Women’s rights in the US are at a critical juncture. A leaked draft Supreme Court judgement indicates that five conservative judges support overturning the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that established a woman’s right to abortion as a constitutional right.
Neither the Liberals nor Labor have any solution to the key problem facing working-class families—the battle to make ends meet.
This federal election, the Victorian Socialists are running their most ambitious campaign to date—contesting 11 lower house seats across Melbourne's north and west, as well as running a Senate ticket. Red Flag interviewed four VS candidates about what made them socialists, why they think people should vote for VS, and what have been the highlights from their campaigns so far.
The University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) student council has passed a historic motion in support of Palestine. The motion, “UMSU stands with Palestine—BDS and Solidarity Policy”, was moved by people of colour officer Hiba Adam and seconded by POC council representative Mohamed Hadi.
World military spending has passed US$2 trillion for the first time, according to new data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Last year was the seventh consecutive year that world military spending increased; total expenditure has almost doubled this century.
The Israeli High Court has approved the expulsion of between 1,200 and 1,800 Palestinians from eight villages in the Masafer Yatta region of the South Hebron Hills in the occupied West Bank. Should the expulsions go ahead, it will be the one of the largest incidents of ethnic cleansing in the area since 1967.
Red Flag is the publication of Socialist Alternative. We're Australia's biggest revolutionary socialist organisation.
Follow us:
Find out more about us here.
Australian workers’ living standards declined by about $800 last year and will go backwards by another $2,000 in the first half of this year, according to the Australian Council of Trade Unions. If current trends continue, workers will be $4,000 worse off by Christmas.
Moreland Council librarians, home care workers, gardeners and waste collection workers—members of the Australian Services Union and the Municipal and Utilities Workers Union—are taking industrial action.
In 1915, Rosa Luxemburg wrote The Crisis of Social Democracy while in jail for her anti-war activism. In it, she criticised the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) for betraying working-class internationalism with their support for the First World War. The pamphlet was smuggled out in April that year and published a year later. Distributed illegally under the pseudonym Junius, it’s commonly known as the Junius pamphlet.
“You know, I hope nevertheless to die at my post, in a street-battle or in a hard-labour prison”, wrote Rosa Luxemburg to a comrade in 1917. This was not rhetorical flourish or hyperbole: Luxemburg gave everything she had to the fight for socialism. Including, in the end, her life.
“Fighting the System, Rebuilding the Left” was the theme of Socialist Alternative’s 2022 Marxism Festival. The event is usually held in Melbourne, but this year was spread across Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide because of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic. Around 1,000 people attended across the five cities.
A 350-strong members’ meeting of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) at the University of Sydney has voted to take strike action twice in the next month, kicking off our industrial campaign with a 48-hour strike on 11 and 12 May. This follows two years of savage attacks on university workers.
The results of the French presidential election in late April expose an intensifying crisis and polarisation within French society. In the second-round run-off, President Emmanuel Macron was returned to office with slightly more than 58 percent of the vote against his far-right rival Marine Le Pen. Although Le Pen was beaten, her 42 percent support was the highest yet recorded by a far-right candidate, an alarming development.
The day after the federal election was called, I met Pushpanayaki, a Tamil mother with two children, in Sunshine in Melbourne’s western suburbs. She witnessed the Sri Lankan army murder tens of thousands of people in 2009, during the final days of its war against our people. Pushpanayaki fled the genocide with her husband; they came to Australia as refugees.
In October 1917, revolutionary Russian workers, supported by millions of peasants and soldiers, succeeded in overthrowing capitalist rule and replacing it with their own democratic structures of power. Exploited masses have risen up in rebellion throughout history. But in Russia, for the first time, they actually took control of society, created a government based on democratic workers’ soviets (councils) and, at least temporarily, routed the capitalist state.
With so little difference between what’s on offer from Liberal and Labor, it’s not surprising that independents can seem like a progressive alternative. This is reinforced by the common-sense illusion that voting is the only way to change things. But there is nothing progressive about the independents.
“If they do me in, I ask you to publish my notebook: Marxism on the State (it got left behind in Stockholm). It’s bound in a blue cover ... There are a number of remarks and notes ... I believe it to be important”.
The carnage of World War I was ended by revolution in Germany. It began in November 1918 with a mutiny of sailors in Kiel. The revolt spread like lightning among Germany’s war-weary and increasingly rebellious workers. All over the country, workers’ and soldiers’ councils were elected and held effective power. Within a matter of days, the monarchy collapsed.