The emergence of a vibrant student movement in response to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza is an exciting development for socialists. Students have bravely put their studies and future careers (and in the US, their bodies) on the line to stand up for Palestine, shining a light on their universities’ complicity with the Israeli war machine.
For any mass movement to go forward, the dynamism, energy and creative flair that young people bring to it are priceless. Students have pushed to the forefront of the international solidarity movement, giving it a more radical edge and providing a left-wing pole of attraction within it. 
This is far from the first time that students have taken a radical lead. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, students were often the catalyst for mass activity on a much wider scale.
The general strike in France in May ’68 was sparked by student protests. Students and workers found common ground in their hatred of the authoritarian regime and the capitalist system behind it. Their combined forces created a deep social crisis, a nearly revolutionary situation that caused President Charles De Gaulle to flee the country. It was possible to restore “order” only because of the treachery of the Stalinist French Communist Party, which bullied and cajoled workers to return to the job—and did its level best to prevent interaction between students and workers.
In Italy’s “hot autumn” of 1969, radical students linked up with workers to challenge both bosses and the state, setting up student-worker committees and helping to establish rank-and-file groups in workplaces. Even after the workers’ struggle subsided, demonstrations and activities on the campuses maintained the momentum for a period.
It was students who provided the militant vanguard of the movement against the Vietnam War, engaging in myriad acts of disruption and civil disobedience. Many also developed a new political outlook, developing a critique of the capitalist system that causes wars.
Similarly, students played a leading role in anti-racist campaigns, from the civil rights movement in the US to the international anti-apartheid movement to the freedom rides by student activists in Australia that highlighted and challenged the appalling racism directed towards Aboriginal people.
It wasn’t just in the West that students led significant struggles. In October 1973, for example, students in Thailand led an uprising that overthrew the military dictatorship and forced the king into exile. Late into the 1970s, large numbers of students in South Korea and Chile also fought heroically against their oppressive right-wing regimes, often drawing workers into their struggles.
Even well after the decline of the mass student movements, students in China in 1989 led the revolt against their supposedly “Communist” government, with many thousands occupying Tiananmen Square for weeks on end. As in France, they sparked off a workers’ movement that presented a serious threat to the regime, subdued only by brutal army repression.
In this century, students have played an important role in struggles all over the world, from Hong Kong to Sudan to Chile to Canada, to name just a few.
So clearly, students can at times be a powerful force for change. However, because students play no direct role in producing profits, they have no real social power and cannot overthrow the system. Ultimately, only the working class—by collectively stopping the flow of profits and taking control of production—can defeat the combined power of the capitalists and the state.
Nonetheless, students can be a vital element of the struggle. They will often be the first to take action, and because of their ability to move into struggle quickly and their readiness to disrupt “business as usual”, they can act as a detonator for broader social forces. Within a movement or campaign, it is often students who put pressure on (or sideline) the more conservative elements and push it to the left. 
For much of capitalism’s history, universities were the preserve of the elite, where those who were born to rule were trained to rule. However, there were always at least a few (Marx and Engels come to mind) who rejected this pathway. In the early twentieth century, Lenin argued that students could play a vital role as “the vanguard of revolutionary democracy”, drawing workers into the socialist movement, and insisted that revolutionaries should conduct serious work among students.
But the composition of the student population changed dramatically with the economic boom that followed World War II. 
In a newly redivided world, the dominant powers competed frantically for military and economic advantage. The Cold War arms race and the drive for technological development created a demand for much higher numbers of skilled and educated workers to operate the machines, the computers and weapons systems, and to administer the expanding state sector. 
Hence the explosion of higher education, which for the first time drew in large numbers of people from working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds. If anything, that process has accelerated. Between 2000 and 2014, the number of students in higher education globally more than doubled to 207 million. This has dramatically narrowed the gap and increased the connection between students and the working class. Today’s students are less of a detached elite and more embedded into the fabric of society.
Students do not belong to any class—as a group they are in transition, an intermediate layer. A few may rise into the upper echelons of society (especially if that’s where they come from), and some will become middle-class professionals, but the majority are destined to become technical or white-collar workers, just as subject to exploitation as the manual workers more traditionally understood as the working class. In this sense, modern universities can be seen as factories, churning out graduates who keep the wheels of the system turning.
Universities are supposed to foster the pursuit of knowledge, the exploration of ideas, a scientific understanding of the world, abstract and critical thinking, creativity—all in the interests of human progress. To the extent that this is true, it’s actually in the interests of maintaining the status quo, both by training the managers and workers capitalism needs and by inculcating the ideology that upholds the system. But the continued advances required by capitalism do demand some of these things, so students are exposed to a range of ideas and have the time and space to discuss and develop them. And the very contradiction between the romantic ideal of the university and their increasing reality as big businesses and willing partners of capitalist enterprises can raise all sorts of questions. Students soon discover that the competition and profit motive that characterise capitalism pervade university life. 
Young people are more likely to encounter radical ideas at university than anywhere else, and socialist clubs can often find a receptive audience by both initiating activity and providing forums for political discussion. And although students work more today than previously, they are less tied to jobs and family responsibilities and have more flexible time than most workers, giving them more freedom to engage in political activity. This can make them more sensitive to shifts in the political climate. By recognising and relating to such shifts, socialists can play a decisive role in deepening the process of radicalisation. And when serious struggles erupt, students can quickly start to develop a revolutionary critique of capitalism.
As a worker, you must win the support of the majority to undertake any action against the boss, such as a strike. Students face no such limitations. Quite small numbers can initiate bold actions that capture the imagination, develop momentum and inspire emulation. The examples cited earlier often started with tiny groups taking a stand and galvanising wider circles.
The volatility that is characteristic of student movements is both a strength and a weakness: a strength in that it means that students can spring into action quickly and with enormous energy; a weakness in that both their intermediate class position and the transitory nature of student life make it difficult to sustain student organisation over the long term.
In the right circumstances, though, student actions can have an impact well beyond their ranks. Most potently, students’ youthful enthusiasm and defiance—as we saw in May ’68—can inspire and ignite struggle by workers, the only social force that can bring real, material pressure to bear. 
How far that process can go is a matter of politics and organisation. 
Many of the students radicalised during the 1960s and ’70s rightly rejected the Stalinist politics and organisations that then dominated the left. Among the currents that vied for influence, the “new left” and many anarchists suffered from an intellectual elitism that dismissed the working class as the key force for social change. They instead looked to struggles in the Third World (the Cultural Revolution in China, guerrilla activity), alternative lifestyles such as communes or even terrorism, all of which were a dead end. 
A lot of student activists were simply demoralised by the collapse of the movement and dropped out. Others made their peace with the system and sought positions of influence within it. For example, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a radical student leader in May ’68 known as “Danny the Red”, became a leader of the German Greens and a European MP; closer to home, Jim Bacon, a Maoist student leader at Monash, ended up as the Labor Premier of Tasmania.
On a more positive note, large numbers of radicalised students went into teaching and public service jobs, significantly accelerating the shift of their white-collar unions to the left.
A small number, however, rediscovered revolutionary Marxism and set about building organisations dedicated to the project of fighting for socialism and human liberation, led by the working class. Paradoxically, campuses are central to this. Even when struggle is at a low ebb, there are always some students who can be won to revolutionary politics on the basis of ideas. They need to develop the ability to defend their political positions on contested terrain, and when the opportunity arises to take action, they can gain experience in mobilising and leading others.
Student clubs play an important role in recruiting and training new members who can provide the cadre of a revolutionary party. Building a base among students is therefore of enormous strategic importance for any revolutionary organisation. It is out of such work that Socialist Alternative has grown to be the largest revolutionary organisation in Australia. 
At some point, as capitalism continues to wreak havoc on society and the environment, there will be a revival of mass resistance. This will create opportunities for students to link up with the working class and build a revolutionary party capable of leading a fight to overthrow capitalism and build a better world.

