As well as having Aboriginal band No Fixed Address open for them at one gig, the Clash had veteran Aboriginal rights activist, Gary Foley, speak at many of their shows during their one and only tour of Australia, in 1982.

Although we are living through unprecedented times, we should not underestimate the clamour for a return to some kind of capitalist ‘normality’ – and not just from the capitalists.

In Australia, as elsewhere, the challenge to workers now could scarcely be greater after three decades of neoliberalism bearing down on them in the form of (in)human resource management and anti-union governments. Even the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 gave workers little respite – indeed, neoliberalism was, paradoxically, strengthened and emboldened as there appeared to be no mainstream alternative to it. Now the country is facing a crisis in which the worst is yet to come, for Australia is several weeks behind the European epicentres of the likes of Italy and Spain.

The critique of neoliberalism by the radical Left didn’t gain much traction before the Great Financial Crisis. It hasn’t gained much more since. If the failure of the efforts of the radical Left to make a discernible impact before the crisis can be forgiven, the failure to do so after the crisis simply cannot. The destitution and immerisation wrought upon citizens has been the most widespread and deep-seated since the 1930s.

Is the performance and provision of sexual services a form of labour? And if so, what are the implications? Since the early 1970s, a growing number of sex worker activists (initially, just prostitutes) have argued that the sexual or erotic labour involved in performing and providing sexual services does constitute an act of labour on a par with the physical, mental and emotional labour involved in many more conventional types of work.

Joe Strummer died at age fifty in 2002, just as he was on his way to re-establishing himself as a major radical voice in rock’n’roll. The vehicle for his return was his band the Mescaleros, formed after his wilderness years following the collapse of The Clash in 1985.