Australia is often portrayed as a vibrant multicultural democracy committed to human rights and equality. The treatment of Indigenous people reveals a starkly different picture. Behind formal ‘equality’ before the law, Black deaths in custody continue, poverty endures, land rights respected only if some other consideration – usually monetary – doesn’t come along, and Indigenous identity, culture and history remain politically contested.
The ongoing reality of Indigenous inequality and oppression has fed a growing desire for a fundamental transformation in the relationship between Indigenous people and Australian society. However, there is a great level of confusion about what such a transformation could look like. Is an Indigenous Voice to Parliament a step towards justice? Can Australia be decolonised? And how does the struggle for Indigenous rights relate to other fights around economic and social justice?
Indigenous Liberation & Socialism offers a socialist perspective on these issues that explains how Indigenous oppression is an expression of the barbarity of capitalist society, and why the struggle for Indigenous liberation is fundamentally bound up with the fight for socialism.
Jordan Humphreys is a socialist activist in Sydney and has written extensively on Indigenous oppression and working-class history.