Tess Lee Ack

The role of students in radical struggles

In 1968 I was a Year 11 student at a Catholic girls’ school in suburban Melbourne. The events of that momentous year—including the Tet offensive in Vietnam and the growing anti-war movement, the student revolt and general strike in France, the civil rights movement in the US, and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia—convinced me that the world was seriously fucked up. 
More than anything though, like many of my contemporaries, I was inspired by those who were fighting back. After the stultifying conservatism of the 1950s, a new and exciting process of mass radicalisation was taking place, especially among young people and students. 
Determined to be part of it, I chose to study at Monash University, at the time the most radical campus in Australia. The Vietnam War was a defining issue for my generation, and Monash was at the forefront of the anti-war movement. 
In 1967, radical students there had begun collecting money for the National Liberation Front—an act condemned as treason by the media and the establishment, but which shifted the entire anti-war debate to the left. Simply opposing the war on a pacifist basis became the soft, moderate position; if you were left-wing, you supported those fighting the imperialist aggression of the US and Australia. 
Any genuine mass movement involves a wide range of people and organisations. Anti-war groups sprang up everywhere—in the suburbs, at workplaces and in unions, on campuses and at high schools—reflecting a range of political opinions and engaging in a variety of activities. 
Along with large mobilisations like the May 1970 Moratorium there were innumerable smaller and often more militant actions, such as assaults on the US Consulate, occupying National Service Centres, dramatic stunts by draft resisters, handing out anti-war leaflets in the city in defiance of by-laws, and much more. 
In response to the growing militancy, arrests and police violence were common, but far from deterring activists, this only further radicalised many people. In the end, the movement was vindicated, and US imperialism suffered a major setback. A minority were won to revolutionary socialist politics in this period, including the tiny group that eventually became Socialist Alternative. 
In the 50-odd years since, there have been occasional eruptions of mass struggle, such as the anti-capitalist and Occupy movements, the huge protests against the war in Iraq and Black Lives Matter, but there has been nothing anywhere near as deep and sustained as the movement against the Vietnam War. Until now.
Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza has given rise to an international solidarity movement with Palestine which is unprecedented, but in some ways strikingly reminiscent of the Vietnam movement. 
Every week for seven months, many thousands have taken to the streets in enormous protest rallies. As well, there have been a host of smaller actions, such as blockading Israeli ships, picketing companies that produce materials for the Israeli war machine, confronting pro-Israel politicians and agitating to get local councils to take a stand against the genocide. A number of new solidarity groups have sprung up, while existing organisations such as Students for Palestine have found a new and wider audience. 
Once again, students have been at the forefront. Indeed, we are currently witnessing one of the most serious outbreaks of national student protest since the Vietnam era. <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/students-protest-palestine">The strikes and walk-outs</a> by university and high school students were a great start. And now, with <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/palestine-solidarity-encampments-spread-across-australia">camps established on numerous university campuses</a>, demanding the severing of ties with Israel, students are the radical cutting edge of the broader protest movement.
The camps are centres of both activism and political discussion. This, again, is reminiscent of campus activism in the ’70s. Teach-ins for example were a feature of the anti-Vietnam War movement, arming participants with the facts and arguments to counter the lies and propaganda of the other side. Discussions about why the world’s most powerful military was invading a tiny third world country led many to an understanding that the war was not an isolated act of aggression, but the inevitable product of capitalism and imperialism.
Another similarity is that the brutal repression of the camps in the US (which Liberal and some Labor politicians <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/fine-unis-that-fail-to-crack-down-on-racist-pro-palestine-encampments-coalition-20240503-p5fotz.html">want to see happen here</a>) has not only failed to intimidate Palestine activists but, like the police violence of the ’70s, has exposed the role of the state and contributed to the movement spreading.
There are differences of course. The stakes for imperialism are higher than they were in Vietnam. The US will not abandon Israel, which is vital to its strategic and economic interests. Liberating Palestine will require the building of a mass, working-class movement throughout the Middle East to overthrow the treacherous and reactionary Arab leaders, such as we saw during the Arab Spring of 2011. 
It also requires challenging and fighting the whole system of imperialism, and the international solidarity movement can play a role in that. As with Vietnam, the intervention of socialists will be crucial to winning arguments that can not only take the movement forward, but convince as many people as possible to commit to the anti-capitalist struggle for the long term.
It’s a big ask, but we’re better placed to do that than in the 1970s, when the left was still dominated by dead-end Stalinist politics. Significant numbers of a new generation have been propelled into political activism, leading to the emergence of a vibrant and sustained solidarity movement. It’s incredibly inspiring for those, like me, who were part of the Vietnam-era student revolt, and provides an all too rare opportunity to build the forces of the revolutionary left, both quantitatively and qualitatively. It’s an opportunity we can’t let slip.

