food ration system reflected a [racial hierarchy](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34907689/?ref=redflag.org.au): 100 percent for Germans, 70 percent for Poles, 30 percent for Greeks and 20 percent for Jews. In the Jewish ghettos, food was weaponised. Access to meat or bread was controlled. Shops were empty. Hunger was not a failure—it was policy. “That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally”, [Hans Frank](https://www.nobelpeacecenter.org/en/news/hitler-s-hungerplan?ref=redflag.org.au), the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, wrote in a diary entry. Today, more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza—the territory’s entire population—are being forced, by design, into famine. Not one million. Not most. All of them. Women and men, infants and the elderly. No one is spared. And yet—in a twisted echo of history—the [GHF’s plan](https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-plan-to-initially-only-feed-60-of-gazans-as-they-endure-extreme-deprivation/?ref=redflag.org.au), like the Nazi food hierarchies before it, will serve only 1.2 million people in its initial phase, excluding the rest of the population. And that should never be noted marginally. Even if the GHF achieves its goals, the average Palestinian in Gaza, by design, will receive fewer than 1,000 calories a day, when those receiving no food at all are taken into account. This is very close to what Jews in the [Warsaw Ghetto](https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-defiant-jewish-doctors-in-warsaw-ghetto-detailed-effects-of-nazi-starvation/?ref=redflag.org.au) were receiving, through both their allocated rations and smuggling. **Mockery of the dying** Gaza is now the hungriest place on earth—the only area where [100 percent of the population is at risk of famine](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/30/gaza-hungriest-place-earth-all-people-risk-famine-un?ref=redflag.org.au), according to the United Nations. Meanwhile, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared in April that not even “[a grain of wheat](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/smotrich-says-not-even-grain-wheat-will-enter-gaza?ref=redflag.org.au)” should enter Gaza. In [Britain](https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/uk?ref=redflag.org.au), the advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel grotesquely suggested that the war might help [“reduce obesity” in Gaza](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/10/uk-lawyers-for-israel-condemned-over-claim-war-may-reduce-obesity-in-gaza?ref=redflag.org.au). This is not just cruelty. This is contempt; it is mockery of the dying. Even the man appointed as executive director of the Gaza Humiliation Foundation, [a former US Marine](https://www.ft.com/content/54ec0009-5023-4130-b69e-300c7333e63d?ref=redflag.org.au), recently resigned, warning that the project is incompatible with humanitarian standards. And no wonder. This is not a relief effort. It is a siege conceived by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, endorsed by US President Donald Trump, and inspired—in logic and layout—by the Nazi Hunger Plan. Armed gangs loot aid convoys with impunity, moving freely in areas under Israeli control. An internal[ UN memo](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/18/gaza-looting-aid-convoys-israel-famine/?ref=redflag.org.au) seen by The Washington Post last year warned these groups “may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” or “protection” from the Israeli army. When guards in Gaza tried to stop these gangs, Israeli air strikes [killed twelve](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfD4NK2Z3H4&ref=redflag.org.au)—not the looters, but those trying to protect the food. This is not chaos. It is a calculated breakdown. It aims to turn hunger into disorder, starvation into surrender. **Stripped of dignity** There are conflicts in the world. There are wars, occupations, displacements. But nowhere on Earth—not anywhere—is an entire population, young and old, locked inside a flattened, walled-off strip of land, bombed from the air, shelled from the sea, and systematically starved under total siege. Gaza is not a battlefield. It is a prison. A graveyard. Eighty years ago, a group of Jewish doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto documented the effects of hunger on the human body. They called their book [*Maladie de Famine*](https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-defiant-jewish-doctors-in-warsaw-ghetto-detailed-effects-of-nazi-starvation/?ref=redflag.org.au) (The Disease of Starvation). In it, the project’s lead doctor, Israel Milejkowski, wrote: “I hold my pen in my hand and death stares into my room … In this prevailing silence lies the power and the depth of our pain and the moans that one day will shake the world’s conscience”. This is exactly what doctors in Gaza are saying today. They treat toddlers who haven’t eaten in days. They watch infants die with sunken eyes and protruding ribs. They speak to the world, but the world does not listen. That day is now. After seeing their homes, schools and bakeries razed; after being displaced again and again, infants on shoulders, elders in wheelchairs, entire families turned to ash—they are now denied bread. Gaza’s people are not just being starved. They are being stripped of the final thing left to them: their dignity. They are treated worse than animals. Hunted when they gather. Shot when they eat. Because Israel is not content with crushing Palestinian bodies. It wants to crush their souls. To erase not just their presence, but their will to exist. And while the world looks away, somewhere, in a corner of the rubble, a mother kneels. Still scraping. Still crying. Trying to feed her children with flour dusted in dirt, and drenched in blood. *Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British Tunisian writer. This article was first published at [Middle East Eye](https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/war-gaza-how-israel-replicating-nazi-starvation-tactics?ref=redflag.org.au).* ### Labor sacrifices Indigenous cultural sites, and the climate, for fossil fuel profits—again URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/labor-sacrifices-indigenous-cultural-sites-and-the-climate-for-fossil-fuel-profits-again/ Last updated: 2025-06-02T05:22:52.000Z The federal Labor government’s extension of Woodside’s North West Shelf Project (NWS) in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, allowing Australia’s largest natural gas facility to operate until 2070, is an environmental disaster. Over its extended lifetime, the NWS will produce ten times more carbon dioxide emissions than the whole of Australia did in 2024, according to the Climate Council, which describes the extension as a “carbon bomb”. The approval also comes just weeks after Woodside spilt 16,000 litres of petroleum products into the ocean near the Ningaloo reef, as [reported by the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/28/woodside-toxic-spill-near-ningaloo-reef-world-heritage-area-under-investigation?ref=redflag.org.au). Environment Minister Murray Watt approved the extension less than 30 days after Labor’s federal election victory—faster than the Coalition had promised to move had it been elected. Watt was not even obliged to consider the climate impact when assessing the proposal, since the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBCA) does not require it. That is thanks to Labor’s Roger Cook, premier of WA. Cook intervened late last year to prevent the EPBCA from being changed to include climate considerations in the environmental assessment process. In doing so, Cook did the bidding of the state’s mining and resources capitalists, and it’s already paying off. What did need to be considered by both the federal and state Labor governments was the potential impact of the extension on nearby significant heritage sites. Murujuga, the area encompassing the Burrup Peninsula and surrounding islands on the Pilbara coast, is home to a rich and ancient collection of Indigenous rock art, some of which is estimated to be tens of thousands of years old. It’s also where the NWS natural gas processing facility is located. An 800-page report on the effects of pollution on the Murujuga rock art was produced for the WA state government last year. It was made public less than a week before the NWS extension decision, along with an eight-page summary document. The summary says “the research indicates that the current levels of the pollutants of most concern for the rock art are lower” than the level that puts the art at risk of continuing damage. Cook himself told reporters days before Watt’s decision that gas extraction has had no effects on the rock art, and that would continue to be the case. Leading scientists say this is a lie. Speaking at a press conference on the steps of the state parliament, Benjamin Smith, professor of archaeology at the University of Western Australia, said that the government’s summary document “contradicts directly the findings inside the report”. Smith continued: “This report contains very serious evidence that industrial emissions are currently damaging the rock art at Murujuga”. An anonymous scientist involved in the rock art monitoring program told the ABC’s *7.30*program: “The claim that we established that no further damage is occurring to the rocks is simply false”. According to the ABC, Curtin University’s Emeritus Professor Adrian Baddeley, one of the report’s authors, accused the state government of “unacceptable interference” to modify a graph from the report in the summary. The change removed a line showing that “five of the \[rock art\] monitoring sites were experiencing pollutant levels above” the level that puts the art at risk. This apparent cover-up would not be the first time the Cook state government has chosen to sacrifice Indigenous cultural sites for the interests of the mining and resources industry. In 2023, his government [repealed the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act](https://redflag.org.au/article/wa-labor-capitulates-racist-campaign-against-aboriginal-heritage-law), which had been in effect for just one month, bowing to a racist campaign by farming, mining and pastoral interests. Instead, the 1972 Aboriginal Heritage Act applies, which allows the state government to override heritage concerns due to “public interest”, with traditional owners given no right to review this decision. It was under this Act that Rio Tinto blew up two sites sacred to the Pinti Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples at Juukan Gorge in 2020. Despite various gestures and phrases about “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, state and federal Labor governments are clearly committed to the fossil fuel industry. The North West Shelf Project is part of the Burrup Hub, a mega fossil fuel project involving facilities on the Burrup Peninsula for processing liquified natural gas taken from offshore gas fields. If completed, the Conservation Council of WA says the Hub will be the most polluting project ever developed in Australia. Labor is willing to allow the destruction of priceless Indigenous cultural heritage and the further destabilisation of the planet’s climate so that the capitalists in charge of Woodside and other fossil fuel companies can continue to rake in billions in profit. We have to resist this. The Burrup Hub must be stopped. ### Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ attack on the working class URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/trumps-big-beautiful-attack-on-the-working-class/ Last updated: 2025-05-30T03:29:13.000Z If satirists tried to produce a caricature of legislation designed to steal from the poor to give to the rich, they couldn’t have done much better than the “big, beautiful bill” that the US House of Representatives passed by one vote on 22 May. Trump describes as “beautiful” a 1,100-page plan that incorporates the Republican Party’s wish list of tax cuts for wealthy Americans while raising costs and imperilling the health and education of millions of working-class Americans. Simultaneously, it calls for a military budget of more than $1 trillion and a vast expansion of the deportation apparatus that is the core of Trump’s program. It would also increase the budget deficit by US$4 trillion over the next decade. Just how tilted to the rich is the “big, beautiful bill”? The non-partisan [Congressional Budget Office](https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/61422-Reconciliation-Distributional-Analysis.