It’s a historic anniversary that the US ruling class and its allies around the world wish we would forget. Fifty years ago, on 30 April 1975, US imperialism suffered the worst military defeat in its history as troops of the North Vietnamese Army and South Vietnam National Liberation Front took complete control of Ho Chi Minh City (then called Saigon) and the few scattered areas of the south that had not yet been liberated.
The Vietnamese victory was the culmination of more than three decades of struggle against Japanese, British, French and American imperialism. At the time, the United States was, as it still is today, the world’s leading military power. And yet that incredible power was defeated by a small, underdeveloped, mostly rural society.
The US war against Vietnam at some stages involved well over half a million regular US troops. During the war, the US unleashed previously unimaginable firepower against the Vietnamese forces and the population in general. The tonnage of bombs dropped on Vietnam was approximately three times the total for all theatres in all of World War Two. The US also employed chemical warfare, such as defoliants containing dioxin, which are still today causing deaths and genetic damage. 
Vietnam received limited military supplies from China and the Soviet Union, but they were never enough to be decisive. Surface-to-air rockets, for example, increased the US Air Force’s military losses but never came close to stopping the US air war.
And yet all this firepower was unable to prevent Vietnamese victory. Something proved more powerful than massive weaponry. That reality is the lesson that the imperialists want us to forget.
The liberation of Ho Chi Minh City provided a striking emblem of the limitations of technological military power. As helicopters flew the remaining Americans and some of their Vietnamese agents to warships waiting offshore, the US Navy pushed each emptied helicopter overboard into the sea to make room for those still in the air.
What eventually defeated US military power? First and foremost was the heroism and endurance of the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese resistance gradually widened doubts and divisions in US society, opening time and pathways for opposition to the imperialist war within the US and eventually on a massive scale worldwide. 
Combined with the US’s inability to inflict a decisive military defeat, this continually growing political opposition contributed substantially to the US rulers’ calculation that continuing the war could cost them more than they were likely to gain. They could see that, around the world, oppressed and exploited peoples were concluding that the US was not invincible and that it could be successfully resisted.
Earlier struggles similarly influenced the antiwar movement. After the 1940s and ’50s era of McCarthyism and “red scare” reaction and house-breaking of most labour unions, things began to shift with the rise of the Black civil rights movement and the ’60s cultural and political radicalisation. The opponents of the Vietnam War who organised the early teach-ins at universities were, in part, following the example of the combination of propaganda and action of early fighters for Black rights, particularly in the US South.
The influence went in both directions. In April 1967, I was conscripted (“drafted”) into the US Army in Chicago. By chance, this occurred on the same day that boxing champion Muhammad Ali had been ordered to report for induction—which he had publicly announced he would refuse because of his religion as a member of the Nation of Islam and his ethical objections to the war. 
Ali, who had a talent for concise and colourful explanations, said, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger”. (“Viet Cong” was the name the US military and media gave to the National Liberation Front.) A week before his scheduled conscription, Ali added:
“I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me; I’d join tomorrow.”
There was considerable public interest in what Ali would do, and one of the soldiers staffing the Chicago induction centre had turned on a radio tuned to a news broadcast. With the report that Ali had refused to be conscripted, I heard one of the Black soldiers mutter, barely audibly, “Damn, wish I had done that”.
As Vietnamese resistance forced the US to increase its troop numbers in the country, conscription also necessarily increased, including of inductees who were either opposed to the war or at least suspicious of it. For thousands of young Americans and their friends, relatives and partners, the war stopped being a strange conflict in a distant country and became an immediate threat to their wellbeing. The impact was all the stronger for their ability to view scenes of the war on nightly TV news.
The US ruling class was beginning to learn something that had only begun to be evident during the 1950-53 Korean War: there is a significant difference between a “citizen army” in which the citizenry feels its interests are seriously threatened by a menace such as fascism, and one facing an abstract enemy such as “communism” that poses no immediate threat—or an oppressed people fighting for their liberation. People who had witnessed or participated in mass antiwar protests tended to have their opposition increased, not weakened, by induction into the military.
During my two years in the army, 1967-69, all within the United States, the challenge was not to convince fellow soldiers that the war was wrong. We had to persuade other soldiers that they could do something about it. This was the period during which the publication of rank-and-file antiwar “newspapers” (really newsletters) proliferated at military bases in the US and overseas. 
At Fort Dix in New Jersey, we called ours the Ultimate Weapon, because the base’s main function was infantry training, and the Army liked to call its infantry “the ultimate weapon”. In the early ’70s, the Student Mobilization Committee, the most radical of the antiwar coalitions, launched a GI Press Service, which sought to provide information, exchange and cooperation among the varied military antiwar publications. We eventually knew of more than a hundred of them.
The spread of antiwar activity in the US military was aided by higher-ups’ bureaucratic efforts to suppress it. A battalion commander who learned of “subversive” activity within his domain, fearing that it would hamper his chances for promotion, would arrange for one or several suspected “ringleaders” to be transferred to a different base, hopefully distant. It could not have been better designed if the object had been to encourage the spread of antiwar activity. The eventual situation was described by Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., in Armed Forces Journal, 7 June 1971: 
“The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not nearly mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.”
In short, the US rulers were worried about the effect of the war, not only on their troops in Vietnam, but on their armed forces more generally. President Nixon tried to ameliorate this situation through his program of “Vietnamization” of the war, which essentially meant withdrawing US troops from Vietnam and supplying the puppet “Republic of Vietnam” with sufficient weapons and financing to fight on for US interests. 
From the US standpoint, this was always a forlorn hope, which became increasingly evident after the departure of US ground troops in 1973. When the liberation forces launched their final offensive in early 1975, the “RVN” forces largely melted away or collapsed.
The impact of the Vietnamese victory is still with us, something that capitalist rulers are still trying to overcome. In the US, that impact was often called the “Vietnam syndrome”, as though it described some sort of unfortunate disease. In fact, it referred to the reality that large sections of the US public had seen that their rulers lied shamelessly about a major military conflict. Consequently, they tended to look sceptically at further military operations. 
It has since become standard US political doctrine that any new military adventure needs to be carried out quickly so that there is no time for large parts of the public to become really aware of it. To restore their ability to intervene militarily around the world, the US rulers found it necessary to abolish conscription and to rebuild their army as “voluntary”—meaning using social and economic coercion to enlist mainly the poor and oppressed racial minorities. 
The ending of conscription was a major setback for US imperialism, and its rulers are today, half a century later, wondering whether they can get away with reintroducing it.
You can see another lesson ruling classes have drawn from Vietnam in government responses to the widespread upsurge of solidarity with Palestinians against the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza and the West Bank. The speed and extremism of government reactions against the first university protest encampments showed their fears of protests growing and spreading as they did with Vietnam. It’s the reason for the attempts to suppress free speech and the almost hysterical attacks on protesters. And just as imperialist propagandists of the Vietnam War sought to discredit opposition as “communism”, today supporters of Zionist genocide try to label any opposition as “antisemitism”.
Our side has also drawn some lessons, which is a part of the reason the Palestinian protests have taken the form they have: both the initial encampments and reaching out to broader layers through large and vocal rallies and marches. Around the world, there are uncountable numbers of oppressed and exploited people who may know little or nothing of the Vietnam War but who have absorbed the understanding that imperialism is not invincible, that it can be defeated by determined struggle, and that “If you don’t fight, you lose”.

