Build neighbourhood and workplace rank-and-file committees! While far advanced, Labor’s devastating plans can and must be defeated by the working class.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, has nominated US President Donald Trump, the author of a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Labor government’s handpicked representative from the Zionist lobby has called for a draconian crackdown on opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza under the false banner of fighting antisemitism.
Labor is persecuting 62-year-old Palestinian grandmother Maha Almassri, who has already endured decades of oppression by the Israeli state.
The emergency powers effectively establish a mini-police state where they are invoked, enabling police to establish roadblocks and to conduct searches without any reasonable grounds.
Premier Chris Minns’ state government is inflicting austerity measures on workers to satisfy the dictates of developers, corporate investors and the financial markets.
BPU members lash out after the WSWS exposes their censorship of socialist campaigners at a protest over the killing of Kumanjayi White.
The event confirmed the character of the new electoral fronts, controlled by Socialist Alternative, as political traps aimed at diverting anti-capitalist sentiment back behind the discredited parliamentary order.
The ACTU’s involvement in this event underscores the Albanese government’s increasing dependence on the trade union apparatus to suppress working-class opposition to its agenda of war and austerity.
The NATO summit held this week in The Hague marks a turning point in history. Seventy-five years after its founding, the imperialist alliance has agreed to the largest military buildup since the Second World War.
The announcement puts the Australian Labor government under great pressure to make major concessions to the US as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese flies to Canada for the G-7 summit and a possible meeting with Trump.
Admiral Johnston declared that Australians had to “reconsider” the country as a “homeland” from which to conduct combat operations for the first time since World War II.
The Albanese government is totally committed to the US war path, which means a wholesale assault on social spending.
David North addresses book launches in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia
David North, the chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site and of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in the United States, spoke at book launches in Sydney and Melbourne over the past week. The events were part of a visit by North, who has played a leading role in the world Trotskyist movement for more than 50 years, to the SEP in Australia.
Thursday’s meeting voted by 99 percent for stoppages, but the NTEU leaders are determined to prevent any struggle by academics and staff against mass job cuts throughout the university sector.
More than 600 Bus drivers in Melbourne and regional Victoria, employed by ComfortDelGro, have held three one-day strikes in recent weeks, against further real wage cuts and attacks on working conditions.
Teachers showed their determination to fight, but Queensland Teachers Union speakers sought to divert them into appeals for a deal with the Liberal-National state government.
The coalminers have been locked out without pay for almost three weeks, in retaliation for a single one-hour strike.
The open letter and the response it has generated speak to the depth of the anguish, shock and anger felt by healthcare workers as they bear witness to the atrocities occurring in Gaza.
There are events which burst through the crust of official politics and media-managed opinion and let popular sentiment erupt to the surface. Saturday afternoon at the UK’s Glastonbury music festival was one of those.
Antoinette Lattouf’s victory is a damning exposure of the extensive campaign that has been waged by the Labor government and the entire establishment, to falsely brand opposition to the Israeli genocide as antisemitism.
“It could be curtains for everybody with World War Three, nuclear war, and I’m trying to stop that. I’m terrified, horrified, especially so because I have children and grandchildren.”
The IYSSE is the only political tendency that advances a genuine socialist perspective based on the lessons of history and the interests of the working class.
Proposed techniques for age estimation of social media users include facial analysis or tracking individuals’ online metadata to determine if a user is under the age of 16.
While the immediate target of the new rules is clearly opposition to the intensifying Gaza genocide, they could be used to suppress any opposition to management, the government or the political establishment.
The decision marks a further shift to outlaw political free speech on the campuses and more broadly and must be opposed by students, staff and all those who defend basic civil liberties.
Beams pointed to the roots of the pseudo-left in tendencies that broke from the Trotskyist movement and rejected the revolutionary role of the working class.
The past three months have demonstrated that the fight against Labor’s administration of the CFMEU requires a rank-and-file movement independent of the ousted union leadership.
The ruling gives the go-ahead for a stepped-up assault on the wages, conditions and democratic rights of building workers, but it also means those who want to fight the administration can no longer be held back with the lie that all they can do is wait for the court’s verdict.
