In the opening passage of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx wrote of the “uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight” between rulers and ruled throughout history. Under capitalism, that fight is nowhere more evident than in the battle between bosses and workers over the length and intensity of the working day.
Anyone who has worked for a wage has participated, whether conscious of it or not, in this struggle. As workers, we generally want to limit the time we spend at work and reduce the intensity of our labour while there. Bosses want the opposite: they want us to work longer and faster. Most people have been told off by a manager for running late for a shift, taking too long on a break, going to the toilet too often or talking too much to co-workers.
Bosses don’t tell their employees off about such things just because they’re mean people. Many of them are no doubt arseholes—it is a common trait of those who exploit other people’s labour. However, their overriding concern isn’t to make other people’s working lives difficult just for the sake of it, but to maximise the profits being squeezed from them. Arsehole or not, every boss is, as Marx put it in Capital, “capital personified”. “His soul is the soul of capital ... which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”.
A brief chat with a co-worker is a short relief from the stress and monotony of the working day. But the manager views it as money down the drain—because when it comes to work, time is money. 
Profit is capitalism’s lifeblood and is derived from the “surplus value” produced by workers’ labour. Surplus value is the value of a company’s finished products or services minus the value of the ingredients or raw materials that went into them and minus the wages paid to the workers (the value of the “labour power” that went into creating them).
For example, take a barista working in a local cafe for $32 an hour. Assume that they make 60 coffees per hour, which the cafe sells for $5 each. For each hour worked, the cafe receives $300 in revenue. Of that, the worker gets $32, and the owner gets $268. Perhaps $220 of that $268 will pay the costs of the necessary inputs: the coffee beans, electricity and water, building rental, depreciation and maintenance of the coffee machine. What remains is surplus value. 
So, of the new value created in each hour, the worker who created that value receives $32 and the boss $48—a rate of surplus value of 48/32 or 150 percent. Further deductions are required by the contradictions of capitalism—such as advertising and supervisors who keep the workers in line. After those bills are paid, what remains is the profit.
Capitalists want to minimise the portion of the total value produced that goes to workers’ wages and maximise the portion that ends up as profit. There are a few ways they can do this. 
The simplest is to extend the length of the working day. The more hours spent making coffees, the greater the absolute sum of value going to the cafe owner at the end of each day. The barista working a five-hour shift will produce only five-eighths of the surplus value they could produce in an eight-hour shift. The longer the workday, the greater the sum of surplus value and the higher the profits after accounting for other costs. (While the owner will pay more for coffee beans and electricity, the rent will be the same regardless of the hours the cafe is open.)
It’s even more profitable for the boss if they can get you to work an extra half hour or so a day without paying for it. A <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Go-Home-On-Time-Day-2023-The-Australia-Institute.pdf">2023 Australia Institute report</a>—Short Changed: Unsatisfactory working hours and unpaid overtime—found that, on average, Australian workers do 5.4 hours of unpaid overtime a week, amounting to $131 billion worth of unpaid labour a year.
Another common way to increase surplus value is by making you work harder or faster. If the barista who makes 60 coffees an hour can be forced to make 66 per hour, the effect is the same as increasing each work day by 10 percent with unpaid overtime.
The methods just described create what Marx called absolute
surplus value. They have obvious physiological and social limits to their increase—people can’t be forced to work 24 hours a day every day.
A more important way to increase surplus value is through relative
surplus value. This involves reducing the real value of what workers receive for their labour. Bosses are obviously always interested in reducing wages, but cutting them directly risks provoking mass resistance. Inflation has the effect of reducing real wages without creating such immediate resistance.
In our barista example, they agree to work for $32/hour because that is the best they can get through their negotiations with the boss. If the wages were any lower, they might look for a different job.
If the economy were to increase productivity such that our baristas could now live at more or less the same standard on a wage of $30/hour, they would have less reason to resist such a reduction. A general increase of prices while wages remain unchanged has much the same effect. It means that the benefits of greater efficiency in the economy go directly to the bosses. If the workers want a share of such increases, they have to fight for it.
Bosses are always trying to increase efficiency and productivity because every business is competing against others of the same type. And every national economy is competing again other economies worldwide. It’s a never-ending battle to maximise the surplus value (and therefore the profit) they squeeze from their workers.
More profitable businesses succeed and grow. They have more money to invest in new, productivity-enhancing machinery, to employ more workers and to organise the labour process to increase efficiency. From a capitalist perspective, it is a virtuous circle. The higher the profits, the greater the new investment, and the more surplus value is squeezed from employees each day. 
These dynamics apply to every business, no matter how big or small. In the Woolworths distribution centres where workers have been on strike, the relationship of an individual worker’s labour to the value of the products they handle appears less direct than that of a barista to their coffee. 
Nevertheless, all workers are part of a chain of production that contributes to the final value of goods—farm workers, manufacturing workers, pickers and packers, transport workers, power station workers and so on. At each point in the production process, the bosses’ goal is the same: maximise profits by getting workers to work as fast as possible for as long as possible.
Each worker in the chain will experience similar scrutiny and pressure from management to perform at 100 percent—or more—of their capacity. As soon as one productivity standard has been met, managers will consider how to increase it even further. 
So, under capitalism, no amount of profit will ever be enough—which is why economists and politicians are always focused on economic growth. If they could get away with it, bosses would have us working like people in Marx’s time, before we won things like the eight-hour day and the weekend that are now taken for granted. It’s already like that in many places, and workers are <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3277316/china-man-30-worked-104-days-1-day-dies-organ-failure-court-orders-compensation">sometimes literally</a> worked to death.
As long as capitalism exists, the battle over the working day will never cease. To reduce work hours and reduce workplace stress, we need to organise collectively. The more we do this, the more we can push back against the bosses’ ceaseless productivity drive—making clear to them that we won’t accept being treated like the robots they would prefer us to be.

