Snapshots of the ecological crisis in Australasia

January 19, 2020 by
Dunedin Smoke

NZ’s South Island with and without bushfire smoke (pic from Alpine Guides).

By Ani White.
This article will be published in Fightback’s upcoming magazine issue on Climate Change and Ecosocialism. To subscribe through PayPal or credit card, click here.

New Years’ Day 2020, Ōtepoti/Dunedin (Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Ironically, my first real-life encounter with the Australian bushfires – not mediated by Facebook, Twitter, or a press article – is the smoke that drifts to Dunedin, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Ironic because despite being born in NZ, my current place of residence is Victoria, Australia – a region which was only directly affected after my NZ holiday began. NZ is over 3,000 kilometres from Australia – contrary to a common misconception, we are not near to each other – so the smoke reaching Dunedin in NZ’s far south is not insignificant.

Although the yellow tint over Dunedin is less severe than habitats and homes destroyed, or deaths, the directness of the experience affects me more. It’s the first time the bushfires make me tear up. The concept of climate grief names this experience. Two weeks later, on my return to Melbourne, its air quality is the worst in the world1, though my flat is out of the path of the fire itself.

Environmentalists often wonder how to convey a crisis that you don’t experience directly. Yet now in Australasia and elsewhere, we are beginning to experience the ecological crisis directly. Even with this shift from abstract to concrete, the denial from key players remains, whether conservative denial of the basic facts of anthropogenic global warming, or liberal denial about the scale of changes needed.

***

October 28th 2019, Narrm/Melbourne (so-called Australia)
A ragtag collection of socialists, anarchists, indigenous protectors, and liberal environmentalists blockade the International Mining and Resources Conference (IMARC) at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

For me, it’s all very reminiscent of NZ’s weapons conference blockades. In both cases the crowd is narrower than the mass marches, and more militant, yet notably intergenerational. In both cases the tactic is to directly stop industry actors even if only for a day, to take direct action, not just symbolic action. And in both cases, police repression is brutal. Although the tactics are portrayed in the press as violent, they are fundamentally the tactics of non-violent civil disobedience – putting your body on the line. The weapons conference actions recently led to the cancellation of the conference in NZ, after a number of years moving between venues and cities in a futile attempt to escape protest actions.

My first hour is spent at the front line, the main entrance. Our arms locked together, cops pressing from behind, knees into backs. The horses arrive, always a terrifying moment of intimidation, and we chant ‘get those animals off those horses.’ The first arrest targets Jerome Small, a prominent socialist who is on the megaphone. A number of cops descend on him, knocking him to the pavement, and we cry ‘shame.’

An organiser requests bodies for another entrance. This is part of the difficulty of these blockades – the coordination to cover multiple entrances without spreading yourself too thin. About ten of us head to this smaller entrance. This site is quieter, though cops visit us a couple of times, monitoring us rather than trying to break the picket. We film them and they film us. During that time the police crackdown at the main entrance intensifies, with multiple arrests and at least one limb broken. Unfortunately I miss the participation of my own union, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), despite wearing an NTEU shirt myself.

Later, a photograph of one cop shows him pulling the OK symbol, recently adopted by far right trolls.

***

September 20th 2019, Narrm/Melbourne (Australia)
The biggest Climate Strike yet. An estimated 100,000 attend in Melbourne.2 More than 3.5% of the population attend the demonstrations in Aotearoa New Zealand. 3

My union endorses the strike. A colleague’s tutorial overlaps with the strike, so it’s cut short. In my classes, the majority of students are engaged with the climate movement, despite being generally uninvolved in party politics.

The NTEU contingent joins the student contingent joins the main march, at state parliament. At that point I move to the pavement to watch, and film, the tens of thousands streaming past, a stream not stopping for well over half an hour. My favourite sign says ‘Aliens will be so disappointed we chose capitalism over existence.’

***

August 26th 2019, Narrm/Melbourne Victoria (Australia)
SBS Australia reports the following:

A tree with smoke billowing out of it was discovered just after daybreak on Monday nearby the site of a mass protest demonstration to save sacred Djab Wurrung trees located in Victoria’s western districts.

