Editorial: Trump ushers in a more barbaric capitalism

Trump’s first six months have dramatically transformed both US and global politics. His return to the highest office in the land was foreshadowed for some months, with the hapless figures of Biden and Harris incapable of staving off the resurrection of one the most incoherent, incompetent – and yet dangerously fascistic – figures in history.

Trump immediately declared that he had a “massive” mandate to radically restructure the politics, international relations and economics of the US, and as a result, the world. Trump’s first presidency was a surprise even to Trump, but this time he meant business. His supporters had developed a broad plan, known as Project 2025, to make US capitalism more authoritarian and pro-business than ever before. As well, without overstating their coherence, his team seemed more serious than last time round, and together enjoyed the fairly disciplined support of nearly the entire Republican party.

Trump began his reign with a bang, unleashing 26 reactionary executive orders in his first day in the Oval Office. Eventually a record 142 orders were signed in the first 100 days, an unprecedented onslaught against workers and the oppressed. The most publicised of these have involved dramatic attacks on women, LBGT, refugee and migrant communities. These include abolishing all programs designed to provide some assistance to oppressed minorities in employment, education and society, given the umbrella term of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). While some of these measures are entirely token and cynical, Trump’s move also undoes some of the more substantial gains won during the civil rights era. His declaration of war on the trans community is breathtaking in its scope, including expelling them from the US army, the federalisation of bans on pro-LBGT content being taught in schools, and expanded restrictions on books involving characters or themes related to LBGT material (along with racial justice, climate awareness, and so on) in libraries and schools. His government is seeking to shift US political life substantially to the right and entrench far-right ideologies for generations to come.

Drawing on his roots in reality television, Trump has given us a glimpse into the future of twenty-first century fascism, where brutal repression is packaged as entertaining spectacle. The arrest and indefinite detention of around a dozen pro-Palestinian student advocates was an early warning sign, sending a message to activists the country over that the new regime wouldn’t be pulling any punches, to insufficiently repressive liberal university managements that they were on notice, and to supporters of Israel that the new government had their back. His deliberately staged and televised deportation of so-called Venezuelan gang members was similarly designed to strike terror into the hearts of undocumented migrants, while also casting red meat to the Republican base. So too the subsequent clash with the supposedly liberal court system, a far-right administration declaring its bona fides as a counter-revolutionary agent of change.

It is important to recognise that Trump and the broader US state are not yet capable – materially or politically – of replicating these stunts on a mass scale. But this is no argument for complacency. These terrifying incidents remain potent means of inspiring supporters and terrorising minorities and dissidents. And in the long run, they risk normalising a new authoritarianism that further erodes the very limited democratic norms that exist in the US and elsewhere, and puts all workers and the oppressed in greater danger. Like the changes ushered in by his rigging of the Supreme Court, the Trump administration’s systematic replacement of liberals by MAGA operatives in the US state will have significant long-term implications for workers and the oppressed.

Trump’s decision to occupy Los Angeles with Marines and the National Guard is perhaps a taste of what is to come. Events were still unfolding as this piece was written, but it’s clear that Trump deliberately sought to polarise and escalate the situation as a distraction from his administration’s many failures. His description of Latinos and their allies as criminals and foreign invaders combines law and order with bigoted nationalism and sets the scene for a renewed authoritarian push. The targeting of a union official, and the threats to arrest the Democratic Governor Gavin Newsome, are also highly significant. Importantly, it has been resisted.

Along with all these highly publicised measures, Trump has unleashed serious attacks on the working class. These have barely registered in the broader discussion, largely because the corporate media is more concerned about the stock market than the living standards of US workers. But this bias is reinforced by a broad left that is more likely to call the Pope a TERF[1] (?!) than notice when hundreds of millions of people are pushed further into poverty and exploitation. But nevertheless, attacks on workers are a key component of the new regime’s agenda. One of its first moves was to fire one of the three remaining members of the National Labour Relations Board. This was an attempt to make all union activity null and void and was only prevented due to intervention by the court in March. Meanwhile, his draconian move to ban around two-thirds of the federal workforce from union representation stands while the courts rule on its validity, after the union’s attempt at an injunction was rejected by a federal appeals court stacked with Republican judges.