Zach Smith’s resignation as national secretary of the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union is an attempt to bolster his credibility with workers, as he continues to serve as a lackey of the administrator.
Union speakers could not openly discuss the election, because to do so would require an explanation of why they continue to back Labor, which has spent the past three years demonstrating its pedigree as a pro-war, big-business government that is totally hostile to the working class.
This report includes videos of speeches delivered by SEP members at the October 27 meeting, explaining the Labor government’s administration of the construction union and outlining a perspective to fight it.
Exactly one year ago, the Ukrainian socialist and leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists was arrested by the Ukrainian Secret Service.
One year after the arrest of Ukrainian Trotskyist Bogdan Syrotiuk, Left Voice, which is affiliated with La Izquierda Diario Network, has issued a statement calling for his release.
The WSWS rejects Alex Steiner's dishonest and evasive explanation of his decision to post false information provided by an anti-communist provocateur, aimed at disrupting the defense of Bogdan Syrotiuk.
Several months into the trial, the prosecution has failed to present evidence for its charges of "high treason" that served as the basis for Syrotiuk's arrest.
Phone: (02) 8218 3222
Email: sep@sep.org.au
Facebook: SocialistEqualityPartyAustralia
Twitter: @SEP_Australia
Instagram: socialistequalityparty_au
TikTok: @SEP_Australia
PO Box 75
Kingsgrove, NSW, 1480
Capitalist breakdown, the fight against war and the tasks of the Socialist Equality Party
This resolution was adopted by the Seventh National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia), held from October 3-6.
The Socialist Equality Party is standing candidates in the Australian federal election to build an independent movement of the working class against Labor, the Liberal-National Coalition, the Greens and capitalism itself.
At Thursday’s meeting, speakers Oscar Grenfell and Cheryl Crisp, as well as chair Max Boddy, presented a Marxist analysis of the May 3 federal election.
The election was marked by a mass repudiation of Trumpism, but within the framework of parliamentary politics, the outcome is a pro-business, pro-war Labor government that will collaborate with Trump.
The key ministers who prosecuted the previous Labor government’s militarist and socially regressive policies retain their posts but changes to the ministerial line-up signal a further lurch to the right.
The WSWS’ record stands as an irrefutable indictment of the capitalist response to the pandemic and a testament to the necessity for a global socialist public health program to save lives.
Only the Socialist Equality Party is opposing the deadly lie, peddled by governments, health authorities, trade unions and the corporate media, that the pandemic is a thing of the past.
The capitalist response to the pandemic has exacted a stark toll of mass death and disability, while accelerating social inequality and initiating the destruction of the world’s public health infrastructure.
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the incapacity of capitalism to deal with the problems of mass society, and that this social system is in an advanced state of regression.
Book launch with David North and Evan Blake: Two works, on Trotsky and the pandemic
At an event in Sydney, Australia on Thursday, May 25, World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North launched his new book Leon Trotsky and the Struggle for Socialism in the Twenty-First Century. He was joined by Evan Blake, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States, who presented another new title from Mehring Books, COVID, Capitalism, and Class War: A Social and Political Chronology of the Pandemic.
Socialist Equality Party assistant national secretary Max Boddy calls on workers and young people in Australia to sign up as an SEP electoral member.
The SEP has launched an energetic campaign to register with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) as a political party. This will enable us to field candidates with the party name on the ballot paper in the next federal elections. We are currently excluded from this basic right due to anti-democratic electoral laws jointly rammed through the Australian parliament by the Labor and Liberal parties on August 26, 2021, which tripled the required membership number to 1,500. This is to block ordinary people from choosing to vote for a socialist candidate.
The working class must have a conscious political voice. Join the SEP today.
Our party fights for:
● Social equality for all!
● An immediate end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
● An end to all militarism and war.
● A scientific program to eradicate the coronavirus pandemic. No to the mass death policies of the ruling elite.
● Against nationalism and racism. For the unity of the international working class.
● Quality, free education and healthcare for all. A decent, full-time job with permanent conditions for those able to work.
● A workers’ government and socialism—democratic control of the wealth that workers produce, for human need, not corporate wealth.
