It would suit the interests of our would-be techno-fedual overlords for each of us to simply fret, individually and impotently, about the situation, while the economic foundations of our lives are hollowed out beneath us. If we aren’t happy with this, we should instead act in our own interest: get connected and organise.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

‘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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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, […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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’, […]

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, […]