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au) estimates that it would decrease the household incomes of the poorest tenth of Americans by up to 4 percent annually, while increasing those of the richest tenth by the same amount. In dollar terms, the poorest 40 percent of the population would lose money while the richest 0.1 percent would gain about $390,000. The administration wants tax cuts skewed toward the upper end of the income distribution, and the slashing of government-provided health insurance for the poor and disabled (Medicaid) and the food program for low-income individuals (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP). Cuts to these two essential programs amount to more than $1.2 trillion over a decade. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris [summed it up](https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/republicans-want-you-to-pay-more?ref=redflag.org.au): “The Republicans want you to pay more for less”. Along with Social Security payments to the elderly and disabled, Medicare, the government medical insurance program for the elderly, is popular with many Republican and Democratic voters—so popular that it is usually considered “safe” from cuts. Yet if Trump’s bill passes the Senate, there will also be mandatory cuts of up to [$500 billion to Medicare](https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/61422-Reconciliation-Distributional-Analysis.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au). For this possibility, we can thank Democratic President Barack Obama and the 2010 Democratic-majority Congress, led by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They pushed through the Pay As You Go Act, which makes cuts to these programs mandatory if the federal deficit exceeds certain levels. The bill’s effects will be devastating in a country where [four out of ten people can’t find $400](https://fortune.com/2023/05/23/inflation-economy-consumer-finances-americans-cant-cover-emergency-expense-federal-reserve/?ref=redflag.org.au) in case of an emergency, and where almost 80 percent report [living “paycheque to paycheque”](https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics-2024/?ref=redflag.org.au). Analysts predict that as many as 15 million people could lose health coverage as the federal government imposes stricter eligibility requirements for entitlements, and states are unable to fill the resulting gaps. Medicaid is not just a program for the poorest Americans. Through the 1997 Children’s Health Insurance Act and the 2010 Affordable Care Act, it now provides health insurance assistance to almost 80 million Americans. In fact, it covers more people than Medicare. So, in many ways that aren’t entirely apparent, Medicaid is a crucial support for the working class. It is the leading funder of nursing homes and home care for the elderly and disabled. In many parts of urban and rural America, it supports the public health infrastructure. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 65 percent of people—either themselves, family members or close friends—have benefited from Medicaid. These cuts are not popular. In none of the country’s 435 congressional districts do more than 15 percent of voters support cuts to [the SNAP food assistance program.](https://bsky.app/profile/dataforprogress.org/post/3lprjnqlnqk27?ref=redflag.org.au) Even Trump’s far-right adviser Steve Bannon warned Republicans against cutting Medicaid. But they did anyway. [House Republicans who swore they wouldn’t](https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2025-04-16-dozen-house-republicans-send-letter-opposing-medicaid-cuts?ref=redflag.org.au) support a bill that cut Medicaid voted for it. They will now spend months playing word games trying to explain that their vote wasn’t for a “cut” but for something else. In another attack on working people, the bill would also slash education grants that help low-income students afford college. [As many as 4 million students could be affected.](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/winners-and-losers-in-the-new-student-loan-bill?ref=redflag.org.au) New provisions applying to student loans would increase payments and lengthen the debt repayment period for most borrowers. Cuts to medical care, food assistance and education support are only part of the story. But they should demonstrate how laughable it is that some people call Trump’s Republican Party a “working-class party”. The rest of the bill is a [Trumpian wish list](https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-05-23-ten-sneaky-sleeper-provisions-trumps-big-beautiful-bill/?ref=redflag.org.au), including: a thirteen-fold increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s carceral system; allowing the administration to terminate the tax-exempt status of any non-profit it deems politically unacceptable; barring state regulation of artificial intelligence technology; even crippling plaintiffs’ ability to seek court injunctions blocking administration actions. The bill now goes to the Senate, where some [Republicans have vowed not to support it,](https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5315185-trump-big-beautiful-bill-senate-gop/?ref=redflag.org.au) have called for large-scale changes to it, and so on. Don’t believe them. Most of the critics don’t think it cuts spending enough. Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s plea of [“Don’t Cut Medicaid”](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/opinion/josh-hawley-dont-cut-medicaid.html?ref=redflag.org.au) in a *New York Times* op ed owes more to political theatre than to political conviction. The bill represents the entirety of the Trump/Republican domestic policy agenda. And even though the Senate might make some cosmetic changes, it will pass the Congress largely intact. By the northern autumn, the US working class will begin to experience the most serious legislative assault on it in more than half a century. ### Rank and file group set up in Victorian public sector union URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/rank-and-file-group-set-up-in-victorian-public-sector-union/ Last updated: 2025-05-29T05:06:24.000Z Victorian public sector workers are taking on the useless union leadership in elections to be held next month. The state branch of the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) has repeatedly failed to stand up for its members. The challengers’ election team, called A Voice for Members, wants to rebuild a fighting, member-led union. This is the first time in more than 30 years that all executive positions (secretary, assistant secretary, president and two vice-presidents) will be contested. The current state secretary, Karen Batt, was first elected in 1993, when Jeff Kennett was premier. Last year, CPSU leaders excluded members from any meaningful involvement in enterprise bargaining negotiations. They eventually pushed through an agreement that includes a real wage cut. [By the time the deal expires in 2028, real wages are expected to have returned to 2018 levels](https://avfm.au/cpsu-rank-and-file-news/edition-7-wages-cap/?ref=redflag.org.au). The union leaders insisted that there was no point in trying to push the government on its “wages cap”, as it would not budge from its three percent per year offer. But they were proven completely wrong when the paramedics’ union and the nurses’ and midwives’ union won pay increases of 17 and 28 percent, respectively, over four years. Firefighters are also pushing for a 25 percent pay increase. The CPSU leaders have long hampered members’ ability to organise: they do not hold members’ or delegates’ meetings, and members frequently report difficulty finding other members, or even their workplace delegates. During last year’s negotiations, for example, most members did not even see, let alone vote on, the union’s proposed list of demands. The seed for the rank-and-file electoral challenge was planted during CPSU for Palestine meetings, which provided a rare space for members to get together and organise, given the union’s lack of democratic structures. At first, A Voice for Members was established as a progressive caucus inside the union, recognising that a union’s power comes from its members, not its paid officials. Consistent with this goal, the group will continue fighting for a democratic, member-led union, regardless of the election result. When Treasurer Jaclyn Symes in February announced [Labor’s plan to slash 3,000 public sector jobs](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-20/vic-govt-public-sector-job-cuts-spending-review-budget/104958948?ref=redflag.org.au), A Voice for Members immediately called a rally opposing the cuts. Longtime union members are hard-pressed to recall the last time the CPSU made such a call. But, four days later, undoubtedly feeling threatened by the campaign, union leaders called a separate rally, scheduling it for the day before the rank-and-file rally. Under Batt, the CPSU’s membership has languished at around [15,000 for decades](https://avfm.