Traditional Owners who have been camped out in an attempt to stop a controversial upgrade to the state’s Western Highway between Ararat and Buangor said they were left feeling “gutted” by the act of vandalism…

The Western Highway development along a 12.5km stretch of land could potentially see nearly 1000 trees bulldozed.

The suspected attack comes in the wake of a mass gathering at the Djab Wurrung Embassy in the past week, as supporters of the land and trees brace for an imminent eviction so that construction of the bypass can begin.4

The Djab Wurrung Tent Embassy, set up to protect ancestor trees from a highway expansion, is around 2 hours’ drive from my flat. I’ve visited twice, when the organisers sent out Red Alerts concerning potential police encroachment. When the arson at Djab Wurrung is perpetrated, the 2019 Australian bushfire season has not begun, but the Amazon fires are ongoing. Across the world, indigenous people are canaries in the coal mine, standing at the front lines of the fight to protect nature from colonial capitalism.

***

Even for those of us with a low opinion of right-wing politicians, the brazenness of Australian PM Scott Morrison’s non-reaction to the bushfires is shocking. Although much has been made of his family holiday, surely more significant is the initial refusal to allocate funding to volunteer firefighters. Surely, even for a man who once held a lump of coal up in parliament saying “don’t be scared”, this is an obvious national emergency. Surely even if you treat this as purely a natural disaster, disconnecting it from the context of increasingly dry land and rising temperatures, it’s good optics to at least pretend you take it seriously.

On December 29, months into the crisis, Morrison finally allocates some payments for New South Wales volunteer firefighters. Yet this is restricted to those who are self-employed or work for small or medium-sized businesses.5 Unemployed volunteers are still threatened with losing benefits, as they are no longer available for paid work.

The New South Wales bushfire is the largest fire front in Australia’s history.6 The Australian bushfires are bigger than the Amazon fires or the California fires. And yet they are met with sheer complacency and negligence, bordering on mockery.

Morrison is confirming our worst fears: that much of the ruling class have decided to simply let the world burn, let the poor die, and retreat to their bunkers (a number of them located in the South Island of NZ7). Morrison is now very unpopular, but if he loses out as a result of a reshuffle, the Liberals will likely continue his policies. Australia has recently charged through 3 leaders in 4 years, a political Hydra.

Although NZ’s Labour government is not quite as overtly atrocious as Australia’s, their response is still grossly inadequate. The recent Zero Carbon Act was heralded for achieving bipartisan success. For all the hashing out of various details on paper, the fact that emitters will face no consequences for failing to meet targets makes the whole thing basically toothless. The reality is that reducing emissions means confronting entrenched powers such as NZ’s agriculture industry. Bipartisanship and ecological justice cannot be reconciled. We’re left with outright denial at worst, and symbolic commitments at best.

I still hold to the position, not new but articulated recently by Extinction Rebellion, that only a mass social movement can force the necessary institutional changes – let alone replace destructive institutions entirely. Yet as the movement grows, institutions remain as yet unchanged, and the world literally burns around us.

1Smoke haze makes Melbourne’s air quality world’s worst, for a time, The Age https://tinyurl.com/ukk3b8z

2‘This crisis, it affects everyone’: Organisers say 100,000 at Melbourne’s climate strike, The Age https://tinyurl.com/y2zptemn

3Tens of thousands of New Zealand children kick off new climate strikes, Reuters https://tinyurl.com/w3ykfzl

4Ancestor tree on fire in suspected arson attack outside Djab Wurrung embassy, SBS Australia https://tinyurl.com/y5zl4v8e

5Scott Morrison announces compensation payments for New South Wales volunteer firefighters, ABC News https://tinyurl.com/vkbemue

6NSW Bushfires: Largest fire front in Australia’s history, Nine News Australia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvUDFCwSF9M

7The Super Rich of Silicon Valley Have a Doomsday Escape Plan, Bloomberg https://tinyurl.com/yaa4jzdy

Filed Under: Environment

Bus drivers refuse to accept abuse

December 13, 2019 by
Bus drivers march down central Auckland road calling for better pay and conditions, December 9, 2019.

Guest post by an anonymous bus driver.

For Wellington bus drivers it is “TIME” to take action, like Auckland drivers have just done.

For the record, earlier this year, our concerns were forwarded onto the head of the Trade Unions, Tramways Union Secretary and the Transport Ministers office, with the reassurance from these parties, that our concerns would be addressed as early as May 2019.

