Socialists are launching an anti-capitalist collective across high schools in Melbourne. Join this lunchtime meet up with other students to discuss what's next in Victoria and nationwide.

High School Anti-Capitalists (Insta)

Meet the High School Anti-capitalists

The brutal truth is capitalists and far right tyrants don’t care if you don’t like them or their system. They don’t care if you hate capitalism in your mind or watch insta reels relaying the latest horrors of the world. They don’t care if you read Capital and watch Succession.

They can survive being disliked, they can ride out, and even profit from, apathy and cynicism. 

That’s why we need to get active in the real world. We need to turn that hatred of the system into organised activity. This panel will bring the Marxism 2026 conference to a close with a call to get involved in the socialist movement. It will feature two revolutionary activists from Australia outlining how the fight for socialism can go from ideas to radical action. 

Ideas to action: the fight for socialism

Meet Socialist Alternative organisers from your university, union or local area. We'll discuss in small groups how to take the first steps towards becoming a committed organised revolutionary.

How to get involved with Socialist Alternative

Come join our printmaking workshop on the lawn and create your own radical art!

Linocut printmaking workshop

Join Socialist Party organisers from your district at this lunchtime workshop and get stuck in to organising.

 to find out more about our project and what's happening in your area

Organise the party: workshop with Socialist Party comrades from your city or district 

Most of us have lived our whole lives under a one-sided class war. 

The billionaires have built fortunes while the poor have been screwed. Governments the world over have bent over backwards to facilitate this. The result has been a world in which the rich stomp over everyone else with little repercussions. The apex of this laissez-faire attitude to the abuse of power being Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians. People have rebelled. In the 21st century, we have seen some truly enormous demonstrations: against the Iraq War, the Black Lives Matter movement, the climate strikes, and now the global Palestine movement. 

However, a fundamental weakness of these movements has been the lack of action by workers. This is crucial because only the working class has the power to challenge the real source of the ruling class's power —their control over the economy. The decline in working-class activity had a devastating impact on the left. The idea that socialism was about building a mass popular movement of ordinary people who could unite together and take power into their own hands was forgotten.

However, recent worker actions in Italy, France, Greece, Minneapolis and elsewhere show that the working class is starting to flex its muscles once again. This blockbuster panel will feature firebrand speakers from Europe, the Middle East and Australia discussing recent examples of workers power from across the globe. 

Why the working class can change the world

Over the last two decades, the tendency on the left has been to dismiss Pauline Hanson as a "has-been" and a joke. We can no longer afford that attitude. The rules of the game have decisively changed. The left needs to rise to the occasion and offer a clear alternative to defend working-class interests. 

We can’t rely on small-l liberals or reformists to oppose fascism consistently. At best, the liberals will equivocate. At worst, as they have repeatedly done in the past, they will go over to the fascists when they feel their class interests are threatened.

Join Mick Armstrong for this discussion of where One Nation's success has come from and where to next for those who want to challenge it.

Combating the threat of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation

How we stopped Pauline Hanson last time

Explaining and Resisting the One Nation Surge

Donald Trump has bombed more nations than any other world leader since WWII. From launching a full-scale war on Iran which will likely murder many thousands, to kidnapping the Venezuelan president, supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza, bombing boats in the Caribbean and threatening the forced takeover of Greenland, this is naked US imperialism in force across the globe.

Trump has filled his newly-named Department of War with far-right hawks such as Pete Hegseth, while Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller is a known white nationalist and far-right conspiracist.

This is all taking place in an increasingly violent and unstable international order, in which the threat of major wars, including nuclear wars, is rising.

This session will look at the imperialist project of the Trump administration, the effect it is having on geopolitics everywhere, and what it means for socialists organising against war and genocide in Australia.