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/AVFM-policy-platform.pdf?ref=redflag.org.au). This is understandable: why would anyone be motivated to join a union that doesn’t stand up for its members? But A Voice for Members is taking action to rebuild a union that’s worth joining, that’s ready to take industrial action to defend living standards, that thinks it’s union business to take a stand against genocide, and that opposes laws restricting workers’ ability to organise and take collective action. We are holding regular organising meetings, public events, and rallies, and conducting daily workplace leafleting to recruit more workers and mobilise existing members. To learn more about AVFM, the candidates, and to join the fight, visit [the website](https://avfm.au/?ref=redflag.org.au). You can also [donate to the campaign](https://chuffed.org/project/a-voice-for-members-cpsu?ref=redflag.org.au). ### The rise of union power in the Pilbara mines URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-rise-of-union-power-in-the-pilbara-mines/ Last updated: 2025-06-05T02:42:09.000Z The following is is an edited and abridged extract from *[Striking Ore: The Rise and Fall of Union Power in the Pilbara](https://shop.redflag.org.au/collections/trade-union-organising/products/striking-ore-the-rise-and-fall-of-union-power-in-the-pilbara?ref=redflag.org.au)*, a new book by *Red Flag* contributor **Alexis Vassiley** published by Monash University Publishing. \-------------------- When Harry Hoskin came to the Pilbara in 1968, the mine superintendent made him a “powder monkey”. His job was to blast the ore body with explosives. But he had no experience: “I can’t even spell gelignite let alone \[know\] what it’s about”. His boss insisted, so he got on with it. Fortunately, he wasn’t injured—others weren’t so lucky. It was like the “Wild West”, Hoskin recalls. Safety was terrible. But business was booming for the iron ore companies. When the iron ore export ban was relaxed in 1960, there was a development bonanza in the Pilbara. Demand for iron ore was relentless. Tonnage of iron ore increased from 6.8 million tonnes in 1967 to 50.5 million tonnes in 1972. Conditions in the late 1960s and early 1970s for miners were tough. Production worker Randall Grant remembers the “soaked and soggy” salad sandwiches at Dampier in 1968, stating, “The guys were really pissed off with that. They wanted a hot meal”. Grant later became an Australian Workers’ Union shop steward (union representative who continues to do their usual work for the company, now usually called a “union delegate”). Lance Elliott, a staff member at Mount Newman, describes conditions at that time as “unairconditioned, dusty, unsafe to say the least”. In the 1960s, before workers exercised their collective muscle, the companies used their responsibility for food, housing and amenities in the “company towns” to their advantage. Towns were run by the companies rather than by a local government. So, for example, the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) reported that in June 1968, a Hamersley Iron boilermaker had his accommodation, and therefore job, withdrawn after making “sharp criticisms” of the food to the messing officer from Poon’s. The same month, a worker’s complaint about food resulted in his alleged assault by a manager. Three workers were framed and remanded in custody for eight days by a justice of the peace who worked for the company; the three were then sacked. Power rested squarely with management in these early days. Workers took action even while the mines were being built. On Christmas Day 1965, the construction crew on a Hamersley Iron mine rioted over the food. It was in the late 1960s, however, that both workers’ struggle and union organising really took off. The two things went hand in hand. AWU organiser Gil Barr relates that Mount Newman was unionised in this period by using the sacking of three workers as an organising opportunity. After previously getting only ten to fifteen workers from a 400-strong workforce to a union meeting, he “fronted the company” and got the workers reinstated. “From then on, we started to get membership as the guys could see the benefit of it”. Randall Grant was present at the first AWU meeting at King Bay in 1968\. Workers with union traditions from the eastern states—who later became shop stewards—got Grant to the meeting: “They were saying this wouldn’t happen at Port Kembla \[an industrial hub eight kilometres south of Wollongong, NSW\] and places like that”. Grant himself didn’t come from a union background, but he became a shop steward too: “as soon as you got onsite and saw what was going on it’s like ... hang on, things have got to be improved here”. AWU officials addressed around 40 workers in the single men’s quarters, signing them up to the union. Yet the Pilbara’s remoteness posed a significant challenge. Unions needed to devote significant resources to the task. They required sacrifices from organisers, some of whom camped in tents with their family while on organising drives. The formula for union organisers was as follows: go up north for a few weeks, talk to workers about their grievances, sign them up to the union and establish a union branch or sub-branch. So, for example, Jack Marks of the AEU, Frank Bastow of the Boilermakers and Blacksmiths Society and J. Quinn of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners went on a “North-West Organising Trip” of several weeks in July 1967. Marks reported back to his union that they “set up new shop stewards wherever we found a group of workers, and when this group consists of more than one union representative, shop committees were formed”. In 1968, workers at Goldsworthy’s port on Finucane Island tried unsuccessfully for weeks on end to convince management to let them eat at the mess (canteen) rather than consume the “power packs” in the smoko room. The entire workforce of 80 then struck for four days to force the issue and were sacked. The company re-employed them days later when a ship needed loading. Union militancy increased in 1969\. On 22 May 1969, workers at Tom Price, Mount Newman and Goldsworthy stopped work for a day as part of a statewide strike in support of jailed Victorian Tramways Union secretary Clarrie O’Shea. In October 1969, there were strikes lasting seventeen days and involving all unionists at two Hamersley Iron sites. Starting with one union at one site, the dispute quickly spread to other unions and a second company site. The grievances included dust, refrigeration, food and heat money (an allowance for working in the hot weather). The strike “was controlled/administered by newly established combined union committees at each of the two sites. Compulsory conferences held between union officials and the company in the Industrial Commission failed to resolve the strike. Further, union officials were given hostile treatment by mass meetings of the workers”. In late 1970, workers broke through and made significant gains in their wages and conditions. Workers at Hamersley Iron won an over-award payment in May. The deal was a substantial increase, worth around $1,000 for lower-bracket workers and $550 for those in a higher bracket. Mount Newman workers were in dispute with the company for about four months, ending in a stunning victory. The workers obtained “more money for a 40-hour week than they were offered for a 60- hour week”. There was a tug-of-war between the company and its workers during these on-again, off-again strikes over many months. Mount Newman tested the workers’ strength, determination and organisation and tried to avoid meeting the unionists’ demands. As Lance Elliott remembers, “All of a sudden there were union meetings, there were union delegates talking with the management and it all came to a severe head ... and the whole place went out on strike”. The atmosphere was “acrimonious”. Staff (managers and white-collar workers) crossed union picket lines to do workers’ work. Key to the victory was the industrial pressure put on the company in the context of high demand for iron ore. Idle iron ore carriers were visible from the site of union-management negotiations. Power relations were changing. The mining companies didn’t grant any concessions willingly—improved pay and conditions were hard fought. Engaged in a show of strength with the unionists, companies reneged on agreements if they thought they could get away with it. Gains won at one company did not automatically flow through to another mining company. Accounts of the Pilbara iron ore industry can make the gains in wages and conditions, and union organisational success, seem almost inevitable. A tight labour market and clauses in industrial awards for “union preference”—where workers need to be members of the union to work in the industry—certainly wouldn’t have harmed the unionists’ cause. But on their own, these are not enough. 100 percent union membership had to be won, enforced and even re-won from the ground up—including by withdrawing, or threatening to withdraw, labour. Once established, this became a weapon in the union movement’s arsenal. The 1969 Iron Ore Industry Award gave limited recognition to shop stewards for the first time. These rights, however, were heavily circumscribed. Concerned that their negotiating role not be usurped, some union officials opposed even this limited clause. Committees consisting of shop stewards representing each of the different unions on a site were first established in 1967\. Similar structures were set up at various companies and worksites in the next few years, undercutting management’s ability to play unions off against one another and engendering solidarity between the different unions. These grassroots bodies would later organise strikes in the region involving all or many of the unions, lasting weeks and costing the mining companies millions of dollars in lost production. ### Want to keep your job? Shut up URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/want-to-keep-your-job-shut-up/ Last updated: 2025-05-29T03:02:26.000Z Review: *Working for the brand: how corporations are destroying free speech* Josh Bornstein, Scribe, $36.99, 304pp. \-------------------- *Working for the brand: how corporations are destroying free speech* by Melbourne lawyer Josh Bornstein is a great read. It is a book about the growth of corporate power over recent decades and one of its more pernicious consequences—companies punishing employees for things they say or do outside of work. Bornstein argues that, in policing the speech of their workers, employers are becoming key arbiters of acceptable speech, often breaching employment law in the process. He makes a damning case that it is the unequal relations between employers and workers that drive some of the most significant attacks on free speech, and that the motivation of these employers is almost exclusively to protect their brand’s public image. Bornstein offers countless examples of this phenomenon. Typically, cases involve a person making a comment on social media, which is then publicly attacked online or in the media by some individual or group. The individual’s employer learns of it and sacks them, citing concern about “ethics and integrity”. Most employees targeted this way lose their jobs, some their whole careers, some their mental wellbeing or that of their families, and some their lives as a result of the stress. On Anzac Day 2015, for example, SBS journalist Scott McIntyre posted on what was then Twitter criticising the celebration of war and the writing out of history of the murders and rapes committed by Australian troops. Twenty minutes later, a Murdoch journalist attacked McIntyre’s posts, followed by other professional right-wingers, including the director of a conservative lobby group, a Liberal Party minister and a Sky News presenter. The next day, McIntyre was sacked by SBS. McIntrye was a sports presenter, so his comments couldn’t be said to show bias affecting his work. Underlining how arbitrary his sacking was, he had made almost identical social media posts on many previous Anzac Days without any consequences. So it wasn’t what he said or did that was the problem, it was how others responded that led to the end of his career, in this case the others being a cabal of right-wing culture warriors. The policies of SBS that were cited to justify the sacking were incredibly vague (as such policies typically are), making it almost impossible to defend against. They include requirements that workers “act in line with company values”, “treat others with courtesy”, “be truthful and transparent” and “not bring the company in to disrepute”, which could mean anything to anyone. As a US Supreme Court judge that Bornstein quotes points out, “Vague laws invite arbitrary power ... by leaving the people in the dark about what the law demands and allowing prosecutors and courts to make it up”. These types of company policies and codes of conduct are also often contradictory and therefore impossible to adhere to. For instance, being truthful might be in line with company values but also bring the company in to disrepute or come across as discourteous. Some examples include ABC presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who in 2016 was sacked for posting a pro-refugee statement on Twitter, “Lest. We. Forget. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine.)” Or an ALP supporter named Ruth who got in to an argument with a Liberal Party campaigner on election day who then tracked down her employer to put in a complaint. Ruth was suspended pending an investigation and later cleared following legal support. Likewise, co-founder of the anti-bullying LGBTI program Safe Schools, Roz Ward, was sacked by La Trobe University for making a humorous post on her private Facebook account after coming under attack from the Murdoch press, the Australian Christian Lobby and Liberal and Labour leaders. And in December 2023, another ABC radio presenter, Antoinette Lattouf, was sacked after posting a Human Rights Watch report about Israel using starvation as a weapon of war against the people of Gaza. There is, by contrast, no requirement that a company comply with its code of conduct or stated values. It’s one rule for workers and another for the company heads. Bornstein’s book mostly tracks this trend in Australia, the US and the UK, noting that it has accelerated over the last 30 years. It has coincided with attacks on trade unions and workers’ rights, privatisation, record profits, transfer of wealth to the richest, wage stagnation, longer work hours and huge cuts to corporate tax rates and regulations—in other words, a one-sided class war. One important consequence of this is that workers have become less well unionised and therefore less able to defend their interests, while employers have become much more powerful, abusive and exploitative. It’s gotten to the point that, far from opposing them, we are supposed to feel emotionally connected to corporations, a situation fostered through the manipulative art of brand management. So Nike doesn’t sell shoes, it “enhances people’s lives through sports and fitness”. The 1980s and ’90s brought with them the rise of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR), consisting of large publicity machines selling the social good of specific corporations, commonly through some minuscule “giving back” via a tax-deductible charity. In a similar vein, “ethics washing” involves companies promoting themselves as ethical and caring (“a friend and neighbour”, says US telecommunication giant AT&T) so as to avoid and discourage proper regulation or to repair their image after being caught committing abuses. And with a similar goal in mind, some companies have more recently resorted to giving lip service to progressive movements. Qantas eventually endorsed the campaign for same sex marriage rights in Australia, for example. Amazon stated its support for “the fight against systemic racism and injustice” at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. Bornstein notes that, since 2005, new hires at UK universities in marketing and public relations departments have grown nine times as fast as new academic hires. Literal armies of people are being employed to convince us to see corporations as friends and not enemies. The spread of the internet and social media through the 2000s also gave new “popular” weight to campaigns calling for people to be sacked. The growing social media giants were rewarded with enormous investor dollars for increased user engagement, which often came to be based on cycles of outrage. In exploring the different angles of this development, Bornstein highlights the hypocrisy of corporations—the vilest and most destructive entities in modern society—posing as any kind of authority on ethics or integrity. He cites Canadian law Professor Joel Bakan, who likened modern corporations to psychopaths, pointing out that “the corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others”. Many of the most successful and ethics-washed companies have killed hundreds or thousands of innocent people, while others have paid poverty wages, destroyed the climate or systematically lied and manipulated consumers. Re-reporting some of those horrendous corporate crimes in the book is a service on its own. For over 30 years, for example, pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson knew that its talc powder products contained asbestos that was causing fatal mesothelioma and ovarian cancer. The company hid this information, fought against investigations about it and created a shell company to avoid paying damages to around 38,000 victims. In 2022, Johnson & Johnson made $24 billion in sales in one quarter while on average one woman died per day while waiting for her case against the company to be heard. Apart from being one of the biggest planet-killers in the world, British Petroleum (BP) has experienced explosions at its refineries and rigs in recent decades that have caused dozens of deaths of workers and released millions of barrels of oil into oceans. The company pleaded guilty to manslaughter and other criminal charges after slashing safety budgets and programs that contributed to the disasters. In 2020, 96 percent of BP’s capital expenditure was dedicated to oil and gas, while the company declares that it’s “working to make energy cleaner” and designs it petrol stations in green colours. Enron, the US-based multinational finance giant, funded a CSR workforce and donated money to arts organisations and environmental groups. When the company collapsed in scandal in 2001, the leaders were found to have hidden billions of dollars of losses and found guilty of fraud, lying, money laundering and insider trading. Volkswagen was the 2012 recipient of the “Ethics in Business Award” issued by the World Forum for Ethics in Business, and declared its goal to become “the world’s most environmentally compatible automaker”. In 2015, it was discovered that, over six years, the company had installed software in at least 11 million of its vehicles that cheated the tests for pollution emissions, allowing each car to emit up to 40 times the legal limit. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the largest retail bank here, cites “integrity” as one of its core values, which means “saying and doing what is right for our customers, our people, our community and our shareholders”. In 2017, a royal commission found that the bank had knowingly charged dead people fees for financial-planning advice for more than a decade, denied insurance entitlements to customers by manipulating medical reports and colluded with the other big banks to rig interest rates to take more money from customers. The marketing department of convenience store empire 7-Eleven boasts of embracing “the highest standards” to act “with fairness and integrity”. In 2015 a media investigation found that it had hyper-exploited thousands of workers, often vulnerable migrants who were sometimes paid $5 per hour or pressured to work as “trainees” for months without pay. Pay records were falsified, workers who complained were threatened with being deported. 7-Eleven’s chairman at the time, Russ Withers, was also chairman of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, which promotes and teaches corporate governance. Then there’s Qantas, where CEO Alan Joyce’s pay package doubled to $24.6 million in the year that he sacked 5,000 full-time workers, and Coca Cola, one of the key corporate sponsors of the 2022 UN climate summit despite being the worst plastic polluter in the world. The list goes on. Corporate corruption, abuse, exploitation and lies are systematic in the boardrooms of the world. Bornstein’s passion for shaming corporate abuses, manipulation and power gives the book a similar feel to Naomi Klein’s influential anti-globalisation classic *No Logo*. But Bornstein’s book is elevated by a class framework: he clearly sides with workers and their industrial and civil rights against bosses’ drive for profits. He understands that the main beneficiaries of the decline in democratic rights, the growth in inequality, the increased vulnerability of employees are the capitalist class and the layer of managers and politicians who act on their behalf. Importantly, Bornstein doesn’t call for penalties or restrictions against criticism, protest or organising. He argues that workers’ rights are issues of citizenship and democracy. Employers should not have the power to sack employees for actions outside of and irrelevant to their job and to protect their brand and profits. And he argues that it’s a revived trade union movement that is the key strategy for fixing this. Bornstein does not shy away from confronting the tendency on the left to campaign for sackings on a progressive basis, even though this is much less common. He writes particularly about the case of Israel Folau—the rugby player sacked in 2019 after posting a homophobic bible quote online which provoked a tidal wave of popular condemnation. This scenario creates a conflict of various instincts for socialists and left-wing people—the need to defend workers’ rights and freedom of expression versus the need to challenge right-wing bigots who attack oppressed people. Bornstein points out the obvious parallels with cases where right-wing campaigns end with progressive individuals being sacked. While having nothing positive to say about Folau, he argues that the corporation involved should not have been the arbiter of speech, and that the question of Folau’s rights as an employee should have been considered by leftists. It is definitely fraught for the left to campaign for right-wing employees to be sacked by their employer. In most instances, this has the effect of legitimising the use of such power by employers, even if it also signifies disapproval of bigotry. Finding ways to make it clear there is popular opposition to such bigotry without strengthening the hand of management is definitely preferable. There was an important and positive public reaction attacking and isolating the reactionary ideas of Folau, activated in the aftermath of the victorious same sex marriage rights campaign and the attempted backlash against it, but that did not call for his sacking. Of course, the momentum of such a campaign may lead corporate brand managers to decide it is in their interests to end the company’s relationship with certain individuals, but this is not the same as the left targeting its arguments and demands at these managers, a stance that tacitly accepts that it is appropriate for corporations to police our collective ethics and politics. Bornstein also opposes using feelings as determinants of what speech is acceptable. One of the more chilling cases he cites is that of Henk Doevendans, a machine operator and union activist for 24 years at BHP Coal. While taking protected industrial action in the middle of an industrial dispute, Doevendans was sacked for breaching the company’s workplace conduct policy by standing near a gate and holding a sign that read “No principles. SCABS. No guts”. The case went all the way to the High Court, which ultimately agreed that Doevendans was sacked because of failing to be respectful and courteous, not because he was actively organising for workers’ rights, and that the sacking was therefore legitimate. Bornstein points to data indicating that the vast majority of public campaigns to get people sacked come from right-wingers. He argues that these campaigns tend to have far more power behind them (the Murdoch press and ruling political parties rather than likes on social media). And he argues that right-wing people targeted by left-wing campaigns are much more likely to be protected by bosses, an obvious case being war criminal and darling of the Australia establishment Ben Roberts-Smith. The crux of the problem for Bornstein is the imbalance of power between workers and bosses. He likens the power that modern corporations exert over their employees to political dictatorships, with employers having the right to monitor