Considering the MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] agreement that was accepted by all participating parties, it is quite clear that the agreement has been breached, by not addressing our concerns as requested in May 2019.

In all fairness to the MOU partners, you have attempted to address one of our concerns, that of our hourly pay rate.  Albeit you gave us a very low and unsatisfactory pay increase of just 3%, without consultation or respect of our concerns raised before the pay increase was given.

Even proper toilet, restroom, and kitchen facilities have been denied drivers to date in appropriate locations.

All Parties fully understand that bus drivers’ rights and certain conditions have been compromised under the new contracts signed with Bus Operators in 2018, that is one of the main reasons why over 100 drivers left the industry in 2018.

The GWRC [Greater Wellington Regional Council] have admitted they “got it wrong” when they implemented the new bus network in July 2018.  Unfortunately, instead of addressing our raised concerns as to the main reasons for the network failure, (poor pay and conditions for existing drivers) The GWRC continues to blame the network failure on the bus operators simply not being “able to recruit new drivers.”

Recently over 50 drivers have resigned in frustration, any new raw recruits will quickly become disillusioned and end up resigning unless urgent action is taken.

The other “sad and disturbing” fact is: Recent advertising to recruit new raw drivers at the same rate as professional drivers shows a “total” disregard for drivers that are “experienced” and “faithful” to their Employer to date.

The general public are not easily deceived, The feedback on social media clearly shows that the majority of people fully understand that the main issue behind the network failure to date, is because the GWRC  is not looking after existing drivers and they (the public) have stressed that the minimum pay for experienced drivers should be $26 per hour.

Why then do all the MOU partners deliberately breach the agreement and continue to ignore the general public’s opinion   and continue to blunder along?  The answer is simple – to “Try” and save costs at the Drivers expense!!    “Unless” the drivers are well looked after, the costs and the failures of the network will continue to escalate, as has been the case to date.

As long as the MOU partners continue to blame other factors and avoid addressing poor pay and conditions for bus drivers, as to the main reason why the bus network is failing so badly, they will have headache after headache and incur further increased costs for all parties, unless the drivers concerns are dealt with in fairness and integrity.

 Instead of addressing the current driver issues, MOU partners are “sweeping them under the carpet,” and desperately trying to recruit drivers, knowing full well the  “pay and conditions for drivers is “below standard and uneconomical for drivers,”  causing real hardship and frustration for drivers and their families.

To date the Unions have failed to fully represent the “frustrated” drivers at MOU meetings and seem to be running their own agenda to a certain extent. They also endorse recruitment of overseas drivers at a higher pay rate than existing drivers, rather than ensuring that existing drivers get proper pay and conditions.

Because of the lack of constructive progress that the MOU partners are making in their meetings to date to make drivers pay and condition better, it clearly shows that the majority of existing bus drivers, potential new drivers and the general public are becoming totally “disillusioned” by the MOU partners and their antics to date that has caused so much disruption.

Even when the failure of the MOU partners to look after existing drivers pay and conditions has been exposed, the MOU partners blindly continue to spend  $ 100,000’s of dollars, trying to recruit and import drivers from overseas at higher basic pay rates than existing drivers based on a minimum rate of $ 25 per hour.

 The continuation of the MOU partners to “blunder on” and ignore the existing drivers and the general public’s concerns regarding the failed bus network in Wellington, will no doubt add to the current havoc in the bus industry, create many more potential bus accidents and the continual loss of drivers will continue to plague the industry, “until” current drivers are full respected and appreciated.

 Bus drivers have been “fighting” since 2018 to regain better pay and conditions, since new bus operators’ contracts were signed back in July 2018.  The actions/inactions of MOU partners to date, regarding the complete lack of real progress to address driver pay and conditions, is simply: “Unfair”, “Unjust”, “Wrong”, and “Out of Order.”

The bus passengers also have had “enough” of the network disasters and disruption,  failure to urgently address the matters raised re the above will leave bus drivers no other option but to take “industrial action”, the status quo can no longer afford to be allowed to continue ignoring the main issues that are continually been “swept” under the carpet.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:

Zombie Stalinism: 25 years later, who wants the Berlin Wall back?