Allen Myers

Vietnam: a victory never to be forgotten

In the early 1990s, Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett launched a savage attack on working-class Victorians. A slew of privatisations, cuts to public services and attacks on working conditions hit working-class communities hard. Public education was a major target, with hundreds of schools on the chopping block. 
Kennett’s cuts and closures outraged working-class Victorians, who looked for ways to resist. At Richmond Secondary College, one of the schools in Kennett’s crosshairs, teachers took matters into their own hands. They drew community members and activists into an epic campaign that involved occupations, protests and pitched battles with police. In the end, they achieved one of the few partial victories in the fight against the Kennett government. <figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Town-Hall-Photo.jpeg" alt="" /><figcaption>Richmond SC students at Richmond Town Hall rally PHOTO: Michael Naismith</figcaption></figure>
Richmond Secondary was just one of 150 schools named in Kennett’s first tranche of school closures. Why did it become such a bastion of struggle? One of the key differences was the presence of socialists in the school’s union sub-branch, who sprang into action even before the closures were officially announced. 
Mike Naismith, the union representative at Richmond Secondary, had been a socialist and militant in the teachers’ unions since the 1960s. According to him, conservative school principals had been working with the Liberal Party even before Kennett’s election, providing input as to which schools should be slated for closure. Despite Richmond Secondary being highly valued by the working-class residents of the area, the school was a likely target for closure because of its relatively low enrolments compared to some others in the area. In the face of resistance from the school’s principal, Naismith and his colleagues set up a committee to fight the potential closure, which they invited parents and students to join. 
When the announcement finally came that Richmond was to be closed, the committee immediately got to work. Naismith describes how they ripped everything off the noticeboards in the staffroom, transforming it into a campaign organising centre. They also notified the school principal—who had previously targeted Naismith and other unionists at the school for their activism—that her office was being requisitioned for organising purposes. 
For the remainder of the school year, the teachers continued teaching classes despite the school’s official closure. The principal’s attempts to restore order were hopeless, as it quickly became clear that the staff were now running the show. 
The occupying teachers had to withstand significant pressure from the Department of Education. Department officials were committed to enforcing Kennett’s attacks, and showed up regularly to try to remove the teachers. Kennett had also given the go-ahead for local principals to ransack the closed school for equipment. The rebel teachers used heavy chains on the school doors to keep them out.
The campaign committee didn’t limit itself to maintaining and defending the industrial occupation of the school—it understood that a broader struggle was needed to challenge Kennett successfully. The activists organised rallies down Bridge Road, the main drag in Richmond. They also packed buses with students and teachers to conduct classes outside the offices of the education minister and state parliament. <figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/bRIDGE-rOAD-MARCH.jpeg" alt="" /><figcaption>March Down Bridge Road, Richmond PHOTO: Michael Naismith</figcaption></figure>
The “rebel school” quickly gained the attention of the press. It became a pole of attraction for activists and community members outraged by Kennett’s attacks. When the school year ended for summer break, the campaign swelled with volunteers.
But they also confronted some serious challenges. The campaign was determined and drew in lots of support from the community, but it was relatively isolated from the broader union movement. The teachers’ union, then the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association (VSTA), could have shut schools across the state and called on other unions for support in an effort to frustrate Kennett’s plans. But the conservative leadership of the union limited itself to only one full-day strike, which was easy for the government to ignore. 
Naismith also attempted to win the support of the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC), the peak union body in Victoria, for a union-supported picket of the school. This could have involved a ban on demolition or other works on the school. But like the VSTA leaders, VTHC leader John Halfpenny was reluctant to offer support. Halfpenny, once a militant Communist metalworker, was by then a member of the Labor Party with aspirations to climb its ranks, not rock the boat.
The lack of support from the union leaders put the teachers in a bind. They risked losing their jobs if they refused the dictates of the Education Department. Leading teachers like Naismith were issued transfer notices, asking them to nominate schools they’d be prepared to move to. Some refused on principle. Others were sacked. 
Without broader support, the teachers could not maintain their occupation. Still, the campaign committee refused to give up the fight. Over the summer break they voted to keep the rebel school going in the new year; only it would now be run by volunteer teachers and activists. 
Their ambitious plan was made possible by a groundswell of support from the community. It helped that Richmond had a rich political history, once being home to three Communist Party branches and a strong branch of the Labor Party. Naismith reported being offered a donation of $50 by a local Communist Party ex-member. Socialist groups sent representatives to the campaign meetings. A shop steward from the Carlton and United Brewery in Abbotsford got involved in the campaign because his child had been a student at the school. Even local firefighters offered their support.
The campaign also transformed many of those participating in it. Elvie Sievers was a local working-class mother whose son attended the school and who had previously been a student there herself. Naismith recalled her “natural ability to grasp injustice and inspire others to fight it”. She would develop into one of the central leaders of the campaign. Some of the school cleaners stayed and became activists. The librarian moved her caravan onto the school grounds and started living there.
But the school also needed teachers. Without any financial backing, the most the campaign committee could offer was $20 a week plus the dole. They scraped together the money for an ad in the newspaper to attract unemployed teachers. It wasn’t long before they started receiving offers from teachers keen to take part. A few were substitutes in the state system, while others just supported the campaign on principle and wanted to help. 
Meanwhile, Kennett’s attacks on public education continued relentlessly. He closed hundreds more schools. The campaign committee attempted to broaden the struggle by organising a “Save our Schools” campaign, which toured around schools and other job sites to drum up opposition to Kennett’s cuts. 
The rebel school managed to survive for nearly the entire school year. But as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to maintain. The campaign committee shouldered the double burden of running the school while also organising a political campaign. Funds were always lacking. Endurance was tested and morale suffered. 
Right-wing pressure was also building on Kennett to crack down on the rebel school. The right understood the campaign was providing a beacon of hope in the resistance to Kennett’s anti-union agenda. The government was eager to put it to bed. 
In December of 1993, after a year of the school being occupied, the state brought the boot down. Writs for up to $1 million were issued to key campaign leaders, and the police forcibly evicted the activists in dawn raids. The school was boarded up.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Police.jpeg" alt="Police charge" /><figcaption>Police charge at teachers and students PHOTO: Michael Naismith</figcaption></figure>
Debates opened up on the campaign committee about how to move forward. Should they reoccupy the school? Naismith reported hearing whispers that some teacher unionists from Mount Waverley were preparing to use bolt cutters to break back into the building. But in the end, the committee decided they lacked the numbers to maintain a new occupation against police pressure. A different strategy was needed.
Despite losing control of the school, the campaign had nevertheless pushed Kennett to reconsider his plans. Originally, Richmond Secondary was to be demolished to make way for luxury apartments. The building occupied prime real estate, just next to the Yarra River. But as a result of the pressure from the campaign, the Kennett government agreed to use the building for a new selective public school, but only for girls.
This was not what the community wanted. In the 1960s, they had fought hard for a coeducational school in the area, which led to the creation of Richmond Secondary. They were not willing to give that up for a selective school that half their children would not be able to attend. 
So the campaign committee decided they would set up a picket at the school, to prevent any work from being done on it until the government agreed to reopen it as a coeducational school. Finally, in response to the forced eviction, Halfpenny and the Victorian Trades Hall Council decided to lend their support to the campaign and endorsed the picket. <figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/PICKET.jpeg" alt="Picket mounted after eviction" /><figcaption>Picket mounted after eviction PHOTO: Michael Naismith</figcaption></figure>
But the Kennett government had other ideas. On Monday, 13 December, known in Richmond as “Bloody Monday”, around 200 police stormed the picket line. They bashed through the community activists using long batons that had not been used against civilians in years. The picket could not hold out against the brutal violence of the cops. Five people were arrested and many were injured, with three hospitalised. 
The thuggery of the cops only increased support for the campaign, as even more picketers showed up the next day and continued to do so for around a week. The police continued to confront them, but resorted to dragging them away from the school one by one, which reportedly took hours. 
The determined resistance forced the government and Halfpenny to the negotiating table with the campaign committee. The government agreed to create a new coeducational school in Richmond, but they left the specifics decidedly vague. Unfortunately, the campaigners felt they had little choice but to accept, as Halfpenny threatened to pull support for the picket if they refused. 
Kennett had succeeded in turning the lives of so many students and school staff upside down. When the dust settled, he had closed around 350 schools and cut around 10,000 education jobs across the state.
But the campaign to save Richmond’s rebel school was not in vain. It demonstrated that resistance to neoliberal cuts was possible and could achieve tangible results. Northland Secondary College in Preston also became a rebel school and won a significant victory. After a community campaign, a successful Equal Opportunity court case—which hinged on the school’s high proportion of Indigenous students—led to the school’s reopening in 1995. 
But to have a real shot at pushing back Kennett’s agenda, the unions needed to shut down workplaces around the state. There’s no doubt this was possible. On 10 November 1992, right after Kennett announced his blitz of attacks, workers took to the streets in numbers that shocked everyone. Police Superintendent Brian Casey estimated that up to 100,000 workers flooded the streets of Melbourne, with thousands more on strike statewide. But Halfpenny and other union leaders showed no interest in maintaining this campaign and offered no meaningful resistance beyond the set-piece demonstrations.
To resist Kennett, a different kind of leadership was needed—one that saw working-class power, not backroom negotiations, as the solution to every problem. This was the approach of those who led the campaign to save Richmond Secondary College, which allowed it to push far beyond where the union leaders were willing to go. And it’s the kind of leadership we’ll need to rebuild in our unions, if we’re going to push back the pro-capitalist agenda that has continued since the Kennett era.