James Plested

Why there is a constant battle over the working day

For left-wing people, it has long been uncontroversial to welcome into Australia refugees and migrants. 
Perhaps not any more. In a recent Instagram post, Keiran Stewart-Assheton, president of the Black People’s Union, an Indigenous activist group, claimed that “economic migrants” (those seeking a better life away from poverty in the underdeveloped world) participate in the colonial occupation of Australia and therefore “reap the fruits of colonialism and imperialism themselves” and are “agents of empire”. 
The post was particularly bizarre, given the context in which it was made. In recent months, refugees have set up protest camps outside government offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The encampments are attempts to highlight the federal government’s inhuman treatment of refugees. Stewart-Assheton’s post was in response to an Indigenous activist’s speech at the Melbourne protest, welcoming both refugees and migrants to Australia. 
Stewart-Assheton’s anti-migrant prejudice is shameful. Indeed, the label “economic migrants” has long been used by the political right to generate hostility toward immigrants and to turn working-class people against each other, distracting them from the crimes of big business and politicians. 
Yet hostility towards so-called settler migrants isn’t a random quirk of the Black People’s Union. It flows from some of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary “anti-colonial” politics. 
The dominant framework on the left for understanding anti-Aboriginal racism is settler colonial theory, first popularised by the academic Patrick Wolfe. Activists influenced by that framework present the main divide in Australia as being between Indigenous people and a homogeneous “settler” population. Anyone who is not Indigenous—no matter how exploited or oppressed they may be themselves—is considered to be a privileged settler and coloniser reaping the benefits of Aboriginal people’s oppression. 
This idea downplays the fact that the majority of so-called settlers suffer from gross forms of exploitation and oppression. After all, can we really believe that poor migrants working shitty jobs in the outer suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne have more in common with CEOs or politicians than they do with refugees and Aboriginal people, just because they happen to have moved to Australia? 
What utility does the concept of “settler” have when it can be equally applied to Peter Dutton, who calls for people waving Hezbollah flags to be deported from the country, and people of Lebanese heritage who defy the pervasive racism of the politicians and the media—and harassment from the cops and the security services—to protest against Israeli terrorism? By the logic of modern “anti-colonial” politics, whatever the differences between them, both are part of a privileged settler population.
The movement of people worldwide has been a constant feature of human society, particularly in modern times. Some migrants move to flee poverty, only to be met with horrendous racist treatment in their new country—if they are admitted at all under the many migration laws that determine whether or not they will be of use to capitalists. 
Migrants can be horrendously paid and work in precarious workplaces, while their rights as workers are not respected at all. On top of this, they are often used as scapegoats to cover for the failures of the capitalist system. 
For example, in Australia, the Liberals are now blaming the housing crisis on migrants, when it’s the government-designed housing market that has turned shelter into a vehicle for making one section of the (disproportionately Liberal-voting) population incredibly wealthy through perpetual asset-price inflation. 
The housing crisis affects almost all working people, particularly those with lower incomes and families lacking accumulated wealth. Yet supporters of settler colonial theory would have migrants slaving away in shitty jobs and living pay cheque to pay cheque “pay the rent” as though they are no different from Rio Tinto. 
Of course, there have been periods when migration has occurred as a part of brutal processes of colonisation—as in the history of colonial Australia. However, to condemn anyone as an evil settler and coloniser for having left the country in which they were born to go somewhere else that has an indigenous population—that is foolish in the extreme. As in the case of Stewart-Assheton, it can just dovetail with the anti-migrant bile of the racist right. 
The problem isn’t just that it can lead activists to counterpose the interests of refugees and migrants. To follow the logic of the argument would mean condemning the hundreds of millions of workers living in Canada, the US, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand as lackeys of imperialism and capitalism.
In some situations, the strident denunciation of settlers has been used to justify the most reactionary crimes. In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalists have unleashed waves of violence and forced expulsions of Rohingya, who have been categorised as “migrants” rather than native to the country. 
In her book Home Rule, Nandita Sharma shows that conflicts in Africa have often been framed as racialised struggles between supposed “Black African natives” and “light-skinned Arab migrants”. Sharma argues that the infamous 1994 Rwandan genocide had its roots in “the self-identification of Hutus as the National-Natives of Rwanda and the categorization of Tutsis as colonizing Migrants” who had to be violently removed from a country that they apparently did not “belong” to. 
Sinhala chauvinists in Sri Lanka similarly argue that Tamils are basically foreigners, and far-right Hindu nationalists in India want to expel Muslims from the country on similar grounds. 
None of this is to deny the very real oppression suffered by indigenous peoples in many countries around the world, particularly here in Australia. However, when activists and theorists try to set up a world view based on the idea that the whole planet is a struggle between settlers on the one hand and radical indigenous peoples on the other, it can only lead to absurdity. 
Many activists influenced by settler colonial theory would reject Stewart-Assheton’s conclusions. But conceptualising the fundamental divide in the world as a battle between indigenous peoples and settler populations makes it easy to see why people can dismiss the rights of migrants and the struggles of workers.
In many ways, settler colonial theory is a form of indigenous nationalism. Like all forms of nationalist politics, it views the world in a classless and sectional manner. This is clear from Stewart-Assheton and the Black People’s Union argument that the key divide in Australia is not between bosses and workers but between Indigenous people and settlers, and that, therefore, an anti-colonial revolution by Indigenous people (who make up just 3 percent of the population) is supposedly the first step to both Indigenous liberation and socialism. 
It’s on this basis that Stewart-Assheton says that all anti-racist, progressive and working-class struggles should be subordinated to Indigenous struggles (and therefore subordinated to the Black People’s Union) and that any failure to agree with such a program or its theoretical underpinning springs from a settler mindset.
This so-called radical program is incapable of securing either Indigenous liberation or socialism. In the end, all it does is take the focus away from the capitalist class and pit the struggles of oppressed people against each other in an Olympics-style game of identity politics, in which the starting point is figuring out who is most oppressed, rather than thinking about how we can best unite to beat our common enemy—the capitalist ruling class and its repressive state.
Oskar Martin is the Indigenous representative on the Student Council at the University of Melbourne Student Union.
Jordan Humphreys is the author of <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/indigenous-liberation-and-socialism">Indigenous Liberation &amp; Socialism</a>.

Oskar Martin

Jordan Humphreys

Are migrants colonisers?

Eleanor Morley

Socialists and the US civil rights movement: an interview with Joel Geier

Lance Selfa

What makes the Democrats different from, but the same as, the Republicans?