Trump’s war on workers extends well beyond organised labour. He has also sought to make substantial cuts to the remaining government agencies that provide desperately needed support for US workers and the poor. The mega bill currently before Congress proposes to cut around 25 percent of government spending on food stamps and kick around 8 million people off Medicaid, among other things. Trump also plans to begin cutting the (already abysmal) social security payments of those who have defaulted on their student loans by up to 15 percent as of June. All of this is necessary, it is claimed, to cover the cost of entrenching enormous tax cuts for the rich, which will cost at least $2 trillion over ten years. Overall, then, his “big beautiful bill” is set to unleash an historic attack on working-class living standards, even as it shovels more and more money into the pockets of the super-rich. An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office finds that the richest 0.1 percent will be about $390,000 a year better off as a result.

Meanwhile, in yet more proof that Trump’s economic populism is purely for show, the richest man in the world was given the job of slashing “waste” in existing spending on social services. It is unclear just how much Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has actually achieved, but the spectre of a billionaire and his private-school educated minions taking a chainsaw to, among other things, the departments of education and social security, sent a clear message regarding the domestic priorities of the administration. And even though Musk was eventually dumped for being a political liability, there are others in the administration with just as much zeal for “cutting red tape” as he.[2]

Imperialism unchained

Yet it is Trump’s foreign policy, rather than his ruthless attacks on workers or the oppressed, that has attracted the heaviest commentary – and criticism – from the international capitalist establishment. Trump has declared war on a series of US-led institutions such as the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, the Paris Climate Treaty, and dramatically cut US foreign aid. He and his followers are explicit, the US is no longer prepared to be the world police. Writing for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Jahara Matisek and James Farwell describe the new approach:

Gone is the era of Pax Americana, where the United States underwrote the global liberal order. A new framework emerges: Pact Americana. Soft power is gone, alliances are transactional, security guarantees are conditional and US strength dictates the rules of engagement.[3]

Trump’s instinct is that of the mob boss, demanding an immediate payoff from every interaction. This has manifested in calls for allies to stump up more funding for organisations such as NATO and in ambitious claims during bilateral negotiations.

Nothing shows the imperial arrogance of the new administration – but also its limits – more clearly than Trump’s ever-evolving tariff policy. His first targets were China, Canada and Mexico, a mix of two of the country’s closest allies and its biggest rival. (To this day US tariffs on Mexico and Canada, countries that are absolutely vital to North American supply chains, remain higher than those on Russia, Cuba and North Korea.) Then came “liberation day”, which saw enormous tariffs raised on a number of countries, again including long-term allies, which were taken off just a few weeks later due to turmoil in the deeper currents of the bond market and lobbying by key representatives of capital, including Musk, JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and many others. He might be further stymied by a New York trade court’s ruling that his tariffs were an illegal use of executive power, but time will tell where the Supreme Court falls on that issue.

Some, not least the administration’s own spokespeople, have attempted to justify these moves as a step towards the reshoring of key manufacturing to the US. And clearly this is a goal that drives parts of the administration. Yet any serious strategy for such a drastic reorientation of world trade would have to consider Mexico and Canada as functionally parts of the US. The USA’s excessive reliance on the ship-building and technological production facilities of Taiwan, Japan and South Korea is clearly a strategic weakness, yet could only be overcome gradually and with careful planning. It’s hard to see how Trump’s erratic policies could inspire companies to commit long-term investments worth hundreds of billions that they were not already considering. For now, US growth has slowed sharply under Trump’s watch, and most of his most radical tariffs have been abandoned. Who knows what tomorrow may bring.

On the military and geopolitical front, Trump suggests both continuity and change. The Biden years saw the US involve itself in two enormous military operations – Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the Ukrainian resistance to Russian occupation. In Gaza, Trump has essentially maintained the Democratic administration’s policy of largely uncritical support for the Israelis. He has managed to go even further, advocating for the Strip’s reinvention as a tourist destination – sans those pesky Palestinians, of course. It is hard to find words to express the horrors unfolding since Netanyahu restarted his forever war on the men, women and children of Gaza. The misery extends beyond the scope of human imagination, epitomised by pictures of emaciated children begging for assistance and body parts flying onto roofs. The barbarism unleashed on Gaza, including the deliberate targeting of hospitals and medical staff, the use of aid as a bargaining chip and so on, will likely set a new baseline for the wars to come. While governments offer only half-hearted criticism in the face of this deathscape, the global movement for Palestinian liberation continues to find ways to mobilise its supporters despite the fear of repression. It is vital that we do so, both in solidarity but also because it’s very possible that Gaza could be a premonition of our collective future.