From Vietnam to Palestine: students are right to revolt

German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht’s life spanned the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century. It was shaped by war, revolution, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and Stalinism and the Cold War, and his work reflects this. “Art”, he said, “is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”.
Brecht famously developed a new and revolutionary theory of the theatre—generally known as “epic theatre”, though he himself referred to it as “dialectical theatre”—that is still influential today. His plays are regularly performed all over the world, and frequently crop up on school curricula. Many features of epic theatre were incorporated into film theory in the 1970s. The films of US director Spike Lee, for example, owe a lot to Brechtian theory. Many people who have never heard of Brecht will have seen his innovations in film and theatre.
Brecht was 16 when World War One began. In 1915, while still at school, he wrote an essay arguing that there was no honour in dying for your country. He was conscripted in the last months of the war and set to work as a medical orderly. This experience further strengthened his horror of war and his hatred of the society that produced it. He later recalled: “As a very young man I was mobilised, and served in a hospital ... I saw with my own eyes how they patched up people post-haste so as to ship them back to the front as soon as possible”. His fiercely anti-war poem, “The Legend of the Dead Soldier”, was based on this experience and had him on the Nazis’ death list as early as 1923.
Brecht was a minor participant in the revolution that ended the war in 1918, serving as a delegate in the short-lived Bavarian soviet. After moving to Berlin to work in the theatre, Brecht found himself at the centre of the flowering of radical art and literature during the Weimar Republic years. In 1922, he was awarded the Kleist Prize, the most important German literary award of the time, for his play Drums in the Night, set against the background of the Spartacist uprising in 1919. The play shone a light on the grievances felt by many working-class soldiers returning from the front to find that their class had been deceived by politicians and robbed by war profiteers. 
Germany was in a continuous state of economic and political crisis during the 1920s, and society was polarised along class lines. Brecht was disgusted by Weimar Germany: the greed, corruption and smug self-satisfaction of the triumphant German bourgeoisie, the treachery of the Social Democrats and the wretchedness of workers and the poor. 
In about 1926, Brecht began a serious study of Marxism, under the guidance of Karl Korsch and Walter Benjamin. He delighted in Marxism’s scientific approach and intellectual rigour. His two short poems “Praise of Communism” and “Praise of the Dialectic” are testament to his newly found enthusiasm. He later said: “When I read Das Kapital, I understood my own pieces”, and commented, “This chap Marx was the first person to really understand my plays”. 
Many Brecht scholars attempt to separate his art from his politics. The usual take is that Brecht was a great artist despite all that Marxist nonsense he espoused. But for Brecht, art and politics were inseparable. From the late 1920s, all of his work was underpinned by his Marxist world view.
In 1928, he found fame and fortune virtually overnight with The Threepenny Opera—a stinging critique of Weimar society and capitalism more generally. Yet, much to his consternation, the capitalists, who were targeted in the play, ate it up. They loved the songs, they loved the wit and the drama, but the politics and the savage satire went right over their heads. 
The success of The Threepenny Opera got Brecht thinking about how to ensure that his political critique couldn’t be missed or ignored in future. Theatre audiences, he said, “hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”. He wanted to create a theatre that had the opposite effect, a theatre that forced its audience to think, to ask questions, make judgements, draw conclusions and, hopefully, act on them.
Traditional naturalistic or dramatic theatre is escapist—the aim is to make the audience forget their own lives, passively immerse themselves in the world of the characters on stage and identify with their emotions. Issues are resolved, whether happily or tragically, and the audience undergoes a process of catharsis. 
Brecht was utterly opposed to this. He wanted his audience to remain objective and emotionally uninvolved so that they could make rational judgements about the issues raised in his plays. The story is the point of interest, not the characters. The story shows the interplay of social forces represented by various characters, and from this the play’s lesson or moral emerges.
To achieve the latter’s aims, Brecht used a range of theatrical devices and techniques to constantly remind the audience that they were watching a theatrical presentation of life, not life itself. To create a distance between the audience and the action, he often used historical or exotic settings to comment on contemporary social and political issues. For example, Joan of Arc becomes a Salvation Army operative in a Chicago meatworks in St Joan of the Stockyards. His anti-war play Mother Courage was set during the Thirty Years War to encourage the audience to think in historical terms about the material causes of war. And rather than developing in a linear way, the action was chopped into discrete scenes or episodes to create a montage effect. 
Brecht wanted to break down the “fourth wall” so audiences could never forget that they were watching a play. For example, non-realistic sets were rearranged by stage hands in full view of the audience; at times the whole theatre would be lit up, not just the stage.
For the same reason, he used devices such as a narrator or chorus to comment on the action, often speaking directly to the audience. Signs and placards were used to provide information about what was really happening, songs and dance interrupted the action and commented on it. 
These techniques and more are collectively known as Verfremdungseffekte, which is often rendered in English as “alienation”. This is somewhat misleading, as it invites comparison with the Marxist concept of alienation (Entfremdung). Verfremdung in fact is the familiar made strange, so that it can be objectively examined and analysed, rather than being taken for granted and viewed as natural. For Brecht, if something seems “the most obvious thing in the world”, it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up. So “estrangement” is a better description of Brecht’s theatrical techniques. 
Consistent with his view of the theatre as a sphere of production, Brecht worked in a highly collaborative way. Anyone who worked with him was encouraged to comment and make suggestions, from the actors themselves to stagehands and technicians.
As Brecht developed the theory and practice of epic theatre, he experimented with a form known as the Lehrstück, or teaching play. He described these pieces as “a collective political meeting” in which the audience actively participated. They were sometimes performed at workplaces, with the performance followed by a political debate. Brecht would invite comment from the audience and would at times adopt their suggestions. 
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Brecht was forced to join the diaspora of left-wing German artists and intellectuals in exile. His work in this period was largely devoted to the anti-fascist struggle. His play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui was a satire on the rise of fascism, the Nazis being portrayed as gangsters. He also wrote a lot of songs and children’s rhymes intended to contribute to the fight against fascism, both within Germany and beyond. “The Song of the United Front”, for example, was sung by socialists who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. 
To those who derided this work and accused him of simply churning out propaganda, he replied: “You can’t write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen”. 
Once the war started, Brecht wasn’t safe in Western Europe. He briefly considered going to Russia, but was warned not to by, among others, the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács, who told him he wouldn’t be safe there either. Brecht’s work was considered suspect, if not outright decadent, in a country where only “socialist realist” art was tolerated.
Brecht’s mentor Karl Korsch had been a leading member of the German Communist Party (KPD), but in 1926 was expelled for “deviationism”. This caused Brecht to develop a lifelong distrust of party officialdom. The feeling was mutual; the Stalinist KPD was not a fan of his work. Nonetheless, Brecht was pulled towards the KPD. It seemed to him and many others that only a mass working-class party could fight the rise of fascism. 
But in private writings and conversations, Brecht was ambivalent about Stalin’s Russia. Stalin’s industrialisation program was in reality about the rapid and forced accumulation of capital, in order to catch up to and compete with Western capitalism. But like many others at the time, Brecht saw in it the development of the productive forces, and therefore believed Russia to be historically progressive. 
However, he also recognised—and unfortunately accepted—that the price of that “progress” involved the destruction of workers’ democracy: “In Russia there is a dictatorship over the working class. We should avoid dissociating ourselves from this dictatorship for as long as it still does useful work for the workers”. As Isaac Deutscher put it, Brecht “surrendered to Stalinism with a load of doubt on his mind, as the capitulators in Russia had done”.
Brecht was dismayed by the purges of the late 1930s, which claimed the lives of some of his closest associates and friends. Not wishing to share their fate, he went to the US. But his hopes of making a living there were soon dashed, and he found himself blacklisted. Of 40 film scripts he wrote, only one was accepted, and it was censored so severely that he withdrew it. It was in this period that he wrote or completed his most famous plays: Life of Galileo, Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Good Person of Setzuan. 
Shortly after the war, Brecht was hauled before the McCarthyist House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and grilled about the political content of his work, especially the didactic plays. The day after his hearing, he took a plane back to Europe. Despite all his reservations about Stalinism, he felt he had to take sides in a world now dominated by the Cold War between the US and the USSR. 
From a personal perspective, the West offered him only continued persecution. The East German regime, only too delighted to have an artist of his stature to lend it credibility, offered him his own theatre. But Brecht was cautious: he came back with an Austrian passport and a Swiss bank account.
Brecht soon came into conflict with the Stalinist cultural bureaucracy, which censored his plays and even banned two of them. The most influential theatre magazine ran a campaign against him. Then, on 17 June 1953, East German workers rose up in the first major revolt against Stalinism. It was brutally put down by Soviet troops. 
Brecht sympathised with the workers; he wrote a letter to the secretary of the SED (the ruling Socialist Unity Party) calling for dialogue on their grievances. But he made the fatal mistake of concluding his letter with a statement of general support for the party. To his dismay, that was the only sentence that was published. 
This was pretty much the end of Brecht’s public life. He retreated to his country house, where he poured his disillusionment and feelings of bad conscience into his final poems. “The Solution” (not published until 1964) is the pithy, satirical Brecht, holding the East German regime up to criticism and ridicule, as he’d done before against the Nazis:
After the uprising of the 17th June The Secretary of the Writers’ Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalin Avenue Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another? 









Brecht died in August 1956, only a couple of months before the Hungarian revolution shook the Stalinist empire. 
Just a year before the 1989 revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall and heralded the collapse of the Stalinist monolith, the East German government built a monument to Brecht. A plaque quotes from his play The Mother:
Who still lives, should not say never! The secure is not secure So, the way it is, it will not remain.


But, perhaps unsurprisingly, Brecht’s prophetic concluding lines are missing:
After the rulers have spoken The ruled will speak.

Brecht never lost his belief in Marxism or his conviction that the working class was the agent of human liberation. But the crimes of Stalinism, and the seeming lack of an alternative, shook his confidence and brought him close to despair. Yet his very last poem, while expressing his feelings of failure, is also a plea not to give up.
And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself Surely you see that.