Zak Borzovoy

The fight for Richmond’s rebel school

Just before my 18th birthday, in July 1988, I landed my first full-time job, as a lay-by clerk at Ahern’s department store in Perth’s city centre.
My workday started with getting off a bus at 8am in St George’s Terrace. I collected a bundle of twenty copies of the West Australian from Newspaper House and, with papers under arm, made my way to Ahern’s in the Hay Street Mall. I then navigated a rabbit warren of offices via the back stairs to deliver each copy to a director’s desk.
Then I clocked in at the lay-by department. In those days a customer who couldn’t afford to pay for an item up front could opt to make six payments over six weeks. The item would remain on the shelf in the lay-by department until it had been fully paid for. 
Many Ahern’s staff had customer account cards: they were offered discounts to encourage them to spend at the store. My manager, a middle-aged woman with an eye for the latest 1980s fashion, had the largest Ahern’s card debt of all. 
One Friday morning, several weeks into my employment, I arrived to face her questions. 
“Nick, I hear you have been selling communist newspapers. Is this true?”, she asked.
This was the 1980s; the Cold War was still raging. Being accused by your boss of being a communist was not to be taken lightly.
My thoughts raced back to the evening before. Thursday night was late-night shopping in Perth. I had joined comrades after work in the mall selling the socialist newspaper Direct Action. The cover that week was emblazoned with the words “Free Nelson Mandela” and featured a portrait of the African National Congress leader. The centrespread featured an article on a strike wave that had gripped South Africa’s poverty-stricken townships.
Some evenings, sales of the paper were hard going. But that night Direct Action
was selling like hot cakes. At one point I looked up and made eye contact with a woman I recognised as an Ahern’s sales assistant. She was a friend of my boss and often came by the lay-by counter. When she saw me, her face moulded into a look of disbelief and then a vitriolic scowl. I felt a sense of dread.
My thoughts returned to the present. What should I do? I responded to my boss with a firm denial. Later that morning, she told me to go to the human resource manager’s office. There, I was told that my performance was not up to scratch. I would be finishing up in two weeks. “Use the notice period to find yourself a new job”, I was told.
I attended the weekly Resistance branch meeting upstairs in a Northbridge arcade the next afternoon. Resistance was the youth organisation of the Socialist Workers Party, which I had also recently joined. I spoke to the SWP organiser, Dave.
“Are you a member of the union?”, he asked. Unfortunately, I wasn’t, though the prospect of the right-wing Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association coming to the aid of an alleged communist was slim. Frank suggested I talk to Leon, a comrade involved in the Law Reform Subcommittee of Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP) WA, the main gay activist campaign group in Perth at the time. 
Leon explained that the West Australian Equal Opportunity Act prohibited discrimination in employment based on “political conviction”. Ironically, it offered no protection to gays. Sodomy was still a crime in Western Australia. Though decriminalisation was achieved in 1990, the Equal Opportunity Act wasn’t amended to include sexual orientation until 2002.
On Monday morning, during my morning tea break, I headed into the Equal Opportunity Commission on St George’s Terrace and picked up a complaint form. Over the following days I reported my complaint and met with my assigned case manager, Graeme Innes. Today, <a href="https://graemeinnes.com/about-graeme/">Innes</a> is a company director and university vice-chancellor. For a decade, he was Australia’s Disability Discrimination commissioner. Back then he conciliated anti-discrimination complaints.
Soon Innes was in my workplace asking questions. My manager told him I slacked on the job and my probation “hadn’t worked out”. By the end of the second week my employment was coming to an end. It seemed the complaint was going nowhere. 
At this point, Equal Opportunity Commissioner June Williams stepped in. <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/a-campaigner-for-equal-rights-20061209-gdp0gk.html">Williams</a>
was a former co-convener of the NSW Women’s Electoral Lobby, where she had lobbied hard to introduce anti-discrimination legislation. She took on the role of Equal Opportunity commissioner after the WA Burke government implemented anti-discrimination legislation in 1984, and she held the position for the following seventeen years.
Williams asked me if I was a member of a political party. I told her I was a member of the SWP. 
“Oh, that’s interesting,” she said. “We’ve never handled an employment complaint relating to political discrimination before.”
Williams explained that, if both parties were willing, a conciliation conference could be held. If that failed, I could consider taking the matter to a court hearing. She suggested I locate a “support person” to take with me. I nominated SWP comrade Richard, who had several years of experience as a union delegate with the Public Sector Union.
The conciliation conference took place in the commission offices. I sat on one side of the table with Richard next to me. On the other side sat three Ahern’s company directors. They were all men, each nearing retirement age with pale complexions and bald heads. 
One of them, his face as red as his whiskers, thumped the table and shouted, “This would never happen in the Industrial Relations Commission!” Williams, who sat between us, politely reminded him that we were not in the IRC.
A short break followed before the Ahern’s directors returned with an offer. I would be re-employed on a part-time casual basis, not on the shop floor but at as a packer in Ahern’s distribution warehouse in the industrial suburb of Claisebrook. I would also receive a written reference acknowledging that I have been a “loyal and diligent” employee. 
I accepted the offer. The new job involved earlier starts but my new workmates were welcoming. In the afternoons, I set about applying for other jobs. A month later, I landed a state government job.
My last day at the Ahern’s warehouse was Melbourne Cup Day. At noon, we gathered around a TV set for the race and then went to the pub for lunch. In Melbourne Cup tradition, each of the women in my workplace donned a fashionable hat. There was a competition for the best hat. 
I wore a construction hard hat with a Builders Labourers Federation sticker slapped on the front. It bore the words, “Dare to struggle, dare to win!” My workmates thought it was hilarious. For me, it was a middle finger to Ahern’s management.
Fourteen months later, Nelson Mandela was released from prison following secret negotiations between the ANC and South Africa’s apartheid regime. Four years after that, he became president of a multiracial South Africa. A now sympathetic media transformed Mandela from a “terrorist” to an <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/nelson-mandela-1918-2013">elder statesman</a>. Mandela obligingly reciprocated, heading a government committed to private enterprise, foreign investment and privatisation of “inefficient” state-run services.
Today, the slogans of the anti-apartheid movement are buried in the past. Yet, social media posts about Israel’s Gaza genocide can get you fired, as the cases of journalists <a href="https://www.newarab.com/news/australian-lebanese-journalist-unfairly-sacked-over-gaza-post">Antoinette Lattouf</a> and <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/trending/cricket-axed-over-gaza-views-social-media-sparking-backlash">Peter Lalor</a> demonstrate. And protesting on campus can get you <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/universities-are-repressing-palestine-solidarity-activism">suspended from your studies</a> or facing disciplinary action amid a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/antisemitism-inquiry-recommends-crackdown-on-free-speech">witch</a><a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/antisemitism-inquiry-recommends-crackdown-on-free-speech"></a><a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/antisemitism-inquiry-recommends-crackdown-on-free-speech">-</a>hunt by increasingly McCarthyite university authorities. 
These examples demonstrate that free speech is never a right guaranteed under capitalism, but a right that we must fight for, again and again.
Nick Everett is the chairperson of Friends of Palestine WA.

Nick Everett

When saying ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ could get you sacked

“The great majority of you are fed up to the back teeth with them. The election gives you the chance to make it clear to these people how you feel.” 
Conservative British Prime Minister Edward Heath was muttering, weeks before the 1974 general election. “These people” were striking coal miners—the advance guard of the British working class in those days.
The last few years had shaken capitalism to its core. Massive strikes and unofficial actions were the norm. Conservative attempts to break the unions with new industrial laws and wage-freeze policies had only let loose a torrent of resistance.
In July 1972, the government imprisoned five docker shop stewards for defying a legal injunction. Forty-four thousand dock workers struck to demand their comrades’ release—all this without hesitation or recourse to “official” union authorisation. The call from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to stop work didn’t come until ten days into the national strike.
As rank-and-file stoppages landed blows against Heath’s industrial laws, solidarity action was breaking his policies on wages. Heath insisted that no worker should receive a wage increase above 7 percent. In January 1972, more than 25,000 coalminers struck for a 35 percent rise.
The government tried circumventing the action by hoarding coal at power stations and transport hubs. It wanted to prove to the miners that it could keep fuelling the industry even if every pit stopped digging.
A class-wide battle ensued, as the National Union of Miners (NUM) won solidarity to stop the movement of coal. Wherever the government had stockpiles, miners travelled to convince workers not to burn, refine or transport the material. Broad layers of unionists, students and other sympathisers were drawn into the fight against Heath.
“I was away from home, at college in Enfield”, Jean Spence told Tribune magazine 50 years later. “My dad was a striking miner at Dawdon pit. We hosted striking miners—flying pickets—from Kent in our student flat, and I had my first experience of picketing at Picketts Lock Power Station. An old trade unionist taught us how to deal respectfully with lorry drivers we were trying to turn away.” 
The best-remembered battleground of the 1972 strike was the Saltley fuel plant in Birmingham, where the Conservatives claimed to have 100,000 tonnes of processed coal ready to burn. There, 20,000 engineers struck to support thousands of miners who picketed the gates, pushing back police. This crucible of solidarity forced the government into submission—days later, the miners won their wage increase.
The following year, a global recession emerged. Once again, the NUM led the way by imposing an overtime ban to win higher wages. With energy and steel production impacted, Heath saw a political opportunity. He was determined to push back the militant edge of the labour movement, turn popular opinion against the miners and bury them under a landslide election victory for the Conservatives.
