Living the Dream with Anarchy and its Allies

In this episode Dave (@withsobersenses) chats with two anarchist comrades Tommy (@correnterosso ) and Charlie about Tommy’s recent article Anarchy and Its Allies: The United Front and the Groupings of Tendency and the related rise in anarcho-communist organisations in Australia. We chat about how anarchism is developing and the current appeal of Platformism and Especifismo . Topics of discussion include the role a theoretical framework plays and where it comes from, class composition and the history of organisations, and the relationship of revolutionaries to class struggle.

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A key text mentioned is Social Anarchism and Organisation

Tommy is a member of Geelong Anarcho-Communists and says sorry for how they pronounced the group TMA

Charlie is a member of Black Flag Sydney

They recommend reading Red and Black Notes

You used to be able to find the archives of the Mutiny Zine at Jura but their website is having issues.

Music by Ernst Busch

November 24, 2021 1

Living The Dream in 2018

ussr-soviet-union-happy-new-year-postcard_19621

Welcome to 2018! In this episode Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) look into the swirling mists of the crystal ball of class struggle and try to work out what’s going on in 2018 and what happened in 2017. It’s a wide ranging chat about race, class, Invasion Day, strikes that didn’t happen and plebiscites. Will the experiments in radical social democracy continue to gain traction? What’s #changetherules all about? What plans do thinkers for capital have if any at all? Is capital accumulation chugging along nicely or is a debt fuelled financial crisis about to explode? What about bananacoin? All this and more!

Stuff we talk about includes:

Novara Media – Faultlines: Liz Fekete on Racism, Europe and the New Right

Ben Pennings – Buying Time To Beat Adani

Tony Birch – On Sovereignty

Endnotes – The Holding Pattern

IMF – World Economic Outlook Update, January 2018

IMF – Credit Booms – Is China Different

Humphrey McQueen – 150 years young Marx’s Capital

Uluru Statement from the heart

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January 31, 2018 3

Living The Dream in the Trade Union Movement

shorter working week — May Day in Wollongong circa 2000 photo by Sharon Pusell

In this episode of Living the Dream Dave (@withsobersenses) chats with Godfrey Moase (@gemoase) the General Branch Assistant Secretary of the National Union of Workers. Godfrey had a number of criticisms of our last show . We talk about these and Godfrey also addresses the broader strategic and tactical possibilities for anticapitalist struggle and how they relate to trade unions.

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You can find some of Godfrey’s writings here:

Maintain the wage rage (with Carina Garland)
Defending Australian Labor
The case for a 30-hour working week
Absorbing Corbyn

Other things we mention include:

Music by The Sweatshop Union

(This podcast was recorded as ex-Tropical Cyclone Debbie drenched Queensland)

April 2, 2017 0

#WTF2016 ? Living The Dream takes the down bound Trump Train out of here

clinton-archepelego

In this episode of Living the Dream Jon (@jonpiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) talk about the weird as hell political environment of the Age of Trump. Was 2016 the worst year ever? Are we caught in the midst of a rising reactionary wave? And why do the failures of the liberal establishment feel to so many people to be failures of the Left? (And what is the Left? Are we the Left?) What’s with the amateur sociology about voting demographics that is everywhere now? Do we really have to choose between identity politics and Left economic populism? Where can we draw hope from and what about the historical experience of working class anti-racism? All this and more!

Articles/organisations we refer to include:

Behind the News with Doug Henwood

Hard Crackers From A Small New England Town As Told To Noel Ignatiev

The Weimar Analogy

KING: There’s a huge education level drop-off with the Trump cabinet picks

Tsiolkas – The Second Coming The Politics Of Rage Won’t Let Us Listen To One Another

Many in Milwaukee Neighborhood Didn’t Vote — and Don’t Regret It

It Was My Primal Scream

Revolutionary Hillbilly: An Interview With Hy Thurman of the Young Patriots Organization

Ghassan Hage – Recalling anti-racism

Knives out for Hanson staffer Ashby, accused of profiting off candidates

redneckrevolt

The great student swindle: how young people are being ripped off

Music by Sharon Jones and Dap-kings and Joe Pug

And watch this footage of this amazing meeting between the Black Panthers and the Young Patriots.

