On 7 December, around 200,000 South Koreans braved freezing Seoul weather to demand the resignation and impeachment of right-wing President Yoon Suk Yeol after his failed coup attempt four days earlier. 
Yoon declared martial law, for the first time in 44 years, at 10.23pm on 3 December in a surprise national television broadcast, which was met with widespread shock and outrage across South Korea. During the broadcast, the South Korean president, who is from the People Power Party (PPP), justified the enactment of martial law by accusing the National Assembly, which is dominated by the opposition Democratic Party (DPK), of paralysing his administration and causing “political strife” by blocking the proposed national budget and “sabotaging the core functions of the state”, while also “turning Korea into a ‘drug paradise’ and causing panic over public security”. 
In the announcement, Yoon noted that since his government came to power in May 2002, opposition lawmakers in the DPK had brought 22 motions to impeach government officials, including the minister of the Interior and Safety, the minister for National Defence, the chair of the Korea Communications Commission and the president of the Board of Audit and Inspection.
Yoon also accused the National Assembly of being a “den of criminals” engaged in a “legislative dictatorship”, as well as being North Korean agents, going on to say that martial law was necessary “to protect the Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces, to immediately eradicate the unscrupulous pro-Pyongyang anti-state forces that pillage the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect free constitutional order”. 
At 11pm, the full text of the martial law declaration was issued, repeating Yoon’s claim that “anti-state forces” were secretly operating in South Korea and that all political activities by the National Assembly, political parties and associations were now banned, along with all political rallies, protests, strikes and workplace slowdowns. The martial law decree also announced that all press and publications would now be under the control of the military, and that any workers currently engaged in workplace protests must “return to work within 48 hours or face punishment under the Martial Law Act”. The decree concluded by declaring that “violators of the decree may face arrest, detention, and warrantless search and seizure” and other punishment. 
Shocked and angered by Yoon’s declaration, thousands of Korean citizens defied the threat of arrest and flooded the streets outside the National Assembly in protest. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) issued a statement condemning Yoon’s actions, saying, “the people will not forgive this,” as they remembered and had never forgiven the previous dictatorships that had “suppressed citizens and violated democracy”. Opposition lawmakers also raced to the National Assembly to vote to overturn the martial law declaration. Under South Korean law, martial law can be overturned by a two-thirds vote of the 300-strong National Assembly. 
Many of the politicians, including DPK leader Lee Jae-Myung—whose party holds 175 seats in the South Korean parliament—had to scale the walls of the building to enter, while other politicians and staff already inside barricaded the main entrances to stop the military from taking control of the building. 
Footage of Ahn Gwi-Ryeong, a former news anchor turned lawmaker, attempting to stop troops from storming the building also quickly went viral. Ahn, a deputy spokesperson for the DPK, was filmed grabbing the rifle of a soldier, saying: “Don’t you feel shame?” In an interview with Reuters on 6 December, Ahn downplayed her actions, saying that they were not “particularly special” and that “there were many people braver than me who stood up to the martial law troops”, including “people who even managed to stop armoured vehicles outside”, referring to the actions of ordinary citizens who had massed on the streets. 
Failure of the Coup
Despite Yoon’s office contacting the national police to “stand by” approximately four hours before his declaration of martial law, it appears that only a small number of Yoon loyalists within the military and his political party were aware of the coup plot. 
In testimony given on 6 December to the National Assembly’s Intelligence Committee, the first deputy director of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), Hong Jang-Won, described how, minutes after the declaration of martial law, the president contacted both himself and the national director to demand they carry out a series of arrests of Yoon’s political opponents, which they refused to do. According to Hong, the Yoon had ordered him to “use this opportunity to round everyone up. Wipe everything clean”. 
Hong went on to state that Yoon’s arrest list included the head of the KCTU, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court and left-wing journalists, as well as the head of Yoon’s own People Power Party, Han Dong-Hoon, who had been critical of the presidential imposition of martial law. Yoon also sought to target for arrest key members of the opposition party, including the DPK’s national leader Lee Jae-Myung, National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-Shik, the DPK’s National Assembly floor leader Park Chan-Dae and DPK Supreme Council member Kim Min-Seok, who four months earlier had warned that Yoon was preparing a coup. 
According to a Korea Times article published on 3 September, Kim Min-Seok raised concerns about a possible coup during the confirmation hearing for Yoon’s newly appointed defence minister, Kim Yong-Hyun. The DPK lawmaker noted that the government was “suddenly replacing the minister of national defense with [former] Presidential Security Service chief Kim Yong-Hyun, a Cha Ji-Cheol-style suppressor of the opposition”, referring to the long-term political ally and security chief of military dictator Park Chung-Hee, who was assassinated along with Park in 1979. He argued that this, along with Yoon’s sudden use of the phrase “anti-state forces”, signalled “a strategic operation to prepare for martial law by stoking fear of North Korea under considerations of a regional war”. 
The DPK member has further noted that the newly appointed defence minister was also a member of the “Chungam faction,” which included Yoon contemporaries and loyalists who all attended Chungam High School with him. Other loyalists within Yoon’s faction included Park An-Su, the chief of the army, who would later enact the martial law decree following Yoon’s national broadcast, the Defence Counter-Intelligence Commander Yeo In-Hyung and Army Special Forces chief Kwak Jong-Geun and Special Forces Commander Lee Jin-woo.
According to a report on 5 December by Yonhap News Agency, it was Kim Yong-Hyun who recommended that Yoon implement martial law and was also responsible for ordering troops to “infiltrate the National Assembly and block lawmakers from entering the compound during martial law”. The former defence minister was subsequently arrested in the early hours of 7 December on charges of insurrection and abuse of power. On Sunday, 8 December, Yonhap reported that another of Yoon’s loyalists in the Chungam faction, Defence Counterintelligence Commander Yeo In-hung, in November had ordered the preparation of plans to implement martial law. Due to his role in the botched operation, Yeo has been suspended, while investigation into the plot continues. 
While evidence continues to emerge about the planning of the coup, the narrowness of the plot resulted in a lack of communication and confusion between military, police and intelligence commands. This delayed not only the dispatch of the special forces and other military, providing a 40-minute window for both opposition lawmakers and ordinary citizens to mass at the National Assembly to try to stop martial law.
According to a report on 6 December in the conservative Chosun Daily, one of Yoon's closest allies, Interior Minister Lee Sang-Min, lamented the failure of the plot, saying, “Frankly speaking, if we had successfully shut down the National Assembly, the vote on the lifting of martial law would not have happened at all. We could have held back the legislators with ease if we had chosen to”. 
Yoon’s lame duck presidency
Yoon has faced turmoil since becoming president in May 2022. A former prosecutor, Yoon only very narrowly defeated the DPK’s Lee Jae-Myung. During his presidential campaign, Yoon ran on an anti-labour and anti-union platform, threatening to cut the minimum wage, remove limits on working hours and enact policies that would allow corporations to operate free from “excessive” regulation. 
Yoon also sought to capitalise on the growing anti-feminist sentiment among many young male Korean voters impacted by rampant economic inequality caused by decades of neoliberal capitalism but who have blamed the modest gains made by Korean women for their plight. Courting the 20-30-year-old male vote, Yoon called for the abolition of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, claiming that systemic “structural discrimination based on gender” did not exist in South Korea. This is despite the economic and social indicators for women in South Korea being some of the worst in the developed world. 
After winning the presidency, the new president moved to crack down on South Korea’s union movement. Yoon’s anti-labour attacks, however, have sparked widespread opposition. On 24 November 2022, more than 25,000 truck drivers walked off the job for sixteen days to demand job security and for minimum pay rates to be extended to all truck drivers. Seoul subway workers joined the truck drivers on the streets, launching their first strike in six years after negotiations about worker redundancies had collapsed. Yoon’s response was aggressive, invoking a law not used for 18 years to issue a “back-to-work order” five days after the strike had begun. Under the order, workers who failed to comply faced jail terms of up to three years and/or fines of 30 million won (USD $22,400).
In January 2023, just weeks after the back-to-work decree was issued, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions was surrounded by 1,000 riot police as 30 National Intelligence Service agents stormed the building, conducting a ten-hour raid. The NIS accused members of the KCTU and the KCTU-affiliated Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union of being North Korean spies and charged union members with violating South Korea’s anti-communist laws. The KCTU, which has a membership of more than 1 million workers, denounced the raids. In a statement issued by the confederation’s Central Executive Committee, KCTU President Yang Kyeung-Soo accused the president of trampling on democracy, say the union would not stop its criticism of the government and would continue to fight again Yoon’s anti-democratic and anti-labour regime.
Yoon’s popularity has continued to plummet, dropping from 53 percent at the start of his presidency to just 17 percent in August 2024. Already unable to pass much of his legislative agenda, Yoon officially became a lame duck president after the DPK won a landslide victory in the April 2024 general elections. While the DPK increased their seats by 19 to give them 175 and a super-majority with other oppositionists in the National Assembly, Yoon’s PPP lost six seats, reducing their parliamentary number to 108. 
The DPK and opposition super-majority has meant that the National Assembly has been able to pass a range of opposition legislation, while actively stymieing Yoon’s legislative agenda, including his national budget. Yoon, however, has repeatedly used his presidential veto powers to stop opposition legislation moving forward. 
Public anger has continued to grow over Yoon’s abuse of the presidential veto, including his vetoing of a legislative investigation into allegations that his wife had been involved in stock manipulation and had interfered in the nomination process in a June by-election and subsequent local elections. In response to Yoon’s abuse of the presidential veto, the DPK and the KCTU have organised a series of mass rallies with between 100,000 and 300,000 workers and other anti-government protesters taking the street each time, the fifth such rally being held just three days before Yoon’s declaration of martial law. 
Candlelight Protests 
The fallout from Yoon’s failed coup has been swift. The morning after the botched coup, the KCTU announced that they would “commence an indefinite general strike until the Yoon Suk Yeol regime steps down” and that their members would stage ongoing public protests. Trade union members and workers have been joined by tens of thousands of ordinary Koreans each day on the streets. The public’s anger has been further fuelled by 105 of the 108 People Power Party lawmakers in the National Assembly boycotting the impeachment vote on Saturday. 
As word filtered out to the 200,000-strong candlelight protests outside the National Assembly on Saturday night that the vote to impeach Yoon had automatically terminated due to the failure to reach a quorum because of the PPP boycott, protesters demanded they “get back in the chamber” and vote. People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, one of the many groups that helped to organise the Saturday rally, called the boycott of the vote “an act of sympathizing with insurrection that tramples on the will of the people, the true owners of the country”, going on to say that the public would “not tolerate the existence of the People Power Party”. 
 While the DPK has scheduled a motion on 11 December for another impeachment vote in the National Assembly to be held on 14 December, newspaper Hankyoreh, reporting live from the Saturday protest, noted the widespread determination from protesters, who vowed they would “not give up” despite the failure of the first impeachment vote. One student told the newspaper “our candles will only grow brighter” because of the PPP’s lack of action. True to their word, tens of thousands of KCTU workers and other protesters returned to the streets again on 9 December to demand both Yoon’s arrest and impeachment. As both Yoon and his party continue to try to cling to power, hoping to wait out the crisis, pressure from the streets will only continue to intensify as people vow to continue their protests until he is arrested and impeached.

