Recently read the 1979 collection of essays Working Class Culture on the British working class. A product of the famous Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies it was published in the year of Thatcher’s election and recalls a lost era.
After the revolution: lessons from Latin America
What would a socialist revolution be like? Socialist Alternative has a view If socialism is not Stalinism, it is also much more than a nationalised economy and a few more publicly run services. When we argue that another world is possible, we mean a world free of the class divisions and inequality of capitalism; a […]
Marriage equality, wealth redistribution and party elites
Are Australian MPs more or less radical than their voters? Some comparisons from the Australian Election and Australian Candidate Studies for 2007 (I have combined ‘agree’ and ‘strongly agree’): Candidates Voters Candidates Voters Support income and wealth redistribution Support income and wealth redistribution Support legalisation of same-sex marriage Support legalisation of same-sex marriage Liberal-National 15.6% […]
Socialism within capitalism?
To look over the landscape of socialism is to be persuaded that again and again that Marx was the socialist thinker who had something enduring to say, non-Marxist socialism is fated to merge into liberalism, and if we were looking to political guidance Leonard Hobhouse probably more offers more than the Webbs.
Labor, science and the 1940s
Some recent reading has shed light on how we evaluate Labor’s most productive decade that of the 1940s. Almost finished Boris Schedvin’s Shaping Science and Industry a study of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the predecessor of the CSIRO.
Reasons to be cheerful
Some valuable words from Brad de Long: If all goes well in China and India in the next generation—and if nothing goes catastrophically wrong in the rich post-industrial North Atlantic core of the global economy—then the next generation will see a real milestone. For the first time ever more than half of the world will […]
Studying Communism
Students at Deakin in interested in wars, Australia and the Two World Wars is a popular subject, they are fascinated by Nazis as well so The Holocaust is a popular subject. Would students would be interested in the history of communism? There are the recent books by Archie Brown and Robert Service and also the […]
600 odd words on the ALP and others
Lenin famously penned 600 odd words on the ALP, Rick Kuhn writes here on the fate of this article. Labour History in 2011 will publish a special issue on the state of labour history in Australia. I have submitted a proposal to be the author of the article on labour and politics. Below are my […]
End of a Communist era: Jyoti Basu
The death on Sunday of Jyoti Basu, Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM) leader and Chief Minister of West Bengal 1977-2000 marks the end of an era in the history of the left within the old British Empire and its former colonies. Basu as a student in London in the 1930s was inspired by the […]
Communism and history
Thinking of of writing a book on the modest topic of the past and future of socialist politics. Much Australian left commentary sees the history of socialism as irrelevant, in particular the Communist movement is either an embarrassment or else the product of malign individuals.