These days, the usual refrain when it comes to women working topless in bars, in the sex industry or otherwise being sexually objectified at work, is that it’s about a woman’s right to choose this treatment and that it can even be a sign of empowerment. The increasingly extreme objectification of women and the normalisation of violent sexual practices, far from being condemned, are increasingly apologised for, even by supposed anti-sexists, as women “<a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/music/sabrina-carpenter-s-new-album-cover-has-sparked-uproar-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-20250612-p5m6up.html">taking ownership</a>” and being “active agents” in their sexual life, or savvy entrepreneurs. 
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was a different story. Many young adults had had some experience of fighting to win women’s rights against hostile authorities, or of confronting other social injustices. They were also much more likely to be members of a union—the rate of union membership was much higher than today, and more workers had some experience of industrial action. This demonstrated in practice to many the importance of unity and solidarity, and gave workers a sense of their own power to shape and change the society around them. There was an understanding that something practical could be done about social or economic injustices, and that they weren’t simply moral concerns. This applied to the discriminatory treatment faced by women and included the sexualisation they were subject to in the workplace. 
A particular battleground was the hospitality industry. Denis Evans was a militant and organiser in the industry and recently spoke to Red Flag about this campaign. After doing a variety of jobs, Evans became a shop steward at a winery, after which, around 1969, he went to work at the Carlton and United Brewery in Melbourne. It was there that he “soon learned the benefits of militant union action”. 
Between 1975 and 1982, Denis worked as an organiser with the Liquor Trades Union (now United Workers Union). In 1979, the union faced a new scourge—a management push to have more women bar workers and wait staff working topless. As soon as it was notified of this development by some of the bar workers, the union took up the fight. 
The union’s women and men organisers had worked in the hotels before becoming organisers and knew immediately what this would mean for working conditions and occupational health and safety. Denis recalls that the feeling was “someone had to stop it”, or the exploitative practice would only spread. Women who refused to comply with management’s demand to work topless and who objected to working alongside topless co-workers were sacked and quickly replaced by women brought in by the criminal-run employment agencies. 
It was going to take a serious union campaign to defeat the power of the hotel industry, known at the time for its strong criminal links. As Denis explains: “Organisers [including Denis] visiting these shonky premises were routinely threatened with violence, knives held to their throats, or in two incidents two organisers taken out the back of the premises and guns drawn and held to their heads, women organisers threatened with rape or worse”. Despite the threats, the organisers went around the pubs telling hotel bosses to stop their discriminatory practices, which were not only demeaning to the women involved, but made their work more dangerous. 
A problem the union faced was that sexism was so profitable that the bosses were willing to pay women well over the going rate to work topless, “up to five times the rate”, according to Denis. But for the union, it was a matter of principle—higher wages should be won based on industrial power, not by individuals unilaterally giving up important conditions and dignity at work. This, Denis argues, left “other hard-working women to survive on the hard-won wages and conditions fought for by them, and the union”, and undermined solidarity.
Stepping up the campaign, the union went to the brewery workers who supplied the hotels, calling for support. At stop-work meetings in every brewery, the workers passed resolutions of support for the bar workers, promising to take their own industrial action. 
After a negotiation between the union and management at the Tarmac Hotel in Melbourne’s west, the publican refused to stop using topless bar staff and to stop showing pornographic movies in the bar, deriding Denis as a prude. This didn’t worry Denis: “I couldn’t wait to let our members at the brewery know about my failed talks with management at the Tarmac Hotel. The instant reaction was one of solidarity with the female workers, and the passing of a resolution confirming the planned industrial action”.
The union’s motto became, “No porn, no top, no beer!”, Denis says. “All the Sunday papers were on to it, five topless women turned up in the union office the next day organised by the criminal element in the hotel industry and the sensationalist media in tandem. Fronting up at the front desk, I was summoned to face the women with cameras flashing and videos whirring; they were hoping my face would be flushed with embarrassment.” 
But Denis didn’t react in quite the way they were hoping. “Well, you could have knocked me over with a wet tram ticket; they continued the theme in the headlines of the newspapers that I was a 40-year-old prude, with photo, mind you. The shame, the ignominy! How was I going to hold my head up in the trade union movement for attempting to wipe out this insidious practice?” 
Denis exposed the hypocrisy of the bosses’ justifications of the practice by asking them whether they would employ their wives or girlfriends as topless bar staff, or do such work themselves. He described their response: “How dare you even suggest that we would subject our loved ones to such a display of semi nudity in public? Well then, [Denis countered] how about you publicans doing a few hours with your penis hanging out, just make sure it goes nowhere near the drip tray. The reaction was apoplexy!”
The first target of the industrial campaign was the Tarmac Hotel. “I told them to consider filling the cellars with coal, because the brewery workers were not going to supply any beer sourced by their labour from that point, and a cellar full of coal might help them survive the coming winter”, remembers Denis. After that, “The victories came fast and furious. Every hotel employing topless bar attendants or waiters was now on a final warning to cease this practice or answer to union members employed at the brewery. It’s called cap in hand. The cellars were soon running low on the amber liquid, and bosses who previously had refused to take down their pornographic movies or sack the women prepared to break down hard-won union conditions for a price, soon mellowed.” The result was that a conga line of publicans “beat a path to the union office to offer their sincere condolences for putting profit before people in an already lucrative business”.
Denis gives most credit to the tremendous work of the rank-and-file women and men in the industry for shutting down the practice at the time. He also points out that it was a warning shot across the bow to other employers who were thinking of employing topless sandwich makers, hardware assistants, hairdressers and the like, that their businesses would get the same treatment. He quipped “Thankfully we were able to cease the practice before seeing topless parliamentarians or, worse still, half-naked bosses”.
It is, however, an ongoing battle. The action taken by the brewery workers, thanks to former Prime Minister Bob Hawke and the ACTU-ALP Accord of the 1980s, is now illegal. Known as secondary boycotts, such solidarity action today incurs huge fines, which are a significant deterrent. 
The battle against sexualisation at work likewise is ongoing. In 1991, liquor trades and retail workers, along with bodies such as women’s refuges and legal groups, set up Women Against Sexual Exploitation in Training. It was followed by the inclusion of a statement of condemnation in the ACTU’s Working Women’s policy. Today, the normalisation of the sex industry and associated practices has broken down consciousness of sexism and the need to take it on industrially as well as in broader society. 
Now in his 70s, Denis still believes it should be a priority of the union movement to stand up for women’s rights and end sexualisation at work. Using occupational health and safety provisions is an obvious basis to object to such practices, but, Denis insists, this has to be combined with industrial action to actually shut down this demeaning, unsafe and exploitative practice, which must be understood as a blatant profit grab. 
The rhetoric of “empowerment” to justify appalling sexism, along with a weakening of the unions and with them class consciousness, means sexual exploitation at work is rife today. It is therefore more important than ever that we remember the history of the workers’ movement fighting back against this, and, in this case, winning.

