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Do We Need To Talk About Donald? Living the Dream on the US Election
In this episode of Living The Dream Jon (@jonpiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) talk about the US Election and the phenomenon of Donald Trump. We aren’t interest so much is speculations about what is going on in the US but rather what the different ways Trump and Clinton are talked about in Australia tells us about what is going on in Australia.
Articles we refer to include:
Debating Deplorables: How the Left Can (and Cannot) Win Trump Voters
Theses on the New European Fascism
Time to hail Hillary Clinton – and face down the testosterone left
How the working class became white
Sweet ’16: Notes on the US Election
Music from Deadmoon and the Immortal Mice Men
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Queer Kids for Full Communism: Living the Dream with the Queer Liberation Front
In this episode of Living the Dream Dave (@withsobersenses) chats with Angus from the Queer Liberation Front. Angus lets us know what QLF are all about, what they have been doing and what they are up to. Angus talks about QLF’s praxis and how this collective of young queer people are attempting to generate a radical anticapitalist politics, how hegemony and aesthetics fit together and how this all relates to the current “Brisbane Moment’ that is going on. And then we finish it all off with a track from Los Crudos.
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Censorship, Vietnam and the Politics of Gore
Today, revelations have emerged that Facebook censored famous image ‘The Terror of War’ – otherwise known as ‘Napalm Girl’ – citing its policy of not allowing nude imagery. This move, called out by the Norwegian journalists who first posted the image, reminds me of attempts to censor brutal images from the Vietnam War during the conflict itself. These images were seen as particularly powerful by anti-war activists, while they were condemned as pornographic by the same governments who were inflicting the violence pictured. Recently, plenty of scholars have begun writing on the uses of images of suffering and violence by humanitarian organisations, so I have posted a condensed section of one of the chapters of my book Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s: Global Radicals that deals with this question in Australia, and the troubled relationship activists had with what has been termed ‘the politics of gore’.
Eric Norden’s American Atrocities in Vietnam
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The Practice of Hope
This is an old piece on organisation I wrote for A Regional Anarchist Convergence: Towards a Federation in 2008. Comrades may find it interesting
This is a paper I submitted to the reader for A Regional Anarchist Convergence: Towards a Federation.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from premises now in existence.[i]
Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self -activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others – even by those allegedly acting on their…
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On dissolving the people: Living the Dream on #ausvotes2016
In this episode of Living The Dream Jon (@jonpiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) have a chat about the recent election. It isn’t a chat about if the result is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but rather how does it fit into, and what does it tell us, about the current moment in capitalism in Australia and class struggle? We also try to work out the relationship between the electoral return of Pauline Hanson and the deep current of racism in Australia.
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#SandersofSthBrisbane ? Council elections, social movements & the #RighttotheCity
#SandersofSthBrisbane ? Council elections, social movements & #theRighttotheCity
In this episode of Living the Dream Jon (@JonPiccini ) and Dave (@withsobersenses) chat with Anna – all-round good egg and comrade pivotal to Radio Reversal and Brisbane Free University – about the successful Brisbane City Council election campaign of Jonathan Sri , the opposition to the West Village development and the emergence of struggles around the Right to the City. What’s going on, how do all these pieces fit together and what do they tell us about struggles within-against-and-beyond capitalism for lives of dignity?
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Related Reading
David Harvey – The Right to The City
(Queensland Government 2016, 37)
Queensland Government. 2016. “2016-17 Queensland Budget Papers.”