Progressive culture since 1954
A kingfisher swallowed a cane toad near Kakadu | A woman in south-east Queensland saw rainbow lorikeets fall from the sky | A flock of brolga fished for frogs in an algal bloom | Just outside Cairns, a bush-stone curlew bounced off the bonnet of a speeding ute | In Broome, a grey nomad pulled a blue-faced finch from the radiator of his 4WD
I don’t make the doors. I just fix them. People always think there’s a special trick to it, some training I’ve done. When they ask, I smile but don’t give too much away. Part of the job is being mysterious. Clients expect it. You’ve got a door doing weird shit, you don’t call a repairman expecting him to be normal.
What it means is that this pandemic, and the near universal inability to properly contain and manage its spread, are a function of the particular material form that disability takes under capitalism. We must understand disability, itself a category historically located within capitalism before we can understand the pandemic. To avert another such global catastrophe in the future, we must confront the structures within which this most recent catastrophe is comprised.
Contrary to what many progressives imagine, the Murdoch press lacks the authority to tell its readers what to think. Every election, the tabloids back the Liberals. Every election, their blue-collar readership overwhelmingly votes Labor, with surveys consistently showing the Telegraph to be the least trusted media outlet in the country.
Problematic places have stories to tell and there are many ways to do so. When outsiders tell those stories, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It would be a dull monochromatic world indeed, void of empathy and intellectual engagement, if we could only write of what we know of personally. But the outsider with the capacity to speak, publish, and represent carries a special burden of responsibility.
Reading the politics of Rooney’s novels articulates a central problem of modern life: our personal anxieties and insecurities as individuals are always intricately part of the estrangement and disenchantment of the modern, social world.
Abolition has risen dramatically into public consciousness in recent years, mostly thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement. The leftist critique of police as racist, colonial enforcers of state violence and property is straightforward enough—but how do we put abolition into practice within left-wing organisations?
What a writing life is that, one might wonder, having to publish one’s own work by oneself, in the case of Pessoa, or consigning one’s own work to obscurity, in the case of Dickinson? But that is exactly what migration—mental, spiritual and creative—is all about.
Striking is the workers’ greatest weapon. Here’s a poster to prove it.
International students are not only a politicised migrant identity under racial capitalism in Australia: they are also part of the international working class, and are getting organised. They survive their arduous daily conditions, set up their own forms of advocacy and mutual aid, refusing and resisting in many yet untold ways.
People who rely on the ability to be anonymous or use pseudonyms online are not bad people, or ‘cowards’, as the prime minister would have us believe. The reality is that anyone seeking community or connection online without the risk of attracting stigma or discrimination in their day-to-day life offline might choose to be anonymous at some point—and they should be allowed to do so.
Contrary to neoliberal institutions that seek to liberate individuals from their pathologies only to the point where they can participate in the realm of economic necessity, the left must offer a vision of freedom that treats our needs and vulnerabilities as challenges to be collectively grappled with.