World capitalism seemed on the verge of collapse at the start of the 1930s. Yet in the late 1920s, economists everywhere were proclaiming capitalism had overcome its tendency towards crisis.

One of the most common explanations given for the dismal state of the union movement today is the decline in manufacturing jobs and a rise in white-collar industries. This supposedly means that a greater proportion of the working class is less likely to join a union. This is both nonsense and an excuse for unions to do nothing.

In 1929 the Communist Party of Australia established the Militant Minority Movement (MM). Its aim was to organise the union movement's growing disillusionment with the Labor Party into a cohesive force, pushing a policy of militant class struggle. This was achieved in just five years, laying a solid foundation in many unions we recognise today as the strongholds of the labour movement.

In May 1933 a group of about 20 mostly unemployed men, all except one recently expelled from the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) met in a hall in the Sydney suburb of Rozelle to form Australia's first Trotskyist organisation.

"If it's anything like Port Kembla...I'd sooner stay away. Men waiting round the steelworks, so that when a chap is killed they could get his job." This is how a character in Kylie Tennant's novel The Battlers described conditions at the Port Kembla steelworks.

As the temperatures rise over summer and the bushfire season heats up Simon Olley explains why the firefighting system in Australia is chronically underfunded and overstretched.

In May 1901, the Australian parliament met for the first time. Its first major act was to pass the Immigration Restriction Act. This enshrined the so-called "White Australia" policy, the basis of Australia's racist immigration program for most of the twentieth century. Under this policy, people from Asia and other "non-white" people were systematically kept out of Australia.

From the start, our rulers have been prepared to sanction any sort of abuse of human beings, if their power and profits depend on it.

On 10 September 1917 a crowd of thousands of disgruntled workers gathered in anger and despair outside the Trades and Labour Council in Sydney. A lone figure emerged from the crowd and began chalking a notice for a meeting in the Domain the next day. A voice from the crowd yelled out: "Why not now?" In response, a procession of some thousands was formed. They marched to the Domain where they voted to denounce the leadership who had just decided to end the biggest strike in Australia's history.

Tess Lee Ack presents an account of the Great Strikes of the 1890s that transformed the industrial and political landscape - and that still have lessons for us today.

The ruling class is engaged in a headlong push to revive the nuclear industry in Australia. The new sales pitch is "clean and green" with even some (ex) environmentalists getting on board the nuclear train. 

With so much uranium in this country, why doesn't Australia have nuclear power stations already? We owe much to the anti-uranium movement of 1976-83.