Kim Bullimore

South Korean coup attempt provokes democratic uprising

The fall of the Assad regime, thirteen years after the beginning of the Syrian revolution, is among the most extraordinary events in Middle Eastern history.
The 2011 Syrian revolution was the most far-reaching of all the Arab revolts, penetrating deep into every crevice of society. Driven by poverty, economic crisis and hatred of a brutal authoritarian regime, millions took to the streets demanding an end to the regime.
But President Bashar al-Assad’s vicious strategy to maintain his rule—slaughtering half a million people, flattening cities, imprisoning and torturing tens of thousands, forcing millions into exile—came to embody the smashing of all the dreams of democracy and freedom that animated the Arab revolution in its first months.
The Syrian struggle for freedom was assaulted from every conceivable angle. Peaceful protesters were mowed down in the streets without mercy, forcing the resistance to take up arms and transforming the mass movement into a civil war. When it looked like the rebel forces might finally overcome the regime, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah intervened to choke the life out of free Syrian cities. 
The US initially mouthed support for the revolution. But Washington was never interested in a genuinely democratic Syria, which it accurately judged not to be in its foreign policy interests. The US refused to provide the weaponry the rebels were pleading for, which would have allowed them to defeat the regime. It also blocked other states from providing those weapons. This betrayal didn’t save the Syrian revolution from being slandered by many so-called anti-imperialists on the Western left, who shamefully dismissed Syrian aspirations for freedom from dictatorship as little more than a CIA/Mossad plot.
Years of devastating civil war, foreign intervention and monumental death and displacement destroyed almost all of the revolution’s civic institutions and fed the rise of groups whose aims greatly diverged from the spirit that drove revolutionaries in 2011.
Yet, despite everything, and seemingly against all hope, Assad is suddenly gone. In less than two weeks, a rebel offensive that began in the northern city of Aleppo transformed into an extraordinary nationwide uprising that routed the regime. As rebel forces swept south, taking first Hama and then Homs, it became clear that the regime would get little support from its foreign backers. Rebel factions across the country joined the offensive.
Instead of the much-feared influx of Iranian-backed militias from Iraq to defend the regime, regime fighters fled to Iraq or ditched their military uniforms and left their tanks and weapons lying in the streets.
The great lie—that the Assad regime had the support of large numbers of Syrians—disintegrated as quickly as the regime itself. Without Russia and Iran slaughtering people on its behalf, the regime couldn’t last two weeks. As Assad fled the country, his forces melted away. Even the coastal Alawite areas fell with barely a fight. 
The coalition of fighters behind this extraordinary chain of events was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—an Islamist group originating in Jabhat al-Nusra, which was affiliated with al-Qaeda. However, the group that became HTS broke from al-Qaeda and then re-formed under its current name in 2017. For many years, and especially in the course of this uprising, it has emphasised tolerance of other religious groups and minorities and has disavowed the most reactionary elements that characterised al-Nusra and ISIS.
HTS has for years controlled Idlib in the north-west. During that time, it repressed protests, but nothing remotely on the scale of what either the Assad regime or ISIS have been guilty of. It is far too early to know its role in the coming months. But whatever the sincerity of HTS’s shift to a more inclusive, all-Syrian stance, that stance played a vital and probably decisive role in uniting the country behind the rebel offensive. Unity across religious lines was a crucial part of the initial success of the 2011 revolution and will remain so for its prospects. 
However, with Assad gone, Syria’s free and democratic future hinges on a revival of the extraordinary revolutionary energy that first emerged in 2011. The real hope is that the mass of Syrian people can seize this opportunity to build a society of genuine justice and equality that so many gave their lives for.
The scenes emerging from Syria since the fall of the regime are extraordinary: thousands celebrating on the streets, chanting the slogans of unity and freedom that had been buried under years of counter-revolution. 
All ethnic and religious minorities have been involved. Christians in Aleppo chanted, “Syrians united, we are one people!” and decorated their areas of the city with Christmas trees. Alawites in the port city of Tartous, traditionally an important base for Assad, tore down regime statues to wild cheering. In Iraqi Kurdistan, people filled the streets carrying the flag of the Syrian revolution and chanting, “One, one, the Syrian people are one!”
Multi-coloured Druze flags filled the streets alongside the green and black flag of the revolution. Palestinians in Raml refugee camp in Latakia held a nighttime demonstration, lit up with lanterns, protesting against Assad right before he fell. 
Across the country, statues of Bashar and his father, Hafez al-Assad, came crashing down. In one case, a gold one was used as a sled. People mocked Bashar by ostentatiously walking along the red carpet in his Damascus palace and filming themselves saying banned words. It was a nationwide carnival of celebration.
An extraordinary reversal of the mass displacement of the last thirteen years has also begun. Thousands are returning to cities they were forced from in the war. From Lebanon and Türkiye, enormous convoys of former refugees are streaming back into the country.
Nothing has captured the momentous but also heartbreaking nature of this moment more than the liberation of the prisons. As each city fell to the rebellion, the doors of the regime’s vile and vast jails were broken open. “Hellholes” does not adequately convey their nature. Every Syrian knew the reality of these places. They were no secret—the whole point of them was to instil terror in anyone who thought of resisting the regime. But to see the videos of people emerging from them—people who had endured years of torture, physically and mentally broken; to see toddlers, whose mothers had been raped in prison and who had lived their whole lives in these pits—is devastating beyond words. 
The joy of seeing these prisons empty must be accompanied by rage that they were allowed to endure for so long. There are those in the Palestine solidarity movement who laud Iran or Russia—because they purportedly fight against tyranny—and who defended the regime as a heroic part of the “axis of resistance” right until it fell. 
But Assad did nothing for the Palestinians except massacre them and lock them up. Among the thousands released from the notorious Sednaya Prison were 67 members of the Al-Qassam Brigades and 630 other Palestinians, according to reports. Bashar al-Assad, like his father, never fought Israel, either to defend the Palestinians or to take back occupied Syrian land. 
Even if Assad had supported the Palestinians, it wouldn’t have justified his regime or made the revolution illegitimate. You can’t tolerate one genocide to oppose another.
And while there was support for Assad among some activists in the West, Palestinians themselves sympathised with the uprising from the start. And why wouldn’t they? Who knows better than the Palestinians the meaning of genocide, dispossession and exile? And how could anyone watch the beautiful scenes of Syrian refugees returning to their country and not dream of the day the Palestinians will end their long exile?
In any case, whatever short-term geopolitical benefit Israel might now gain (which is not at all clear), the past year has demonstrated, yet again, that there is no hope for a free Palestine in a Middle East ruled by dictators. The hope that dictators in Tehran and Moscow, any more than those in Cairo or Amman, would liberate Palestine was a fantasy. The only hope for Palestinian liberation is an Arab world with the Arab people themselves in charge.
Overnight, Syria has gone from being the most despotic state in the Middle East to the freest. This is not to say that the country’s problems will be resolved simply. There are enormous issues to be worked through and obstacles to be overcome. After a long dictatorship and civil war, the country is deeply scarred and controlled by militias, many of which have fought each other in recent years. The Israelis have already invaded from the west, the Americans have troops in the south-east, Turkish-backed forces are fighting the Kurds in the north, and ISIS still holds territory in the centre of the country. The struggle ahead will be long and difficult, with no guarantee of success. 
Nevertheless, the precondition for achieving any of the goals of the Syrian revolution was the overthrow of the Assad regime. This is now done; he is gone. The future can start to be written.
Jasmine Duff contributed to this article.