Liz Ross

When the workers’ movement took on sexual objectification

War and genocide, catastrophic climate change, poverty and hunger, oppression and preventable diseases: the case for a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalist barbarity has never been stronger. Yet most revolutions seem to end badly: bloodshed, civil war, dislocation and the replacement of one form of tyranny with another. Why?
The historical record shows that most of the bloodshed results from the violent suppression and defeat of revolutions, rather than the revolutions themselves. Time and again, largely peaceful revolutions have been drowned in blood as the ruling class take a terrible revenge on those who challenge their power. Just one example: from 2011, Bashar al-Assad slaughtered an estimated 650,000 Syrians who dared to revolt, even using chemical weapons against them.
When socialists talk about revolution, we mean the wholesale reordering of society: billionaires and capitalists having their wealth taken from them, and the state, which exists to enforce their rule, being replaced by democratic structures that genuinely reflect the interests and collective will of the majority. A socialist revolution would equitably redistribute the world’s wealth and use it to solve the problems that plague humanity. 
The people who currently rule the world fear this kind of revolution and will do whatever it takes to prevent it. 
The only successful socialist revolution to date occurred in Russia in October 1917. Yet it ended in Joseph Stalin presiding over a hideous dictatorship, a police state that mercilessly repressed any breath of opposition. 
But this outcome was not inevitable. For a few brief years, and under the most adverse conditions, the workers’ state carried out reforms that were light years ahead of what the most liberal democracy at the time could offer: universal suffrage, equal pay, independence for oppressed nationalities, religious and sexual freedom, to name just a few. 
The Russian Revolution took everyone by surprise, including socialists. As the First World War raged in 1915, Russian Marxist leader Vladimir Lenin—who would soon lead the victorious uprising—wrote despondently that he did not expect to see a revolution in his lifetime. Most expected that it would be a country like Germany—with its large, well-organised working class and a mass socialist party—that would have the first socialist revolution.
So there was a problem from the outset. Russia had a much smaller working class and was far less developed than the other imperialist powers, and years of war had shattered its economy. Lenin repeatedly warned that the workers’ state could not hold on for long without economic assistance from a victorious revolution in one or more developed countries. 
The world’s ruling classes were equally aware of this, and organised to strangle the revolution at its source. Armies from fourteen countries (including Australia) were dispatched to Russia to assist the counter-revolutionary White Russian forces to “restore order”. Against enormous odds, and with incredible courage and sacrifice, Russia’s workers and peasants defended their revolution and won the civil war. But the country was left in an even more dire and impoverished state, and the working class that had led the revolution was decimated and exhausted. It was even more imperative that the revolution spread.
And indeed, the October Revolution galvanised workers around the world. In late 1918, German sailors mutinied and German workers toppled the government, ending the carnage of World War One and saving who knows how many lives. A period of intense class conflict followed, with revolutionary uprisings in Finland, Hungary, Italy and Spain, nearly revolutionary situations in Britain, France and elsewhere; even a short-lived Socialist Soviet Republic in Persia. 
But in no other country did the working class succeed in taking power. Russia was left isolated, and this was to have terrible consequences—not just Stalin’s rise to power, but also the triumph of fascism in Italy, Spain and Germany.
There are two main reasons why revolutions fail. The first is that they don’t go far enough. This is above all a failure to come to grips with the nature of capitalist rule, in particular the role of the state. The state is not neutral; it exists to protect the property and rule of the capitalists. They will not hesitate to use their armies, police, courts and prisons to crush opposition. The state cannot be reformed; it has to be smashed.
Within the workers’ movement, some always deny this reality and try to mislead workers into some form of accommodation with the system short of completely overthrowing it. In Chile in 1973 and Egypt in 2011, for example, workers were encouraged to believe that the army would respect democracy. In both instances, the armed forces led the counter-revolution and established dictatorships. As the French revolutionary Louis de Saint Just put it: “Those who make half a revolution dig their own grave”. 
The second reason is related to the first. Success in Russia was predicated on the existence and leadership of a mass revolutionary party, the means by which workers can most effectively organise their power , take on the state and be prepared to withstand counter-revolution.
The party’s role is to lead the revolutionary movement and win the battle of ideas against political currents that try to hold back the fight for a new society. The party embodies and transmits the lessons learnt in previous revolutions so that workers can avoid the pitfalls that have derailed them in the past. 
Revolutionary parties grow rapidly during a revolution, but that’s way too late. Millions of people need to be won to a clear revolutionary perspective. To do this, we need organisations that argue for revolution, train their members in revolutionary politics, history and strategy, and build experience and credibility over time. The party needs, in Lenin’s words, to “patiently explain” why and how the working class can and must defeat the power of the capitalists and their state. This is a lengthy process that cannot occur in the heat of battle. So to have any chance of success, parties need to be built well before revolution breaks out.
By 1917, the Bolsheviks (Lenin’s group) were a mass party, with thousands of worker members in key sectors of the economy. The party had proved its ability to lead the struggle against the Russian monarchy as well as the capitalists. It had earned the trust and confidence of the most politically advanced sections of the working class, who were in turn able to influence and lead those around them. Bolsheviks led strikes, but also seized every opportunity to argue for socialism, whether in the tsar’s fake parliament, the Duma, or through publications such as their newspaper Pravda (Truth), which workers widely read.
During the earlier 1905 revolution, a new kind of organisation had sprung up: the soviets, democratic councils of workplace delegates. Similarly, in 1917, a network of soviets emerged, comprising worker representatives, soldiers and peasants. These delegates had no special privileges and were recallable at any time. As the American journalist John Reed noted: “No political body more sensitive and responsive to the popular will was ever invented”. As such, the soviets would form the basis of a workers’ state.
Between February and October, a period of “dual power” existed between the soviets and the provisional government, which wanted to keep Russia in the war and establish a limited form of capitalist democracy. But such an unstable situation could not last: either workers would go forward and take power, or capitalist counter-revolution would triumph.
The Bolsheviks had to wage a political struggle, not just against the provisional government, but also against reformists such as the Mensheviks, who argued that Russia was not ready for socialism, so workers should moderate their demands. The Bolsheviks counterposed the demand of “All power to the soviets”, and their slogan “Peace, bread and land” encapsulated the hopes of millions of workers and peasants.
The Bolsheviks’ leading role in defeating a right-wing coup in August was crucial in helping them defeat the reformists and win a majority in the Petrograd soviet. The depth and breadth of working-class support meant that the insurrection in Petrograd was almost bloodless. As the leading Menshevik, Julius Martov, admitted: “Almost the entire working class supports Lenin and expects its social liberation from the uprising”. 
The Russian workers’ victory inspired a wave of revolutions. But nowhere was there a party like the Bolsheviks. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had long since abandoned the goal of revolution, and in 1914 had betrayed the working class and supported the war. A clearly revolutionary Communist party wasn’t established until December 1918, with only a few thousand members. Lacking both experience and roots in the working class, it launched a premature insurrection, and the SPD, now in government, demonstrated its loyalty to capitalism by ordering the murder of its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and unleashed the reactionary Freikorps
to terrorise the working class. 
In Italy, a powerful workers’ movement waged heroic struggles during the Biennio Rosso of 1919–20—striking, occupying their factories and defending them with arms, setting up councils like the soviets. But again, there was no clearly revolutionary party that could unite all the struggles into a movement to challenge the state. The reformists and trade union leaders maintained control, which ultimately allowed the fascist Benito Mussolini to take power in 1922. 
With Stalin’s rise to power, another deadly factor came into play. The Communist International (Comintern) was set up in 1918 to help spread the revolution by providing advice and assistance to the new Communist parties that were springing up everywhere. But by the late 1920s, Stalin’s new regime abandoned the international working-class revolution, and the Communist parties became agents of Russian foreign policy instead. 
This too was a product of the failure to build revolutionary parties: Russia’s prestige and authority as the first workers’ state meant that the young and inexperienced parties were incapable of standing up to all the bad advice they received. Stalinism strangled revolutionary possibilities in China, Spain, France and Germany. And Stalinist politics have continued to play a counter-revolutionary role. They are responsible for derailing anti-colonial movements and for the failure of the momentous working-class revolts in France and Italy in the late 1960s and ’70s, among other tragedies.
Revolutions have failed or been defeated, often at a terrible cost. But that has never stopped people fighting for a better world. In fact, revolutions are inevitable. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”, wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, and this is particularly true of capitalism. Rarely has a decade gone by without revolution breaking out somewhere, and at times spreading across entire continents, most recently in the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring of 2011. Whether our rulers like it or not, revolutions will continue to occur. The real question is, how can we win?
The capitalists and their supporters are a minority, but they are well organised and command a powerful state. Our side is far more numerous, but to win, we must be as well organised as our enemies. That means building revolutionary parties today, wherever we are.

