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Anti-imperialist Marxism Seminar Series [Melbourne]
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Anti-imperialist Marxism Seminar Series
Monthly Seminars – Wednesdays 6pm
Kathleen Syme Library, Faraday Street Carlton
RED SPARK offers this Anti-imperialist Marxism seminar series addressing key issues a revitalised Marxist movement in Australia will need to understand.
Socialism will only be possible if there are revolutions inside the rich, imperialist societies – especially the United States. Yet, so far, socialist revolutions have only taken power not in the imperialist countries but the Global South. To begin rebuilding the revolutionary movement in Australia we must clearly understand why that is the case.
Despite Australia’s political backwardness Revolutionaries here have a crucial role to play in the coming clashes and battles that the global imperialist system is creating. We must understand iso that we can effectively oppose future wars and support revolutions occurring internationally. Through both active internationalism and clear headed participation in movements of working people and young people in Australia, revolutionaries must aim to weaken the Australian state and strengthen the working class as one important factor within the global class struggle.
August 20 (tenth anniversary of John Percy’s death)
Anti-Imperialist Solidarity Campaigns in Australia: Indonesia, Vietnam, Timor Leste and Palestine today
Speaker: Max Lane
Powerful solidarity with movements against imperialist oppression have occurred several times in post-war Australia. Between 1942-1946, probably the largest ever mobilisation of trade unions black banned all work on Dutch ships taking soldiers, arms and ammunition to crush the Indonesian republican movement. In the sixties and into the seventies, unions, churches, students and the organised Left fought against the US and Australian war against the Vietnamese. From the mid-1970s and surging again in the 1990s, East Timorese refugees found allies among the Australian community and the Left to build solidarity with the Timorese liberation movement and demand the end of Australian military and diplomatic support for the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. During the same period, there was a campaign in solidarity with democratic movement against the dictatorship in Indonesia itself. Today there is a worldwide surge of support for the Palestinian liberation movement and demanding an end to ties with Israel. The Indonesian republicans, the Vietnamese socialists, the Indonesian democrats and the Timorese people all won those battles but, we face new challenges today. The Palestinians are still fighting. What can we learn from all these experiences about Australia and the world that may help the movement today for Palestine?
September 24
Viva Cuba and Venezuela: end the blockades!
Speaker: Ria Evelyn
Cuba since 1959 and Venezuela since 1999 have stood as examples to the rest of the world. Not only as examples to oppressed countries globally that it is possible to fight imperialism and win, but that to do so is the first step towards building socialism as an antidote to the terror, war, poverty and destruction imposed by capitalism. For this, western imperialist countries led by the US have sought to punish and destroy socialist Cuba and Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Economic sabotage, blockades, coups, invasions and assassination attempts are just some of the methods the US and its allies have used to try and overthrow socialism in these countries. Imperialist aggression has continually failed. The projects of building socialism in Cuba and Venezuela are surviving, however, they are under constant escalating attack. In this meeting we will discuss the serious challenges and threats facing Cuba and Venezuela today.
October 22
China’s Challenge to the US Stranglehold
Speaker: Sam King
China’s economic advances are seriously challenging imperialism’s stranglehold over China and, by implication, over other parts of the Global South. The history of capitalist imperialism is a history of subjugation and exploitation primarily through monopoly dominance over production – especially over the ability to “revolutionise” the production process – as Marx described it. Today, China’s ability, especially since the pandemic, to very rapidly emulate high quality production techniques and do so on a gigantic scale seems to be fast bringing about acute crises for imperialism’s ability to keep its monopoly.
November 19
The Left Can Revive: the Challenge for Youth in Imperialism’s Dead-End Era
Speaker: Max Lane
The world finds itself at the beginning of a crossroad in the evolution of the contradictions of imperialist capitalism. The capitalist system’s energy, which came from its struggle to establish and consolidate itself globally, has been exhausted. Politically this is expressed in degenerate, directionless “leadership” from Trump to Biden to the Australian scene. Most glaring economically is the extreme slowness, almost incapability, to adopt renewable energy widely enough. The countries of the Global South, with the partial, extraordinary, exception of the Peoples Republic of China, are stagnating in low-levels of productivity, with profound social and cultural consequences. Everywhere, the world is entering the period where capitalist method is the fetter on its own development to a degree that is severe and even existential.
However, imperialism is able to distribute impacts of the spiralling crisis unevenly. In Australia, like other rich-club, imperial societies, there are few direct stimulus to provoke the majority of people to first imagine, and then work towards a different future. The background noise of climate dystopia and social malaise is drowned out by countless distractions. The social conditions foster sleepiness and boredom.
Almost everywhere, including in Australia, the Left also stagnates below its potential. Severe ruptures with its past hinder the left’s capacity to learn the central historical lessons. The individuals being newly radicalised by the crisis, so far, reside mostly online but remain unorganised: throwing them into eclecticism and confusion.
Inspiration for those remaining active on left has come from the Global South: Cuba, Venezuela, the heroism of the Palestinians, and in a different way through the material achievements of China. In the Global South, a different social scenario exists: shaping a different future remains the immediate pressing challenge for the majority of people and shapes their outlook.
In Australian conditions, linking with Global South struggles must be a key in waking up, inspiring and training a new generation of young people to fight here – ultimately, and urgently, against our own ruling class. The first step is to prove that a socialist perspective is interesting, and more than a repetition of cliches or schema. It means linking with and understanding struggles internationally and grasping that another Australia is possible only in another World, different everywhere.
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ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Max Lane is renowned internationally as a writer and translator of Pramoedya Ananta Toer – a leading Indonesian dissident intellectual during the military dictatorship. Max was a key leader of the international solidarity movement against the Indonesian dictatorship and helped unite socialist opponents from Indonesia and East Timor with those in Australia. His latest book is Indonesia Out of Exile: How Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet Killed a Dictatorship.
Ria Evelyn has travelled on Solidarity brigades to Cuba in 2019 and 2023 and written on Venezuela and Cuba for the publication Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!
Sam King is the author of Imperialism and Development Myth: How rich countries dominate in the twenty-first century (Manchester, University Press, 2021) and Is China an Imperialist Country? (Red Spark)