The revolutionary theatre of Bertolt Brecht

“People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away. The small black bundles now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands. At the same instant birds ignited in midair. Mosquitoes and flies, squirrels, family pets crackled and were gone.”
—Richard Rhodes, The making of the atomic bomb
“Little Boy” was the ludicrously innocuous name of the uranium bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, destroying 70 percent of its buildings. This single bomb had unprecedented destructive power, with an explosive yield equal to 15,000 tonnes of TNT. Three days later, the “Fat Man”, an even more powerful and deadly plutonium bomb, razed the city of Nagasaki, levelling 6.7 square kilometres. 
To this day, it remains uncertain how many people perished when US planes unleashed these deadly weapons of mass destruction, causing ground temperatures to reach 4,000°C and radioactive rain to pour down. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as many as 210,000 (140,000 at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki) died up to the end of 1945. The vast majority were non-combatant civilians—women, children and older people. 
Those deaths were only the start: the effects lasted for decades and are still being felt. Those who survived the initial firestorms endured terrible side effects from radiation exposure. Pregnant women experienced high rates of miscarriage and still births, while children exposed in utero were more likely to have birth defects, intellectual disabilities or impaired growth, as well as an increased risk of developing cancer. In the decade following the bombings, there was a marked increase in incidence of leukaemia, as well as thyroid, breast, lung and other cancers. 
The bombings were not only war crimes; they were crimes against humanity. But it’s always the victors who control the narrative, and in this case the enduring myth is that the use of nuclear weapons was necessary to bring an end to the war. It wasn’t. 
The decision to drop atom bombs was a political, not a military, decision. It was opposed by every one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and most of the US’s top military officials. They all believed that Japan—its air force and navy shattered, its harbours mined and blockaded and 40 percent of its major cities destroyed—was ready to surrender. The 1946 United States Strategic Bombing Survey in Japan concurred:
“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts ... it is [our] opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
At school, we’re taught that World War Two was a “war for democracy”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like World War One, it was a war for empire: the inevitable outcome of capitalist competition, with the most powerful states striving to carve up the world between them. Each was determined to increase their economic and political power at the expense of the others, to create spheres of influence in which their respective capitalist classes could maximise their profits. 
World War Two is best understood, as historian Richard Overy put it, as one between “incumbent” and “insurgent” imperialist powers—primarily Britain, France and the US (the Allies) on one hand, and Germany, Japan and Italy (the Axis) on the other. The Allied powers held fifteen times more colonial acreage than the Axis states. As the head of Britain’s navy candidly observed in 1934, “We have got most of the world already, or the best parts of it. We ... want to keep what we have got and prevent others from taking it away from us”. The Axis powers sought to redivide the world and grab a bigger share for themselves. 
The USSR was also an emerging power; Stalin had consolidated his counter-revolutionary rule in the late 1920s and embarked on a program of rapid forced industrialisation to catch up with the West. He was determined to restore and expand the Russian empire, and industrialisation was key to being able to compete militarily with the likes of the US and Britain.
Initially, Stalin made a deal with Hitler, but joined the Allied side when Germany attacked Russia in June 1941. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 1941 provided the pretext for the US to join the war. A State Department memorandum a year earlier had warned that the US’s “diplomatic and strategic position would be considerably weakened ... by our loss of Chinese, Indian and South Seas markets (and by our loss of much of the Japanese market for our goods ...) as well as by insurmountable restrictions upon our access to the rubber, tin, jute, and other vital materials of the Asian and Oceanic regions”.
The entry into the war of the US and the Soviet Union shifted the military balance decisively. However, once it was clear that the Allies would win the war in Europe, the rivalry between them came to the fore. There was a flurry of deal making as their leaders jockeyed for maximum advantage in the postwar world. There was nothing democratic about this: the people of Eastern Europe, for example, got no say about being brought under the domination of the USSR.
The Manhattan Project—set up in 1942 to produce nuclear weapons—was well underway when Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met at Yalta, Crimea, in February 1945, but the bomb had not yet been tested. The USSR was not at war with Japan at this point, and the Americans believed Russian ground troops would be needed to win the war in Asia. So, in return for Stalin’s pledge to declare war on Japan once victory in Europe was concluded, the US and Britain agreed to territorial concessions.
By the time of the Potsdam conference in July, the situation had altered. The war in Europe had ended with Germany’s surrender in June, and the bomb had been successfully tested. This changed US strategic thinking. Secretary of State James Byrnes advised new US President Truman that “the bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our terms at the end of the war”. 
A demonstration of the military power of the US would provide leverage in negotiating the postwar world order to its advantage, intimidating the Russians and keeping them out of Japan and China. The certainty of hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths was no deterrent. On the contrary, as one historian wrote: “[Hiroshima and Nagasaki] had been chosen not despite but because they had a high density of civilian housing ... the attacks were to be a show, a display, a demonstration”.
On receiving the news of the Hiroshima bombing, on his way home from Potsdam, Truman declared it to be “the greatest thing in history”.
The use of atomic weapons was not the first atrocity visited on Japan. In 1944, Britain and the US had begun saturation bombings of cities in Germany and Japan respectively, in a deliberate strategy designed to “undermine civilian morale”—a euphemism for the mass murder of civilians that would become standard US policy in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. 
On a single night in March 1945, US planes dropped on Tokyo masses of incendiary bombs containing an early version of napalm. The fires spread rapidly through the flimsy dwellings of the poor, and the atmosphere became superheated to almost 1,000°C. An estimated 125,000 people died of oxygen deficiency, carbon monoxide poisoning, radiant heat, direct flames or flying debris or were trampled to death; those who jumped into the river for protection were boiled alive. 
In August 1946, the New Yorker published a lengthy article by war correspondent John Hersey, graphically describing the results of the Hiroshima bomb, including the horrific effects of radiation poisoning. Many were reading about this for the first time, and the article had a huge impact. As a defender of the bombing observed, it “did not moralize or sensationalize”, but “humanize[d] what the Air Force publicists had always taken pains to keep abstract: civilian death”.
James Conant, a key figure in the Manhattan Project, feared that the truth about Hiroshima and Nagasaki would weaken the resolve of future Cold War leaders, and that he and others who worked on the bomb would be seen as war criminals. He pressured Secretary of War Henry Stimson to write a response justifying the bombing as “the least abhorrent choice”. Stimson was reluctant, confiding to a friend his fear that “the full enumeration of the steps in the tragedy will excite horror”. The friend, a former Supreme Court justice, replied that it was necessary to combat “sloppy sentimentality”, and silence “self-righteous critics”.
Following the publication of Stimson’s article, most mainstream commentary fell into line, and the lie has persisted despite the evidence.
In wars, atrocities are committed by all sides. The war crimes of the Nazis and the Japanese army are well documented and rightly condemned, but the idea that “our side” is untainted is refuted by numerous examples. Think of the war on Iraq—justified with false claims about weapons of mass destruction. The city of Fallujah was heavily bombarded by US Marines in 2004, their weapons made even more lethal by the addition of white phosphorus, the use of which in inhabited areas is supposedly banned by the UN. Since then, there has been a dramatic increase in infant mortality, serious birth defects, leukaemia and other cancers.
A study titled “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009”, reported that the types of cancer there are “similar to [those suffered by] Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout”; and indeed, that the toxic legacy of the US assault on Fallujah is even “worse than Hiroshima”—for example a 38-fold increase in leukaemia as compared to a 17-fold increase in Hiroshima.
Today, the weapons at the disposal of our rulers are more destructive than ever. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been, because of Russia’s threats to use atomic weapons against Ukraine. But the growing danger of a war between the US and China also looms large. Either could spiral out of control. Capitalist competition in the form of imperialism makes wars inevitable. The only way to stop them—and atrocities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki—is to get rid of this barbaric system.

