For almost half a year, Serbia’s students have occupied their university buildings and led a mass protests against the Serbian government. They’ve forced the resignation of the government and destabilised a highly entrenched presidency under Aleksander Vučić.

This session will look at the inspiration and lessons that can be learnt from the student blockades and protests, how they’ve organised protests through mass, democratic methods, and how they’ve drawn into protests workers, farmers, pensioners and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people.

Serbian students lead mass movement against autocracy

Serbia in revolt: a student struggle unfolds

In 2024 Australia and Indonesia celebrated 75 years of diplomatic relations. Indonesia is considered one of Australia’s most important. In recent years government figures have gushed when describing the closeness of the relationship – from trade to defence and counter-terrorism co-operation. But it wasn’t always this way. Soon after the end of World War Two Australia collaborated with the main imperialist powers of the time - the Dutch in an attempt to hold on to its former colony and then the US to bring Indonesia into the American orbit.  

It's commonly argued on the left that Australia is simply subservient to big power allies. This session examines Australian imperialism in Indonesia and argues that Australia has own its imperialist ambitions especially in what it considers its own backyard - the Asia-Pacific. 

Australian imperialism in Indonesia 

The truth about the 1965 Indonesian massacre

The neighbour from hell [book]

Australia: the neighbour from hell

Since the defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament proposal, there has been a sharp shift to the right on Indigenous issues in Australia.

Anti-Aboriginal racism, which had largely been in abeyance since the end of the Howard era, has made an aggressive comeback. Emboldened by the defeat of the Voice proposal, conservative forces have launched numerous attacks on Indigenous rights. In the face of this offensive, the Labor Party has raised the white flag, either joining in on the attacks or offering no resistance to them.

This session will explain why there is a renewed backlash against Indigenous rights and explore socialist strategies for fighting back. 

How do we resist the new backlash against Indigenous rights? 

Capitalism is a runaway train and we need to pull the breaks. The billionaires are lining their pockets while the rest of us suffer. Elon Musk and his tech bros are gathering around the Trump regime stoking culture wars and slashing the budgets for social services. We are facing the prospect of a world wracked by climate crises, global wars and an expansion of the far right. Join us for the opening rally of Marxism 2025, to discuss how we can stop the capitalist horror show.

Opening night: Trump, War and the capitalist horror show 

As the violence of capitalism expands, so too does the resistance to it. In Serbia, student activists have inspired a mass movement against the corrupt regime. In Germany and Argentina, hundreds of thousands have marched against the Far Right. In Iran, courageous oil workers continue to strike for decency, in the face of a violent and repressive regime. We need a struggle against the system that can beat back the violence, oppression and injustice that is rife. Join us for this panel discussion. 

Wherever there is injustice: the global struggle against the system 

We need a revolution. To stop world wars and planetary collapse, power needs to be taken away from the ruling class and their cronies. This means we need to build the power of our side. We need more strikes, more protests, and more people engaged with socialist and revolutionary politics. Join us for the closing rally of Marxism 2025 and get involved in the fight for our future. 

Why we can’t wait: Being a socialist today

The story of Tiananmen Square did not begin – or end – in 1989. Protests erupted across the country following a decade of political and economic crisis and, although the movement was ultimately suppressed, workers and students redrew the boundaries of repression and resistance in contemporary China. 

Originally published in 1991, Charlie Hore’s ‘The Road to Tiananmen Square’ unearths the historical roots of the 1989 revolt. He explores the central role of workers, students, and mass movements in the creation of the Chinese Communist Party, the 1925-27 and 1949 revolutions, and the tumultuous reigns of Mao and Deng. In the new introduction to this updated edition, Hore charts the evolution of Chinese class relations in the wake of Tiananmen. Despite state attempts to repress and co-opt dissent, resistance to exploitation and oppression has been a constant feature of politics across China, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong.

 Red Flag Book Launch: The Road to Tiananmen Square with Charlie Hore

Early in 2019, hated dictator Omar al-Bashir was toppled by the Sudanese masses, bringing the rule of his Islamist clique and the military into a serious crisis. The following years saw a polarising of forces between the military and the civilian masses. Thousands of civilian committees popped up across the country with the aim of finally ousting the military from politics. 

Fast forward to 2025, Sudan has seen 2 years of counter-revolutionary civil war between two major factions of its military. The war has spurred on the worst humanitarian crisis this century, with millions fleeing the country and more displaced. 

