Grant and Joe had me back for a “sequel” appearance on their Rabble Report podcast — moving on from the failures of left-wing populism to the successes of right-wing populism. The episode examines whether today’s populist parties reflect a broader social movement or function instead as scavengers capitalising on the political hollowing-out of the establishment, […]
03 Nov
By Tad Tietze I was recently on Grant Gallagher and Joseph Sciortino’s excellent podcast The Rabble Report. It’s a real deep dive, in which we look at the rise and fall of left populism by using the recent book, The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger (Verso, […]
12 Oct
By Tad Tietze This post is dedicated to the memory of the essayist and blogger The Piping Shrike, who passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on 15 July this year. A dear friend and a key inspiration for this blog’s “anti-politics” analysis, as well as my thinking on race and the Constitution. Strip away the rancour […]
08 Apr
I know this is not a popular opinion in progressive circles but the attacks on Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán as “anti-democratic” are overblown rubbish. It has gotten to the point where op-ed writers in The Guardian claim that “Hungary today is on the verge of full-blown autocracy” and “the war on democracy in Hungary is a war […]
03 Feb
A recent think piece by Spiked!’s theoretical guru, Frank Furedi, is an attack on the idea that anti-politics is any kind of solution to the current breakdown in authority of the political system. It’s worth examining Furedi’s case because it aligns with anti-anti-politics arguments currently found on the Left in its softer and more radical […]
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 […]
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) […]
01 Nov
In the latest post at her personal blog, An Integral State, Left Flank’s ELIZABETH HUMPHRYS challenges Naomi Klein’s celebrated “shock doctrine” thesis of neoliberal transformation by looking at the Whitlam dismissal and the Fraser government’s failure to drive through neoliberal reform. But despite these concurrent ‘shocks’ — the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression […]
29 Sep
GUEST POST BY KEVIN LIN The past week has seen a dramatic escalation of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, against the Chinese government’s obstruction in Hong Kong’s electoral process. In scenes reminiscent of the Arab Spring uprisings, 30,000 college students and supporters occupied streets in Hong Kong’s central financial district, encircled by riot police armed with […]
14 Sep
It’s been enjoyable indeed to watch the humiliation of both sides of NSW politics on the ICAC witness stand. But, unlike Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald — or the Greens, who have been pushing the idea for some time — I don’t think a federal ICAC would either solve the problem of “political […]
13 Jan
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