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 […]
31 Dec
Comments Off on 12 months
Happy New Year to all our readers. Thank you for you thoughts and comments on Left Flank, in what was a year of revolutions and a return to politics from below in many corners of the world. Of course we’re not all politics here, just mostly, so here are other parts of our last 12 months […]
21 Dec
Comments Off on Interface Journal: New issue on ‘Feminism, women’s movements and women in movement’
Photo of Cairo street art by Hossam el-Hamalawy. A new issue of the journal Interface was released last week, announcement below. Volume 3/2 (November 2011): Feminism, women’s movements and women in movement Issue editors: Sara Motta, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Catherine Eschle, Laurence Cox Volume three, issue two of Interface, a peer-reviewed e-journal produced and refereed by social movement practitioners […]
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 […]
08 Dec
Comments Off on Breivik update: Politics, terrorism and psychiatry
Candle-lit vigil in Oslo, soon after the 22 July massacre Since my last piece for The Drum, the IPA’s Chris Berg has produced an attack on our book, On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe. We haven’t formally responded, but many of the comments below his article deal with his frankly desperate and unconvincing attempt to […]
03 Dec
Comments Off on The Breivik diagnosis: Fascist ideology wrapped in a straitjacket, political implications denied
Comments now closed on this article at The Drum, so reposting here for your commenting pleasure! Two court-appointed psychiatrists have found confessed Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik legally insane and unfit to stand trial. The full text of their 243 page report is yet to be released, but if public statements are representative of its contents, […]
30 Nov
Comments Off on Rewind: Depoliticising Utoya — Anders Breivik as ‘madman’
It was not entirely unexpected that two prosecution-appointed psychiatrists would find Norwegian fascist mass murderer Anders Breivik insane and unfit to stand trial, diagnosing him with Paranoid Schizophrenia. The diagnosis — so far only backed by a few, unconvincing details from their as-yet unreleased report — runs counter to the voluminous information, available in the public […]
27 Nov
Comments Off on The Greens & Palestine: confronting inconvenient truths of the party’s right of return policy
Guest post by TONY HARRIS — cross-posted from his blog, Watermelon. In March last year, 35 prominent Jewish Australians signed a petition renouncing their automatic right of return to Israel, labelling such a right a “racist privilege” while Palestinians, ethnically cleansed from Israel in 1948, are denied their rights of return under international law.
16 Jan
Comments Off on Chris Berg’s libertarian dreaming. Or, when ‘liberty’ for the few means tyranny for the many