Muzan al-Neel, Sudanese socialist, who participated who in the revolution of 2018/19 and resistance against the military, will be helping make sense of how such revolutionary hope was crushed both from within Sudan and from the wider world.

Revolution, counterrevolution and civil war in Sudan with Muzan al-Neel

In 2022, huge protests against austerity in Sri Lanka forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign in disgrace and flee the country as demonstrators occupied the presidential palace. In the wake of these protests, last year’s presidential and parliamentary elections saw a sweeping win for a coalition of leftist parties led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s Liberation Front). 

This session features a discussion with Bashana Abeywardane, a leading member of Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka. We’ll explore the evolution of the JVP from an avowedly revolutionary group that led insurrections in 1971 and 1987-9, to today’s parliamentary orientation. What does the election result mean for workers and the class struggle in Sri Lanka? Will the new government be able to introduce any meaningful change given the challenges facing Sri Lankan capitalism? And what are the implications for the oppressed Tamil community in Sri Lanka, who were subjected to a genocide in 2009 which was supported by the JVP?

Comrade President? Change and Continuity in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka’s People Have Kicked Out the Old Political Class

Crisis of Sri Lankan capitalism provokes a popular uprising

Mass struggle in Sri Lanka forces president’s resignation

75 years of Tamil oppression in Sri Lanka

The forgotten genocide – fifteen years on from Mullivaikkal

Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka on Twitter

Sri Lanka after the elections

Unions covering teachers and other school staff have been combative and effective in the past – and we need to rebuilt this militant approach if our unions are to address the multiple crises affecting public education. This session will feature Mike Naismith, a veteran of the Victorian teacher union battles of the 1970s and beyond. We’ll also hear from prominent Queensland rank and file teacher unionist Bec Barrigos, as well as education union militants from Victoria on the battles we face today.

Reds at the blackboard: Militancy in the teacher unions

Big ‘no’ vote a step forward for Victorian school staff

QLD Teachers Fightback

Thousands vote for union fightback

Classroom wars: teacher union battles from the 1970s to today

German politics is fraying under the pressure of the far right and rising inequality, expressed in the downfall of the traffic light coalition government. Despite this, the German left is struggling to respond to the new situation. The traditional party of the socialist left, Die Linke, seems trapped in an intense crisis, bleeding votes to Sahra Wagenknecht's socially conservative split party. Meanwhile, the revolutionary left is still marginal. This session, introduced by a revolutionary from Germany, will explore how Marxists are trying to rebuild revolutionary politics in the heart of Europe. 

This session is a part of the "Rebuilding the Revolutionary Left" stream at Marxism 2025, a series of sessions that highlights socialist activists involved in building Marxist organisations across the globe. 

Germany: revolutionary politics in the heart of Europe with Willi Schulz

France is a country in crisis. The centrist government of Macron has revealed itself to be an authoritarian regime of the uber-wealthy, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen is within striking distance of assuming power and despite years of protests, riots and strikes the left has not been able to turn the tide. This session, introduced by a revolutionary activist from France, will explore how the revolutionary left can build an alternative to corporate centrism and far-right nationalism.

This session is a part of the "Rebuilding the Revolutionary Left" stream at Marxism 2025, a series of sessions that highlights socialist activists involved in building Marxist organisations across the globe. 

France: a revolutionary alternative to Macron and Le Pen with Mathis Aversenq

Last year a massive youth protest movement exploded onto the streets of Kenya, rejecting years of growing inequality and the corrupt rule of an uber-wealthy elite. This session will explore the attempts by Kenyan socialist activists to build a revolutionary anti-capitalist organisation in Kenya, one that rejects the meddling of the imperialist powers and the African capitalist class that has ruled over Kenya since independence. 

This session is part of the "Rebuilding the Revolutionary Left" stream at Marxism 2025, a series of sessions that highlights socialist activists involved in building Marxist organisations worldwide. 

Speaker: Ochievara Olungah is a revolutionary activist, organizer and thinker. He has been organising among the Kenyan masses, youth and university students for nine years and is a member of the Central Committee of the Kenyan Revolutionary Socialist League.

Youth rebellion scores victory: an interview with Kenyan activist

Why the Kenyan youth revolted: an interview with a Kenyan socialist

Kenya: A Revolutionary Left in Africa with Ochievara Olungah

The election of far-right president Javier Millei has opened up a new round of attacks on workers' rights and social progress in Argentina. In the process, he has had to confront the fact that Argentina has a large and combative trade union movement and socialist left. But despite strikes, protests, and student occupations, Millei has not been defeated. 