Why the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki

“We all want to change the world”, sang John Lennon, a sentiment most of us could agree with. Lennon was inspired by the widespread political protests of the late 1960s, including mass strikes by French workers that nearly brought down the government. It seemed back then that radical change was on the agenda.
But it didn’t happen, and today the need to change the world is more urgent than ever. Climate change and the drive to war threaten the lives of hundreds of millions. And then there’s the routine business as usual of capitalism. Every day, millions of people die or have their lives ruined by war, hunger, disease, homelessness, industrial “accidents”—most of which are the direct product of our rulers’ insatiable drive for profits. 
“But when you talk about destruction”, continued Lennon, “Don’t you know that you can count me out”—another sentiment that many would agree with. Even though the world is going to hell in a handbasket, the idea of revolution—and the violence that is associated with it—just seems too extreme. Surely there’s a more peaceful way?
It’s completely understandable that people shrink from violence. But unfortunately, attempts to reform the system peacefully have failed miserably—usually because violence is used by the wealthy and powerful to prevent any meaningful change.
Violence is deeply embedded in capitalist society. As Karl Marx wrote, “capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. It wields its enormous destructive power on a daily basis. So revolution is not about destruction, it’s about stopping our rulers’ ability to use violence against us. 
The need for revolution arises from the nature of capitalist society. Capitalists are a tiny minority who profit from exploiting the labour of the vast majority. They rely on the state—with its armies, police, courts, jails and so on—to maintain this situation. Far from being a neutral institution, the state exists to defend capitalist interests, against both foreign rivals (hence the unending wars) and opposition from below, especially from the working class. 
So, fundamentally, revolution is about winning the battle for democracy—not the sham we have now, but a genuinely equal society. That means taking the wealth and the means to produce it away from the capitalists and using it to satisfy human needs. That is the basis of socialism.
Only the working class can do that. Only they can challenge the capitalists’ rule by stopping the flow of profits at the source. An organised working class is the only power that can match and defeat the power of the capitalist state. Every strike gives us a glimpse of this potential. By standing together and withdrawing their labour, workers can win concessions such as wage rises and improved conditions. 
But to transform society, this needs to happen on a mass scale. A revolution cannot be the act of a minority or a conspiracy. It can succeed only when the majority of workers, from every sector, assert their power, not only to cut off the bosses’ profits, but to take production into their own hands and reorganise it completely. 
That is something the capitalist state will simply not allow. It will use all the repressive forces at its disposal to stop such a thing occurring. That’s the source of most of the violence associated with revolutions—or any serious challenge to capitalist rule. Whenever the capitalists feel threatened, they respond with the most hideous violence. 
For example, the Paris Commune of 1871, the first attempt to create a democratic workers’ state, was ruthlessly smashed. More than 30,000 were slaughtered and 15,000 arrested. In Chile in 1973, the mildly reformist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military coup, leading to the massacre of tens of thousands of workers, while countless others disappeared into General Pinochet’s jails. 
More recently, think of the violent repression meted out to workers in the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring, the torture and execution of protesters in Myanmar and Iran.
In Chile, Allende trusted the military not to intervene, and disarmed workers by assuring them that the army would not move against them. Similarly in 2011, Egyptian workers were deceived into thinking that the army supported their revolt, only to find themselves living under even worse terror than under the dictator Mubarak.
We have to be prepared to defend ourselves against such reprisals. For our side to renounce violence altogether means conceding defeat from the outset and condemning humanity to the continuing violence of capitalism. And we need to be clear that the state is our implacable enemy. 
The state has a virtual monopoly of armed force. But a determined mass revolutionary movement can inspire sections of the army and police, many of whom come from the working class, to change sides—as for example when the women of Petrograd successfully appealed to the tsar’s Cossack troops not to fire on them in the 1917 Russian Revolution. 
Holding back from revolution leaves the armed forces under the control of our rulers. As the French revolutionary Louis Saint-Just observed: “Those who make revolutions by halves dig their own graves”.
The reality is that the fight for a better world will not be won without some violence. The best way to minimise that violence is to build as large a movement as possible, one that can disarm and overwhelm the forces ranged against us. Such was the case in October 1917. The insurrection in Petrograd was nearly bloodless because the majority of workers, soldiers and peasants supported it.
Ultimately, the choice is not between violence and non-violence, but, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote over 100 years ago, between socialism and barbarism. And if we can create a world in which a tiny minority no longer control all the wealth, where wealth is used to eradicate poverty and need, the root causes of violence will disappear.

Do revolutions have to be violent?

Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) is often described as the “founder of German social democracy”. But his influence on the German workers’ movement was mostly disastrous.
Lassalle participated in the 1848 revolution, for which he spent a year in prison. But he was not at all the workers’ champion. Frederick Engels said, in an 1891 letter to Karl Kautsky, that until 1862 Lassalle was “a specifically Prussian vulgar democrat with strong Bonapartist leanings” before “he suddenly switched round for purely personal reasons”. Lassalle tried unsuccessfully to assume leadership of the main bourgeois party, the Progressives. His hatred of the liberal bourgeoisie and subsequent turn to the working class were largely due to his resentment at the liberals’ rejection of him.
In the 1860s, there was a revival of struggle in Europe, as the working class recovered from the defeats of 1848. This made it possible to establish an international workers’ organisation, the First International, in which Karl Marx and Engels were key players.
In the early 1860s, the German workers’ movement was starting to organise, notably in Leipzig. But lacking in experience and self-confidence, these workers felt the need for a spokesperson and turned to Lassalle. Still smarting from his rejection by the liberals, Lassalle saw an opportunity to put himself at the head of this burgeoning workers’ movement and use it as a vehicle to advance his own ideas. He founded the General German Workers’ Association (GGWA) in 1863 and ran it as a dictatorship.
Lassalle was killed in a duel in 1864, but his ideas had quickly become hegemonic in a section of the German movement. Marxist writer Hal Draper commented that, by the time the First International was established in 1864, “the German field had already been pre-empted by Lassalleanism”. Under Lassalle, the new movement “was cradled in the swaddling clothes of a bureaucratic dictatorship, nurtured on state-cultist politics, and educated in the spirit of the Cult of the Individual Leader”.
The centrepiece of Lassalle’s ideology was “state socialism”. Like the philosopher Georg Hegel (whom he studied at university), he believed that the state’s mission was to accomplish the development of human freedom. The role of workers’ or popular movements was essentially to pressure the state into fulfilling its historic role. Marx, having long since rejected the idea that the state could be any kind of progressive force, argued that “state socialism” was a form of reformism. 
For reformists, social change comes about through tinkering with the existing state. But for Marx, the question is who controls society—that is, which class rules the state. Therefore, the aim must be a change in class power. Uncompromising hostility to the state, the instrument of the class that rules society, was central to Marx and Engels’ thinking—even before the 1871 Paris Commune demonstrated in practice that workers couldn’t simply take over the existing state but had to smash it and replace it with a new kind of state.
For Lassalle, however, the state was “the immemorial vestal fire of all civilisation”. And he drew no distinction between his idealist conception of the state and the oppressive nature of the state as it actually existed. 
In practice, this meant siding with reaction. As Draper pointed out in the fourth volume of his monumental Karl Marx’s theory of revolution, “in 1862 reformists still had a choice between contending ruling classes, the old one still in control of the state [the feudal aristocrats] and the new one dominating the economy [the capitalists]. Lassalle chose the power that still visibly monopolised the state machine”. That is, he looked to a state that rested on the old reactionary class; concretely, he tried to form a secret alliance with Prussian Chancellor Bismarck against the liberal bourgeoisie. 
In May 1863, Lassalle wrote to Bismarck. He boasted of his dictatorial powers within what he openly called his own “empire” (the GGWA), and asserted that “the working class feels an instinctive inclination towards dictatorship if it can ... be persuaded that the dictatorship will be exercised in its interests”. He proposed an anti-bourgeois coalition: an alliance between king, aristocracy, army and his workers’ movement. 
Lassalle described his personal dictatorship of the workers’ movement as “on a small scale the prototype of our next form of society on a large scale”, without the nasty “malcontent spirit” and “individual opinion” that characterised liberalism.
Nothing came of Lassalle’s secret dealings with Bismarck, which were exposed after his death. Engels commented to Kautsky that they “would certainly have led him to the actual betrayal of the movement, if fortunately ... he had not been shot”.
Lassalle propounded what he called the “iron law of wages”, based on Malthusian population theory. “Under the rule of the supply and demand of labour”, he wrote, “the average wage always remains reduced to the necessary subsistence level ... needed for eking out a living and for propagation”. Wages could not rise above the average for any length of time, as the working population would increase, bringing wages down again. On the other hand, wages could not remain for long below subsistence level, as poverty would lead to a reduction in the number of workers, and thus the supply of factory hands.
But if this were a natural law, Marx argued in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, it couldn’t be abolished, because it would govern “not only the system of wage labour but every social system”. The so-called law simply allows bourgeois economists to argue that “socialism cannot abolish poverty, which has its basis in nature, but can only make it general”. As Engels noted in a letter to August Bebel in 1875, “Marx proved ... in Capital that the laws regulating wages are very complicated ... they are in no sense iron but on the contrary very elastic”. 
The political conclusion arising from Lassalle’s “iron law” is that workers cannot improve their conditions of life through their own efforts, so there is no point engaging in collective economic struggle or forming trade unions. Lassallean logic suggests that the only way workers can be freed from the “iron law of wages” is to become their own employers. 
And how do they do that? Lassalle’s solution was massive state loans to found large-scale cooperatives that would eventually take over all industry and all branches of the economy. This process would, at some point in the distant future, lead to socialism. So the state, rather than the working class, was to be the agent of social transformation, and no revolution was required. The central demand of the movement therefore had to be for universal (male) suffrage. Indeed Lassalle argued that it should be the only demand of the workers’ movement. He exhorted his followers to “be deaf to all that is not called universal and direct suffrage”:
“When [universal suffrage] comes ... there will be at your side men who understand your position and are devoted to your cause—men armed with the shining sword of science, who know how to defend your interests. And then you, the unpropertied classes, will only have yourselves and your bad voting to blame if the representatives of your cause remain in a minority.”
These “men armed with the shining sword of science”—men like him!—would then legislate to ensure that the state provided the loans to set up producers’ cooperatives.
Lassalle believed that while state aid did not in itself amount to socialism, it nonetheless contained the “germ” of it. The state and its rulers were presumably not expected to understand this; otherwise they would hardly finance their own demise. But workers weren’t expected to understand it either! 
Lassalle’s approach—not just socialism from above, but socialism by stealth—is the polar opposite of the conscious self-emancipation of the working class. 
Marx condemned the Realpolitik of Lassalle, whose idea of practicality was to conform to existing conditions. But he understood its appeal to a working class that was still demoralised by a long period of reaction, and so was ready to “hail such a quack saviour, who promised to get them at one bound into the promised land”.
After Lassalle’s death, Marx and Engels set out to fight his ideas within the workers’ movement. They opposed the Lassallean project of getting state capital for producers’ cooperatives, on the grounds that this would only help the government extend its tentacles into the workers’ movement.
As Marx wrote in letters to Engels: “The Prussian state can not tolerate workers’ coalitions and trade unions ... In contrast, government support to a few lousy cooperative societies is just the kind of crap that suits it. It means extending the noses of officialdom ... corrupting the most active of the workers, emasculating the whole movement”. Lassalle’s “hapless illusion” that “a Prussian government would carry out a socialist intervention” was doomed to disappointment; and “the honour of the workers’ party requires that it reject such illusions, even before their hollowness is punctured by experience. The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing”.
In January 1865, Marx had written to J.B. Schweitzer, now leader of the GGWA, “telling him that he must array himself against Bismarck, that even the appearance of a flirtation with Bismarck on the part of the workers’ party must be dropped”. But in the 1866 election, the GGWA supported Bismarck’s candidacy. By this time, Marx and Engels had resigned as contributors to the GGWA’s publication.
Lassalleanism declined as the political power of the bourgeoisie grew and its weight within the state increased. By 1875, there were discussions about the possibility of unity between Lassalle’s followers and the Eisenachers—the group led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, who saw themselves as Marxists and had founded the Social Democratic Labour Party in 1869.
Marx believed that the Lassallean forces were being forced towards a merger because of their weakness on the one hand, and the growing independence of trade unions and influence of the Social Democrats on the other. Nonetheless, his preference was not for a united organisation, but for a period of common activity, a kind of united front. The vital step, in his view, was not agreement on a common programme but rather the advancement of the workers’ movement: “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs”, he wrote in a letter to Wilhelm Bracke.
But Bebel and Liebknecht succumbed to impatience and opportunism, viewing organisational unity as a shortcut. At a conference in Gotha in 1875 the two organisations merged to form the Socialist Labour Party of Germany under a draft program that made huge concessions to the Lassalleans. The programme pledged that the party would work “by every lawful means to bring about a free state”. It contained none of Marx’s analysis of economic development, no word of revolution, no discussion of the class character of the state. Unity was achieved at expense of political principle. 
Marx wrote a savage critique of the Gotha programme, which he described as “for all its democratic clang ... tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state”. To summarise his main objections:
First, the programme dealt with the state “as an independent entity”, whereas the German state in question rested on a reactionary class. The programme “attacked only the capitalist class and not the landowners” and described all classes other than the working class as “one reactionary mass”. This Lassallean distortion was used to “put a good colour on his alliance with absolutist and feudal” forces.
Moreover, the workers’ movement was viewed, again following Lassalle, “from the narrowest national standpoint”. Marx argued that working-class struggle is national only in form, not substance. The national state exists within the framework of the world market and the system of states. The programme thus reduced internationalism to “the international brotherhood of all peoples”, with no class content.
Second, the programme enshrined the slogan of “cooperative societies with state aid ... on such a scale that the socialist organisation of the total labour will arise from them”. Marx’s response was scathing: “It is worthy of Lassalle’s imagination that a new society can be built with state loans just as well as a new railway!” Marx didn’t oppose cooperatives per se, or oppose making demands on the state. But he objected to such reforms being held up as the goal, a substitute for a rounded socialist programme.
For Marx, reformism does not simply mean the advocacy of reforms, but rather “assigning a certain all-encompassing meaning to the fight for reforms, its elevation to the be-all and end-all of politics”. Marxists fight for reforms partly to improve the conditions of workers, but more importantly as a way of developing the consciousness and confidence of the workers’ movement to go beyond reforms and challenge the capitalist system itself.
As for cooperative societies, “they are of value only in so far as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés of either governments or of bourgeois”. The key word there is “independent”. 
Similarly, Marx drew out the political meaning of the demand for “state aid”: “Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the ‘socialist organisation of total labour’ ‘arises’ from the state aid that the state gives to the producers’ cooperative societies and which the state, not the worker, calls into being”.
Thus the Gotha programme, following Lassalle, dispensed with the need for revolution and assigned the basic creative role to the state. 
Engels, in his letter to Bebel, also dismissed the idea of the “free state”: “As the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, in order to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is pure nonsense to talk of a free people’s state ... as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist”.
Ominously for the future of German socialist organisation, Marx’s critique was suppressed for years, as were the passages in his writings that were most critical of Lassalle. The Gotha programme was, as Hal Draper described, a “bridge between the state-socialist reformism of Lassalle, which by itself had no future, and the bourgeois reformism of the type that did represent the future of German social democracy”.
Despite the Social Democratic Party’s formal rejection of Lassalleanism and the adoption of the seemingly more radical Erfurt program in 1891, a degree of confusion about the state—and therefore the seeds of reformism—remained within the German party.

