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 made 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)

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

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

Lessons from the Black Power Movement

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 and Second Wave Feminism

"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.

Science and Sex: Hirschfeld’s Legacy

A chapter of the LGBT liberation struggle

Early critic of homophobic repression

Magnus Hirschfeld and the Eary Fight for Gay Liberation

Marxists are among some of the earliest proponents of women's rights. The positions adopted and advocated by Marx and Engels themselves, as well as some of thier most high profile adherents in the nineteenth century, stand the test of time better than many of thier contemporaries' positions. 

This talk will look at what these positions were, how the radical approach of the early Marxist movement underpinned them and why they still provide an important guide for women's liberation today.

The Marxist tradition and women's liberation

Chapters 5 and 6

Marxist Women versus Bourgeois Feminism

Marx and Engels to the Bolsheviks and SPD: early Marxists and women’s liberation

Trans people are singled out for attack by the mainstream and far right at every opportunity. They have become the symbol of "wokeism" and its supposed incorporation into the institutions of capitalism. 

Trump's pushback on this is about reasserting the dominance of the nuclear family, obedience to social norms and deference to ruling institutions and practices. This is more than an expression of bigotry – it is about preparing society for a meaner and more brutal period ahead. 

Marxists defend trans rights and fight for a society where people can be themselves. To win this, we need to be rid of capitalism.

The freedom to be: Marxism, gender oppression and the struggle for trans liberation

Transgender Resistance: Socialism & the Fight for Trans Liberation

Marxism and trans liberation

Why does capitalism care about who we have sex with and what gender we express? 

A system that depends on the exploitation of the majority for capital accumulation cares very much about how we live our lives, what we think, and what we pass down to the next generation. It has eleborate means of maintaining social control for this purpose. 

This disucussion will look at why, and what all this oppressive control is in aid of.

The roots of gay oppression

Marxism, feminism and transgender politics

Where does homophobia and transphobia come from?

Radical feminism emerged in a period of radicalism and ideological forment. It popularised some important ideas about women's place in society, including that there is nothing natural about sexist stereotypes, that gender roles are arbitrary and oppressive and that sexism is systematic. 

Many advocated radical change, but this has so far not been acheived and radical feminism has never become a mass movement. This discussion will look at why that is and offer a critique of this ideological current.

Theories of patriarchy

The failure of success: The women’s liberation movement in the United States

Radical Feminism: theory, practice and limits

Violence against women seems like an intractable problem: as hard to solve as it is commonplace. The failure of various strategies aimed at reducing it, most of which focus on sexual equality, point to the complex factors which contribute to its prevalence. 

This discussion will look at how women's unequal position vis a vis men intersects with living standards, the degree of control most of us have over our lives, the hierarchical nature of the family and workplace, and the values that underpin capitalist society, all of which create a dangerous situation for women and children.

The roots of sexual violence

Losing it

See What You Made Me Do

Understanding violence against women: a Marxist perspective

The sexual revolution purported to free women from the restrictive conventions pertaining to women's sexual expression and remove the double standard in sexual behaviour between men and women. 

While it has undoubtedly ushered in a period of greater freedom for women, it has not necessarily made sex better for women or thier relationships more fulfilling. Often, it has functioned to give license to men to treat women in a grossly sexist manner. 

This discussion will look at how we can explain this failure and why capitalism cannot accommodate real freedom, but commodifies sex instead, to the ongoing detriment of women and sexual equality.

Foucault’s History of Sexuality

When the workers’ movement took on sexual objectification

Female Chauvinist Pigs

Women’s liberation today

The Sexual Revolution: promise and contradiction

This session cuts through the myth of the “neutral” university and exposes the academy as a pillar of capitalist power. We’ll examine how universities police radical ideas, exploit workers, and convert knowledge into a weapon for ruling-class interests. 

The role of left wing academia will be put under the microscope. Critical and "Marxist" academics are often critical of the universities but fail to see the limits of their own “radicalism”. The role of academia in deforming sections of the socialist left is also rarely acknowledged.

Life in the cardboard tower: the university experience today

A Marxist critique of the academy (audio recording)

Radical intellectuals in the ivory tower? The limits of leftist academia

The Deutscher Lecture: Henryk Grossman and the responsibility of socialists

Knowledge and class power: a Marxist critique of the academy

Privilege theory, a popular idea on the left, argues that some groups have unearned advantages over others due to their privilege, and locates the source of oppression in the relationships between the "privileged" and the oppressed: white versus non-white, straight versus queer. But is that really how oppression works? Marxists argue that oppression comes from the structures of capitalism, enforced by the genuinely privileged ruling class, not the power relations between ordinary people. This talk will explore the Marxist critique of privilege theory and present an explanation of oppression, along with a strategy rooted in working class solidarity.

A Marxist critique of the theory of "white privilege"

What’s wrong with privilege theory?