Corey Oakley

Hope returns to Syria

In 2014, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page made what seemed like <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B">a bold claim</a>: “If policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened”. In 2024, that became clearer as billionaires flaunted their influence in the US electoral circus.
It wasn’t just that one corrupt and noxious billionaire, Donald Trump, won the presidential election or that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, used his social media platform and wealth to land a spot as a “virtual” co-president. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/us/politics/democrat-donors-harris-biden.html">Billionaire Democratic donors</a> for months propped up President Joe Biden, before driving him from the presidential race, having been assured that his replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, <a href="https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/tony-west-negative-influence-on-harris-campaign/">would run a business-friendly, centre-right campaign</a>.
In 2024, the American oligarchy <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/12/06/trump-billionaires-cabinet-elon-musk">emerged from behind the curtain</a>. More accurately, 2024 marked the year when oligarchic tendencies that had been gathering force for decades came into full bloom. Months before Trump narrowly won the election, the Supreme Court, whose unpopularity rivalled Biden’s, granted Trump and future US presidents <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supreme-courts-presidential-immunity-ruling-undermines-democracy">expansive impunity</a> even to commit crimes while in office.
The liberals—the leaders of the Democratic Party and its associated non-governmental organisations, intellectuals, media and fundraisers—said the 2024 election was a <a href="https://dailyjournal.net/2024/10/22/harris-says-democrats-are-ready-if-trump-tries-to-prematurely-declare-victory/">referendum on US democracy</a>, maybe even the last-ditch effort to stop “fascism” riding in on Trump’s coattails. Yet despite the heated rhetoric, they ran an uninspired campaign in defence of a status quo that most Americans had already rejected. They showed themselves (once again) to be a party more interested in touting support from “never-Trump” Republicans than in campaigning for real change for working people.
In the process, they showed their contempt for the main source of activist energy in 2024, the movement opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Their support for Israel wasn’t a surprise. But the degree to which the liberal establishment—from university presidents to the president of the US—<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/criminalization-of-first-amendment-protected-pro-palestinian-speech-is-spreading/">reached to criminalise</a> supposedly First Amendment-protected political activism reminded us of earlier periods of liberal capitulation, such as the <a href="https://accuracy.org/release/how-liberals-collaborated-with-mccarthyism-then-and-now/">anti-communist witch hunts</a> of the 1940s and 1950s.
In 2025, when the Trump administration is trying to outlaw pro-Palestinian activism, or is implementing mass deportations, we will need to remember that the liberals paved the way. When the Democratic Party hierarchy believed that supporting the most restrictive immigration bill in a generation <a href="https://www.ctinsider.com/politics/article/ct-chris-murphy-dnc-speech-19715629.php">was a clever piece of political jujitsu</a> against Trump, we should tell the inconvenient truth. <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/09/27/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-a-campaign-event-douglas-az/">If you’re competing to show how “tough on the border” you are,</a> you’ve already ceded the ground to the right. And when the voters are presented with the original (Trump) or the copy (the Democrats), <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/11/24/far-right-voters-generally-prefer-the-original-to-the-copy_6285464_23.html">they almost always choose the original</a>.
For all their attempts to disqualify Trump and to make their stand “in the most important election of our lifetimes”, it’s revealing to see the liberals and Democrat leaders revert to “business as usual”. The hosts of the liberal MSNBC’s Morning Joe <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2024-11-18/kissing-the-ring-msnbc-morning-joe-hosts-say-they-met-with-trump-to-reopen-lines-of-communication">visited Mar-a-Lago</a>, Trump’s Florida estate, to “kiss the ring”. Biden, who, earlier in 2024, cast his presidency as no less than a Second World War fight against totalitarianism, welcomed Trump—whose own vice president <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/jd-vance-once-compared-trump-hitler-now-they-are-running-mates-2024-07-15/">once called him “America’s Hitler”</a>—for a cordial White House photo op. Even the <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/11/24/resistance-trump-protests-womens-march">2017-era liberal “resistance” is deflated</a>.
So, what is the alternative? One path that 2024 should have closed is <a href="https://jacobin.com/2019/04/karl-kautsky-democratic-socialism-elections-rupture">the electoral road to change</a> that supporters of Bernie Sanders/AOC (New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) reformist politics represent. Since Sanders’ failed 2016 Democratic primary challenge to Hillary Clinton, we’ve heard many social democrats say that <a href="https://jacobin.com/2020/04/third-party-bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism-elections">reforming the Democratic Party</a> is the only meaningful way for the left to impact US politics. 
And yet, in 2024, with Sanders and AOC being “all in” for Joe Biden and then “all in” for Harris, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/its-the-economy-stupid/">that strategy has run aground</a>. And Sanders’ post-election chastising of the Democrats for “abandoning” the working class is much less credible after he and AOC touted Biden as the most pro-working-class president in our lifetimes.
The next few years under the Trump administration will be exceedingly difficult, with many defeats to come. But there will also be unanticipated and heroic struggles that push back what is, despite the election results, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/a-trump-mandate/">an unpopular agenda of social regression</a>. It’s in those struggles, not in the multibillion-dollar electoral circus we just witnessed, that working-class people can win the change we deserve.

Lance Selfa

US liberalism offers nothing for workers or the left

These French governments just fly past, don’t they? Under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron, the expected lifespan of a prime minister has gone from three years to three months. Michel Barnier, the latest PM to fall victim to the rolling political, social and constitutional crisis that is the Macron presidency, was appointed in September and kicked out in time to spend Christmas with his family. His predecessor, Gabriel Attal, lasted a comparatively Methuselean six months. Projecting this rate of decline forward, some online statisticians estimate that the duration of the next French government will be somewhere below zero weeks, potentially triggering a crisis in the space-time continuum on top of the political disorder.
Macron called a midyear snap election to disorganise the left-wing opposition. The move backfired. Support for Macron’s coalition collapsed. An increase in support for the far-right National Rally was outpaced by anti-fascist and anti-neoliberal sentiment, the election bringing a surprise victory for the left-wing Popular Front coalition.
In response, Macron carried out a typically high-handed anti-democratic stunt. Claiming that “nobody had won” the election, he spent weeks locking the various parties into “consultations”. Finally, he appointed as his new prime minister an aged operative of the right-wing Republican Party—a party that had just won 3.8 percent of the vote.
Michel Barnier’s new government was completely dependent on far-right support. He had previously distinguished himself in politics by endorsing some of the most extreme and unconstitutional anti-migrant politics of the far right, including a five-year moratorium on immigration. Marine Le Pen, leader of the quasi-fascist National Rally party, noted approvingly that the new PM was “respectful” of National Rally and its supporters. Her offsider, Jordan Bardella, noted with pleasure that the Barnier government would operate “under surveillance” from the far right, who could bring it down at any moment.
For the fascists, the Barnier government provided a means to implement aspects of their anti-immigrant, pro-cop agenda while remaining unsullied by formal collaboration with Macron. For Macron, Barnier’s main qualification seemed to be that, unlike most other candidates for the prime ministerial post, he would retain Macron’s hated neoliberal pension reforms. Barnier embodied the symbiotic relationship between Macron’s neoliberal authoritarians and the French far right, for all that those forces denounce each other demagogically.
France’s broad reformist left is unusual: its most influential and biggest part is also the most left wing. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s pugnacious electoral outfit, France Unbowed, is the main force on the French left. It drags behind it the Greens and France’s ancient, decrepit Socialist Party, whose leaders are constantly tormented by the desire to break with the coalition and return to “respectable” centre politics. When Barnier’s appointment proved Macron’s desire to completely ignore popular concerns, protests broke out throughout France. The left spoke in strong terms: France Unbowed, and others around its region of the left, called the move a “coup against democracy”.
But the reformist left did not rise to the level of its own rhetoric. The midyear elections proved there is strong social support, especially in the big cities, for a left-wing, anti-racist political program. The entire Macron presidency has proven the willingness of workers, students and the oppressed to mobilise in protests, occupations and serious, prolonged strike movements. France faces the real prospect of fascist governments and presidencies. The left-reformist coalition, and particularly France Unbowed, have articulated a pretty coherent anti-racist, left-reformist program, and backed it up with impressive speech making and disruptive parliamentary operations. They have helped cohere and shape a left-wing current in French society that is in better health than what is found in many other imperialist countries. They have scored important victories—including the electoral defeat of the far right this year. But speech making and parliamentary interventions are not sufficient to confront a growing fascist menace in a country experiencing what is effectively a permanent political crisis.
France Unbowed’s main response to the Barnier government was to move repeated no-confidence motions, exposing his dependence on the far right each time the National Rally voted to keep him in power. Now, after Barnier proposed an austerity budget, the far right have decided to bring him down. 
Time after time in France, as social struggles are converted into parliamentary crises, the initiative has passed to the far right. This was true even of the electoral mobilisations, where mass support for a left-wing government was in part defused by Macron’s long procrastination in nominating a new government. It is even more true of the strikes and protests that have been a recurring feature of Macron’s presidency. Both Macron and Le Pen tend to passively wait out the big eruptions of social struggle. It is much easier for right-wing forces—both of the neoliberal and far-right variety—to get away with their political tricks when the streets are empty of protesters, strikers have gone back to work, and the only path to resolve social problems seems to be the state.
The causes of the crisis are not hard to understand. Macron’s commitment to neoliberal austerity politics is confronting a population that consistently rejects his program. Macron’s refusal to back down requires him to engage in more daring experiments with the anti-democratic provisions of the French constitution, and with racist scapegoating. This has fuelled the rise of the far right along with the revival of a social-democratic left. None of these currents can claim a complete social majority. The best weapon of the left is its capacity to mobilise workers and the oppressed in joint struggle, regardless of the rhythm and schedule of elections, and in defiance of the law and constitution if necessary. A significant national strike against Barnier’s austerity budget—a strike that continued even after Barnier had resigned—shows the capacity for resistance to develop and grow remains.
The crisis is likely to deepen. France’s economy is under serious pressure, and not only from the familiar effects of neoliberalism. Last year, the fascist Eric Zemmour, interviewed on Le Grand Jury, analysed the French economy from a different perspective: “France has managed to bring its artillery production from 1,000 to 3,000 shells per month”, he explained. “You must know that Ukraine consumes 5,000 shells a day, and that the Russians produce a million shells a year. Voilà: the balance of forces.” 
Macron, the military-industrial hawk of Europe, sees things in similar terms. Late last year, he spoke of the need for a “long-term war economy” in France. France aims to triple its annual manufacturing of 155mm shells; Russia produces more of its equivalent than all the EU combined. Macron’s project of bringing down the debt and deficit while ramping up military production will require economic sacrifices.
“We have rediscovered what great nations can do: realise the impossible”, Macron said at the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral. The ceremony did not necessarily provide the symbolic moment of optimism and hopefulness that was intended. Barnier’s government had fallen, and no replacement had been appointed. Macron’s audience included firefighters and priests. It also included President-elect Donald Trump, whose concept of a “great nation” is largely shared by France’s far right and may define future French governments. With him was Volodymyr Zelenskyy; his besieged nation’s need for artillery shells and air defence systems foreshadows how imperialist war is likely to reshape world politics in the coming years.

D. Taylor

On the fall of France’s government

“Step down, impeach, arrest!” chanted around one million protesters, according to rally organisers, in Yeoido, Seoul, on 7 December. They were demanding the impeachment of South Korean President Yoon Seok-yeol, who days earlier had declared martial law. In front of the National Assembly, people chanted, sang and waited tentatively in the cold for hours for the outcome of the impeachment vote.
Seven years earlier, the incumbent right-wing party, now rebranded to People Power Party (PPP), faced another one-million strong impeachment movement that successfully brought down the Park Geun-hye government. “This time it’s very fast”, Seon-gyeong, a socialist student organiser with Workers’ Solidarity told Red Flag during the demonstration. She explained how it took many months of patient work to grow the anti-Park movement. In the end, rail strikes were the lynch pin for its success.
Striking workers spoke from the main stage. Three days into their strike, Kang Jeong-nam, head of the Seoul branch of the railway union, apologised to the crowd for any inconvenience. “It’s okay! ... Keep going!” thousands shouted back. “But it’s okay to be uncomfortable right now, right?” Kang said, which was met with a loud supporting cheer.
People in the crowd flew satirical flags from the anti-Park movement. Some held repurposed signs, crossing out “Park” and adding “Yoon”. The lively block of university students reached around 100,000—many hoped that such large numbers would guarantee impeachment. “Impeach Yoon Seok-yeol! Arrest Yoon Seok-yeol!” the crowd chanted in unison. 
There’s a sense of déjà vu at the demonstration: a corrupt PPP, rail strikes and impeachment. However, Seon-gyeong isn’t sure that the result will be the same as 2016, when impeachment led to a heavy electoral defeat for the conservative party. 
When the vote was eventually held, all bar a few PPP members left the assembly, resulting in a failed vote. The crowd was incensed. “Come back you traitors!” people yelled as the main stage called out the names of each absent politician. As the sham became apparent, people streamed out of the rally, cursing the PPP. Organisers asked people to stay, but most knew it was over. There were neither tears nor rage, just disgust and a determination to keep coming back until the job is finished.
“Next week! Next week!” people chanted as they left the rally. The opposition vowed to reintroduce another impeachment bill in a few days, but “it’s not just about how big the next rally is” Seon-gyeong said, but whether it will be large and sustained enough to encourage more workers to join the strike.
The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) have promised an indefinite general strike until Yoon is impeached. Some of the key areas covered are the Hyundai manufacturing plants in Ulsan, the site of historic labour struggles in 1987 and 2006. “Yoon Seok-yeol is most afraid of the union between the KCTU and the citizens”, KCTU Chairman Yang Kyung-soo said from the main stage.
Yoon is determined to cling on to power. But millions of South Koreans are even more determined to oust him.