This session, introduced by a leading Argentine socialist activist, will explore the response of the sizable revolutionary left in Argentina to Millei's attacks and the debates within the movement about the way forward.

Argentina: the socialist left and the struggle against Milei with Mariano Rosa

Yoon Suk Yeol's declaration of martial law in December 2024 caught many commentators by surprise. Journalists around the world labelled it bizarre or irrational and even pondered whether the President was suffering a secret mental illness. But for thousands of South Koreans the picture was immediately clear, with their snap midnight protest in Seoul fending off military rule in a country all too familiar with what that means. This dramatic episode in a drawn out political crisis in one of the world's most developed and modern economies, raises questions about power, class struggle, democracy, and imperialist rivalry in East Asia."

The battle for democracy in South Korea

Omar Hassan spent the first weeks of 2025 in Syria in discussion with Syrian revolutionaries, join him for this session to discuss the hopes and the challenges for the population of Syria after the fall of Assad. You can read his coverage in 

Syria after Assad

Trotsky is the most important theorist and practitioner of revolutionary insurrection in the socialist movement to date. As leader of the Petrograd Soviet and organiser of the Military Revolutionary Committee, he oversaw the first successful attempt to topple a capitalist government and put the working class in power. In a number of subsequent works, Trotsky laid out the political, social and military conditions which allowed the October Revolution to win. This talk will explore the lessons of the insurrection and the debates it sparked on the left.

Lessons of October

"The Art of Insurrection", Chapter 42 in History of the Russian Revolution

Trotsky on insurrection

Since being formed in 2018, the Victorian Socialists have recorded some of the best results for socialists in many years. But this is not the first time in Australian history socialists have had an impact at the ballot box.

This discussion will look at the history of socialist and radical electoral campaigns, and ask how they fitted in to building working class resistance and socialist organisations, and what lessons we can draw for today.

Help make history: get a socialist into parliament

Victorian Socialists: putting socialism on the political map

A history of socialist electoral projects in Australia 

The Communist Party of Australia reshaped working class politics in Australia from its foundation in 1920 for decades. But by 1991, it vanished with barely a whimper.

The story of the CPA is one of courage and dedication by thousands of working class fighters, led by the party in important battles. At the same time, it is a story of bitter disappointment as the party was plagued by bureaucratic Stalinist politics. These politics eventually led the party further and further towards capitulation to capitalism.

This talk will focus on Tom O'Lincoln's significant exploration of the decline of the CPA, tracing its rise to historic heights around World War Two, and its role in important struggles of the post-war period, as well as its ultimate decline and demise as it drifted "into the mainstream." This talk comes as 

is re-released in a new edition, with its lessons for revolutionaries of today as relevant and pressing as ever.

Into the Mainstream - The Decline of Australian Communism

Into the Mainstream: Understanding the Communist Party of Australia

US President Donald Trump was once distrusted by the world’s most powerful CEOs because of the “instability” he would bring. Today, billionaires and tech giants are flocking to fawn over his return to the White House, eager to reap the rewards of his anti-worker agenda. Australian capitalists like Gina Rhinehart and Anthony Pratt have funded congratulatory ads in major American newspapers while the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, leads an unelected “department” that will smash through all limitations on capital investment in the US. This session will examine the motives of these sycophantic profiteers who are giving Trump their direct political backing as capitalism increasingly accommodates far-right authoritarianism around the world.

Resisting the right-wing vibe shift

Why the capitalists have fallen in with the far right

MAGA and the Billionaires: a love affair

With Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches was the founder of the revolutionary Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland, in 1893. He was the Party’s main practical leader and also the principal organiser of the Spartakist League, the largest revolutionary group in Germany during the First World War, and then the Communist Party of Germany. Jogiches and Luxemburg, as leaders of Polish social democracy, were vehement opponents of Polish nationalism. Like Lenin, he saw the need for a centralised and disciplined, revolutionary party, with roots in the working class, if workers were ever to take and hold political power.

A Letter from Prison

Meet Leo Jogiches, Rosa Luxemburg’s spymaster who lived in Neukölln

Leo Jogiches and workers’ revolution in Poland and Germany

The public education system is a vital part of keeping capitalism alive. From kindergarten, children learn about gender roles and discipline. The schooling system is designed to produce literate, well-behaved adults who are already adapted to the overbearing atmosphere of the workplace. Ideological battles, like Indigenous history and LGBT rights, often play out over school curricula because school is where we develop fundamental assumptions about the society we live in. Private schools play a very different role, preparing the next generation of elites on their way to power. Come to this session to discuss how social class and government priorities shape education under capitalism.