On 13 December 1973, Heath announced nationwide power rationing in response to the miners’ bans. Under a State of Emergency, households were subjected to a rotating schedule of energy stoppages. Electricity would be limited to three days per week for industry—workplaces were directed to shut down operations for the remaining four days. Heath maintained this “three-day week” for the whole northern winter. The government was in effect imposing a lockout against the entire British working class in punishment for the NUM’s action.
Back then, coal accounted for three-quarters of the UK energy supply, and steel remained a core part of Britain’s dwindling manufacturing base. By February 1974, miners had moved from overtime bans to all-out action, and the strikes had reduced steel production to 60 percent of its usual capacity. The miners held immense industrial power—and they were fighting on behalf of all workers facing real wage cuts. 
Barclay’s Bank profits had risen by 75 per cent since 1970, while food prices had increased by one-half. Much like our own “cost-of-living crisis”, the “recession” of the early 1970s was a recession for workers, while bosses prospered. If the miners could break through Heath’s wage policies, they could set a new standard for what other workers could win. 
For my parents and their siblings, images of 1974 still glimmer through murky childhood memories. Before I even knew what a strike was, I learned about the power cuts under Heath and those orangey, incandescent evenings in my Gran’s living room.
Winters in Glasgow are cold and dark. So during the three-day week, it was flickering candles and the buzz of a repurposed camping stove. John Peel’s prog-rock sessions had adolescents transfixed by the radio—television channels went dead by 10pm. My dad watched his older brother pore over Tolkien by candlelight, night after night. I can still find those volumes on my Uncle Jim’s shelf, lovingly dog-eared and worn. 
In the mornings, even by 9 o’clock, daylight would be hours away. The street lamps were knocked out by the power cuts. “We had to wear luminous vests going to school in the pitch black”, my Aunty Jackie explained. These were formative weeks, when the children of the British working class undertook with pride the task of outlasting Heath in his stand-off against the miners. 
The older kids at university found their own creative ways to support the NUM. Student unions were barred from sending direct financial donations. So, instead, striking miners were invited to mass meetings at Norwich, Warwick and Essex universities. Socialist student societies fundraised towards a £250 “speaker’s fee” for each miner—a cunning scheme to deliver solidarity funds to the pit communities.
The Tories employed dirty tactics to try to break the workers’ resolve. As a new ballot on industrial action approached, one Conservative MP growled, “Social security should not be made available to wives and children [of NUM members], because it allowed the enemies of the state to go on strike”.
The Thatcher administration would make good on this threat during the great battles of 1984-5. But for the time being, the Tories were driven back by the very union movement they’d hoped to extinguish.
Heath ran the 1974 election on the now infamous slogan, “Who governs?” Would voters prefer questions of economic policy to be decided by responsible Conservative ministers, or by the trade unions? The British working class at that time answered unswervingly: “Who governs? Not you!” 
Heath lost the election in a hammering defeat. Over the next decade, the Tories geared up for another showdown. These years of humiliation at the hands of the labour movement would not go unavenged. 
As early as 1977, with the party still in opposition, Conservative MP Nicholas Ridley outlined a program for hoarding coal, slashing strikers’ entitlements and training a new army of riot police to attack picketers. The “Ridley Plan” would become widely recognised as the Tories’ blueprint for defeating the NUM.
Four years of Labour rule had curbed the tide of workers’ struggle. With Heath gone, union leaders accepted a shameful compromise—they would forgo wage rises and refuse to authorise strikes in exchange for more government welfare spending. In the winter of 1978-79, a heroic bout of wildcat actions arose over the heads of the officials. But Labour had successfully dulled strike rates and cohered union leaders around a new industrial peace. 
When Margaret Thatcher won the prime ministership in 1979, she tried to enforce this “peace” through open class warfare. Ruling classes around the world were looking to slash social welfare and privatise public services to stabilise profit rates after the recession. The Conservatives wanted to win a final, set-piece confrontation to force unions into total submission and ensure minimum resistance. Thatcher announced the appointment of her new energy minister in 1983 with the menacing words: “We’re going to have a coal strike”. 
The Tories were so determined to break the miners that they were prepared to reorganise totally Britain’s energy infrastructure. A massive expansion of nuclear power and North Sea oil was to displace coal—the mines would be closed down to drive out the country’s most powerful union.
Don Keating, a South Yorkshire miner, remembers the night he learned his pit would close. “I was doing a 6 o’clock evening shift with a mate”, he told the BBC. “I’m walking down Pit Lane and a couple of lads who were coming up off shift said, ‘Don, do you know pit’s shutting?’ A bit of a joke, we thought—more rumours. We got down there and ... they were saying, ‘Yeah, it’s been announced that Cortonwood will be shutting’.”
On 5 March 1984, the government’s National Coal Board declared a wave of closures across England, Scotland and Wales—twenty mines were to be shut and 20,000 miners sacked. Cortonwood miners had recently been assured their jobs were safe for another five years; now, the pit was to close within five weeks. 
South Yorkshire had always been a militant area. They’d been among the first to blockade Saltley Gate in 1972. The Cortonwood NUM sent mobile pickets across the Yorkshire coalfields. Kent, Durham, South Wales and Scotland followed. Pit by pit, day by day, the immense network of mines across Britain was being pulled out on strike.
It was the confrontation Thatcher had been waiting for. Faithful to the Ridley Plan, the government had stockpiled 9 million tonnes of coal over the preceding three years. They now unleashed the hell hounds of the state against picketers. Thousands of police from different branches were drafted to patrol roads and pit villages for the duration of the strike. Mike McKay, a BBC journalist at the time, recalled:
“I remember particularly one very early morning, I was driving up the A1, and on the other side of the road was this endless convoy of police riot vans. It just went on and on ... It was like you were watching an occupying army travelling to the front.”
Many who remember 1984 speak of “civil war”. Dave Creamer from the Yorkshire Silverwood colliery described the atmosphere as flying pickets worked to spread the strike in spite of police: 
 “We were setting off at four o’clock picketing, trying to get through roadblocks ... We went through every back alley you could think of, up farmers’ fields, down through woods—everything—just to get to that picket line.”
“It was quite an adventure at first”, Creamer recalled in a BBC interview. “I was 20-odd-year-old, it was exciting. The adventure became a bit of a nightmare later on.”
The miners fought with everything they had, but the mood darkened towards the middle of the year. On 18 June, a mass picket assembled at Orgreave, where fuel was being supplied to a major steelworks. Miners hoped to recreate the victory of 1972 by hitting industries beyond coal. Despite some hesitation from union leaders, thousands of NUM members were ready to confront the police. 
But nothing could have prepared them for the 6,000 officers, dressed in riot gear, who thrashed, clubbed and beat their way through the picketers on that day. Watching footage of the bloodbath will still turn your stomach, even 40 years later. Yet the British media cruelly doctored the scenes, framing strikers as the instigators of violence. 
From that moment on, the civil war against miners was played out on ideological terrain. Thatcher arraigned them as “the enemy within”—with the full backing of the mainstream press. Miners and union leaders were increasingly described as “thugs” and even likened to fascists. Print workers at the Sun newspaper refused to publish the vicious anti-NUM headlines prepared by their bosses.
Pockets of secondary action opened across the union movement. Dock workers struck for three weeks in August 1984 to stop employers transporting coal to the steelworks in Scunthorpe. In Leicestershire, unionised rail workers did not handle coal for 35 consecutive weeks. 
These exceptional cases needed to be turned into a tide of solidarity to face down Thatcher, the police and the media’s combined forces. After all, the Tories wouldn’t stop at smashing the NUM. Every worker had a stake in this fight.
Mainstream accounts of the 1984-85 miners’ strike describe a tragic arc; a losing battle against Thatcher’s inevitable victory. It’s true that the NUM couldn’t have won the dispute alone. A class-wide mobilisation against Thatcher was necessary—and possible. But it never materialised. 
After Orgreave, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock encouraged comparisons between the so-called violence of picketers and the tyranny of the state. Some union officials even helped employers circumvent the strike’s impact, hoping they’d be rewarded with better sectional agreements. The TUC itself dealt the death blow, announcing in December 1984 that it would not endorse promised solidarity action after the High Court ruled the NUM’s strike illegal.
It’s difficult to communicate the gravity of this betrayal and the consequences that the British workers’ movement faced for decades afterwards. Unions have only recently begun to recover strike rates and membership numbers after the devastation of the Thatcher years.
Strikers themselves resisted the trajectory—they maintained their action through the Christmas and winter of 1984. In March 1985, miners reluctantly accepted a recommendation from NUM leaders to end the longest mass strike in British history. Dave Creamer recalls: 
“The night they held that branch meeting, when the orders came through from national level to go back to work ... There was almost fighting inside the club with people that wanted to stay out, people who wanted to go back ... It was one of the angriest meetings I’ve ever seen in my life.”
At the beginning of 1984, 170,000 miners worked across 170 collieries in Britain. Twenty years later, those numbers had dwindled to 4,000 workers in only eight pits. Unemployment destroyed whole communities. The economic power of the NUM—a power that had once disrupted heavy industry and toppled a government—was broken. 
Miners alone couldn’t defeat the arrayed powers of the ruling class. But they’d given Thatcher a serious fight. Because of them, the 1970s and 1980s in Britain are remembered not only as decades when the capitalist state attacked trade unions and working-class people. They are also memorialised as an era of defiant, tenacious and bitter class struggle, full of lessons. 
This history is the miners’ gift to every new generation of working-class resistance. For that, we owe them our gratitude.
Let them exhale
in unity
in hope
in disgust
and let them
remember
that shimmering sad yesterday 
when
people screamed no
—Extract from the poem “The unification” by Patrick Jones.