Jayden Trask

One million protest for Yoon Seok-yeol’s impeachment

You know the multiverse theory, that there are many parallel universes, and that they may contain alternate versions of ourselves and our conditions in this universe … Well, the last couple of days feel like we’ve jumped from one existence into a parallel universe, one in which a lot more is possible. 
This universe is a flexible, more cheerful place, in which the Syrian revolution may even be resolved. (As it happens, we went the day before yesterday [30 November—ed.] on a trip to Edinburgh to see my son. He bought us tickets to the Museum of Illusions. We walked through an arrangement of swirling lights called The Vortex, and we lost our balance. Was that when it happened? When we got home we heard the news that Aleppo city had been liberated.)
The rebels advanced out of the narrow strip of Idlib in which they and millions of Syrians from around the country had been crammed for over four years. “The rebels” here means a military alliance under the umbrella of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—the greatly moderated and better organised reincarnation of Jabhat al-Nusra. It’s still an authoritarian Islamist militia, but it’s not at all “like ISIS”, as the uninformed are saying. 
It broke definitively from the ISIS stream in 2014. It has a much more positive policy towards sectarian and ethnic minorities than ISIS. It allows far greater space for pluralism, disagreement and consultation than ISIS did (though it still arrests and detains some political opponents and tortures them). Unlike ISIS, it doesn’t field a Hisba Diwan (morality police) to interfere in people’s daily lives. Its focus is Syrian rather than transnational. It doesn’t threaten the West.
Its Fath al-Mubeen military alliance also incorporates lots of members of other less authoritarian groups that were displaced to Idlib and then gobbled up by HTS. HTS has not been popular among people in Idlib—they’ve been demonstrating against it for months—but its offensive is wildly popular because the people want to be rid of Assad and his foreign backers and to return to their homes.
I didn’t expect the offensive, at least not on this scale. Nobody did. At first, it looked to me like a controlled operation to restore the agreed Astana lines—that is, the division of north-west Syria agreed upon at Astana by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Russia had pushed Turkey to normalise and negotiate with Assad, and Turkey had tried hard to do so. Assad had refused to budge from his maximalist positions, the Russians don’t want to alienate Turkey (given their difficult position attacking Ukraine), and Turkey needs more Syrian territory to which to send Syrian refugees. So perhaps the Turks and Russians were scaring Assad into negotiating by taking a few towns in the Aleppo countryside.
But the offensive went much further than that, far beyond the Astana lines. News came, meanwhile, that the Turks had prevented the Syrian National Army—comprised of former Free Army militias now under Turkish control—from moving towards eastern Aleppo. This allowed the PKK-dominated SDF to take areas in Aleppo abandoned by collapsing Assad forces—surely the opposite of what Turkey wanted. Turkey was not, therefore, in control of events. Turkey clearly didn’t know what was going on.
What this offensive shows, therefore, is Syrians organising themselves, and Assad’s gangster regime crumbling as soon as Russian and Iranian imperialists are unable to protect it. When Assad subjugated free Aleppo in 2016, 80 percent of his ground troops were Iranian-organised transnational Shia militia and the air force was Russian. Now, the Iranian militia system is weak as a result of its targeting by Israel. In particular, Hizbullah was decapitated. (After 2011, Hizbullah turned itself from a resistance organisation into a counter-revolutionary tool, and was infiltrated and now destroyed by Israel as a result – but that’s another story.) The Russians are preoccupied with their invasion of Ukraine. 
In these circumstances, the unsustainable nature of regime rule comes inevitably to the fore. Anybody who knew Syria knew that the regime was widely hated, that it had utterly destroyed the Syrian economy, and that it was held in place only by foreign powers. But nobody expected such a dramatic and sudden turnaround.
The rebels swept into Aleppo city. The regime and the Iranian militias, which had previously spent years battling for the city, fled without resistance. Military analysts say the rebels appear better organised and more disciplined than ever before. Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, the HTS leader, issued directives to his men to respect the civilians of the city, including the large population of Christians and other minorities. 
So far, I have heard one unconfirmed report of a woman being ordered by a rebel fighter to cover her hair, but nothing worse. Apparently, people in the city are nervous of how the rebels may behave, and of course of punitive Russian and Assadist bombing, which has already begun. (It is important to hold the rebel fighters to account, and to high standards. In the past, they have helped the revolution’s enemies with their violations of Syrian people’s rights.)
Key towns in Idlib province were quickly liberated—places that were once full of creative revolutionary activity, like Saraqeb, Khan Sheikhoun, Ma’aret al-Nowman, and Kafranbel. Next, the offensive moved into the Hama countryside, taking towns like Morek. Years’ worth of progress is happening in mere hours. As I write [1 December—ed.], the rebels are at the gates of Hama city.
This is by far the best news in many years. Assad, Iran and Russia are being smashed. Prisoners are being released (moving footage can be seen of prisoners, including many women, rushing out of the dungeons in Aleppo <a href="https://qunfuz.com/2024/04/11/syrian-gulag/">in which they were tortured and starved</a>). Hundreds of thousands of people are returning to their homes.
Apparently, Rastan and Talbiseh, towns in Homs province, have been liberated by armed residents. In Deraa in the south, several towns have risen against Assad. (Next door, the Druze-dominated Sweida province is already largely autonomous, having <a href="https://qunfuz.com/2023/08/26/revolutionary-resurgence-in-syria/">roundly rejected Assad well over a year ago</a>.) The Turkish-backed National Army, meanwhile, is this morning moving into territory held jointly by the PKK/SDF and the Assad regime in the Tel Rifaat area.
The fact that other parts of Syria are rising, and under different commands, is important because it means HTS influence will be diluted. If several parts of the country are liberated, HTS will have to build a united front with people with other perspectives and political backgrounds.
This doesn’t mean that the democratic revolution is about to seize power, or that Syria is about to enter paradise. The civil revolution that began in 2011 was largely crushed, its experiments in democracy eliminated, its most grassroots military forces co-opted or gobbled up by more powerful and authoritarian actors. There are no longer hundreds of independent, quasi-democratic local councils to organise civil life. The country is divided, traumatised, cursed by warlords and foreign occupiers. 
But suddenly, it looks as if it may be possible not only to challenge but to end the rule of the monster, which means it may become possible for millions to go home, and therefore for civil society to begin to reconstitute itself. The future can’t start until Assad is gone.
Today, the most important events may occur around the city of Hama, where the regime may be able to mobilise fighters based in loyal communities to stage a fightback. If the dominoes continue to fall, I’d expect very fierce fighting in Homs and Damascus, where militarised Alawi communities have been planted in strategic locations precisely for this eventuality.
I also expect all fascist forces regionally and globally to do what they can to stop Syrian self-determination, including the genocidal Zionist state, which Assad father and son have served so well. Israel certainly wishes to crush Hizbullah and the Iranian militia system, but it doesn’t want to unseat the dictatorship <a href="https://qunfuz.com/2023/03/05/palestinian-assadists/">which handed over the Golan</a> and which imprisons teenage girls (like Tal al-Mallouhi) if they write poems about Palestine. 
Already, there are Zionists making noises about the “danger of chemical weapons falling into the hands of jihadists”—people who didn’t worry about chemical weapons in the hands of Assad, who slaughtered thousands of innocents with them, or in the hands of the Iranian militias that are supposedly such a threat to them.
People who still choose to believe that the fascist Assad regime—which murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians, and recently withdrew further from its side of the Golan so that Israel could advance—is “anti-Zionist”, well, I really can’t help them. Freedom for the Syrians from fascism and foreign occupation is a noble aim in itself. So is freedom for the Arabs in general from the dictatorships which abuse them. This is actually a precondition for Palestinian liberation.
But today, it doesn’t matter so much what outsiders think. History is being made on the ground.
First published at <a href="https://qunfuz.com">Qunfuz.com</a>. Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Road-Damascus-Robin-Yassin-Kassab/dp/0141035641/ref=pd_sxp_grid_i_1_0/275-3026135-7857639">The Road From Damascus</a>, and co-author, with Leila al-Shami, <a href="http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745336220">Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War</a>.