Trump and US imperialism—an interview with Joel Geier

US imperialism’s quest for ‘a new Western century’

The far right is ascendant, but don’t weep for the old liberal order

Trump's imperialism: A brutal, bloody rampage on the international stage

Live country with the Ironbark Brothers

Live music with the Red Blues

Live music with Not My King

Join guests from Kenya, Argentina, France and elsewhere for informal discussion before the conference formally opens with the Opening Night session that evening. 

Greetings from the international guests

Registration Open

This session explores the resurgence of Islamophobia amid global crisis, war and rising authoritarianism. From media scare campaigns to discriminatory laws and far-right mobilisation, anti-Muslim racism continues to divide and justify state repression. 

Drawing on a Marxist analysis this talk will examine why Islamophobia persists and how we can build effective solidarity to challenge racism and the system that sustains it.

New wave of Islamophobia must be resisted

The hidden history of Islamophobia

Islamophobia in Australia: Imperialism, Racism and Persecution

During high-points of struggle, Australian unions have historical played a key role -- from striking for equal pay, against war and apartheid, to defending the environment. 

More recently, these traditions have been eroded by our union officials. Victorian Trades Hall is an exemplary case study. They have failed to fight for workers’ interests against the Labor government and have refused to use their weight to build or defend the Palestine solidarity movement. While they constantly run political campaigns, these are always calculated to boost the electoral efforts of the Labor Party.  

This discussion will look at the role played by this section of the union movement in Victoria over the past decade, and will explore the radically different approach needed to revive the political and industrial militancy of our unions.

Our union leaders are unmoved by genocide and indifferent to pay cuts: we need a stronger ‘extreme left’

A tale of two union movements: Palestine and the unions in Italy and Australia

From Vietnam war to Gaza genocide. Where have all the unions gone?

Victorian Trades Hall: the farce behind the facade

The breathtaking scale of the Epstein case has highlighted the ways in which networks of ruling class power operate with an entrenched sense of privilege and impunity. His ties across finance, politicians and capitalist institutions reveal an elite social world in which immense wealth and influence allow the normalisation of extreme abuses of people and power. The depth of elite depravity exists in sharp contrast to the intensive policing and regulation of working-class lives. This session explores what the Epstein case reveals about ruling class immorality and power sustained by extreme concentrations of wealth and influence.

Epstein is the sick and depraved face of capitalism

Epstein, Elite Power and the Depravity of the Ruling Class

Red Flag Radio LIVE

Explore this chapter of revolutionary history through verse

No Pasarán: Poetry of Resistance in the Spanish Civil War

Join us for this lunchtime workshop to organise plans for Palestine student activism with SFP members from around the country

Students for Palestine workshop

Join us in a lyrical celebration of the greatest workers' revolution in history

Poetry, literature and the Russian Revolution

Red October: Poets of the Russian Revolution

Consistently crisp podcasters - in the flesh

The Party Line: live and uncensored

Palestinian refugee, teacher and socialist Reem Yunis presents the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani

Lines of liberation: Palestinian resistance poetry

France is a country in crisis. The centrist government of Macron has revealed itself to be an authoritarian regime of the uber-wealthy, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen is within striking distance of assuming power and despite years of protests, riots and strikes the left has not been able to turn the tide. 

This session introduced by Chris Miclos, a revolutionary activist from France, will explore how the revolutionary left can build an alternative to corporate centrism and far-right nationalism.

NPA Révolutionnaires website

Organising against Macron, Le Pen and capital with Chris Miclos

From Latin America to Europe, Asia to Australia, revolutionaries are grappling with how to build parties rooted in struggle and socialist politics. 

This session will explore the role of organised socialists in the momentous struggles that shook Egypt and the Middle East in 2011, and how revolutionaries have survived the long period of reaction that followed.

The socialist movement in Egypt

Anticapitalistas was founded in 1995 under the name Espacio Alternativo (Alternative Space) by former militants of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR). Since then it has played an important role in numerous struggles and left political projects in the Spanish State. They were one of the founders of the new left wing party Podemos, but left the party in 2020 as Podemos drew closer to the centre left Socialist party government. This talk will explore the recent history of Anticapialistas and its attempts to build revolutionary politics in the Spanish State.