In his lifetime, Karl Marx witnessed the establishment of capitalism as an all-encompassing, global system, and with it the international working class—a force capable of radical social transformation. As this system of exploitation and ruthless competition developed, Marx studied it closely, becoming well known for his theories of class, exploitation and value. 
The power of Marx’s economic writing means that frequently, and sometimes deliberately, his political insights are overlooked. But Marx was, first and foremost, a revolutionary, an activist and a radical. Coupled with an understanding of his economic insights, the evolution of his political writings demonstrates most clearly how Marx became a Marxist, and founded a movement that continues to fight for radical social change more than 140 years after his death.
In February 1848, Marx published The Communist Manifesto with collaborator Frederick Engels for the Communist League, a recently formed revolutionary party based in London that both were part of. The manifesto was a bold call to revolution and an assertion that it was the working class that must lead it. Immediately, historical events provided a test and, ultimately, vindication for the manifesto.
The 1840s were racked with mass hunger and poverty for those at the bottom of society. At the top, rifts and ruptures were emerging between the rulers—the old nobility and the conservative bourgeois states—and the liberal bourgeois reformers who were challenging them. 
In 1848 a wave of popular uprisings and revolutions crashed over Europe. Beginning in France, upheavals went on to rock the Habsburg, Russian and Prussian empires. It was the last radical gasp of the emerging bourgeoisie.
The uprising in France began in February 1848. Initially successful, it toppled the unpopular regime of Louis Philippe through an alliance of the liberal reformers and radical workers in the cities. It ended only a few months later when the capitalist forces turned on the workers and drowned their struggle in blood. The capitalists installed a military dictatorship with a liberal veneer, and in so doing laid the basis for the brutal dictatorship of Louis Napoleon that followed. The workers, although outnumbered and outgunned, erected barricades and fought heroically in the streets of Paris.
In the German principalities, the bourgeoisie were far more acquiescent to the old nobility. They undermined their own nationalist project of uniting Germany into a modern capitalist state by refusing to confront the German kings and princes. They abandoned the working-class forces, leaving them vulnerable to brutal defeat.
Marx and Engels were keen observers of these developments and were closely involved in the German uprisings. Engels fought to the bitter end in south-west Germany, while Marx participated in the Rhineland with the Communist League.
Marx was engaged in debates about strategy and organisation within the league at this time, and emerged from these heady days with two key insights: first, that the bourgeoisie was no longer a revolutionary class and could not be relied upon to confront the old feudal ruling classes; and second, that the working class must organise independently as a class.
After experiencing the brutal backlash of the old order in alliance with the new capitalist ruling classes, he concluded that the liberal bourgeoisie was not willing to pursue democratic reforms, including those they themselves would benefit from as a class, like political freedoms. He compared the approaches of the French and German bourgeoisies in an article written in November 1848: “In France it [the bourgeoisie] played the part of a tyrant and made its own counter-revolution. In Germany it acts like a slave and carries out the counter-revolution for its own tyrants”.
Following from these revelations were organisational implications, namely, the urgent need for working-class independence. He argued that the working class must act in its own interests and needed independent organisation to do so. He was beginning to see what this could look like as he took inspiration from nascent forms of working-class organisation, from the Silesian weavers’ strike to the Chartists in Britain and the workers’ clubs in Paris. 
He outlined these arguments most clearly in his Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League in March 1850, known as the March Address. He explains, “[T]he workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organisation of the workers’ party ... the League must aim to make every one of its communes a centre and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence”.
As the 1848 upheavals were crushed, Marx and Engels were exiled to London. There, they found themselves at the heart of the British Empire—the centre of industrial capitalism—and surrounded by the most developed working class in the world at the time. This working class was, by the 1860s, rallying for abolition of slavery in response to the US Civil War and in support of Irish independence. Much of Marx’s political life was preoccupied with how the working class could develop the political consciousness necessary to take power, and the 1860s provided an opportunity to better understand this through close observation of the workers’ movement happening around him.
Civil war broke out in America in 1861. On one side was the Confederacy, fighting to secede in order to maintain slavery in the interests of the southern landowning elite. On the other side was the northern bourgeoisie, the Union, for whom industrial development was key and slavery dispensable.
The British ruling class came down on the side of the Confederacy, certain sections pushing for Britain to intervene. Slavery provided Britain and Europe with cheap cotton and was an integral part of industrialisation and world trade. It’s estimated that the livelihood of one quarter of Britain was based on the cotton industry. On the other hand, European and English workers by and large supported the Union, even those in Lancashire, who were devastated by the cotton famine.
The Civil War signalled new political possibilities after a decade or so of retreat following 1848. Meetings of workers in support of the Union were called by the London Trade Union Council. This renewed internationalism became the precursor to the International Working Men’s Association, better known as the First International, which Marx helped found in 1864. The International brought together unions and radical political currents from across Europe.
Unlike many other radicals at the time, Marx landed firmly on the side of the Union. He understood that slavery needed to be opposed because the presence of slavery anywhere undermines the conditions of labour everywhere. In his words, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded”. Although Abraham Lincoln and other conservative Union leaders initially denied the war was about slavery and refused to promise abolition, Marx identified that a Confederate victory would mean an expansion of slavery. He could see that the war was a contest between two economic systems, and only one side could win out. 
In a similar vein, the Irish struggle for independence from the yoke of British occupation gave Marx an opportunity to deepen his understanding of how political questions were central to working class self-emancipation. In the 1860s, Fenianism, a radical expression of Irish nationalism, emerged, inspiring many Irish workers and English workers to take up the cause.
A high point of this was the campaign to save the Manchester Martyrs in 1867. Three Irish nationalists were put on trial and publicly hanged for the death of a police officer. The ruling class whipped up a hysterical campaign to inspire anti-Irish sentiment. A campaign for the release of all Irish political prisoners was then spurred on.
Although Marx and Engels criticised Fenian terrorist tactics in private letters to one another, they championed the Irish cause and pushed for the International to take up the fight. Marx fought the more conservative union leaders to his right and the ultra-lefts around Bakunin, who were hesitant to support Irish independence. He argued that the impoverishment of Ireland was a great source of wealth for the British Empire, and that anti-Irish sentiment amongst English workers undermined working conditions and their ability to fight the English ruling class. He urged, “[I]t is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland ... to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation”.
Marx and Engels’ enthusiasm for and affinity with working-class struggle is captured in Engels’ words to Marx in a letter the day after the execution of the Manchester Martyrs in 1867: “To my knowledge, the only time that anyone has been executed for anything similar in a civilised state was the case of John Brown at Harpers Ferry. The Fenians could not wish for a better precedent”.
Marx first articulated a theory of working-class self-emancipation in the 1840s. Decades later, in 1871, this theoretical assertion became a reality. For 71 days, Paris was under workers’ control, a heroic experiment in radical democracy and the first of its kind.
In The Civil War in France, a pamphlet Marx wrote in June on behalf of the International, Marx describes it as a “glorious harbinger of a new society”, one of many emotive descriptions throughout.
The backdrop to this uprising was the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. France was losing, and Adolphe Thiers, the head of the new French republic, refused to defend Paris if it meant arming the working class. He sent soldiers into the working-class neighbourhood of Belleville at dawn on 18 March to disarm the National Guard, a workers’ militia. By midday, the soldiers had fraternised with the guardsmen, barricades were erected, General Vinoy—who was leading the operation—had fled Paris, and crowds of men, women and children were taking to the streets in anger and building barricades. The Paris Commune had begun.
Over the subsequent months, workers constructed a new state out of radically democratic institutions, with recallable, elected delegates of the working class. Workers envisioned and enacted radical change in every aspect of society, from the family to the workplace. Everything was up for debate, from political strategy and defence of the commune to science, the church and even the arts. Marx got to see, if only briefly, humanity flourishing under workers’ control. He wrote: “For the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and ... without any police of any kind”.
In order to re-establish bourgeois rule, the ruling class carried out a brutal massacre. Thirty thousand Communards were killed within a week. The privileged classes and their newspapers delighted in the torture and imprisonment of countless more.
Marx responded to the counter-revolution with equal parts rage and theoretical clarity about the need to smash the capitalist state in order for workers to take power and create a socialist society. He explained that the working class in power naturally meant the abolition of exploitation. The Commune was “the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour”.
The Paris Commune showed, Marx argued, that workers couldn’t simply take hold of the existing state. There needed to be new radical forms of democracy. And the capitalist state must be confronted—his only criticism of the Commune was that they took up arms too late; they needed to defend their fragile, embryonic institutions of self-government against the might of the bourgeois state.
Marx’s political legacy offers invaluable lessons for us today. He developed and refined his theory of social revolution by engaging in the debates of his time and by taking part in the most important struggles of the day. This approach—learning and developing theory through the practical experience of the working-class movement—remains the guiding principle of the Marxist movement today.