Karl Marx’s battle against ‘state socialism’

Shelley’s revolutionary poetry

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees ...
“<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DGY9HvChXk">Strange Fruit</a>” has been described as “a declaration of war ... the beginning of the civil rights movement”. When Billie Holiday first performed the song, in a New York nightclub in 1939, it had an electrifying effect. “There wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly, everyone was clapping”, she later wrote.
Holiday was singing about the thousands of African Americans who were tortured and murdered by racist thugs, usually with total impunity. The last recorded lynching took place as late as 1981. But the killing of Blacks by police and racist vigilantes continues to this day. Trayvon Martin, Freddy Grey, Daunte Wright, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd—the list goes on and on. 
Racism is built into the fabric of US society, impacting every aspect of life. African Americans are nearly twice as likely as other Americans to live in poverty and to be unemployed; and the imprisonment rate of Blacks is more than five times the rate among whites. 
But it’s not just the US. Immigrants, refugees and indigenous people everywhere are subjected to appalling treatment. And Australia is right up there with the worst. Its whole history is steeped in racism, which continues to be a defining feature of our society. Here too, young Black men are many times more likely than their white counterparts to end up in jail, or dead at the hands of the police; Indigenous people are more likely to suffer poverty, unemployment and discrimination in all walks of life. Migrant workers are super-exploited by unscrupulous employers. And if you’re fleeing persecution or war, heaven help you, because the Australian government certainly won’t. If you get here by boat, you’ll be locked up indefinitely.
Racism is a modern phenomenon, the legacy of slavery. It developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a new class of capitalists scrambled to exploit the opportunities offered by the opening of the Americas, and as the great powers sought to extend their empires.
There weren’t enough free labourers in Europe to work the vast sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations in the colonies, so the capitalists turned to slavery. Millions of people, mainly from Africa, were forcibly transported and condemned to miserable lives and early deaths on these plantations, while producing stupendous wealth for the plantation owners.
Slavery was central to the development of European and North American capitalism, and it laid the basis for the rapid spread of capitalism as the dominant mode of production globally. “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”, Karl Marx wrote in Capital.
In their struggle to overthrow feudalism, the rising bourgeoisie had developed an ideology that stressed “the equality of man”. How, then, to justify the enslavement and inhuman treatment of millions of human beings? This contradiction required a new ideology, one that divided human beings into a hierarchy based on their physical characteristics. 
In the new ideological framework, there was supposedly a hierarchy of “races” representing different levels of human development, from “advanced” to “primitive” and even “subhuman”, with Europeans at the top and Africans at the bottom. In the nineteenth century, pseudo-scientific theories such as social Darwinism and eugenics, dreamed up by the middle-class intelligentsia, helped to legitimise racism. Eric Williams, in his book Capitalism and Slavery, concludes: “A racial twist has ... been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery”.
Racism’s usefulness to the capitalist class didn’t end with the demise of the slave trade. On the contrary, the now well-established ideas about race could easily be extended to people in Asia and elsewhere as their lands were colonised. The violent subjugation of indigenous peoples, the disruption of their societies, theft of their land, destruction of their culture and plundering of their resources—all these atrocities were justified by notions of racial inferiority. 
And racism continues to serve imperialist interests. It’s invariably used to win popular support for wars. For example, anti-Asian racism, that enduring staple of Australian politics, was invoked against the Japanese during World War II and the Vietnamese in the 1960s and 1970s.
Racism was also useful on the domestic front. In a letter written in 1870, Marx described the divisions between English and Irish workers as “the secret of the impotence of the English working class”. “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life ... feels himself as a member of the ruling nation, and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats of his country ... thus strengthening their domination over himself”, he wrote. This antagonism was “artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling class”. This, said Marx, was “the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it”. 
Today, it’s this capacity of racism to divide the working class that is most useful to the capitalists. They understand that when workers accept racist ideas, it undermines class solidarity and unity. The scapegoating of particular groups divides workers against each other, blunts their understanding of who their real enemies are and thus weakens their capacity to resist exploitation. 
Racism can be adapted to our rulers’ needs at any time. It can be directed against any group, at home or abroad, that they see as a problem. For example, the anti-Irish racism described by Marx and which was also a feature of post-invasion Australian society, has now largely disappeared, with other scapegoats replacing the Irish.
In more recent times we’ve seen how racism based on physical characteristics can be morphed into a racism based on supposed “cultural differences”, as with Islamophobia. This adaptability suggests that racist attitudes are not natural: they have to be continually manufactured and reinforced.
The capitalists don’t rule directly: they rely on governments to enact and enforce laws and policies in their interests. The state is not some neutral, independent body standing above society; it’s an instrument of class rule. It’s not that the politicians, judges, the heads of the public service and armed forces who run the state are racists—though of course some of them often are. But as members of the ruling class, they are committed to the maintenance of exploitation and the protection of the interests of their “own” capitalists vis-à-vis those of other countries. 
In a world divided into competing nation states, the state is also the primary means by which notions of national identity are developed. Nationalism serves the capitalists’ interests by obscuring the class divide—and the partisan nature of the state itself—and persuading workers to side with their own rulers in “the national interest”. So racism is an inevitable extension of nationalism. Australia’s history provides a wealth of evidence for this.
The roots of racism in Australia lie in its origins as a white settler state in Asia: it arrived with the First Fleet as part of the baggage of empire. Racism has always been characteristic of colonial settler states, where it often assumes particularly virulent forms—think of Israel and South Africa. A major reason for this is the inconvenient presence of indigenous people. 
In Australia, the Indigenous population stood in the way of the expansion of the wool industry. Aboriginal resistance to the theft of their land was savagely put down. The massacres, the introduction of disease and alcohol, the stealing of children and all the other genocidal atrocities were aimed at securing the land for capitalism. 
But racism in Australia also served broader purposes. From early on, the Australian state and capitalists set out to create their own empire, dominating the region economically and politically. Racism helped to justify everything this entailed—from protecting the operations of companies like Burns Philp and BHP to invading “failed states” like the Solomon Islands. 
The White Australia policy was a key element in forging the Australian nation and the Australian “identity”. It served to convince white workers that they shared a common interest with the white ruling class. The policy was supported by all the respectable institutions of society, such as the press and the churches, as well as sections of the trade union movement. However, mainstream accounts focus almost exclusively on workers and the unions. Hence the widespread view that racism comes from below, from workers, especially blue-collar workers.
This is not surprising: after all, it’s hardly in the interests of those who’ve ruled Australia since invasion to admit that the nation was founded on a racist basis, and that the national identity was built on racism. The “history wars” of the Howard era showed how important this is to the ruling class. Attempts to strip the veil from Australia’s past and reveal the ugly truth beneath were derided as a “black armband” view of history. 
But socialist historians have shown how the ideology of White Australia was central to the agenda of the ruling class, and how they and their ideologues deliberately fostered racism. As Marx and Engels put it, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”.
In Who are our enemies? Racism and the working class in Australia, Verity Burgmann dismisses as a historical absurdity the view that the White Australia policy was imposed by the working class to protect wages. She argues that this “attributes to the working class a degree of power and influence that is quite unrealistic. It is not logical that the middle class, let alone the capitalist class, would espouse ... White Australia ... out of any concern for working-class wage levels”. 
What’s more, the adoption of the White Australia policy by the first Australian parliament occurred only a few years after important strikes by key sections of the Australian working class—maritime workers and shearers—were smashed. Yet somehow this defeated and demoralised working class is presumed to have imposed its will on a parliament in which it had virtually no representation.
Phil Griffiths, in his PhD thesis “The making of White Australia: Ruling class agendas, 1876-1888”, has thoroughly debunked the <a href="https://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/47107">mythology</a> surrounding the White Australia policy, arguing that it was “the product of the dominant agendas of the Anglo-Australian ruling class”.
The first agenda was strategic. Northern Australia was sparsely populated, and the ruling class feared that Chinese immigration might lead to it losing control of the area. Paranoia about invasion by “yellow hordes” (whether from China or Japan) was a constant feature of late nineteenth century Australian politics and persisted into the twentieth century.
The second agenda was economic, involving a dispute between different sectors of the capitalist class. Those in the south favoured a modern industrial economy and opposed the development in Queensland and the Northern Territory of a plantation economy based on imported indentured labour, mainly Pacific Islanders and Indians. Australia’s capitalists had no desire to repeat the recent experience in America, where the conflict between a slave-based economy in the south and one based on wage labour in the north had led to a destructive civil war. The capitalists who favoured the importation of a cheap, non-white labour force were eventually overruled.
The third agenda was the construction of a culturally homogeneous population, a society in which workers identified with their bosses on the basis of race, and class conflict was muted or deflected as a result. 
These agendas reflected the class interests of the capitalists of the time. And those same class interests are responsible for the persistence of racism in Australia today. Thanks to the anti-racist movements, certain practices, language and so on are no longer acceptable—but racism continues to serve the interests of the capitalist class, as more recent Australian history shows.
Since the dawn of capitalism, the capitalists, politicians and bureaucrats who run the world have consciously and deliberately used racism to further their class interests. Racism is deeply embedded in capitalist society and all its institutions, and it’s too useful a weapon for them ever to give it up. In his book The Political Economy of Racism, Melvin Leiman argues: “As a theoretical construct, capitalism is conceivable without racism. But racism is historically rooted in the combined slave-capitalist system, and its persistence suggests that overcoming racism would require transcending capitalist society”.
In other words, to eradicate racism, we have to get to the source of the problem. The strange and bitter fruit of racism will disappear from society only once we tear out the whole capitalist system, root and branch.