Speaker: Germán P. Montañes is a member of Anticapitalistas from the Spanish state. A graduate in Political Science and International Studies, he has been an active member in the student's movement in 2019-2022, and then also in the solidarity movement with Palestine after the 7th of October 2023. He also writes in diverse media, especially Viento Sur.

Spanish left in transition: Interview with Anticapitalistas

Documents from the IV Congress of Anticapitalistas, held in June 2025.

Poder Popular (Anticapitalistas news site)

Viento Sur (South Wind)

History of LCR (predecessor of Anticapitalistas)

Anticapitalistas: revolutionary socialist politics in the Spanish state with Germán P. Montañes

Argentina has a strong Trotskyist left. The Workers' Left Front – Unity (Spanish: Frente de Izquierda y de Trabajadores – Unidad, FIT-U), an electoral alliance of four revolutionary Trotskyist parties in Argentina gets hundreds of thousands of votes. There are regularly mass protests and despite the Peronist trade union bureaucracy there is still a significant workers movement. 

However, far right president Javier Milei is waging war against the Argentine left, and has scored important victories. This has opened up vital debates on the Argentine left, in the social movements and the unions about how they can defeat Milei. This session will be introduced by Federico Moreno from the Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores (MST), one of the Trotskyist parties in the FIT-U.

Argentina: Opportunities for the left grow amid debates within the FIT-Unidad

Labor reform and austerity package: Can Milei be defeated?

Argentina: Debates in the FITU. Building a left-wing alternative that transcends mere testimony

The Argentine revolutionary left and the struggle against Milei with Federico Moreno

Two years ago a massive youth protest movement exploded onto the streets of Kenya, rejecting years of growing inequality and the corrupt rule of an uber-wealthy elite. This session will explore the attempts by Kenyan socialist activists to build a revolutionary anti-capitalist organisation in Kenya, one that rejects the meddling of the imperialist powers and the African capitalist class that has ruled over Kenya since independence. 

Speaker: Purity Machogu is a member of the Permanent Revolutionary Congress in Kenya. She is one of the leaders of its women’s front and a former leading student activist.

Kenya: The Permanent Revolutionary Congress has been founded

An analysis of the recent protests in Kenya

Kenya’s June 25 Protests: A Reflection of Revolutionary Potential and Political Stagnation

Building a socialist movement in Kenya with Purity Machogu

Indigenous oppression is not just about racist policing. On virtually every measure—employment, income, health, life expectancy, education, homelessness, savings, imprisonment rates, home ownership and quality of housing—Indigenous people are much worse off than the mass of the population. Australian capitalism keeps Indigenous people in a perpetual state of poverty, and then criminalizes and vilifies them. 

This session will look at the main mechanisms of Indigenous oppression in Australia today and why true liberation requires a fundamental challenge to the entire capitalist system.

Indigenous oppression is a product of poverty

Report reveals worsening conditions for Indigenous communities

Indigenous rights, the Albanese government and fake progressivism

Who is to blame for racism in Australia?

Poverty, prisons and racism: Aboriginal oppression today

Socialists resolutely oppose America and Israel’s imperialist war on the Middle East. To build a movement powerful enough to end this war, we’d need workers uprisings across the region. To end the system that creates war, we’d need international revolution. 

Understanding the revolutionary history of the Iranian working class gives us a glimpse of that potential. 

The talk will uncover this rich history, from the heights of the 1979 Revolution, through to today.

Why the US is attacking Iran

Rupture and Revolt in Iran

Labour activism and democracy in Iran

Iran’s rising for dignity and freedom

Between Empire and Repression: the Revolutionary History of the Iranian Working Class

"Revolutionaries in the nineteen-nineties faced both hope and hard realities. The fall of the Stalinist regimes and a new cycle of anti-war agitation opened space for radical politics, but resistance would not return to the level of the late 1960s and ‘70s. Old certainties broke down as unions and social democratic parties continued into freefall. 