Belle Gibson

Karl Marx: more than an economist

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of settler colonialism.” So opens a recent article by Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese in the Australian magazine Overland. For today’s left, anti-colonialism has become the key framework for understanding many forms of contemporary injustice. The racist oppression of people of colour, migrants and refugees, and Indigenous peoples across the world is all said to be due to both the history of European colonisation and ongoing systems of colonialism.
It is the Israeli state’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians that is at the centre of most contemporary discussions about colonialism and anti-colonialism. And it isn’t hard to see why.
Zionism emerged during the high point of European colonialism and was deeply influenced by it. Israel itself was founded on the dispossession of the Palestinian population and has always sought to ally itself with the imperialist nations of the world. Today, right-wingers and Zionists pump out propaganda trying to defend Israel from the accusations of colonialism. Pro-Israel organisations like the American Jewish Committee have published lengthy articles seeking to rebut the claim that Israel is a settler colony, while the Tory MP Michael Gove denounced the “prevailing intellectual fashion of decolonisation” as antisemitic in a recent speech to the UK parliament.
For many, the politics of anti-colonialism has been a starting point for rejecting the racist lies of capitalist society and supporting the struggles of the oppressed. In this way, it is a positive move away from the limitations of liberal multiculturalism and moderate centrism with their emphasis on gradually reforming capitalism into a supposedly “post-racial”, “colour-blind” society.

