Living The Dream with a Workers’ Plan To Survive Covid-19 Crisis

In this episode of Living The Dream Dave (@withsobersenses) chats with Godfrey Moase (@gemoase) a director of the United Workers Union.

The UWU, a recent a fusion of the National Union of Workers and United Voice, has been receiving a lot of attention due to the industrial actions of its members, its claims to be revitalising internal democracy and its Workers’ Plan To Survive Covid-19 Crisis : a broad vision to address the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 crisis in a way that points beyond capitalism.

Here Godfrey explains the strategy and organisational direction of the UWU, gives a critique of the #changetherules defeat and presents what he thinks is a viable way forward to accumulate class power.

This interview with Tim Kennedy the National Secretary of the UWU in Jacobin is very useful: “We Can Use This Crisis to Reconceptualize the Economy” .

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Music by Meatraffle

April 6, 2020 0

Living The Dream in the time of COVID-19

*If the unemployed are dole bludgers, what the fuck are the idle rich?* -Redback Graphix remixed by Wendy Murray

In this episode of Living The Dream Dave @withsobersenses talks about the questions that COVID-19 is forcing us to confront – and then goes on to do an analysis of a report from Macquarie Wealth Management stating conventional capitalism is dying and finishes by looking at the latest developments in the provision of stimulus from the RBA and the Federal Government.

After recording this episode I found out that the story about dolphins in Venice wasn’t true. Bum.

Articles mentioned include:

The Age of Mass Protests: Understanding an Escalating Global Trend

Conventional capitalism is dying: Macquarie warns

Music by Cable Ties

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March 24, 2020 0

Living The Dream with COVID-19 and a Recession

In this episode Dave @withsobersenses takes a moment to think about how and why COVID-19 is impacting the capitalist mode of production, what are the drivers of the looming recession and depression and why various Keynesian arguments get it wrong.

You should read Social Contagion

Music by Assück

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March 12, 2020 0

Living The Dream against anti-Chinese Racism

In this episode, Jon (@JonPiccini) has a long delayed conversation with Shan Windscript (@ShanWindy), Phd student at University of Melbourne and organiser, who has played key roles in the fight for casual workers in the tertiary sector and the rights of international students. We talk about how the Coronavirus has served to weaponise long standing fears about China in Australia, how supporting movements for change in Hong Kong is not incompatible with working for political and economic rights on the mainland, and how Shan’s research on the inner lives of everyday activists in Maoist China undermines attempts to present the present CCP regime as omnipotent.

Shan’s writing includes

Can Chinese Students Abroad Speak? Asserting Political Agency amid Australian Nationalist Anxiety

How to Write a Diary in Mao’s New China: Guidebooks in the Crafting of Socialist Subjectivities

Music by RE-Tros

February 19, 2020 0

Gong Commune at Bushfire Snap Action in Wollongong (2 of 2)

GONG COMMUNE

One of the contributions from Gong Commune to the recent snap action in response to the bush fire crisis:

I would like to Acknowledge that we are gathering here today on the lands of the Dharawal and Yuin People. To acknowledge that since invasion the struggle for sovereignty, community, Country and dignity has never ceased. The successful, careful custodianship for millennia that First Nations people have practiced here in so-called Australia, on the very lands we now stand, across the beautiful Yuin Country down south and across the entire continent, throws into stark relief the fundamental violence of settler colonial capitalism. In but a couple of hundred years, this system has wrought such deep destruction on these lands, of which the current fire crisis is just one aspect. I want to pay respects to all First Nations people present here today. Pay my respect to all elders past present and…

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January 14, 2020 0

Gong Commune at Bushfire Snap Action in Wollongong (1 of 2)

GONG COMMUNE

Lauren Tynan of Koori Country Firesticks and Gong Commune gave this contribution to the bush fire snap action in Wollongong on the weekend:

Acknowledge Country

Protection here by the escarpment and thousands of years of people caring for Country
Acknowledge all the local mob down the coast supporting families and communities, especially those who wanted to but can’t be here today

My name is Lauren Tynan and I’m a trawlwulwuy woman of tebrakunna country in northeast Tasmania and live here in Wollongong.

I’m a Director of Koori Country Firesticks Aboriginal Corporation, a cultural burning organisation based in NSW.

I’m also conducting a PhD on relationships with Country through fire and cultural burning practices.

Because our relationships with country have changed.

Today we’re talking about change – we’re talking about these wildfires in relation to climate change. Climate has changed but the real change we can see in this place over…

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January 14, 2020 0

Science, magic and the climate crisis

‘Understanding the world we live in requires a bit of observation and a bit of imagination. A bit of science and a bit of magic. Changing the world will require the same.’

andypaine

I’ve always been one of those people (you know, the artists,
religious believers and flat-earthers) who believes not everything can be
explained by science. Science is good for understanding the mechanics of how
things work, but not necessarily why we should care how they work. Scientific
studies are rarely unburdened by the individual biases and influences of the scientist,
and a “scientific worldview” carries its own preconceptions.

Like any ideology, it can be used to avoid debate and blind us to other possibilities (“it’s simple science!”), and can be frustratingly conservative, like when evolutionary psychologists give answers to explain why we act in certain ways with no acknowledgement of the very human (evolutionary) urge to explore and progress.

In recent years, in the struggle to stop catastrophic
climate change, one of the repeated catchcries has been to “listen to science”
and its studies of climate impacts. Like some kind of…

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October 24, 2019 0

Living The Dream with a Green New Deal

In this episode of Living The Dream Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) catch up with Tash Heenan (@tashellenheenan) and Jeremy Poxon (@JeremyPoxon) to discuss the Green New Deal. Jon, Tash and Jeremy are partisans of the Green New Deal, seeing it as a way of addressing immediate concerns and opening pathways to more radical transformations whilst Dave remains something of a half-reformed ultra-left curmudgeon who can do nothing more than yell ‘but the value-form’ at worried passer-bys.

We chat about what a Green New Deal may or may not be, if it is an attempt to save or destroy capitalism, its relationship or not with creating communism, the hard limits the environmental crisis imposes, the disappearance of the commons as a concept, and a whole lot more.

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