In Ukraine though, Trump, at least initially, broke more substantially with Biden’s approach. Having judged that the occupied nation is not likely to return sufficient benefit on the investment of nearly $130 billion in US aid, Trump is attempting to cut his losses by forcing Ukraine to surrender. He has threatened on multiple occasions to withhold military aid and has successfully negotiated an agreement with Zelensky that will allow the US to profit from Ukraine’s mineral resources. So harsh were US terms early in the negotiations that one commentator compared an earlier draft of the deal to the colonial treaties imposed on China by the European powers in the nineteenth century.^[4] While the final document removes some of the most blatant neocolonial provisions, the overall message is clear and will be received by US allies the world over: protection doesn’t come for free. Having said all that, there is an attempt by the US Congress, the EU and other more traditional advocates for the US empire to pull Trump back towards confrontation with Putin. As with so much else about the administration, it’s unclear where things will end up. Trump’s decision to end the pause on military aid to Ukraine in July and threaten Putin with tariffs if he doesn’t sue for peace is only the latest twist in this geopolitical drama. Yet it’s important to understand that both the pro-war and the pro-Putin wings of the US and EU establishment are entirely reactionary and should be opposed by all those on the left.

For all their specificities, Trump’s policies on Gaza, Ukraine and tariffs all reflect a broader shift towards a more dangerous and aggressive imperialist posture. The bombing of Iran by the US in June is just the latest sign of this dangerous shift. The combination of resurgent nationalism, economic protectionism and increasing inter-imperialist tensions is reminiscent of periods leading up to intense global conflict and war. Some of this continues on from the work of Biden’s last administration, which expanded tariffs on China and worked hard to boost US industry. But Trump has radically expanded and transformed the means of achieving these goals, seeking to bolster the profitability and competitive advantage of US enterprises – and the state as a whole – by increasing the exploitation of workers at home and by extracting surplus value from both allies and rivals abroad. To achieve this it hopes to leverage its status as the world’s largest consumer market and its most powerful military machines. His preparedness to work with the Gulf states even more closely than Biden, even to the point of snubbing Netanyahu in his dealings with both Syria and Iran, is further proof of this transactional approach.

We cannot know whether the US can succeed in preventing the rise of an economically more dynamic China, and there is no political benefit to be had in guessing. What is certain is that the world working class is in an era of escalating tensions, involving both cold and hot wars, with unprecedented weapons of mass destruction at the disposal of the contending powers. There are counter-tendencies, including the interpenetration of capital and trade, and the fact that decades of inter-imperial peace means it will take time for both sides to prepare for total war. But the trajectory is terrifyingly clear. With the fraying of old US-led institutions that ran the world for much of the last century, we’re also likely to see increasing violence on the margins of the world system, as with Gaza and Ukraine. Contra the campist left, Putin and Netanyahu’s successes in conquering their relatively defenceless neighbours make further wars of aggression more, not less, likely.

Resistance grows

While it seemed at first that Trump’s second term would be more damaging and coherent than the first, even spurring talk of fascism, Trump still has many weaknesses. To begin with, his attempt to combine far-right personalities with the more traditional Republican hard right means there are constant tensions in his administration. These tensions have been on display in the debates over visas for skilled migrants, the toing-and-froing on tariffs, Trump’s decision to reverse the pause on military aid to Ukraine and the bombing of Iran. For now, the more orthodox ultra-conservatives, with their ties to big capital, have tended to win out over the more ideological extremists. Trump has then tried to compensate by ramping up far-right culture wars, hence his recent adoption of the white supremacist talking point against “white genocide” in South Africa.