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December 22, 2016 1

#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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The Institute of Public Affairs really isn’t the problem…

1404147600000 — Tim Wilson former IPA policy director, former Australian Human Rights Commissioner and possibly the next Member for Goldstein

On the 7^th of April Elizabeth Farrelly (2016), writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, launched a stinging attack on the right-wing think tank the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA). Judging from the response on social media her column has been well-received by much of the Left: from left-liberals and social democrats to anti-capitalists. However whilst I have no sympathy for the IPA the argument that Farrelly makes is both deeply wrong and also a fine example of the common-sense of the Australian Left: that the state we are in is due to the nefarious influence of bad people and bad ideas.

Continue reading “The Institute of Public Affairs really isn’t the problem…” →

April 8, 2016 2

Living the Dream – Last Drinks in (the workers) Paradise?

qld pic — State Of Queensland (Department of Infrastructure, Local Government and Planning)

In this episode of Living the Dream Jon (@JonPiccini) and Dave (@withsobersenses) talk about the meltdown of politics in Queensland and the failure of the ALP government to carry out a coherent plan to address the decline in capital accumulation and facilitate social reproduction. Rob Pyne resigning from Labor(#corbynofcairns ?), candidates sending dicks pics and the shared anti-political language of both sides of the referendum campaign show a political class in freefall and deeply out of touch with the concerns of everyday people.

Should we care? Or just point and laugh? What is the relationship of the political to capitalism on a whole and to our struggle against it? How much of this is this a broader and global phenomenon and what can it tell us about life in Queensland?

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Articles we refer to include:

The State Infrastructure Plan

Humphrey McQueen – Queensland: a state of mind

Kathleen McLeod – “I Will Protect You With My Body” The Case For A Radical Sanctuary Movement To Protect Asylum Seekers In Australia

Andy Paine – Rewriting the political script

Chris O’Kane – State Violence, State Control: Marxist State Theory and the Critique of Political Economy

Mario Tronti – The Political (1979)

Left Flank and An Integral State

Mike Beggs – The Void Stares Back

March 15, 2016 0

#LetThemStay Fieldnotes 3: What happened? What were the different elements of the event and how did they fit together?

Recently I posed twelve questions to help myself understand the events of recent weeks and help think through what has happened and where we are all going. This is my first attempt to answer them. I doubt I will answer – in writing – all twelve.

The answers I provide are necessarily subjective and partial. I only attended the vigil twice. I welcome disagreement and corrections. However I think that subjective and qualitative reflections on collective experience are a vital part of how we understand them.

I think there were three separate elements: the decision by staff at the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital to not discharge Asha on the basis that Nauru didn’t qualify as somewhere safe to return to; the vigil which became a blockade of sorts faced with the possibility of Border Force taking Asha; and the wave of symbolic actions and stunts where people proclaimed #LetTheStay with the aim of generating and circulating imagery in the media (social and otherwise).

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February 26, 2016 0

#LetThemStay Fieldnotes 1

The decision by the Lady Cilentro Children’s Hospital to not discharge the infant Nepalese refugee Asha back to Nauru and the emergence of a vigil in solidarity was an important and inspiring event. The experience of it was radically different from the protest-politics-as-usual that typify the activist repertoire in Brisbane. Now that Asha has been discharged into community detention, and is facing a very uncertain and probably deeply unpleasant future, there is a desire to make sense of what has happened, what is going on and what does it mean?

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February 23, 2016 3

Ergon workers defy Qld ALP’s Debt Action Plan

On the 20^th January workers at Ergon Bundaberg Depot walked off their jobs in protest at proposed plans to cut positions and increase outsourcing. This followed a similar action in Atherton the previous Friday. Whilst this industrial action has received little news coverage it is of incredible importance. It is the articulation of a group of workers’ collective self-interest in a way that actually points to the deep flaws in the ALP state government’s attempt to manage the challenge of funding social reproduction and honouring the state’s debts (in the context of the end of the mining boom which is a symptom of the Global Recession). What this struggle shows us is that under the layers of mystification debt is ultimately about class struggles: debt hinges on the struggle between the ability of capital to secure the future of its profits via the imposition of work and discipline today and our collective ability to refuse it and assert our dignity and desires.

Continue reading “Ergon workers defy Qld ALP’s Debt Action Plan” →

January 28, 2016 2

Tag: Australian politics