Tess Lee Ack

Why do revolutions always seem to end in bloodshed and tyranny?

A recent Red Flag article (“<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-palm-scheme-is-modern-slavery">Labor’s PALM scheme is modern slavery</a>”, by Priya De) outlines the PALM scheme, a policy facilitating agricultural production based on nearly slave conditions for many immigrant labourers. This is far from the only instance of unfree labour in Australian history. 
The use of highly exploited, unfree labour in Queensland is as old as the state and former colony itself. From the mid-1860s until 1906, the indentured labour trade, also known as “blackbirding”, was one of many foundational crimes in the history of early White Australia. 
In his 2006 doctoral thesis, <a href="https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/items/0d27c6fe-7a8c-4b84-b84e-8a306366e82e">The making of White Australia</a>, historian Phil Griffiths writes that colonial planners and agriculturalists “were convinced of the racist myth that ‘white men’ could not safely do manual labour in tropical climates”. The high instances of disease and exhaustion, owing to the arduous work of plantation production, would be too high a barrier for white farmhands, they believed. A better acclimatised labour force appeared as the logical alternative: Pacific Islanders. 
There was an economic logic to this racist idea. Islander labour, especially if indentured, was far cheaper than hiring whites. Workers from Vanuatu, Kanaky (New Caledonia) and Papua New Guinea, as well as some from Indonesia, Malaysia and south Asia, were brought to Queensland in the tens of thousands. 
The Queensland government estimates that, of the approximately 65,000 brought to Australia, one-third died on plantations, not including those killed during “recruitment” and transport. Three-year, locked-in contracts with an employer bound Islander workers. They were to be paid at the end of their contract, and only then were they allowed to find employment elsewhere. 
Workers performed a range of tasks, predominantly on sugar plantations. They cultivated fields, planted sugarcane, cut and harvested, refined and milled. The workers also maintained the plantations and performed laborious tasks such as fencing and tree felling. Domestic tasks were often undertaken by women workers, who were responsible for sustaining the workforce as well as the landlords and plantation owners.
Living conditions were squalid: cramped living quarters, minimal leisure time and little access to the world beyond the plantation. Workers faced harsh restrictions, often being confined socially and financially to the plantations and beaten if “out of line”.
In her book Workers in Bondage, Kay Saunders writes about two Islanders, nicknamed Tom and Dick, who received rations of maize meal and pollard, which is usually fed to animals, instead of flour. “When we spoke to Captain Whish about it he said ‘maize meal is good enough for blackfellows, flour for white men”, one of the Islanders is quoted as saying.
In his 1993 book Cane and Labour, Adrian Graves notes that resistance was not uncommon, often by feigning sickness, working extra slowly and, occasionally, going on strike. However, when bosses triumphed, workers faced the lash. 
Indentured labour was chosen because it enabled the Queensland sugar industry, and the colonial economy more broadly, to remain profitable and competitive with its rivals in southern Asia and elsewhere within the British Empire. 
While economic competition initially led to the demand for cheap labour, it later drove technical changes in the industry, which, from the 1880s, ultimately contributed to the abolition of indentured contracts. For instance, advances in milling resulted in the rise of small-farm production and reduced the demand for labour as the industry became more capital intensive. 
Importantly, there were also political factors behind the abolition. Indenture had always been controversial within liberal ruling class circles. And the mistreatment of Islander workers sometimes sparked outrage. In 1885, the Brisbane Courier deemed the trade a “scandal to the Empire ... The labour trade must cease”. 
Beyond moral objections, liberal opposition was also motivated by a desire for social stability and economic development. By the 1890s, with federation around the corner, the existence of a large, “backward” tropical plantation economy in the north of the continent was a sore point for leading parliamentarians and businesspeople who wanted Australia to develop a modern, industrialised economy. Brisbane’s The Week, a business journal, accused supporters of indenture of trying “to build up an aristocracy on a basis of cheap labour”. 
A racially homogeneous society was considered essential to establishing a new federal government and a united Australia. A nationalism founded on Anglo-identification was created to instil fears of racial disloyalty from Asian and Islander populations, and to unite the white population.
By 1901, indentured labourers, brought to Australia by racist employers for exploitation, were being deported under the White Australia policy. Between Federation and 1906, roughly 7,500 workers were shipped back to the Pacific, many to islands they or their families had not come from. 
As Labor continues to promote the exploitation of Islander workers today, we must not forget how the PALM scheme echoes one of Australia’s founding colonial crimes.

