Following on from Part 1 and Part 2 of my analysis — which were first published in abridged form as a single article at Jacobin Magazine — I bring the Greek tragedy up to date with why the Syriza breakaway Popular Unity failed its first electoral test, as well as delving deeper into the dead-end of trying […]
17 Aug
Let’s get something clear right away — same-sex marriage has not been and will not be the kind of issue that could destroy Tony Abbott’s prime ministership. Electorally, despite overwhelming popular support for equal marriage rights, it has consistently been a lower-order issue in terms of votes. And within the party room Abbott is on the […]
18 Apr
It’s been less than 12 months since the last federal Budget, yet it seems like an eternity since Clive Palmer managed to break through the Right-Left partisanship that usually accompanies post-Budget discussion. This was the apex of Palmer’s influence on politics, a world away from the report in today’s Fairfax newspapers that then PUP senator […]
12 Mar
Comments Off on Tariq Ali & Luke Stobart: Podemos, crisis & movements
Within a year of its creation, Podemos became the main opposition party in Spain. Analyses of its rapid rise have centred on its unorthodox and ambitious political approach and the different forms of participatory democracy practised (however imperfectly). Less has been said about the relation between the Podemos phenomenon and the Spanish context of major […]
01 Feb
Assert, don’t defend. Fight, fight, fight. —Andrew Bolt, “[Abbott] Government behind 46 to 54. But here’s how it can recover”, 15 December 2014 [Campbell Newman] just seemed arrogant and beyond the control of voters — a fatal flaw in Australian politics. Abbott hasn’t had Newman’s freedom to smash through as he tackles another Labor debt, […]
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) […]
05 Oct
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