workers with electronic tracking, limit toilet breaks, impose compulsory drug tests, make them wear what they’re told to and smile on demand. Approximately 60 million US workers are barred from going to a court to seek redress for unpaid wages or discrimination, and must instead go through their company’s internal arbitration processes, removing even the possibility of independent legal processes. More and more workers in some industries are required to sign non-compete clauses in their contracts, which prevent them working for rival companies (any other company in their field) for up to 12 months after leaving a job. And non-disclosure agreements restrict or ban criticism of an employer, including after leaving the job, and are used to hide misconduct and abuse by corporations and management. In a section about the silencing of academics by university admins, Bornstein argues emphatically that “brand management and academic freedom are mortal enemies”. Likewise, capitalism is a mortal enemy to actual democracy, workers’ right, economic equality and a sustainable planet. How deep can democracy be when a tiny minority own and control the majority of media and the dissemination of ideas? Or when a tiny minority own and control the majority of wealth and production? Looking around today, we see increasing waves of repression aimed at left-wing activists and those who speak out or organise, most notably people supporting Palestinian rights against the murderous onslaught of the Israeli state. It’s imperative for left-wing people to defend democratic rights and challenge power, not ask the state to protect us. Bornstein’s book is a radicalising read, publicising a relevant and relatively hidden issue from which to point out the rigged and hypocritical nature of the profit-driven system of capitalism. ### Revolutionary history of Jewish anti-Zionism URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/revolutionary-history-of-jewish-anti-zionism/ Last updated: 2025-05-29T03:00:50.000Z One conspicuous sight at the regular Palestine solidarity demonstrations is the contingents of Jews, often with banners proclaiming, “Not in my name” and the like. This is not a recent development. Anti-Zionism has been a crucial part of the Jewish radical tradition since the late 19th century. Way back in 1886, a Russian Jewish socialist revolutionary called Ilya Rubanovich argued against Jewish settlement in Palestine: “What is to be done with the Arabs? ... The Arabs have exactly the same historical right and it will be unfortunate for you if ... you make the peaceful Arabs defend their right. They will answer tears with blood.” Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, argued that nothing could be done about antisemitism, that it was inherent in non-Jews and that Jews must leave their home countries and set up a state of their own. The first Zionist congress in August 1897 represented only a small minority of Jews at the time. The first organisational opposition to this current, the General Jewish Labour Bund, was set up only two months later in the Russian Empire. The core concept of the Bund was “*doykeit*”, a Yiddish word meaning “hereness”: it wanted to fight antisemitism in the here and now. Based in the Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class, the Bund was the first Marxist group in the tsarist empire to create a mass organisation. It played a major role in the Russian revolutionary movement, particularly in the 1905 revolution. After the 1917 revolution, the Bund continued the struggle in independent Poland, including its polemics against Zionism. Marek Edelman, who participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, put it this way: “The Bundists did not wait for the Messiah, nor did they plan to leave for Palestine. They ... fought for a just, socialist Poland, in which each nationality would have its own cultural autonomy, and in which minorities’ rights would be guaranteed”. The local Zionists had difficulty articulating their politics. In the parliament, for example, when Jewish deputies were speaking, right-wingers would heckle them, yelling: “Go to Palestine”. The problem was that the Zionists were also calling for Jews to go to Palestine. It’s not surprising that Zionists were often ridiculed, as we can see in a [Bundist song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJZNcUCVXBo&ref=redflag.org.au): *You want to take us to Jerusalem* *So we can die as a nation* *We’d rather stay in the diaspora* *And fight for our liberation!* By 1939, the Bund was the strongest Jewish political party in Poland, while the Zionist and clerical parties drastically declined. After World War Two, the Bund continued to publicly oppose Zionism. In April 1948, it warned that partition of Palestine was the “beginning of a new bloody chapter” in Jewish-Arab relations and that “the creation of an independent Jewish State would lead to a new catastrophe”. It said the atmosphere was becoming “more and more favourable for the development of political brigandry, terror, the extremes of home-grown Jewish fascism, nationalism and reactionary tendencies”. How prophetic. Today, many Jews are breaking with Zionism under pressure of events in Gaza. This has also happened in the past. For instance, the socialist-Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard) was a youth group in Eastern Europe with 70,000 members in 1939\. Its Zionism had a strange mix of political influences including psychoanalysis and even Marxism. Tony Cliff, who later became a well-known British socialist, was born in British mandate Palestine. He explained how “the Zionist socialists were trapped ideologically”. “They believed that ... in the kibbutz we could see the embryo of a future socialist society ... But in the meantime, Arab resistance ... had to be overcome so they collaborated with Zionist moneybags and rich institutions as well as the British army and police. The Zionist socialists held the Communist Manifesto in one hand and a coloniser’s gun in the other.” Nonetheless, Hashomer Hatzair provided a route towards politicisation and anti-Zionism for many people. The most famous is probably Abram Leon, who repudiated Zionism and in 1940 became a leader of an underground Trotskyist organisation in occupied Belgium. He was arrested in 1944 and murdered in Auschwitz. Chanie Rosenberg was another anti-Zionist who started out as a member of Hashomer Hatzair. Born in South Africa, she emigrated to Palestine in 1944 and thought she was living the socialist dream on a kibbutz. But one day she came across some guns used to steal Palestinian land. “At that point, I knew that I had become an anti-Zionist.” The USA has a significant Jewish anti-Zionist history. During the 1920s and ’30s, the heavily Jewish Communist Party campaigned against Zionism as a component of British imperialism. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), established in 1938, was also anti-Zionist. It played an important role among Jews in 1939 when the fascist German American Bund (nothing to do with the Jewish Bund) held a mass rally in New York. The SWP called a counter-demonstration, but not one Jewish organisation was prepared to participate. Both Yiddish daily papers called on their readers to stay away. The Communist Party also refused to support the demo because they “could not undertake to forcibly prevent such a meeting once the City Administration had allowed it”. And the local Hashomer Hatzair branch also refused, saying “sorry we can’t join you ... Our Zionist policy is to take no part in politics outside Palestine”. On the day 50,000 protesters turned up—way beyond anyone’s expectation. Most were Jewish, and many rank-and-file Communists defied their leadership to participate. Anti-Zionist organisations in Palestine have an important history. First was the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), formed in 1923\. It had a promising start but quite quickly became politically confused. For instance, it attempted to integrate Arabs into the Zionist labour organisation the Histadrut. But the Histadrut was (and remains today) a conscious tool of the Zionist project in Palestine. The PCP also had problems with the constant zigs and zags imposed by the Stalinist Comintern, as it switched strategies in the 1930s. They were first instructed to have a class-based focus on Arab workers and *fellaheen* (peasants and agricultural labourers) only to suddenly be instructed to give uncritical support for Arab nationalism and the bourgeoisie. Then the Moscow show trials began in the late 1930s, with many of the victims Jewish; most of the PCP leaders were annihilated in the process. So, the PCP failed among both Arabs and Jews, and became increasingly ineffectual and disoriented. In 1943, the political tensions became too much, and the party split into two separate organisations—one Jewish and one Arab. On Victory in Europe Day in 1945, the Arab organisation marched together with feudal and bourgeois parties, under anti-Zionist slogans. The Jewish party marched under the Zionist flag, with Zionist slogans. In 1947, the Jewish PCP completed its political destruction and endorsed partition. Meanwhile, the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League of Palestine (RCL) was set up in the late 1930s. Most of its members were Jewish workers—some were born in Palestine, and some had fled from Germany. There were, however, some Arabs. The RCL recognised that unity between Arabs and Jews could come about only “through the abolition of all racist ideology and practice on the part of the Jews”. The RCL wanted to build a united revolutionary socialist party. But there were major difficulties. For example, when they tried to organise joint trade unions for Arabs and Jews, the British interned them without trial. One of those interned was Tony Cliff, at that time still Yigael Gluckstein. Cliff’s family were strongly Zionist. “It took me a few years to make the transition from being an orthodox Zionist to being a semi-Zionist with a pro-Palestinian position and then to making a complete break with Zionism”, Cliff later wrote. To be a revolutionary socialist operating illegally in Palestine required enormous commitment. With fewer than 30 members, the RCL published two magazines, one in Arabic and one in Hebrew, and put out leaflets. Cliff was eventually released from British internment, married Chanie Rosenberg and ended up in the UK, where he was a founding member of the International Socialists, later the Socialist Workers Party. Another RCL member, Jakob Moneta, arrested by the British at the same time as Cliff, said he “learned that democratic imperialism, in the struggle to preserve its empire, is sometimes no less squeamish than fascism going out to conquer a new empire”. The RCL was too small to have any significant impact on workers’ struggles. The organisation collapsed after 1948, but individuals including Jakob Taut and Jabra Nicola remained active and provided continuity into the next organisation. In 1962, a group of ex-members of the Communist Party set up the Israeli Socialist Organisation, usually known by the name of its magazine Matzpen (Compass). Most, but not all, members were Jewish. The organisation always remained very small—only a few dozen—but was important. It is historically the only committed anti-Zionist organisation within the state of Israel. Matzpen developed a sophisticated analysis of Zionism that influenced revolutionary socialist groups around the world. One of its members, Moishe Machover, moved to the UK in 1968\. In a bizarre twist of fate, he was expelled from the UK Labour Party in 2017 for supposed antisemitism—this was the right-wing party machine cracking down on its left opposition. Unfortunately, the stresses of trying to maintain an organisation like Matzpen are extreme, and the organisation finally ceased to exist in the 1980s. But a large amount of the standard works on Zionism that we use today were produced by or under its influence. This history of Jewish anti-Zionism also exists in Australia. The Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism, established in 1942, was non-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist. It had hundreds of members and widespread support, so much so that in 1948 the council became the official public relations representative of the Jewish community. But the council’s non-Zionist stance was unsustainable, and it started to lose support. In 1950, a prominent Zionist attacked it, asserting that they “\[do\] not ‘combat’ but ‘spread’ antisemitism”. Seventy-five years ago, the Zionists were already slandering left-wing Jews just as they do today. In 1978, a soft Zionist magazine called *Paths to Peace*(PTP) applied to join Melbourne community radio station 3CR. But 3CR rejected its application on the grounds that Zionism is racist. The right-wing publication *Bulletin* smeared 3CR as terrorist, and PTP and others laid a charge at the Broadcasting Tribunal claiming the pro-Palestine programs were offensive to the Melbourne Jewish community because they were antisemitic. Sound familiar? 