How to make the most of this moment? And how did debates and ruptures within the International Socialist tradition shape the strategic outlook and organisational practices of Socialist Alternative?"

The origins of Socialist Alternative

History of Socialist Alternative: founding a new organisation

How can problems like racism and sexism be effectively resisted? The dominant left-wing approach presents different forms of oppression as separate issues, driven by timeless conflicts between different "identity groups" who should be generally suspicious of each other when fighting for their rights. The politics of identity assumes that white people, for instance, cannot and should not actively engage in political debates about strategies for opposing racism – at best they should be passive "allies" subordinating their political views to those with "lived experience".

Marxists reject this framework because it fundamentally undermines real solidarity among the oppressed against a common enemy. All forms of oppression help keep the core oppressive relationship in place – that between a ruling class minority and the exploited majority. 

This session will discuss the toxic impact of "identity politics" on left-wing movements and why Marxists insist on working-class politics as the key dividing line that can advance struggles for liberation.

Deference to the oppressed gets us nowhere

The failure of identity politics: A Marxist analysis

Mistaken identity: can identity politics liberate the oppressed?

How Identity Politics Undermines Solidarity and Movements

Many activist circles promote so-called "direct action" as the way to advance protest movements. This slippery concept encompasses everything from civil disobedience stunts to individual violent confrontations with the state. In general, direct action elevates the symbolic acts of small numbers above the need to build mass struggles. 

This session will discuss why these tactics persist in protest movements from anti-fascism to Extinction Rebellion, and why socialists insist on building mass movements.

Police are getting more violent, but black bloc tactics make things worse

Marxism and anarchism

Spectacle or Struggle? The politics of Direct Action

In 1891 the Queensland government deployed thousands of troops to break a strike of shearers, precipitating one of the most bitter industrial conflicts in Australian history. The Queensland Shearers Union had resisted cuts to shearers rates and demanded a closed shop (compulsory union membership). It faced off against an employer class that dominated the Queensland parliament, the courts and the press.

With the price of wool was falling, the pastoralists were determined to smash the unions and impose savage wage cuts. For several months, central Queensland was on the verge of insurrection as shearers established armed strike camps and raided shearing sheds to disperse scab (non-union) labour. Ultimately, their strike went down to defeat, with strikers starved out, arrested and gaoled.

The Shearers Strike has gone down in Australian history as a founding myth of the Labor Party: workers supposedly rejected class conflict and insurrection in favour of political action to capture the state and make it serve their interests. This talk will present a different critique, arguing that the strike demonstrated, as Marx had argued two decades before, that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes, but must instead fight to overthrow capitalist rule.

Shear Power: Shearer’s strike of 1891

The Pastoral Strikes, 1891 and 1894 (Chapter 6) in The Big Strikes

The Shearers’ War

Burning the Rodney

The Great Shearers’ Strikes of the 1890s (Part 1)

New Unionism in Australia, 1880-1900

The Shearers' strike: class war in the bush

Pauline Hanson's demagogic maiden speech to parliament in 1996 was given wall to wall coverage by the mainstream media and provoked a surge in racist attacks. This talk will look at how the momentum of her far right party was broken by an inspiring mass movement and the lessons for taking on the far right today.

How we beat Pauline Hanson in the 1990s

Resisting Hanson's One Nation in the 1990s

As fascist leagues grew on the streets of Paris and the far right threatened to topple the Third Republic, France became a key battleground in the global fight against fascism. This session explores the rich and complex history of French antifascism—from the mass strikes and street mobilisations that halted fascist advances, to the Popular Front and the tensions within the workers’ movement. What strategies worked, what failed, and what lessons can socialists draw today from one of the most important antifascist struggles of the interwar years?

June ’36: Class Struggle and the Popular Front in France

From revolutionary possibility to fascist defeat: The French Popular Front of 1936-38

French anti-fascism in the 1930s

Women's second-class status is a product not just of their unequal position in formal work, but also in the domestic sphere, where they are expected to shoulder the bulk of the housework and caregiving. 