August 20, 2019 by

honecker

This piece was originally printed on the IS Network (UK) website on the 18th November 2014.

We reprint it in light of the lapsing of that original post, aswell as our own convergence with the analysis of Stalinism and ‘campism’ (see for example Daphne Lawless’ Against Campism: What makes some leftists support Putin?).

Twenty-five years on, how has the fall of the Berlin Wall affected our analysis of Soviet Russia? How has what we have learnt changed our analysis of post-’89 Eastern Europe, Russia and the current situation in Ukraine?

The deepest discussions in the international workers’ movement about the relationship between dictatorship and democracy happened in the years after 1917 and either side of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the 1980s, revolutionary Marxists faced a growing crisis of Stalinist power in the East, and of the Stalinist parties in the West. Unlike the 1930s or 1940s, the failure of the Stalinist states to deliver democratic rights was more visible to many workers than capitalism’s failings. That, coupled with the low level of class consciousness, meant that many aspirations of working people and our allies could easily be channelled into social democracy and other pro-capitalist avenues. The way that the USSR and the other Stalinist states misrepresented the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ meant that workers rejected it both East and West.

In the 1980s, working people around the world were looking for alternatives to the dogmas of Stalinism. Stalinism was the root of elitist schemes in which a paternalist and monolithic party excluded workers from power, on the premise that freedom of discussion opened up the possibilities for counter-revolutionary ideas. Because it reflected the common sense of the post-war imperialism, this notion spread beyond the Stalinist parties and into parts of the social democratic and revolutionary Marxist movements.

The search for alternatives took place largely outside these parties and flowed into the social movements. In the East and the West, class consciousness was deeply stratified and uneven. Struggles spilled out in many directions, picking up the movements and leaderships to hand, like flood waters flowing down the path of least resistance.

The paucity of open, democratic and accessible organisations on the left had two results. First, the anti-Stalinist movements had to find direction independently, much as early feminist movements rejected by the western Communist parties found their ways into the social movements: the Stalinist narrative saw independent movements only as counter-revolutionary. Second, the left could not learn from those movements if it failed to recruit from them.

Schemas and dogmas, however, were not the sole preserve of Stalinists. Many revolutionary Marxists equated socialism with states that used nationalisation to deprive imperialism of a toehold, regardless of the concrete power of the working class. That blind spot meant that some socialists found themselves quite adrift. Some ended up supporting state-capitalist enterprises that operated in order to intensify the profit system. Many found themselves disoriented when working class movements confronted states that opposed a larger imperialism or defended nationalised property. They focused attention on the crimes of imperialism, but failed to make solidarity with the masses when they confronted governments which simultaneously excluded imperialism and the people from power. This acquiescence to the repressive secret-police apparatus of the Stalinist states meant that some socialists underestimated the degree to which the Stalinist co-option of socialist rhetoric would channel working class struggles into trade union, church and democratic movements.

Some comrades found themselves caught in the political dead-end that Ernest Mandel, the pre-eminent leader of the post-war Fourth International, called “campism”. Writing in 1983, Mandel criticised those who subordinated the interests of the working class and the revolution to the interests of defending the camp of states that opposed Western imperialism. He pointed out that the bureaucratic leaderships of these states were often mortal enemies of national liberation movements and working class struggles.

This campist viewpoint was widespead in the Trotskyist movement, notably in the English-speaking countries, as well as in the social democratic and Communist parties. In 1986, for example, the US SWP wrote that the progressive character of the Russian states was “a far more weighty factor for the world revolution than the obstacles represented by the Stalinist bureaucracies”. Mandel’s position was the opposite: “The counter-revolutionary role of the Soviet bureaucracy weighs more heavily on world history than the objective positive effects.”

These dogmas made much of the left unable to understand the developments of the anti-Stalinist movements, and the reality of the new movements’ fragile foundations led many on the left into quite disoriented positions.

The fall of the Berlin Wall remains a useful yardstick for revolutionaries. The working class moves imperfectly, and works with the ideas and the leaders it has to hand. The left must celebrate and learn from its imperfect legacies, from the NHS to the unfinished struggle for equality and unity in Germany.