What privilege theory doesn't explain

Marxism and oppression

Why privilege theory Is wrong

The idea that news and journalism manufacture consent for capitalism is attributed to Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. In Manufacturing Consent (1988), Herman and Chomsky articulated the “propaganda model” to explain “consent”. For 40 years, it has been the static and lifeless centrepiece of liberal-left media theory. The bourgeois academic solution to capitalist “propaganda” is more state-imposed “regulation”. 

This approach is wrong because it relies on an ideological myth: the supposed existence of democratic “free speech” marketplace. Antonio Gramsci’s thesis that “hegemony” represents a dynamic balance between conflicting class forces is central to a Marxist critique of the propaganda model.

How the right use and abuse free speech

Right-wing hypocrisy on free speech

In Perspective: Noam Chomsky

Their free speech and ours

Free speech and political struggle

Manufacturing consent: media and the liberal myth of free speech

The failure of identity politics: A Marxist analysis

Deference to the oppressed gets us nowhere

The problem with identity politics

Mistaken identity: can identity politics liberate the oppressed?

How Identity Politics Reinforces Capitalism

In the face of capitalism's economic misery and falling living standards, one strategy seems to offer some relief. But how radical is "mutual aid"?

This session will critique the anarchist moralism that champions mutual aid, and put forward a Marxist perspective on drawing ordinary people into fights to improve their own conditions.

Mutual aid is nice, but it doesn’t challenge capitalism

Reflections on “prefigurative politics”

Marx, Engels, and Self-emancipation

The Limits of Mutual Aid

Marxism is often criticised for being “Eurocentric”. It is argued that Marx’s critique of capitalism doesn’t apply to non-European societies and that Marx’s analysis is fatally tainted by racist assumptions.

However, there is a long and rich history of revolutionary socialists in non-European societies using Marxist politics to understand their countries. Today, Marxism is key for understanding how capitalism and imperialism & class, and oppression structure the Global South. Contrary to the critics, the revolutionary wing of the socialist movement has a long tradition of fighting racism and imperialism. As well, accusations of “Eurocentrism” often cover up for a classless analysis of the Global South, which excuses the non-European ruling classes from their complicity in the crimes of capitalism. 

This session will outline why only Marxism can explain the Global South.

Why is the global south still poor?

Beyond the western world

Marx and race: a Eurocentric analysis?

From value to uneven development

Why Marxism Isn’t Eurocentric: Understanding the Global South

This session explores how revolutionary socialists confronted the Cold War and the Vietnam War, and a ruling class determined to suppress radical movements around the globe. We will examine how Marxists analysed the rise of U.S. imperialism, the dynamics of the Cold War consensus, and the brutal interventions used to crush struggles from Korea to Latin America. We will also look at the influence and distortions of Stalinism and why it was important for the revolutionary left to stand against the idea that Stalinist countries were socialist. Central to the session is the Vietnam War. Anti-war resistance dealt serious blows to Western imperialism In Australia, the anti-Vietnam War movement-including draft resisters, student radicals, unions and the revolutionary left- formed the backbone of a broader radicalisation. 

This session is part of a stream exploring the role played by revolutionaries in standing up to war at key moments in history: WWI, WWII, Vietnam and the cold war. Often the anti-war movement is described as broad and pacifist but revolutionaries have always found themselves facing off against not only the ruling class but also would-be progressives, even socialists. Revolutionaries have made vital contributions in these moments but holding the line, providing a sharp critique and, crucially, agitating to turn imperialist wars on their head by replacing them with class war.

Introduction and Part 2

A People's History of the Vietnam war

Vietnam: The Soldier's Revolt

Revolutionaries Against the War: Struggles against the Cold War and Vietnam War

How did revolutionary socialists respond to the outbreak of World War II, especially when “anti-fascism” was used to justify cross-class alliances and support for imperialist war? We will look at the debates that emerged between revolutionary socialists on the nature of the war, the impact Stalinism and the Hitler-Stalin pact had on the socialist movement, as well as how revolutionary Marxists navigated questions of national liberation and the resistance movements that arose in the war. 

World War II: The Good War?

When Australia's communists became cheerleaders for imperialist war

Introduction and Conclusion

Review: A People's History of the Second World War

The Marxist Analysis of the Second World War – A Contribution to the Discussion

Revolutionaries Against the War: The Fight to Stop WWII

This session examines how Marxist revolutionaries transformed World War I from a brutal imperialist conflict into the spark for class war and revolution.  Lenin and the Bolsheviks, building on Marx’s tradition, developed a revolutionary internationalism: they saw the war not as a temporary aberration, but as a structural crisis of capitalism. Socialists workers in Russia and Germany overthrew their rules and formed soviets and workers’ councils arose turning the imperialist war into civil war and ending the bloodshed of WWI. Socialists and workers in Australia also fought against the war, and revolutionary organisations like the Industrial Workers of the World were key to this. The anti-conscription movement, mass rebellion and strikes brought down a prime minister and opened up a class sharp struggle. 