What political conclusions to draw about this unique social position has been debated since the beginning of the women's rights movement--should domestic labour be treated as another form of wage labour, or should our aim be to relieve women of this burden altogether and fully socialise housework and caregiving?

This discussion will look at this debate through a contemporary lens.

Producing and Reproducing: Capitalism’s Dual Oppression of Women

Women and the Subversion of the Community

The Care Factory

Marxism and women's liberation

Wages for housework: debates then and now

Fascism is a violent mass movement aimed at smashing working-class organisation in defence of a brutal, crisis-ridden capitalist system. 

This session explores the conditions that produce fascist and far right movements, from economic breakdown, ruling-class panic, and the failures of reformist politics. We’ll compare classical fascism with contemporary far-right forces and discuss the strategies needed to confront them. 

The history of anti-fascist resistance shows that only mass mobilisation, rooted in working-class solidarity, can stop the far right—and open the way for a deeper challenge to the system that breeds it.

The many faces of fascism

Trotsky and the struggle against fascism

Fascism, Capitalism, and Class Struggle

Trump. Genocide. Billionaires. War. 21st-century capitalism is spinning out of control. As fascism and white nationalism remerge, it is more important than ever to build a new socialist movement to take on the system. There are signs of the revival of leftism: on the streets of Minneapolis, in the Palestine solidarity protests, and in the youth anti-capitalist vibes on social media. However, this comes after decades of fragmentation and retreat for the global left and the workers' movement. Many are coming into leftist ideas with little background knowledge or organising experience. Stalinist, reformist and liberal politics abound amongst those who see themselves as socialists. If we are to shape this nascent anti-capitalist consciousness into a powerful force that can shake the system, then we need a new serious Marxist left that can rise to this challenge. 

Opening Night: Marxism for a New Left

Unrepentant in her working-class politics and hate by the police for her activism, Lucy “mum” Eatock was a central figure in the struggle to stop the Glebe Evictions in Sydney the 1930s. An Aboriginal woman, raised and educated in a white family in colonial Queensland, Lucy Wakenshaw not only defied colonial social convention by marrying Aboriginal stockman William Eatock, she would also go on to become an active member of the International Workers of the World and the Communist Party of Australia. The matriarch of large family, Lucy’s sons and daughters would follow in their mother’s footsteps and join the working-class struggle for worker and Aboriginal rights as communists.

Lucy Eatock was just one of the many Aboriginal Communists and Revolutionaries, whose participation in the struggle for both working-class and Aboriginal rights has often been pushed to the margins of Australian history. This talk will examine the history, lives and contributions of Aboriginal communists and revolutionaries discussing both the importance of these activists to the struggle for working-class and Aboriginal rights, while also looking at how their legacy has inspired later generations of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal activists struggling for a better world.

Indigenous liberation and communism during the Great Depression

Red and black: How Australian communists fought for Indigenous liberation

The Aboriginal Struggle & the Left

Aboriginal communists and revolutionaries: a hidden history

"In America they call color prejudice Jim Crow, in Germany Hitler called it the 'superiority of the Aryan race.' In Australia we pretend it doesn't exist. But it does exist, and at times takes as filthy and poisonous forms as it ever did under Hitler or in the lunch law Southern US States” - Tribune, 1950.

In post-war Australia Indigenous people were segregated by racist laws and practices which sought to keep them marginalised. But this racism didn’t go unchallenged. Strikes by Aboriginal workers in Pilbara and Darwin rocked the racist institutions of the 1940s. 

In the fifties and sixties, Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists worked together to build campaigns against racism. Left-wing trade unions disrupted segregation on the NSW South Coast, civil rights groups organised, and campaigners won the 1967 referendum. This was the vital background to the emergence of the land rights and Power Black movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. 

This talk by historian Jordan Humphreys, author of Indigenous Liberation & Socialism, will explore the often forgotten story of this activism.