Robin Yassin-Kassab

In Syria, history is being made on the ground

At least 42,000 people flooded Pōneke (Wellington), Aotearoa (New Zealand), on 19 November, as the final act of the hīkoi mō te Tiriti (protest march for the Treaty).
The hīkoi began in Cape Reinga, the northernmost point of the North Island, and travelled more than 1000 kilometres over nine days, ending at the New Zealand parliament. Tens of thousands joined the march as it moved through the North Island, and Iwi (Māori tribes) from across the country participated. Many Tangata Titiriti (non-Māori New Zealanders) joined and supported the action.
The hīkoi marks the latest in a long and proud history of Māori resistance, bringing the population together in opposition to the racist right-wing government currently in power and the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers (ACT) party’s Treaty Principles Bill.
A notable moment was when the hīkoi crossed the Auckland Harbour Bridge and visited Ihumātao. Ihumātao is Māori land that has been an ongoing site of occupation and protest as the state (under both Labour and Nationals) attempts to sell it to private developers in flagrant breach of Te Tiriti O Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi).
The hīkoi finished its march at parliament, where crowds filled the grounds to capacity to hear from hīkoi leaders and Te Pāti Māori MPs. A petition to stop the Treaty Principles Bill with more than 281,150 signatures (a larger number than the total vote for the ACT party in the last election) was also delivered to parliament.
Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke (a Te Pāti Māori MP, and at 22 years old the youngest MP in parliament) gave an emotional recounting of the Haka she had performed in parliament the day before, describing how she received a 24-hour suspension as punishment but “the next day, showed up outside the steps with 100,000 of my people”. David Seymour, author of the Treaty Principles Bill and ACT leader, attempted to speak to the crowd, but was drowned out by chants of “Kill the bill” and retreated to sook on his social media.
The day finished with a celebration of the largest hīkoi in Aotearoa’s history at Waitangi Park. Those present described the mood as defiant and joyful, as Māori and non-Māori celebrated together. “What’s good for Māori is good for everyone, we come here in peace, we love everyone no matter who you are, where you come from” one protester told Radio New Zealand.
There were solidarity protests in London, New York, the Cook Islands and across Australia, with the hīkoi solidarity action in Melbourne drawing hundreds of people.
The bill
Tiriti O Waitangi enshrines Tino Rangatiratanga (self-determination or sovereignty) for Māori. However, there are two versions, one in English and one in Māori, and only the Māori one recognises Māori sovereignty. The Treaty Principles were established to resolve this contradiction as part of the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act. The principles are partnership, participation and the guarantee of rangatiratanga for Māori.
ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill, which would replace the current principles with “All New Zealanders are equal under the law, with the same rights and duties, The New Zealand Government has the right to govern New Zealand, The New Zealand Government will protect all New Zealanders’ authority over their land and other property”, is a racist attack on Māori sovereignty. Seymour argues the current principles give Māori “special privileges”, a recurring racist argument from the right. 
NZ First and the Nationals, the other two parties in the governing coalition, agreed to support the bill’s first reading in order to get ACT to join their coalition so they could cobble together a government. They have said they will not support the bill beyond its first reading, but their support up to now has emboldened the racist far right and provided it with significant air time. And the Nationals and NZ First have spent the last year attacking Māori rights in other ways, including destroying the Māori health authority and restricting the use of Te Reo Māori (Māori language) in government.
At the bill’s first parliamentary reading, instead of announcing Te Pāti Māori’s vote, Maipi-Clarke tore up the bill and began a haka. She was joined by the rest of Te Pāti Māori MPs, Māori Green MPs and members of the public in the gallery. Maipi-Clarke has become something of a hero for many on the left during her first year in parliament. She used her maiden speech to do a haka, and has repeatedly taken on right-wing politicians like Winston Peters (vice prime minister and leader of the NZ First Party).
Peters is a bastion of the conservative and reactionary right wing, and he regularly demeans and attacks Maipi-Clarke, although he is Māori himself. After he told her to “listen to her elders, hush up and learn some manners” and “stop showing off” in the parliamentary budget debate, Maipi-Clarke’s speech in response ended with her saying “moumou tō toto Māori” to Peters three times, which translates as “a waste of Māori blood”. The video of her response went viral and sparked a Tiktok trend involving young Māori women lip-syncing to the speech.
1960s radicalisation leads to new organised resistance
To understand what’s happening today, history is important. Māori were pushed into the capitalist workforce in the major cities to support the war effort in World War Two, while their land was increasingly stolen by the state. By 1975, Māori controlled only 2 million hectares of their land.
By 1966, 70 percent of Māori men worked in production, transport-equipment operation and labouring, centred in industrial zones. Māori were subject to racist discriminatory laws, forced into impoverished, over-policed city suburbs, denied opportunities and education, restricted to difficult and low-waged work, had their children removed and abused by the state, and were punished for practising their culture or speaking their language. In 1961, Māori life expectancy was 15 years less than Pākehā (white New Zealanders), and Māori were three times more likely to be unemployed. In 1960, only 25 percent of Māori could speak Te Reo (the Māori language), and by 1975, only 5 percent of children could. Resentment towards the system, especially among urban youth, was rising.
The radicalisation of the 1960s brought movements against the Vietnam War, for women’s rights, against Māori exclusion from the 1960 All Blacks rugby tour of South Africa and an increase in strikes. Many young Māori participated in these movements and emerged as political leaders, and an array of radical organisations sprung up in the cities.
The Māori Organisation on Human Rights (MOOHR) was founded in Wellington in 1967 by Tama Poata. Poata was a member of the New Zealand Communist Party and the Wellington Drivers Union and was labelled the country’s “leading Māori Communist” by ex-Prime Minister Robert Muldoon.
MOOHR was established when Poata organised mostly Māori and Pasifika drivers in his union to resist the Maori Affairs Amendment Act, a law designed to break up what was left of Māori communal land ownership. MOOHR campaigned for a cross-racial resistance to capitalism, which it saw as the cause of all oppression and inequality, and published a regular newsletter.
In 1970, Ngā Tamatoa (Young Warriors) was established at a young Māori leaders conference at Auckland university under the guidance of Ranginui Walker, a Māori academic. These Māori student leaders were inspired by the Black power movements in the US, and wanted an organised fight for Māori sovereignty, not a polite appeal. After the group was established, it was joined by Māori highschoolers and young workers in urban centres, like Tama Poata. Ngā Tamatoa was not explicitly anti-capitalist, and members had different political approaches, which would diverge more drastically as time went on. Although labelled “violent revolutionaries” by the mainstream press, only some members believed in armed uprising, and Ngā Tamatoa organised only peaceful resistance and community aid.
Ngā Tamatoa’s first action was to protest Waitangi Day celebrations, which it argued should be a day of mourning and reflection on the ongoing oppression of Māori people. In 1973, members of Ngā Tamatoa like Hana Te Hemara were arrested as they tried to burn the union jack and storm the stage on which Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk was speaking. Kirk had recently changed the name to New Zealand Day in an attempt to obscure Aotearoa’s colonial history. Hana Te Hemara is Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke’s great aunty and her namesake. In 1972, Ngā Tamatoa, the New Zealand Māori Students’ Association and the Māori Language Society delivered a petition to parliament with 30,000 signatures to teach Te Reo Māori in schools, presented by Hana Te Hemara. It was signed by a significant number of Pākehā, and reflected a shift in mainstream Pākehā consciousness against Māori oppression. Another Ngā Tamatoa member, Tame Iti, set up the Māori tent embassy that same year, inspired by the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra.
The Polynesian Panthers were formed in Auckland in 1971 by Will ’Ilolahia and five other Pasifika youth, with an average age of 20. They were a revolutionary socialist organisation formed to fight racism, inspired by the Black Panther Party in the US.
Many Pasifika people were brought to Aotearoa in the 1950s to do the hardest, lowest paid work, and they faced systemic racism. In the 1970s they were blamed for the economic crisis by the media and ruling class, who depicted them as job-stealing criminals. They were subjected to violent “dawn raids” brought in by Norman Kirk in 1973, in which police would break into homes while people slept and forcibly take them to the police station without any belongings to be deported, for apparently overstaying their visas. The Polynesian Panthers provided community support, set up a pig patrol and organised activism and occupations of homes whose families were being evicted. They also carried out dawn raid of minister’s houses, drawing widespread publicity to the depravity of the dawn raids.
Miriama Rauhihi Ness joined the Polynesian Panthers in 1971. After moving to Auckland when she was 18, she worked in a sewing factory with many Pasifika women. She became a union representative and within six months had organised a strike over unfair conditions for Pasifika workers. After joining the Panthers, she became a key organiser and held the culture portfolio, organising workshops educating members on sexism and chauvinism.
1975 land rights hikoi: not one more acre of Māori land!
In 1975, Ngā Tamatoa, the Polynesian Panthers, Whina Cooper and other left-wing groups took on the loss of Māori land together. Whina Cooper was a revered activist who fought both women’s and Māori oppression through her activism for Māori land rights, beginning in 1915 when she was only 19 years old. As a single mother in 1949, she moved to Auckland and worked with the Māori women’s welfare league. Her involvement in both the fight for Māori land rights in rural areas and against urban Māori impoverishment, demonstrated to her the connection between the two issues.
In 1975, at age 79, she organised Te Ropu o te Matakite (the people with foresight), an organising group for a hīkoi for Māori land rights. The group was made up of Ngā Tamatoa members, Polynesian Panthers and other left-wing activists. Deciding on the slogan “Not one more acre of Māori land”, they encouraged diversity in politics and tactics, and united the activism of the old and new generations. They also sought to consolidate support for Māori land rights amongst other oppressed demographics, writing; “We see no difference between the aspirations of Māori people and the desire of workers in their struggles. We seek the support of workers and organisations, as the only viable bodies which have sympathy and understanding of the Māori people and their desires. The people who are oppressing the workers are the same who are exploiting the Māori today”.
To journey down the entire North Island on foot was a decision made by organisers to draw attention to their struggle, and to connect with different Iwi. As they travelled, they stayed at different Marae (meeting houses), and Whina Cooper would spend the nights agitating for more people to join the hīkoi and sign their petition to end the sale of Māori land and for Māori control over Māori land. She was often successful.
After the hīkoi concluded, 60 protesters occupied parliament’s lawn. The pressure from this resistance led to the Treaty of Waitangi Act, which established the Waitangi Tribunal, a court that would examine the theft of Māori land and breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, and bring the Treaty into law.
The act also established Treaty Principles, made necessary by the discrepancy between the English and Māori treaty documents, which enshrined Māori sovereignty in law. But the tribunal created to uphold the principles was not given power to enforce its decisions.
Members of Ngā Tamatoa and the Polynesian Panthers continued to organise resistance throughout the 1970s. Although they had dissolved by the 1980s, many continued to organise resistance and activism, becoming key organisers of the anti-apartheid action against the 1981 South African Springbok tour.
Ngā Tamatoa members also went on to be key figures in the Māori cultural renaissance. They worked in unions, the arts and community to revitalise Māori culture and pride. The renaissance brought Māori language back from near extinction, and led to the establishment of Kohanga reo and Kurakaupapa (Māori language schools) in the late 1970s, and later Māori radio, television and film.
A policy of “bi-culturalism” was adopted by the Labour Government in 1984, which included Māori personnel, Māori models of organisation and Māori social practices and cultural symbolism in institutions of the state. In 1987, the Māori Language Act was passed, making Te Reo Māori an official language of Aotearoa. Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke attended Kohanga reo, and is seen as representative of a Kohanga reo generation, who have been raised with pride in Māori culture.
Some Ngā Tamatoa members moved towards the right. Donna Awatere Huata, who wrote the influential book Māori Sovereignty, later started a consulting business that provided Māori cultural education for government departments like the treasury and the police. In 1996 she joined ACT, the right-wing libertarian party, and became an MP.
2004 foreshore and seabed hikoi
In 2004, the Labour government under Helen Clarke announced the seizure of the foreshore and seabed around Aotearoa by the state. The Foreshore and Seabed Act would annex millions of hectares of marine land from Māori, the largest grab since the 1800s. The act was in response to appeals made by Māori to have their customary right to the foreshore and seabed recognised.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the Māori Land Court should determine whether the foreshore and seabed could be customary land. The Court of Appeal ruling (which didn’t give anything to Māori) was jumped on by the right. National party MP Nick Smith started a petition to “save our beaches” from Māori who were trying to “steal them”. The Nationals spread racist rhetoric that Māori had special privileges, and at a protest Nick Smith attended, many Pākehā brought placards with racist slogans, such as “Whites have rights too”.
The National party elected Don Brash as leader, who had previously led ACT. He doubled down on the vicious racist attack against Māori, and jumped 17 percent in the polls. Instead of condemning the racism of the right wing and supporting Māori customary rights, Clark lurched to the right herself with the Foreshore and Seabed Act.
Māori decided to replicate the 1975 hīkoi to resist the Foreshore and Seabed Act and the rampant racism being pushed from the top of society. Some of the key organisers were Ngā Tamatoa veterans like Hone Harawira. As in 1975, the hīkoi travelled from the top of the North Island to parliament, stopping at Marae along the way to gather support, under the slogan “Māori Seabed, For Shore”! Young Māori played an active role in the hīikoi, and many had learnt about the 1975 land march in Kurakaupapa. As the growing hīkoi advanced on the capital, Clark hardened her attacks, infamously saying, “What it is is the same old faces—the Ken Mairs, the Harawira families, the Annette Sykes—the haters and wreckers”.
Around 15,000 people arrived at parliament as the hīkoi concluded, filling the grounds. The Labour Party held most of the seven Māori seats (seats that are reserved for Māori MPs, which only Māori can vote for) in parliament. These MPs were facing expulsion from the party if they did not vote for the act. Only one Labour Māori MP, Tariana Turia, voted against and despite the massive protest, the act passed.
Organisers of the hīkoi began to look to different avenues for change. Hone Harawira and Tariana Turia decided to create the Māori Party (today Te Pati Māori), as a way to combat the two major parties’ anti-Māori politics and fight for Māori rights in parliament. The party went on to help National form a government in 2008, and the Foreshore and Seabed Act was overturned and replaced by the Marine and Coastal Area Act. This decision to join a National Party government led to Hone Harawira resigning and a plummet in the party’s public support.
Prior to the 2017 election, Raiwiri Waititi and Debbie Ngawera-Packer were elected leaders (and still are today). Under their leadership the party has moved to the left. In the 2023 election they won six seats, claiming five from Labour, reflecting a political polarisation and collapse in support for the centre. They have used their platform in parliament to build campaigns and movements on the ground, like Hīkoi mō te Tiriti. 
Hīkoi mō te Tiriti is the largest hīkoi ever. It is the latest chapter in this radical tradition, buoyed by the two preceding Hīkoi and Aotearo’s rich history of resistance. It is an escalation of a protest movement that is mobilising huge numbers of Māori and non-Māori in unity against the right, and is gathering momentum. There is much to learn and take inspiration from in the current movement, and the radical tradition on which it builds.

