Marxism 2023 brings together activists, radicals, rebels, students, unionists and revolutionaries from across the world for a weekend of debate and discussion of contemporary radical politics, history and theory.

Speaker Index

The story of one Tamil refugee family, abducted in 2018 from their Biloela, Queensland, home by Border Force agents and forced into detention, is well known. And the groundswell #HometoBilo campaign to free Priya, Nades and their two daughters, Kopika and Tharunicaa was perhaps the most prominent individual campaign for refugee rights since mandatory detention was first introduced by the Labor Party in the 1990s.

Most coverage of the family’s plight understandably focused on them being victims of Australia’s world-leading, institutionalised cruelty against asylum seekers. But less was written about the fact that, if it weren’t for one woman’s determined resolve to fight, there would be no campaign, no court challenges and no trace of the family, at least in Australia.

The Marxism conference this year wlcomes as a speaker Kokilapathmapriya Nadesalingam -- Priya, as her friends know her.

Kokilapathmapriya (Priya) Nadesalingam

Peyman Jafari is a socialist and a historian based in the Netherlands and the US. His writes on the the social history of revolutions, the role of the labor movement in contemporary Iran, and the relationship between oil, labor and imperialism in the global history of oil.

Peyman Jafari

Sergio Garcia is a member of the leadership of the MST and the FIT-Unidad, and the director of the website Periodismo de Izquierda.

Sergio Garcia

Anxel Testas is a Galician–Mexican socialist activist and member of Anticapitalistas (Spanish state revolutionary organization). Based in Madrid, he contributes in 

. He will be at the conference in person, speaking on:

Strategies for party building: the experiences of Anticapitalistas within Podemos- 4:15 Friday

Anxel Testas

Joseph Stalin is the General Secretary of Sri Lanka's Ceylon Teachers' Union, which played a pivotal role in the mass movement to oust former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2022. Stalin was arrested and imprisoned for a week in a wave of repression against the movement. The Ceylon Teachers' Union has a history of militancy and solidarity with the oppressed Tamil population, and Stalin has previously been arrested for protesting against the militarisation of education.

Joseph Stalin

Liz Walsh is the Victorian Socialists candidate for the Western Metro region. She has been a socialist and refugee activist for the last 25 years. She fought to get refugees out of detention and get them permanent protection through protest and direct action. She has campaigned more recently for the release of the Park Hotel refugees.

Liz Walsh 

Ilya Budraitskis is a leader of the "Vpered" ("Forward"), Russian section of the Fourth International, which participated in the founding of the Russian Socialist Movement (RSD) in 2011. Ilya writes regularly on politics, art, film and philosophy for e-flux journal, openDemocracy, LeftEast, 

 and other outlets, and teaches at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and the Institute of Contemporary Art Moscow. The Russian edition of his essay collection Dissidents among Dissidents was awarded the prestigious Andrei Bely prize in 2017.

Ilya Budraitskis

brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist activist, writer, and agitator. They are one of the founding editors of Rampant Magazine and a member of the Tempest socialist collective. Their work has been published in Jacobin, Red Flag, International Viewpoint, New Politics, Spectre Journal and others. They are the co-editor and contributor to Palestine: A Socialist Introduction (Haymarket Books, 2021).

brian bean

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review (New York) and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of numerous works, including, most recently, The Return of Nature (2020), The Robbery of Nature (with Brett Clark, 2020), and Capitalism in the Anthropocene (2022)—all published by Monthly Review Press.

John Bellamy Foster 

A socialist, trade unionist and civil rights activist, Eamonn McCann has campaigned for social justice in his native Derry, and beyond, since the 1960s. He was educated in the city’s famous school, St. Columb’s College, where among his contemporaries was the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, and another central figure in Northern Irish political life, John Hume. Eamonn was a key organiser of the early civil rights marches in Derry in 1968 and’69 that lead to the founding of the Civil Rights Movement. He acted as election agent for Bernadette Devlin (later McAliskey) when she took a Westminster seat. He fought Westminster elections in 2005 and 2010, and successfully took a seat in the Stormont Assembly in 2016 on an anti-austerity People Before Profit Alliance platform. Eamonn campaigned against the Vietnam War and against internment in Northern Ireland. He’s been a strong voice advocating women’s rights, and tirelessly fought for the truth about what happened on Bloody Sunday. In 2008 he was acquitted of criminal damage charges during a campaign against Raytheon, a missile manufacturing company based in Derry, making weapons used in the Middle East. A journalist, he’s a frequent commentator on the BBC, RTÉ and other broadcast media.