Chris Morris

Australia’s history with slavery

“John Vorster Square ... four or five men and then hood and then electric shock, everything. I don’t know ... Angry Hood and torture, breasts, everything. Why? I don’t understand. Why torture? Anyway, it’s sad ... And then me angry so no talk. Why torture? So I don’t talk. So angry. Rape or what. I don’t care. I don’t talk.” 
These are the words of South African anti-apartheid activist Joyce Dipale about her detention, torture and rape at the hands of South Africa’s notorious Special Branch in 1976. The torture centre was named after Prime Minister John Vorster, who held office from 1966 to 1978. It was an appropriate name for a violent and blood-soaked building and reflected the political history of the person it was named after. 
Vorster not only oversaw more than a decade of apartheid, including the crushing of the Soweto uprising; he had also been a member of the fascist Afrikaner group Ossewabrandwag during World War Two. Vorster admired the supremacist politics of Hitler’s Germany and, when he became PM, sought to emulate elements of the Nazi program. 
A white supremacist who believed that blacks and whites could not live together, Vorster dressed up his racism as a kind of progressive generosity of spirit. He jokingly welcomed foreign dignitaries to “the happiest police state in the world” while overseeing the implementation of the Bantustan system of segregation, which attempted to quarantine South Africa’s black population into poor, desperate and underfunded zones of control. It was also under Vorster that the South African military participated in a bloody war against the newly decolonised Angola. 
In the year that Joyce Dipale was raped and tortured, Vorster was welcomed to Israel. His Nazi past and his crimes against the black and coloured population of South Africa were irrelevant to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The fascist Vorster was given a special tour of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, before being honoured at a state dinner. There, Rabin and other Israeli dignitaries toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”.
Today, amid Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians such history might not seem so surprising. But it is important to note that Israel has not suddenly changed as a result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s belligerence and political alliance with his country’s fascist forces. The country was part of a global archipelago of reaction well before the latest atrocities.
Indeed, despite its declared commitment to equality, Israel was a key backer of the apartheid regime in South Africa—and vice versa. Both countries shared a common predicament: they were minority colonial regimes that had achieved their rule through violence and bloodshed. In 1976, the South African government’s yearbook characterised the two countries as confronting a single problem: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples”.
In South Africa, these “dark peoples” vastly outnumbered the white Boer and British colonial populations; in Israel, the Zionist population ruled (and rules) over an ethno-supremacist Jewish state that expelled much of the Arab population at its founding. 
Atomic love
The year after Vorster’s Tel Aviv love-in, the UN voted for a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa, calling for an end to the sale and shipment of arms, ammunition and military vehicles to the country. Israel quietly defied this prohibition. From the mid-1970s, Tel Aviv helped, <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/12/israel-south-africa-apartheid-weapons">in the words of Alon Liel</a>, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, to create “the South African arms industry”:
“They [South Africa] assisted us [Israel] to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together, we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies. We were involved in Angola [South Africa never recognized the country’s 1975 independence from Portugal] as consultants to the [South African] army. You had Israeli officers there cooperating with the army. The link was very intimate.”
The love affair became nuclear in the late 1970s. Both countries wanted to strengthen their military capacities and become the most significant powers in their own regions. Nuclear weapons were key. South Africa had the uranium, and Israel had the scientists. Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that, during this period, Israel purchased 550 tons of uranium from South Africa for its nuclear plant in Dimona. 
In exchange, Israel supplied South Africa with weapons design information and materials to increase the power of nuclear warheads. Israeli arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe maintained that South Africa helped Israel to test nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean in 1979. The Israeli government later denied this. 
Both countries also required a brutal military infrastructure to police their oppressed populations. By the mid- to late-1970s, a Palestinian resistance movement was gathering strength. Israeli officials travelled to South Africa to learn from the apartheid regime’s counterinsurgency techniques. A Kibbutz called <a href="https://www.972mag.com/the-kibbutz-that-sells-riot-control-weapons-to-war-criminals/">Beit Alfa sold anti-riot vehicles</a> to South Africa and other brutal governments. The vehicles were used against the anti-apartheid movement in the black townships. In 1999, <a href="https://www.icrc.orghttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/external/doc/en/assets/files/other/southafrica.pdf">a former South African soldier recounted</a>, for the International Committee of the Red Cross, the force used against the popular uprising against apartheid:
“I know for myself, each guy was carrying at least three hand grenades and 16 magazines, so you had more than enough firepower and then you’ll have two Caspers [armoured vehicles] rocking up with 500 Brownings on the top. So even if there were 10,000 coming at you, you had enough firepower and there was no way they were going to stampede you and they knew that as well.”
Some of the most notorious and violent figures of the Israeli state spent significant time in South Africa. Ariel Sharon, the defence minister in the 1980s, directed the massacres of Palestinian civilians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the Lebanon war. For these and other crimes, he was known as the Butcher of Beirut. In 1981, Sharon secretly visited South Africa and spoke to troops along the border of Angola. Former Israeli Ambassador Avi Primor was part of the Israeli delegation and recalled how impressed Sharon was with the repressive apparatus of the apartheid regime and with the developing Bantustan program. Former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema told Haaretz
in 2003 that Sharon had expounded on the merits of the Bantustan model for Palestine. 
The Israeli state has perfected and developed many of the repressive and violent aspects of South African apartheid. The current genocide—the massacres, the starvation, the bombing—has brought levels of brutality that the monsters who ran South African apartheid could only dream of. Indeed, when South African Communist and anti-apartheid fighter Ronnie Kasrils visited Palestine in 2004, he said:
“This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.”

Vashti Fox

When apartheids of the world united: South Africa and Israel’s secret embrace

The following is a summary of the new introduction written by Nick Reich for a reprint of <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/revolutionaries-they-could-not-break">Revolutionaries They Could Not Break</a> by Ngo Van, published by Red Flag Books.
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Colonial rule in Indochina stands as one of the most grotesque monuments to capitalism’s capacity for systematic torture, cruelty and humiliation of masses of people. The price paid by the Vietnamese people for the forceful imposition of French imperialism was desperately high. 
During the war of occupation in the mid-1800s, the French dispossessed tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants of their only means of subsistence: their land. As they vanquished the much less well-equipped Vietnamese defending armies, they concentrated that stolen land into the hands of French settlers and Vietnamese collaborators. Those peasants lucky enough to hold onto their farms suffered the economic burden of much greater taxes, rents, debts and forced labour for the French colonial authorities. Under the new colonial regime, the French managed the inevitable resistance stoked by their system of exploitation through a sprawling network of police spies and torture prisons. 
But French colonisation also laid the social basis for its own demise. In order to make as much profit as possible from the colony, the French state encouraged investment and urbanisation. Under torturous working conditions, a modern rural working class developed in the mines and rubber plantations alongside an urban proletariat and middle-class intellectuals in the cities. With increased education, compact organisation and social power, these forces provided leadership to the hyper-exploited peasantry in their struggle against colonialism. 
The Vietnamese intellectuals were barred from any serious advancement in the colonial state bureaucracy. The French suffocated the development of a free press, independent schools or any other associations they suspected could become subversive. This left only low-level teaching or civil service jobs open to educated Vietnamese. Urban intellectuals articulated their frustrations at being held back and their anguish at the humiliation of their people through nationalism. 
The early modern nationalists in Vietnam looked to advanced countries like France or Japan as models to emulate. They sought to supplant the French as ruling class through elitist methods. One camp embraced conspiratorial terror and the other advocated gradualist lobbying for reforms, hoping France would honour its ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Both methods stalled by the 1920s. 
In the inter-war years, many Vietnamese students in France searched for ways to overcome the failures of the earlier generations of nationalists. They found inspiration in the 1917 Russian Revolution. They viewed it as an answer to the unique problems they faced in a colonised and underdeveloped country. Workers’ taking power in Russia demonstrated that even a small but concentrated industrial working class in a majority peasant country could seize and hold state power to begin the transition towards socialism. 
But the Russian Revolution was an inspiration not just because it was an underdeveloped country. Tsarist Russia was an empire in its own right, often referred to as “the prison-house of nations”. The new workers’ state inherited this imperial structure and almost immediately affirmed the right for all oppressed nations to self-determination, up to and including secession. The Russian revolutionaries also established the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 to attract, lead and organise revolutionaries in other countries to foment workers’ revolutions elsewhere. The early Comintern congresses, in appealing to revolutionaries in colonised countries, laid out their support for national self-determination as a fundamental democratic right and as a means to build international workers’ revolution. They also emphasised the importance of maintaining the independence of revolutionary workers’ parties from pro-capitalist, nationalist forces. 
Unfortunately, international workers’ revolutions did not follow in the footsteps of the Russians, so by the mid-1920s, the revolution was isolated and degenerating under the weight of invasion, famine and economic collapse. Over time, a state bureaucracy came to substitute itself for mass workers’ democracy. This counter-revolutionary process expressed itself politically in Joseph Stalin’s rise to power. Stalin rationalised the increasingly undemocratic, state-capitalist form of rule and turned Communist parties around the world from organisers of international revolution to geopolitical satellites for Soviet Russia. 
This was cruelly demonstrated when a revolutionary struggle broke out in China in 1927. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was prepared to play a leading role in organising workers to challenge for power just as the Russian workers had a decade before. Stalin ordered that they subordinate themselves to the pro-capitalist, anti-colonial nationalist party, the Kuomintang. This was a cynical reversal from what the Comintern had propagated in early congresses. Tragically, the Kuomintang betrayed the Communists as soon as they took power and slaughtered tens of thousands of them. 
Among the Vietnamese students in France, the success and then degeneration of the Russian Revolution created two hostile camps of Vietnamese communists in the 1920s. On one side were the followers of Nguyen Ai Quoc, who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh. His politics were more influenced by the Comintern during its degeneration into a foreign policy arm of the Russian state than by its revolutionary period. He was a die-hard Stalinist. He adopted the perspective that the socialist revolution in Vietnam was not on the immediate agenda, and so the key task for communists was to support and develop the forces of nationalism. Where he did fight for “socialism”, he identified that with the one-party dictatorship of Stalin: a powerful state exploiting workers and peasants to drive industrial development.
On the other side were the followers of Ta Thu Thau. He began as a nationalist, leading the Annamite Independence Party in the mid-1920s. Ta Thu Thau watched the revolution of 1927 closely, and was repelled by the Kuomintang and the Comintern’s directions to the CCP demanding servile submission. His reading of Leon Trotsky’s critiques of Stalinism, particularly his articles about the tragedy of the Chinese revolution, converted Ta Thu Thau and his followers to the politics of Trotskyism. 
Both of these camps attempted to build mass parties to fight for their politics in Vietnam during the 1930s, particularly in the most industrialised city, Saigon. Initially, both Trotskyists and Stalinists agreed to unite around the newspaper La Lutte (The Struggle) and a joint electoral ticket in the local municipal council. This Stalinist-Trotskyist alliance was tested in a major struggle that broke out following the election of a Socialist Party-led government in France in 1936. 
 