Elliott Shaw

Hīkoi mō te Tiriti! Protect the treaty!

Joel Geier has been a socialist activist in the US since the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. He has written extensively on US imperialism, politics and economics. He spoke to Red Flag’s Robert Narai. The interview has been edited for length.
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How would you characterise the position of US imperialism today?
The US is still the world’s dominant economic, political and military superpower. But it now faces competition from a newly emerging superpower, China, and its allies. This introduces a new, more dangerous phase of imperialism, which has its roots in preceding phases.
There have been three previous phases of imperialism over the last century or so. First was the struggle for the world market and an international economy that led to World War One, the Great Depression and World War Two, the latter of which the US emerged from on top. It was the strength of US industrial capacity that, converted to war production, produced the planes, ships, tanks, trucks, guns and ammunition that were vital to the Allied victory.
After World War Two, there was superpower competition between the victors of that war: the US and the Soviet Union. This was a political and military struggle without economic rivalry, as the Soviet Union could not compete on the world market. 
The third phase begins at the end of the 1980s. After the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union, the US emerged as the world’s only superpower. It used this phase to organise its globalised order under US auspices.
During this time, the US made its greatest strategic gamble and, ultimately, mistake. To gain access to cheaper labour and greater profits, it outsourced its industrial capacity and manufacturing to China and others. The US thought it could incorporate China into the economic world that it controlled. Instead, the US has found itself in the ironic position that it is dependent upon the decisions of the Chinese Communist Party for some of its industrial goods, and even its military is dependent upon parts and supplies from China. The US currently lacks the industrial-military capacity to engage in a major conflict with China. 
There is now an attempt by the US to restore its industrial-military capacity. This requires a major struggle for the world market, raw materials and the military preparations necessary for world domination. This is a new phase of imperialism that has been accelerated by three recent events.
First, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted US industrial supply chains that were dependent upon China. Manufacturing parts didn’t arrive from China and so sections of manufacturing ground to a halt. Supplies of pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies were dependent upon China. This highlighted to the US ruling class that it could not remain dependent upon China; it was necessary to restore self-reliance to ensure its continued control over the world. 
Second, the Russian invasion of Ukraine convinced sections of the American ruling class that they must control Middle Eastern oil and should not pivot away from this commodity that the US’s allies and rivals depend on.
Third, Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and Israel’s advance against Iran and its allies in the Middle East—all of which is dependent upon US support—have strengthened the US’s position in the region.
These events have restored or reinforced alliances and the formation of blocs and coalitions over the last few years. The US has used the war in Ukraine to restore its military dominance over NATO and Europe. In Asia, the US has created AUKUS and restored its alliances with the Philippines and cemented ties with South Korea and Japan against China. On the other side, Russia and China have formed an alliance. Both now have ties with Iran, which is supplying military goods to Russia, and North Korea is sending troops to support Russians fighting in Ukraine.
What were US imperial interests in the Middle East prior to the war in Gaza?
The US’s strategic objective for more than 80 years has been to control world oil and to use this leverage over other countries because no modern capitalist economy or military can function without oil. 
During the first half of the twentieth century, the US was the leading oil producer in the world and supplied oil to the Allies that contributed to their victory in World War Two. During the war, the US made an alliance with Saudi Arabia. It created the modern Saudi state and military in order for US oil policy to be supported by Saudi Arabia. And with the decline of British and French imperialism after the war, the US came to dominate the Middle East and Middle Eastern oil. 
The US fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to extend its control over Middle Eastern oil. These wars were won militarily but were a disaster from the vantage point of US imperial interests. They cost the US trillions of dollars, thousands of deaths of US soldiers and many tens of thousands of injuries. These were endless wars: they could not control and maintain the occupations they were involved in. This weakened the US’s ability to confront China and so they were determined to pivot away from the Middle East, starting with Obama.
Obama was also the fracking president. He restored oil production in the US, which is now again the leading oil producer in the world. The US no longer depends on oil imports from the Middle East: it is now a net exporter of oil. Biden continued this policy by pulling the last troops out of Afghanistan and scaling down the troops in Iraq to a few thousand.
The US withdrawal from the Middle East created a vacuum that was mainly filled by Iran, which has set up allies in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. This shifted the balance of forces in the Middle East and created a clash between Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others against Iran. These Arab states wanted the US back in the region as protectors against Iran.
The US also changed its attitude towards the Middle East after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Germany and other EU countries were dependent upon oil and gas from Russia, which made it difficult for the US to organise Europe and NATO against Russia until that question was solved. However, the US and its Arab allies were now in a position to supply oil and natural gas to Germany and others in Europe. 
The war in Ukraine convinced the US that if they are moving towards a conflict with Russia and China, they have to control Middle Eastern oil. They therefore came up with various plans to reorganise the Middle East, the most important of which was an alliance of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan and so on with Israel against Iran and their allies, under US military auspices. This is what was being proposed prior to the war in Gaza. One of the reasons Hamas gave for taking on Israel militarily on 7 October was they wanted to prevent this alliance from taking place. 
How have Israel’s wars against Gaza and Lebanon, as well as their repeated confrontations with Iran, changed the US plans for the Middle East?
The war in Gaza has altered US plans for the Middle East. Although its Arab allies are for an Israeli victory, they cannot openly ally with Israel while the genocide of the Palestinians is taking place, out of fear of how unpopular it would be with their own populations. These plans are either postponed or have to be readjusted when the war ends.
Israel is a close ally of the US: the Israeli military, intelligence services, technology etc. are heavily intertwined with their American equivalents. This has been true for decades. Israel does the dirty work for American imperialism in one country after another throughout the world. When the US do not want to get their hands dirty, they often have the Israelis do it for them.
Israel’s current war could not exist without US-supplied arms, intelligence, technology and so on. The US want an Israeli victory but not a generalised regional war. 
The ongoing support by the US for Israel in this war is not because Netanyahu is smarter than them, or that Biden is a lifelong Zionist, or any of the other reasons the liberal press give that cover up the real nature of US imperialism, which many of them support. They do not want to present the truth: the US is also genocidal, not just Israel. Israel has killed 43,000 people in Gaza. In Vietnam, the US killed between 2 and 3 million civilians. In Iraq, the US killed half a million people, of whom over 200,000 were civilians. It is the US that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is the US that firebombed Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden during World War Two. This is what it takes to become the global superpower.
At the same time, the US does not want the fallout from a genocide against the Palestinians. Politically, it has been a disaster for Israel and the US in parts of the world. And so the US issues press releases to quiet liberal opinion about how terrible it is, that Israel should be giving more humanitarian aid, protecting civilians and so on. At the same time, the US provides Israel with all the support needed to carry out these atrocities. 
Meanwhile, the US has supported Israel’s expansion of the war into Lebanon against Hezbollah and confrontations with Iran.
The US enables Israel—but just as important, Israel is enabling a victory for the US. Unless there is dramatic change in the war, this is becoming the biggest Israeli victory in the Middle East since the 1967 war against the Arab states. It is the biggest US military victory in decades.
Israel enables the US to change the balance of power in the Middle East to the detriment of Iran, which has been rising in importance in the Middle East for the better part of a decade now. This is an enormous shift. It is one that is vital to the US if it is to restore its control over Middle Eastern oil in preparation for bigger conflicts with China and Russia. If the US can control the Middle East, it can control the oil supply from the Middle East to China (even though Russia can provide a large amount of oil for China). This is the long-term goal of US imperialism. 
Israel, with the full support and backing of the US, has inflicted a huge blow against Iran’s allies in Hamas and Hezbollah. It is probably the US that took out the air defences in Syria and Iraq that allowed Israel to get to Iran. Israel has used air power to take out the Iranian air defences. There is total cooperation between the US and Israeli intelligence and military services in carrying out these attacks.
The US has totally decided what Israel could do in terms of Iran. It has protected Israel by providing them with the THAAD defences against Iranian missiles. The US bombed Yemen to send a signal to Iran that the US will take part if they continue to fire missiles at Israel.
The US has told Israel that it would not go to war against Iran and has refused to allow Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. The US refused to provide Israel with the necessary equipment: bunker buster bombs necessary to take out their nuclear facilities or the B-52 bombers that deliver them. It has not allowed Israel to target Iran’s oil infrastructure. Iran said if Israel takes out Iranian oil, Iran will take out oil in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. 
The US also leaked the Israeli war plans to Iran. This is something that is not usually done among allies. The US have also been negotiating with the Iranians publicly and behind closed doors. If the US was for Israel bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and oil infrastructure, it would have happened. 
At this point, the US attitude has been, We will protect and support our ally Israel, but we will not allow this to become a war against Iran. 
The US demanded and got compliance from Israel that US national interests were to be decisive—not Israeli war ones—in the confrontation with Iran.
Israel might do some things that make it difficult for the US to carry out their political objectives for the region. But this is a fight among friends. Despite whatever headaches the Israelis might give them, this is providing the US with the biggest military victory that it has had in decades after winning militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan but losing the occupation.
This has been a cheap war for the US so far. The US spent US$2-4 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and from the strategic vantage point of US imperialism, they were a disaster. The US has spent US$20 billion on Israel in the past year and achieved its biggest military victory in the region in decades by pushing back Iran and its allies. 
There were several thousand American soldiers killed in those wars and many tens of thousands injured. This victory is taking place without one American soldier being killed or injured and no political blow-back at home for these causalities. It is a very cheap victory for the US.
As this war has shifted from Gaza to include Lebanon and Iran, the left is finally starting to wake up to the idea that the US may be doing more than just enabling Israel. Israel is enabling a victory for the US to restore its power in the Middle East. This victory also pushes back China and Russia, which are allied with Iran. 
What implications does the election of Donald Trump have?
The new Trump presidency will not be a repeat of his first administration. The new phase of imperialism we have entered will accelerate even more with Trump in power. We are in a very different world because of the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, supply chains that must be uncoupled, of the new alliances and bloc formations taking shape.
The foreign policy of the US will not be the ruling-class foreign-policy establishment political strategy pursued by Biden, of managing the status quo of a US-dominated world order. Trump and Republican imperialist foreign policy is to change the world order. It is divided about how to pursue that.
The Trump administration includes both wings of the Republican Party. The traditional Republican hawks generally supported Biden’s foreign policy of restoring American alliances, but criticised him for not being aggressive enough: the US provided weapons to Ukraine but didn’t deliver the weapons that it needed and did not allow Ukraine to use them against Russia. These Republican hawks also criticise the US for holding back Israel against Iran. 
But the greater section of the China hawks—Trump and his associates who now dominate the Republican Party—argue that the US does not have the resources to effectively intervene everywhere in the world: they have to concentrate on China. Despite what Trump and the liberal media say, they are not going to dissolve NATO. Europe is militarily dependent on the US, and NATO is a key pillar of US domination over Europe. Instead, Trump argues that the Europeans have to deal with Russia and make it their responsibility. And he wants to end the Ukraine war and its costs to US imperialism. Trump doesn’t step back in terms of the Middle East because Israel is restoring US power in the Middle East against Iran. 
Trump’s strategy is “make America great again”, to rebuild American economic industrial and military power so that it is capable of preparing for competition and war with China.
Trump has presented this mainly in terms of a trade war against China and if necessary whole sections of the world in order to restore US competitiveness and industry. This is part of what the stock rally was about when he got elected. The capitalist class expects there to be an enormous boom under Trump, who will do away with as many regulations as possible.
The other aspect of Trump’s policy is to quickly raise the war budget from 3 percent of GDP to 5 percent to US$1-1.5 trillion annually. 
Deregulation and lower corporate taxes will be used to try to unleash a new trickle-down scheme that aims to convince US corporations to rebuild the military-industrial complex. 
Biden made a small gesture in that regard with infrastructure and the subsidies for electric vehicles. Trump will make more moves to re-shore production to the US mainland.
Trump’s strategy has been primarily that of a trade war than can threaten the entire world economy through economic nationalism and economic warfare. 
We are in a world in which imperialism threatens not just war but total economic instability. We are entering a whole new period that can produce crises. Both of wars like Gaza and Ukraine. There can be even bigger ones coming. And alongside it there is the threat of economic instability as the US and China attempt to separate and become self-reliant. As these great powers attempt to uncouple from each other, we are back in a world that existed before World War Two. 
What are the tasks for socialists in this new era of imperialism?
Revolutionary socialists, like everyone else, have to face reality, draw conclusions and act on them. We have to understand that the decades of globalisation and one superpower, however bad that was, are now over, and that we are in transition to a more unstable, volatile, dangerous world. A world that threatens economic warfare that impacts on people’s daily living standards, as well as more wars that could culminate in a struggle between the superpowers for world domination. 
Imperialism and war radicalised generations throughout the twentieth century. They created an international movement and led to revolutions—from Russia in 1905 to Portugal in 1975. This new phase of imperialism has the potential to do that again. During previous decades, consciousness of imperialism, war and revolution practically disappeared, even in most sections of the left. We are starting again almost from scratch. In the twentieth century, imperialism and war also created vicious, right-wing and fascist movements. A more aggressive far-right, nationalist movement is under way internationally. 
In the last year, the war in Gaza has produced a new international movement in support of Palestine. It is centred on a new generation of young people opposed to war and its horrors who, like all newly radicalised people, do not have consciousness of imperialism or revolution, but who are suspicious, if not outright hostile, to their rulers, who have excused and supported genocide. Like all new generations, it will take time and experience of struggle for this consciousness to reach radical and revolutionary conclusions. But it is the key question: how to raise the consciousness of people who have been moved by war in the last year to the road of the socialist struggle against imperialism; how to raise their consciousness through struggles, battles, including ideological ones, to win them to the conclusions of the socialist struggle against imperialism and war. We have to win them to internationalism, to support all the struggles of workers, students and the oppressed against all the ruling classes in the world, that the struggle against imperialism and war have to be connected to the struggles against exploitation and oppression. It is a long struggle in front of us. But it is essential we build a much larger and stronger revolutionary organisation committed to this goal.