Eamonn McCann

Layan Kayed was arrested on Monday morning, 8 June 2020, while crossing Za’tara military checkpoint. During the previous four years, Layan was a sociology student and activist at Birzeit University. Her arrest was part of an Israeli crackdown on the Democratic Progressive Student Pole (DPSP), affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Layan spent 15 months in Damon Prison for her student activism, experiencing tortuous conditions. She is one of several female Birzeit University student activists detained over the last two years.

Layan Kayed

Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian journalist, blogger and revolutionary socialist.

He has been an active participant in many key struggles over the past decades; including the 2008 Egyptian general strike, the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and the on-going struggle against repression post-revolution.

During the 2011 revolution, his reports provided a vital window into what was happening on the ground; particularly events in Tahrir Square – the heart of the revolution.

As a journalist his works have been published by major outlets including Al Jazeera and The Guardian.

Hossam is a member of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists.

Hossam el-Hamalawy

Emeritus Professor John Maynard is a Worimi Aboriginal man from the Port Stephens region of New South Wales. He has held several major positions and served on numerous prominent organizations and committees including, Deputy Chairperson of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and the Executive Committee of the Australian Historical Association. He was the recipient of the Aboriginal History (Australian National University) Stanner Fellowship 1996, the New South Wales Premiers Indigenous History Fellow 2003, Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow 2004, University of Newcastle Researcher of the Year 2008 and 2012. In 2014 he was elected a member of the prestigious Australian Social Sciences Academy and in 2020 made a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He gained his PhD in 2003, examining the rise of early Aboriginal political activism. He has worked with and within many Aboriginal communities, urban, rural and remote. Professor Maynard’s publications have concentrated on the intersections of Aboriginal political and social history, and the history of Australian race relations. He is the author of several books, including Aboriginal Stars of the Turf, Fight for Liberty and Freedom, The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe, Aborigines and the Sport of Kings, True Light and Shade and Living with the Locals.

John Maynard

Emma Dynes

Luka Kiernan

Janey Stone has been a lifelong socialist and activist since her days at Melbourne Uni in the 1960s. She was a founding member in 1972 of Socialist Workers Action Group which became the International Socialists and is a predecessor group of Socialist Alternative. She has been active around the Vietnam War, Women's Liberation, health and medical politics, trade unionism and Jewish anti-Zionism. She has published many newspaper and journal articles and given many talks on these topics and others such as radical Jewish history and resistance to the Nazis. In recent years, Janey's focus has been on cultural issues and she leads multi-media performances on political topics at the annual Marxism conference. Janey was the founding force behind the establishment of left-wing publisher Interventions in 2015 and edited Tom O'Lincoln's political memoirs The Highway is for Gamblers (Interventions 2017).

Janey Stone

Omar Hassan is a socialist activist and the editor of the Marxist Left Review. He has played a prominent role in a wide variety of left-wing campaigns, including the movement against the far right, for refugee rights and the environment. He has written widely on the dynamics of global capitalism, including his latest editorial 'Morbid Symptoms'.

Omar Hassan 

Liz Ross is a long term socialist who has written widely on Australian politics and the Australian labour movement. Her works include 'Revolution is for us: The Left and Gay Liberation in Australia', 'Dare to struggle, dare to win! Builders Labourers fight deregistration, 1981–94' and 'How capitalism is costing us the earth'.