However, there are also significant limitations with the contemporary politics of anti-colonialism, even if these problems have nothing to do with what right-wingers are ranting about. Most importantly, it either discounts or heavily distorts the relationship between imperialism and oppression, and abandons any serious understanding of class and capitalism more broadly. This has important implications for developing the kind of organisations and struggles we need to confront successfully oppression in the Middle East and throughout the world.
Take, for instance, the popular idea that the reason Western countries like Australia, the United States, Canada and New Zealand, support Israel is their common heritage as settler colonial states. As Jewish Voice for Peace Deputy Director Cecilie Surasky put it in a talk published on her organisation’s website, “The ‘special relationship’ between Israel and the United States is rooted in our common national narratives and founding mythology”.
But this can’t explain why governments that have suffered from colonialism, such as Modi’s administration in India or the Kenyan government, are such strong supporters of Israel. Conversely, it cannot explain why countries like Indonesia that are currently engaged in colonisation (West Papua) are capable of opposing Israel’s actions, even if only rhetorically.
Even in the cases of the US and Australia, the establishment’s support for Israel has little to do with some shared history of settler colonialism. They support Israel because it is in the interests of their ruling classes to do so. They want to enforce their dominance over the global capitalist system by strengthening their hold over one of the key pillars of Western imperialism in the Middle East. If for some reason it was no longer in their imperialist interests to support Israel, then the ruling classes of the West wouldn’t do so, no matter what shared history they might have. This explains why neither the US nor Australia are particularly supportive of Chinese colonisation of Tibet and Xinjiang.
The idea that Western nations support Israel because of their common colonial history also repeatedly spills over into cultural explanations for imperialist backing of Israel rather than geopolitical ones. Surasky from Jewish Voice for Peace argues that “the root of this special relationship” is “our [own] national narrative” that it is “right to expand onto other people’s land”. “[O]ur resistance must also be at the level of narrative”, Surasky concludes. “All of us in this movement have to decolonize our minds.”
It is true that Western support for Israel isn’t due to the influence of AIPAC. But nor is it simply rooted in “our national narrative and the feelings it engenders”. Narratives can change, and feelings are fickle, but America’s bipartisan support for Israel is grounded in material interests that are yet to be shaken.
The origins of the Israeli state are commonly portrayed by anti-colonial theorists as lying in the Jewish settlers making a pact with the West to serve its interests in the region and in the process transforming themselves into a “white” population. As academic Johannes Becke wrote in a 2018 article for International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, “While American Jews became white by suburbanisation, Israeli Jews did so by colonization”. This is a very reductive understanding of the origins of Israel on a number of levels.
First of all, it obscures the fact that imperialist nations came to support the Zionist state because it was perceived to be in the interests of their ruling classes and states to do so. It wasn’t in the interests of the undifferentiated mass of people living in the Western countries, the vast majority of whom had no say in the matter. 
Secondly, it places the similarities between the colonial ideologies of the Zionists and the West as key to explaining why Western governments supported the creation of Israel. However, the relationship between Western governments and the Zionist movement was complicated and tension-filled, and it evolved over time, undermining the idea that common cultural affinities drove the relationship.
The British government, the key Western player in the region before 1948, was
primarily concerned with entrenching its control over mandate Palestine—not, at least initially, in supporting the narrow goals of the Zionist movement. There was considerable debate within the London colonial elite about the positives and negatives of the Zionist project. These debates were underpinned by discussions about what course would best serve the interests of British imperialism first and foremost. 
While the British were happy to suppress the rights of the Palestinians, they were hesitant for a long time about unconditionally backing the creation of a Jewish state. They preferred to lord over the region themselves and play the Jewish and Arab populations off against each other, even while granting more concessions and privileges to the Jewish settlers. As the Zionist movement emerged as a powerful force, the British government came to endorse this project as seemingly the best way to stabilise Western influence over the Zionists and the region in the upheavals of the postwar world.
The US, which would emerge in the postwar world as the major Western imperialist power, was also ambivalent about Israel for some time. It endorsed the establishment of Israel in 1948 but then opposed the 1956 invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain and France. There was a strong “Arabist” wing of the US State Department that worried that if the US backed Israel, it would send Arab states into the arms of the Soviet Union. It was only after Israel had proven its military credentials in the 1967 war that American state officials swung around to build the tight alliance with Israel they have today.
It is also important to note that it was not only the traditional imperialist countries of the West that endorsed the establishment of Israel. The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to recognise Israel, and both the USSR and its satellite states in Eastern Europe supported the UN partition plan in 1947. Until the 1950s, the Soviet Union either supported Israel or took a neutral position on conflicts between it and the Arab states. This further complicates the idea that Israel was simply created by the West.
The argument that Jewish settlers transformed themselves into a “white” population and that Israel is an example of white supremacy is also dubious. There are indeed white nationalists like Richard Spencer who champion Israel. There are also certain similarities between how Zionism racialises the Arab world and racism in Western countries. And there is clearly discrimination against Jews from non-white backgrounds in Israel, such as those who arrived from the Middle East, North Africa or Ethiopia.
However, the idea that Jewish settlers—including the many Black and Brown ones—became “white” springs from the illogical underpinnings of identity politics which is deeply embedded within the anti-colonial framework. It flows from the idea that imperialism, racism and colonialism are products of “whiteness” and Western culture, rather than something pursued by capitalist states and nationalist movements regardless of their race or ethnicity.
Are Hindu nationalists in Modi’s India “white” because they organise violent attacks on Muslims and other minorities? Granted, these divisions have historic roots in the imperialist strategies of the old British Raj, but they continue today because of the political dynamics of contemporary Hindu nationalism. 
The reality is that violent oppression is something that all sorts of capitalist states, political parties and movements can participate in. As capitalist development has spread across the world, including into the global South, more and more non-Western countries have become violent and oppressive capitalist states. To explain this by claiming that ruling figures in these societies have become “white” would mean describing large parts of Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa as such.
Most of the current settler colonial projects in the world today are being carried out by “non-white” countries. China’s ongoing push to replace Uyghurs with Han Chinese settlers in Xinjiang, India’s colonisation of Kashmir and the genocide of the Rohingya by the military of Myanmar are just some of the most prominent examples. Most theorists of settler colonialism show little interest in this, presumably because it goes against the thesis that settler colonialism is a product of Western culture, and it cuts against the softness on non-Western governments notable in anti-colonial theory circles.
The anti-colonial framework also downplays how the class divisions within the Palestinian population and the broader Arab world facilitated the rise of the Zionist state. 
Absentee Palestinian landlords sold large tracts of land to the Zionist organisations, helping them gain a substantial foothold in the region. When Palestinian peasants and workers erupted into protest against Zionist attacks, some sections of the Arab elite helped the British crush these movements. Abdullah I, the king of Jordan, for instance, forged an alliance with the Zionists in the 1930s and received money from the Jewish Agency, a branch of the World Zionist Organization. When the revolt of 1936 began, he helped Zionist and British forces isolate and eventually defeat the rebellion. At one point he even tried to encourage Zionist settlement in Jordan, a move blocked by the British government.
Palestinian elites, such as the al-Husayni family, held back the struggles of the Palestinians, instead placing their hopes in negotiations with the British government. This led to a series of tragic defeats for the Palestinians that paved the way for the victory of the Zionist forces in 1948. After the Nakba, Arab ruling classes treated the mass of poor Palestinian refugees disgracefully, shunting them away into refugee camps. It was a different story for the elite of Palestinian society, who quickly carved out a position for themselves within the Arab states as successful business owners and professionals.
Since 1948, class divisions amongst Palestinians have continued to be an important issue. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from Palestine were integrated into the class structures within the surrounding Arab states, which if anything exaggerated the already existing class differences among Palestinians. Wealthier Palestinians were more insulated from the worst effects of the expulsion. Many Palestinian merchants, bankers and entrepreneurs already had well-established links with capitalists and markets in Arab countries, and transferred what movable assets they could. They then quickly merged into the broader Arab ruling classes, their sons and daughters marrying the children of the Jordanian, Lebanese and Saudi elites. By the 1960s there were hundreds of Palestinian millionaires throughout the Gulf states. The vast majority of the Palestinian refugee population, however, were former peasants and unskilled workers who were viewed as unwelcome and potentially rebellious visitors by the Arab governments. 
It is these class divisions that lay behind many of the political debates within the Palestinian national movement. The disastrous concept that the Palestinians should look primarily to the Arab states for support didn’t come out of nowhere, but reflected the fact that the upper sections of the Palestinian population were deeply connected materially to the Arab regimes.
Some anti-colonial theorists can acknowledge divisions within national movements, but they see elite layers within nationally oppressed populations as simply sell-outs putting their own narrow interests above those of the national movement as a whole, rather than a class pursuing its own class interests. They also often underestimate the problem of middle-class layers within these movements having different class interests to the mass of workers.
The role that the Palestinian Authority has played in working with the Israeli state to suppress any genuine resistance to Israeli rule is often seen as an example of a small section of elites selling out the nation’s cause. However, in his book Lineages of Revolt, academic Adam Hanieh explains that the actions of the Palestinian Authority are only explicable from an analysis of the class structure of Palestinian society. Since Israel occupied it in 1967, the economy of the West Bank has transformed from a mainly rural one dominated by structures of traditional village life into “an incorporated, dependent, and subordinated appendage of Israeli capitalism”. This shift dispossessed the mass of the Palestinian population of what little land they still controlled and proletarianised it while at the same time there developed “a tiny layer of Palestinian capital that articulates Israeli rule and whose accumulation is dependent on that mediating position”.
The politics of anti-colonialism are not simply ill-thought-out ideas. If taken seriously as a guide to action, they would be disastrous for building a movement that can actually challenge imperialism and capitalism. In South Africa, the theory that Africans suffered from “internal colonisation” was developed by primarily white intellectuals around the South African Communist Party. They used the theory to justify the pro-capitalist strategy of the African National Congress, which sought to narrow the radicalism of African workers around a program to simply replace the racist apartheid regime with a new capitalist government controlled by a Black elite. 
In the US, Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton used the theory that African Americans were a colony within the US to argue for building up a Black political power bloc. This ultimately primarily benefited the layer of Black mayors, congresspeople and police chiefs who were elected to supposedly decolonise urban spaces. 
In Australia, anti-colonial rhetoric is just as often used to argue for more Indigenous-owned businesses, NGOs and government bureaucracies as it is for any genuine struggle against racism, let alone capitalism.
Throughout the 20th century, anti-colonial movements were able to win across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. While socialists celebrate the end of direct colonial rule, we need to be clear that in none of these cases did anti-colonial revolutions lead to societies based on equality and justice. Instead, new capitalist states were created with continued exploitation and oppression.
There are those on the Left who adopt the politics of anti-colonialism but consider themselves to be fighting for something more radical than the examples raised above. But the problem is that the logic of anti-colonial politics inevitably leads towards pro-capitalist so-called solutions to the issues of racism and imperialism. Its very framing reinforces the idea that the key division in the world is different national groups rather than classes, and that the problems of the world are due to things external or secondary to capitalism, rather than the fundamental nature of the system itself.
For instance, in Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, Sai Englert, a socialist writer, argues that one of the benefits of anti-colonial politics is that it can foster “unity across different sections of the Palestinian people”. But unity with whom and on what political basis? Englert discusses many examples of movements against national oppression, including in Palestine, but at no point even acknowledges, let alone discusses, the different class forces within them, opting for uncritical veneration instead.
Many of the people protesting for Palestine today are doing so at least in part because of these anti-colonial ideas, which make sense as a starting point given the weakness of class struggle and the left. But faced with another century of brutal wars and vicious oppression, we need a clear Marxist politics that emphasises the necessity of confronting the underlying structures of capitalism through the immense potential power of the working class.
Jordan Humphreys is the author of “Palestine and the classless politics of settler colonial theory” in the upcoming issue of the Marxist Left Review. He is also the author of Indigenous Liberation and Socialism available through Red Flag books.

