Socialist Alternative Adelaide University | Political organisation
Socialist Alternative Adelaide University
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25.01.2022 Adelaide comrades showing solidarity with the staunch West End Brewery workers out on incredible indefinite strike for fair redundancy packages There’s been a wealth of stories to learn from, some told by workers who’ve been with the company for nearly four decades. Management and other scabs have tried to substitute themselves for the workers. Satisfyingly, reports suggest they’re not having much luck production is at a fraction of its usual pace and much is of unusable... quality. Workers make the company run, they should run company!
25.01.2022 The Brereton report confirms what socialists have been arguing for years: Australian troops are no better, humane or honourable than every other invading, occupying imperialist force. The Australian SAS were not on a mission for democracy or to free women from oppression: it was always about securing Western interests in the Middle East by brutal, bloody force. The 39 murders were also not an aberration: violence was what the SAS and al troops were there to commit, and the entire Afghanistan invasion was a crime. In this time of global crisis it's crucial to understand Australian imperialism. Join us for this important livestream tomorrow!
22.01.2022 Still time to get your tickets for day two of RevConf! RevConf2020.com
21.01.2022 On Zoom for Adelaide attendees
20.01.2022 What a fantastic public meeting with research presented by two marxist students, Leila and Nix, on the 70’s radicalisation. Highlights included Flinders University’s record-breaking student occupation, during which they broke into the Vice Chancellor’s office and discovered his work developing weapons for the Vietnam War, as well as hearing about how Adelaide Uni students used Union House to shelter draft dodgers. That’s the kind of radical politics we want to bring back to campus students intervening into social questions, disrupting business as usual, and sparking broader movements against injustice and, ultimately, capitalism. Message us or visit one of our stalls on campus to learn more and get involved.
18.01.2022 Today at 2pm! Come join the Socialist Alternative Adelaide Uni club for a discussion on the role played by radical women throughout history and in the struggles of today.
17.01.2022 The climate crisis is upon us. Instead of shutting down the fossil fuel industry, the Liberals want to use public money to fund the expansion of the gas industry. Join us this Friday to fight the capitalist consensus on expanding the fossil fuel industry.
17.01.2022 Write up of the brilliant indefinite strike at West End Brewery. A rare taste of true worker militancy in Adelaide. Some absolute gems in here: "The imported scabs are predictably hopeless. Every time the workers hear the machinery malfunctioning, strikers honk an air horn to embarrass them. When we hear bottles smashing, laughter crosses the picket line. For many, this is not their first strike. Older workers share stories from a time of union strength. Back when the site wa...s a closed shop, if a worker was arrested on the weekend, the company was expected to bail them out. Workers won perks, including a shared company-maintained holiday house. A story circulates about a manager twenty years ago who tried installing a camera in the workshop, suspecting workers of stealing tools. Hundreds of workers stopped work and chanted for this individual’s head, after which he was promptly dismissed."
13.01.2022 Tonight! Universities are being purged of creative content. Flinders Uni management gut arts courses while expanding ties with weapons manufacturers. Higher education has long been in a trajectory towards military and big business, putting profit ahead of furthering humanity and society. The Drama Centre came about in a time of great student radicalism and fightback. Struggle is what it will take to save it from a massive neoliberal restructure that will turn it into a glorified marketing and communications course.
12.01.2022 Join Adelaide university students on September 25 to show our support for the global climate strike! As if the health and economic crises of 2020 weren't enough, we are increasingly facing the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. In a terrifying sight familiar to us in Australia, California is currently facing its biggest and most extreme fires in history. Already, more forest has burned than in the whole of 2019 - 3 million acres - and the fire season is far from ...its peak. Instead of the immediate dismantling of the criminal fossil fuel industry, governments globally have loosened environmental regulations to allow new fossil fuel projects. In Australia, the government's COVID recovery commission, filled with mining and energy executives, is preparing a gas-led economic recovery, that will cement the country’s status as one of the world’s worst climate criminals. It's clear no one will save us but us. We must keep up the fight for climate justice. On Sept 25th, uni students across South Australia will gather at the UofA hub wooden steps for a speak out, and march as a bloc to Adelaide's global climate strike at Parliament House. Join us in rejecting the "gas-led economic recovery", and demand action on climate change.
12.01.2022 People have taken to the streets in their hundreds and thousands across the United States tonight as news breaks of the denial of justice for Breonna Taylor. None of the cops involved with her murder are being held accountable for her death. Just one cop is being charged with "wanton endangerment" - not for the shots he fired that killed her, but the shots that missed and hit neighbouring houses. This article gives a rundown of all the mobilisations across the country, showin...g the real depth of rage at the verdict and the violence meted out to black people in the US daily and hourly: Breonna Taylor protests live updates: Louisville police arrest about 100 during demonstrations https://www.wpxi.com//breonna-/Z6NYUQRFAZDFFNREINPISVLLJI/
11.01.2022 Via Sel Dowd: This is such an important fight being waged in NSW. The cops are on a rampage trying to clamp down on EVERY protest, no matter how small or how much safer it is to gather outside fully masked rather than with 40,000 others inside a sports stadium, or with hundreds of people squashed into supermarket aisles. There are attacks on us right now: the cutting back of Jobkeeper and Jobseeker for starters, the doubling of student fees, the refugees still in detention. T...here will be many more attacks coming soon from the rich and powerful as they try to make us bear the burden of the crises they created. Mobilising in our numbers is one of our most important weapons of resistance, to show how unpopular the ruling class' agenda is, to give confidence to our side when we gather in our hundreds and thousands. We can't accept any restrictions on our right to demonstrate. For several weeks now, students defying this crackdown on civil liberties have been levied with massive fines - please donate and share!