Ruby Healer

Remembering the British miners’ strikes

Conferences about colonialism aren’t unusual today. Universities host them regularly. But the one that took place in September 1920 was different. When the delegates set off for that conference, they were taking their lives in their hands. 
As boats from the east made their way across the Caspian Sea towards Baku, they were strafed by British Army warplanes: two delegates were killed. Participants travelling from the west through Russia found that anti-Communist militias had ripped up the tracks, burned down the stations, and threatened to besiege their trains. Borders were closed, and delegates had to sneak through.
The British had good reason to worry about this conference. It was called not just to discuss colonialism, but to end it. The participants were representatives of the international Communist movement and the various national and anti-colonial movements, particularly through Asia and the Middle East. 
“The European working class sees now, at every step, that the course of history has united the working people of the East with the workers of the West”, said Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International. That organisation, which united the post-revolutionary Russian government with Communist parties around the world, had called the conference. Zinoviev spoke of two “streams”: the “workers’ proletarian Communist struggle” and the “movement of the oppressed nationalities” that was challenging British and French colonialism. Those two streams, Zinoviev said, must be united into “one single tumultuous, powerful stream that, like the sea, will sweep all obstacles from its path, clearing the land of all the evil from which we have suffered so long”.
European colonialism existed before capitalism, but the two would become inextricably linked, and the growth of each would drive the development of the other. Precious metals from the Americas and slaves from Africa fed the growth of early capitalism in Europe. By the late nineteenth century, industrial capitalism had driven European powers to acquire colonies around the world. 
The unending pressure to compete and accumulate profits meant there was no end to the need for raw materials, export markets and armed outposts to ward off rivals and terrorise “the natives”. Continents were carved up and “zones of influence” determined by treaties between Western powers: plans for the division of Africa were finally settled at the Berlin Conference of 1884, without reference to the opinions of any Africans themselves. 
In the same period, as capitalism transformed Europe and expanded throughout the globe, the modern anti-capitalist movement came into existence. When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, it was impossible to ignore capitalism’s global spread—and its opponents’ necessarily internationalist strategy. 
The capitalist class, Marx and Engels wrote, “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the capitalist mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst”. In the broad outlines of this foundational document—more a declaration of principles than a worked-out theory—Marx and Engels still emphasised that capitalism had become a world system, and the socialist movement would be a world movement: the workers had “a world to win”.
But it was over the next decade that Marx and Engels would come to fully understand the promise of anti-colonial movements. At the time of the Manifesto, Europe was entering a wave of revolutions, and colonial questions were not at the forefront of Marx’s mind. When those revolutions receded, leading activists like Marx and Engels became political refugees. Marx made a living writing on world affairs for English-language newspapers. Through this work, as Kevin Anderson traces in his work Marx on the Margins, the 1850s became a time of political discovery for Marx.
The European revolutionary movement was in retreat; many of its key leaders were drifting away from their principles. Marx famously spent this time doing the research that would become Capital. But his journalistic obligations led him to study movements in Asia. During this time, he came to see that not only the global spread of capitalism but also the native populations’ resistance to colonialism could be a powerful revolutionary force.
The Indian rebellion of 1857, in which army officers trained by the British mutinied to lead an uprising against colonial rule, made a powerful impression—especially in comparison to the then dormant European socialist movement. “India”, he wrote to Engels, “is now our best ally”. The uprising in India, Chinese resistance to the British and other anti-colonial movements showed the possibility that world capitalism could be simultaneously challenged on two fronts: a revolutionary socialist workers’ movement combined with rebellions in the colonies. 
Marxist anti-colonialism was not simply a matter of supporting the “native” ruling classes, who could try to maintain their own rule under the guise of protecting traditional ways of life. But nor was it a matter of waiting for capitalism to “civilise” the natives and bring them into the world socialist movement. Socialist workers in Europe would have to oppose the oppression wrought by the colonial powers. When, in the 1860s, Marx and Engels helped found the International Workingmen’s Association to bring together the socialist parties of the world, they fought stridently for it to take a position in solidarity with colonised peoples—struggling in particular to encourage English workers to act in solidarity with the Irish national liberation movement.
This strategic position was based on the idea of an international revolutionary movement of workers, which respected no borders and aimed to overthrow all capitalist states. Naturally, such a movement would be the enemy of any nation that tried to extend its state power to rule over colonies and steal their wealth. But over the coming decades, the socialist movement, organised in the Second International, split into two wings. 
On the one hand, figures such as Eduard Bernstein—often described as “moderates”—would argue that revolution was impossible and unnecessary, and that socialists should avoid conflict and work through existing institutions. They would also become supporters of colonial projects. Opposing them were figures like Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, who put opposition to colonialism at the centre of their revolutionary politics. Both saw colonialism—and competition for overseas influence—as central to the logic of capitalism, its drive to war and its tendency to economic collapse.
When World War One broke out in 1914, these revolutionaries also saw anti-colonialism as central to the strategy for socialist revolution. Luxemburg, writing from jail, condemned capitalism not only for its contemporary war, but for its atrocities in the colonies: “This same imperialism doomed tens of thousands of Hereros to destruction”. 
Lenin—exiled from Russia—wrote to revolutionaries at home, advising them to put this question to the working class: “Are you willing to pay these gentry, the capitalists, hundreds of millions of roubles [the Russian currency] every year for a war waged for the division of the African colonies, Turkey, etc.?” He proposed “workers and peasants’ peace terms” to end the war: “liberation of all colonies; liberation of all dependent, oppressed and unequal nations”.
When the Russian workers seized power at the end of 1917, this program was put into action. Almost immediately, the new revolutionary government published its Decree on Peace, describing “this war over the issue of how to divide among the strong and rich nations the weak nationalities they have conquered” to be “the greatest of crimes against humanity”. To the German state, Russia’s negotiators, led by Leon Trotsky, proposed peace on the basis that “colonial questions” be resolved by removing all troops and organising referendums of the colonial populations to decide their future. 
Unsurprisingly, the terms were not accepted by the German imperialist powers, or any others. Instead, the Marxist movement—which was being reorganised into separate revolutionary Communist parties inspired by the Russian example—would have to reach out to the oppressed colonial populations themselves.
“We do not want to become like the ‘heroes’ of the Second International”, Zinoviev told the anti-colonial conference in Baku in 1920. “We are mindful that in this world live not only people with white skin ... We want to put an end to the rule of capital everywhere in the world. And this will become possible only when we have lit the fire of revolution not merely in Europe and America but throughout the world, and when all the working people of Asia and Africa march with us.”
Of course, this was easier said than done—and even saying it was difficult, when the world’s imperialist powers were trying to eliminate the new Russian revolutionary government using the same techniques of mass slaughter and starvation they had learned in their colonial territories. 
But there were serious political challenges, too. The anti-colonial movements were based in economically underdeveloped countries and could be strongly influenced by local landlords and capitalists. Outside Russia, the European revolutionary movement was still too small and weak to challenge its own ruling classes. The global alliance between socialists and anti-colonial movements was an important strategic goal; implementing it required a level of strength and organisation that had not yet been reached. 
“If the struggle in Persia, India, and Turkey were merely to bring to power the capitalists and landlords of those countries, with their national parliaments and senates, the masses of the people would have gained nothing”, argued a Russian delegate, Pavlovich. “Every newly formed state would be rapidly drawn, by the very course of events and the iron logic of the laws of capitalist economy, into the vicious circle of militarism and imperialist politics.”
This vision of communist anti-colonialism inspired generations of fighters—but it has not yet been realised. The imperialist blockade of Russia had the desired effect: the revolutionary movement was starved out and replaced with the bureaucracy of Joseph Stalin. Zinoviev himself ended up in Stalin’s prisons, as would “all the speakers from Asia at the Baku congress who were within Stalin’s reach and whose fate is known”, according to the historian John Riddell. 
Stalin’s “Communist” movement retained the language of anti-colonialism when it suited its interests. But the idea of a simultaneous global movement to wipe out capitalism and colonialism in “one single tumultuous, powerful stream” of resistance became an occasional rhetorical device, not a strategic reality.
Now, the “vicious circle of militarism and imperialist politics” has absorbed most of the post-colonial nations. Some, like India, are happily supplying arms to Israel. Others, like Iran, collaborate with Russia’s foreign military adventures. China even pursues its own internal settler-colonial project in Xinjiang. The world remains in need of the strategy shaped by Marx: a global anti-capitalist revolution to liberate the oppressed all over the world.