Intellectuals, workers and peasants expected a more liberal colonial policy from this government. La Lutte used these raised expectations and relative freedoms to propose “action committees”. These committees were bodies in which Vietnamese workers and peasants discussed their grievances and formulated demands. Just as the action committees began to stall, a strike wave spread across all major industries in Vietnam from mid-1936 to mid-1937. La Lutte played a leading role in this strike wave. But as it spread, the French government shifted decisively towards repression. 
Friction grew between the Stalinists and Trotskyists in these years. Ta Thu Thau and the Trotskyists wanted to denounce the mass arrests and reactionary policies of the rightward-moving French government. But the Stalinists, loyally following Moscow’s orders to help keep the French government as a Soviet ally, refused to condemn it. In late 1937, the Stalinists were directed to leave La Lutte.
Freed from the Stalinists’ conservative influence, the Trotskyists grew their prestige. In the 1939 Saigon Municipal Council elections, the Trotskyists won 80 percent of the vote. 
Unfortunately, the outbreak of World War II, the ascendancy of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime in France and Japan’s occupation of Vietnam all combined to suppress and break up the Trotskyists’ organisation after 1939. These historical developments also created a revolutionary situation in which Ho Chi Minh’s forces rode to power.
In the dying days of their doomed war effort, the Japanese redirected rice from the Mekong Delta to use as fuel for their power stations. As a result, about a million Vietnamese peasants died. Seeing that the war was coming to an end, Ho Chi Minh called on starving peasants to storm rice warehouses and resist taxes, winning mass support. That support enabled his forces, organised in the Viet Minh, to enter Hanoi unopposed after Japan’s surrender in August 1945. On 2 September, Ho declared independence to a crowd of half a million. 
But they fought the French attempts to take back their colony with one arm tied behind their back. Stalin had agreed with the US and Britain to restore French rule in Indochina. Since France lacked troops, the Allies agreed that the British would take over in the south as a stopgap. When British forces arrived in Saigon, the Communist leaders, acting on Moscow’s instructions, welcomed them as anti-fascist allies. 
Needless to say, freeing Vietnam was the last thing on the minds of the British. The British commander, General Douglas Gracey, turned on the Communists and their nationalist allies. Gracey freed and rearmed Japanese forces and French colonials, then drove the Viet Minh and its nationalist allies out of every government building, killing all who resisted. In response, the people of Saigon rose in revolt. Workers, Trotskyists, Buddhists and communists who rejected compromise with the British seized weapons and held the working-class suburbs for days. Ultimately, the French would overpower them and retake the city, but even as they retreated from French attacks, the Stalinists continued to arrest and kill thousands of Trotskyists. Under the political leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh wiped out the entire Vietnamese Trotskyist movement along with many militant workers.
Revolutionaries They Could Not Break documents this history. It is a tragedy written by an exiled participant, Ngo Van, four and a half decades after the events took place. His attention to naming so many of the Trotskyists who fought and died, and his careful account-keeping of the crimes of the Stalinists, all read like a cry for the world never to forget what happened. Such an appeal we must heed. The heroism and sacrifice of the Vietnamese Trotskyists represent more than just a footnote in the grander narrative of Vietnam’s history—they fought for a path not taken and embodied a spirit upon which the counter-revolution had to pile mountains of scorn and rubble in order to suffocate it for future generations. 
Ngo’s book is a political argument about the lessons of their experiences as much as it is a demand to remember.

Nick Reich

Revolutionaries against capitalism and colonialism: a history of the Vietnamese Trotskyists