Liz Ross

Chloe Rafferty

Katie has been a delegate for the library at the University of Melbourne for the National Tertiary Education Union for just over a decade. She has been involved in numerous campaigns to save jobs, around Enterprise Bargaining and to defend working conditions. She is also an historian and archivist, undertaking a phd on women in the Australian metal trades. She has written several articles for the Marxist Left Review.

Katie Wood

Grace Hill

Luca Tavan

Sarah is a Melbourne socialist, agitator and regular contributor to the Red Flag newpaper.

Sarah Garnham

Rick Kuhn is an Australian Marxist economist, political analyst and honorary associate professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. He is best known for his biography of the Marxist economist Henryk Grossman, for which he won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2007. Rick is the author of Labor’s Conflict: Big Business, Workers and the Politics of Class (with Tom Bramble), edited Class and Struggle in Australia and has written for International Socialist Review, Monthly Review,Counterpunch, The Canberra Times, New Matilda and Red Flag. He is a member of Jews Against the Occupation and Socialist Alternative and a life member of the National Tertiary Education Union.

Rick Kuhn

Corey is a member of Socialist Alternative's National Executive, and an editor of the newspaper Red Flag.

Corey Oakley

Kevin Lin writes about Chinese politics and China's labour movement, and his writings have appeared in East Asian Forum, Jacobin, Labor Notes, New Labor Forum, New Matilda, New Politics, Red Pepper, Socialist Review and others. He is also an editor at the Made in China journal, New Politics and the Asian Labour Review.

Kevin Lin

Jerome Small is Socialist Alternative's industrial organiser. He has been a socialist and union activist in the telecommunications, clothing, clerical and construction industries for over 30 years, as well as playing a prominent role in climate, refugee and anti-uranium campaigns.

Jerome Small

 is a long-time refugee activist, socialist and founder of the Tamil Refugee Council which played a leading role in the campaign to bring the Tamil refugee family of Priya, Nades and their two children home to Biloela.

In 1997 at the age of 13, Aran fled Sri Lanka as a Tamil refugee after his family faced murder and persecution at the hands of the genocidal Rajapaksa regime. Having spent much of the last two decades as a community and union organiser, he is now standing as a candidate for the Victorian Socialists in the upcoming Victorian state election.

Aran knows first hand the experience of Australia’s bipartisan cruelty towards refugees, having been locked up in detention as a child. From the Tampa affair to the Park Hotel detainees, both Liberal and Labor governments have overseen a punitive system designed to pressure refugees into returning to the countries they have fled. This session will be exploring the link between borders, anti-refugee racism and the priorities of capitalism.

Aran Mylvaganam

Dr. 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 Blacklivesmatter demonstrations, and he is also an outspoken supporter of Palestine and refugee rights.

As well as educating generations of people on the streets, Foley educates his students at Victoria University where he lectures in history. He 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:

 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 hundreds with his lively stories and research into Aboriginal history. 

Gary Foley: ‘a direct and fiercely intellectual man’

Dr. Gary Foley

Panos Petrou is a leading member of Internationalist Workers Left (DEA, by its initials in Greek), a revolutionary socialist organization in Greece. He is also on the editorial board of Workers' Left newspaper.

Panos Petrou

Tom Bramble is a long-term socialist activist, author and retired academic based in Queensland, Australia. He taught Industrial Relations at the University of Queensland for many years and has authored numerous books and articles on the Australian labour movement. His most recent book, with Mick Armstrong, is '“The Fight for Workers’ Power: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the 20th Century”.

Tom Bramble

Vashti is a socialist, member of the Socialist Alternative's National Executive. She is the author of the book 'The Story of Palestine' and is currently writing a PhD on Australian antifascism. Check out some of her other articles in the Marxist Left Review.

Vashti Fox

Sandra Bloodworth is a labour historian and socialist activist, based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been involved in radical politics since the 1970s, where she has played roles in the women's, Aboriginal, anti-uranium mining and trade union movements. She is a member of the National Executive of Socialist Alternative and has written on the Russian Revolution, the global financial crisis, women's struggles, working class resistance in the Middle East and Australian imperialism. 

Featured Speakers