Schooling in Capitaist America [book]

A tale of two schools: an education in inequality

Education under capitalism

Global politics today is shaped by economic and geopolitical competition between China and the United States. In this session, Chinese labor activist Kevin Lin will be talking to the book he recently co-authored China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry. Lin will discuss the themes of the book-  the rise of capitalism in China, class struggle, China’s place in the new world of inter-imperialist rivalry and crisis, and the possibilities for international working-class solidarity- in conversation with Australian Marxist Tom Bramble.

AUKUS and the US alliance: Australian imperialism in the Indo-Pacific

China in Global Capitalism: Building International Solidarity Against Imperial Rivalry

Against the US-China imperialist rivalry with Kevin Lin

The flame of revolution touched every corner of the Russian empire in the year 1905. For ten months between January and October, a mass strike wave ebbed and flowed in industrial towns and cities as peasants chafed against ancient relations in the countryside. Out of this crucible emerged the modern political form of working class political power. Come along to this session to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the "Great Dress Rehearsal" to the first successful workers revolution in history.

1905

The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Councils 1905-1921

The 1905 revolution and the birth of the Russian soviets

The history of spies in Australia

Socialist Alternative was founded by a small group of comrades in 1995. Since then it has become the largest socialist organisation in Australia with over 600 members across the country. This session will look at how Socialist Alternative developed a series of distinctive positions on how the revolutionary left can be rebuilt out of the wreckage of the neoliberal age that has helped guide us over the last 30 years and has shaped the kind of organisation we have become. Some topics discussed include: the debate over broad left parties, the role of socialists in protest movements, the socialist left and identity politics & students, workers and building an interventionist socialist organisation.

Speaker: Jordan Humphreys is a member of the National Executive of Socialist Alternative and the editorial committee of Marxist Left Review. He is also the author of Indigenous Liberation & Socialism. 

The origins of Socialist Alternative: summing up the debate

The broad party question after Syriza

From Little Things, Big Things Grow: Strategies for building revolutionary socialist organisations

30 years of Socialist Alternative: history and perspectives

The fight for the Amazon

Trump is presiding over the most reactionary US government in well over a century. From swingeing cuts to global aid to his plan to destroy total government departments, Trump's America is going to destroy the lives of millions of people around the world. Domestically he is just as brutal, violently evicting immigrants and throwing trans kids to the wolves. All of this alongside greater tax cuts and incentives to US corporations. While many of his policies are controversial, the capitalist class effectively backed Trump's return to the White House, as did the "opposition" Democrats who paved the way for it in the first place. The core of Trump's agenda - industrially re-equipping the US in the lead up to a war with China, and driving up the profits of US capitalists - is supported across the board (even if there are objections to how far some of the tariffs go). And although Trump's rule so far has been one of shock and awe, many of his proposals build on the existing brutality of US society ravaged by neoliberalism and endless attacks on workers. This session will look at Trump's presidency in the context of the last few decades of class war in the US.

Prisoners of the American Dream [book]

Trump’s new era of reaction

The American nightmare: US politics today

Far-right and misogynistic attitudes among young men are on the rise. In the United States, Donald Trump increased his support among young men by 15 percentage points last year. A recent Monash University study found that female teachers are facing an increase in misogynistic behaviour — and many are quitting the profession because of it. Why are teenage boys so misogynist and how can socialist organisations respond?

Teenage boys are being 'bombarded' with misogynist content online. It's making its way into the classroom

Andrew Tate is a misogynistic monster pimp

Why are so many teenage boys misogynists?

Before the development of world capitalism, different states targeted various sex acts as "unnatural" whenever this suited their needs. Only with the rise of modern industry and the enforcement of the nuclear family was the category of "homosexual" universally constructed and punished. This session will discuss how developments in social relations shaped the emergence of homosexual identity.

Foucault's 'History of Sexuality': A Marxist engagement

The Roots of Gay Oppression

The social construction of the homosexual identity

2024 marked the hottest year on record and the first to exceed 1.5°C of global warming. For millions, the climate crisis isn't some distant future but a devastating present. Meanwhile the rich and powerful continue to drive us off the cliff. Governments around the world are committed to plundering the earth and destroying the environment for the wealth of a small few. This session will discuss why we need radical system change in order to have a liveable future.