For nearly two decades, Israel has enforced a devastating land, air and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip. Since March, almost all supplies have been blocked from entering the territory, <a href="https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/east-mediterranean-mena/israelpalestine/gaza-starvation-experiment">resulting in mass starvation</a>. 
In early June, the Madleen Freedom Flotilla set sail from Catania, Italy, towards Gaza. On board were twelve activists, including Greta Thunberg and French politician Rima Hassan. Their goal was to deliver humanitarian aid—rice, baby formula and medical kits—and to defy Israel’s criminal siege. Before reaching its destination, and while in international waters, the Madleen was intercepted by Israeli forces. Soldiers boarded the vessel, took the activists on board and held them in Israeli prisons for days. 
This wasn’t the first time Israel has used force to stop activists from breaking the siege. In 2010, Israeli commandos boarded the Mavi Marmara, a ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza from Turkey, and killed nine activists aboard. 
But two years earlier, in 2008, the siege had been broken. Two small wooden boats, the Free Gaza and the Liberty, sailed to Gaza from Cyprus, carrying 44 international solidarity activists and medical supplies. Aviv Shiron from the Israeli foreign ministry <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7578880.stm">said at the time</a> that the government wanted to avoid a PR disaster: “They wanted a provocation at sea, but they won’t get it”. So, Israel let them through. 
When the boats arrived in Gaza, they were greeted by crowds of Palestinians. One participant described the scene: “Dozens jumped into the water and climbed aboard our boats, cheering and waving and hugging everybody”.
The idea to break the siege and deliver humanitarian aid had come from Michael Shaik, an organiser for Free Palestine Melbourne and a founder of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition in 2008. He spoke to Red Flag’s Renee Nayef about the origins of the flotilla campaign. 
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What led to the formation of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition in 2006, and what was your role?
There were a lot of experienced activists who had been deported from Palestine, and we were discussing what we could do. The purpose of international activists is to use their privilege to shine a light on the invisible aspects of the occupation. We’d had some success in working with Palestinian communities resisting the construction of the Separation Barrier through the West Bank and drawing attention to house demolitions in the Gaza Strip. 
The big hidden story in 2006 was that Israel was claiming that it no longer occupied the Gaza Strip because it had withdrawn its settlers, even though it was blockading imports and exports, forcing the population to rely on aid handouts to survive. That was the hidden violence we needed to shine a light on. So I proposed that we charter a boat to “break the siege of Gaza!” The plan was to place Israel in a lose-lose situation. If they let us through, we break the siege. If they don’t, then we highlight the fact that they have intercepted us—not in Israeli waters, but in Gaza’s waters—and that there was a real blockade. 
None of us had a boat, none of us could sail a boat, and we didn’t have any money. So we did a lot of fundraising around the world. Some people raised donations, some did cake stalls and other grassroots fundraising until we got together the money to purchase a couple of wooden boats. When, in 2008, we first broke the siege, it seemed that the whole population of Gaza came out to the docks to welcome us—just a couple of fishing boats. 
In 2008, the Kadima Party, led by Ehud Olmert, was in power in Israel. Their calculation was that it was best to let the boats through, rather than embarrass themselves with the spectacle of intercepting unarmed activists bringing humanitarian supplies to Gaza. We got three boats through before the end of the year, when <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/mde150212009eng.pdf">Operation Cast Lead</a> commenced. 
After that, Israel became much more aggressive and we couldn’t get any boats through, so we decided to ramp it up to a flotilla of boats. In 2010, when the Likud Party, led by Netanyahu, had taken power, Israeli commandos attacked the Mavi Marmara flotilla and shot dead nine activists. For the next four or five days it was headline news around the world. 
A flotilla carrying high-profile activists, including Greta Thunberg, was recently raided and its passengers taken by Israeli forces. What do you think is different this time?
I’ve been repeatedly shocked over the last twenty months at what Israel has done and gotten away with. They’re doing insanely vicious things in the Gaza Strip—cruel things that don’t seem to have any military logic. International solidarity is based on the premise that Israel will be less inclined to use lethal force against Westerners because it will be sanctioned by Western governments. 
Yet Israel got away with <a href="https://rachelcorriefoundation.org/rachel">killing Rachel Corrie</a>. It got away with the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/apr/02/australian-aid-worker-zomi-frankcom-killed-idf-strike-gaza-world-central-kitchen">murder of Zomi Frankum</a> and her colleagues from the World Central Kitchen. Every time they kill an international activist and [Australian Foreign Minister] Penny Wong expresses her regret and then refuses to demand an independent investigation and exonerates the Israeli military by abetting the cover-up, it normalises violence against international activists. We’ve known Palestinian life was cheap for a long time, but even internationals in the line of fire can’t count on their governments protecting them anymore.
The thing you learn when you’ve been doing this for a long time is that Israel’s supporters are active everywhere. They’re active in the mainstream media, they mobilise professional trolls and bots to obscure the facts of the genocide on social media, they are active in all the major parties except the Greens, and I think we have to be the same. The only antidote we’ve got to their big money is big organising—this applies to all movements, Palestine and the climate. 
Rallies are good, but we need to move beyond them. People want to do something to stop the genocide. The activists on the flotilla showed the world that there is something you can do. It’s great what they’re doing. Future generations will remember that when Gaza was on its knees, they, like so many others, stood up for justice and against genocide.
Why is international solidarity important in the struggle for Palestinian liberation?
When I was in Gaza, I noticed that, apart from the physical violence of having their relatives murdered and their homes destroyed, one of the things that most oppressed the people was the feeling that they were being strangled in the dark. 
They can’t leave, the media isn’t allowed in, the walls keep closing in on them, and nobody seems to see them. I think that’s why, when the boats came in in 2008, two pitiful little wooden boats, it was like, “Woah! These people from around the world have come to help, and we’re not invisible”. If nothing else, international solidarity is a morale boost for the people in Palestine—otherwise it’s like they’re fighting the empire on their own. 
Last month, Angela Davis said that Palestine is now the centre of the world. I think she was spot on. The struggle for Palestine, like the struggle for South Africa last century, is bigger than Palestine. Before 2023, I often felt like I was shouting into a void, like no-one was listening. I’d always dreamed that one day there would be an anti-apartheid mass movement in Melbourne, but I never really believed it would happen. Now, people in Melbourne and around the world understand that Palestine stands at the centre of the ancient and global struggle between racism and justice. They also know that Penny Wong and Donald Trump aren’t going to free Palestine, and we have to get up and do it for ourselves. 
I’m not saying that we will win. Or that we won’t suffer defeats and make mistakes—but I don’t think this movement is going to fall away. It radicalised a generation. Palestine is part of young people’s identity now. I think they understand the enormously powerful forces that are supporting Israel, that there will be no easy victories and that we need to be in it for the long term.