Capitalism and colonialism today

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

Tess Lee Ack

The role of students in radical struggles

Socialist Alternative is a revolutionary socialist organisation. The point of a socialist group is ultimately to fight to overthrow the capitalist system and create a world run democratically by workers—one that prioritises human need, not profit. 
In moments of mass resistance, which break out periodically under capitalism, the question of which political forces are the best organised becomes crucial. The ruling class have numerous defences to protect their rule, from repressive laws and armed police to the loyalty of “moderates” in the movement—reformist politicians, well-heeled NGO leaders, union officials and more. A socialist party is necessary to combat these “respectable” and “pragmatic” leaders who are invested in, and enjoy a privileged position within, the system as it is. They tend to argue that workers and the oppressed should rely on their leadership and their efforts to bring change through official channels, rather than workers’ own power. This functions to protect the status quo. 
Socialists, by contrast, argue that real social change is possible only when the mass of people are actively engaged in bringing about change. In workplaces, this means workers taking control and deciding for themselves what to produce and how, in a collective and democratic manner. 
This is exactly what tends to happen at high points of social struggle or during revolutions, but can easily be crushed or coopted by those looking to preserve the system. This is why a mass socialist party is necessary: to push in the direction of mass action and stronger grassroots organisation. That requires people who can argue and convince others of the need to dismantle the police, armies and parliamentary institutions that back up the rule of the rich, and to begin building a new society based on democracy and solidarity. 
We’re a long way from this today, but this gigantic and urgent task isn’t going to be accomplished by pontificating in armchairs and waiting until the barricades go up. It requires an organisation of people committed to building resistance wherever possible in the here and now—while also preparing for the much larger challenges to come. Through campaigns and organising, socialists can gain experience in fighting for and winning things, figure out what tactics and strategies are effective and learn who are allies or enemies.
This is why we expect our members be active wherever they are—whether at work or on a university campus. It’s why we take working in campaigns seriously—from the fight for marriage equality to the campaign against racism and fascism, to struggles for workers’ rights and against education cuts. We want to win these demands because we support workers and the oppressed having as much control over their lives and the highest living standards possible within the confines of capitalism. And every struggle is a chance to learn how to challenge the power of the capitalist class and its defenders. 
So whenever or wherever the oppressed and exploited have a grievance against the system, socialists want to stand with them, to strengthen the fight, learn from it and, through this process, demonstrate in practice the veracity of socialist politics. 
This is particularly important at work. Our members are often doing the painstaking and unglamorous work of convincing individual workmates to join the union or raising their voices about seemingly small workplace grievances. But this work, which builds union culture and marks out socialists as workplace leaders, is invaluable. It can at times lead to fairly impressive union activism considering the current state of class struggle. Socialist Alternative members have led or been an important part of a number of strikes across Australia, and more recently a walkout of hundreds of community service workers in Melbourne in solidarity with Gaza. Also, socialists can’t expect workers to follow their lead in a radicalisation if they have not already proved themselves to be committed, principled workplace activists. Any organisation that is serious about its claim that workers have the power to bring about socialism must be part of the workers movement and aim to win the respect of other workers.
We are also involved in the gargantuan task of building a genuinely radical electoral alternative to Labor, establishing the electoral coalition Victorian Socialists, which has won more than 8 percent of the vote in a series of working-class suburbs across the state and put socialist ideas on the map. These campaigns have involved conversations with countless thousands of people, where we must make socialist ideas and strategies accessible and convincing to those not already involved in activism.
In all the campaigns we’re a part of, our approach is determined by our socialist politics.
Because we are revolutionaries, we don’t limit what we demand to what we think will be acceptable to those in power. This stands in contrast to moderate organisations and NGOs, which often oppose even minimal demands and activism for fear of alienating their friends in high places or being seen as “extreme” or “fringe” and not listened to by those in power. 
For example, when we called demonstrations against the coal-championing Liberal government at the height of the bushfire crisis in 2020, “progressive” NGOs fell over themselves to parrot police and media talking points about protests being “inappropriate” during a time of national emergency. We said, “Ignore the manipulative cops and come to the bushfire protests”, mobilising 100,000 people across the country. 
Similarly, most of the union leaders have been utterly silent since Labor won government, whilst wages and working conditions have taken a battering. Socialist Alternative is a small group, and we don’t pretend we can transform the union movement, but when we are able to put an argument against the more conservative line of union leaders, we can find an audience. 
For instance, a Socialist Alternative member argued at a mass meeting of Western Australian nurses during their last contract negotiations to reject the state Labor government’s insulting pay cut offer, leading to nurses voting to demand a 10 percent pay increase. During the pandemic, members of Socialist Alternative led a national campaign to defeat a proposed 15 percent wage cut on every worker in the university sector, a plan that was being pushed by the university union itself. 
These campaigns are often inspiring to participate in. They raise participants’ political horizons, give them experience in organising and allow them to draw practical lessons. They demonstrate in practice that the instincts and attitudes of workers are frequently well in advance of their “representatives”, but so often are invalidated by those with a more conservative agenda. 
But campaigning alone is not enough. Small victories can be overturned. And, the reality is, many campaigns and struggles don’t win their demands. This doesn’t mean that those campaigns are a waste of time. But defeat often demoralises people and leads to pessimistic conclusions. Importantly, though, this is not inevitable—defeats can be important learning experiences that make victory next time more likely. And, if the appropriate political conclusions are drawn, they help establish political lessons in the eyes of those who take part that are important for future struggles. Socialist organisation plays an important role in this, by helping to ensure that the skills, insights and political principles learnt through generations of class and social struggles are passed on and built upon in a way that can shape the future of the workers’ movement—toward overthrowing the entire system. That’s why socialists meet, discuss and write about struggles, and attempt to draw the participants into ongoing political activity, rather than let them drift away when the campaign ends.
The fight for a better world is not an easy, linear path. It is paved with ups and downs, victories and defeats, rapid surges and temporary setbacks. Socialists can learn from all of this to try to give us a better shot in the future.
Winning in the long term will require building a mass socialist organisation that is capable of leading strikes and rebellions, thinking and acting collectively, and arguing effectively for revolutionary ideas. 
This is why we don’t just organise activism: we take constructing an experienced, collaborative group seriously. There are many elements to this. 
It means, first and foremost, constantly growing our ranks. To challenge capitalism, we are going to need socialist organisers embedded in every workplace, every campaign and on every university campus. 
That starts today with recruiting individuals, educating them in socialist ideas and giving them the political experience to become effective organisers and recruiters. This is why we promote our politics at rallies, sell a publication and regularly host anti-capitalist meetings after the demonstration concludes. 
Contrary to the complaints of some, this isn’t “hijacking” or bringing an “outside agenda”. This is what every serious organisation, and even many individuals, do in every struggle. Every campaign is a battle of ideas, bringing together people who want to work for a common goal but have different political approaches. Not all those approaches will lead to victory. Arriving at the best strategy is possible only in a democratic environment where all these competing strategies and ideas can be aired, tested and evaluated.
What’s more, many activist campaigns have been sustained only because a minority of participants were convinced to become ongoing socialist organisers, turning a moment of protest into a lifelong political commitment. The more socialists we recruit today, the more people there are who will continue to build resistance in the future. 
For a socialist group to be effective, it must build a culture of serious political activity. This is why we make regular activity a requirement of membership. 
This is not only about maximising the impact Socialist Alternative can have on society. It is also necessary for the organisation to be democratic. We make decisions, carry them out and evaluate them collectively. Only an active membership can hold the leadership to account and learn how to be leaders themselves.
All the work that Socialist Alternative does takes significant resources. Running multiple campaigns, a national publication and theoretical journal, renting or booking venues to organise in, hosting the Marxism conference every year—all this costs money. We are funded through members’ own financial contributions, which vary according to their personal situation. For a revolutionary organisation, this is even more important than for other parties because it’s a question of political independence—to function as a radical group, we can’t rely on corporate donations as the ALP does, or government grants as is the case for NGOs. 
We organise weekly branch meetings in every area where we have a presence. These meetings allow members to discuss what’s happening in the world and campaigns we are involved in, and to deepen our collective knowledge of history and political theory. And they are able to democratically decide the direction of the group, unlike most traditional political parties, which operate according to a top-down model. We have elected leadership structures at a campus, city and national level to coordinate the activities of our group, all of which are democratically accountable to the members. 
Socialists need to be well organised and determined if we’re going to have an impact. But revolutionary groups won’t build themselves—they have to be consciously consolidated by those who believe it’s possible for workers to build a society that’s fit for human existence, even if we’ll always be in a minority outside of major political crises and radicalisations. 
We still have a long way to go—from an organisation of around 600 to many thousands. But we also have a proud history of campaigning, and a conviction that our politics stand a chance of winning the fight for a better world. If you agree with these ideas, you should join the largest and most serious group of revolutionaries in Australia today—you should join Socialist Alternative.