3CR organised a “fight back” campaign and mobilised 1,000 people to distribute half a million leaflets throughout Melbourne. Jews Against Zionism and Antisemitism (JAZA) was set up in 1979 to help the defence, declaring that they “represent a socialist and internationalist tradition among Jews that is much older and has a much brighter future than political Zionism”. They held forums and demos, including against the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and brought out Matzpen member Ehud Ein-Gil as a speaker. History matters because the battle for memory is also a battle for the present. The Zionists don’t want us to know about this alternative history. They don’t want us to know about the committed anti-Zionism of Jews like Marek Edelmann. During the second Palestinian Intifada, Edelman wrote a letter to the Palestinians in which he compared them to the Jewish Fighting Organisation. He addressed it to “commanders of the Palestinian military ... to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisation”. When we loudly proclaim, “Not in our name”, we are following in these footsteps. ### Debates on NSW abortion legislation show Labor won’t fight the right URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/debates-on-nsw-abortion-legislation-show-labor-wont-fight-the-right/ Last updated: 2025-05-28T02:14:49.000Z Progressive legislation allowing nurse practitioners and midwives to prescribe medication abortions has passed in the NSW parliament. Yet the debate over these laws illustrated the abject refusal of the Labor Party to challenge proactively the politics of the right. The new bill, introduced by Greens MP Jenny Leong and MLC Amanda Cohn, was moved as a response to the postcode lottery that is abortion access in NSW. The 2019 legalisation of abortion has done little to make it more accessible in practice. Only three of the state’s 220 public hospitals are currently providing routine, open access to formal abortion services, according to researchers at the University of Sydney. A particularly egregious example of the barriers facing NSW women was brought to light by the ABC’s November 2024 investigation into abortion access at the Orange public hospital in regional NSW. Hospital staff were sent a flow chart explicitly banning them from providing abortions where there was “no identified pregnancy complication”. All women seeking abortions for non-medical reasons were to be directed to private providers like GPs or the nearest Family Planning clinic—neither of which provide surgical abortions. Staff reported to the ABC at the time that they believed this was part of an “unspoken ban” on abortion for non-medical reasons due to anti-abortion attitudes “high in the health bureaucracy” of the Western NSW Local Health District. The new legislation will help provide wider access by allowing a greater variety of healthcare providers to prescribe medication abortions. But that’s no substitute for widespread, free, on demand access to surgical abortions. Medication abortions are generally prescribed only up to nine weeks of pregnancy—there will inevitably be cases in which people either don’t realise they’re pregnant in time or simply change their minds about continuing a pregnancy. The Greens’ original draft of the bill acknowledged this and included other measures to boost abortion access. The two most important were a requirement for local health districts to ensure that public abortion is accessible to everyone in NSW within a reasonable distance of their homes, and stricter obligations for “conscientious objector” doctors to transfer patients directly to a provider who will give them an abortion. These measures were stripped out of the bill by Labor and Liberal MLCs backing up amendments moved by right-wing crank Rob Borsak of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers. Of course, this still wasn’t enough for the anti-abortion right, who mounted a repulsive sexist campaign against the bill. Leading the charge was Tony Abbott, who had the backing of all the usual suspects: the Catholic Church, alongside other ideologues from the religious and secular far right. But the campaign drew attention because of the addition of far-right “anti-abortion influencer” and Labor member Dr Joanna Howe, whose self-proclaimed goal is to “make abortion unthinkable”. It can seem as though abortion is a settled question in Australian politics. Polling repeatedly finds that a strong majority of people support unconditional abortion access. Attempts to wind back abortion rights are unpopular, as illustrated by the desperation with which Liberal leaders like Dutton and Queensland Premier David Crisafulli ducked the question during recent election campaigns. But unpopularity has not deterred the right from campaigning stridently to chip away at abortion rights whenever they get the opportunity. As the US illustrates, we cannot be complacent about gains for progressive politics. They must be vigorously defended and strengthened in the fight against a right that show no signs of giving up on their reactionary agenda. Many in parliament and the media decried the campaign against the bill as an attempt to bring Trump-style politics to Australia. It’s true that Trump has given a fillip of confidence, and something of a political role model, to many far-right ideologues. But sexist, anti-abortion politics and the religious right have a longstanding political home in Australian politics, not only on the fringes, but also in the mainstream parties of capitalist rule. Labor’s pandering to the religious right is particularly shameful. Labor has a tradition of allowing a conscience vote on laws relating to abortion, meaning parliamentarians are not bound to vote with the official party position. This policy only legitimates anti-abortion politics as a spiritual belief that is above political challenge, rather than what it is: run-of-the-mill bigotry. No comparable exception exists for left-wing opposition to Labor’s line on morally pressing questions like the plight of refugees or Australia’s complicity in the war on Gaza—as Senator Fatima Payman found out just last year. Bigoted and sexist ideas can be tolerated because, unlike left-wing opposition, they do little to disrupt Labor’s enthusiastic commitment to ruling for the rich. Labor parliamentarians not only worked with the right-wing parties to strip the bill of important measures; even when the bill passed the lower house in this reduced form, five Labor MPs voted against it. Why does hard social conservatism have such a safe home in the Labor Party? In part, it’s about electoral opportunism. In certain conservative electorates, pandering to right-wing religious institutions by parroting their regressive social politics can help win votes. But it’s also about the political weight conservative religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, enjoy in Australian capitalism. The Catholic Church on its own is a massive, wealthy landowning institution, a bastion of conservative politics, and runs a vast network of private schools, hospitals, shelters and charities that function (poorly) to patch holes in the social safety net that Labor and Liberal have taken turns defunding and neglecting. In the case of the NSW abortion laws, there has been an unholy coalescence of Labor’s internal anti-abortion right with the party’s unanimous, bland, neoliberal unwillingness to spend on making public health care better for ordinary people. Just as despicable as the open bigotry of Labor parliamentarians like Greg Donnelly were the cynical speeches made by the likes of Penny Sharpe, who claimed “\[Labor\] realise there are issues for women” in accessing abortion, while at the same justifying her vote to strip the bill of its strongest provisions on the basis that cancer and heart attack treatment are not also mandated in legislation. In the wake of a federal election result that Labor are trying to sell as the victory of the “sensible centre” over “extremism”, we would do well to draw the lesson that Labor governments are no bulwark against the bigoted politics of the right. Indeed, on questions like abortion, the call is coming from inside the house. ### NSW Labor government attacks workers’ compensation URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/nsw-labor-government-attacks-workers-compensation/ Last updated: 2025-05-28T02:12:55.000Z The Minns Labor government plans to slash workers’ compensation in New South Wales. Unions, as well as legal and mental health groups, have vehemently opposed the changes, which will make it more difficult to claim workers’ compensation for psychological injuries. This will hit essential front-line workers like nurses, teachers, paramedics, firefighters, aged care and transport workers particularly hard. NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey defended the proposals as essential cost-cutting measures intended to bring down employer insurance premiums. They will do this not by making workplaces safer, but by denying workers the support they need. Mookhey has frozen cash injections to icare, the state workers’ compensation insurer, and issued an ultimatum: either these attacks are passed through the Legislative Assembly, or the government won’t fund its own insurer properly. Mookhey wants to turn back the clock and de-legitimise workers’ mental health issues, citing the doubling of psychological injury claims in the past six years. The most obviously cruel change is to increase the threshold for minimum Whole Person Impairment (the scale used to measure the degree of impairment resulting from workplace illness or injury) to 31 percent for psychological injury claims beyond 130 weeks or for permanent impairment. But people who meet this threshold are “essentially catatonic” according to NSW Unions leader Mark Morey. According to psychiatrist Anthony Dinnen, who assesses workplace psychological injuries, imposing this threshold “would exclude 99 percent of patients from benefits”. “The workers compensation system is the only reason I am still alive”, explained a NSW firefighter in a Unions NSW report, [*Cast Adrift*](https://www.unionsnsw.org.au/publication/cast-adrift-cuts-to-workers-compensation/?ref=redflag.org.au). “Without being able to access essential mental