Without a revolution, we'll have climate catastrophe

New movement, new debates: The contested politics of climate change 

Why we need a revolution to solve the climate crisis

Part of Donald Trump's reactionary agenda has been a massive attack on transgender rights. In Australia, Pauline Hanson, Labor's Mark Butler and the QLD Liberal government are "investigating" gender-affirming care for people under the age of 18. Why are trans people facing the brunt of right-wing attacks? Why are the far right so obsessed with gender?  

Biology is not our destiny

Trump's transphobia must be stopped

Explaining transphobia today

Judith Butler's theoretical contributions are back in vogue after the publication of a new book, Who's Afraid of Gender?, grappling with far-right attacks on trans and LGBT rights. 

Butler's 1990 book Gender Trouble argued that gender is a performative social construct rather than a biological category. Contrary to popular understandings on the left at the time, Butler even argued that biological sex does not exist outside of social gender. This talk will give a Marxist take on Judith Butler and Queer Theory, explaining both their strengths and limitations.

In perspective: Judith Butler

The politics of Judith Butler

Despite all the gains made over the last 50 years, women have never been more objectified. Industries that thrive off the requirement that women look attractive to men at all times are thriving. The sex industry is increasingly normalised, and with it, attitudes that normalise the treatment of women as though they exist to serve men. And much of the time, it's women who are profiting from or promoting these soul-destroying practices. This session will look at why this is happening, who is driving it, how they are benefiting and what it is about the capitalist system that means it cannot tolerate genuine equality.

The system behind sexism

Misogyny as "entertainment"

Capitalism and sexual objectification

In 1910 German socialist Clara Zetkin moved a motion to establish International Working Women's Day as a day of protest uniting the labour movement around women's specific demands. 

Two years earlier Manhattan's Lower East Side had been shaken by a momentous strike of female needle workers beginning on March 8. The date was selected for IWD to commemorate the stirrings of women's industrial organisation. A century later, the day is claimed by liberal feminists and corporate PR pushers to brush over class divisions between women. Join this discussion to celebrate the real history of International Women's Day.

Honoring working women's struggles

The Radical Origins of International Women's Day (extract from the book Bread and Roses)

The strikes that made international working women's day

Abortion rights are being dragged back decades in America. Not content with filling the Supreme Court with conservatives, since Trump's re-election he's shut down the government-run reproductive health website accessed by millions. In Australia, various state Liberal parties have discussed restricting access to abortion. How were abortion rights won in the first place, and how can we defend them? 

Our bodies, our lives! A history of abortion rights activism in Australia

The struggle that won legal abortion

Abortion fights from Australia to the US

Despite some progress, women in Australia still get paid less, have worse jobs, retire with less and do more of the unpaid caring work than men. This is not the result of sexist attitudes on the part of men, although many have them. Inequality persists because capitalism is a system based on exploitation. Effective exploitation requires that the lives of the great majority of us are organised to maximise profits for business and industry, not to fulfil our potential or relate to each other as equals. This session will explain the connection between exploitation and oppression, focusing on the situation facing women in Australia today.

The impact of women's changing role in the workplace

Marxism and women's liberation

The XX Factor

Sexism and class in Australia today

The Popular Front: 90 years of class collaboration from tailing Winston Churchill and the US Democrats to Eurocommunism and identity politics.

The ‘left’ face of Eurocommunism

New Deal and Popular Front

The politics of 'Marxism Today' 

 The Marxism and Strategic Concepts of the Communist Party of Australia 1963-1972

Two Steps Back: Communists and the wider labour movement 1935-1945 [book]

The Popular Front

While revolutionary socialists might advocate for public control of utilities, nationalisation is not socialism. Socialism requires workers' control, which can only be the product of workers' mass revolutionary struggles.

What would be different about a socialist economy?

Workers' control of production

What do we mean by workers' control over production?

General strikes are nearly as old as the workers’ movement. They have featured in virtually every major upsurge of the class struggle in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The stakes are high as they bring the working class into conflict with the capitalist class and the capitalist state. This session will examine how revolutionary Marxists have understood the theory and practice of the general strike—not as a slogan applicable at all times and under all circumstances, but as a specific demand to be raised at particular, concrete points in the struggle.

The General Strike

Wars can take many different forms. Imperialist wars are an inevitable outgrowth of the competition at the heart of the capitalist system. Marxists absolutely oppose such wars. But socialists are not pacifists. We support the right of oppressed nations to fight for their freedom and the right of any future workers' state to defend itself against imperialist invasion. This session will discuss the different types of war and the attitudes socialists take toward them.