Renee Nayef 

When the first freedom flotilla broke the siege of Gaza

Alexis Vassiley

Workers’ revolution in Portugal, 1974-5

The following is is an edited and abridged extract from <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/collections/trade-union-organising/products/striking-ore-the-rise-and-fall-of-union-power-in-the-pilbara">Striking Ore: The Rise and Fall of Union Power in the Pilbara</a>, a new book by Red Flag contributor Alexis Vassiley published by Monash University Publishing. 
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When Harry Hoskin came to the Pilbara in 1968, the mine superintendent made him a “powder monkey”. His job was to blast the ore body with explosives. But he had no experience: “I can’t even spell gelignite let alone [know] what it’s about”. His boss insisted, so he got on with it. Fortunately, he wasn’t injured—others weren’t so lucky. It was like the “Wild West”, Hoskin recalls. Safety was terrible.
But business was booming for the iron ore companies. When the iron ore export ban was relaxed in 1960, there was a development bonanza in the Pilbara. Demand for iron ore was relentless. Tonnage of iron ore increased from 6.8 million tonnes in 1967 to 50.5 million tonnes in 1972.
Conditions in the late 1960s and early 1970s for miners were tough. Production worker Randall Grant remembers the “soaked and soggy” salad sandwiches at Dampier in 1968, stating, “The guys were really pissed off with that. They wanted a hot meal”. Grant later became an Australian Workers’ Union shop steward (union representative who continues to do their usual work for the company, now usually called a “union delegate”). 
Lance Elliott, a staff member at Mount Newman, describes conditions at that time as “unairconditioned, dusty, unsafe to say the least”.
In the 1960s, before workers exercised their collective muscle, the companies used their responsibility for food, housing and amenities in the “company towns” to their advantage. Towns were run by the companies rather than by a local government. 
So, for example, the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) reported that in June 1968, a Hamersley Iron boilermaker had his accommodation, and therefore job, withdrawn after making “sharp criticisms” of the food to the messing officer from Poon’s.
The same month, a worker’s complaint about food resulted in his alleged assault by a manager. Three workers were framed and remanded in custody for eight days by a justice of the peace who worked for the company; the three were then sacked. Power rested squarely with management in these early days.
Workers took action even while the mines were being built. On Christmas Day 1965, the construction crew on a Hamersley Iron mine rioted over the food.
It was in the late 1960s, however, that both workers’ struggle and union organising really took off. The two things went hand in hand. 
AWU organiser Gil Barr relates that Mount Newman was unionised in this period by using the sacking of three workers as an organising opportunity. After previously getting only ten to fifteen workers from a 400-strong workforce to a union meeting, he “fronted the company” and got the workers reinstated. “From then on, we started to get membership as the guys could see the benefit of it”.
Randall Grant was present at the first AWU meeting at King Bay in 1968. Workers with union traditions from the eastern states—who later became shop stewards—got Grant to the meeting: “They were saying this wouldn’t happen at Port Kembla [an industrial hub eight kilometres south of Wollongong, NSW] and places like that”. Grant himself didn’t come from a union background, but he became a shop steward too: “as soon as you got onsite and saw what was going on it’s like ... hang on, things have got to be improved here”.
AWU officials addressed around 40 workers in the single men’s quarters, signing them up to the union. Yet the Pilbara’s remoteness posed a significant challenge. Unions needed to devote significant resources to the task. They required sacrifices from organisers, some of whom camped in tents with their family while on organising drives. 
The formula for union organisers was as follows: go up north for a few weeks, talk to workers about their grievances, sign them up to the union and establish a union branch or sub-branch.
So, for example, Jack Marks of the AEU, Frank Bastow of the Boilermakers and Blacksmiths Society and J. Quinn of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners went on a “North-West Organising Trip” of several weeks in July 1967.
Marks reported back to his union that they “set up new shop stewards wherever we found a group of workers, and when this group consists of more than one union representative, shop committees were formed”.
In 1968, workers at Goldsworthy’s port on Finucane Island tried unsuccessfully for weeks on end to convince management to let them eat at the mess (canteen) rather than consume the “power packs” in the smoko room. The entire workforce of 80 then struck for four days to force the issue and were sacked. The company re-employed them days later when a ship needed loading.
Union militancy increased in 1969. 
On 22 May 1969, workers at Tom Price, Mount Newman and Goldsworthy stopped work for a day as part of a statewide strike in support of jailed Victorian Tramways Union secretary Clarrie O’Shea.
In October 1969, there were strikes lasting seventeen days and involving all unionists at two Hamersley Iron sites. Starting with one union at one site, the dispute quickly spread to other unions and a second company site. The grievances included dust, refrigeration, food and heat money (an allowance for working in the hot weather). The strike “was controlled/administered by newly established combined union committees at each of the two sites. Compulsory conferences held between union officials and the company in the Industrial Commission failed to resolve the strike. Further, union officials were given hostile treatment by mass meetings of the workers”.
In late 1970, workers broke through and made significant gains in their wages and conditions. Workers at Hamersley Iron won an over-award payment in May. The deal was a substantial increase, worth around $1,000 for lower-bracket workers and $550 for those in a higher bracket.
Mount Newman workers were in dispute with the company for about four months, ending in a stunning victory. The workers obtained “more money for a 40-hour week than they were offered for a 60- hour week”.
There was a tug-of-war between the company and its workers during these on-again, off-again strikes over many months. Mount Newman tested the workers’ strength, determination and organisation and tried to avoid meeting the unionists’ demands. As Lance Elliott remembers, “All of a sudden there were union meetings, there were union delegates talking with the management and it all came to a severe head ... and the whole place went out on strike”. The atmosphere was “acrimonious”. 
Staff (managers and white-collar workers) crossed union picket lines to do workers’ work. Key to the victory was the industrial pressure put on the company in the context of high demand for iron ore. Idle iron ore carriers were visible from the site of union-management negotiations.
Power relations were changing. The mining companies didn’t grant any concessions willingly—improved pay and conditions were hard fought. Engaged in a show of strength with the unionists, companies reneged on agreements if they thought they could get away with it. Gains won at one company did not automatically flow through to another mining company. 
Accounts of the Pilbara iron ore industry can make the gains in wages and conditions, and union organisational success, seem almost inevitable.
A tight labour market and clauses in industrial awards for “union preference”—where workers need to be members of the union to work in the industry—certainly wouldn’t have harmed the unionists’ cause. But on their own, these are not enough. 
100 percent union membership had to be won, enforced and even re-won from the ground up—including by withdrawing, or threatening to withdraw, labour. Once established, this became a weapon in the union movement’s arsenal.
The 1969 Iron Ore Industry Award gave limited recognition to shop stewards for the first time. These rights, however, were heavily circumscribed. Concerned that their negotiating role not be usurped, some union officials opposed even this limited clause.
Committees consisting of shop stewards representing each of the different unions on a site were first established in 1967. Similar structures were set up at various companies and worksites in the next few years, undercutting management’s ability to play unions off against one another and engendering solidarity between the different unions. 
These grassroots bodies would later organise strikes in the region involving all or many of the unions, lasting weeks and costing the mining companies millions of dollars in lost production.

