Socialism is back, with good reason
The spectre of socialism is again haunting world politics. Until recently, the word “socialism” was uttered in mainstream politics only as a slur that right wing fanatics hurled at their neoliberal-centrist rivals. It seems like an eternity since former US president Barack Obama and former...CONTINUE READING
As an anti-Semitic fascist movement grows, Zionists attack the anti-fascist left
Far right politics is making a comeback. And with it comes political anti-Semitism. In the English-speaking world, quasi-fascist “alt-right” milieus increasingly consider the “JQ” (“Jewish question”) an important component of their political war against immigration, liberalism, socialism a...CONTINUE READING
The fraud of Stalinism
Stalinism is experiencing a small revival. For now, it is greatly exaggerated online, where many of the popular socialist meme pages are as devoted to praising gulags and North Korea’s nuclear missile program as they are to denouncing capitalism. But as the imagery and politics of Stalinis...CONTINUE READING
Backlash after Monash University slashes arts funding
The trouble at Monash began at 9am on the first morning of semester. New students enrolled in the popular first-year Introduction to International Relations unit arrived for class, only to find themselves in a silent and abandoned lecture theatre. To deal with overcrowded lectures, the adm...CONTINUE READING
The fight over free speech on campus
On university campuses around the world, “free speech” is becoming the favourite slogan of the right, sure to be raised during campus political controversies. The Spectator, a magazine whose political allegiance sits somewhere between Tony Abbott and Richard Spencer, writes of a “free spee...CONTINUE READING
Vale David Feeney. Nah, lol
Few will mourn the political death of David Feeney, the amnesiac Labor backbencher who has now fallen to Section 44. Feeney’s career in the House of Representatives produced only two moments of heroic distinction. First, during the 2016 federal election, when Labor was aggressively campaig...CONTINUE READING
How not to remember the Russian Revolution
On 7 November, the world marked 100 years since the Russian Revolution: the brief seizure of power by a socialist workers’ movement that showed millions that a better world is possible. The centenary is both an inspiring occasion and a sobering one. Inspiring because it reminds us that the...CONTINUE READING
Right wing takeover of Monash Student Association
Right wing students have taken over the Monash Student Association (MSA), a bastion of the broad left for decades. In the annual MSA elections, a conservative group won a landslide victory, gaining around 60 percent of the vote for most positions. It is a decisive shift in the politics of...CONTINUE READING
On the socialist path with Bolshevik Bill
When do you begin to pity a Liberal government? When it has to ask the High Court whether it exists at all? Or when its last argument in its own favour is that if Bill Shorten takes over, he will establish a communist dictatorship based on absolute equality enforced with brutal violence? T...CONTINUE READING