Welcome to the first post of the new Left Flank. We’ve moved from Blogger to WordPress, hosted at the lovely http://nuttify.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 […]
20 Mar
Comments Off on Malcolm is not so in the middle
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 […]
25 Jan
Comments Off on For the love of women’s liberation
Here is a link to my article on feminism, published yesterday at the ABC’s The Drum website. I don’t call myself a feminist. But some of my best friends are feminists.
16 Jan
Comments Off on Chris Berg’s libertarian dreaming. Or, when ‘liberty’ for the few means tyranny for the many
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 […]
10 Jan
Comments Off on New revolutionary rehearsals. Part two: From democratic to social revolution
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 […]
07 Jan
Comments Off on New revolutionary rehearsals. Part one: The limits of neoliberal ‘democratisation’
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 […]
17 Dec
Comments Off on When freedom is a dirty word
Whatever criticism one may have of the Occupy Everywhere movement, its central idea that ‘We Are the 99%’ speaks to the many people who sense a deep injustice in the current socio-economic system. People do not feel they have it ‘better than ever’, even in Australia, and many point to the diminished freedom they feel […]
13 Oct
Comments Off on Occupy Everywhere: Against capitalism and its paid prizefighters
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 […]
20 Sep
Comments Off on Limits of liberal critique: Murdoch, the media & the Manne Quarterly Essay
Not so omnipotent anymore Cross-posted from Overland Journal‘s blog and ABC’s The Drum. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its […]
09 Jul
Comments Off on Carbon pricing — even the Right admits it’s really all about neoliberalism
This is what the climate movement, the Greens and sections of the Left have staked their futures on: [I]n Australia, the push for carbon pricing originated from the Treasury as a pro-market economy-wide reform whose great advocates were Ken Henry, Martin Parkinson and Ross Garnaut with their ideas holding sway with John Howard, Rudd and […]
08 Apr
1 Comment