D. Taylor

Communists versus colonialism

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

Lance Selfa

Jimmy Carter’s real legacy

How can the devastating cycle of imperialist invasions, genocide, exploitation and authoritarian rule that has been inflicted on the people of the Middle East be ended? There is profound sympathy among the workers and the poor of the Arab world for the Palestinian cause, but the brutal dictators who rule Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria have held popular mobilisations in check. There is a burning need for a socialist left that can galvanise the masses into action.
The Arab Spring revolution that swept the region just over a decade ago showed the potential for rebellion against these detested regimes. But today the region’s once powerful left is very weak because of the disastrous failure of the Stalinism that long dominated its politics.
If a socialist left is to be built with some hope of liberating the workers of the Middle East and winning freedom for the Palestinian people, then it is vital to come to terms with the legacy of Stalinist class-collaborationist politics and rebuild on a genuinely revolutionary basis.
Prior to the 1930s, the Arab Communist parties were tiny. In the early 1930s, the original Communist leaders, who were genuine working-class revolutionaries, were purged and the parties thoroughly Stalinised. New leaders trained in Moscow loyally carried out the dictates of Russian foreign policy—the policy of the counter-revolutionary regime that had destroyed workers’ power in Russia.
The last thing Russia’s rulers wanted were workers’ revolutions that would threaten their imperialist interests. For Stalin and his supporters, the role of Arab Communists was to find allies for Russia, not to advance working-class interests.
From the mid-1930s, Moscow directed Communists to adopt a class-collaborationist popular front policy that subordinated the interests of workers and peasants to the supposedly progressive national bourgeoisie. As the Syrian Communist leader Khalid Bakdash put it in 1943: 
“We assure the national capitalist, the national factory owner, that we do not look with envy or with malice on his national enterprise. On the contrary, we desire his progress and vigorous growth ... We assure the owner of land that we do not and shall not demand the confiscation of his property ... All we ask is kindness towards the peasant.”
This approach totally contradicted the genuine Marxist tradition. Compare Bakdash’s statement with what Lenin argued about how revolutionaries should relate to their local capitalists in 1920: “The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in colonial countries, but must not merge with it and must under all circumstances preserve the independence of the proletarian movement, even if in its most rudimentary form”.
The precise form of the popular front varied over time, and the section of the bourgeoisie that was considered progressive could also change dramatically. During World War Two, Moscow told Arab Communists to back the war effort of Stalin’s British allies. Consequently, Communists opposed strikes by workers. And in the eyes of the Stalinists, the bourgeois Arab forces that continued to support the struggle against British and French colonial rule went from being progressive allies to outright fascists.
Later, the main task was to curry favour with the new nationalist Arab regimes. Moscow spelt it out in 1960:
“At the head of the majority of new national states ... stand bourgeois political leaders ... However, this cannot belittle the progressive historical importance of the breakthrough that has taken place ... [T]he central task ... remains for a comparatively long period of time that of struggle not against capital but against survivals of the Middle Ages. From this stems the possibility of the cooperation over a long period of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia ... with that part of the national bourgeoisie which is interested in the independent political and economic development of its country and is ready to defend its independence against any encroachments by the imperialist powers.”
But no section of the Arab bourgeoisie, even supposedly radical leaders like Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, was prepared to mobilise the masses for a determined fight against imperialism. In June 1969, Gaddafi opposed a popular war of liberation to free Palestine. He argued that the Palestinian guerrilla movement must rid itself of “ideologies” and operate only according to the strategy laid down by Arab governments.
The popular front approach had an incredibly damaging impact. It led to repeated defeats for the working-class movement. In Iraq following the popular revolution of July 1958 that overthrew the monarchy, the Communists built mass working-class support and dominated the student movement. But despite intensified repression, the Iraqi Communist Party tailed behind the government of General Kassem, which supposedly represented the “national bourgeoisie”. The failure to mobilise workers to fight for power led to a crushing defeat, with at least 5,000 Communists murdered and thousands more sacked from their jobs and sent to prison by the lorry load.
The Communists learned nothing from this disaster. In the 1970s, Iraqi Communist Party members took cabinet posts in the authoritarian Ba’athist government until Saddam Hussein had them hanged.
In Egypt, the Communists initially denounced Abdul Nasser’s nationalist regime as “fascist” after it executed striking workers. But once Nasser developed friendly relations with Moscow, the Communists became cheerleaders for his regime despite the fact Nasser was imprisoning Communist Party leaders. The Egyptian Communists eventually dissolved their party into the highly authoritarian ruling party.
In Lebanon during the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s, the Communists refused to establish democratic control by workers over the sectors of Beirut the party’s armed wing dominated, instead tailing behind the bourgeois nationalist forces. They even went so far as to adopt communalist slogans that served to divide the working class. In Syria, the Communists were absorbed into the Assad regime’s totalitarian state apparatus, occupying minor cabinet posts. This disoriented the working-class movement, tying it to the exploiters and impeding the possibility of independent working-class actions to defend living standards and democratic rights.
Despite these repeated failures, popular-front-style class-collaborationist politics rather than clear-cut class politics in one form or another remained hegemonic on the Arab left for decades. In Palestine, the popular front approach meant that in the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939, the Palestine Communist Party (PCP) was unable to offer a class-struggle alternative to the reactionary Arab leadership of landlords and clerics. And because the PCP abandoned class politics for nationalism, it was in a weaker position to hold the line against Zionism among its Jewish worker members (who were a majority of members in the 1930s).
The end result was the formation of two Communist parties in British mandate Palestine. One party, predominantly Jewish in composition, tailed Zionism. The other party, predominantly Palestinian in composition, tailed Arab nationalism.
In 1947, Moscow backed the setting up of the Zionist state as it saw Israel as a potential ally. This had a disastrous impact on Communist parties throughout the Arab world.
The membership of the joint Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon, which had built substantial support during a postwar strike wave, collapsed from 18,000 in 1947 to just a few hundred. Dissidents who opposed Moscow’s pro-Zionist line were expelled. Consequently, Communists were in no position to take advantage of the wave of strikes and protests that rocked Syria after the failure of the Arab regimes to defend Palestine. 
The Communists were discredited for many years among Palestinians driven from their land. This explains why the Palestinian left that developed in the 1960s, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), were not direct descendants of the old PCP, but had quite different origins.
The tragedy was that when these groups groped towards Marxism, the predominant ideas on offer were still those of Stalinism. They ended up embracing a popular front approach, as reflected in the names of their organisations, and with all the same problems.
The official Communist Party did retain some influence among Arabs within the state of Israel. It was, however, a reformist party committed to the Zionist state. And the PCP on the West Bank was a conservative force promoting a two-state solution.
The new Palestinian left of the 1960s originated in the Arab National Movement (ANM), which originated among a group of intellectuals at the American University of Beirut, the most prominent of whom were George Habash and Wadi Haddad. The ANM was a highly secretive organisation that had an elitist approach of armed struggle by small bands of guerrillas. It viewed armed actions as a means to pressure the Arab states to launch a war against Israel.
In its early years, the ANM was conservative politically and, reflecting the upper-middle-class social backgrounds of its members, hostile to working-class politics, which it viewed as disrupting Arab national unity. After 1957, the ANM looked to Nasser’s regime in Egypt to unite the Arab world and drive out the imperialists and Zionists.
The crushing defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 war with Israel discredited Nasserism. The ANM condemned Nasser’s regime as petty bourgeois rather than socialist and began to look to the Vietnamese model. In December 1967, George Habash established the PFLP based on a version of Stalinised Marxism looking to Cuba and China. Then in February 1969, the Democratic Front split from the PFLP. 
Initially, the Democratic Front, influenced by New Left ideas and with a following among Palestinian students in Europe and the US, was the more leftish and open group. Some Palestinian Trotskyists exiled in Europe joined. The Democratic Front strongly rejected Arab chauvinism (and slogans such as drive the Jews into the sea, which was still influential in the 1960s) and placed less emphasis on militarism than the PFLP, which in 1969 and 1970 engaged in a series of plane hijackings and hostage takings.
The DFLP called for the “establishment of a democratic state in which Arabs and Jews shall enjoy equal national rights and responsibilities”
as part of a federal socialist state of the whole region. It sought links with the Israeli Trotskyist group Matzpen. 
In 1970, during the mass upheavals in Jordan, both the DFLP and the PFLP raised the slogan “All power to the resistance” and called for a socialist state. But after the Black September crushing of the resistance, the DFLP moved to the right, purging its more left-wing members and moving towards a more pro-Moscow orientation.
This explains why the DFLP, which had participated in the Left Front in the Lebanese civil war and had been critical of the PLO’s failure to launch an all-out struggle against the far-right Lebanese forces, largely dropped out of the fighting once Russia’s ally Syria invaded Lebanon. The main game for Moscow was its relationship with Arab regimes like Syria. That meant that the interests of Arab and Palestinian Communists were always going to be sacrificed.
The Russians were also keen to develop a relationship with Fatah, the mainstream leadership of the PLO. From the late 1970s, the Russians gave the group substantial funding and arms. Consequently, a strong pro-Moscow Stalinist current developed within Fatah.
The DFLP began to popularise the idea of a Palestinian mini-state in the Occupied Territories. By the early 1970s, sections of the Fatah leadership supported the idea but faced opposition within their ranks, so they were happy for the DFLP to be the stalking horse for the idea.
The DFLP was smaller than the PFLP and had less of a base in the refugee camps. But it had an ideological impact on left-wing intellectual circles in the Arab world. In the early 1970s, it published an influential weekly paper in Beirut with the Lebanese Communist Action Organisation. This enabled it to play an important role in rallying sections of the secular Arab intelligentsia to support a two-state position. It was a slippery slope. The end result was that the DFLP became little more than a left cover for Fatah’s betrayals. 
The PFLP was hostile to “Arab reaction”, represented in its view by feudalism and capitalism, particularly the rulers of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Jordan. But it was much less critical of the supposed radical Arab regimes such as Algeria, South Yemen, Syria and, at times, Iraq.
In March 1969, George Habash attacked the DFLP as suffering from “infantile leftism”. “We are not as against Arab regimes as they are”, he argued. “We criticise but collaborate with Arab regimes, as Mao did with the Kuomintang against the Japanese threat in China.”
But so-called radical regimes like Algeria, Syria and Iraq were far from reliable allies of the Palestinian masses. Their approach was not qualitatively different from that of Jordan, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. By tying themselves to these regimes, the PFLP downplayed the need to build a mass revolutionary movement from below throughout the Arab world. The PFLP ended up providing left cover for regimes like the Ba’ath in Iraq and Syria.
So, while the PFLP called itself Marxist-Leninist and talked a lot about the role of the masses and the working class, this became little more than a rhetorical incantation as it sought alliances with various non-proletarian forces.
In 1970, Habash went to China and North Korea to win support, and the Chinese began to send the PFLP considerable amounts of arms. But this was at a cost, as the Chinese opposed the PFLP’s attacks on conservative Arab regimes in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, with which China was trying to curry favour.
After the defeat of the Arab states in the 1973 war with Israel, Yasser Arafat openly backed the proposal for a Palestinian mini-state in the Occupied Territories. In response, the PFLP and other groups formed the Rejection Front, which was also backed by the Iraqi regime.
Opposition to a mini-state had a resonance among intellectuals and students and in some refugee camps in Lebanon (after all, the refugees would get nothing out of setting up a state in the Occupied Territories). However, by 1978 Iraq was moving to cosy up to the conservative Arab regimes and it consequently went cold on the Rejection Front, which went into a marked decline.
Despite tensions and battles with Fatah, the PFLP refused to break decisively with the Fatah-dominated PLO and called for the national unity of all Palestinian groups. In other words, despite declaring itself a Marxist-Leninist organisation, the PFLP consistently put nation before class. It sought to unite with the bourgeois-dominated Fatah rather than build a class-struggle alternative to Fatah’s betrayals of Palestinian workers and peasants.
The PFLP came to operate as a ginger group within the PLO rather than trying to build a clear socialist leadership alternative to Fatah. This led the PFLP, on several occasions, to fudge its opposition to official PLO policy in the interests of preserving national unity. 
Eventually, the PFLP toned down its opposition to a two-state solution. It came to accept it as inevitable, and when the Palestinian Authority was established, it chose to operate within its framework.
The failure of the PFLP, the DFLP and the official Communist parties to build a class-struggle alternative to the rightward-moving Fatah demoralised their supporters. The demoralisation was further compounded by the collapse of the Russian bloc, which all of the Arab left had mistakenly looked to as socialist. 
This opened the space for the rise of the Islamists, who cohered around them a new generation of Palestinians who wanted to fight. But the Islamists were incapable of offering a road forward and, just like Fatah, led the Palestinian people down the road to further defeats.
A new revolutionary left needs to be built in Palestine and the broader Arab world that bases itself on a clear rejection of all forms of alliances with capitalist forces. A left that puts working-class unity ahead of national unity. A left that has no truck with any of the Arab regimes, whether so-called progressive or reactionary. A left that fights for working-class leadership of the struggle against Zionism and imperialism. One that seeks to rally the urban poor, the peasantry and the refugees behind the working class and recognises that freedom for the Palestinian people can be won only by a socialist revolution that sweeps away both the Zionist state and the bourgeois Arab states.

