Category: neoliberalism

10 Apr

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Thatcher, the ALP & the dregs of neoliberalism

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747387-thatcher-hawke

If there’s one thing the entire Australian Left agrees on right now it’s that “Thatcherism was a very bad thing”. But beyond that, it may be appropriate to ask what exactly it is that people think was a bad thing. The answer to that question rests on one’s interpretation of what exactly was going on in the high neoliberal period of the 1980s, and what followed it. There is an uncomfortable fact that many local progressives are also trying to dance around, one that impacts on their view of the domestic political situation. That fact is that the highpoint of the ALP’s federal political success with the Hawke and Keating governments shared much of its DNA with Thatcher’s neoliberalism, here understood as a political project to shift the balance of forces in the class struggle towards capital, and thereby enact a historic redistribution of wealth and power upwards.

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Filed Under: ALP, class, Featured, John Howard, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Liberal Party, neoliberalism, social democracy, Tony Abbott, trade unions, UK

10 Mar

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Europe: The persistence of racism & the fascist threat

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Golden Dawn’s MPs in the Greek parliament

 

by KEVIN OVENDEN

Below are the points, updated and a little amplified, I made in a contribution to the highly successful Unite Against Fascism conference in London on 2 March. The speech (and I’ve incorporated my summing up) was in a workshop with Petros Constantinou from Greece, Marwan Mohammed from France and Glyn Ford MEP from Britain, who all made extremely clear and thought-provoking contributions.

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Filed Under: age of austerity, democracy, dogwhistling, Europe, fascism, Featured, Greece, immigration, Islamophobia, Left strategy, neoliberalism, racism, refugees, social democracy, state, the Right, War on Terror

08 Mar

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Leo Panitch, the state & capitalist social relations

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Introducing AN INTEGRAL STATE, the new blog by Elizabeth Humphrys

Recent years have seen a big increase in Marxist theorising on the state and its relationship to the capitalist system. These discussions have gone through several phases, from debates over the nature of globalisation in the late 1990s, to renewed interest in imperialism in reaction to the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, to the connections between capitalist interests and state agencies as governments dropped their “free market” pretensions to bail out the financial sector after the GFC.

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Filed Under: Featured, Gramsci, Left strategy, Marxism, neoliberalism, state

08 May

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The moment has passed: Megalogenis & the twilight of the reform agenda

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Today, I’ll be reviewing George Megalogenis’ book, The Australian Moment, for you*. It is notable for two things. Firstly, it is hymn to Australia’s class war from above reform era of the 1980s and 90s — but tinged also with regret that since about 1993 the political class has lost the will to fight the good fight. Secondly, in making an argument that the reform agenda can be resurrected with popular consent today, he must engage in a lot of contortions and self-contradiction.

Megalogenis has something of a following on the mainstream Left, perhaps because of his wonkish persona and apparently moderate politics for someone working at The Australian. But a deeper reason is that he reflects a strong residual view that the ALP’s economic rationalist turn was “a good thing”. Mainstream Left politics, whether in the ALP, the unions or even the Greens, operates in the shadow of those times. You can see it in Megalogenis’ scribblings on the weekend supporting Swan’s budget cuts as “hard truths” that must be realised. So how does his pro-reform argument stack up?

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Filed Under: ALP, class, economics, Featured, media, neoliberalism, trade unions

08 Apr

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Misdiagnosed anxiety: David Marr and the politics of Panic

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Welcome to the first post of the new Left Flank. We’ve moved from Blogger to WordPress, hosted at the lovely http://brellabee.com/ As you can see we’re still working on porting all the old comments from Disqus to the new platform. Time to change your RSS feed or subscribe by email (see the sidebar on the right of the page).

While we’ve been effecting that change, we’ve also started our new fortnightly blog at the Overland Literary Journal website, which has also had a spiffy redesign! My first post went up on 29 March, a review of David Marr’s latest book on the politics of fear, which is reposted below for your pleasure.

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Filed Under: dogwhistling, Featured, Islamophobia, media, neoliberalism, racism, refugees, state, the Right

20 Mar

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Malcolm is not so in the middle

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Malcom

Here’s my latest for ABC’s The Drum website, published yesterday.

Australian politics has a strange ‘centre’ at the moment, and the dial seems increasingly to fall at the feet of Malcolm Turnbull.

His presence on shows like Q&A results in both calls for him to reassume the Liberal Party leadership, and the suggestion he is an ALP member in disguise. Analogies are drawn with Don Chipp and he is urged to create a new party of the centre. While some celebrate his staring down of Abbott on climate change, others seem seduced by his status as the likable one inside elite circles.

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Filed Under: class, Featured, Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull, neoliberalism

16 Jan

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Chris Berg’s libertarian dreaming. Or, when ‘liberty’ for the few means tyranny for the many

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General Augusto Pinochet — champion of liberty

Do you remember 1989? That was the year that a series of East European Communist regimes fell in the context of a wave of popular protest. It was a tremendously inspiring time, a real indication that ordinary people could be the subjects, rather than objects, of history.

But the collapse of Communism also presaged a new era of capitalist triumphalism, perhaps infamously summarised in Francis Fukuyama’s assertion that we were witnessing “the end of history” — the victory of liberal democratic capitalism as the highest possible achievement of human social organisation. The rapid shift of the Eastern bloc to various kinds of democratic political systems combined with harsh neoliberal restructuring (or, as it was called at the time, “shock therapy”) seemed to provide material evidence that the outcome of struggles against tyranny and dictatorship could only end in market democracy at best. Even countries like China, despite officially going under the name “socialist” have rapidly moved towards market capitalism.

Filed Under: neoliberalism, state

10 Jan

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New revolutionary rehearsals. Part two: From democratic to social revolution

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Bolivia’s water wars

 SPECIAL GUEST POST BY COLIN BARKER

In the last post we published the first half of Colin Barker’s new introduction to the South Korean edition of Revolutionary Rehearsals, looking at the trend towards ‘velvet revolutions’ or ‘negotiated transitions’ in the neoliberal era. In the second half he looks at how the contradictions of the neoliberal era have not only spawned new resistance but opened up the possibility of fundamental social transformation.

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Filed Under: Left strategy, neoliberalism, revolution

07 Jan

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New revolutionary rehearsals. Part one: The limits of neoliberal ‘democratisation’

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Vaclav Havel — faceof the ‘velvet revolutions’

SPECIAL GUEST POST BY COLIN BARKER

For those of us drawn to Marxist politics in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collection of essays edited by Colin Barker called Revolutionary Rehearsals was a brilliant riposte to ideas that history had ended with the victory of liberal capitalism and that “there is no alternative”. Here was a book that showed the possibilities and limitations of a series of revolutionary moments in the period from May 68 in France to the crushing of the Solidarność movement in Poland in 1981. In May last year Colin wrote a new introduction to the South Korean edition, bringing the book’s arguments up the present. We are reproducing it here in two parts with his permission.

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Filed Under: Left strategy, neoliberalism, revolution