Secondly, Trump remains quite unpopular. His first term saw him become the most hated president in US history, and he has already returned to similar figures just a few months into his second. This can seem at odds with the fact he won all seven swing states last November, but his victory was not a particularly decisive one. Most of the nation remained relatively unmoved by the relentless partisan debates (of incredibly little substance) that characterise US politics, with only very small changes in a handful of places delivering Trump his victory. In the end he failed to win a majority of voters, and, crucially, continued the Republican tradition of losing nearly every major city to the Democratic Party. So his substantial electoral college victory reflects the fundamentally undemocratic structure of the US system, where working-class voters in big cities are under-represented in favour of relatively unpopulated rural states. To this it must be added that many workers, especially those from oppressed minorities, do not vote. This can be due to the endless logistical barriers placed in their way, but also their lack of political support for the candidates on offer. Overall then, the fact that Trump only won the support of 29 percent of US adults means that, like last time, he would be vulnerable to mass resistance.

It was hard to keep all this in perspective in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory, which led to understandable shock on the US left, broadly defined. There was of course opposition to his attacks from the very outset, and a number of small but important local actions took place in solidarity with trans and migrant communities, among others. As well, it is significant that Republicans were advised to stop hosting traditional “town hall” public meetings to avoid public hostility[5] to the administration’s reactionary policies. But at a national scale, there was a sense of paralysis, disbelief that Trump could possibly win a second time. This was reinforced by Democratic Party, which decided early on that the best thing to do was “roll over and play dead”[6] while Trump trashed working-class lives and stoked bigotry.

It seems clear that the initial period of demoralisation among those in the US opposed to Trump has come to an end. In recent months there has been a steady growth in the size and scale of street mobilisations as progressives regained confidence that they could begin to resist Trump’s attacks.

Tesla dealerships were an early focal point, as activists sought to highlight Elon Musk’s role in slashing essential services under the slogan “Tesla takedown”. The contradiction of a company whose clients were mainly environmentally friendly progressives being operated by a sieg-heiling fascist was doomed to unravel, leading to a satisfying collapse in the company’s sales and share price, as well as Musk’s personal fortune. There were also small but important actions against ICE raids, and the kidnapping of pro-Palestinian student activists. However it was the nationwide “Hands Off” protests on April 5 – fortuitously timed just days after Trump’s liberation day madness – that created a new feeling of confidence. The day saw strong turnouts across all fifty states, including all sorts of small country towns as well as major urban centres. This was quickly followed by sizeable, if not overwhelming, demonstrations on 19 April and 1 May, and then even larger “No Kings” rallies on 14 June. Along with Musk’s sidelining and Trump’s tariff backflips, these rallies have given confidence to the resistance and will encourage further action. Opposition to Trump’s anti-migrant agenda has also taken the form of increasingly militant actions against ICE raids. The dramatic protests in LA in June were only the tip of the iceberg, with local actions against ICE occurring across the country. The bravery of often small numbers of people to intervene and try to stop arrests and deportations is particularly encouraging.

The popular opposition to Trump has encouraged greater institutional pushback against the worst excesses of Trump’s agenda. After Columbia’s early cowardice, a number of universities, notably Harvard, have taken a stronger stand against Trump’s intervention into their institutions. University managements – not to mention their staff and students – tend to be implicated in liberal networks of fundraising and organising, overwhelmingly tied to the Democratic Party. This helps to explain why Republicans despise them so, but also why their leaders have an interest in pushing back. It’s likely that campuses will remain an important flashpoint for struggles over curriculum, staff cuts, democratic rights on campus, and so on. Broadly, however, corporate opposition to Trump has been extremely limited, with most preferring to stay silent and avoid a confrontation with the president. Importantly, in the rare cases it has manifested, this type of opposition has focused overwhelmingly on issues that affect corporate profits, such as tariffs, not on the attacks targeting the vast majority of Americans.

As with all political movements, the growing resistance to Trump throws up political questions that need to be worked through. What exactly is being resisted? And what is the end goal? The Democratic Party machine argues that Trump is an outlier, a freak accident in the US political system. It follows that he can and should be defeated at the next electoral opportunity, and things can go back to normal.