health services and receive diagnosis, treatment, education and support to begin my recovery, I would have certainly taken my own life. My whole person impairment is 24 percent which is a very significant injury. If the threshold was increased to 30 percent and that affected me by taking away my entitlements again, I would be destitute and would have no hope of survival or recovery.” The report shows how prevalent psychological hazards are in NSW workplaces. Of 10,000 workers surveyed, 60 percent had been exposed to trauma, 44 percent had experienced bullying and 22 percent had faced harassment, including sexual harassment. The government wants to narrow the definition of compensable psychological injuries. If an injury is sustained due to “reasonable management action”, workers will not be eligible for compensation. This wording provides an easy out for negligent and bullying bosses to argue their conduct was “reasonable”. Work pressure and burnout are major causes of the growing rates of psychological injury to workers in NSW, yet these will no longer be eligible for compensation. Workers who face bullying, sexual harassment or racial harassment won’t be eligible for compensation until they have had a court, commission or tribunal ruling in their favour. They will also have to pay their own legal fees. This suite of changes constitutes a major attack on the rights and conditions of all workers. Unsafe work conditions will be allowed to flourish if it becomes easier to reject workers’ compensation claims. The government and business have argued that workers make frivolous claims that clog up the system. In reality, claiming workers’ comp is already a difficult bureaucratic process in which workers are treated with suspicion and hostility by an adversarial system. Dealing with that system can itself be traumatic. The NSW State Insurance Regulatory Authority had to admit this year that it contributed to the psychological injuries of a group of already injured workers by mishandling their cases. It is rich for the government to use the failures of the state insurer icare as an excuse to attack workers. Icare has been plagued by scandal, including chronic underpayment of workers, blatant corruption, intimidation of a whistleblower and outrageous executive bonuses. Between 2012 and 2019, icare underpaid at least 53,000 workers and was forced to pay back $38 million. During that time, the former chief executive of icare, John Nagle, awarded his wife a contract without tender, paying her $800,000 over three years. Icare leaders were accused of the homophobic bullying and harassment of a senior whistleblower, Chris McCann, causing him to be hospitalised, diagnosed with PTSD. Despite these scandals, icare still awarded its executives with some of the highest salaries and bonuses in the public service, bringing CEO Richard Harding’s salary to over $1 million. The NSW government has done nothing to rein in icare’s mismanagement or its executive salaries. Instead, it is attacking the victims of unsafe workplaces. Unions NSW has [called protests](https://psa.asn.au/rally-against-changes-to-our-workers-compensation-protections/?ref=redflag.org.au) across Sydney to respond to Labor’s attacks. It’s important that unionists and supporters stand against the gutting of workers’ comp. We are facing an onslaught of overwork and underpay, and now we’re being denied compensation for the damage done to us. Ultimately, we need to build a movement against the anti-worker Labor government and the business interests it serves. ### History and memory URL: https://redflag.org.au/note-9-history-and-memory/ Last updated: 2026-01-20T02:26:13.000Z A memory of Gummidipundi refugee camp, north of Chennai, haunts me. In dim light, a young(ish) man, missing one of his limbs, sits on the concrete floor in a brick shack. The roof is thatched, or maybe it’s concrete sheets, perhaps asbestos. Hopelessness has eaten away at his eyes; not even a hint of anticipation animates their gaze. That’s what sticks. His demeanour doesn’t shift. It’s as though nothing will ever change, a barren future seemingly already written. Yet my notebooks and photos show no record of ever being here. I’ve gone through everything that I retained from the trip. That I now can’t even conjure his name feels callous. Have I lost my notes? Or did I put the pencil away out of a desire not to compromise what was left of his dignity? Could I not bring myself to record anything? Perhaps I was asked not to, as sometimes happens in these circumstances. I can’t recall. But it must have been something—the memory is etched, the scene too real to be a concoction. It was dusk, or just past. A circle of people sat in the room, each on the floor, all listening, and with their own story that would not be told. Not to me, at least. Why can’t I remember his name? And was it his arm or his leg, missing from the elbow or the knee? All I can picture are those eyes, brown and sullen. Full of life, but not the life anyone would long for. They were still young, though; age didn’t take away their sparkle. Sometimes when I’m drinking alone, chain smoking menthols, his face appears, distant, staring at the floor. It’s more than half a decade ago now. We were visiting refugee camps across Tamil Nadu. A long day of interviews had left us feeling harried. Or was it just me, with a train to catch? Maybe it was the cups of tea and their attendant build-up of caffeine across hours. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/67fbbd19-8105-4f26-a4f9-20d1fc8b69bc_3036x4048-jpeg.jpg) Above: A typical refugee camp residence in Tamil Nadu, India. Many refugees from coastal Sri Lankan villages are Catholics—a legacy of the first, Portuguese, colonisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even if I’d jotted the usual way on paper or recorded the conversations on the phone, it would have helped only so much: you cannot interview someone only once if you want the truth. I didn’t understand that at the time. But having previously been in Sri Lanka and Indonesia with former Tamil Tiger cadres and their families, I should have. Our memories often contain many contradictions. They have been reworked a thousand times—to make sense of them, to fit them into a meaningful narrative—before being recounted to another person. The translator, too, filters and interprets the responses. The subject and the translator also try to decipher what you want to hear, thereby censoring themselves, if only for brevity. That, of course, is generous. But the omissions can also strain the truth. By the time you realise, it’s too late. You’ve moved on, out of the town, the province, the country. Hegel wrote that impatience demands the impossible: attaining the end without the means. He might also have said that laziness often demands likewise. Ultimately, it is just plain lazy to sit with someone for a couple of hours and think that you can divine their life’s worth. That’s why, years later, you wouldn’t remember their name, or which of their limbs was amputated, or how exactly they ended up in a refugee camp in a foreign country. These thoughts have eaten away at me these last few years. Before the pandemic, [I put together a book](https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/losing-santhia?ref=redflag.org.au) that received generous reviews, no doubt in part because it had noble intentions: to illuminate a people’s struggle by reconstructing the life of one of its protagonists. But I now view it with a sense of unease. How impatient, or lazy, was the reconstruction? How timid were my interrogations? Not a few people put targets on their backs by speaking openly or by navigating me through the military occupation in Tamil Eelam or through the Indian camps potentially littered with spies augmenting their rations by providing information to the authorities. How much did the writing repay them for those risks? Not near enough, if I’m to be honest. Moreover, how does anyone get it right? If the past is what *really* happened, and history is our record and interpretation of that reality, then, arguably, most writing should be history. But so much of the past feels like it is already walled off, but for the effort to penetrate the memories of its witnesses. So the effort matters a great deal. I’ve probably opened myself up to ridicule here—they probably explain this stuff in first-year university courses on how to do history. It’s to my disadvantage that I wasn’t taught such things and learnt only through stuffing it. Either way, there’s a lesson. And while this might all seem a little self-indulgent, there’s a broader point. For three decades, beginning in 1983, more than 300,000 Sri Lankan Tamils sought refuge in Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state, as the national liberation war raged across the Palk Strait, led by the Tamil Tigers. More than fifteen years after the Sri Lankan armed forces emerged victorious, perhaps 100,000 of Sri Lanka’s Tamil-speaking minority remain in India. The refugees are tolerated, but they have few rights. The majority, about 60,000, reside in more than 100 camps, where they are under the surveillance of Q Branch, the intelligence wing of the Tamil Nadu police, founded initially to deal with the Naxalite movement and later refashioned to tackle Sri Lankan Tamil militant groups operating in the state. Many of these stateless people were born into a country that rejected them, but they have little future in the land that they, their parents or their grandparents fled. There are around 1,000 families in Gummidipundi alone. Over the years, we—*Red Flag*, the Tamil Refugee Council, and many other refugee rights activists in Australia—tried to bring attention to the national liberation movement and its aftershocks. My friends and comrades Lavanya Thevaraja and Aran Mylvaganam, along with others whose names can’t be mentioned here, have done a great deal to bring attention to the situation(s), and to the remnants of the Tigers scattered throughout Asia, some of whom still survive in Sri Lanka. I tried to help as well. It makes sense to interrogate the efforts and consider whether more could have been done in the reporting. Perhaps I’ll soon get another chance. If so, you’d hope we learned a few lessons from previous attempts. And maybe some of these thoughts will be useful for the next set of activists who attempt to write history, be it of a rebellion or a local trade union strike. For what it’s worth, it comes down to this: stay longer, listen more intently, and clarify. Stay for a few days, depending on where you are. Eat, drink and play games. Watch. Listen to what’s being said when you aren’t asking a question. Then come back to clarify some more. My feeling is that this advice holds whether it’s a refugee camp or a working-class household in the suburbs. Think long and hard about how you can do justice to the story you are attempting to tell. Above all, remember. Forgetting is agony. It’s a torment. More than that, it is an injustice. We need to hold on to what *really* happened—wherever it happened—as best we can. --- The photo below is from Vellore refugee camp, Tamil Nadu, where Lavanya (not pictured) was raised. Aran is on the left, taking the shot. None of the men were members of the Tigers. I think all of them were born in India. But that’s another detail that escapes my memory. The main thing is that too many people, all over the world—with all its riches—still don’t have a place they can yet really call home. