Winner: Jenah Shaw | The houseguest For such a formally inventive story – a mosaic of descriptive and narrative passages of varying lengths and degrees of evocativeness, ‘sorted’ under subject headings – it’s remarkable that ‘The houseguest’ feels so warmly humane and is such fun to read. The narration has an intriguingly hypothetical tone and […]

1. A wealthy and worldly socialite, financier turned jaded art dealer, resigned to holding life at a certain ironic distance, encounters for the first time a piece of music that – in his emotional response to its phrasing and harmonies – holds out the promise of recovering authentic enthusiasm.

I have no reason to doubt Corbyn’s sincerity in rejecting antisemitism. The problem is that the rhetorical framing of his critique in moral terms of the defence of the economic wellbeing of the nation against ravaging international capital tends, unwittingly, to resonate with noxious forms of ideology and ressentiment.

Nagle claims that the liberal-left position on immigration reflects its elite detachment from the concerns of ordinary people: the American workers whose livelihoods are threatened by an influx of cheap labour.

Last week’s announcement that Fairfax newsrooms are to suffer cuts of ‘the equivalent of 120 full-time employees’ is terrible news not only for those Fairfax journalists and other newsroom staff who will be made redundant and have to struggle to find work in a shrinking and intensely competitive pool of job opportunities. It’s also bad news for the survivors of the cull, who will face the unenviable prospect of producing news with fewer colleagues, making a traditionally high-pressure job even more stressful. And it’s very unwelcome news for the general public.

Capital flows freely across the globe, picking the cheapest labour force it can; workers of different countries are pitted against each other in a race to the bottom on wages, working conditions and rates of tax on the operation of companies. It seems a quixotic venture to attempt to establish socialism — or even social democracy — in one country, when the benefits accruing to its citizens can be wiped out by currency devaluation, disinvestment and an exodus of industry to a country with lower (or to use the euphemism preferred by politicians, more ’competitive’) labour costs and tax.

On the face of it, it’s hard to argue against George Monbiot’s contention that the state is required to curb the excesses of capital, by imposing ‘legal restraints upon freedoms which interfere with other people’s freedoms – or on freedoms which conflict with justice and humanity.’ Decades of financial deregulation led to a financial crisis […]

Something is rotten at the heart of Sydney University. On the surface, it has never shown so attractive a face to the world. In the evening, walking back towards City Road, the glass and steel of the newly-finished law building frame the sloping green of Victoria Park, and beyond that, the lights of the city. […]

Lane Kenworthy considers the correlation of social democratic outcomes in a nation’s politics with a strong labour movement, in the context of American politics: But what if you live in a country with labor unions that are weak, and getting weaker? What if your country is the United States? He goes on to list a […]

‘We live in a world,’ Chip Rolley declares on the welcome page of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, ‘that is ultimately understood only through language.’ Let’s bracket the objections of mystics (for whom language is an obstruction, not a key) and sceptics (who would question our assumption that we can understand the world to any meaningful […]

Renewal and reinvigoration has never been more urgent for the Left, yet with a few exceptions, mostly in Latin America, it is everywhere in retreat and on the defensive. A serious intellectual realignment – while of course not sufficient – is necessary. It is my contention, as I’ve argued in the two previous posts, that […]

In yesterday’s post, I argued that critique is a double-edged sword: a necessary aspect of political struggle, but one that, in combination with social atomisation and lack of political agency, deepens our alienation and contributes to a cycle of cynicism and bad faith. How then, do we extricate ourselves from this impasse? Sloterdijk proposes that […]

In the face of looming environmental catastrophe, we seem unable to resist the temptation to bury our heads in the sand. The feeble results of the Cancún summit last month, in which world leaders yet again kicked the can down the road, were hardly unexpected, but depressing nonetheless. Enormous and powerful interests defend the status […]

There has been a resurgence of interest out there on the blogs about Buddhism, its Western interpretations, and the various statements of the provocative Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek on the subject. To represent Zizek’s opinions is to take aim at a moving target, as he develops them over time, dialectically, and often contradicts himself even […]

The media’s focus on personality over policy – and in that shrinking proportion of the time in which policy is discussed, the endless speculation on how events will be perceived, and how ‘narratives’ will ‘play out’, rather than the actual impact of policies on people – makes for a lack of serious analysis that results […]

In the wake of Synthetic Genomics’ dramatic achievement, ‘playing God’ was the predictable cry in the media. The verb is misleading. It implies that whereas God works, Venter and his colleagues are merely playing; a blasphemous mockery, the trifling mimicry of a monkey, carrying out the form of creation while missing its content of the […]

It is said that popular culture is becoming increasingly infantilising. JK Rowling made it acceptable for adults to sit on the train reading a book about magical boarding schools, infused with the nostalgia of books from our own childhoods (Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising), but the process was already well underway […]

This week I’m going to Melbourne for the launch party of the second issue of another literary journal, where I’ll be reading an excerpt from my story ‘Meeting the Colonel’, set in a fictional dictatorship somewhere around the Hindu Kush, in a loosely real maravilloso style. I blush when it read it now, with its […]

We all remember the end of last year for the dismal outcome, at Copenhagen, for concerted international action to deal with the world’s problems. Just a few weeks before, however, another meeting took place. In November last year, the International Encounter of Left Parties met in Caracas. At that meeting, Hugo Chávez, in typically theatrical […]