The truth is that the US, like all capitalist states, has a long history of anti-democratic, bigoted and far-right politics. Its history of slavery and Jim Crow remains embedded in its social structure to this day, despite the formal equality won in the 1960s. And the mainstream institutions of the capitalist class and state – here we should include the courts, the police and military forces, the intelligence services, the Democratic and Republican parties, the universities and the corporate media – have never been a bulwark against such things. Indeed they have more often been the agents of it. Thus Barack Obama remains the president responsible for the most deportations in US history, the liberal New York Times supported the slaughter in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Gaza, and the police, FBI and CIA have consistently sided against democracy for as long as they have existed.

These terrible facts suggest that defending the status quo prior to Trump – and the despicable institutions that maintained it – is untenable for anyone seeking justice, either for US workers or for the many victims of US imperialism. Yet this is precisely what many of the mainstream organisers and media spokespeople for the resistance would have people do. Their goal is to keep the protests that take place as set-piece actions of reactive opposition to Trump’s excesses, rather than allow them to develop a progressive vision for the transformation of US society. This also explains why Palestine is so often left off the agenda, as Democrats share Trump’s undying support for Israel. And as midterms and the 2028 presidential election edge closer, the pressure will be to fall in behind every corporate Democrat regardless of their stance on key questions. In these conditions, the task of the left is to find creative ways of engaging with the broader resistance all the while fighting to win a minority to a more radical perspective.

Global reverberations

It might have been expected that Trump’s victory would prompt a surge in the fortunes of the international far right. Capturing the US state is by far their biggest win globally, and would seem to reinforce the likes of Modi, Meloni, Orbán and others. And clearly he has shifted the Overton window dramatically to the right in a series of ways, and the far right continues to make gains, as seen recently in Portugal and Spain. The contradiction, however, is that Trump’s America First approach has led to a nationalist backlash in country after country, placing some local fascists in an uncomfortable position. There have been three broad approaches to this problem. Some, like Marine Le Pen in France, have denounced Trump’s approach to international relations and declared their intention to defend their country against him. This has the benefit of appealing to the political mainstream, but risks alienating the more ideological of their supporters. Elsewhere, figures like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni have tried to act as mediators, emphasising their shared reactionary values in order to leverage better trade outcomes, while maintaining some independence. Then there are figures such as Modi who have revelled in finding themselves so ideologically in sync with an American administration. They risk being accused of prostrating their nation at the feet of a foreign leader, a reactionary line of argument that has been deployed effectively by centrists in places as diverse as Canada and India. These dynamics are unstable and will continue to shift as Trump’s policies evolve.

But while the far right remains somewhat awkwardly positioned, the political centre has been quite effective in using Trump as a means of cohering and galvanising themselves. In Canada, Romania and Australia, establishment forces have been able to channel widespread hostility to Trump to dramatically shift electoral outcomes. In France and Germany, centre-right parties have attempted to use Trump’s erratic imperial policy to justify massive rearmament drives and a more aggressive foreign posture. There is now talk of the need to broaden Europe’s nuclear defence policy, a terrifying prospect given the tensions in Ukraine and elsewhere. In France also, it’s possible that ruling-class fury with Trump bolstered the High Court’s confidence to ban Le Pen from the 2027 presidential election.

None of this has meant the centre is breaking with the reactionary social and economic values the far right espouses. Indeed, the opposite is true, as policies and ideas that were once seen as fringe continue to be normalised. Britain’s Keir Starmer is a perfect example of this dynamic, with his persistent and highly inflammatory attacks on migrants and refugees, support for the dramatic curtailing of trans and women’s rights by the High Court, and cuts to essential services and payments relied on by millions of workers. In this context, every political defeat of the far right feels temporary, their return almost inevitable. To break out of this cycle it is essential that the revolutionary left continues to grow and build its capacity to provide an alternative political pole and a way out of the social, economic and climate crises facing our world.

Australia: a global outlier

For decades Australia has been something of an outlier. Economically, it enjoyed a long boom between the 1990s and 2013, and saw living standards rising consistently, if anaemically. Politically the country has been remarkably stable: while the rest of the world deals with the rise of new parties, or the transformation of existing ones into something unrecognisable, our two-party system remains largely intact. There are counter-tendences, including the phenomenon of party leaders lasting less than a term and the rise in the percentage of voters supporting candidates outside the big four parties. But compared with similar nations the situation has remained remarkably stable, as Australia’s success in cashing in on China’s rise allowed it to ride out the global financial crisis and even the COVID pandemic with relative ease.

