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 […]
08 Mar
Comments Off on Leo Panitch, the state & capitalist social relations
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 […]
24 Jun
I’m reposting a recent piece I wrote for Overland Journal’s blog, in response to the debate over the contentious Enterprise Migration Agreement negotiated between the Gillard government and Gina Rinehart to allow the mining billionaire to import up to 1700 skilled workers from overseas. It was written as an open letter to Paul Howes after […]
08 Jun
Since I last wrote about the situation in Greece the debate I mentioned at the end of my post — about whether all tendencies on the radical Left should get behind the election of a Left government led by SYRIZA — has been hotly debated by various Marxists on the internet. This should not be […]
13 May
Read mainstream accounts of the massive electoral realignment in Greece and you notice a strange use of terminology. The pro-austerity parties — especially conservative New Democracy and centre-Left PASOK — are called “pro-bailout” and “moderate”, while the parties that oppose austerity are called “extremist” and “hard-line”. And there’s a tendency to portray the rise of new […]
22 Apr
Comments Off on With our minds & bodies on the line: Democracy v fascism in Breivik’s shadow
Later this week Left Flank will be looking at the controversy over the reporting of Breivik’s trial in a post at our regular blog at Overland, asking if the media has handed him an effective platform for his fascist ideological arguments. In the meantime, today we post the second of two parts of an extract […]
20 Apr
With Anders Breivik’s trial underway, Left Flank will be analysing the politics both here and at the Overland website. Below we reprint the first of two parts of an abridged extract from the e-book that Guy Rundle, Elizabeth Humphrys and I edited last year, On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe. The chapter […]
08 Apr
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 […]
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 […]
01 Oct
Comments Off on Premature celebration? The Bolt verdict & the Left’s missing critique of the state
In this blog post I want to argue that the Bolt verdict is a problematic “victory” against the right-wing pundit and the Right more generally. Without wanting to diminish abhorrent and manifestly racist character of Bolt’s attack on “fair-skinned” Aboriginal people, I think that any celebration of the result by the Left is premature and […]
10 Mar
Comments Off on Europe: The persistence of racism & the fascist threat