Mick Armstrong

The terrible legacy of Stalinism in the Middle East

The Labor government’s deregistration of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) in 1986 was a pivotal moment in Australian trade union history. Backed by most unions, including the peak Australian Council of Trade Unions, the move against the BLF was brutal. 
The union and its members were stripped of their rights federally, in the ACT and the strongest branches: NSW and Victoria. BLF members were forced to join other unions, such as the Building Workers Industrial Union (BWIU) or Federated Engine Drivers and Firefighters Union (FEDFA), or be sacked. The BLF could no longer represent members or win legally binding gains in the industrial relations system. A code of conduct was introduced, enforcing fines or cutting off utilities to the construction companies if they allowed BLF members to stay on their jobs. 
The BLF, initially a union of downtrodden labourers, had built itself into one of the most militant Australian unions by the 1970s. Like several unions in construction, the waterfront, mining and manufacturing, it was led by the Communist Party of Australia and contributed to rising militancy in Australia, mirroring a worldwide upsurge during the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, workplace activism accompanied more political demands and action, including anti-apartheid and anti-Vietnam War movements, and support for Indigenous, women’s and gay rights. As the 1960s and 1970s militancy ebbed and bosses went on the offensive, the crucial question was which way the workers movement would go. 
Most unions embraced the politics of cosying up to the bosses. In Australia, the class collaboration of the ALP-ACTU Accord propelled the Australian Labor Party to electoral victory in 1983. Union activist Ronnie remembers “a whole layer who were sold on taking that corporate unionism line. They thought it was going to give them a power base and an ‘in’ in decision making [while] providing a minimum of protection for the working class ... a trickle-down effect”. It was “an easy option to say nothing, to sign up and shut up and collect your job and fees”. That’s the kind of unionism that rank-and-file labourer Ivor Lawrence dismisses as “just revenue making, like the bloody poker machines”. 
Apart from direct attacks, the Accord process continued to weaken union organisation. In the building and construction industry, union coverage fell to 47 percent by August 1988. The period between 1986 and 1988 marked the most dramatic decline, a fall of 58,000, the largest since 1929. 
Militancy fell off equally as dramatically, meaning that a construction boom in 1986-88 didn’t benefit workers. “I’ve been in the game since ’49”, said lifelong BL Kyran Nicholls. “I can’t remember any boom, at any time that we didn’t get something out of it. This was the biggest boom of all and we went backwards, thanks to the BWIU, the FEDFA, ACTU and mainly the Labor Party.” 
In the end, that was what even the architects of the Accord were forced to admit. The BWIU’s Tom McDonald later acknowledged that the Accord “disempowered workers and in the end undermined unionism—it took away workers’ right to struggle for higher wages and conditions with everything decided at the top echelons”. 
One of the keys to that disempowerment was the BLF deregistration. From the late 1970s, when the Liberal-National Party was in government, to the Hawke ALP government from 1983, the union was constantly investigated and threatened with fines and other legal penalties for its militancy and workplace gains. 
In 1986, after the latest investigation, which cited the union’s “addiction to slogans such as ‘Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win’” and its ability to act first and negotiate later, Labor used the combined forces of the state, the union bureaucracy and the employers against the BLF. When federal Labor delivered the deregistration blow, a triumphant industrial relations minister—or “minister of war”—in Victoria, Steve Crabb, was on the Sun’s
front page “beating [the union] into submission”. 
BLF leader Norm Gallagher dismissed the threat: “We have been deregistered before. We survived and during that time our membership increased ... We will look after ourselves, just wait and see”.
It was true that the BLF and other unions had previously overcome deregistration, or the draconian anti-union laws of the 1950s and 1960s. But this time was different. Then, other unions had rallied around the unions under attack. Now, almost everyone was acting against them.
Deregistration—D-Day 16 April 1986—and chaotic scenes spread across the industry in three states. Members were shocked on that first day. Melbourne shop steward Ivor and others felt, “How the hell can this happen? How the hell can workers do this to other workers? Disbelief”. On his job, Ivor Lawrence called a meeting, and they walked off, refusing to sign over to rival unions. Some went to the federation’s office, where other meetings and demos were being organised, determined to fight to get their jobs back.
Despite members being told the BLF had no legal status, no industrial rights and could no longer protect their wages and conditions, defiant BLs went to work determined to stay only on their federation tickets. “BLs arriving at work ... were faced with a combination of government officials armed with ‘union transfer’ documents, organisers from other unions, police on a number of sites and employers who had themselves been threatened”. As the
Age had warned earlier, solidarity would have to be broken by force. The paper assumed the government “must ... be ready to use police to clear the sites and make sure construction work can continue”.
The union kept up the struggle to survive for the rest of 1986 and into 1987. Members, many of whom kept their BLF tickets, also reluctantly joined the BWIU or FEDFA to continue the fight on the job, to fight for a principle—the right to be in the union of your choice. However, after the first few months, most of the action was in Victoria because NSW and the ACT branches were too weakened to respond effectively. 
The blows kept coming. On 13 October 1987, the BLF headquarters in Melbourne was raided by 150 Special Operations police in full attack gear amid government claims the union was funded by “Libyan money” and had $6 million in the bank. As the raid launched, a distraught unionist called out: “It’s World War Three! They’ve smashed the office like you wouldn’t believe, had a go at the staff, the women, cut the phones, tried to seize all the assets!” 
Outraged, protesters marched on parliament and again the next day as unionists walked off the Tennis Centre job and the waterfront shut down for three hours. On 15 October, a Trades Hall delegates meeting condemned the raid. At another protest, tramways union leader Clarrie O’Shea, whose jailing had led to a general strike in 1969 in defiance of anti-union laws, backed the BLF.
The raid wasn’t aimed just at the BLF; it was designed to undermine the ultimately unsuccessful attempts by ex-BLF members inside the BWIU to build a rank-and-file challenge in the 1987 elections.
Though the BLF survived the raid, the government had dealt a nearly fatal blow. It appointed a custodian and, on $1,000 a day, former Judge Ian Sharp was given control of all the funds and investigative powers over the running of the branches. Instigating a raft of charges against officials and organisers, he mired the union in court cases and in May 1988 froze the union funds until 1991, also refusing to pay the union’s wages and bills. 
Even when the BLF was forced into amalgamation with the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) in 1994, the custodian held control of the BLF funds and assets until the state finally relinquished them in 2002. Not one charge was ever laid over the original accusations.
Despite all this, amid a dramatic decline in Victorian labourers’ jobs, from 21,000 to 12,000, the remaining hope for a comeback was dashed when deregistration was extended for another five years. From 1991, the only choice left was amalgamation.
In the end, the BLF’s industrial militancy wasn’t enough. Most inside the union acknowledged the federation needed a more politically based response to the Accord and more organised opposition. After deregistration, there were attempts to build such opposition with groups such as “Defend the Unions, Defend the BLF” and a Fightback Conference pulling together activists and several unions and left-wing groups. But in the lead-up to the Accord, the BLF didn’t develop and cohere a more political opposition to counter the class-collaborationist politics of unions such as the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), one of the key backers of the Accord. 
The federation was seldom able to go beyond the limits of trade union struggle and, up against the power of the state, Kyran Nicholls pointed out, no union on its own could have won. Nonetheless, it was more prepared than most to take that struggle to the edge. As John Cummins said: “If we hadn’t fought, hadn’t run the distance, it [the sacrifices of rank-and-file BLs], it would have all been lost”.
Organised building workers prepared to fight not just for themselves but also for the rights of other workers and many oppressed groups—that is what brought the BLF up against the forces of capitalism and led to the campaign to smash it. This is why we remember the union to this day.
All quotes are from Liz Ross’ book Dare to Struggle! Dare to Win! The 1986 deregistration of the BLF, available from Red Flag Books.

Liz Ross

The last time Labor deregistered a construction union

Israel’s US-sponsored genocide in Palestine has now brought the Middle East to the brink of regional catastrophe. But if you open up a newspaper in the West, you’ll read that the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East is the victim of aggression from its neighbours, including one it has just invaded for the fourth time. And while Israel is doing nothing but “defending itself”, its regional rival Iran is being painted as enemy number one. 
The irony is that Iran was once a vital US ally in the Middle East. The post-WW2 period was a golden age of US influence in Iran, during which control over the spigot of Iranian oil was transferred from the British to the US empire. 
In 1953, the US sponsored a coup against progressive nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh to prevent the nationalisation of Iranian oilfields. In the following decade, Iran became increasingly authoritarian. The anti-communist and pro-Western king, or shah, was a welcome friend to the US in an era when pan-Arab nationalism was threatening US interests in the Arab states. 
In 1979, a revolution swept aside the hated shah. The revolution, which had opened up the possibility of liberation for workers, women and oppressed minorities, was ultimately hijacked by the clerics, who implemented a new authoritarian state, the Islamic Republic. Unlike the previous autocracy, this regime did not ally with US imperialism, instead presenting itself as intractably hostile to US influence in the Middle East. 
Iran’s anti-Western posture has given a measure of popularity to an otherwise despised regime. And no wonder, given the US has long been the greatest purveyor of violence and instability in the Middle East. 
As a rival capitalist power, Iran has benefited from anti-US feeling and from the US’s strategic failures in the region, particularly during the “War on Terror”. Iran’s major rival, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was removed from power by the US in 2003, and Iran was able to take advantage of the power vacuum created when the US proved unable to establish a pro-Western government. 
Iran’s regional influence was also boosted by the defeat of Israel in Lebanon by Hezbollah, an independent militia strategically allied to Iran, following Israel’s invasion in 2006. In the wake of the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, Iran also carried out military interventions to prop up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with the support of Hezbollah, and sponsored the Houthis in Yemen against local forces and a Saudi-led coalition of Gulf states. 
Renewed Iranian influence has presented a strategic dilemma for US imperialism. In the last 15 years, there has been debate in the US ruling class about whether confrontation or containment is the best approach. The Obama-era Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015 represented a pragmatic response to the failure of US occupations in the Middle East. The deal sought to balance overwhelming US military superiority and deterrence with a partial loosening of sanctions on Iran in exchange for a commitment to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The motivation for the deal was hardly peacenik: Obama was attempting to tie up loose ends in the Middle East the better to carry out a “pivot to Asia” and prepare for war with China. 
In the intervening years, Trump tore up the nuclear deal and carried out the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Aside from plying their ally Israel with weapons and levelling ever greater sanctions on Iran’s economy, the US has not had a coherent strategy for confronting or containing Iran. 
There is no shortage of anti-Iranian hawks in the US today. When asked in an interview with 60 Minutes what country represents the “greatest adversary” to the US, Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris claimed that Iran was the “obvious” answer. At a campaign event in North Carolina, Donald Trump encouraged Israel to strike Iranian territory to “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later”.
And while there are no doubt differences of opinion in the US elite about Israeli strikes on Iran—whether to avoid hitting oil infrastructure, which would risk destabilising oil prices, and whether to avoid attacks on nuclear facilities, for example—if Israel decides to strike, the US will back it. 
It is absurd to suggest today, as so many in Israel and the West do, that Iran is an existential threat to Israel. The opposite is true. Israel has never been more secure. The Gulf states have all but normalised relations, Egypt maintains the barbaric blockade on the Rafah crossing into Gaza, and Jordan shoots down Iranian rockets to defend Israel. Israel, on the other hand, poses an existential threat to any neighbour that finds itself at odds with US imperialism. 
A comparison of their military capacities and security alliances shows a stark gulf between them. Israel is a rich, nuclear-armed power with the backing of US imperialism and spends nearly three times Iran’s annual military budget. Iran is a relatively weak power, strained under the weight of crippling US sanctions. This is not the clashing of two comparable powers but an attempt to assert full spectrum US and Israeli dominance in the Middle East, which should be resolutely opposed. If war emerges between Israel, backed by the US, and Iran, socialists should be for Israel’s defeat.
Iran’s government is an authoritarian capitalist regime that brutally oppresses its own population. Animosity from the US and Israel does not make it progressive. The anti-government protests and strikes that accompanied the Women, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 were a positive development that required solidarity. Opposition to an attack on Iran, and the desire to see Israel roundly defeated, does not reflect political support for the Iranian regime, just as opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not imply support for Saddam Hussein. 
Now as then, anti-war activists in the West have a responsibility to reject the lies and expose the hypocrisy of Israel and the West’s wars—current and threatened—in the Middle East.