Racism—the strange fruit of capitalism

Archie Roach’s sons, Amos and Eban, have given permission for their father’s name and image to be used “so that his legacy will continue to inspire”.
Archie Roach, Gunditjmara and Bundjalung elder, tragically died on 30 July, aged only 66. We have lost a peerless artist and fighter for justice. Uncle Archie, as he was affectionately known, was not only a sublime singer-songwriter whose performances could and did move you to tears; he was also a poet and author who powerfully and articulately expressed the pain and loss resulting from Indigenous oppression. But along with the pain there were also messages of courage, solidarity, resilience and hope. 
The saturation media coverage and the many tributes that poured in from all round the world are testament to Archie’s deep and lasting impact. As Jill Gallagher of the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation said: “He made the world stand up and listen”. Billy Bragg noted that his death was a loss “to all of us who believe that music can be used as a tool to seek justice”. Paul Kelly put it simply and succinctly: “Big tree down. Weeping in the forest”.
In 1990, Kelly booked Archie to open for him at the Melbourne Concert Hall, his biggest gig to that point. Archie played just two songs, the second of which was to become known as his signature song, “Took the Children Away”—the story of his own harrowing experience as a member of the Stolen Generations. “When the song finished, there was dead silence”, Kelly later recalled. “[Archie] thought that he bombed and just turned and walked off stage. [But] as he was walking off, the applause started to build and build. The audience had been so stunned that it had taken them a while to respond.” “Took the Children Away” would later win an international Human Rights Achievement Award, the first song ever to do so.
Shortly after, Kelly produced Archie’s first album, Charcoal Lane, full of songs of searing honesty, their effect heightened by his glorious voice. It won him two ARIAs—the first of many awards and accolades.
But Archie’s success came after a long period of trauma and hardship. At a very young age, along with his siblings, he was forcibly taken from his parents at the Framlingham Aboriginal Mission in south-west Victoria. Snatched from our mother’s breast/ Said this was for the best/ Took us away. Separated from his siblings, he was placed first in an orphanage and then in a series of foster homes. Then they split us up again/... Sent us off to the foster homes/ As we grew up, we felt alone/ ’Cause we were acting white and feeling black ... 
Archie had a period of relative stability in his third foster home, with the Cox family, Scottish immigrants from whom he acquired a love of music. But when he was 14, out of the blue, he received a letter from his sister Myrtle, informing him that their mother had recently died and their father was already dead. This came as a huge shock to Archie, who had falsely been told his family had died in a fire. (It was the cruel common practice for stolen children to be told that their parents had died or abandoned them, to prevent attempts at reunification.) Archie’s world, he later said, “started to spin”, his childhood now appearing to him as an empty lie. Not long after, aged 15, he fled the foster home and never saw the Coxes again.
With vague intentions of finding his family, Archie hit the road. He spent the next few years as a homeless itinerant, frequently being arrested and jailed for begging and vagrancy. Not surprisingly, he began drinking to dull the pain. 
Down city streets I would roam, I had no bed, I had no home/ There was nothing that I owned, used my fingers as a comb/ In those days when I was young, drinking and fighting was no fun/ It was daily living for me, I had no choice. It was meant to be ... (“Down City Streets”, from Charcoal Lane, written by Ruby Hunter).
At various points in this period he managed to find his sisters Diana, Alma and Myrtle and his brother Lawrence, and learned that another sister, Gladys, had died in a car accident.
Still in his teens, Archie was wrongly arrested for car theft and sentenced to a year in prison. Released after six months, he hitchhiked to Adelaide. It was there he met the love of his life, Ruby Hunter, herself a stolen child from the Ngarrindjeri people and a gifted musician. They had two sons, and later fostered other children, motivated by the desire to provide the loving family and security they had both lacked.
For some time, Archie continued to struggle with alcoholism and mental health issues, spending time in hospitals and rehab and on one occasion attempting suicide. Eventually he was able to turn things around; supported by Ruby, he became a rehab counsellor and began writing songs. He sang “Took the Children Away” at a protest against the bicentennial celebrations in 1988, a performance that brought him to Paul Kelly’s attention. At first reluctant to record, Archie was persuaded by Ruby, who said: “When one of us shines, we all shine”. The rest is history.
Archie and Ruby co-founded Black Arm Band, a collective of Indigenous artists with a focus on protest songs. Their own songs highlighted various aspects of Indigenous oppression. “Song for Elijah” and “Lighthouse”, for example, are elegies for young Indigenous men who died violent deaths due to racism. In a 1992 interview, Archie explained: “I don’t want to see my people destroyed anymore”.
Ruby died suddenly in 2010, and Archie was shattered, himself suffering a seizure and then a stroke. But he sang at Ruby’s funeral and went on performing and speaking out for his people, as she would have wished. In 2013, shortly after receiving a Lifetime Deadly Award, Archie called on then Prime Minister Tony Abbott to end the Northern Territory Intervention, a call that unsurprisingly fell on deaf ears. In 2014, he set up a foundation to help incarcerated Indigenous people turn their lives around.
Even after having surgery for lung cancer and needing oxygen to take to the stage, Archie continued performing. In February this year, together with Paul Grabowsky and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Archie did a concert at the Myer Music Bowl, attended by more than 6,000. Grabowsky described it as “a performance for the ages ... he flew like an eagle, and sang up the land”, his voice “gravelled with age and yet sweet as dark honey”.
I was fortunate to meet Archie once. It was late 1997, and Bringing them home, the report that exposed the horror and cruelty of the Stolen Generations, had been published earlier that year. Sandra Bloodworth and I were writing a pamphlet on the issue, Genocide, the Australian Way. That day, I was selling Socialist Alternative magazine (predecessor of Red Flag) in the Bourke St Mall. Archie stopped to sign our petition, and I asked him for permission to use the lyrics of “Took the Children Away” as a preface. With a smile that lit up his face, he immediately agreed.
Politicians have been effusive in their praise for Archie. But unless and until they do something meaningful to address the ongoing dispossession, Black deaths in custody, the appalling incarceration rates, the theft of children and all the other issues that blight Indigenous lives, their words will ring hollow. The rest of us can best honour Archie’s memory by continuing to fight racism and for justice for Indigenous people.

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Karl Marx’s battle against ‘state socialism’

Shelley’s revolutionary poetry

Racism—the strange fruit of capitalism

Archie Roach: 1956–2022

'Pravda': mirror of the revolution

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