Our Common Cause

Our Common Cause is the column of Socialist Alliance in Green Left which is widely recognised as one of the most authoritative left-wing English-language sources of news and political analysis in print and online. Green Left covers many of the issues and campaigns that Socialist Alliance members are involved in.

Members and supporters are encouraged to promote Green Left while campaigning in their communities and workplaces and to become financial supporters of Green Left to ensure its ongoing production and distribution.

Greta Thunberg told the massive Fridays for Future rally in Glasgow on November 5 that it was already clear that the COP26 climate summit was a “failure”.

The lesson from the G20 and COP26 is that it is not enough to just change an extreme climate foot dragging government for a seemingly climate friendly, big talking, but small action capitalist alternative.

Corruption is not an accidental feature of these parties, nor the result of individual greed or weakness. It is a structural feature of a system geared to protecting the interests of a few at the expense of the many, and cannot be ended without revolutionary change.

That the federal Coalition government cannot even promise a target by 2050 — which is pretty meaningless given the climate emergency requires dramatic carbon draw down in the next few years — reveals it is still trying to avoid doing anything.

Australia’s foreign and military policy is not a force for good in the world. Australia is one of a small clutch of imperialist powers that extracts vast wealth from the 85% of the global population who live in the less developed countries.

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Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed. We will never know the true extent of this disaster because counting was never systematic. It was bad at the beginning, and worsened under the Barak Obama administration which relaxed its “rules of engagement” for airstrikes.

Labor seems more determined than ever to promise little, hoping the next election will land in its lap without offering any meaningful change.

It’s obvious that the corporate-profits-first logic is incapable of dealing with the challenge of COVID-19 efficiently or fairly.

Even though different state governments are taking slightly different approaches, the reason for this debate is that governments — state and federal — are making corporate interests a higher priority than people’s health.

The aggressive police operation to “combat” the COVID-19 outbreak in Sydney’s South West is yet another example of politicians’ racist, anti-working class and punitive handling of the pandemic.

The pursuit of Wikileaks founder Assange is founded on a gross manipulation of the legal process – at every step of the way.