There is no solution to the crisis confronting the working class except by ending the capitalist system. The slaughter being carried out in Gaza is the latest and most bloody expression of the drive by imperialism to World War III. We advance a socialist program that calls for the abolition of a society based on corporate profits, the establishment of democratically-controlled public ownership over big business, and the dissolution of the vast military-industrial complex.
Fill out this form to apply to join the SEP as an Electoral Member.
Membership is free.
The AEC’s escalated reasons for refusing to release the information—claiming that it would not be in the “public interest” to do so—further underscore the anti-democratic nature of its ban on the SEP registration.
This Freedom of Information decision further exposes the anti-democratic character of Australia’s electoral laws and the AEC’s totally obscure use of them against the Socialist Equality Party.
Held in person in the working-class Sydney suburb of Bankstown and streamed on Zoom, the meeting was attended by a broad cross-section of workers, students and young people.
The AEC letter underscores the anti-democratic character of the country’s party registration legislation.
Australian electoral authorities reject Socialist Equality Party’s registration, despite it meeting membership requirements
The decision was made as the looming election is characterised by mass hostility to the official parties and a growing desire among workers and young people for a genuine alternative.
On Monday, Julian Assange walked out of the UK’s Belmarsh Prison a free man, following five years of imprisonment and nearly 15 years of persecution by a cabal of imperialist governments led by the United States which hounded him for exposing their crimes.
The Australian government's involvement in the plea deal arrangements was the result of mass popular pressure. It followed years of Labor actively assisting the persecution of Assange.
The complaints have a pathetic character to them, but also underscore the fact that the assault on democratic rights associated with the persecution of Assange persists and deepens.
In a press conference, Stella Assange hailed a global support movement for creating the conditions for Assange's freedom, while warning of an ongoing assault on press freedom that had to be fought.
“The criminal ‘let it rip’ pandemic policies of governments—invariably enforced by the labour and trade union bureaucracies—have exposed the brutality of capitalism, and its readiness to sacrifice lives for corporate profit and private wealth accumulation.”
“The same contradictions and crisis of world capitalism are also propelling the working class into struggle, providing the basis for the building of an international anti-war movement.”
A mass network of interconnected rank-and-file committees can and must serve as the foundation for the fight for the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a workers’ government based on a socialist program.
The ongoing persecution of Julian Assange is bound up with imperialist war, escalating online censorship and a broader turn to authoritarianism.
The Voice voting patterns demonstrate the intensifying hostility of working-class people to the entire political establishment.
An open letter, issued by a privileged layer of indigenous figures who led the Voice Yes campaign, further highlights the immense class chasm shown in the referendum’s overwhelming defeat on October 14.
Socialist Alternative’s analysis of the referendum is an attack on the working class, exposing this organisation as a rightward moving representative of privileged layers of the affluent upper middle-class.
“The Labor government is not working class, it is an elite group of people, setting up a puppet called the Voice.”
The program of the Socialist Equality Party is of a principled, not a conjunctural and pragmatic, character. It is based on an analysis of the crisis of world capitalism and an assimilation of the strategic revolutionary experiences of the working class and the international socialist movement.
The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party was adopted by the Founding Congress of the SEP in Sydney in 2010. It traces the historical events and strategic experiences of the working class and Marxist movement spanning more than a century.
Membership in the Socialist Equality Party is based on agreement with its Statement of Principles. The principles of the SEP incorporate the essential experiences of the revolutionary upheavals of the twentieth century and the corresponding struggle waged by Marxists for the program of world socialist revolution.
The lectures, now all available online, reviewed some of the fundamental lessons of the protracted struggle by the Trotskyist movement for socialist internationalism.
Crisp was a founding member of the Socialist Labour League, the forerunner of the SEP, in 1972, and has played a leading role in the Trotskyist movement in Australia for more than four decades. She was elected National Secretary at the Fifth National Congress of the SEP in 2020.
Max was elected to the position of assistant national secretary at the 2020 SEP National Congress. He writes regularly for the WSWS on issues facing asylum seekers and their inhumane treatment at the hands of Australian governments. He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Newcastle, majoring in Aboriginal Studies.
Authorised by Cheryl Crisp for the Socialist Equality Party, Level 1/457-459 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, NSW, 2010, Australia.