Luca Tavan

What kind of organisation is Socialist Alternative?

The military ordered hundreds of thousands of people into a designated “safe” zone. On reaching it, they were shelled by the army and the air force. The generals said there was another safe zone; if the people kept moving, respite would be found. It wasn’t. Again they were attacked. The scene repeated, but now, corralled onto a tiny stretch of beach and trapped against the ocean, there was no way out. 
Government officials said that they were interested in killing only “terrorists”. But the “terrorists” were supported by most of the population, whom the authorities in fact considered collaborators and fair game. So the military prevented humanitarian aid entering the territory and turned the place into a mass grave through relentless and indiscriminate shelling and bombing. Then they blamed “the terrorists” for the carnage.
The rest of the world’s governments did nothing or assisted in the unfolding genocide.
It could be Gaza. But this was <a href="https://www.remembermay2009.com/">Sri Lanka just fifteen years ago</a>, when the country’s government waged a merciless campaign to smash the national liberation movement led by the Tamil Tigers. Arguably, it provided the template for Israel’s current strategy.
In the first four and a half months of 2009, the Sri Lankan armed forces killed at least 70,000 of the island’s Tamil minority, according to a 2012 internal UN report. Local census records reportedly show more than 146,000 people unaccounted for, presumed dead. Perhaps 20,000 were slaughtered in the week leading to 18 May, when the Tigers were militarily defeated.
“We were herded like cattle to this place”, a survivor recounted when this writer visited the site of the massacre several years ago. “We didn’t have enough time to bury the dead. Every day we counted them: one hundred, one hundred and fifty ... in the last days, thousands.”
The <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/comparing-zionism-and-sinhala-buddhist-nationalism">parallels between Israel and Sri Lanka</a> are striking. In some ways, the respective genocides are unique. But placed in the broader context of 21st century violence, they come across as almost par for the course.
For example, the “costs of war” project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, a research centre in the US, estimates that at least 4.5 million people have been killed in 9/11-related, US-led wars and war zones this century. That figure doesn’t include the tolls from Sri Lanka, the Congo, Darfur, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Chechnya, Ukraine and so on. 
The UN refugee agency estimates that more than 100 million people today have been forcibly displaced around the world because of such conflicts. 
Or take the “non-violent” terror stalking more than 800 million people: starvation. The World Food Programme estimates that 9 million die every year of hunger and hunger-related diseases. Another 1 million die because of inadequate water or sanitation, according to the World Health Organization.
There is simply too much terror to be tallied: death, displacement, violence, hunger and poverty haunt much of the planet.
Any horror can to some extent be explained in its own terms. The genocide of Palestinians, the poverty of Russia’s workers, the hunger crisis in Sudan, the foul discrimination of India’s caste system, the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, the extraordinary levels of interpersonal violence in the United States, the increasing military build-up of the major world powers—masses of scholars, activists and researchers dedicate countless hours trying to explain the particularities of each, and more. 
Sometimes, commonalities are found. For example, the “settler colonial” narrative has given many supporters of Indigenous rights a framework with which to make sense of Palestine and to make links between various other instances of national oppression. (It only gets one so far of course: most instances of national oppression in the world have nothing to do with settler colonialism, and most Israelis today cannot plausibly be designated “settlers”.)
But most of the time, the specifics of each horror are emphasised, without reference to the fundamental thing linking horrors around the world: the capitalist economy, which subordinates human need everywhere to the interests of business owners and the rulers of states.
The incessant economic and geopolitical drive to compete for profits, resources, territory and markets underpins everything. That competition is becoming more cutthroat as increasing numbers of countries—the rulers of countries, that is—accrue wealth enough to project power beyond their own borders. At the same time, global economic growth has slowed, and greater disparities of wealth have emerged between those at the top and those at the bottom of each country. 
A volatile combination of international aggression and domestic divide and rule and repression is the result. Global politics has become increasingly zero sum—for anyone to get ahead, someone else must end up in a ditch. 
That’s why genocide both is and is not a special case. It’s exceptional for the brutality. But it’s also part of “normal” capitalist terror, which destroys millions of lives every day.