The rise of union power in the Pilbara mines

One conspicuous sight at the regular Palestine solidarity demonstrations is the contingents of Jews, often with banners proclaiming, “Not in my name” and the like.
This is not a recent development. Anti-Zionism has been a crucial part of the Jewish radical tradition since the late 19th century. Way back in 1886, a Russian Jewish socialist revolutionary called Ilya Rubanovich argued against Jewish settlement in Palestine:
“What is to be done with the Arabs? ... The Arabs have exactly the same historical right and it will be unfortunate for you if ... you make the peaceful Arabs defend their right. They will answer tears with blood.”
Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, argued that nothing could be done about antisemitism, that it was inherent in non-Jews and that Jews must leave their home countries and set up a state of their own. The first Zionist congress in August 1897 represented only a small minority of Jews at the time.
The first organisational opposition to this current, the General Jewish Labour Bund, was set up only two months later in the Russian Empire. The core concept of the Bund was “doykeit”, a Yiddish word meaning “hereness”: it wanted to fight antisemitism in the here and now.
Based in the Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class, the Bund was the first Marxist group in the tsarist empire to create a mass organisation. It played a major role in the Russian revolutionary movement, particularly in the 1905 revolution. After the 1917 revolution, the Bund continued the struggle in independent Poland, including its polemics against Zionism.
Marek Edelman, who participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, put it this way: “The Bundists did not wait for the Messiah, nor did they plan to leave for Palestine. They ... fought for a just, socialist Poland, in which each nationality would have its own cultural autonomy, and in which minorities’ rights would be guaranteed”.
The local Zionists had difficulty articulating their politics. In the parliament, for example, when Jewish deputies were speaking, right-wingers would heckle them, yelling: “Go to Palestine”. The problem was that the Zionists were also calling for Jews to go to Palestine.
It’s not surprising that Zionists were often ridiculed, as we can see in a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJZNcUCVXBo">Bundist song</a>:
You want to take us to Jerusalem
So we can die as a nation
We’d rather stay in the diaspora
And fight for our liberation!
By 1939, the Bund was the strongest Jewish political party in Poland, while the Zionist and clerical parties drastically declined. 
After World War Two, the Bund continued to publicly oppose Zionism. 
In April 1948, it warned that partition of Palestine was the “beginning of a new bloody chapter” in Jewish-Arab relations and that “the creation of an independent Jewish State would lead to a new catastrophe”. It said the atmosphere was becoming “more and more favourable for the development of political brigandry, terror, the extremes of home-grown Jewish fascism, nationalism and reactionary tendencies”. How prophetic.
Today, many Jews are breaking with Zionism under pressure of events in Gaza. This has also happened in the past.
For instance, the socialist-Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard) was a youth group in Eastern Europe with 70,000 members in 1939. Its Zionism had a strange mix of political influences including psychoanalysis and even Marxism. 
Tony Cliff, who later became a well-known British socialist, was born in British mandate Palestine. He explained how “the Zionist socialists were trapped ideologically”.
“They believed that ... in the kibbutz we could see the embryo of a future socialist society ... But in the meantime, Arab resistance ... had to be overcome so they collaborated with Zionist moneybags and rich institutions as well as the British army and police. The Zionist socialists held the Communist Manifesto in one hand and a coloniser’s gun in the other.”
Nonetheless, Hashomer Hatzair provided a route towards politicisation and anti-Zionism for many people.
The most famous is probably Abram Leon, who repudiated Zionism and in 1940 became a leader of an underground Trotskyist organisation in occupied Belgium. He was arrested in 1944 and murdered in Auschwitz.
Chanie Rosenberg was another anti-Zionist who started out as a member of Hashomer Hatzair. Born in South Africa, she emigrated to Palestine in 1944 and thought she was living the socialist dream on a kibbutz. But one day she came across some guns used to steal Palestinian land. “At that point, I knew that I had become an anti-Zionist.”
The USA has a significant Jewish anti-Zionist history. During the 1920s and ’30s, the heavily Jewish Communist Party campaigned against Zionism as a component of British imperialism. 
The Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), established in 1938, was also anti-Zionist. It played an important role among Jews in 1939 when the fascist German American Bund (nothing to do with the Jewish Bund) held a mass rally in New York. 
The SWP called a counter-demonstration, but not one Jewish organisation was prepared to participate. Both Yiddish daily papers called on their readers to stay away. 
The Communist Party also refused to support the demo because they “could not undertake to forcibly prevent such a meeting once the City Administration had allowed it”. And the local Hashomer Hatzair branch also refused, saying “sorry we can’t join you ... Our Zionist policy is to take no part in politics outside Palestine”. 
On the day 50,000 protesters turned up—way beyond anyone’s expectation. Most were Jewish, and many rank-and-file Communists defied their leadership to participate.
Anti-Zionist organisations in Palestine have an important history. First was the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), formed in 1923. 
It had a promising start but quite quickly became politically confused. For instance, it attempted to integrate Arabs into the Zionist labour organisation the Histadrut. But the Histadrut was (and remains today) a conscious tool of the Zionist project in Palestine.
The PCP also had problems with the constant zigs and zags imposed by the Stalinist Comintern, as it switched strategies in the 1930s.
They were first instructed to have a class-based focus on Arab workers and fellaheen (peasants and agricultural labourers) only to suddenly be instructed to give uncritical support for Arab nationalism and the bourgeoisie. Then the Moscow show trials began in the late 1930s, with many of the victims Jewish; most of the PCP leaders were annihilated in the process. So, the PCP failed among both Arabs and Jews, and became increasingly ineffectual and disoriented.
In 1943, the political tensions became too much, and the party split into two separate organisations—one Jewish and one Arab. On Victory in Europe Day in 1945, the Arab organisation marched together with feudal and bourgeois parties, under anti-Zionist slogans. The Jewish party marched under the Zionist flag, with Zionist slogans. In 1947, the Jewish PCP completed its political destruction and endorsed partition.
Meanwhile, the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League of Palestine (RCL) was set up in the late 1930s. Most of its members were Jewish workers—some were born in Palestine, and some had fled from Germany. There were, however, some Arabs. 
The RCL recognised that unity between Arabs and Jews could come about only “through the abolition of all racist ideology and practice on the part of the Jews”.
The RCL wanted to build a united revolutionary socialist party. But there were major difficulties. For example, when they tried to organise joint trade unions for Arabs and Jews, the British interned them without trial. 
One of those interned was Tony Cliff, at that time still Yigael Gluckstein. Cliff’s family were strongly Zionist. “It took me a few years to make the transition from being an orthodox Zionist to being a semi-Zionist with a pro-Palestinian position and then to making a complete break with Zionism”, Cliff later wrote.
To be a revolutionary socialist operating illegally in Palestine required enormous commitment. With fewer than 30 members, the RCL published two magazines, one in Arabic and one in Hebrew, and put out leaflets. 
Cliff was eventually released from British internment, married Chanie Rosenberg and ended up in the UK, where he was a founding member of the International Socialists, later the Socialist Workers Party.
Another RCL member, Jakob Moneta, arrested by the British at the same time as Cliff, said he “learned that democratic imperialism, in the struggle to preserve its empire, is sometimes no less squeamish than fascism going out to conquer a new empire”.
The RCL was too small to have any significant impact on workers’ struggles. The organisation collapsed after 1948, but individuals including Jakob Taut and Jabra Nicola remained active and provided continuity into the next organisation.
In 1962, a group of ex-members of the Communist Party set up the Israeli Socialist Organisation, usually known by the name of its magazine Matzpen (Compass). 
Most, but not all, members were Jewish. The organisation always remained very small—only a few dozen—but was important. It is historically the only committed anti-Zionist organisation within the state of Israel. Matzpen developed a sophisticated analysis of Zionism that influenced revolutionary socialist groups around the world. 
One of its members, Moishe Machover, moved to the UK in 1968. In a bizarre twist of fate, he was expelled from the UK Labour Party in 2017 for supposed antisemitism—this was the right-wing party machine cracking down on its left opposition.
Unfortunately, the stresses of trying to maintain an organisation like Matzpen are extreme, and the organisation finally ceased to exist in the 1980s. But a large amount of the standard works on Zionism that we use today were produced by or under its influence.
This history of Jewish anti-Zionism also exists in Australia. 
The Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism, established in 1942, was non-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist. It had hundreds of members and widespread support, so much so that in 1948 the council became the official public relations representative of the Jewish community. 
But the council’s non-Zionist stance was unsustainable, and it started to lose support. In 1950, a prominent Zionist attacked it, asserting that they “[do] not ‘combat’ but ‘spread’ antisemitism”. Seventy-five years ago, the Zionists were already slandering left-wing Jews just as they do today.
In 1978, a soft Zionist magazine called Paths to Peace
(PTP) applied to join Melbourne community radio station 3CR. But 3CR rejected its application on the grounds that Zionism is racist.
The right-wing publication Bulletin smeared 3CR as terrorist, and PTP and others laid a charge at the Broadcasting Tribunal claiming the pro-Palestine programs were offensive to the Melbourne Jewish community because they were antisemitic. Sound familiar?
3CR organised a “fight back” campaign and mobilised 1,000 people to distribute half a million leaflets throughout Melbourne. 
Jews Against Zionism and Antisemitism (JAZA) was set up in 1979 to help the defence, declaring that they “represent a socialist and internationalist tradition among Jews that is much older and has a much brighter future than political Zionism”. They held forums and demos, including against the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and brought out Matzpen member Ehud Ein-Gil as a speaker.
History matters because the battle for memory is also a battle for the present. The Zionists don’t want us to know about this alternative history.
They don’t want us to know about the committed anti-Zionism of Jews like Marek Edelmann. During the second Palestinian Intifada, Edelman wrote a letter to the Palestinians in which he compared them to the Jewish Fighting Organisation. He addressed it to “commanders of the Palestinian military ... to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisation”. 
When we loudly proclaim, “Not in our name”, we are following in these footsteps.

Janey Stone

Revolutionary history of Jewish anti-Zionism

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”.

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