Further reinforcing this stability, Australia has not seen any sort of mass far-right force emerge either within or outside the parliamentary framework. This is partly explained by the country’s recent social and economic history, but not completely. There clearly is a hard-right minority who could be radicalised and organised by a capable and interventionist political current, and the votes of the various fragments tallied around 13.6 percent nationally in the Senate in the most recent election. But the Australian far right does not impact politics anywhere near as much as its support would suggest. In part this is because its main leader, Pauline Hanson, is incompetent, ageing, rurally-based, and does not appeal to young voters. Conversely, its most dynamic extra-parliamentary grouping, the National Socialist Network, is tiny and espouses Nazism, which makes it impossible to connect with a sizeable audience. Along with the billionaire Clive Palmer’s amateurish interventions, it’s been difficult for a new right to emerge that is more solidly organised and rooted in the cities. So for now, though its vote is stable, the far right remains fragmented and ineffectual.

There was potential for all this to change with the post-COVID surge in inflation, which saw a sharp drop in the living standards of Australian workers for the first time in a generation. Taking into account the cost of elevated mortgage repayments, the Australia Institute estimated that real wages in 2024 had declined by an average of $8,000 – or 12.4 percent – since 2021.[7] This was due to inflation, of course, but also the pathetic inaction of the union officials. These so-called leaders allowed their members’ wages to go backwards at a rate of knots, all the while cynically celebrating the achievements (sic) of the Labor government. Their failure is made even clearer given the historically low rates of unemployment, a situation which gives workers enormous bargaining power. In these conditions, it seemed as if a relatively conservative Labor government was set to be punished, as with so many other incumbents. Polls late in 2024 showed Labor set for minority government at best, and even left open the possibility of an historic return to opposition after just one term.

Yet just a few months later, Labor is ascendant following a smashing victory over the Liberal and National parties in the 2025 federal election. How to explain this stunning turnaround? Many mainstream pundits blame Dutton’s terrible campaign, in which it seemed every week a new policy or talking point was rolled out and then abandoned after coming under political fire. But his support was dropping well before the campaign officially began. And it’s doubtful whether many people pay much attention to the chattering classes and their inane daily commentary on the campaign trail. Others have suggested that the influence of the right-wing Murdoch media empire is falling to an all-time low. This is partly because the Murdoch press has drifted so far to the right as to make it nearly unreadable for anyone to the left of Genghis Khan.

A more compelling argument given for the result is that it is a refutation of Trumpism and the attempts by the Liberal Party to import it into Australia. There is clearly some truth to this, with a range of polls showing that the majority despise the US president. While this is definitely a positive sign, one caveat is that it is not clear how much of this hostility relates to his reactionary social agenda, as opposed to his generally chaotic approach to governance. Certainly Labor did not run strongly on issues such as Indigenous or LGBT rights, let alone climate change. And they refused to openly attack Trump, relying instead on indirect references to “politics imported from elsewhere”. But they were able to slam Peter Dutton for his flirtation with Trump’s policies – including attacks on working from home, public servants, putting the far-right Jacinta Price in charge of a local DOGE. And Labor benefited from the fact that inflation had stabilised, and real wages were no longer falling.

Dutton’s Trump-lite policies were widely seen as prefiguring an assault on workers’ wages and conditions – particularly those of white-collar women – and the essential social services, like Medicare, that make life bearable. These are the precise themes that Labor based their campaign on. This is an important point that can be obscured by simplistic comparisons with the Canadian election, where a former central banker gained heavily by posing himself as an opponent of Trump in aggressively nationalist terms. In Australia Labor did not run a right-wing nationalist campaign. If anything, they drew more deeply on social democratic motifs – albeit in typically tepid fashion – than at any time during their term. Their policy announcements focused on providing more support to workers by cutting student debt by 20 percent, increasing funding to Medicare, increasing childcare funding, and providing a (minuscule) progressive income tax break. Another difference was that in Canada the Liberal vote grew by cannibalising the rest of the progressive vote. In Australia, the election represented a clear, though modest, shift to the left, a result that wildly bucks the international trend. Traditional swing voters chose Labor or independents over the Liberals, all except the wealthiest Greens voters stuck with the party – and it picked up more working-class votes than ever – despite its relatively progressive positioning, and serious socialist candidates won good results across Melbourne.