Robert Narai

US imperialism and the war for the Middle East

A former agent of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile has been living in Australia avoiding justice for her role in the aggravated kidnapping, torture and murder of at least seven Communist Party activists in the 1970s. 
Adriana Rivas is accused of being part of a government campaign of terror and genocidal violence unleashed on the left and the workers’ movement by the dictatorship after the coup of 11 September 1973. 
Rivas lived as a free woman in Australia from 1978 to 2006, working and living in Bondi, Sydney. While visiting Chile for a family wedding in 2006, she was arrested and later charged for her role in Pinochet-era crimes. But while released on bail in 2010, she fled Chile, making her way back to Australia. 
In 2014, Chile formally requested her extradition. The Australian government failed to act on the request for five years before arresting her in 2019. While several Australian courts have confirmed the legitimacy of her extradition, Rivas and her lawyers continue to appeal the extradition order in the High Court. 
In 1970, Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity coalition were elected to office in Chile, promising to carry out a parliamentary road to socialism. The election of a left-wing government, and the resistance of the Chilean capitalist class to its progressive reforms, unleashed a wave of strikes across the country. 
The struggle reached revolutionary proportions in 1973, when workers began to form industrial cordones, institutions of working-class power and industrial democracy independent of the government, to coordinate struggle, defend workers’ gains and pressure the government to implement the promised nationalisation of industry, which Popular Unity had retreated on. 
Tragically, the revolutionary process was drowned in blood. In August 1973, Allende invited General Augusto Pinochet into his cabinet in an attempt to appease the Chilean and international capitalist class. On 11 September, Allende was murdered in the Presidential Palace. Militants from the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the revolutionary MIR and working-class activists were rounded up in their thousands, ushered into the National Stadium of Santiago to be tortured and summarily executed. 
The regime continued to hunt down left-wing workers and socialist militants for nearly two decades, while receiving the full diplomatic support of Western governments, including Australia. 
In 1974, the Pinochet dictatorship passed Decree Law 521, which created the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), a Gestapo-like secret political police force reporting directly to Pinochet. DINA became infamous for its apparatus of repression. This included torture centres, extrajudicial murder and the forced disappearances of thousands of civilians. 
The murder of prisoners sometimes occurred through suffocation, the experimental use of sarin gas or injection with cyanide. Survivors have testified that prisoners were killed through beatings, their bodies disposed of in lime mines or thrown into the sea via helicopter in notorious “death flights”.
US support for these crimes is well known. In August 1970, a month before Allende and Popular Unity were elected, Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser for President Richard Nixon, had discussed the feasibility of the US supporting a military coup against Popular Unity. 
After the coup, the US supported DINA significantly. In 1974, CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters hosted a luncheon for DINA Director Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda at CIA headquarters in Virginia. The following year, the CIA briefly put the DINA director on its payroll as a paid asset.
Between 1973 and 1977, Adriana Rivas worked for DINA as part of the Lautaro Brigade, operating under the name “La Chani”. The Lautaro Brigade was an intelligence unit within DINA that targeted Communist Party activists with the aim of liquidating the underground leadership of the resistance to the regime. Rivas was the personal secretary of Army Colonel Contreras, who oversaw DINA. 
Many of the Lautaro Brigade’s crimes and its agents were not exposed until 2007, when a former agent gave evidence as part of the Conference Street I and II judicial processes. These two cases covered the aggravated kidnapping and disappearance of Fernando Ortiz, Fernando Navarro, Lincoyan Berrios, Horacio Cepeda, Hector Veliz, Reinalda Pereira and Victor Diaz, secretary of the Communist Party at the time. Rivas is accused of being a participant in the disappearance of all seven. 
In 2007, a former DINA waiter turned witness, Jorgelino Vergara—whose own guilt led him to expose the Lautaro Brigade torture centre—claimed that Rivas participated fully in the torture as well as the administrative side of the Lautaro Brigade’s work. In an article in El Dinamo, Vergara claimed he saw Rivas in the gym hitting one of the detainees, who was sitting in a chair with his hands cuffed behind his back.
While Rivas denies involvement in kidnappings, beatings and disappearances, she remains unrepentant about the violence of the Pinochet era and DINA. In a shockingly candid interview with SBS Spanish in 2013, she claimed that the torture of Communists was “the only way to break people” and described her time at DINA as “the best years” of her youth. In the interview, she proudly recounted guarding Pinochet’s hotel room door. 
It is a travesty that the Australian government allowed Rivas to live freely in Bondi until 2019 despite knowledge about her crimes coming to light as early as 2006. The Australian government’s indifference to justice for the Chilean victims of Pinochet’s agents should not be surprising, given Australia’s past. 
Despite having a reputation for welcoming Chilean refugees, Australia gave full diplomatic recognition to the Pinochet regime for its entire existence, and Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) spies aided and abetted the CIA in destabilising the Allende government and cultivating conditions for a military coup. 
In 2021, declassified Australian documents revealed that, in 1970, Liberal Foreign Minister Billy McMahon approved an ASIS request to open a base in Santiago. The heavily redacted papers show that Australian spies operated in concert with the CIA, but very little detail has been revealed—in line with Australia’s secretive approach to security documents. 
In 1972, Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam ordered the closure of the Santiago office, while working strenuously to avoid “embarrassing” the CIA. But after his dismissal in 1975, Whitlam suggested his orders to ASIS may have been ignored. 
The next High Court hearing for Adriana Rivas is on 10 March 2025. Chilean militants with Movimiento Anticapitalista, including Camilo Parad—the grandson of one of Rivas’ victims, Fernando Ortiz Letelier—have called on the <a href="https://anticapitalistas.cl/2024/11/20/el-caso-de-la-represora-adriana-rivas-la-impunidad-como-legado-dictatorial/">Australian left to mobilise to pressure the courts to extradite Rivas</a>. 
The attorney general must act to extradite Rivas without further delay. Every day that she remains in Australia is another insult to the people of Chile, as well as the thousands of Chilean Australians who fled to this country as refugees. In addition, all records relating to ASIS operations in Chile in the 1970s must be fully declassified and released. Justice delayed is justice denied.