From Marx to Lenin: the Debates that forged the socialist approach to war

How world war one led to class war

Revolutionaries Against the War: How Socialists Ended WWI

The Soviets are rightfully understood as the political organ through which the Russian working class overthrew their rulers and began to transform the conditions of their existence. But the role of the Russian trade unions, before but especially after the 1917 Revolution, is largely forgotten.

This session will cover how Russia’s challenges manifested in the changing relationship between the Soviets and unions. The respective roles of the institutions will be investigated, and the infamous Bolshevik trade-union debate of 1921 excavated for what it can teach socialists today about what it takes to build a workers’ state.

Chapters 1-3

War Communism at an impasse (Chapter 11)

The discussion on the trade-union question in the Bolshevik party (1920-1921)

The Trade Union Debate and Lenin’s Will (Chapter 8)

Zinoviev-Trotsky-Shlyapnikov Debate at the Tenth Party Congress

Soviets vs Unions?: challenges in building a workers' state

The Democratic Centralists were the most persistent and consistent left-wing opposition within the Bolshevik Party. The Decists were active from the Civil War, were a part of the defeated opposition of 1923, and were essential to bringing together the United Opposition of 1926 before they split to fight for a more left-wing platform. With Stalin’s rise to dominance, the Decists debated the nature of the new regime as Party democracy was more and more restricted and activists imprisoned. 

While many of the Decists argued that the Bolshevik Party had transformed into a new exploiting class from the late-1920’s, they never abandoned the struggle to re-establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. This session will investigate the hidden history of the Decists’ fight for democracy in the Soviet State and the insightful debates they carried out with the other left-wing forces.

Stalinism and the Crisis of 1928: The Trotskyists-Decists Dialogue

Our Differences with the Democratic Centralists

Letter to Decists

Statement of 15 Submitted to the Fifteenth Party Congress

The Decists: Democracy and Dissent in the Workers’ State

The Workers’ Opposition emerged as a faction within the Bolshevik Party through the Civil War and was ordered to dissolve just a few years later at the Tenth Party Congress. Despite this, the Opposition left their mark as harsh critics of rising bureaucratism in the Bolshevik Party and state, opponents of specialists, advocates for expanded workers’ democracy and trade-union control of industry. 

This session will explore the history and arguments of the Workers’ Opposition. Were they right to call out bureaucratism in the Bolshevik Party as early as they did? How could their proposals have reinvigorated democracy? And was Lenin correct to declare the faction a syndicalist deviation that couldn't exist within the Party?

Chapters 5-8

Losing Power: The Workers’ Opposition in the Russian Communist Party

On the relations between the Russian Communist Party, the soviets and production unions

The Workers’ Opposition

Speeches at the Tenth Party Congress (9, 10, 11)

Democracy, Bureaucracy, and the Party: The Workers’ Opposition in 1920s Russia

The Russian civil war of 1917-21 is one of the greatest of historical dramas. And it is the subject of important debates to this day.

The barbarity of the so called enlightened West is on full display: massacres, repression, anti-Semitic pogroms. All utilised to crush the workers revolution of 1917 and to give the peasants' land back to the old landed aristocracy.

The courage, determination, astounding organisational abilities, combined with self sacrifice by millions of workers and peasants across the Russian empire were pitted against the monstrous military  might of invading imperialist armies. 

This session will consider how an army of poorly trained soldiers were victorious.

 Also, it will assess the arguments by both left and right wing opponents of the Bolsheviks. Was the civil war unnecessary if only the Bolsheviks had been more reasonable? Were the measures they took to win that victory justified, or were they the basis of Stalin’s counter revolution?

Year One of the Russian Revolution

Revolution in Danger: Dispatches from the Russian Civil War 1919-21

The Russian Civil War: a Marxist analysis

The Civil War in the RSFSR and the International Revolution (Chapter 37)

The Civil War: Fighting for the survival of the Revolution

Working class women were at the heart of the Russian Revolution- sparking the February uprising with demands for bread, leading strikes and street protests, and transforming the struggle into a mass working class revolution. Throughout the 1917 revolution women continued to play a key role. The Bolshevik party championed this and helped lay the foundation for it; Bolshevik militants organised among women workers before and during 1917, from engaging the textile mills that launched the February Revolution to building women’s committees, workplace agitation, and political education. The Bolsheviks also took seriously the question of women's oppression and how a socialist society should mitigate and overcome it. After the revolution they implemented divorce rights, communal childcare and abortion access. This important history of working class and revolutionary resistance to one of the most significant questions of oppression continues to hold lessons and insights for socialists today.