On the 20th anniversary Gareth Dale wrote in the International Socialism journal to remind us of  the revolutionary nature of the movement for unification in East Germany. Those struggles are outlined well in his trio of books on the end of the DDR. However, Dale showed an appreciation of his readers when he wrote, “Readers of this journal are unlikely to be participating in the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the ‘transition to capitalism’ in Central and Eastern Europe and it’s easy to see why.”

Ironically it is Gregor Gysi, spokesperson of Germany’s ex-Stalinist party, who struck a more useful note on the 25th anniversary. Speaking last week, he reminded the Bundestag that the fall of the Wall was a victory for the masses: they confronted a dictatorship and defeated it in order to fight for democracy.

The challenge for the left is to celebrate the fall of the Wall as a progressive, revolutionary accomplishment of the German working class. The East German masses took up the ideas they had to hand: pacifism and trade unionism. The peace movement provided the initial core for the New Forum, a movement eventually backed by 200,000 East Germans. It argued for participatory democracy to reshape society but, partly because the trade unions were state organs, it mobilised workers through a grassroots movement rather than through the workplace.

That said, trade union militancy has deep roots in Germany, which had been warped by the DDR to meet the needs of the state. With the movements for democracy came new labour struggles and the foundation of independent trade unions, starting in East Berlin, encouraged by the positive experience of the independent Solidarity union in Poland. There were also unsuccessful attempts to move the New Forum into the workplaces by demanding a general strike, as Linda Fuller mentions in her book Where Was the Working Class? Mathieu Denis and Gareth Dale have also written convincingly about the role of workers in the movement: something removed from pro-capitalist and campist narratives about reunification. We should not deny the mass, revolutionary nature of these movements because of the later failure to defend and extend the social state, or because of the collapse of heavy industry on both sides of the former border. The ‘counter-revolution’ in East Germany did not happen in 1989, but before the establishment of the DDR itself. The creation of the DDR, far from creating socialism, had replaced one brutal, repressive dictatorship with another.

Nor, as John Rees does, should we view the outcome of reunification primarily as a matter of shifting walls between camps of states. In Rees’s opinion, the mass movement in 1989 was doomed because of the absence of socialist ideas. On the Counterfire website, he writes, “When Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev abandoned his East German satellite there was no social force that could resist the embrace of right wing West German chancellor Helmut Kohl. German unification would be a Western annexation, not the beginning of a social revolution…  The neoliberal offensive that took a huge step forward in Germany in 1989 has created a wall between the rich and the poor that is higher than ever, and more difficult to cross.”

This view is mistaken. Echoing Dale’s 2009 article in International Socialism, the revolutionary struggle in East Germany is discounted because of the prior absence of the ideal social force: a working class with revolutionary socialist ideas. The outcome is measured only in the partial attenuation of inequality between West and East, and the geopolitical defeat of Russia. For Rees, it seems, the development, success and memory of mass movements that ended the Stalinist dictatorships are nothing when weighed up against the expansion of NATO.

The same must be said of other struggles. Campism is alive and well, most clearly in relation to Ukraine and Syria. Some socialists have cultivated the absurdity of seeing Putin, leader of the Russian plutocracy that has used IMF diktats to suck wealth out of Russia, and his allies as governing an anti-imperialist bloc of states. The revolutionary struggles of the Syrian workers and peasants against the Syrian dictatorship are discounted by these comrades because US imperialism finds it expedient to oppose dictators who are independent of its sphere of control. In Ukraine, with a different constellation, some comrades are championing reactionary ultra-nationalists in the Donbass against a mass democratic movement. The nationwide Maidan movement took the path of demanding democratic rights and legal protections against corruption and oligarchical power. Because that movement mistakenly believed that an association with the EU was the most effective path towards those victories, some socialists discount the positive nature of the mass movements because one faction of imperialists benefits.

The reality is that mass movements do not always arise in the form of a working class acting consciously for itself. Whatever the level of class consciousness, factions of imperialism will try to co-opt, channel the course of and benefit from progressive movements. Transforming these capitalist factions into blocs whose interests outweigh progressive working class movements leads us to not celebrate the masses’ victories, but eventually to see them as counterproductive struggles which should be subordinated to the interests of neoliberal elites in Russia, Syria and elsewhere.

Socialists must learn different lessons from the fall of the Berlin Wall. The working class and its allies will never have perfect self-consciousness. Our task is to support its forward movement, preparing for the reality of the uneven and unknown path ahead, and never to mourn partial victories.