Ben Hillier

Capitalism’s permanent horror

Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza is not a simple response to the Hamas raids on 7 October last year; the roots of the conflict over Palestine are deep within the history of imperialism and a by-product of the capitalist system of exploitation and competition. 
1. “Western values” aren’t what politicians say they are
The West, we are routinely told, is the inheritor of a set of ethical precepts and cultural practices bequeathed to us by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. At its core are the so-called values of a free society: rationality, scepticism, liberty, freedom of thought and perhaps some form of human rights.
These values are supposedly universal—which suggests that some ideas or principles are fundamentally true and ought to be recognised as applying to all humans in all societies. However, it’s clear these values are not being applied in Gaza and human rights are not being afforded to the Palestinians.
Sometimes, this collection of rights and values is referred to as the “Judaeo-Christian tradition”, despite European religious authorities being historically the most resistant to philosophical, political and scientific progress. Throughout so-called Western history, progress often comes in spite of, not because of, the religious affinities of the Enlightenment’s most influential thinkers.
For some time, the purported “defenders” of these values have argued their case in Manichean terms: “Western civilisation” is a beacon in a world of increasing darkness. But the West’s intellectual and cultural achievements face existential threats and must be defended at all costs.
Put aside for a moment the dubious contention that “the West” is some hermetically sealed, homogenous, cultural entity or philosophical innovation, rather than a recent political invention. 
The Palestinians have been made aware, for decades, that the values Western politicians and rulers claim to uphold are not at all universal. The right to self-determination, for example, has been denied to them for generations. 
Many of the articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the document that purports to be the highest political expression of Enlightenment universalism, seem not to apply to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The first article of the declaration: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”, is simply not applied in their case. 
Indeed, Zionism, as embodied by Israel—an ethnically exclusivist and increasingly theocratic state that systematically oppresses and discriminates against the non-Jewish population—is hardly compatible with humanist universalism. The separation of church and state was one of the great political achievements of the Enlightenment; in Israel, the government is instituting an ever-closer marriage of the two. However, these obvious contradictions haven’t been cause for any wavering of support from Western leaders.
It’s not only the Palestinians who are excluded from Western universalism. A cursory glance around the world, including within Western countries, indicates that the main form of “universalism” practised by ruling classes (those with the economic and political power), is that they “universally” make exceptions to the very values which they purport to defend so vigorously. 
2. Money is more important than (some) people 
For all the talk about values, there is only one value that really matters to the people who run global capitalism: economic value. The value of their profits and fortunes.
For an illustration of this, look no further than the joint statement about the Gaza conflict issued by fourteen governments on 3 January. The ongoing attacks in the Middle East were, it noted, “illegal, unacceptable, and profoundly destabilizing”; a “significant international problem that demands collective action”.
“Let our message now be clear”, the announcement continued: “we call for the immediate end of these illegal attacks”.
At the time, Gaza’s Ministry of Health was reporting that more than 20,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israel’s invasion and bombing of the territory. A further 7,000 were missing, presumed dead, and nearly 60,000 were injured.
Yet the joint statement wasn’t about the carnage in Palestine. The White House released it while simultaneously funding and arming Israel. What was the issue that moved the US and its co-signatories to such strong language? It wasn’t systematic mass murder, but the interruption of trade through the Red Sea because of intermittent attacks on shipping vessels by the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The statement came after Operation Prosperity Guardian was initiated by the US military a couple of weeks earlier (“prosperity” being the only thing worth guarding, apparently—though not the prosperity of anyone in Gaza). The operation involves a coalition of more than 20 countries “committed to defending international shipping”.
“These attacks are impacting global trade and commerce, negatively impacting the economies of nations around the world and costing commercial shipping firms billions of dollars”, US Air Force Major General Pat Ryder said at a Pentagon news conference in December.
To underline what is at stake, what animates capitalist governments, and what moves them to action, Ryder reiterated the view that the Houthi blockade was “negatively impacting billions and billions, billions of dollars in global trade”.
The coalition has since launched yet another war; this time bombing Yemen again and again, because shipping companies have been forced to re-route their vessels around Africa, “adding significant cost and weeks of delay to the delivery of goods”.
If only the Palestinians could pass themselves off as economically valuable, tradable commodities. Then they might earn the sympathy and protection of the people who run global capitalism. 
3. The “rules” are only for some
“We remain committed to the international rules-based order and are determined to hold malign actors accountable”, the 3 January White House statement proclaimed.
Yet, if values are selectively applied and selectively held, so too are the rules in a so-called rules-based order.
For example, it is inconceivable, that the terror unleashed on Gaza could have been conducted with impunity on Tel Aviv. Imagine for a moment the response of the “international community” if some actor or country was obliterating schools, universities, hospitals and synagogues, month after month, in Israel’s main city, killing tens of thousands of people. 
The double standards are clearly on display regarding Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has, rightly, been condemned for committing war crimes and denying Ukraine its right to self-determination. The International Criminal Court has even issued an arrest warrant for the Russian leader. 
But, as is standard practice, whether someone is considered a war criminal depends on what side of the fence they sit on. So while the US supports Ukraine and denounces Russia, it takes the opposite position in the Middle East, supporting the oppressor nation against the oppressed and occupied Palestinians. Despite clear evidence of war crimes, the West continues to proclaim that Israel has a right to defend itself. This too is a double-standard, even according to the West’s own rules.
Moreover, the rules are often about protecting the people and states who write them. Or the jurisdiction of the courts is simply denied. Not one US leader, for example, has ever faced serious sanction for the myriad crimes of empire: the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carpet bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the overthrow of democratically elected governments, the military support for dictatorships, the obliteration of Iraq—on and on it goes. 
4. Criminality extends beyond “the West” 
While Western countries have been at the forefront of supporting Israel, they are not the only ones. Neither the Russian nor the Chinese ruling classes care about the liberation of the Palestinians. Why would they? They hardly have a principled opposition to killing Arabs and Muslims, robbing them of their democratic rights and stealing their land. 
It was only six years ago that Russia flattened the Palestinian refugee camp in Yarmouk, outside Damascus, because it was a base of opposition to the Syrian dictatorship. President Vladimir Putin’s rise to the top was helped by his brutal eradication of the Chechnyan separatist movement. When it comes to carpet-bombing Arab and Muslim “barbarians”, Putin is a regular Likudnik.
China is one of the few modern states that, like Israel, is ethnically cleansing a Muslim nation through a process of settler colonialism. The Uyghurs of Xinjiang might raise an eyebrow at the Chinese government’s complaint that the UN is “evading the fundamental issue of independent statehood for the Palestinian people”.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing and the oppression of national minorities—along with the ideological lies that justify them, such as “counter-terrorism” or rank Islamophobia—are tools common to every imperialist power. Europe, the US, Russia and China all use them when it serves their interests—and they all condemn them when doing so also serves their interests.
For the Middle Eastern ruling classes, grandstanding about the Palestinians is good politics. Doing anything meaningful for the Palestinians isn’t. Arabs and Muslims in the region, suffering under a motley crew of American- and Russian-backed dictatorships, rightly view the Palestinian cause as the most pointed expression of the long fight against imperialism and colonialism in the region.
But their rulers are happy to deal with the Israeli state and sign away the rights of the Palestinians while paying lip service to the need for justice. Egypt’s US-backed dictatorship has been Israel’s great partner in the slow strangulation of Gaza through blockade. The tyrannical Arab states have no interest in human liberation: they see Palestinians as mouths to feed, potential terrorists and fodder for demagogic posturing. 
5. We live in a world of permanent war
The state of almost permanent war against the Palestinians, from 1948 to today, is not an aberration. From the moment of its emergence, capitalism has been synonymous with violence. Karl Marx described in his 1867 book Capital:
“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production ... 
“[Then came] the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China.”
Once most of the world was carved up and a global system of production and trade established by the end of the nineteenth century, capitalist competition resulted in a constant contest over and re-division of resources and spheres of influence between states that were, in the words of Russian Marxist Nikolai Bukharin, “armed to the teeth and ready to hurl themselves at one another any moment”.
There has not been a day of peace since. Indonesia fought for independence from Dutch colonialism, only now to violently deny the same freedom to West Papuans. China suffered at the hands of the Japanese and the Europeans, only now to oppress the Uyghurs and threaten its neighbours. India gained independence, only to split in two and engage in decades of territorial conflict with Pakistan and China. On almost every continent, every decade, the conflicts continue as countries jockey for power, influence and resources. 
But few areas have witnessed as much destruction and warfare as the Middle East, which, because of its abundant oil reserves, has been at the centre of global imperialist competition for a century. The cause of the conflict is not simply the nature of Israel itself; other states arguably have been more brutal toward civilian populations., It is the role Israel has historically played as an ally of Western imperialism, which has determined the fate of the Palestinians.
They are up against not only Israel, not only the West, not only the Arab regimes, but world imperialism. That tells us something else: the fight for Palestine is not just a fight for the Palestinians; it is part of the fight for a different sort of world. 
There will only be peace in the Middle East when we get rid of capitalism once and for all.

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