Chloe Rafferty

Australia must extradite Pinochet agent Adriana Rivas

Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality. Now that the dust has begun to settle on the presidential election results, he looks at some of the conclusions that should and should not be drawn.
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Flush with election night news that he had won the presidential election fair-and-square, Donald Trump took to the stage at his victory rally to assert: “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate”. The next day, Republican congressional Representative Elise Stefanik, a Trump lickspittle, declared: “We the people made our voices heard by re-electing President Trump in a historic landslide”. Trump rewarded Stefanik’s fealty with an appointment as US ambassador to the United Nations.
On the Democratic Party side of the political spectrum, <a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/liberal-arrogance-and-hatred-display-after-trump-victory">despair mixed with lashing out at</a> millions of “stupid” and “selfish” Americans who supported Trump. As always, social media brought out the worst, of which this was just one small example:
“I hope every woman who voted for Trump and lives in a no abortion state gets what they wanted. To bleed out in a parking lot due to a miscarriage and no doctor will help you because THAT’S what you voted for. Y’all deserve it.”
Even <a href="https://x.com/HowKeen/status/1859194744938594495">Rachel Bitecofer,</a> a political scientist turned Democratic Party consultant, condemned Uncommitted movement adviser Waleed Shahid with the indefensible statement: “I probably won’t be able to stop the Schadenfreude when Shahid gets deported”.
Did Americans vote for authoritarianism, misogyny and racism? Is that who Americans “are”? Millions certainly are avid supporters of Trump and, at the very least, don’t consider his racism and misogyny disqualifying. But it’s harder to extend those observations to all Americans—or even to the 64 percent of eligible voters who cast a ballot.
As more votes are sorted, it becomes much clearer that Trump’s victory, far from being a landslide, was quite narrow. When the count is finalised nationwide, more voters will have chosen someone other than the bigoted billionaire. At the time of writing, the president-elect had corralled 49.8 percent of all ballots, meaning that more than 50 percent of voters chose either Harris or a third-party candidate. In fact, Trump’s victory is the seventh narrowest (about 1.6 percentage points in vote share higher than Harris) in 51 presidential elections going back to the 1820s.
When compared to the 2020 election, we see a mirror image. In each election, the incumbent president was turfed out, and the winning candidate’s party lost ground but prevailed as the majority in the House of Representatives and narrowly won the Senate. Trump and the Republicans certainly won, but the margin of their victories doesn’t suggest a fundamental reordering of US mainstream politics.
That doesn’t mean that the Trump administration won’t try to act on its most reactionary, authoritarian and venal impulses. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/11/americans-elected-trump-they-might-not-like-what-comes-next/">But those actions won’t embody “the will of the people”—even of those who voted.</a>
To take a couple of examples: exit polls showed that support for abortion rights exceeds support for either major party candidate. And clearly, millions of people who support abortion rights also voted for Trump. If the Trump administration pushes through a national abortion ban, it won’t be because it was acting on an anti-abortion “mandate”.
Second, exit polls showed that while most voters support “mass deportation” of the undocumented, more significant majorities support providing the undocumented with a path to US citizenship. When people are asked if undocumented residents who have lived and worked in the US for decades should be deported, support for “mass deportation” evaporates.
Despite what the pundit “hot takes” and “instant analyses” say, the simplest explanation for the election result is that millions of people were dissatisfied with the Biden administration’s economic management, and enough of them decided either to vote for Trump or to not to vote for Harris (more on this later).
And that’s the judgment of the estimated 155 million people who voted—out of a voting-eligible population of just under 245 million. When the counting is completed, Trump is expected to net about 77.8 million votes and Harris about 75 million. Trump’s total will be about 4 million fewer than Biden received in 2020. Meanwhile, about 90 million people who could have voted didn’t. In other words, the “party of non-voters” is the winner again—as it has been in every election since the post-Civil War era.
Research over the years has shown that these non-voters tend to be younger, not college educated, lower income and people of colour. They don’t pay much attention to politics, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have political opinions. One of the reasons they tune out of mainstream politics, <a href="https://knightfoundation.org/press/releases/new-study-sheds-light-on-the-100-million-americans-who-dont-vote-their-political-views-and-what-they-think-about-2020/">according to a large 2020 study</a>, is because they have little trust in politicians or the system to do anything that will change their lives for the better. They are more likely to consider the system “rigged” than those who cast ballots.
An <a href="https://apnews.com/projects/election-2024-our-very-complicated-democracy/election-2024-why-americans-dont-vote-episode-6.html">October Associated Press story</a> showed these sentiments were alive in 2024. It recounted an encounter between a voter registration organiser and Earl Jones, a 73-year-old Detroit resident who said he survives on Social Security and “hustling” and hasn’t voted since the 1970s. “I ain’t voting for nobody unless we see somebody go do something for us, and not just for me, for everybody—you, him and him”, Jones said, pointing to people around him. “If they do something for us, it’ll be alright. If they don’t, the hell with it.”
This sentiment reduced the turnout for Kamala Harris. While the media maps of the vote showed a “red shift” to Republicans in most of the country, Harris lost the most ground in urban Democratic Party strongholds. A <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/23/city-turnout-black-hispanic-neighborhoods-00191354">Politico analysis</a> of precinct data in “swing-state” urban areas showed major declines in Democratic turnout from 2020. In swing-state precincts with African American populations of 85 percent or more, Harris lost more than 17,000 votes compared to Biden’s total in 2020, while Trump gained about 3,500 votes in the same precincts. Politico showed a similar pattern in swing-state precincts that were more than 85 percent Latino.
And those data are from the seven swing states, where both campaigns focused the entirety of their campaigns. In those states, the popular vote split between the Democrats and Republicans shifted 2.5 to 3 percentage points to the Republicans, compared to 2020 results. In fact, Harris won more votes than Biden did in four of them (Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina). Nationally, the shift was about 5.5 to 6 percentage points compared to 2020. The decline of the <a href="https://www.semafor.com/article/11/15/2024/democratic-turnout-plummeted-in-2024-but-only-in-safe-states">Democratic presidential vote in non-swing states</a> such as California, New York and Illinois, and the increase in Republican votes in Texas and Florida, accounts for the bulk of the national popular vote shift.
These figures illustrate the absurdity of the electoral college system of electing a president. A multi-billion-dollar presidential campaign that essentially ignores 43 of 50 states doesn’t have to address itself to the mass of working people clustered in the largest and most diverse cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Tampa. It’s why so much post-election commentary magnifies as significant changes what are small shifts among voters in a handful of states.
Widening the lens on the election result provides more perspective. Do most Americans really want an authoritarian theocracy that architects of the conservative <a href="https://www.aclu.org/project-2025-explained">Project 2025</a> promise? Did they get to vote for what they really want?
The 2020 study quoted above noted that about one in five non-voters say they would vote for a third party if they did vote. And, for about two decades, <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/651278/support-third-political-party-dips.aspx">opinion polls have</a> shown majorities of Americans believe a third party is needed because the two major parties don’t “do an adequate job” of representing the people. In 2024, however, third-party support was low by historical standards, and the Democrats couldn’t blame the Green Party or the independent campaign of Cornel West for costing them the election.
The money-soaked US electoral system managed to do what it always seems to do in presidential years: present an increasingly dissatisfied electorate with two capitalist parties—one an increasingly authoritarian, theocratic party (the Republicans) and the other a centre-right party of the status quo (the Democrats). That’s the way the plutocrats and oligarchs behind both parties like it. The Elon Musks and Richard Uihleins on the Republican side and the Michael Bloombergs and Reid Hoffmans on the Democratic side aren’t about to <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/i-worked-democrats-years-billionaires-have-unfettered-influence-opinion-1961471">finance a real political challenge to their dominance of the US political economy</a>. Social commentator <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/if-the-democrats-want-to-win-someday">Freddie deBoer,</a> who voted for the Green Party’s Jill Stein in Connecticut, drew this conclusion: 
“A country with a two-party system that include[s] a far-right party and a center-right party is a country that will inevitably move in a far-right direction. And not [pundits] Jon Favreau nor Gail Collins nor Matt Yglesias nor Jon Chait nor the New York Times editorial board nor Hillary Clinton herself nor any other of the tongue-cluckers have a response to that fact. Because they’ve assumed away any possibility of positive change; they know they’re stuck. That’s the other thing almost nobody did [on election day]: articulate any path for the country to get better. You can’t, because better can’t emerge from this rotten system.”
There’s no use in sugar-coating the election result. But it’s also important to remember that most positive social change in US history didn’t come from elections. It came from the struggles of ordinary people. This may not seem to be on the cards right now, but history hasn’t “ended”. The great peoples’ historian Howard Zinn put it well:
“The Constitution gave no rights to working people; no right to work less than 12 hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance….Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel and violate the law in order to uphold justice.”

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