Racism is at the forefront of the 2010 Australian election.

Julia Gillard’s successful challenge to Kevin Rudd for leadership of the federal ALP on June 24 delivered Australia its first female prime minister. Sydney Morning Herald journalist Josephine Tovey wrote the next day that, “While her role as the first female Prime Minister will make her a hero to many women, it is her actions that will keep her being one ...

We stand for the transformation of human society, from its current basis of greed, exploitation, war, oppression and environmental destruction, to a commonwealth of social ownership, solidarity and human freedom, living in harmony with our planet’s ecosystems.

“The ultimate reason for all real crises”, Karl Marx argued in Capital, his seminal work on the laws of motion of the capitalist system, “always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their outer limit”.

It’s easy enough to see that there are many things in this world that need changing. Figuring out how to change them is a bit more complicated.

I’ll begin with two preliminary remarks. First, football here refers to the sport played with your feet, not those codes where the primary limbs used are the hands. Some of these hand-codes are known in a handful of the 195 nations of the world as football. Australia is one of these, where the term soccer is used instead for football.

We stand for the transformation of human society, from its current basis of greed, exploitation, war, oppression and environmental destruction, to a commonwealth of social ownership, solidarity and human freedom, living in harmony with our planet’s ecosystems.

“Socialism sounds like a great idea, but it’s not really feasible. At least in the developed countries, workers are too brainwashed by the system, and the ruling class is just too powerful to be overthrown.” That is not a precise quotation from any specific person, but socialists frequently encounter arguments to this effect.

Thirty-five years ago the monstrous US (and Australian) war against the people of Vietnam finally came to an end. On April 30, 1975, Vietnamese forces entered Saigon.

We stand for the transformation of human society, from its current basis of greed, exploitation, war, oppression and environmental destruction, to a commonwealth of social ownership, solidarity and human freedom, living in harmony with our planet’s ecosystems.

Australia has been much luckier than most countries in the current international recession. While unemployment has certainly increased, it has not risen as much as in most of the world and, at 5.4%, it is still lower than it was throughout the 1990s.

We stand for the transformation of human society, from its current basis of greed, exploitation, war, oppression and environmental destruction, to a commonwealth of social ownership, solidarity and human freedom, living in harmony with our planet’s ecosystems.

“Why can’t the left get together? Why are there so many different socialist groups?” Sometimes these questions are just an attempt to belittle the socialist left by right-wingers (who nevertheless think it perfectly normal that there should be many pro-capitalist parties). But it is also a serious question from unaffiliated leftists.

Last month, I was fortunate to hear Phillip Adams’ ABC Radio interview with Dr James Hansen, the US scientist who has done so much to awaken the world to the fact that our climate is already changing and that it will change catastrophically if we don’t very quickly stop dumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

We stand for the transformation of human society, from its current basis of greed, exploitation, war, oppression and environmental destruction, to a commonwealth of social ownership, solidarity and human freedom, living in harmony with our planet’s ecosystems.

In a March 19 article on the website of the Socialist Alternative (SAlt) group, the largest Australian organisation claiming to be Marxist, titled “Why men don’t benefit from women’s oppression”, SAlt member Kate Jeffreys repeats a gross distortion of the Marxist analysis of the oppression of women under capitalism.

The first issue of the Socialist Alliance’s Green Left Weekly for this year, dated January 20, carried an article headlined “New period of left unity and struggle launched”.

In the wake of the failure of last December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to reach even a token legally binding agreement for greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction, and with the Rudd Labor government’s patently inadequate emissions trading scam blocked by the Senate, reformist environmentalists have been casting around for an alternative way to try to address the c

We stand for the transformation of human society, from its current basis of greed, exploitation, war, oppression and environmental destruction, to a commonwealth of social ownership, solidarity and human freedom, living in harmony with our planet’s ecosystems.

An Sydney Morning Herald report a few months ago unintentionally pointed out one of the absurdities of modern capitalism. This is that a good part of the so-called wealth of capitalist societies doesn’t really exist.

International Women’s Day began at a time of political and social upheaval more than 100 years ago, on February 28, 1908, when socialist women in the US organised demonstrations and meetings all over the country demanding women workers’ political and economic rights and called it “Women’s Day”. In 1909, 2000 people attended a Women’s Day rally in Manhattan.

“Penny Wong jeered, Hugo Chavez cheered” was the headline of an article in the Australian newspaper during the final days of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December. Wong, the Australian Minister for Climate Change, was there to “seal a deal” which favoured business-as-usual for the world’s biggest carbon dioxide polluters.

We stand for the transformation of human society, from its current basis of greed, exploitation, war, oppression and environmental destruction, to a commonwealth of social ownership, solidarity and human freedom, living in harmony with our planet’s ecosystems.

Marx and Engels’ establishment of the scientific basis of socialism was indispensable to the struggle for a better world because the fight against capitalism must be a conscious one in a way that capitalism’s fight against feudalism was not.

From its very beginning, capitalism has always created resistance in those it exploits and oppresses. Well before capitalism had overrun the rest of the world, in Western Europe, where it originated, it was engendering opposition, at times quite fierce: sabotage of capitalist property, illegal workers’ associations, local rebellions.