Category: Anti-capitalism

30 Dec

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2012 in review: The year that politics disoriented the Left

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Immigrants protest against Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn

Just before 2012 closes out, I’m reposting my last Overland blog of the year, which originally appeared here. In some ways it is a summing up of themes we have developed at Left Flank since we started in mid-2010; chiefly in our attempts to present not just a general ideological or theoretical approach to the topics we covered, but to concretely analyse actually existing politics — something that we thought had not been focused on enough by the Australian Marxist Left in recent years. We hope readers have found the blog and our writings elsewhere stimulating because of that focus, and we look forward to developing these ideas more next year. Thanks to all of you for your readership, comments, criticisms and support.

The political prediction business is not one you should engage in unless you’re either willing to repeatedly admit erroneous forecasts (one of Ben Eltham’s most endearing qualities) or to march on obliviously ignoring them (most of the rest of the commentariat). It’s even worse for us Marxists, as we’re notorious for having accurately foretold five out of the last two recessions. The problem is that history unfolds dialectically in the real world, and not simply through a logical derivation from some initial starting point.

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Filed Under: age of austerity, ALP, Anti-capitalism, Christine Milne, Egypt, Europe, Featured, Greece, Greens, imperialism, Islamism, Julia Gillard, Left strategy, revolution, social democracy, social movements, Spain, trade unions

04 Nov

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Australia’s #occupy protests: When ‘politics’ is no longer just a game played by elites

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Occupy Sydney: photo by Kate Ausburn

This week ABC’s The Drum published an article by Tad on the Occupy Movement and the demand from many that it list its ‘demands’. Below is the article in full. Tad was also interviewed on ABC Brisbane about this question.

It’s been remarkable to see the sheer number of public lectures and admonishments – delivered by assorted politicians, pundits, bloggers and Tweeters – that Australia’s #occupy activists have had to endure since they started their protests on October 15.

Indeed, there is a glaring contradiction in the fact that so much attention has been paid to a movement by detractors who also claim it is irrelevant to local conditions and therefore has no chance of attracting wider recognition.

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Filed Under: Anti-capitalism, Left strategy

31 Oct

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Qantas lock-out: The 1% declares all-out war on the 99%, and Gillard lends it a hand

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If there was ever any proof needed that the central concerns of the #occupy movement, about rising social inequality and injustice, and the absence of democratic institutions willing to protect the interests of the vast majority, surely we got it in the behaviour of Qantas management over the last few days — and the Gillard government’s response, which took the bait and came down dramatically on the side of the bullying employer.

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Filed Under: Anti-capitalism, Julia Gillard, trade unions

21 Oct

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#OccupyOz captures the mood, but its critics are too busy demanding the possible to be realistic

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There are times when living in Australia is a bit like living in a bubble, sequestered from the massive economic and political convulsions that have marked 2011. It is the kind of situation that allows prominent progressive bloggers, like Greg Jericho (Grog’s Gamut) and Scott Steel (Possum Comitatus), to spew venom and ridicule at the modest run of #occupy protests that have hit capital cities in the last week. Sure, they argue, things may be really bad in the United States where Occupy Wall Street has become the epicentre of a rapidly growing and multifaceted social movement, but there’s no excuse for the kind of nutty, far Left indulgence of the Australian iteration.

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Filed Under: Anti-capitalism, class

13 Oct

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Occupy Everywhere: Against capitalism and its paid prizefighters

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During protests in Egypt to overthrow Mubarak, a protester displayed a handmade sign that said ‘Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers – One World, One Pain’. 

The sign broke all the rules: it was terribly written, hard to read even up close, had a confusing graphic of a wrench and cog within the writing, and the text went in two directions. Yet it, more than any other, flooded my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

In recent weeks as the Occupy Wall Street protests have grown, comparisons between them and the Arab Spring have been made, with some noting ‘though the two movements have many differences, they share the same fundamental drivers: a deep sense of injustice and invisibility’.

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Filed Under: Anti-capitalism, Egypt, neoliberalism

14 Apr

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The ETS and CPRS: Neoliberalism by any other name

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A most curious thing happened that continues to shape mainstream political debate in this country. In the lead-up to the 2007 election Kevin Rudd campaigned strongly on winning a mandate for taking real action on climate change, skewering the inaction of the Howard Government as proof that it had failed on the “greatest moral challenge” of our age. Yet the incoming government also settled on an emissions trading scheme (ETS) as its central and primary initiative to achieve this action.

I’m sorry, what was that again? Yes, in order to deal with the catastrophic failure of global markets to account for and adequately address the questions of environmental pollution and climate change the ALP would introduce another market.


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Filed Under: Anti-capitalism, climate change, Kevin Rudd, neoliberalism

18 Sep

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A ‘Philosophy of Praxis’ for our times

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As I blog this, liz_beths is writing the conclusion to her Masters thesis, which analyses the rise and fall of the Global Justice Movement in Australia. She wrote a bit about the arc from S11 2000 to 9/11 and the present day on the Overland blog last weekend. Rather than simply re-use hackneyed categories that have confused the Left when faced with apparently non-class-based movements, she’s gone back to Marx and Gramsci to develop some fresh ideas about social movements in general and the nature of activists’ intellectual and practical activity in particular.

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Filed Under: Anti-capitalism, Gramsci, Marxism