Ernest Mandel on state campism:

What lies today behind the argument of the ‘international relationship of forces’ is in reality the strategy of ‘state campism’, which tends to subordinate the interests of the working class and the revolution in a given country to the interests of defending this or that workers’ state, or the so-called ‘socialist camp’ of states in its totality. We do not accept that subordination in any shape or form – again not for ‘dogmatic’ reasons, but because history has proven again and again that any victorious spread of revolution strengthens the international situation of any and all workers’ states, because it weakens imperialism and international capitalism. Reciprocally, the defeat of revolution in any country, whatever may have been its origins or the pretexts for which it was sacrificed, weakens the international situation of the workers’ states and the working class.

So in reality, those who defend revolutionary self-restraint and self-limitation (including in Poland) do not defend the interests of the working class, the workers’ states, world socialism or world peace. They defend the interests and material privileges of the labour bureaucracy, even if this defence finds its ideological roots in the ‘dialectic of partial conquests’. In the bureaucratised workers’ states, these layers have become a monstrous ossified caste which rules despotically over society and oppresses the great majority of the working class. In open conflicts with that working class, they do not defend the workers’ state. They defend their privileges and their monopoly in the exercise of power, which are barriers on the way forward towards socialism. Likewise, when they oppose the international extension of the revolution, including with ‘pacifist’ arguments of the type ‘We do not want to provoke imperialism into launching war’ or ‘Destabilisation undermines peace’, they do not serve the interests of the workers’ state, of world socialism or of world peace. They serve the particular, conservative, anti-socialist interests of the bureaucracy. So there is no reason whatsoever to yield to these reactionary strategies and arguments.

Sources

Dale, Gareth, ‘A short autumn of utopia: The East German revolution of 1989’, International Socialism 124 (autumn 2009), http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=581&issue=124

Denis, Mathieu, ‘Labor in the Collapse of the GDR and Reunification: A Crucial, Yet Overlooked Actor’, doctoral dissertation, http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/dissertationen/denis-mathieu-2007-05-31/PDF/denis.pdf

Fuller, Linda, Where Was the Working Class?, University of Illinois Press, 1999

Mandel, Ernest, ‘The Threat of Nuclear War and the Struggle for Socialism’, New Left Review http://bit.ly/Campism

Rees, John, ‘Berlin: the wall that came down and the walls that went up’, http://www.counterfire.org/articles/analysis/17510-berlin-the-wall-that-came-down-and-the-walls-that-went-up

Filed Under: Campism, International, Revolutionary Strategy

Editorial: Syria – Revolution and Counter-Revolution

July 28, 2019 by

iss35-arab

Fightback is releasing a pamphlet on the Syrian revolution in English and Arabic. To buy a copy for $10, please email fightback.australasia@gmail.com. To subscribe to our publications for a year, please visit fightback.zoob.net/payment.html

As you probably know, this pamphlet was crowdfunded, not only to cover regular costs but to pay a translator to print in both English and Arabic. We thank everyone who contributed to the crowdfunding campaign, and Miream Salameh who translated the articles.

This pamphlet contains five articles on the Syrian revolution, originally published over five years, from 2015-2019 on the Fightback website (http://fightback.org.nz). Given this time span, some are outdated in the facts they present, representing the time of publication.

In Syria today, Assad and his lackeys are flattening entire neighbourhoods, so this little collection of writing seems like a small contribution in terms of solidarity.

However, ugly lies about Syria have become commonplace, infecting even the left1 which claims to be a bastion of solidarity. We therefore consider it important to tell the truth about Syria, as an absolute minimum commitment of anyone who believes in democracy and self-determination. As the authors of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War put it, “the start of solidarity is to correct the narrative.”

We insist on the need to learn from a real 21st century revolution, from its inspiring highs to its tragic lows. We have tried to draw from the knowledge and experience of Syrians themselves, with two reviews of books by authors embedded in the revolution, and an interview with a Syrian artist in Australia.

Some may ask what socialists are doing promoting a revolution that’s not directly for socialism. However, as Yassin al-Haj Saleh aptly observes in The Impossible Revolution, political freedom and economic justice are intimately connected. Socialism suffocates without democracy, as the legacy of 20th century revolutions reminds us.

