An essential introduction to Marxism for activists, students, and anyone curious about socialist ideas. This stream explores the foundations of Marxist theory, the history of class struggle, the workings of capitalism, and the strategies socialists have used to organise and fight back. Build your understanding of the ideas, debates, and tools that shape the struggle for a socialist future.

Participants are encouraged to read Introducing Marxism by Tom Bramble in preparation for the sessions.

The story of this huge social upheaval and its tragic defeat remains largely untold. Yet China's 1925-27 working-class Revolution provoked fierce debates in the world Communist movement and generated one of the most serious anti-Stalinist oppositions outside of Russia. These sessions examine the events that shook China throughout the 1920s and how they impacted Mao’s turn away from the working class and Trotsky’s historic break with Stalinism.

Delegates to the Communist International’s 1922 world congress faced a rapidly changing world situation. As peasant and colonial rebellions flared at the edges of the system, a capitalist offensive and the first stirrings of fascism demanded a new strategic orientation for the mass parties in Europe. Organised socialists steeled themselves for a long fight for influence among non-revolutionary layers while maintaining an uncompromising radical pole. This stream follows some of the key themes that animated the Comintern’s Fourth Congress.

Follow the political adventures of tireless revolutionary Karl Marx as he participates in and analyses the great struggles of the 19th century. From the first mass working-class rebellions of 1848 through the fight to abolish slavery, these sessions bring to life the historical context behind Marx’s key political and theoretical breakthroughs.

While the ruling classes sent millions to die in the trenches of the First World War, workers, soldiers and radicals fought back. The horror of modern imperialist competition sparked some of the greatest eruptions of working-class revolt in history. This stream examines the movements, divisions and politics that shaped resistance and renewed the socialist left between 1914 and 1918.

How can the working class run the world? This stream examines historic moments of dual power, delving into the internal debates that shaped democratic institutions of workers’ self-emancipation. From the Russian soviets to the Iranian shoras, the sessions argue that workers must wrest political control away from the capitalist state as a prerequisite for building a classless society.

Australian socialists have always drawn on international revolutionary traditions and attempted to apply lessons to our own context. This stream looks at how three figures from the Russian Revolution, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, made lasting impressions on the Australian left, for better or for worse.