The Red Flag editors have set up this Substack to publish occasional notes and commentary, much of which will not be in the print edition or at the Red Flag website. The posts will mostly contain things that one of us found interesting, thoughts that didn’t make it into articles, and perhaps breaking news or live coverage of events where appropriate. We hope you find them useful. If you were forwarded this email, you can ...
How Australian workers are being screwed, graphically
Australia has never had more billionaires, and those at the top have never had it so good. The richest 200 Australians’ share of the wealth rose from the equivalent of 8.4 percent of GDP in 2004 to 23.7 percent this year, according to the Australia Institute. Meanwhile, as the chart below shows, living standards for the average Australian worker have been pushed down for the last three years.
“The fall is bigger than anything we have seen since 1959 [when relevant data was first complied by the Bureau of Statistics]”, economist Chris Richardson told the Australian newspaper last month. Thanks to the political duopoly of the Liberal and Labor parties, with their rule-for-the-rich policies, we are no better off than we were ten years ago. In fact, many of us are far worse off.
Click here for the interactive if the chart doesn’t load.
One of our favourite images from 2024
A sight for sore eyes: the butcher Bashar al-Assad’s photo was trampled in his own home, in Damascus on 8 December, after he fled to Russia. The Syrian people have taken their country back, but still face many challenges.
PHOTO: Omar Haj Kadour.
More debt crises to come in 2025 and beyond
Almost half the world’s population now lives in countries that spend more on debt servicing than on basic social welfare. Meanwhile, wealthy elites continue to amass fortunes off the back of crisis ridden economies—the International Monetary Fund says that at least 100 countries will have to reduce spending on health, education and other social programs to meet their obligations to creditors.
At the end of last year, the total external debt owed by low- and middle-income countries (those with gross national income per capita of less than US$14,000) reached a record $8.8 trillion. As the chart below indicates, when debt is measured as a proportion of income, the situation is not as bad as the crisis years of the 1980s, when more than 40 countries were financially crippled by creditors. But the situation has detiriorated in the last decade and a half, and several countries remain on the brink of ruin—and potentially rebellion, as was the case in Sri Lanka in 2022.
Click here for the interactive if the chart doesn’t load.
Gaza in 2024: a new Nakba
It is one of the greatest crimes of the 21st century. An investigation of satellite images by Al Jazeera’s Sanad Verification Agency this year revealed that Israel has razed and expelled Palestinians from about one-third of the land in the Gaza Strip (the blue areas in the image on the left below). The Israelis have split the territory in two and continue their attempts to depopulate North Gaza entirely—including ongoing attacks on and demands to “evacuate” the last functioning hospital there, Kamal Adwan Hospital. Much of the rest of the Strip has been made uninhabitable, and most people have been driven from their homes. The Israeli military has dropped at least 75,000 tonnes of explosives (the red areas of the image on the right below); total debris from the destruction is estimated to be more than 42 million tonnes. In the West, opposition to this horror is termed “antisemitism” by the pro-Israel political and media establishment.
SOURCE: Sanad Verification Agency / Al Jazeera.
Editor’s picks of 2024
A few of our favourite Red Flag articles, and a couple of others, to revisit in the New Year:
‘We’re not going to take it!’—mass protests in Argentina
It was the end of 2023. But Jasmine Duff’s first-hand reporting of the mass protests in Argentina provided some sorely needed good news.
Community workers walk out for Palestine
Socialist Alternative member Louisa Bassini helped organise a wildcat strike against Australian complicity in the Gaza genocide. She gave this speech at a subsequent Palestine solidarity rally in Melbourne. As far as we know, it was the only time during the current genocide when a majority in an Australian workplace voted to strike for Palestine, and followed through.
Talking Gaza in Detroit
Ben Hillier was in the US to cover the student encampment movement. While in Detroit for a Palestine solidarity event, he concluded that a bigger story was outside the conference: the US ruling class doesn’t just destroy other countries; it destroys its own cities.
Bec Barrigos speaks at the ‘Your union, your choice’ rally
It’s a YouTube, not a Red Flag article. But Socialist Alternative member Bec Barrigos was holding a copy of our publication when she addressed a Brisbane rally in defence of rank-and-file CFMEU members, whose union is being smashed by the federal Labor government.
Monash University: a yardstick for how far Palestine solidarity has come
D. Taylor’s account of a sensational student general meeting called by Palestine solidarity activists at the Australian university with the most hostile atmosphere for Palestine solidarity activism.
Hope on the picket line
Jerome Small from Socialist Alternative’s workers organising committee spent many a day and night with striking Woolies workers, who were picketing the company’s distribution centres. This is his account of why their fight against the supermarket giant was a fight for all workers around the country.
Hope returns to Syria
A wonderful development in the Middle East—the fall of the despotic Assad regime—analysed by Corey Oakley.
The Syrian revolution returns with a bang
Again, not a Red Flag article, but required reading for anyone wanting to understand what just happened in Syria. Australian-based socialist Michael Karadjis is a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a clinical polemicist against its detractors. This piece, written as the dictatorship crumbled, is outstanding.
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. That’s partly because the socialist movement throughout its history has created a vernacular of working-class struggle, which we want to preserve and promote, even if it’s not widely used at the moment. So we’re creating an activist dictionary, “The A-Z of Marxism”, to help readers understand the language of socialism and trade unionism (including words in this very paragraph, such as “left wing”, “struggle”, “working class”, “activist”, “socialist” and “movement”).
Today’s entry is…
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”.
Finally, a special thanks to subscribers to the print and digital editions of Red Flag. We couldn’t do what we do without your financial support. We’ll see you all in the New Year with our regular Invasion Day issue in late January.
