Progressive culture since 1954
We resist through BDS so that we can return to and rebuild villages like Safsaf. We resist through BDS to stop forced ethnic displacements in villages like Sheikh Jarrah. We resist through BDS to create a unified Palestine where our rights and sovereignty are realised and respected. We resist through BDS to organise communities around the world to dismantle the systems that oppress.
If you’re unemployed it’s not because there isn’t any work. Just look around: a housing shortage, crime, pollution, we need better schools and parks. Whatever our needs, they all require work. And as long as we have unsatisfied needs, there’s work to be done.
It was 1980. I was writer-in-residence at a university. I had booked a meeting room for the first reading of a play. But three young men were dug in deep with each other. I became stiff and shrill. — ‘Did you book this room? I booked this room!’ —
Presuming the anti-vax movement doesn’t peter out, the only organisations with the social weight to counter it are the trade unions. This isn’t to disparage the important work being done by groups like the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, which can build a longer-term movement. Rather, it is to say that a union rally with thousands of nurses, cleaners, teachers, retail workers, hospitality workers—and, yes, construction workers—could deny the anti-vax movement its populist mantle overnight.
Across history, there has been a long record of the state shifting issues of sexual health into the carceral sphere for the purpose of building the idea of the nuclear family, and encouraging support of the national project. Nowhere has that become more pointed than in the police response to the Australian covid-19 lockdowns, and the kind of strategies taken to prevent movement and intimacy.
The Dawn of Everything—David Graeber and David Wengrow’s ambitious revision of the Standard Narrative regarding so-called ‘pre-history’ and ‘pre-historic’ groups—is full of doors left ajar and rooms gleefully, if tentatively, explored. If it does not provide the reader with marching orders by the end of its 600+ pages, it nonetheless provides countless inspiring examples of the ways that many of our ancestors gradually built alternatives to their own societies, from within and without.
She climbs into the cardboard box, curls into a foetus shape, knees by her ears, right arm tucked below. She starts folding the lid closed, blocking the room, but the left flap keeps popping open. After her sixth try, she lets it be. Wouldn’t it be funny if someone walked in now? Wouldn’t it be a great surprise? Only she lives alone. And she has no visitors either currently in her home or scheduled to visit.
And so, the aesthetic of rebellion overtakes unpleasant conversations about accountability and material change. In lieu of the vast and sweeping efforts needed to satisfy an anarchist utopia, we are offered lads and larks and playful disobedience. There are punk bands that want to eat the rich, and there are punk bands that want to eat ‘shrooms. What is often misunderstood is that the former is a false equivalent of the latter.
Private investment funds now have optimal conditions for entry into the new social housing market, with minimal capital expenditure, guaranteed market rent, a not-for-profit managing the tenancies and full control of the assets after 10 years. Governments have created a social housing market that delivers dividends to private capital, dressed up as a solution to the deepening housing crisis.