Words Are Wind
In this episode Dave (@withsobersenses) and Jon (@JonPiccini) discuss Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia. This is the first of three books we are reading as part of a series on race and capitalism in Australia,
We try to come to grips with his argument and its explanation of racism as arising from the specifics of class formation in Australia, how it challenged established Leftwing thought and its implications for today.
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Music by Redgum
Welcome to 2018! In this episode Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) look into the swirling mists of the crystal ball of class struggle and try to work out what’s going on in 2018 and what happened in 2017. It’s a wide ranging chat about race, class, Invasion Day, strikes that didn’t happen and plebiscites. Will the experiments in radical social democracy continue to gain traction? What’s #changetherules all about? What plans do thinkers for capital have if any at all? Is capital accumulation chugging along nicely or is a debt fuelled financial crisis about to explode? What about bananacoin? All this and more!
Stuff we talk about includes:
Novara Media – Faultlines: Liz Fekete on Racism, Europe and the New Right
Ben Pennings – Buying Time To Beat Adani
Tony Birch – On Sovereignty
Endnotes – The Holding Pattern
IMF – World Economic Outlook Update, January 2018
IMF – Credit Booms – Is China Different
Humphrey McQueen – 150 years young Marx’s Capital
Uluru Statement from the heart
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The text below has been developed to counter the arguments of Reclaim Australia. Please share as widely as possible and feel free to copy and modify the text for any or all kinds of publication. Unless you are a racist: then you should just read it and have a big long think.
So you want to Reclaim Australia?
The very fact that these protests are called ‘Reclaim Australia’ would seem to suggest that it has been lost, that someone or something else has the power and control in Australian society, not the population at large. And that would be right. When it gets down to it the vast majority of us have very little say in how this country functions and what direction it should take.
We get it. The world seems crazy. The so-called “War on Terror” has been going for about a decade and a half and violence is spreading to more and more places. More and more people face their lives being threatened either by suicide bombers or drones firing missiles. It’s insane.
We get it. Life in Australia is very prosperous (relatively) but it is also increasingly unequal and precarious. Much of our consumption is facilitated by debt, jobs are insecure, unemployment is rising and the mining boom is fizzling out. The future looks bleak.
Yet when we looked at Reclaim Australia’s 9 point demands they seemed pretty silly and ridiculous. They seemed to boil down to trying to get the government to try to make people more patriotic and also to restrict the freedom of people who are Muslims.
But can you make people love their country more by having the government tell them to do so? And do you want to live in a society where the government has more power to control what and how people believe in or have more power to determine what they wear?
We think the only answer, the only way to try to make life more liveable, is to try to make a society in Australia that is free, equal and just.
Blaming ‘Islam’ is just looking in the wrong direction…. And a bit racist…
The Word From Struggle Street 