The corporate media, of course, have no interest in such an interpretation, and instead chose to highlight the marginal swings that resulted in three out of four Greens MPs losing their seats as evidence of a rejection of extremism “on both sides”. According to them, the Greens were battered for their “radical” stance against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and for their “disruption” of Labor’s pro-developer housing policies. This narrative is being used by people inside and outside the party to argue for a shift back to the centre. This was prefigured in the final months before the election, when the Greens adjusted their messaging to being primarily about attacking Dutton as the main enemy, encouraging the idea that blocking the Liberals was the key issue in this election. The appointment of Larissa Waters as new leader would suggest a compromise between the left and right wings of the party is on the cards, but time will tell.

In this context, the national expansion of Victorian Socialists is an important step to consolidate the gains won in Melbourne, and can help both to put pressure on the Greens to maintain their leftish stances, while also giving left-wing and disenfranchised working-class voters a vitally needed anti-capitalist alternative. The construction of this kind of united socialist front in the electoral arena is of course just one part of building a stronger revolutionary movement in Australia, but it has already shown its capacity to popularise socialist politics in working-class communities, strengthen existing extra-parliamentary organising, and generate space for new campaigns moving forward.

Overall then, it is very positive that the right, led by Dutton and other extremists in the Coalition, failed to lead more than a small minority behind a Trump-like agenda. As a result, unlike in nearly every comparable country, the far-right bogey cannot be deployed to justify a shift to the right on social issues. The strong Labor majority means there are no excuses now for inaction on the various issues of importance to the left and working-class people. Housing affordability remains a permanent crisis for working-class people that the corporate obsession with increasing supply will do little to fix. Workers who have suffered years of declining wages, such as teachers, health professionals and others, could feel more confident to take action now that the economy has stabilised. Trump remains a lightning rod for opposition, a permanent factor of instability and resistance. The Albanese government’s support for the US’s bombing of Iran, the AUKUS submarine deal and Jillian Segal’s fake “antisemitism” plan have already made the priorities of the Labor Party clear.

But through all of this, Gaza. An unspeakable, unfathomable crime. A concentration camp and a holocaust, broadcast live. A daily reminder that resistance is essential but insufficient, that we urgently need to overthrow an international capitalist class capable of enabling these unthinkable horrors. If not now, when?

References

Carville, James 2025, “It’s Time for a Daring Political Maneuver, Democrats”, New York Times, 25 February. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/opinion/democrats-trump-congress.html

Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose 2025, “‘Never seen anything like it’: Trump’s outrageous new Ukraine deal”, Financial Review, 28 March. https://www.afr.com/world/europe/us-seeks-far-reaching-control-over-investment-in-ukraine-20250328-p5ln63

Jimison, Robert 2025, “Republicans Face Angry Voters at Town Halls, Hinting at Broader Backlash”, New York Times, 23 February. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/23/us/politics/republicans-congress-town-halls-trump.html

Kilgore, Ed 2025, “DOGE May Not Need Elon Musk Anymore”, Intelligencer, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/doge-may-not-need-elon-musk-anymore.html

LGBT Rights Australia 2025, “TERF POPE”, 9 May. https://www.facebook.com/EMRAUST/posts/pfbid0296jCeyBna2bxGZsGZkB1FqQMHQHRaNNNLSG1CQUkfxNt7B73wK9xN3g54B4Xq1Mml

Matisek, Jahara and James Farwell 2025, “Trump’s national security strategy: from Pax Americana to Pact Americana”, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2 May. https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/trumps-national-security-strategy-from-pax-americana-to-pact-americana/

Richardson, David and Greg Jericho 2024, “Wages are growing faster than inflation – but workers are $8,000 worse off than 3 years ago”, The Australia Institute, 13 November. https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/wages-are-growing-faster-than-inflation-but-workers-are-8000-worse-off-than-3-years-ago/

[1] Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. See LGBT Rights Australia 2025.

[2] Kilgore 2025.

[3] Matisek and Farwell 2025.

^[4] Evans-Pritchard 2025.

[5] Jimison 2025.

[6] Carville 2025.

[7] Richardson and Jericho 2024.