Socialist Alliance
Socialist Alliance condemns violent police attacks on Occupy Melbourne and Occupy Sydney
For more reports on the Occupy movement, click HERE.
By Socialist Alliance (Australia)
October 23, 2011 -- Socialist Alliance -- Socialist Alliance condemns the violent police dispersal of peaceful protesters at Occupy Melbourne (October 21) and Occupy Sydney (dawn, October 23) and pledges its full support for the re-establishment of these occupations against the tyranny of the world's richest 1%.
The experience around the world has been whenever one of these Occupy movement camps has been attacked, even more people have rallied to support them in response. We are confident the same will happen here.
John Bellamy Foster: Capitalism and the accumulation of catastrophe
Film produced by Jill Hickson and John Reynolds.
[For more material from the conference, click HERE.]
October 20, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- At the 2011 Climate Change Social Change Conference held in Melbourne, John Bellamy Foster, Marxist academic, editor and author on economics and ecology, was a featured speaker. Above is the video of his keynote speech on September 30.
The conference was sponsored by the Office of Environmental Programs, Melbourne University, and organised and co-sponsored by Green Left Weekly, Resistance, Socialist Alliance and Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Other co-sponsors included Friends of the Earth (Melbourne), the Labor Party Pakistan and Sydney University Political Economy Society.
#Occupy Melbourne diary: Six days of peaceful protest, then police violently attack
Green Left Weekly’s Sue Bolton has been part of the Occupy Melbourne protest since it began on October 15, 2011. Below she recounts the past week of the occupation in Melbourne’s City Square, which was broken up by a violent police assault on October 21. However, protesters have vowed to re-establish the occupation once more. For more updates on Occupy Melbourne, regularly check GLW's live blog at http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/49153.
For more activist reports on the Occupy movement, click HERE.
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Day 5, October 19, 2011: Still going strong
We are still going strong with about 45 to 50 tents in City Square. I estimate there are about 100 people camping each night with many others staying until late in the night.
The occupation has been set up as a well-established occupation with a 24-hour roster for the info desk and the kitchen. The kitchen is feeding homeless people who also use the square.
The tide of rebellion and revolution now sweeping Latin America is posing a serious challenge to imperialism’s brutal global rule. For anyone who wants an end to war, exploitation and oppression, Latin America’s struggles to create alternatives are crucially important.
Australia's leading socialist newspaper Green Left Weekly is strongly committed to supporting the growing “people’s power” movement in Latin America. Through our weekly articles on developments in the region, GLW strives to counter the corporate media’s many lies about Latin America’s revolutions, and to give a voice in English to the people’s movements for change.
The continent-wide rebellion is weakening imperialism’s power. As a result, it is taking increasingly threatening steps to push back the power of the people. Our solidarity, to help the people of Latin America defend and extend their tremendous achievements, is vital.
Australian socialists: 'Occupy to put human need before corporate greed'

Statement by Socialist Alliance (Australia)
Download a PDF version of this statement to print and distribute
October 14, 2011 -- Socialist Alliance -- The Occupy Wall Street protest started small. But it has now become a global movement, with occupy events planned in about 1500 cities worldwide.
It’s born out of the recognition that, in country after country, ordinary people are being made to pay for an economic crisis caused by the super-rich. The 99% are being told they must surrender their livelihoods, their future, their security and their dignity to keep a broken system afloat.
In contrast, the 1% are having a wonderful crisis. The world’s biggest corporations have emerged stronger, more profitable and more powerful than ever before.
To add insult to injury, the 1% want to convince us that we, the 99%, are to blame for the crisis. They say our wages are too high and that we don’t work hard enough. They say our social security systems are not affordable and that our rights at work are should be done away with. They say our public education and health systems are not efficient and that our public services must be privatised.
Pakistan: Imperialism, dictatorship and fundamentalism
October 3, 2011 – The Labour Party Pakistan's spokesperson Farooq Tariq and human
Hands over the city: Towards an urban nightmare
By Dave Holmes
[This is an edited version of a workshop talk given on October 2, 2011, at the World at a Crossroads: Climate Change, Social Change conference in Melbourne. For more material from the conference, click HERE. It first appeared at Dave Holmes' Arguing for Socialism and is posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission. See also Are livable cities just a dream? by Dave Holmes.]
I want to give an overview of the crisis of our cities as I see it. The city I focus on is Melbourne, where I live. But I doubt that the broad situation is much different in the other states.
Modern cities are "free-fire" zones for the corporations. And the situation is getting worse. We can't work out what to do without understanding this basic reality.
How socialists work to win mass support

By Dave Holmes
Ian Angus: How to make an ecosocialist revolution
By Ian Angus
October 8, 2011 -- Green Left Weekly/Climate and Capitalism/Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Ian Angus is editor of Climate and Capitalism and co-author, with Simon Butler, of the new book Too Many People? This is his keynote presentation Climate Change Social Change conference in Melbourne, on October 2, 2011. For more material from the conference, click HERE. Thanks to artist Margaret Scott for permission to use her drawings in the PowerPoint slides visible in the video.
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October 5, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- In the late afternoon of October 5, 2011, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal passed another historic milestone -- its 2,000,000th article read (since statistics began being kept on April 4, 2008). The reader from South Africa entered site at the popular "Dissecting those 'overpopulation' numbers", an excerpt from the just published Too Many People? Population, Immigration and the Environmental Crisis by Ian Angus and Simon Butler.
That reader was the 1,509,498th visitor to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal.
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal's mission has been to promote the revival of a democratic, ecological, thinking, activist socialism, and to encourage and publicise the activities and views of active socialists around the world who are rebuilding the socialist and radical alternative in deed as well as word.