Marxism and War

From Marx to Lenin: Debates that forged the socialist approach to war

Marxism and war

Generations of socialists have tried to change society through parliament, a strategy known as reformism. Yet, time and again, these reformist socialists have ended up selling out to the capitalists and carrying out anti-working class measures, including supporting imperialist wars. But does that mean it is unprincipled for revolutionary socialists, who prioritise mass working class struggle and deny that parliament can be a forum for far-reaching socialist reforms, to run for parliament under any circumstances? This talk will discuss situations where revolutionaries have used elections and parliamentary positions as a platform to advocate for socialism, to disrupt the consensus-building process of bourgeois elections and to build faith in the working class and the possibility of a world organised for human need.

Revolutionaries and parliamentary elections

How should revolutionaries view parliamentary elections?

Revolutionary parliamentarism?

The Ballot, the Streets-or Both?

What is the socialist approach to parliament?

Mass protests change people. The act of collectively standing together pushes aside the powerlessness we experience in everyday life, builds confidence and generates a sense of strength. This experience lies at the heart of all famous movements against tyranny and oppression, all social action that has won radical reforms or ended wars. Protests are not just some strategy to pressure politicians to grant our demands, even though, at times, they do. They are essential if fundamental social change is to be achieved.

The importance of a mass movement

Militancy in movements

The Gulf States play a central economic and political role for capitalism in the Middle East. Economically, they are the centre of capital accumulation for the oil industry that produce vast amounts of wealth for a tiny minority. Politically, they are bastions of authoritarian reaction that brutally suppress their own populations and export counterrevolution across the region. This session will explore this role played by the Gulf states from a Marxist perspective.

Hothouse capitalism in the Gulf Arab states 

The contemporary dynamics of imperialism in the Middle East: a preliminary analysis

Oil slicked reaction: The role of the Gulf States in the Middle East with Adam Hanieh

Nasser speaking

In 1952, a military coup installed a group of junior army officers in power—known as the Free Officers and among them Gamal Abdel Nasser—and drove into exile the pro-British monarch King Farouk. Nasser's ascendance rode the wave of popular nationalism surging across the region in order to project a vision of pan-Arab unity and resistance to Western powers. This project inspired millions and made Egypt the leader of the section of the Arab world looking for independence from either the United States or the Soviet Union. In power, Nasser constructed a brutally repressive state capitalist regime that nationalised large swathes of the economy in order to rapidly industrialise the Egyptian economy. This session will examine the contradictory role played by Nasser and Arab nationalism and the influence it still exercises over Egypt and the broader region today.

From Nasserism to collaboration

Nationalism and revolution in the Arab world

Nasser and Arab Nationalism

Mass protests in the Arab Spring

The 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa started in Tunisia and spread across the region as far east as Bahrain on the Arabian Gulf. They shook and overthrew decades-long repressive monarchies and presidencies and opened up the possibility of social transformation. Yet, within a couple of years, the uprisings had been snuffed out as a result of both repression and their political weaknesses. What lessons can we learn from these uprisings and their defeat? All are welcome to reflect on and analyse these momentous events.

Ten years since the great Arab revolutions

Marxism and the Arab revolutions

The rise and fall of the Arab spring

Depiction of the Lebanese civil war

In the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-90, it seemed that revolutionary Lebanese students and workers could link up with resistance across the Middle East to transform Lebanon and provide a launchpad for Arab liberation. But thanks in large part to brutal military interventions by surrounding states, the revolution turned into a terrible civil war that ended in a stalemate and the PLO's exile to Tunisia. What went wrong, and was there an alternative? All are welcome for a discussion.

The hidden history of Lebanon's revolt

From revolution to barbarism: Revisiting the Lebanese Civil War

Woodcut by a convict

Resistance by both free and unfree labourers emerged soon after the colony of NSW was established in 1788. Sometimes, this took the form of individuals absconding from their masters; at other times, it involved collective action, including strikes, go-slows, riots and sabotage. Professor Michael Quinlan, author of "The Origins of Worker Mobilisation: Australia 1788-1850" (2017) brings this rich history to light.

Southern Tree of Liberty

The Origins of Worker Mobilisation: Australia 1788-1850

United We Stand: Class Struggle in Colonial Australia

Confronting the lash: Workers' rebellion in the early Australian colony with Michael Quinlan

Police in uniform

The right to protest in Australia is under attack. Protesters today face draconian laws, big fines and jail time for defying the state. Police forces around the country are becoming more militarised and courts are willing to dish out harsher penalties for activists challenging the status quo. This talk will explore the context for increased repression in Australia and how we can fight back.

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