Marxism 2024

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Addressing the Institute of Public Affairs earlier this year, Peter Dutton proclaimed “the time has come for a sensible and sober conversation on nuclear power in Australia.” With AUKUS, Australia is experiencing the most serious proposal for expanded domestic nuclear technology in decades. It’s no coincidence this comes at a time of increasing imperialist tensions between the US and China. The nuclear industry is not safe, clean or renewable – the push for its expansion should be opposed by the left today.

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The Wall Street crash of 1929 was a watershed moment. It not only plunged millions of workers into poverty but had a dramatic economic and political impact on world capitalism. In its wake, major economies embraced protectionism and state intervention and turned away from the "free" market. This laid the basis for a renewed intensification of international and domestic political tensions on everything from the remilitarisation of Europe to the expansion of Japanese imperialism into China and the crisis of the Weimar Republic in Germany. This session will unpack both the reasons why the Great Depression broke out and how it reshaped world capitalism for years to come.

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Israel’s brutal war on the Palestinians has strengthened the already growing interest amongst left wing people in the interconnections between colonialism, imperialism and capitalism in the Middle East and beyond. For many, this has meant an engagement with settler colonial theory. However, settler colonial theory is not a useful guide to understanding colonialism, imperialism and racism in today’s world. The emphasis on the cultural and ideological similarities between different imperialist projects - rather than the material and structural roots is disorientating. As is settler colonial theory’s dogmatic assertion that Israeli Zionist settlers and non-Indigenous workers in Australia are both privileged colonizers. The intellectual roots of settler colonial theory lie in the postmodern turn away from Marxism and the suspicion of socialist politics that this produced. This talk will explore the pitfalls of settler colonial theory, drawing attention to how it obscures the role that capitalism plays in reinforcing racism and imperialism and the disorienting impact it has had on developing strategies and movements to fight for a better world. Speaker: Jordan Humphreys is a socialist activist and the author of Indigenous Liberation & Socialism (Red Flag Books). He has written widely on Indigenous history and politics.

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Today China and the US are locked in a strategic conflict for global dominance. However, it was the US that helped transform China into the economic powerhouse that now challenges American hegemony. How did the US-China conflict emerge? And what does it tell us about the contradictions of global capitalism in the 21st century?

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Insurrection is a term that rarely enters debates on the left today. But revolutionary Marxists have long insisted that the capitalist state must be consciously dismantled if workers are going to overthrow the capitalist class and build socialism. This session will explain why socialist revolution necessitates insurrection, what it would look like and how socialists can organise for it.

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The Syrian revolution was part of the Arab Spring, a revolutionary wave across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011. The revolution began with demonstrations demanding the overthrow of the Assad regime. Self-organisation flourished in local coordinating committees and Friday protests. Assad’s regime unleashed brutal repression: sarin gas, barrel bombs, and widespread arrests and torture of political prisoners. This prompted the movement to arm itself in self-defence and form the Free Syrian Army. The brutal violence of the Assad regime and its use of sectarianism also assisted the growth of Islamist militias. Despite this, aspirations of the revolution lived on and sections of the movement continued to call for the overthrow of the regime, and for a Free Syria. These aspirations have re-emerged in anti-regime protests in September 2023. This session will outline why the leftists must support the Syrian revolution and how Syrians resisted the brutal Assad regime.

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In most of the world, Stalinist states have long since disintegrated. Many of the Communist parties that supported them have likewise collapsed. But even where organised Stalinism appears to have vanished, its ideological legacy lives on. As in every oppressive state, the Stalinist bureaucracy had to produce an ideology that justified its existence. We are used to the rulers of free market capitalist societies promoting some mixture of nationalism, “democratic” values and religious piety to convince their victims that we're all on the same team. Stalinism had its own versions of those tricks. But they were almost all expressed in the language of Marxism. That has left a poisonous legacy that holds back social movements to this day. This talk will explain how Stalinism distorted Marxism, and why these ideas persist in parts of the left today.

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There are few historical figures who have been subject to as much abuse as Leon Trotsky. In Stalin's Soviet Union he was slandered as a Nazi collaborator or agent of Western imperialism. Winston Churchill, on the other hand, labelled him the “ogre of Europe” for fighting to extend socialist revolution across the continent. The ire that Trotsky has provoked in defenders of the status-quo stems from his uncompromising struggle against a world built on exploitation, violence and oppression. He dedicated his life to the socialist revolution and held a profound belief that the working class has the ability to lead it. This talk will explore Trotsky's life and role in the Russian Revolution, and his fight against the counter-revolutionary crimes of Stalinism.

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The COVID pandemic, economic crisis and climate catastrophe have all exposed the continued and seeming irresolvable divide between the first and third worlds. To many, this divide can be explained as a simple case of rich countries getting rich off the back of poor ones. This can find echoes in the left in concepts like 'unequal exchange' and the 'labour aristocracy', which argue that first world workers benefit alongside their bosses from the exploitation of the third world. This talk will provide a critique of these ideas and argue that the central divide is the same across the globe- one between the bosses that organise exploitation, and a working class who have an interest in ending it.

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