Chloe Rafferty

How Iran became Western enemy number one

The children of the stones 
have scattered our papers 
spilled ink on our clothes 
mocked the banality of old texts ... 
What matters about 
the children of the stones 
Is that they have brought us rain after centuries of thirst 
Brought us the sun after centuries of darkness, 
Brought us hope after centuries of defeat ... 
The most important 
thing about them is that they have rebelled 
against the authority of their fathers.
Nizar Qabbani—Syrian poet
The First Intifada was one of the deepest and longest-lasting rebellions of Palestinians against Israeli oppression in history. It was known as the “uprising of stones”. 
The emblematic figure of the Intifada was the youth, hurling rocks, head covered by a keffiyeh, standing defiant against Israeli tanks. This figure represented a break from the militarised forms of Palestinian resistance that had dominated in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The Intifada involved hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza and even inside Israel, and represented a broad and deep radicalisation of the Palestinian population. It involved resistance, civil disobedience, strikes and protests. 
Stories from journalists at the time reveal the breadth of popular involvement. American Ramallah-based journalist Joe Stork described how a middle-aged working-class woman, after watching demonstrations on television for a month, eagerly joined a group of young boys building a roadblock. 
Another article described a toothless 100-year-old woman admitted to a Gaza hospital after having her hand broken by Israeli soldiers. As she entered the ward, she sat up on the bed and gave a speech of defiance to the applause of other victims in surrounding beds.
Over the course of the six years, there were times when the Intifada managed to achieve something like dual power. Palestinian popular committees took over significant elements of civil society and social infrastructure. This was all in response to increased Israeli control and brutalisation of Palestinians in the preceding decades.
After Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank following the 1967 war, the intensification of military rule became unbearable. These conditions provoked extreme resentment amongst the Palestinians, and, throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, there was an increase in organisation. Students played a leading role, with universities starting community programs and organising protests. Strikes began to occur with greater frequency as all Palestinian factions turned toward organising workers. 
The immediate event that sparked the Intifada occurred in Gaza on 9 December 1987. An Israeli army tank drove into a line of cars of Arab workers who had just passed one of the military checkpoints at the northern entrance to the Gaza Strip. Four were crushed to death and seven were seriously injured. The crime was witnessed by hundreds of labourers returning from jobs in Israel. 
Three of the dead men were from the nearby Jabalia refugee camp. Their funerals turned into a huge demonstration of 10,000 camp residents. From this moment onwards, the residents of the camp referred to it as the “camp of the revolution”. 
The killings sparked waves of similar actions across the refugee camps, home to the poorest and most oppressed Palestinians. One young resident in Gaza said: “We were waiting to do such an uprising. Everyone here has a demonstration inside their heart”. 
The insurgence of the early demonstrations provoked a violent reaction from the Israeli military. Hundreds of young people were arbitrarily arrested. The military picked them up and imprisoned them. Eventually, the Israelis converted an army camp on the edge of Gaza city into a new place to hold young men. Palestinians dubbed it “Ansar II” after the notorious POW camp Israel set up in southern Lebanon. Ansar II became infamous for its sadistic treatment of Palestinians, which included clubbing prisoners while they were shackled to the ground. 
Curfews were introduced; telephone lines, water and electricity were cut. Administrative detention was introduced, and activists were deported. 
By 1988, Israel was sending 10,000 troops every day into the West Bank and Gaza, using more soldiers than in their conquest in 1967. By the end of 1988, more than 30,000 Palestinians had been detained and hundreds killed.
This initial phase of the uprising was primarily a war of the camps versus the army, but by mid-January 1988, the villages also became centres of resistance. Women and the young were at the centre of the rebellion. There were stories about boys, so young that they had to stand on their tiptoes to look through car windows, staffing the Palestinian checkpoints established by the uprising. Women routinely attacked Israeli patrols with pots and pans to release detained youths. Outside one Ramallah prison in late 1988, three women claimed an arrested youth, explaining: “They are all our sons”. This phrase became a refrain throughout the whole of the Intifada. Women even talked about protecting their “sons” as their profession. 
All this resistance would have been significant enough, but the rebellion deepened and expanded in a variety of ways. Tax strikes were organised and Israeli goods boycotted.
Importantly, workers began to mobilise. Over the decades, the numbers of Palestinian workers working low-wage jobs in the West Bank and as day labourers inside Israel had increased. Wage workers became a larger part of the Palestinian population overall, and unions grew. One union official estimated in 1985 that, out of 150,000 workers in the West Bank, around 30,000 were members of a union. 
Strikes became a regular feature of the Intifada. In late December 1987, a general strike of Palestinian workers occurred across all the Occupied Territories. Israeli profits collapsed in a variety of sectors, including hospitality, construction and fruit farming. 
The organisation of workers was not, however, unified. There were several union federations and blocs organised along political lines—many of whom were competing for members. 
Other committees were also established: youth committees, medical committees, popular and neighbourhood committees, and local defence committees.
The neighbourhood and popular committees became responsible for the running of basic infrastructure, including health, education and rubbish collection. When schools were shut down by military order, the committees established alternative schools with a whole new curriculum. 
These committees did more than help organise different elements of society. They started to give political and social confidence in new ways. Many of the generational and class relations were shifting. The class forces that had dominated society, like intellectuals and professionals, began to seem marginal. There were open challenges to old leaders and old hierarchies. 
The idea behind many of these committees was to disengage from existing Israeli structures and lay the basis for Palestinian statehood. Or, according to Salim Tamari, “To prepare the Occupied Territories to receive the national authority.” 
While the early months of the Intifada were led by a combination of local spontaneous action and pre-existing formations, a more formal political leadership coalesced in early 1988. This was called the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU). Outside of the UNLU, and with growing influence, were the Islamist factions: Islamic Jihad and Hamas. 
The UNLU directed the course of the uprising through a series of communiqués. These communiqués, particularly in the early years of the uprising, would give each day of the week ahead a particular focus. They were distributed at night, on the ground or tucked under car windshields or doors. The directives were assiduously followed. 
The UNLU comprised both a political leadership on the ground in the Occupied Territories and also the leadership amongst the diaspora. The diasporic leadership developed a broader strategic orientation. The early articulated goals of the movement were to hold an international peace conference that could push for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The UNLU was mainly run by the organisations affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). This included the increasingly dominant Fateh, led by Yasser Arafat. Fateh was a compromised and conservative nationalist organisation. Its horizons were shaped simultaneously by its cosy relationships with despotic regional powers and a desire for a Palestinian mini-state. The other main factions were the Maoist-influenced leftist organisations of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Later, the Communist Party joined. 
All these factions organised their own committees and trade unions. While there were often sharp disagreements between the factions on a range of questions, all held to a generally nationalist framework. In the unions, this meant that the class struggle should be frozen in the interests of a “nationalist alliance” between workers and bosses in the Occupied Territories. An independent Palestinian state needed to be established before the class struggle could begin. Such a political approach meant that, although the unions were a vital element of the Intifada, the workers movement did not fundamentally shape the political contours of the popular committees. This was a missed opportunity. By the end of the first year of the Intifada, there was such a consensus that the popular committees were the basis for a Palestinian state that there may well have been room to argue that an expanded and deepened version of popular power, workers power, was necessary. 
But even if such a view was in a minority, it was the right argument to make. National independence, while important, does not bring genuine liberation for the nationally oppressed working class. Indeed, twentieth century postcolonial states have often become hell-scapes for workers. Workers needed to fight for the struggle for national independence to become a struggle for socialism.
The Intifada inspired other regional uprisings in Algeria, Jordan and the Gulf States. These rebellions weren’t just in solidarity with Palestine: they challenged the regional order. This was something that the Fateh leadership could not countenance. So much of their existence and power was dependent on funding and support from these regimes. They began to codify a policy of “non-interference” in the affairs of the Arab regimes.
The resilience of the popular movement was also considered potentially problematic by the Fateh leadership. While Fateh understood the popular committees as providing the infrastructure for a future Palestinian state, they did not approve of their radicalising dynamic. Fateh saw the mass movement only as a lever for its own power plays. 
In the wake of the Intifada, the Israeli and US ruling classes felt that they were unable to continue ruling in the old way. Much better to find a collaborationist Palestinian leadership. Fateh happily obliged, thus beginning the disastrous Oslo Accords that ended in the establishment of the traitorous Palestinian Authority. 
Both the DFLP and the PFLP, in differing ways and at different paces, challenged elements of this trajectory, while nevertheless maintaining their fundamental commitment to the PLO and its institutions. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, on the other hand, maintained a strident objection to the notion of a Palestinian mini-state, and this objection stood them in good stead for the later betrayals. 
At the same time, between 1991 and 1993, the Israeli arrest and killing campaigns eliminated many leading activists. This repression occurred while Fateh was deliberately fragmenting the movement. Arafat allocated PLO funds to institutions and personnel according to political loyalty, much to the detriment of genuine resistance activities. These two factors ultimately contributed to the decline of the mass character of the Intifada.
Tragically, the promise of the Intifada was lost. It was crushed by an Israeli state that was determined to continue its rule over the Palestinians in whatever way it could, by violence and
negotiation. 
The Intifada was also betrayed by a Palestinian leadership that preferred to chase the dream of a Palestinian capitalist state in which its own power and prestige would be safeguarded. Finally, all that brilliant defiant energy was squandered by a left that refused to try to carve out a different, more radical path: a path that was certainly more difficult, but that centred working-class resistance in the Occupied Territories, that argued for regional revolution and looked to the power of the masses rather than the power of states.

Vietnam: a victory never to be forgotten

The fight for Richmond’s rebel school

When saying ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ could get you sacked

Remembering the British miners’ strikes

Communists versus colonialism

Jimmy Carter’s real legacy

The terrible legacy of Stalinism in the Middle East

The last time Labor deregistered a construction union

How Iran became Western enemy number one

Sun after darkness: The First Intifada

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us