11.01.2022 The indefinite strike continues at West End. Socialist Alternative comrades have been down helping picket scab trucks like this one, which originally refused to stop and pushed picketers into the yard. Eventually, the picket forced him to turn back. Workers were exhilarated. Today feels like a big win without the truck emptying the brewery’s spent grain, production can’t continue. ... Nothing in, nothing out!
11.01.2022 Statement: We need to end the neoliberal approach to quarantine! Any health response to COVID-19 is only as strong as its weakest link. South Australia’s neoliberal model of high-risk hotel quarantine has proven to be the achilles heel of our pandemic response. The current medi-hotel system of casualised and underpaid private security guards is not safe for workers and the wider community. Our petition demanding fully-paid quarantine staff received over 5000 signatures this ...Continue reading
10.01.2022 session highlight! Revolution! 2020: a Marxist Conference THIS WEEKEND Spotlight on Latin America: Crisis and Resistance... Introduced by Socialist Alternative Melbourne socialist, Robert Narai Latin America is a nightmare. COVID-19 has lit up the vast class disparities that exist in public health and livelihoods, resulting in some of the highest per capita infection rates and death tolls in the world. But the pandemic also entered a region wracked by a series of pre-existing crises economic, political, social and ecological as well as one of the largest waves of popular rebellions that the region had seen for some years. Despite the right and far-right holding power in a number of countries and the projects of the parliamentary left in disarray, recent months have seen the re-emergence of popular struggles in response to the devastation wrought by these multiple crises. This talk will examine the parameters of the crisis and the elements of popular resistance that point to a way out of the nightmare. Check out the readings: https://revconf2020.com/spotlight-on-latin-america-crisis-/ View the full conference program: https://revconf2020.com/conference-program/ Get your ticket here, for just $20! https://www.trybooking.com/events/landing?eid=662521
09.01.2022 Postering for our public meeting on Adelaide student radicalism in the 70’s! Tonight at 6:00pm Lower Napier LG28 We’ll be outside the library from 12pm today, come chat with us about Marxist politics and getting involved
06.01.2022 Another reason to fight for system change: Any fall in CO2 output from a massive decline in economic activity globally is incomparably small compared to the years and years of rising global emissions. This years' fall in output will only take us to 2006 CO2 emissions. It's why hoping for a gradual reduction in fossil fuel investment is not enough. An "energy mix" will still produce enough of a mass of CO2 in the atmosphere to have a warming effect. "The Covid-19 pandemic will... deliver an unprecedented annual drop in global greenhouse gas emissions of up to 7% by the end of 2020, but the slowdown’s impact on the atmosphere will be almost imperceptible, according to a major report led by the United Nations. For this year, what this means for the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere fundamentally, is nothing, Canadell told Guardian Australia. That’s because we put 42bn tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere last year so even three per cent less means we are still loading the atmosphere so heavily that this is not even a blip.'
05.01.2022 Building the climate strike outside the library!
04.01.2022 Joyous student defiance in the face of extremely worrying police repression! As a letter signed by USyd staff explains: "Students [have been] told that they were allowed to congregate in groups if they were eating lunch, but not if they were protesting," the letter said. "This unambiguously constitutes political censorship." Please donate to help protestors pay their fines, in solidarity with the civil liberties campaign against the political use of COVID-19 to suppress political speech
01.01.2022 Today socialists attended the farce of a forum called by the UofA council board to "address student concerns" about disgraced sex pest former VC Peter Rathjen. Microphones were muted, cameras and chat disabled, and other students' questions in the Q&A box were hidden. Instead of answering questions asked directly by students, a panel of university management asked one another carefully paraphrased questions that they themselves had vetted prior to the meeting. The forum was... an authoritarian outrage orchestrated to ensure that students were kept silent while the university produced a PR video. They will no doubt use this "forum" as evidence that action has been taken to assuage student concerns about the scummy elite culture of the university board. The authoritarian way this forum was conducted proves the university has no satisfactory answers to student concerns about ruling class sexism and the way the university treats staff. No questions were answered as to why Rathjen should be paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars, while staff, who are disproportionately female at university, are being fired to make up a budget shortfall. This forum has affirmed that university management are not our friends in the fight against sexism or for wider social justice. We will continue to fight them and the rest of their class. University management clearly learned the lesson from Monash University that, given the opportunity, students will speak up and challenge power -- leading to further PR scandals. (News story here: https://www.sbs.com.au//monash-university-o-week-zoom-chat)
01.01.2022 Online for Adelaide! Exciting first time co-hosting a Marxist conference for us. Get your (very cheap) tickets now!