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/3f/203fcc0d-6556-4e5f-bb3b-59a4389fa85e/content/images/2026/01/8e459383-11d2-480e-875f-8e293d9ef359_1600x1200-jpeg-1.jpg) ### The Liberal Party in crisis URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/the-liberal-party-in-crisis/ Last updated: 2025-05-26T02:52:49.000Z With few exceptions, Liberal Party federal parliamentary representation is now restricted to regional and rural seats removed from the centres of political and financial power it once dominated. For the Liberals to lose their traditional blue-ribbon seats in wealthy areas of Sydney and Melbourne in two successive elections is significant not just because of the loss of votes on the floor of the House but also because of the role these electorates have traditionally played in the internal life of the party. Branches in these electorates have a long history of training activists and leaders, making connections with business executives and senior state functionaries, fostering relationships with deep-pocketed donors and contributing to the party’s image a meeting place for the country’s elites. The Liberal Party has historically been the preferred party of the capitalists, who have been important financial contributors and at times run serious campaigns on its behalf. Currently, though, the capitalists and their representatives are despairing of the Liberals. In part, that’s because the Liberals have now lost two federal elections and could be out of power until the 2030s. But it’s also because, through his attempt to create a right-wing populist constituency, former leader Peter Dutton advocated a shift away from the “free-market” policies beloved by business. Dutton’s nuclear power program would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars of public funds, a white elephant in the eyes of capitalists who can access much cheaper sources of energy and who were happy to let private investors decide if nuclear power had a future in Australia. Dutton’s pitch to regulate or even break up supermarkets, insurance companies and Bunnings and to introduce a gas reservation policy appalled the likes of the Business Council as outrageous infringements on big capitalists. Dutton backed away from his initial commitment to press ahead with the original highly regressive stage three income tax cuts if he won office and very soon learned to love what he initially called Labor’s “cost-of-living sugar hits”. This was a far cry from 2014, when Tony Abbott and Treasurer Joe Hockey delivered a budget written by Business Council of Australia, which threatened a wholesale attack on social welfare and a huge redistribution of income to business and the rich. Since the defeat of the 2014 budget, coming on top of the defeat of the Howard government’s anti-worker WorkChoices industrial relations laws, the Liberals have not been game to try such a full-frontal offensive against the working class again. For this, they have been slammed by pro-business partisans and capitalists. During and after the election, business mouthpiece the *Australian Financial Review* ran a string of comment pieces blasting the Liberals for running economic policies that were “Labor Lite”, “defied basic liberal economic principles” and were a “mix of economic populism and socialism” that “bowed to an insidious entitlement culture”. The *Financial Review*’s attacks are echoed by the Business Council and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. They want a fresh wave of “economic reform” involving income and corporate tax cuts, “workplace reform” (i.e. reductions to minimum wages, awards and worker protections), public asset sell-offs, a reduction in “reckless” public spending on things that benefit workers and the poor and the winding back of industry regulations. The goal, these business lobbyists say, is to increase “productivity”. What that means in practice is fewer restrictions on the capitalists’ ability to rip off the working class, fatten their profit margins and improve their ability to undercut competitors. Yet, presumably, one of the reasons that the capitalists have complained but not intervened to discipline their party is because they have generally done well financially under governments of all stripes. The profits share of national income has increased decade after decade, the economy has expanded almost uninterruptedly since the early 1990s, Labor has governed in the capitalists’ interests and, thanks to the trade union leaders, strikes have been at historic lows. So the bosses have not needed special laws to screw the working class; they have just been getting on and doing it in the absence of much resistance. Business may have tolerated the Liberals’ failure to mount a more aggressive attack on workers and to preside over a new wave of pro-capitalist “reform”, but they don’t like it. The Australian economy may have steadily expanded, but in recent times, growth has tanked and relied entirely on immigration. Capital investment is low, public debt is rising, even if it is lower than elsewhere, and “productivity” is stagnant. These are all alarm signals for the capitalists—and they want a party that can tackle these head on, at the expense of the working class. Since the Liberals lost the election, the bosses must, perforce, lobby the Albanese government to squeeze the working class and cut taxes on business and the well-off. We cannot trust the ALP to resist these demands, While Labor rules for the rich, the capitalists are never satisfied. They want a government run by their own people to rule the country in their interests; they want their party back. Similarly, we need a party to fight for our interests. ### Ben Roberts-Smith reminds us he is a war criminal URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/ben-roberts-smith-reminds-us-he-is-a-war-criminal/ Last updated: 2025-05-26T01:02:17.000Z For the second time, in spite of notoriously censorious defamation laws, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, has been confirmed to be a war criminal. After spectacularly losing a defamation case against Fairfax Media’s Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe in 2023, Roberts-Smith’s appeal, heard by a full bench of the Federal Court, went down in flames on 19 May. Central to the case was claims, now upheld twice to be substantially true, that Roberts-Smith committed war crimes during Australia’s occupation of Afghanistan. These crimes included kicking a man off a cliff and directing soldiers under his command to shoot him; murdering another man and encouraging other soldiers to drink alcohol from his prosthetic leg; and multiple instances of directing other soldiers to kill unarmed people. In his repeated attempts to clear his name and punish his accusers for telling the truth, Roberts-Smith has succeeded only in proving more convincingly that he is, indeed, a war criminal. His arrogance is almost comical. He presents as a man who believes that he is untouchable. In 2021, Roberts-Smith fronted a court to explain why he had petrol-bombed hard drives in his backyard in 2018\. This was after McKenzie broke the story that he was being investigated by the Australian Federal Police for war crimes. Roberts-Smith explained: “If you don’t get rid of a hard drive, all of the data on the hard drive ... can typically be pulled off it”. Indeed. These were the actions he was trying to paint as those of an innocent man. At the time of the original defamation case, barrister Bruce McClintock deployed a foolproof defence in the mould of another war criminal, Bill Clinton: “My client did not drink from the leg”. Unfortunately for Ben Roberts-Smith, video footage has recently emerged which shows that he did, in fact, drink from the leg. It doesn’t take a lot of digging to work out where Roberts-Smith’s self-righteous arrogance comes from. He likely believed he could get out of trouble, like so many private school boys before him, simply by asking the question “Do you know who my father is!?” His own dear papa being, of course, a former Supreme Court justice in Western Australia. He is also backed by a who’s who of Australia’s rich scumbags, from Seven Media’s Kerry Stokes—who funded Roberts-Smith’s original defamation case to the tune of $30 million and gave him an upper management job—through to MAGA mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who has sprung to his defence in recent weeks. He expected the establishment to defend him. He assumed, not without reason, that anything goes in the pursuit of Western interests in the Middle East—that a culture of impunity is an important part of hyping up soldiers to commit the sort of atrocities that are part and parcel of carrying out military campaigns. Australia’s most decorated soldier has become a symbol of the hubris of an empire which gave itself the right to kill not just four innocent Afghans, but thousands upon thousands in the course of a nihilistic 20-year slaughter and occupation. If that wasn’t enough, Roberts-Smith is ostentatiously remorseless. In 2023, he posed for a photo at a beach club in Bali alongside Zachary Rolfe, the still-serving Queensland police officer who shot dead Aboriginal man Kumanjayi Walker in the remote Northern Territory town of Yuendumu in 2019\. In the comments, Rolfe mockingly wrote “Just a couple of cops/murderers and war criminals Havin a lovely afternoon in the sun”. Satisfying as it is to see Roberts-Smith lose again, the reality is that he is walking away with a slap on the wrist. Despite twice being found, on the balance of probabilities, to have committed war crimes, he is not rotting in a cell, nor lying dead at the bottom of a cliff like one of his victims. Instead, he continues to wear his Victoria Cross—Australia’s highest military decoration—proudly on his chest. He was spotted doing so only a month ago, at Perth’s ANZAC Day dawn service. His uniform continues to be displayed in Canberra’s War Memorial, alongside a story of his award-winning “gallantry” in Afghanistan. Only now, it has a mealy-mouthed disclaimer: “In June 2023 a Federal Court judge determined that there was ‘substantial truth’ to the allegations that Roberts-Smith had been involved and complicit in unlawful killings in Afghanistan”. It goes on to remind us, “Roberts-Smith has appealed this decision. Roberts-Smith has not been charged with any offence under criminal law”. The Brereton report, which was commissioned in response to news of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan surfacing, has been similarly toothless. Despite finding evidence of 39 “unlawful killings” perpetrated or participated in by 25 special forces soldiers, not one has been convicted of a crime. Only one, former SAS soldier Oliver Schulz, has faced charges. Naturally, the report stopped short entirely of laying any blame at the feet of the generals and ministers who were ultimately responsible for the war. By contrast, former army lawyer David McBride, who leaked documents about the conduct of Australian troops in Afghanistan to the *ABC* in 2016, languishes in prison, serving a five-year sentence. Like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning before him, for the simple crime of telling the truth, McBride has faced far harsher consequences than any of the murderers in the ranks of the Australian army. Astoundingly, Roberts-Smith has indicated he will be launching a second appeal, this time to the High Court, presumably bankrolled by Gina Rinehart. Despite all the legal professionals who have so far deemed him a war criminal, he obviously thinks there is a chance of winning and getting revenge on those who dared bring his crimes to light. Real justice won’t be served until Roberts-Smith, and every murderous general, politician and media baron who enabled and decorated him, is locked up. _Includes the latest 500 public posts. Use `/sitemap.xml` for the complete archive of public content._