Welcome to the sixth and final blog in the Sex and Society series. Over the past five blogs we’ve looked at the growth of the nuclear family, its connection to class society, and how the oppression of women and queers manifest today. Last time we looked at love and marriage — how our modern manifestations […]
13 Apr
Two hostile intersecting axes are forming against the Syriza-led government in Athens. Together they comprise an increasingly cohered effort to destabilise and defeat the government, to usurp the democratically expressed hope of the Greek people to break from the iron cage of austerity. The first axis, from without, has been evident since before the 20 […]
28 Mar
KEVIN OVENDEN writes from Athens on continuing moves to re-legitimise the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn on the eve of their trial as a criminal organisation, and responds to voices that have tacitly defended some of the perturbing concessions to chauvinism coming from within the new Greek government. Following his essay is some background on the legal […]
26 Feb
In this special guest post for Left Flank, PANAGIOTIS SOTIRIS forensically dissects the SYRIZA government’s agreement with the Eurogroup — not to lead people to despair but to focus the question on the political and economic limits of the Eurozone that SYRIZA has accepted, and to argue the basis for a policy of rupture with […]
25 Feb
My postings here will resume but be episodic for a few weeks as I am commissioned to write a book in short order on the Greek crisis, Syriza and socialist strategy. The plan for that writing includes weekly gobbets on Greece and the politics of the austerity crisis in Europe. Here are what I hope […]
02 Jan
This is the third part of Left Flank’s series exploring the rise of Podemos. [i] The first part looked at how the new organisations drew on the inspiration and power of the 15-M (“Indignados”) movement. The second part critically examined the Podemos leadership’s deployment of radical populist strategy. In the third part Luke Stobart examines […]
29 Dec
Abbott has to perform well as prime minister next year, not just to preserve his leadership and give the Coalition a chance of re-election but also to restore public faith in the political class and Australia’s system of parliamentary democracy. The year 2015 has to see a restoration of political stability in the national interest. […]
08 Dec
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. —Marx & Engels (1845), The German […]
18 Nov
When Elizabeth Humphrys and I originally wrote “Anti-politics: Elephant in the room” on Left Flank just over a year ago, we were trying to summarise the changes in our thinking over the causes and consequences of the “crisis of representation” that the blog had been focused on since its inception. The post has been widely […]
14 Nov
The first part of Left Flank’s series exploring the rise of Podemos looked at the positive incorporation in the project of the “Indignados” (15-M) movement’s participatory democracy and radical opposition towards “politics”. Here Luke Stobart looks more critically at the “radical populism” that has shaped the approach of its dominant grouping (and now formal leadership) […]
15 Jul
Comments Off on Sex and society (6): Liberation or Equality?