Indigenous Liberation & Socialism

How segregation was smashed in southern NSW

Son of Alyandabu: My fight for Aboriginal Rights

A History of Aboriginal Illawarra, Volume 2: Colonisation

Ray Peckham, a working-class Aboriginal hero

Aborigines & Activism: Race, Aborigines & the coming of the Sixities in Australia

Aboriginal rights and trade unions in the 1950s and 1960s

Desegregating Australia: post-war struggles for Aboriginal rights

Gary Foley is a legendary Aboriginal activist, writer, actor, teacher, storyteller and historian. Foley describes his politicisation after arriving in Redfern in 1967 at the age of seventeen: "Getting bashed by the NSW coppers, and reading the biography of Malcolm X; that transformed my thinking". Foley was soon involved in setting up the Aboriginal Legal Service and the Sydney chapter of the Black Power Movement. In 1972, he was one of the founders of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra.

Foley quickly came to the attention of ASIO, and as revealed in SBS series "Persons of Interest", was heavily surveilled for years. He continued to be involved in every major struggle for Aboriginal rights, participating in the 1982 Commonwealth Games protest, the 1988 bicentennial demonstrations, the successful campaign to save Northland Secondary College in Melbourne in the early 1990s, and the protests that stopped the Jabiluka uranium mine later that decade.  Foley has been a keynote speaker at consecutive Invasion day demonstrations in Melbourne as well as at several Palestine protests. He has been an outspoken fighter for a free Palestine since the 1970s. 

As well as educating generations of people on the streets, Foley educates his students at Victoria University where he lectures in history. He also has a vast body of written work, from his PhD on the history of Aboriginal organisations and struggles in Redfern in the late 1960s and early 1970s through to his website: www.gooriweb.org. Foley is currently building what will be the biggest ever archive of Aboriginal history. Rather than sitting on dusty shelves, these materials are being compiled as a resource for future generations of radicals.

Foley has been a regular speaker at Marxism conferences over the years, schooling and entertaining thousands with his lively stories and research into Aboriginal history. Everyone will benefit from his enlightening presentation. Foley has made it his mission to inspire and educate future generations of radicals and Marxism is a key forum for this. If you want to be part of the next chapter of resistance to this barbaric, racist system, come to this session to hear from one of the living legends of our movement. 

The Koori History Website Project

Forever Uncompromising

Foley Invasion Day 2020 [video]

Lessons from the Black Power Movement with Dr Gary Foley

This talk will explore the development of racism during the rise of capitalism. 

This wide-ranging discussion of capitalist production, the state, colonialism, slavery and the ruling class will draw out lessons for anti-capitalists looking to understand, fight and abolish racism today.

Slavery and the origins of racism

Racism: the strange fruit of capitalism

Karl Marx Fought for Freedom

The origins of racism and the rise of capitalism

Life magazine included Simone de Beauvoir in the 100 most influential people of the millennium. 

Sandra Bloodworth will pay tribute to her as a significant existentialist philosopher who wrote The Second Sex, a seminal book about women’s oppression, and who took a courageous stand for Algerian independence from French colonial rule, sold censured left-wing papers in the streets, and took a controversial stand for abortion rights. 

Interview with de Beauvoir 1976: The Second Sex 25 years later

The Second Sex

The Blood of Others

The Mandarins

Simone de Beauvoir: a biography

Simone de Beauvoir: feminist, philosopher, and activist

"A freak acting for freaks" was how Magnus Hirschfeld was described by a German newspaper in 1907. The pioneering doctor was an advocate for homosexuality, gender diversity, women's rights and sexual freedom. His work continues to underpin ideas about gender and sexuality today. 

Like today, the far right hated him. When the Nazis ransacked his institute in 1933, his books and papers were burnt in one of the largest Nazi book burnings of the time. 

This discussion will look at how Hirschfeld's ideas developed, the political context which shaped them and what we can learn from them today.

Program