On a sombre note, on the 15th of March 2019 far-right terrorists attacked two mosques in Christchurch, with 51 killed. Christchurch has long been a hotbed of white supremacist groups, however this is an escalation in a country that has not experienced mass shootings for over a century. We are glad to see Jacinda Ardern call these attacks what they are – terrorism – however we also note that successive Labour and National governments have focused their ‘anti-terror’ efforts on indigenous, left and Muslim groups as far right terrorists grew unchecked. Those attacked included Syrian children, having escaped state terror at home only to encounter more terror at the end of their journey. We stand against racism, sectarianism and Islamophobia everywhere it emerges.

Meanwhile, the ‘Arab Spring’ has re-emerged in Sudan and Algeria. The revolution will never die.

We hope you find these articles edifying.

1

E.g. Chris Trotter claimed on New Zealand’s most popular left blog that the CIA armed rebels from the early days of the Syrian revolution in 2011 (in fact this did not occur until 2013): https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/10/17/a-howling-moral-vacuum-americas-syrian-policy/

Filed Under: Publications, Syria

Introduction: ‘Fighting Islamophobia and anti-Semitism’ Special Issue

April 15, 2019 by

activestills_febr005

To order our pamphlet on Fighting Islamophobia and anti-Semitism for $20, please contact us at Fightback.australasia@gmail.com, or subscribe to our publications at Fightback.zoob.net/payment.html.

This Special Issue began as a response to the events of March 15th in Christchurch New Zealand, the murder of 50 Muslims by a far right terrorist.

On a personal note, a week or two before the attack I visited a local mosque to purchase a book. One old man, perhaps sensing a nonbeliever, kept saying “We are one people, Homo sapiens.” The awkward attempt to be inclusive was appreciated. The story of the old Afghani man at Al Noor mosque whose last words were “welcome brother” reminded me of this. Muslims welcome strangers into their places of worship, yet are not welcomed in so many countries.

We argue that stopping events like the March 15th attack from happening again requires that wider social processes are identified and stopped – particularly the spread of Islamophobia.

We also seek to undermine the false dichotomy between fighting Islamophobia and fighting anti-Semitism. Both reinforce each other, both are key building-blocks of fascism, and both are interlocked with all other forms of oppression and exploitation.

Despite the cries of ‘religion not race’, both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are racist: race is not a genetic category, it is a social one, and religious minorities are racialised by white supremacists. As for claims that Islam is inherently regressive, the Arab Spring proved that Muslim-majority countries are crying out for radical democracy, although the revolutions have now collapsed.

All forms of racism do not operate identically. The US regime, still the most powerful nation on Earth, promotes Islamophobia to justify its expanding military and surveillance state. Anti-Semitism has not apparently enjoyed the same level of structural support – although Trump recently dog-whistled about George Soros, reflecting his general tendency to not so much widen the Overton Window as tear it off its hinges. Russia, a nascent imperialist power, encourages both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as part of its strategy of courting the international far right.

Anti-Semitism poses a distinct kind of threat for the left. As Marxist theorist Moishe Postone highlights, anti-Semitism does not rely on a myth of inferiority like most racism, but rather a myth of superiority – the myth of a conspiratorial elite. This myth has found a new lease on life in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. This means while anti Semitism is not distinct to the left, and not the only form of racism that leftists reproduce, it can pose a special threat on the left, because it appears superficially to match a class critique of capitalism – yet it covertly replaces class with ethno-nation, a dangerous swap that lets many exploiters off the hook while scapegoating many of the exploited.

This collection comprises two Fightback articles, and two reprints. The first three pieces form a chronology of responses to the Christchurch attack; first, Faisal al-Asaad’s “Today we mourn, tomorrow we organise”, published the day after on Overland; second, a Fightback analysis of the processes that led to the attack, published a week after; finally, a piece reflecting on the relationship between Islamophobic attacks and anti-Semitic ones, published just over three weeks after.

The fourth and final piece was first published in 2014. This offers a more general perspective on how to criticise Israel – a key promoter of Islamophobia – without being anti-Semitic.

We hope this collection helps foster the solidarity needed to finally overcome the nightmares that continue to plague humanity.

Ani White, coordinating editor

Filed Under: Racism
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